Leechcraft: the art of healing (archaic); also the art of bloodletting.
—Words and Their Origins
by K.A. Haberthal
At 1:30 a.m. Myrna, the lab technologist, bent over the struggling patient, syringe in hand, and searched his arm for a vein. Dr. Meyer, one of the interns, held the man down as Myrna tried to tie the tourniquet.
"What's wrong with this guy?" she asked.
"DTs," said the intern.
"How come you don't tranquilize him?" asked Myrna.
"I don't like to coddle alcoholics."
Myrna found a vein in the emaciated arm and shoved the needle home, but the patient flinched away. When she pulled back the plunger, she drew no blood, only a vacuum.
"What's wrong, Vampira? Forgot to sharpen your teeth this evening?" quipped the intern.
Myrna groaned inwardly. Vampire jokes were an occupational hazard of medical technology. She withdrew the needle and tried again. This time she was successful.
"Now that's more like it," said Dr. Meyer. "I was afraid I was going to have to waste an hour, showing you how. Can we get STAT amylase, CBC and a crossmatch on that?"
Myrna injected the blood into tubes, some with anticoagulant, some without. "Why does he need a crossmatch, STAT?" she asked. "Are you going to do surgery?" In hospital jargon STAT meant immediately.
"He needs it STAT because I ordered it STAT. Who's the doctor here, you or me?" said the intern.
"I want to know, because if I have to work my fanny off all night, I'd like to think it's for a good reason. Not just because some doctor decided to write STAT on the order."
"My, you're an assertive little lady," said Dr. Meyer. "If you must know, yes, we might nave to do surgery. We think this guy has a 'hot' appendix, and the sooner you get those lab reports back, the sooner we'll know. So hustle back to the lab and get busy. You might win a date with a handsome, young doctor."
"Yuck!" said Myrna and walked away, leaving him standing there with a quizzical look on his face.
"Vampira, indeed!" she said under her breath as she stabbed at the elevator button. But when she thought about it, it made sense. A blood-drawer intent on collecting a specimen had to have a knowledge of veins and arteries, had to have a calming effect on agitated patients, and had to be able to coax blood out of the weakest, most scarred old veins; in effect, had to think somewhat like a Vampire.
When she got back to the lab, she plopped the tubes of blood into the centrifuge to spin down the clot. She threw a switch and a grumbling roar commenced as the centrifuge gained speed.
The lab was a small room crowded with machine consoles. Myrna took an anti-coagulated sample and fed it to "Clarabelle" the Coulter Counter, which slurped it up in pneumatic tubing. She watched as the little snake of red traveled up the tubing and into the reaction chambers. Winking indicated that the red and white blood cells were being counted. The printer chattered and spat out answers: Hematocrit 47.8, white cell count 16,700.
The hematocrit, the percentage of red blood cells, was normal but the white count was elevated. They would probably operate if the amylase was normal. A high amylase meant that the pancreas, not the appendix, was involved.
When the centrifuge clicked off at the end of ten minutes, Myrna reached in and slowed the spinning head with her hand to save precious minutes. She grabbed for squishy plastic bags of blood out of the refrigerator and lined them up on her desk to set up the crossmatch. Then she took serum to another console to run the amylase.
On the day shift, 30 people worked in the laboratory. On the graveyard shift, Myrna worked alone, handling the emergencies. She was a genius of time organization, as one had to be to keep up with the work of a whole hospital on a busy night. She often felt that the doctors and nurses got all the glory and that she was one of medicine's unsung heroes.
The amylase was normal. Myrna checked her cross-match tubes and saw no clumping, a compatible reaction. She phoned Dr. Meyer with the report.
"Well, I guess you'll have to set up that crossmatch after all," he said.
"I already did," she said. "You've got four compatible units for surgery."
"My God, woman, you must be the fastest crossmatch in the West," he said. "How would you like to go out Saturday night?"
"I'm busy," said Myrna. "I've got to get my horse ready for a show."
"You mean you'd turn me down in favor of a horse?"
"Absolutely," and she hung up on him.
Shanty, a big Tennessee walking horse gelding, was the love interest in Myrna's life. His big free-swinging stride had carried her to the Plantation Walking Horse trophy last year. On the back of her tall graceful horse, Myrna felt a sense of accomplishment similar to that which she felt in her work. A lab tech working the night shift did not have much time to develop a social life, but Myrna sometimes went out of her way to avoid contact with men. And when she did go out, she was careful not to get involved. She had loved once and decided that was enough to play the fool.
She usually found herself the huntress, the predator, the seducer in her relationships. The men she ensnared on her forays into beery, cigarette-smelling nightspots were sometimes unkind. One had called her "hairy chested" after seeing the patch of silken mouse-like down that grew between her breasts. Before embracing them to that hirsute bosom, she sometimes warned, "Be careful, I bite." But after the orgasmic relief, she was always left feeling vaguely unsatisfied. Even the one man who had loved her had not fulfilled all her need, and she had backed out of the relationship feeling guilty and ungrateful. She sometimes wondered if she might be a changeling from some secret elder race.
Now that all her work was finished, she was free until the next emergency cropped up. Myrna loved the stressful nature of her work. When she had nothing to do, she would drift off into fantasies. She would imagine that she could travel back in time and bring modern medicine into a primitive setting.
Tonight she was working in an early 19th century laboratory with Robert Koch, founder of modern bacteriology. She was showing him how the growth of bread mold on a gelatin plate could inhibit the growth of bacterial colonies. Out of gratitude he pledged her his undying love and devotion (all in German) and crushed her against his bushy, bearded face, losing his pince-nez in the process.
Now that was silly!
She was feeling bored and hoped something would happen to get her through the rest of the night. "The said irony of it is," she thought, "that nothing fun happens around here unless someone's dying," and with this ghoulish thought in mind she put her Bell-boy beeper in her pocket and went downstairs to get hot brown water out of the coffee machine.
1845. Russia. The Caucasus.
Against dark hills burst occasional red flares as Imam Shamil's troops displayed their heavy artillery against the forces of Czar Alexander II. An orange blast of cannon fire exploded in the night, and in the distance could be heard the crack of musket fire and the shouts of men. Outside a large tent, a horse-drawn wagon pulled to a halt in the mud.
"There are two more wounded out here," a voice called. "One's taken a ball in the leg and the other has a saber wound in the gut."
"Thank you," another voice answered from the depths of the tent. "Please put them on my last two beds."
In the dark, stuffy tent Vaylance knelt by a pallet on the mud floor. One of his patients was dying. He peeled back the bloody piece of cloth and observed the neat flax string stitches that closed the wound. The man stirred in his uneasy sleep. The bleeding had stopped externally but not internally, and if it did not stop soon, he would have to resort to the dangerous process of transfusion.
"How's he doing?" asked Dr. Rimsky as he made his way among the pallets, holding a lantern high. Vaylance squinted away from the lantern. "He needs a transfusion."
The art of transfusion was seldom practiced in European medicine after the studies of Robert Boyle and others in the 17th century had shown it to be often fatal to the recipient. Vaylance, however, had learned his medical skill from a different tradition and had devised a method that worked fairly well in most cases.
"It's up to you to do it, then," said the doctor. "You have the best luck with it of anybody I've ever seen. I won't try my hand at it. Killed more than I ever saved with that method."
