CHAPTER ONE
Sadou Maurie’s guts coiled as if they were living snakes trying to work their way out of her body through sheer boa power. The misery had a familiar taste. Dry mouth, exhaustion so great even her tongue wanted to lie flat rather than help with a wet swallow. The fine dust standing in the air longer than any reasonable breeze should allow finally triggered recognition.
It was Africa, West Africa. And from the taste of the air, it was somewhere near home. She felt too hot, even for dry season, and wanted to sleep and dream of air-conditioning. She forced her eyes to focus on details.
A good metal roof slanted down overhead and met solid cement-block walls with large windows bringing in the light to save on electricity.
This latest mistake had landed her somewhere with a few resources. Had they finished fixing the well system? She couldn’t remember.
A chart hung at the foot of her cot. Tightly squinted eyes let her read it: schistosomiasis, fever, and complications. What was schisto again? A vague memory from grade school health class dragged up a cartoon diagram of blood flukes infesting a liver. With luck the horrid medicine had killed off the microscopic beasties. If not, well, it wasn’t like a woman needed her kidneys, liver, or other internal organs. Maurie squinted at the chart to see if she could make out the names of the medicines she’d been dosed with.
A machine roar from overhead rattled the cement-block clinic building. Not quite the quiet bushlands where she’d been working last week, but still home. Of course, the nonprofit hadn’t considered flight paths when they picked the spot for this clinic. Foreigners forgot that when locals could afford it, they used supersonic air travel to get to their destinations too.
If Maurie could just stop breathing and let her intestines have whatever they wanted, she would have given up days ago. But the treacherous gut wasn’t stopping and besides this was home—no quitting without permission. And absolutely no surrendering to a mere snail-borne river sickness.
The orderlies were not allowing any such cowardice. Maurie searched the room for her attendant. She remembered powerful arms and tightly braided no-nonsense hair framing an expressionless dark face. Ah, there she was.
Ms. Oumarou regarded her with a posture that indicated a faint disdain as if Maurie’s illnesses were too mundane to be worth much effort. Maurie let her eyes drift close.
Ms. Oumarou, who certainly didn’t have a nursing degree or any sort of medical license, shook Maurie awake at least once every five minutes. The small woman should have been overwhelmed by the number of patients, but Maurie suspected this was a slow day. Ms. Oumarou’s forcefulness might also be why Maurie hadn’t been able to give up. Yesterday, she’d tried to say thank you and been repeatedly ignored. Today, Maurie was too exhausted to be a good patient.
“Mange.” Eat. It was an order, not a suggestion. Maurie took the spoon and filled her mouth.
She hated this stuff. Sweet yams with the life boiled out of them mashed to nothing but soft pulp. There was too much in the bowl, she wanted to complain, but she was too tired. So Maurie ate exhausting spoonful after exhausting spoonful. When the bowl was empty she dropped the spoon, letting it clatter on the floor.
Ms. Oumarou scooped it up and favored her with a scowl. Maurie managed the faintest smile. She had done it on purpose. It had taken extra energy to make the spoon land on the floor instead of the bowl.
“Bete.” Ms. Oumarou tapped her lightly on the head and tucked the sheet up over her shoulders. “Beast,” she added in case Maurie hadn’t understood. The woman did have some English. Maurie was pleased to hear it. Her own French was execrable.
So, she was sick. Wasn’t everyone?
Maurie was grateful to be too old for American boarding school intake physicals. She could imagine the horror on the clinicians’ faces if she’d had to report this one to the medical office. “Um, yeah, I had a high fever, no, not 101°F, an actually high fever, 108°F, the kind treated in the field with ice baths when you can get the generator working long enough to make ice. A cool stream seems to work okay too. And yeah, so I think it was probably malaria because chloroquine fifteen seemed to work, but then I got schisto or something like it from the stream…” They’d look things up on their tropical diseases wiki and argue with her about her symptoms and how infectious she might be to other students. They never did want her blood donations. Not a great loss when Maurie didn’t particularly want to get extra needle pokes, but such was life.
The fever broke.
Maurie woke soaking in sweat with too many sheets wrapped one on top the other over her. She pushed them off, and Ms. Oumarou was there to catch and bundle them up.
“Stand up then,” the orderly said.
Maurie glared. She did not want to stand. Where was her bowl? Her stomach growled and she’d willingly eat without even the threat of constant wake-ups, but that wasn’t Ms. Oumarou’s plan for her.
“Mange. Eat!” Maurie demanded.
The woman responded with a flow of French that Maurie caught barely enough of to recognize that she was being chastised in rather low form and compared to all manner of animals, most quite poorly bathed. “Leve toi. Up. Up.” Ms. Oumarou clapped her hands.
Maurie looked pointedly at her tray.
“Toilette premiere,” Ms. Oumarou insisted. Clean first.
