5

Toward morning, there’s a distant rumble. I bury my face in my pillow, dreaming of the sudden downpours that scour the grasses at the edge of the lake, releasing their musk.

But the rains haven’t come. A few moments later, the gelid ground heaves.

Officers and porters pour out of their tents half dressed. The word “earthquake” is in the air, but then someone spots a column of fire on the horizon in the direction of the gas pipeline.

This isn’t the first time the pipeline has been breached. The thieves lack the tools to cut it safely. They use hammer drills, grinders, sometimes even torches. A crowd will have gathered in anticipation of free fuel. There will be casualties.

Soon the first makeshift ambulance arrives: a flatbed truck. We smell the wounded before we see them. Third-degree burn victims, seven of them, their clothes still smoking. Of these, three are dead, three are critical, and one is a hysterical toddler fused to his mother’s thigh by a melted jerrican. The mother is dead, the flesh on her back burnt down to the spine. It seems she died protecting the child from the blast. It’s horrifying and heartrending and we cut them apart and move on.

The next group arrives in the back of a poultry truck, piled in among reeking crates. Then another truck arrives, and another. The ward overflows into the yard, which is soon heaped with empty burn kits.

As the hours pass, the cries intensify, assaulting the ears like a flock of starlings that never settles. At a certain point, I look up to find an armored convoy barreling down on us. Personnel carriers skid to a halt in front of the hospital, raising clouds of dust. We cover our patients as best we can while soldiers from Protective Services dismount and race across the grounds. Their trucks are left idling. Diesel fumes fill the air, even as the dust settles.

I approach the drivers and ask them to shut off their engines, but they refuse to hear me. They don’t even roll down their windows.

The soldiers move in sudden evasive spurts, taking cover where they find it, as if this were a battlefield.

Fine, I think, let them play at their war-making. I have a hospital to run.

Then one of my surgeons comes to tell me that patients are being removed from the ward.

“And taken where?” I ask.

The surgeon shrugs. His hands are covered in gore and burn ointment. I hold a canteen to his lips. He drinks it dry, then tells me that we’re dangerously low on everything.

I spot a pair of guards bearing a wounded marshman and rush over to them.

“Here!” I say. “Where are you taking this man?” But they ignore me, too. I might as well be a ghost.

I follow them to a metal shipping container mounted on a flatbed. The doors of the container shift like vanes in the breeze. The air is alive with cries of agony, but of a different sort from the ones I’ve heard all morning.

The soldiers heave the patient into the container, then race back to the hospital with their empty stretcher.

I peer inside, where a dozen marshmen are laid out in a row, their hands bound with bright plastic restraints. In the depths of the container, an officer is setting up an arc lamp. I recognize him by the pale eyes and delicate mustache as a man named Reiff, one of Curtis’s adjutants. When we first met, he was a gunnery sergeant; now he wears the uniform of a lieutenant colonel.

Reiff aims the lamp at a bearded elder whose torso has been ravaged by the explosion. The man’s blackened rib bones are thrown into stark relief; the raw fibers of his intercostal muscle glint as he breathes. There’s a lot of shouting, but Reiff’s language skills are poor. I can barely make out the words, and only because I know how to adjust for his foreign accent.

Then he reaches in his pocket and produces a miniature plumber’s torch, which he lights with a flourish. He adjusts the flame to a brilliant blue pinpoint, then kneels and holds it to the elder’s open wound.

The marshman lets out a bloodcurdling cry. The others cry out, too, like dogs howling in response.

“Reiff!” I shout.

Reiff turns to me, his face purple with heat and exertion. “It’s Gus, right?” he asks. “The king of jibber-jabber? You’d better get in here.”

“These men belong in the ward.”

Reiff smiles sardonically. “Curtis warned me about your bullshit,” he says.

“They need to be moved. Right now.”

“No,” he says, “what they need is for you to get in here and translate for me.”

Master, gasps the marshman at my elbow, help me.

The face is thick with edema, but I can still recognize my canoe boy.

Chigger, I say, why have they brought you here?

He starts to answer, but is overcome by a coughing jag. His breath smells like charred meat. His lungs are finished. He won’t live through the night.

Reiff rushes over with the torch. “Good man!” he says. “Keep him talking. Ask him about their command structure. No, belay that—ask him what they’re planning to hit next.”

I look up in amazement and say, “Go fuck yourself.”

He squats to confront me. The torch hisses by my ear. “You do not want to go down that road, my friend,” he says.