"Well, I guess I'd better find a donor then," Vaylance stood up. He was tall, lean and dark-haired with a sickly sallow complexion, and the most striking dark eyes—eyes that could read the soul. He staggered as he tried to stand, and Dr. Rimsky caught his arm to help him stabilize.
"I know you're not one of us, lad," said the doctor, "but even you must have your limits. You haven't been eating lately. Something is wrong."
"It bothers my conscience to feed, when you are all so sickly," said Vaylance. "When you were all fat and healthy, it was different. Now the cost is too high."
"Small good you'll be to us if you shrivel up and die of starvation," said the doctor. But he saw that his strange young friend was not to be persuaded. Vaylance, when he set his mind to follow his own inner law, was never waylaid by good advice. The fast would continue.
A year ago Vaylance had gone to Dr. Rimsky to tell him that he wished to serve in this war. Rimsky, an army surgeon, gray with age and much responsibility, had tried to discourage this young son of the Varkela from serving with the Russian soldiers.
"They would not accept you once they found you out, dear Vaylance," said the older man. "They would find out your hiding place and stake you while you slept. I cannot allow it. You must serve the Lord in some other way."
"You misunderstand my meaning," said Vaylance, fingering the wooden cross at his throat. "I would not serve as a soldier, but as a medical assistant with you. I must, for you, because you have saved me from the black-water sickness. You know my people are known for their herbal lore, leechcraft, and some for the healer's touch, and you have taught me much of the science of surgery. Let me come with you."
"The Varkela are known for other things besides their skill at healing," said Rimsky. "Even as a convert, you would be mistrusted by the men, and, besides, this is not your war, Vaylance. Your people are considered Tartar and not subject to the Czar." Rimsky hoped that Vaylance would survive the war and become a leader of his people, an ancient race that might become extinct. He had met Vaylance's father while stationed near the Caucasus. He had been surprised to find the old Varkela leechman living with a group of Kalmuck nomadic tribesman who still paid the ancient blood-price for his medical services.
Vaylance had not given up, however. "You forget," he said, "that I was born on Russian soil. And, remember, it has always been the custom of my people to heal the sick and wounded. When the Mongols came over the steppes and made war, did not we Varkela come in the night to ease pain and bind up wounds? All I require is that you provide me with a place to sleep, and I will keep the night watch while you work days."
"Very well," Dr. Rimsky had sighed. "You have my permission, and I will be very glad to have your assistance."
The volunteer came into the dimly lighted tent and sat on the campstool. Vaylance recognized the man.
"You can't give blood again so soon, Sarnov," he said. "It takes at least a month for your body to make more. Go and send someone else."
A few minutes later another man came and presented himself. Vaylance had him lie on the cot next to the wounded man and rolled up his sleeve. He applied the tourniquet and the veins bulged like rope cards. As he worked, Vaylance sang softly the "sleeping song" of his people, which had the effect of inducing a hypnotic state in the volunteer.
With his fingers he traced the swollen veins. He could actually hear the blood hum as it pulsed through the arteries like the rushing of water in subterranean caverns. His mouth began to water as he knelt next to the cot. Gentle as a kiss, his mouth touched the exposed arm, his hollow teeth entered the vein, and a swirl of blood flowed into his mouth. A taste was enough to tell him what he wanted to know. He withdrew his mouth and licked at the wound with his thin, doe-like tongue. Saliva from his lower gland bathed the prick and stopped the bleeding.
There were four blood types Vaylance could recognize by taste: salty, more salty, bitter and slightly sweet. This was the bitter, same as his patient, and without further delay he began to set up the transfusion. He had two hollow needles, and connecting the two was a crude form of rubber tubing. In the middle of the tubing was a glass reservoir with a pair of stopcock valves, a glassblower's nightmare. Vaylance selected the proper vein on the donor's arm and inserted the upper needle, and the lower he placed into the chosen vein of his patient. Slowly the reservoir filled with the dark fluid. Vaylance reversed the stopcock and forced air into a vent on the side of the reservoir, and it slowly emptied.
Knowing that there are four major mood types was a breakthrough in the art of transfusion, but it didn't rule out all danger. There was an antibody lurking in the serum of the patient. A more sophisticated test might have detected the telltale clumping in the bottom of a test tube, but Vaylance, limited to tasting the blood, missed it completely. For this reason he did not know anything was wrong until he saw the skin of his patient go all mottled with reddish splotches. He yanked the needle from the arm, but it was too late to save the man. Hemolyzed red blood cells had already dumped a toxic load of raw hemoglobin into the system. The patient burned with fever as the night wore on. His kidneys, confronted with the hemoglobin, failed, and he entered the coma from which there was no return. As the sun came up, the surgical assistant fought his weariness and stayed near his patient's side, but abruptly he ceased to breathe, and Vaylance admitted defeat. There was nothing to do but clean all the paraphernalia and remove the corpse for burial.
Vaylance went to Dr. Rimsky's tent and woke the doctor. After telling him of the failed transfusion, he prepared to sleep. He always slept in Dr. Rimsky's tent, which was strictly off-limits to everyone except himself and the doctor. Vaylance lay on his cot thinking. Presently his breathing slowed and his pulse dropped to 20 beats per minute. He slept as only the Varkela sleep.
Vaylance awoke with a start to find a crushing weight on his chest. The sun had gone down: it was time for him to work again, but something was wrong. Around him he heard the sounds of men groaning in pain. Hoof-beats approached and then receded in the distance. Then he heard a voice:
"The medical tent's been hit! Give us a hand."
Vaylance struggled with the weight on his chest and found it was a dead man.
"Over here!" he called to the voices.
Someone was moving the heavy tent cloth, and then strong hands reached in and pulled him from the wreckage. Vaylance then helped his rescuer, a large man in an ill-fitting black infantryman's uniform, to clear away the remains of the tent and find the wounded men.
"Shamil's broken through the front here," said the burly soldier as he hefted a stump-legged patient.
"Go and find me a wagon to move the wounded," Vaylance ordered.
Vaylance began to check his patients, who were lying scattered about on the muddy ground. Several of them had died, perhaps from shock or suffocation when the tent was hit. A cannon ball whistled overhead and burrowed into the clay of a nearby embankment. Suddenly he realized Dr. Rimsky was missing. He blundered back into the tent and floundered amid the fallen poles and tent cloth until he found the doctor lying face-down. He was wet all over and the smell of fresh blood hung heavy on the night air. Vaylance turned Rimsky over and saw where a tent pole had slashed an artery in his arm. He found the doctor's medical kit and began to work, quickly removing the pole and applying a pressure bandage to the wound. He prayed that the bleeding would stop.
Then he heard the approach of wagon wheels. The big soldier was back with two others, and they began to load the wounded into the cart. Vaylance lifted the doctor gingerly and placed him in the wagon. Then he climbed up and stayed at the doctor's side as the wagon creaked slowly over the soggy ground. By two hours past midnight they had reached an encampment of supply wagons.
A tall grimacing officer with epaulets on his shoulders approached the wagon on horseback.
"We are the Fourth Medical Unit," said Vaylance, "or rather what's left of it. The doctor is wounded. I am the surgical assistant."