No wonder they were called orderlies. All they did was order you about. Maurie stood. Bare feet on cool concrete, she was tempted to lie down and attempt to suck the coolness out of the silk-smooth floor. She straightened her knees against temptation.
The world shifted uncomfortably, but Ms. Oumarou’s strong arm held her up while the other stripped off the hospital gown and sponged her off.
Moderately cleaner and with a new gown wrapped around herself, Maurie was placed on a fresh hospital bed with the back lifted high up. There was a bowl on the left side. Ms. Oumarou took the lid off.
Rice this time, with a meaty broth poured over top. Ms. Oumarou stuck a spoon into the bowl and left it sticking straight up.
No Japanese cultural sensitivity training had reached this clinic. Or maybe it had, and the orderly was fighting back against foreign rules. Maurie felt a surge of sympathy for her. She imagined the woman had enough of a struggle with strange foreign patients and entirely too many native diseases. Maurie hoped Ms. Oumarou had been spared corporate rule makers.
“Mange,” Ms. Oumarou said again, and she left to tend another patient.
Maurie’s eyelids let her know they wouldn’t mind if she wanted to take just a brief rest before struggling to lift the spoon as many times as necessary to empty the bowl. Maurie met Ms. Oumarou’s glare from across the ward.
Those other patients were entirely too compliant. They didn’t distract the woman at all.
Maurie ate. She considered dribbling some of the broth down her front in toddler-like obstinacy. Her stomach rumbled in objection. She carefully cleaned the bowl with the slightly bent old aluminum spoon.
When Ms. Oumarou wasn’t looking, Maurie straightened the spoon to fix the odd half twist some past patient had applied to it.
Fixing things was what Maurie did. It didn’t always get her hospitalized. She hadn’t known that the clogged well had been filled intentionally to keep people away. When Grandpere had asked her to fix that village’s water problem, she hadn’t thought to ask why they hadn’t already done it themselves.
Pascaline, the sour cousin always ready to point out problems, also hadn’t asked. “People say there’s a curse on the well,” she’d said and kept her distance, managing the work crew’s food needs rather than get involved with troubleshooting the barely half-functional digging gear or minding their finicky portable generator. Maurie had ignored it but now she wondered. Probably just the fever confusing her thoughts, but Pascaline had a talent for avoiding injury, illness, and pain.
Except of course for the thing that had happened to her parents. It had happened to Maurie’s dad too, of course, but losing one parent wasn’t really the same as losing both. And it helped that her dad hadn’t been at fault. One giant kaboom neither Maurie nor Pascaline had seen for themselves, and everything changed.
Grandpere’d held everything together after. Both sons gone, he’d had to resume the director position while still managing the extended family, which was a harder job than even maintaining profit margins in a declining industry.
Oil and natural gas, crude energy sources from a poor nation, piped and shipped to companies too rich to be national at all. One of their biggest buyers, TCG, had done something important recently. If Maurie were less tired she was sure she could remember. It had something to do with them not being such a big buyer in the future. But Uncle Fabrice had some kind of plan. If it worked, the TCG thing was also going to improve the Sadou family money situation and make this poor country rich enough to fund their own bush country clinics without foreigner-led nongovernmental organizations involved.
Her eyelids betrayed her, closing. The spoon stayed clutched in her hand.
Maurie woke next to the treacherous utensil being tapped on her forehead as a makeshift cattle prod.
“So. You lived.” Pascaline, her younger cousin with the permanent crease between her eyebrows and the always glaring deep brown eyes, seemed annoyed. “I bet against you, you know.” Pascaline’s parentage was the same general muddle of ancestors connected to a half dozen tribes as Maurie’s was, but on her cousin those genetics looked good. Maurie didn’t need a mirror to know that the clinic staff would’ve assumed she was a vagrant who’d stolen the tailored field gear if queenly Pascaline hadn’t been the one to bring her in. Pascaline’s expression was assessing, and she’d taken the time to have her braids redone with gold beads.
Maurie closed her eyes again, hoping Ms. Oumarou would rid her of the annoying visitor.
Pascaline’s stolen flatware whacked her forehead again in a fast double tap. Where had she gotten two spoons?
“Stop that!” Maurie pulled away.
Pascaline chortled. “I knew you were awake. And to be quite honest, I won more on you than I lost. I just had to get it going by being the one to bet you’d die so the others would get over the horror of being negative about it all. Get out of bed today, and I’ll cut you in for a share.”
That was Pascaline, always focused on the bottom line.
“How much?” Maurie croaked out. Her voice came out annoyingly healthy sounding. No coughing lung infection component with this latest super bug apparently.
“Ten percent,” Pascaline said. “I was prepared to go to twenty if you got up before noon, but that pretty Médecins Sans Culottes kid wanted a drink and to chat about Switzerland, so I was late getting in here.”
