Kinning by Nisi Shawl

Author:Nisi Shawl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

CHAPTER NINE

May 1921

Kisangani, Everfair

“Commodious, and well laid-out,” Bee-Lung pronounced the royal clinic. “Your planning is exemplary.”

“Thank you. But of course much was already in place—the hotel’s laundry and kitchens were both located here, and they used the same rooms for storage as we do.”

“What do you store?” Bee-Lung asked the expected question automatically, but only half heard Queen Josina’s expected answer. She could categorize most of the supplies she smelled: an abundance of bleached cotton, of alcohol, of water liberated of its stony impurities by distillation, and also traces of other necessities such as honey, sharpened steel, and salt. Those scents she didn’t recognize must belong to unfamiliar names the queen recited as they walked the long room’s circumference. Plants, mostly, and most likely local. Yes—there were whiffs, there, of two she’d learned to recognize during her earlier stay: pennyworth and periwinkle.

“And through here?” she asked, stopping at a doorway filled with a wooden door. Unusual in this climate, even in this building.

“A patient under observation.”

“What for?” The door was tightly fitted. Yet between its joined boards threaded a male’s aroma. A white. Not enough perspiration in it to warn of a fever.

“An infection that I don’t think has run its course. Do you care to examine him yourself?”

Bee-Lung nodded, and Queen Josina’s attendant opened the room. On a small bed built into its far wall stretched a sleeping man, thin and reeking of bad dreams. Black curls twisted on his pillow as he rocked his head from side to side, but his eyes stayed shut.

“Why doesn’t he wake?”

“Drugs. His own. He says he needs them.” The queen shrugged. “Won’t it be easier for you this way?”

She went in. What was the matter? The closer she came to the man, the stranger she felt. Was it because of his race? No—she’d seen plenty of white men before, here and at home in Macao, and in Tourane and other stops along their route.

One forearm ended in a stub, with a reddened ring of scar tissue right above it.

She stood by the bed, looking down. Behind pale, twitching lids the man’s pupils spun and danced. Something was missing—what? She shut her own eyes, to focus.

The air at Bee-Lung’s back stirred as Queen Josina entered, and with the addition of her scent the feeling of wrongness faded and shifted a bit. Another’s scent would have been better, though—

“His name is Alan Kleinwald. He’s a doctor, but not of human wellness and disease,” the queen said. “He studies how the entire world folds—I think that’s what he’d say. How big is little and little is big. How we’re all related.”

Gopal’s! Gopal’s scent belonged here. Because the first time she’d encountered one particular ingredient of this room’s blended odors had been in his company. In Zanzibar, in the qadi’s apartments, in the body of the man himself … It was the odor of the Russian organism, the Europeans’ equivalent of and rival to May Fourth’s Spirit Medicine.

She opened her eyes and turned to meet Queen Josina’s gaze.

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