The officer nodded and called to some men by the supply depot. In an hour they had the tent up and had made the patients as comfortable as possible. There were six patients left, including Dr. Rimsky. As Vaylance made his rounds, he was encouraged to see that one of his patients with the leg amputated at the knee was doing well. The man's fever had responded to an infusion of willow leaves, and the stump was healing without infection.
Vaylance was worried about Dr. Rimsky, however, and he decided to re-dress the wound. But when he set the new bandage in place, he saw where the blood still oozed to darken the fresh white cloth. And he realized his hunger. The nearness of blood was beginning to affect him again. He hastily finished the dressing and stepped out of the tent to gaze at the moon. The moon waned in the eastern sky, a thin scimitar of light. In a few nights would come the dark of the moon, the blood-moon, as his people called it.
The Varkela had originally been horse nomads of the Eurasian steppes, wandering from tribe to tribe, exchanging their skill at healing for the blood-price. For centuries they had survived, one here, a few there, in close association with humankind, yet always a race apart, a secret brotherhood. According to oral tradition, they had served in the legions of Attila the Hun around 400 A.D., and when Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis, invaded the Russian frontier, he found tribes that still employed the services of the old Varkela leechman. By Vaylance's time they had mostly died out or had interbred with humankind to the extent that the old genetic traits had been diluted out. One occasionally ran across Varkela characteristics among the Circassian people of the Caucasus or their Tartar neighbors on the steppes. Every now and then, a youth would have those dark, seductive eyes that seemed to exert so much power over the beholder. Or there would be a Tartar brave with such uncanny ability to train horses that people would say of him, "He speaks the horses' language." Blood-need was of course extremely uncommon. One Circassian folktale tells of the wolf-minded Tartar maid who lures a Cossack youth away into the night to drink his blood.
The Varkela had left their imprint on the Slavic racial memory in the form of Vampire stories.
By their strange nocturnal habits and their state of daylight dormancy, they had been regarded as "undead," the nosferatu. The old Greek word for Vampire, "Vrkolakas," may be a corruption of Varkela, the children of the night.
As the gray dawn appeared, Vaylance left the medical tent and sought out the officer he had seen earlier. He found the man sitting on a wooden crate, cleaning a small flintlock handgun that rested on his knee. The officer forced a wet rag down the small bore with a straight alder stick, and with loving hands he polished the smudges of powder burn from the browned metal flashpan. His well-fed gray mare stood patiently tied to the supply wagon. It raised its head and swiveled its ears toward Vaylance, making a barely audible nicker. Vaylance scratched the animal's poll.
"A fine animal you've got here," he said. Then he proceeded with his lie:
"I must go to a nearby village and seek sheeting to make bandages. Could you please assign someone to stay with the wounded until I return?" He hoped this would be a good excuse to sneak away and take his daytime sleep. He no longer had Dr. Rimsky to explain away his odd habits. The taciturn officer nodded and continued his polishing. Vaylance turned to take his leave, then added:
"By the way, your horse has a stone wedged in her left fore hoof."
The road to the village branched, and Vaylance took the less traveled fork. Soon he was ascending a small hillock that was heavily wooded. The increasing light made it hard for him to see, and he welcomed the shadow of the trees. He found a dense thicket where he hoped he would not be discovered, and burrowing into the underbrush, he flattened the grasses and made a place to lie down. He drowsed, pondering his troubles. He might have to transfuse Dr. Rimsky, his dearest friend, yet he feared to take the risk without further knowledge. He would have to risk dream walk to find the answer. The trouble with dreamwalking was that he never knew where he might end up, and he needed someone else to help him do it, but it was the only course open to him. With resolution, Vaylance stopped breathing, slowed his heart and loosed his soul into the void.
He felt as if he were lifted up above the gently rolling hills of the Russian countryside, and he could see the grove where he slept far below. Then the landscape shimmered and disappeared, and in its place came the flat, dry grasslands of the open steppe. A yurt, a tentlike dwelling, stood like a bump in the flat plain, its felt cloth sides rippling in the wind. A few scruffy horses were grazing nearby, and a two-humped Bactrian camel lay sunning itself, its face toward the wind. The surroundings shimmered again, and Vaylance found himself inside the arched cane poles of the yurt. On a wicker couch lay an old man, whose leathern Tartar features, windburned and ancient, did not change, but acknowledged the presence in the yurt.
"My son, do you dreamwalk?" asked the old man.
"My father, I greet thee from the void," answered Vaylance. "I feel myself being pulled forward in the river of time, and I need your help." Vaylance explained his predicament to his father.
"The last time something like this happened," said Freneer, the father, "you almost brought back that unclean woman as your blood-love. You know I am against these outblood liaisons of yours. Favarka's been dead a long time, and I think you should take another mate. I am seeking a Varkela wife for you. You must consider, Vaylance, that we are dying out as a race; if the young men do not produce offspring, the 'old knowledge' will die with us."
"I don't intend to let you breed me like a horse, Father," said Vaylance. "Right now marriage is far away from my thoughts. I must find a way to save Dr. Rimsky."
"And yet you let that Russian doctor study you like some species of beetle—but I know he is your friend and I will help you—but you must promise to choose some wolf-minded girl, just as I chose your mother Odakai."
Vaylance remembered his mother, a Varkela woman who had left the steppes to live in Moscow, where she practiced as a medium and spiritual healer under the name of Anna Varkeerovna. He had lived with her until he was about thirteen, learning French and English in the drawing-room society of Moscow, and then she had taken him back to the steppe to study leechcraft with his father. One night on their journey to the steppes she had come across a wolf-cub which she had picked up and carried for a while across her saddle bow, saying to her young son: "This is the soul-beast of your blood-love, Vaylance." His parents insisted on a pedigree.
"Very well, a wolf-minded girl," Vaylance agreed, "but in my own time, Father, and in my own way."
"Well, then," said the old leechman, "let us begin." He took his staghorn rattles from the altar and sat cross-legged on the rug. Beating the horns together, he began to croon softly in the old language.
Vaylance sat on the rug opposite his father and concentrated on Dr. Rimsky. Gradually the singing got softer and Vaylance felt time, like a river, flowing around him. He let go and drifted with the current. Then he did not hear the singing anymore; in its stead came a sound like rushing water in his ears. He entrusted himself to the forward dream and waited.
Myrna sat up with a start. A face at the blood bank window was enough to jolt her from her reverie.
"Got a live one for you down in admitting!" said the intern, offering Myrna tubes of blood. "Not bleeding now but he seems to have lost a lot somewhere along the way. Hematocrit of sixteen. Dressed like he was going to a costume party. Also he didn't have any I.D. So we just gave him a number. And if you haven't already guessed, we want it STAT."
Myrna fed a sample to "Clarabelle" and got a reading: Hematocrit 15.9 percent, white cell count 4000.
"He won't live long at that rate," she said, as she plopped the tube into the centrifuge to spin. She was most concerned about the low hematocrit, the volume of red blood cells expressed as a percentage. Normal for an adult male was 45 percent. At 15.9 this patient wasn't doing at all well.
When the centrifuge stopped turning, Myrna retrieved the tube of blood, separated the serum from the clot and prepared to type the sample. She added typing serum, spun the tubes and frowned.
"Damn it! He doesn't type," she said, looking at the mixed-field agglutination in the A tube. "Must be a weak subtype of A; either that, or someone's been mixing A and O together." Uncertainty about a blood type was about the worst problem a tech could have when blood was needed for a transfusion.