“It’s Sans Frontières. Sans Culottes would be without underclothes. Sort of. In slang, though, unless you meant to make a reference to that group of French revolutionaries who—” Maurie narrowed her eyes at her cousin. It was hard to know what Pascaline would do with any information you inadvertently gave her. “Old slang. It probably doesn’t mean a thing to anyone under twenty.”
“Says the ancient thirty-eight-year-old.” Pascaline grinned too broadly for someone also in her thirties. “Brain works too. Another win for me. Ha.” She let out a satisfied sigh. “We did get you pumped full of meds and into that stream fast enough after all.”
Maurie groaned. She didn’t feel like her brain had escaped being boiled. Maybe it was only lightly sautéed instead. So the local Doctors Without Borders MD was cute, huh? Wait. There was a doctor? Why hadn’t the patient ever seen the doctor? Her bladder was beating its own insistent demands. It felt even more unhappy than her intestines did at the moment, so she was probably minutes away from wetting herself.
“Fifteen percent,” Pascaline countered, misinterpreting the grimace. “But that’s my final offer. I won’t go any higher than that.”
“Liar.” Maurie swung her legs off the side of the bed. “Help me to the outhouse. Or I’m staying in bed.”
Pascaline pulled back about a meter. “Walk first. I can’t carry you and claim it.”
Maurie looked around for shoes. There didn’t seem to be any.
The polished cement floor gleamed with a cleanliness any Western European hospital would be proud of. It also felt pleasantly cool under her feet. She balanced and carefully shifted her weight from the bed onto her own feet. They held her. And no spike of fever or nausea wiped her out.
Maurie walked around the bed to Pascaline and punched her in the stomach. The blow didn’t quite have her usual force behind it; too many days in a hospital bed would do that, but her cousin doubled over nicely.
Ms. Oumarou was holding up another patient and paying her no attention at all when Maurie made her way to the outhouse behind the clinic. A line of visitors’ inexpensive plastic flip-flop shoes lined the back porch. Maurie slid her feet into an orange-and-purple pair for the trip to the outhouse and back. The smell of the outhouse was reasonably well contained by a makeshift metal door set into a wood frame, and woven-grass matting gave the hole a bit of privacy. Maurie held her gown carefully out of the dirt and squatted.
Her bladder thanked her.
Pascaline banged on the door.
“I’ve got toilet paper.”
“I still hate you.” Maurie cracked the door and accepted the peace offering. It was hard to stay mad at Pascaline when she was so annoyingly useful. Maurie finished up and came out.
Her cousin held a bottle of hand sanitizer at the ready. Maurie accepted a large dollop. “Do we truly not have running water here?”
“They’ve got it,” Pascaline acknowledged. “But they can’t boil all of it, and some shitheads keep letting their cattle take dumps upstream of the town’s water intake system. I wouldn’t risk it, if I were you.” The woman shrugged. “I had a water truck sent to supply the ward when I found out where you’d been admitted. They’ve been using it for your baths and for all the cooking.”
“I still dislike you,” Maurie amended. “They use contaminated water for cooking?” The mind boggled.
“Heat does kill most of the microbes. And nobody local picked this site for the clinic.” Pascaline lifted an eyebrow to let her know she expected better of her usually sharp cousin. “And didn’t I say I sent you a water truck? Some people.” She shook her head. “You want me to get the doctor to get you released, or you just want to walk out of here yourself?”
Maurie sighed. “Do you have another bet riding on that?”
“Nope. But other people do. I don’t care.”
Maurie looked back at the clinic building. It had her bed in it. “I don’t have shoes. These belong to someone else. Go buy me some and I’ll check myself out.” She could take a nap in the hospital bed while she waited.
Except that Ms. Oumarou stood on the porch with her hands on her hips.
Maurie slipped off the stolen flip-flops and tried to act like she wasn’t embarrassed. She stepped onto the clean concrete, careful to leave the shoes in the precise position where she’d found them. Pascaline, the coward, had vanished. Presumably she was going off to buy shoes, but Maurie thought she’d have found a reason to go even if there wasn’t a convenient errand.
“I’m up.” Maurie smiled brightly. “I suppose I’ll just go lie back down now and rest until the doctor can see me.”
Ms. Oumarou scowled and blocked the door back into the ward. Maurie peeked over the woman’s head. Her bed was now occupied by someone else. They may or may not have had time to change the sheets first. She sighed.
“How about a chair?” Maurie said. “I’m only just starting to recover. Do you think I can have a chair?”
Ms. Oumarou pointed. A scattering of small stools hand-carved from tree trunks lined the side of the porch against the cement clinic wall. Tourists would pay outlandish amounts for even the smallest of them and put it on a display shelf. But this place didn’t have tourists, so people sat on them. The largest was about eight inches in diameter and not much taller than that. If she could get back indoors, she might be able to sit on the edge of someone’s hospital bed instead.
