Outlander 03 - Voyager полностью

“A loa-loa worm,” Geilie said, looking amused at my reaction. “They live in the eyeballs, just under the lining. They cross back and forth, from one eye to the other, and when they go across the bridge o’ the nose, I’m told it’s rather painful.” She nodded at the slave, still quivering slightly on his pallet.

“The dark keeps them from moving so much,” she explained. “The fellow from Andros who told me about them says ye must catch them when they’ve just come in one eye, for they’re right near the surface, and ye can lift them out with a big darning needle. If ye wait, they go deeper, and ye canna get them.” She turned back to the kitchen and shouted for a light.

“Here, I brought the needle, just in case.” She groped in the bag at her waist and drew out a square of felt, with a three-inch steel needle thrust through it, which she extended helpfully to me.

“Are you out of your mind?” I stared at her, appalled.

“No. Did ye not say ye were a good healer?” she asked reasonably.

“I am, but—” I glanced at the slave, hesitated, then took the candle one of the kitchenmaids was holding out to me.

“Bring me some brandy, and a small sharp knife,” I said. “Dip the knife—and the needle—in the brandy, then hold the tip in a flame for a moment. Let it cool, but don’t touch it.” As I spoke, I was gently pulling up one eyelid. The man’s eye looked up at me, an oddly irregular, blotched brown iris in a bloodshot sclera the yellow of heavy cream. I searched carefully, bringing the candle flame close enough to shrink the pupil, then drawing it away, but saw nothing there.

I tried the other eye, and nearly dropped the candle. Sure enough, there was a small, transparent filament, moving under the conjunctiva. I gagged slightly at the sight, but controlled myself, and reached for the freshly sterilized knife, still holding back the eyelid.

“Take him by the shoulders,” I said to Geilie. “Don’t let him move, or I may blind him.”

The surgery itself was horrifying to contemplate, but surprisingly simple to perform. I made one quick, small incision along the inside corner of the conjunctiva, lifted it slightly with the tip of the needle, and as the worm undulated lazily across the open field, I slipped the tip of the needle under the body and drew it out, neat as a loop of yarn.

Repressing a shudder of distaste, I flicked the worm away. It hit the wall with a tiny wet splat! and vanished in the shadows under the cheese.

There was no blood; after a brief debate with myself, I decided to leave it to the man’s own tear ducts to irrigate the incision. That would have to be left to heal by itself; I had no fine sutures, and the wound was small enough not to need more than a stitch or two in any case.

I tied a clean pad of cloth over the closed eye with a bandage round the head, and sat back, reasonably pleased with my first foray into tropical medicine.

“Fine,” I said, pushing back my hair. “Where’s the other one?”

The next patient was in a shed outside the kitchen, dead. I squatted next to the body, that of a middle-aged man with grizzled hair, feeling both pity and outrage.

The cause of death was more than obvious: a strangulated hernia. The loop of twisted, gangrenous bowel protruded from one side of the belly, the stretched skin over it already tinged with green, though the body itself was still nearly as warm as life. An expression of agony was fixed on the broad features, and the limbs were still contorted, giving an unfortunately accurate witness to just what sort of death it had been.

“Why did you wait?” I stood up, glaring at Geilie. “For God’s sake, you kept me drinking tea and chatting, while this was going on? He’s been dead less than an hour, but he must have been in trouble a long time since—days! Why didn’t you bring me out here at once?”

“He seemed pretty far gone this morning,” she said, not at all disturbed by my agitation. She shrugged. “I’ve seen them so before; I didna think you could do anything much. It didna seem worth hurrying.”

I choked back further recrimination. She was right; I could have operated, had I come sooner, but the chances of it doing any good were slim to nonexistent. The hernia repair was something I might have managed, even with such difficult conditions; after all, that was nothing more than pushing back the bowel protrusion and pulling the ruptured layers of abdominal muscle back together with sutures; infection was the only real danger. But once the loop of escaped intestine had twisted, so that the blood supply was cut off and the contents began to putrefy, the man was doomed.

But to allow the man to die here in this stuffy shed, alone…well, perhaps he would not have found the presence of one white woman more or less a comfort, in any case. Still, I felt an obscure sense of failure; the same I always felt in the presence of death. I wiped my hands slowly on a brandy-soaked cloth, mastering my feelings.

One to the good, one to the bad—and Ian still to be found.