Myrna had seen a reaction like this only twice before. Once had been when a patient of type O blood had been mistakenly given type A. The other had been when she had been new on the job, just out of training school. An intern had brought her a specimen to type for a "friend." She had at first been puzzled until she looked at the name on the tube. "I. M. Nosferatu." Then she had to laugh. Someone was pulling her leg. The intern had mixed A and O together as they might be expected to occur in the stomach of the fictitious Mr. Nosferatu. It was the ultimate vampire joke.
The man would have to be transfused with such a low hematocrit. So Myrna decided the best thing to do would be to collect a fresh specimen and repeat the tests. Hopefully someone had made a mistake the first time. She filled a tray with the tools of her trade: sterile needle encased in plastic, rubber tourniquet, vacutaner tubes, cotton swabs, alcohol and skin tape. Then she took the elevator to the intensive care unit.
The sweet, sickly odor of the patients hit her as she walked into the ICU. The most critical patients lay in full view of the nursing station, looking like a row of strange vegetables planted in a garden of wires and plastic tubing. The heart monitors peeped every few seconds, and electric recording devices hummed in the background.
"Hi, Rose," she said to the older woman at the nursing station. "I need a new specimen on your Mr. Number 3489."
"First door on your left, " said Rose, "and good luck. I don't think he's got any blood left."
She had expected him to be unconscious when she entered the room, but he was awake and looking at her. He looked to be about thirty, with a shaggy crop of black hair and the most striking dark eyes that glowed faintly as if there were light inside of him. There was something too intimate about looking into those eyes.
And then Myrna had one of those occasions that people in her family called "second sight." She seemed to see a woman, wearing a Cossack's baggy clothing and a fur cap, sitting astride a horse facing into the wind. In the crook of her arm was a wolf cub. The woman stroked the cub and turned her head toward Myrna and smiled at her with those same large dark eyes. She spoke a few words and then the image faded. Myrna realized she was standing there staring at the patient, who regarded her with a whimsical smile.
"This must be an English hospital and you are the leech," he said. He had an accent, although she couldn't place it, and she instinctively knew that he used the word "leech" in its oldest sense, the archaic term for "doctor."
"I suppose you could call me a leech of sorts," she said, "but I'm not a doctor, I'm a medical technologist. And this isn't England. You're in America, friend."
"America!" he exclaimed. "I thought there were only wild Indians and revolutionaries living there. What year is this?
"Nineteen seventy-nine," she said.
"My God!" he said. "When I went to sleep it was 1845."
"What did you do, fall asleep in a time machine? Or are you Rip Van Winkle?"?
"Neither, I hope," he said. "If things are what I think they are, then I'm dreamwalking, and I'm not really here."
"We'll see about that," she said tying the tourniquet around his arm and swabbing vigorously with alcohol. She stuck the needle into his arm and pushed the vacutaner down snugly, breaking the vacuum. Blood was sucked into the tube. Suddenly he clenched his arm, causing the needle to pop out leaving a little trail of red. His hand closed over her wrist tightly.
"Do not take from me, little blood-thief," he said. "I don't have enough to give."
"You don't understand," she said. "I must test your blood for the right type and do a crossmatch. Then they will give you a transfusion because you have lost much blood."
"I have not lost any," he said. "But I have need of it. I have not taken blood in a month." After divulging this bit of information he stared at the few drops of blood in the tube. Perplexed, he said, "Perhaps I'm really here and Rimsky is over one hundred years dead." He lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He seemed to be concentrating on something very far away. For a moment she seemed to see his image fade before her eye so that she thought she could see through him, and then he was back, solid as before.
"It's all right," he said. "I can still hear my father's voice if I listen."
Something very odd was going on here. She wrinkled her brow and studied him for a moment. Then businesslike and efficient, she retied the tourniquet.
"I don't know what's happening," she said, "but whatever it is, my time-travelling friend, you had better give me some blood so I can get back to the lab, or you are going to be one sick turkey." She tried to maintain a calm appearance as she bent over him to obtain the specimen.
There was something about this woman that attracted Vaylance. For a brief moment, when he had looked into her eyes, he thought he had seen the "look of the wolf." And there was something else. Beneath the civilized odor of cologne and talc, he detected a fragrance, imperceptible to human-kind, of something definitely feral, as wild and sweet as the crushed leaves of his medicinal herbs, and this excited him. It called to mind a verse from one of the great Varkela love poems. He converted it into English in his mind and came up with: "Ah, woman, the scent of thy wolvish cunt hath turned my head." It was intended as a compliment, but was definitely not the sort of thing one said to an English-speaking lady in his time; so he kept it to himself.
As she bent over him, he observed that her hair was piled up on her head and held in place by a clip. The nape of her neck was lovely and vulnerable in the half-light, and he felt a strong urge to press his lips to her inviting throat and sink his cat-like teeth into the pulsing artery. Thinking this way caused him to have an erection, and he smiled inwardly at his attempt to stifle the impulse. This Christianity that he practiced was more difficult than the shamanistic religion of Freneer, his father. One of the saints had called the body "brother ass," an appropriate term for his, as it sometimes went stubbornly astray.
She finished drawing the blood sample and left the room, taking her fragrance with her. If she gave him blood, he would have to give her something in return. He knew some members of his race, especially those in the Balkan countries, stole blood like vile insects, giving neither love nor leechcraft in return.
It had been a long time since he had shared blood-love with a woman. Service in the Czar's army did not provide many opportunities. He had counted himself lucky when at the age of 17 he had won the love of Favarka, a full-blooded Varkela. Women were so rare that he'd shared her with another older man, according to their custom, but she'd called him "favorite." She was ten years dead, but he sometimes thought of her and the times he had laid his head on the soft fur between her breasts. He still carried the small scars where Favarka in her passion had marked him hers with love bites.
Back at the lab, Myrna fussed with her test tubes and got the same frustrating results. Holding the tubes up to the light, she saw little red flecks in the typing serum.
"This will have to do, I guess," she said.
Dr. Meyer was waiting at the window, impatiently drumming his fingers along the countertop.
"You'll have to sign for this one," said Myrna.
"That bad, huh?" he said.
"He doesn't type," she said. "I called my supervisor and she said give O-negative packed cells. At least he doesn't have any serum antibodies that I can detect."
"Maybe it's a hypoimmune response," said Dr. Meyer.
"You know, that guy is weird. 'Crit of 16, and he sits up in bed asking me questions all night. I'm surprised he can move his mouth, let alone sit up. You'd better loan him one of your books on blood-banking. He's asking things that are over my head."
At 5:00 A.M. when things had quieted down, Myrna was washing out the tubing on the auto-analyzer. She was finished and just about to get a cup of coffee, when she heard it. She did not exactly "hear" it, for there was no sound, but the definite words came to her: "Come to me," they said.
She got her coffee and sat down at the lab bench to think this over.
"Come to me."
It was a voice inside her head pleading subtly but insistently. It was him. It had to be him.
Her curiosity compelled her sufficiently that when Ernie the security guard came by, she asked him to watch the phone while she went upstairs.