“The marshmen have a word for someone like you,” I say. “Unclean.”

Reiff’s eyes narrow; he still hasn’t learned that supremely shameful word. He drives a rigid finger into my chest and bellows, “Out!” before turning his attention back to Chigger.

I pretend to walk calmly away. Then I free my sidearm.

But unlike the soldiers I’m used to, Reiff is a professional. The warm rubber grip is the last thing I feel before the ground leaps to my cheek.

*   *   *

I come to in the ward. My ears won’t stop ringing; each heartbeat is a fresh blow to my head. I cover my eyes against the light of the bedside candle.

It’s night. The ward is empty, save for Paul, who sits by me, whittling a reed with his homemade knife. I’m parched, but just as I start to ask for water, Paul gets up and races out to the hall.

I explore the back of my head with tentative fingers. There’s a decent gash, and the hair all around is matted with blood. The fact that the wound hasn’t even been laved is a puzzle that occupies my whirling mind.

The door flies open. Ah, my water, I croak.

Curtis steps into the room, looking taller and leaner than ever. The shine on his freshly shaven face seems to match his polished boots. He smells strongly of horses and cologne.

Paul scurries in after him, brandishing his homemade dirk. Curtis rests a hand on the boy’s head, then asks if he can have a look at the knife. Paul hands it over.

May I keep it for a while? Curtis asks.

Not too long! the boy says. Then he blushes, realizing he has just dictated terms to the general.

Don’t worry, Curtis says. I’ll give it back. He flips the boy a coin. Paul pockets it, then gently closes the door behind him.

“A good kid,” Curtis says, brushing reed shavings from the chair. He admires Paul’s knife for a moment before sitting down. “This is what a child of the marshes makes out of garbage,” he says.

With a smooth and easy motion, he hurls the knife at a bedpost across the room. It bites into the wood with a loud thunk. “Well balanced, too,” he says.

“Where are my patients?”

He waves off the question as he turns to me. “Part of this is my fault,” he says. “I vouched for you. I didn’t want to believe the reports. I had no idea you were so far gone.”

“You’re wrong about the pipeline,” I say. “These are poor people. This time of year, there’s always a shortage of cooking fuel.”

“Administrator!” he says. The word hangs in the air for a moment between us, vibrating with disgust. “You pulled a weapon on Reiff.”

“He was about to torture a child.”

“A child? What you don’t know about the enemy could fill an encyclopedia.”

“On the contrary,” I say. “He’s sitting with me right now.” And then it’s so quiet between us that I can hear the faint suckling of the candle.

“Well,” he says, “it’s over. In a few weeks, the last of the new levees will be done, and then we’ll pull the plug on these swamps, once and for all.”

“You’re draining the marshes?”

“Whoever controls the water, controls the marshman. I think you told me that once. No? It sounds like you, anyway.”

“Quick, give me the bowl,” I say. While I’m retching, a woman comes in with a pitcher. Curtis tells her to hurry up and leave, but she lingers by the bed.

This is the general? she asks. I recognize the voice. It’s the laundress.

Curtis answers for himself. I am the general, he says.

Good, she says. Here’s what I bought with your money.

She points awkwardly at his belly and fires before either of us can stop her. It’s an old service revolver, drawn from beneath her robe. The impact throws his chair backward and lands him in a heap on the floor. “Fuck!” he cries. “What the fuck?”

She pulls the trigger again, but the action has jammed. She drops the gun and looks around the room, her eyes wide with the fear of not finishing. When she spots the homemade knife, the relief is evident.

Curtis tries to unstrap his sidearm, but his fingers are slippery with blood and the legs of the chair interfere. He turns to me and says, “Get my gun.” Blood spurts from his abdominal aorta. “Get it,” he says, his words starting to slur.

I kneel down and pull it free.

“Shoot,” he gasps. But instead I toss it away.

There’s shouting at the door. Someone pounds it with the butt of a rifle.

The laundress walks up to him and places her foot on his gut, right where the bullet went in. She leans into it, adding her weight bit by bit as Curtis’s eyes roll back.

She turns and offers me the knife. I don’t take it; nor do I move to stop her.

She digs her fingers into his hair. She’s just touching the blade to his throat when the soldiers break through the door. One of them races over, slipping in the growing pool of blood. He’s very capable, though. Without fully regaining his balance, he manages to shoot her cleanly through the forehead.

I slowly raise my hands as more soldiers pour into the room. Curtis is deathly pale. He lifts a dripping finger and manages one final word. Every head turns to me.

“Traitor.”