The ICU was quiet except for the beep-beep of the heart monitors. When she entered the room, her patient was lying back on the bed with a smile on his face and a little white tooth projected over his lower lip. He had taken the IV needle from his arm and placed the tubing over one of his teeth. The blood bag, hung on a rack overhead, was emptying visibly. He seemed quite pleased with himself.
"You didn't come right away," he said. "That means you are somewhat wolf-minded—sit here." He pointed to the bed. His voice was quiet, but she could feel the command in it. And she felt an overwhelming desire to obey his commands, especially when she looked into those dark, seductive eyes. Somehow she resisted: he would not have fun at her expense. What is happening, she thought, is that he is trying to control my mind. With an effort, she raised her eyes from his.
"Suppose I refuse," she said.
His spell was broken, but he didn't look at all unhappy about it; in fact, quite the contrary.
"You know, you're one of the few people who can do that?" he said. "This is even better than I'd hoped." His eyes appraised her carefully, with a certain longing, laced with self-confidence.
She detested his smugness. "You'd better get that needle back in your arm before a nurse catches you."
He heaved a languorous sigh and winked at her.
She shivered and walked determinedly from the room. Halfway down the hall, she heard it again: "Come back."
The hell I will, thought Myrna.
"Please?"
No!
He was ecstatic to think that he could find a wolf-minded girl in this place.
At 8:00 a.m. Myrna went home from the hospital. She unlocked the door to her small apartment, crossed the room and turned on the television to keep her company. A blink of light, and the Morning Show came on. A psychiatrist was being interviewed about the effect of modern technology on the psyche. "We may find," he was saying, "that man needs mythology more than all the conveniences of our modern age." Myrna left the voices mumbling behind her, as she took the few steps to the kitchen. She stooped to open the small refrigerator that fitted under the counter and peered among the cottage cheese cartons and plastic-wrapped packages. She selected a package of two-day-old chicken, removed a drumstick, and shut the door.
Her small breakfast finished, she turned off the TV and opened the bedroom door. In one corner stood a clothes hamper stuffed to overflowing, and in the middle of the room lay a mattress under a heap of blankets. Beside it were piled the books she was currently reading. There was also the letter from Terry, in which he complained of her inability to say the word "love." The most she would say to someone she felt close to was, "I care for you." She had written back to him: "There is something wild in me that won't be caged by love."
Along one wall of her room was a bookcase that reached from floor to ceiling. She went to the wall and searched among the titles. Following one row with her finger, she stopped on The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, by Montagu Sommers. She tossed it on the bed and went to the bureau and opened the top drawer. She searched a while among the lipstick cases, pill bottles, and mismatched socks. It wasn't there. She pulled open the next drawer and sorted around the underwear until she found the little wooden jewelry box. Inside the box, tangled in a mass of neck chains and a string of pearls, she found the object of her search, a tiny silver cross, given to her when she was a little girl by her grandmother. She had never worn it, but she put it around her neck now. Then she began to undress. Removing her white nylon pants, she put on her flannel nightgown, rearranged the blankets, and settled into her nest to read. Eventually she fell mid-paragraph into a restless sleep.
The use of the cross as a religious symbol predates Christianity, going back as far as neolithic times. It was usually a glyph for the axe or hammer and, as such, signified power. To the Teutonic tribes of northern Europe, it represented the hammer of Thor. In the Shamanistic tradition of Eurasia it was Skaldi's hammer, the sun's hammer. To the Varkela, children of the night, the sun was viewed as an ancient enemy. For them the idea of a bright, sunny day had the same connotation as we might attribute to the phrase "dark of the moon." The sun hammer was regarded as a bad omen, as is echoed in the Varkela curses: "May the sun hammer smite thee," or "May the sun strike you blind." As a Christian symbol, the cross was supposed to ward off the devil, and so by converse logic the Varkela were regarded as "demonkind" because they avoided it.
That evening Myrna went early to the hospital. She went to the intensive care unit and inquired about the progress of her patient.
"He had a code 99 this morning, cardiac arrest," Rose reported. "They had to resuscitate him. Lucky they caught him when they did or he would have been gone."
Nervously Myrna entered the room and stood inside the doorway watching the figure on the bed. In her lab coat pocket she fingered her silver crucifix. He was sitting up in bed and he smiled when he recognized her.
"A person could get killed in a place like this," he said. "This morning when I was almost asleep, they came in and jolted me right out of it with that horrible shock machine."
"You're lucky," she said. "They could have decided you were dead and sent you to pathology for an autopsy. Then you would be all cut up and placed in little bottles by now."
"I see this age has its share of barbarous customs," he said.
Myrna took a step into the room, fumbling with the object in her pocket.
"You're a vampire, aren't you?" she said, stopping at what she hoped was a safe distance from the bed.
"I'm not a corpse come back to life, if that's what you mean," he said. "But I am Varkela, which is probably the source of all those silly legends."
Vaylance eyed her pocket mistrustfully, thinking it must contain a small hand pistol. When outbloods began using the word "vampire" it usually meant trouble, and only a fool would stick around trying to argue about technical differences. Therefore he was quite relieved when she took a small crucifix out of her pocket and extended her arm triumphantly in his direction.
Aha, he thought, someone comes to smite me down with the sun's hammer. He decided to have a little fun with her. Shrinking down in the bedclothes and feigning terror, he watched as she advanced in somnambulistic grandeur. When she was within range and the little cross dangled in front of his nose, he reached out and took it from her hand. An impudent grin spread across his face.
"Thank you," he said, "but as you can see, I already have one," and he pulled at the chain around his neck, bringing his own hand-carved cross into view.
Crestfallen, Myrna sat down on the bed, her mouth gaping.
"Little blood-thief," he said, "if you only knew how funny you looked just then."
"But I thought…" she began.
"I can be a Christian like anyone else," he said.
She didn't seem to hear him. She was still recovering from the shock.
"Hello," he waved a hand in front of her face. "You of all people don't have to be afraid of me. A wolf-minded girl can defend herself. I won't bite you or whatever it is you are afraid of."
He was glad when he saw the wolvish look return to her eyes, but now she regarded him with such a stern expression that he stopped smiling. She was angry with him.
"I suppose you think this is a soup kitchen, where you can come for a free meal," she said. "I work hard to crossmatch blood for sick people. I'll have you know blood costs sixty dollars a pint, if you're interested. If you're hungry, go find someone who's healthy and bite them on the neck!"
He felt ashamed to have taken blood without payment.
"You don't need to haggle the price of blood with me," he said. "I know it comes dear, and I will find some way to repay, but right now I need your help."
He began to explain to her about the war in 1845, about his work in the medical tent, and about his dearest friend Dr. Rimsky who lay dying in another time. He watched her face for signs of comprehension. At first she raised a cynical eyebrow at his outpouring, but he rushed onward with his story, hoping to convince her by his urgency if not with logic. Soon her skepticism was replaced by doubt. She began to ask questions and to demand explanations on certain points. Eager to sway her his way, he supplied detail upon detail. Finally, as the torrent of his rhetoric abated, he thought he saw just the barest glimmer of belief in her eyes.
When he finished, Myrna was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You know, you're not such a bad sort, and I'm half persuaded that you're telling the truth, but you make a horrible first impression. If you wanted my help, why didn't you ask me, instead of going through all that stupid 'come to me' business? You scared me half to death."
"I'm sorry about that," he said. "I was only thinking of myself. You see, I have not shared blood-love with anyone for a long time and your response was so typically Varkela, that I forgot for a moment that you are an outblood and do not understand. Most of humankind cannot resist the 'call' and will come to us when summoned, but those who resist, the wolf-minded ones, are those we prefer to mate with, for they usually have some Varkela ancestry. But there are also wolf-minded outbloods here and there, and we also marry with them, because full-blood Varkela women are subject to an illness, and thus are very rare."
"It must be a sex-linked genetic defect," said Myrna.
"A what?"
"Never mind," she said. "Listen, if I'm going to help you, we're going to have to get you out of this place. Otherwise they'll keep trying to start your heart every morning, and you'll never get any rest."
"That's not the only thing," said Vaylance. "These doctors think I'm human. They are planning to transfuse me again tonight to raise my what-you-call-it."
"Hematocrit."
"Right. But I'm Varkela and don't need as much. It would be a waste of good blood and might even make me ill."
"I saw your chart and your 'crit is only eighteen. No doctor is going to sign your release," she said. "I can get your clothes from admitting and you can come and stay at my place for a while, but I don't know how to smuggle you past the nurses' station."
"That's no problem to me," he said, and so saying, he concentrated for a few minutes, and his image faded from view. Then he was back again. "I would have done it sooner, but I had no place to go."
"I have to go to work now," said Myrna, checking her watch. "But if you can slip past the nurses and meet me down at the lab, I'll have your things. I can teach you about transfusion, and maybe we can rig up a sort of crossmatch that would work back in 1845."
About 2:30 a.m. Ernie, the security guard, came by the lab to tell Myrna that one of the patients was missing from the ICU and that she should keep an eye out for him. After he left, Vaylance materialized behind the filing cabinet.
"I wish I knew that trick," said Myrna. "I'd vanish every time my supervisor came around with a stool specimen to analyze."
"It's merely an illusion of the dreamwalk," he said. "One shouldn't do it too often. It expends a frightful lot of energy."
Myrna seated Vaylance at the lab bench and prepared to teach him immuno-hematology.
"The four major blood groups, A, B, AB, and O, are probably what you are able to distinguish by taste," she said. "We differentiate them by adding typing sera to the blood specimen." She showed him how the blue serum precipitated group A; the yellow, group B. For type AB, both the blue and yellow serum precipitated and for type O, neither of them did.
"The next thing you have to worry about are antibodies," she said. "A person with type A has Anti-B antibodies in his or her serum; this is why you can't give type-B blood to a type-A person. A type-B person has Anti-A; therefore, you can't give type-A to a B person. A type-O person has both Anti-A and Anti-B; therefore, you can't give type A or B to an O person; but type O is sometimes called the "universal donor" because you can give it to type A, B, and AB persons because they don't have an Anti-O in their serum."
"Now you've cot me really confused," said Vaylance. "I'll never be able to remember all that."
"You won't have to," said Myrna, "because I am going to teach you a simple crossmatch technique, which should rule out some of the dangers." She then took two different blood specimens and separated the serum from the cells. Next, using a porcelain slide, she mixed the donor cells with the patient serum on one side, and the patient cells with the donor serum on the other.
"If either mixture reacts, then you know that the donor is the wrong blood type, or that he has an antibody against the patient, malting an incompatible crossmatch."
She showed Vaylance now to let the blood clot and take off the serum, and how to mix serum and cells on the slide to make what she called a "major" and a "minor" crossmatch.
"It's not perfect," said Myrna, "but it will pick out a few antibodies and prevent errors in typing."
Most of the rest of the night they talked about blood and transfusions and antibodies. She asked him how drinking the blood could raise his hematocrit, and he explained that the blood didn't go into his stomach, but that most went through valves in his hollow teeth and directly into his bloodstream. The serum antibodies were apparently filtered out somewhere in the process. She theorized that he probably had a deficiency of rubriblasts in his bone marrow, which caused the blood-need he felt from time to time. She was surprised to discover that a 'Vampire' needed only two pints of blood in the course of a month and could subsist on small amounts taken from many, healthy, sleeping donors. Vaylance revealed that he had two kinds of saliva: from the lower gland, a rapid clotting agent, and from the upper gland, an anticoagulant. Myrna was fascinated and asked if she could take samples.
"You're as bad as Dr. Rimsky," said Vaylance. "He experiments with my spit on men, rats, and horses. I've spent hours drooling into bottles for the furtherance of science."
Vaylance noticed that during their long conversation, she seemed to avoid any topics of a personal nature. There was a certain aloofness or distance that she tried to maintain. And he was reminded of how he had been after Favarka's death, the withdrawal from life and the inward nursing of pain. He was not sure how to broach the subject. So he decided on the bold, blunt approach.
"Have you ever loved anyone, Myrna?" he asked.
She pondered this for a long time and then answered:
"Yes, once a long time ago."
"And he hurt you?" asked Vaylance gently.
"How did you know?"
"I don't know, I just sense it," he said.
There was a long silence, punctuated by the clicking of the peristaltic pump on the autoanalyser and the ringing of a distant telephone.
Finally he said, "And you've never allowed yourself to love anyone since." It was a statement of fact, not a question.
"Does that show too?" she asked defensively.
"It does," he said. "Don't you know that if you refuse to love, the wound may heal over on the surface, but inside an abscess grows, poisoning you from within?"
"Love is an illusion," said Myrna. "Two people come together to satisfy their own needs. The secret lies in not caring too much. That way you don't get hurt when they leave you."
He knew that this cynical answer was just her defense against deeper feelings, but it angered him, moving him to say:
"But in that way you defeat your own purpose. You hurt people and use them and drive them away. Don't you see that if you continue in that way, you will become more of a vampire than I am?"
He saw a flash of anger in her eyes, and then she looked away, biting her lower lip. He saw that his words had had an effect: she wept silently.
Well and good, he thought, she will learn to care again. He reached out and put an arm around her shoulders.
"Heal thee, heal thee," he said after the custom of his people.
When she had dried her eyes and regained some of her composure, she said, "It's not fair of you to knock down a person's defenses like that."
"It's fair if my intentions are honorable, which they are," he said.
She had to laugh at "honorable intentions."
"Now I really believe you are from the nineteenth century," she said. "Welcome to the age of noncommitment, Vaylance."
At 8:00 a.m. Myrna took him home with her. At first he balked at the "horseless carriage," her Volkswagen Superbeetle, but she finally persuaded him to get into the metal contraption. At her apartment she prepared him a place to sleep on cushions on the living room floor. Then she went to take her own daytime rest.
She awoke to hear music. He had found her old guitar and returned it to resemble some instrument familiar to him. He strummed a minor chord and sang in his own language. It had the sound of cold wind howling across open plains.
"What is that you're singing?" she asked.
He translated for her:
"The dun mare has died,
Little sister of the wind
She wanders the pasture of the spirit world.
I hear her neiqh sometimes
When the north wind blows."
It moved her to confess to him. "I have a horse."
"Really?" he said. "You must take me out to meet him tonight before I leave. But first I want to hear you sing for me."
She didn't like to think of his leaving. The more she got to know him, the more she felt he was the sort of man that she had always hoped to meet. She took the guitar from him and returned it, and played an old Scottish ballad, a favorite of hers called "The Waters of Tyne."
"Oh, I cannot see my love if I would dee.
The waters of Tyne stand between him and me.
And here I must sit with a tear in my ee,
All sighin' and sobbin' my true love to see."
Except that when she sang it her tongue stumbled so that it came out "the waters of time."
She took him out to the stable where she kept Shanty, her horse. Crickets were singing in the warm night, when they arrived, and Shanty trotted up to the fence to greet them, pushing his nose into Myrna's pocket to bee for sugar. Vaylance scratched Shanty's neck and then bent, sliding his hand down a foreleg to check the hoof.
"You'd better be careful. He's fussy about his feet," warned Myrna. She thought of the farrier, whom Shanty had chased out of the barn. The man refused to go near Shanty now unless the horse was hobbled.
Shanty, however, made no trouble, and at a softspoken word picked up his feet and allowed them to be examined.
"He isn't usually like this with strangers," said Myrna. "He's really taken to you."
Vaylance took hold of the horse's mane and vaulted up onto his back. Shanty made a half rear and pivoted, galloped to the far end of the field and came back at an easy lope. Vaylance bounced down next to her again.
"You can ride a strange horse without saddle or bridle!" exclaimed Myrna.
"Only to show off for you," he said. "Actually, I am not that good. Back home I could introduce you to some real riders. When you tell a Russian boy that he rides like a Cossack, he takes it as a compliment, but to Varkela it is an insult."
When they got back to the apartment they were hungry. Vaylance insisted on cooking for her.
"It is a custom of ours. I haven't prepared food for a woman in a long time. It would give me pleasure," he said.
They searched in the refrigerator and found lamb chops. Vaylance, as he set about to cook, consumed a quart of milk, explaining that on the steppes he had lived mostly on mare's milk. Myrna showed him how to work the electric stove and then found a snack for herself as she awaited the results of his experiment.
"What's that funny stuff you're eating?" he asked. "Surely that can't be good for you."
"Coca-Cola and potato chips. I eat them all the time."
"Ugh!" he said.
"What's wrong with it?" said Myrna, knowing full well but desiring to provoke him a little. They had been having contests of the will all day. It was some sort of Varkela custom having to do with courtship or flirting.
"If you were my blood-love, I'd make you eat lots of green, leafy foods, bran meal and meat," he said.
"Why?"
"So my love wouldn't weaken you, and your blood would grow back rich and strong. I'd not have it said that my woman faints. And of course you would have to eat lots of karacheer."
"What's that?"
"Jerked goat's liver."
"Bleccchhh!"
"If you wouldn't, I'd force it down your throat!"
"The hell you would!" she said.
He engaged her eyes and tried to stare her down. She felt the force of his will as he tried to "Call" her to him. She thought a fierce, sharp thought that sent him reeling backward.
"Ow, you are wolf-minded. Now you've gone and given me a headache just as Favarka used to do."
It was fun, but it made him look at her throat with such longing.
"You will eventually yield to me, won't you?" he asked hopefully. "It's not fair for you to be so good at the teasing game if you don't intend to yield."
"Wait and see," she said. She seemed to have the upper hand and she was enjoying it.
After dinner she had to admit he was a very good cook.
His presence had stimulated Myrna into a lovely fantasy. She had an idea:
"I wish I could dreamwalk and go back with you. I think I'd like helping you in the medical tent. I know first aid and I could teach you a lot about modern medicine."
Vaylance was surprised. He had been wishing he had more time with her. Then perhaps it might have worked.
"We don't know each other well enough," he said. "To dreamwalk requires love and trust in your guide. It can be dangerous."
"We could at least try," she said.
He tried half-heartedly to dissuade her. He really wished it could be so. Finally he agreed to try. He sat her in a chair and stared into her eyes, trying to put her into the proper trance. But she resisted. He could see that she didn't mean to, but she couldn't help it. The wolf in her that so strongly attracted him fought against him now.
"Keep trying," she insisted. "I feel something beginning to happen."
Carefully he tried to coax her soul into the void. Finally he seemed to be succeeding. She slumped forward in her chair.
Myrna found herself inside a long, dark tunnel. She moved toward gray light in the distance until she felt grass under her feet, and, looking up, she saw the night sky, a panoply of stars. In the distance a rider approached over the steppe. No sound came to her from the horse's hooves, only the small ringing of tiny bells. She could see the rider clearly now, outlined against the starry mist, a woman clad in baggy trousers wearing a fur cap. A loose Tartar jacket enclosed her arms, which held a small wolf cub. The sturdy horse of the steppes came to a halt before Myrna, shaking its mane with a sprinkle of wind chimes. The fierce, dark-eyed woman offered the cub to Myrna, who cradled it in her arms. No word was spoken. The rider spurred her mount and cantered away, making no sound except the jingle of tiny bells.
Myrna looked at the small wolf and thought she saw sentience begin to glow redly in the depth of its eyes. Abruptly its countenance changed so that it was no longer a cub, but the wizened face of a small demon.
"Are you then one of the chosen?" it asked of her.
Myrna screamed and flung down the cub. Where it fell the ground split open in a great rent. Something made a scratchy noise deep in the dark hole, and then Myrna saw it, a giant centipede-like creature with many-jointed legs. It began to come toward her. She turned and fled. As she ran, she could hear the gnashing of chitinous jaws just behind her. Then she was in the tunnel again, which seemed to wind on forever as the thing gained on her. Just as a whip-like antenna snaked out to touch her shoulder, she woke up sobbing in Vaylance's arms.
"I was afraid of something like this," he said. "Where did you go? I couldn't find you."
She told him about the dream as he held her close, comforting her.
"You have seen the ghost-soul of my mother, Odakai," said Vaylance, "but what it means, I do not know."
He lifted and carried her into the bedroom, and, setting her gently on the bed, he lay down beside her.
She had avoided any affectionate gestures from him all day, being both attracted and repelled by his vampire nature. But now, partly because she was upset, and partly because he would be leaving soon, she pressed closer in his arms.
"If you yield to me now," he said, "I will make your blood to sing."
She could feel his breath on her neck and she braced herself for what she knew must come next. But he didn't bite. He kissed her tenderly, and then he was kissing her mouth and her nose and her eyes and carefully undressing her. "Why you're tattooed!" she said, when he took off his shirt.
She traced with her finger where a stag raced across his chest.
"It's my soul-beast," he told her.
They played at love for a long time. He was gentle, teasing, the most sensitive lover she had ever known.
Vaylance, when he saw the soft fur of her bosom, made a little cry of joy. This and her scent proved to him that she was one of his own kind, and he banished his Christian conscience to a remote corner of his mind where it could not touch him.
When he finally pulled her over on top of him and entered her, she was so close that she could hardly contain it, but he sensed this and stopped, then brought her close to the knife's edge several times before allowing her to finish. And her blood sang, pulsing in her ears, a song of the open steppes. As she lay satiated on top of him, he sought the jugular vein in her throat and bit deeply. She didn't really mind. She felt so warm and sleepy that she was content to lie there and enjoy the intimacy of it. When he finished, he licked the wound clean with his pink dog-like tongue, and Myrna, having recovered, reached up and nipped him playfully in the throat.
"My poor little wolf with no teeth," he said. "I must help you." And he turned his head and bit his own shoulder so that the blood flowed.
"I share myself with you," he said.
She looked at the red trickle. She knew what he wanted her to do, but she didn't want to do it So she just stared down at him.
"You reject me then?" he asked with such soft, wounded eyes that she couldn't refuse him. She pressed her lips to the small cut and drank a little of the warm liquid. The taste of his blood awoke in her some ancient need and she continued to drink until it was satisfied. For an instant it seemed as if she saw herself through his eyes. The moment passed and she was aware that he looked at her intently.
"Our souls have touched," he said.
They lay together a long time without talking.
Vaylance's conscience uncoiled from where it lay sleeping like a dormant asp and bit him.
"I have sinned and must repent," he said. "The Christians have such strange rules about love."
Then he looked at her and brushed back her hair to kiss her forehead. "And yet I don't think God would begrudge me to share blood-love with you," he said, "because it's such a comfort, and doesn't the Bible say, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord'?"
Myrna laughed.
"Have I made a joke?" he asked.
"Sort of," she said. "That's the first time I ever heard anyone quote the Bible to justify fornication."
Hurt, he rolled away from her, pulling the pillow down over his head.
"You make it sound like something people write on the wall of a latrine," he said.
Myrna pulled the pillow away and was going to clout him with it, when she saw that although his eyes were tightly closed, a tear wet the lashes.
"Hey, I'm sorry," she said. "I was only teasing you."
"It's nothing," he said. "Just my romantic nature showing. I'd hoped we could call it love, not fornication. But I know it's much too soon to know."
He was silent for a moment and then he said, "Do you know why it's so difficult for you to love, Myrna?"
"No," she said honestly, almost guiltily. "I thought it was because I'd been hurt once, but I know it goes much deeper than that."
"It's because the wolvish soul builds trust slowly," he said. "It rejects all but those who persistently continue to take the risk of courting it. It may be befriended, never tamed."
Myrna felt that, for the first time, someone had really understood her nature. It seemed impossible that he could be leaving.
"I wish we had more time," she said.
"So do I," he said, "but perhaps we may meet again someday. I think that dream you had gives us cause for hope. It may mean that Odakai accepts you, but you are just not ready yet."
They held each other for a long time in the dark, saying nothing.
From somewhere in the room, Myrna seemed to hear a faraway voice, singing in an unknown language, his language.
"I must leave you now," he said.
"I wish I could go with you," she said, "but if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride."
He didn't understand the English proverb, and she had to explain to him that back in the 17th century only those with enough money could afford a horse.
"It sounds funny to me," he said, "because where I come from even the beggars ride. I'll change the saying around and give you my blessing as a parting gift. May your wishes be horses, Myrna, and carry you wherever you desire to go."
"May your wishes be horses," she said. "I like the sound of that."
He gave her a parting kiss and an affectionate little nip on the neck, and then he was gone.
In 1845 it was raining. Vaylance slogged back toward camp in the evening drizzle. On the way to the medical tent, he passed the cook's station. Old, fat Temboyov was boiling a vat of some kind of lumpy gray porridge and bragging to a new recruit about how he'd looted a set of porcelain tea cups. Vaylance surreptitiously relieved him of a few of the saucers.
The crossmatch worked just as she said it would. He was able to rule out any incompatible donors by watching for red clumps against the white porcelain background The transfusion was a success, and Dr. Rimsky was up and around on the third day. Vaylance moved back into the medical tent, after spending two days sleeping in a hollow tree.
"I'm relieved to see that you are not slinking into camp looking like a drowned rat anymore," said Rimsky. "But why didn't you just take your bed and claim illness? I would have thought up some way to cover for you."
"Because no one would believe me," said Vaylance. "I look healthier than the lot of you."
It was true. His complexion was almost rosy. Thanks to the transfusion in Myrna's hospital, Vaylance was in better health than he'd been in a long time.
"What's that tune you keep humming?" asked Dr. Rimsky one night as they worked together in the tent.
"I think it's called 'The Waters of Time,' " answered Vaylance, a little sadly.
Externally, Myrna's life did not change much after Vaylance left. Work was still a series of frantic rush orders interspersed with periods of boredom. She brought a book on Russian history to the hospital to read when she wasn't needed.
Shanty still moved his big feet with the grace of a fairy dancer, and she won another blue ribbon at the shows. But he could not carry her to the place she really desired to go. One Saturday afternoon as she brushed the saddle marks out of his hair, she pressed her face into his neck and wet his mane with tears. It was then that she heard him make the little noise in the throat, as horses do when they wish to express sympathy, and she realized she had allowed herself to love again.
That night when she went to sleep, she dreamed that she walked through a long, dark tunnel. She came out into a large grassy place under a starry night sky. A horse and rider approached, making no sound except the jingling of faint harness bells. As the figure drew closer, Myrna recognized the Cossack woman who carried the wolf cub. The dark-eyed woman stopped her horse and offered the cub to Myrna, who took it and held it close to her heart. The woman pointed to a rutted wagon road, then turned her horse and rode away making no noise of hooves but only the ringing of tiny bells.
Myrna followed the road indicated until she came to a wagon parked by the roadside. A man was just climbing up to the driver's seat. Myrna put the cub on the wagon bed and boosted herself up. There were men, some lying, some sitting up, in the wagon. The man nearest her was crudely bandaged about the head and he muttered softly to himself. The driver clucked to the horses and the wagon creaked on its way. Myrna tucked the small wolf under the light flannel she was wearing. She felt its cold nose against her bare breasts. It was getting colder, so she moved closer to the man and placed her back against the side of the wagon. They lurched along until the road turned in at a large tent. Horse were tethered in a small grove of oak trees, and there was a fire a little ways from the tent. The driver pulled up and said something in Russian. A sturdy, gray-haired man with a bandaged arm came out of the tent and spoke to the driver, who climbed down from his seat.
Myrna reached for the wolf cub and found it was missing.
She looked down the front of her flannel gown and saw that in the hollow between her breasts, her little patch of gray fur was denser. Before she had time to think about this, she heard a voice she recognized from inside the tent. She jumped down from the wagon, and, ignoring the gray-haired man who spoke to her, ducked under the flap and entered.
Inside, in the lantern light, she saw him, with his back toward her, bending over a patient. He turned to look her way and his mouth fell open in astonishment so that his blood teeth showed.
"Myrna!" he cried, and stepping around a cot, he hugged her to his white, blood-stained apron, then held her back to look at her.
"Like all dreamwalkers, you have come ill-prepared," he said, plucking at her flannel night gown. "And barefoot too."
She looked down past her ruffled hem to where her bare toes peeked out. He rummaged in a corner of the tent and tossed her a wool shirt, a pair of trousers and two heavy-knit woolen socks.
"This will have to do for now," he said. "We have incoming wounded and I have work to do." He was already busy with scissors, cutting back the sleeve of a soldier's uniform.
Myrna saw his surgical tools—forceps, scalpels, needles—all lying in neat order on a dirty piece of linen.
"You could stand to learn a few things about asepsis," she said, and made a mental note that she would have to teach him sterile technique. She hunted until she found a pot and water to boil, and took it out to put on the fire. Then she returned to where Vaylance bent over his patient, speaking soothing Russian phrases, as he pried at a musket ball in the ragged flesh. She found the bandaging cloth and made ready to assist him.