“I can just step inside and lean against the wall.” Maurie tried to brush past. It was an attempt doomed before she started, but there was something about Ms. Oumarou that made Maurie want to try her.
“Assis toi.” The orderly put her hands around Maurie and lifted. One moment Maurie’s toes were grazing the concrete and the next her butt was on a stool. Not forcefully but not with any extra gentleness, and there she was. Sit down, the woman had said, and sitting Maurie now was.
Ms. Oumarou smiled and turned back to her patients inside the clinic, satisfied that her troublesome charge had been dealt with.
Maurie leaned against the wall of the clinic and closed her eyes. Pascaline would be back later.
But Pascaline wasn’t back. The porch shade’s coolness lulled Maurie into dreamland with a bare touch of breeze brushing her skin. Someone else waited.
A swath of vapor in a woman’s shape with a serpentine thing trailing after her mounted the single step onto the cement porch. The water power, Mami-Wata, twitched an algae-mossed skirt hem, and the snake spirit untangled itself from around her feet to curl up out of sight. Wet comfort breathed over Maurie better than any air-conditioning. The rank scent of river mire settled in after. And Maurie started to drown.
“Not yet!” Mami-Wata yanked a spirit coil from Maurie’s face and shook it, so the snake head attached bobbled back and forth. “No drowning my acolytes.”
The snake spirit hissed unwilling acceptance and huddled in an angry pile of coils at its mistress’s muddy feet.
“Where was I?” The water woman swayed side to side as if she were part snake herself. “Scrawny. If there were more offspring, I’d swallow you whole and tell the ghosts to quit their clamoring until a better one was born.”
That sounds painful, Maurie thought.
“Oh, yes, yes, it is.” Mami-Wata spat and venomous fangs drove into Maurie’s face. “You are mine now.”
The bite spread agony and bitter cold at the speed of a panicked heart. Maurie grabbed her cheek to claw open the wound and attempt to bleed out some of the venom, but Mami-Wata slapped her hand down. And then the spreading chill held her numb.
Maurie wanted to vomit but couldn’t move her constricting throat enough to let the rising bile out. Shivers alternated with burning heat, and she forgot about the old wooden stool and the solid cement porch.
Instead Maurie struggled in river mud on the edge of a not yet dry stream bed. Heat beat down on her. Too late, she could move, but nothing stopped the searing pain spreading from the bite.
Not fair, she thought. A reasonable dream should at least include her feeling somewhat better while she endured the weirdness her subconscious chose to inflict on her.
Heat and sweat boiled over her body. A fever dream, Maurie decided.
Mami-Wata writhed back as snake, woman, and steam all at once. But she smelled of that almost dry, more mud than water, stream bed next to the last bush camp Maurie’s team had used. It was the same one she was fairly sure that Pascaline had used to dunk her in when the fever got bad, and the rest of the team had scattered across the countryside searching for the nearest clinic.
“A mami-wata is a river spirit,” Maurie said, “and I don’t believe in spirits.”
“A Maurie girl,” the spirit snapped back, “is a noble one, and I don’t believe in nobility no matter what silly colonialist names the living are calling their young these days.”
“That makes no sense.”
Maurie tried to force her mind to other things.
There were other problems to think of. She pushed her subconscious to fixate on anything else in hopes of redirecting fever anxiety in a more rational manner. Her cousin Reuben was still in prison last she’d heard, or at least jail awaiting trial. The bail set too high, he hadn’t asked for help early enough, and—
“I’m not done,” Mami-Wata interrupted. “But I can curse him too if you don’t pay attention properly.”
The spot on her left cheek where the fangs had hit throbbed in a fiery pulse, and Maurie screamed.
“That’s more like it.” Mami-Wata slid an arm or coil onto a bit of dream space turned riverbank. “And since you weren’t my preferred sycophant, I’ll have to be more blunt than usual. I really don’t believe in nobility. That wasn’t just me mocking you, much though you richly deserve it.”
Maurie curled tight in a ball and focused on breathing as the pain ebbed. She really should not have let Pascaline help her to the outhouse. There must have been chamber pots to use. Ms. Oumarou would notice soon that Maurie was unconscious on the clinic porch, wouldn’t she?
But she didn’t wake up. “Okay. I accept responsibility. Tell me what I’ve done,” Maurie said, hoping to rattle her subconscious into a giving her some hints that might at least partially explain this bizarre self-torture. The Reuben thing was very wrong, but it was a lot more Uncle Benoit’s fault than hers. Perhaps if she’d stayed in closer contact with her cousins, she could have known about Reuben’s situation sooner and helped him get a lawyer immediately when her own funds could’ve been enough?
“Enough!” Mami-Wata slapped her. The sky spat hard drops of rain that sizzled when they hit the parched ground.
Another spirit, snake shaped, lifted from the water and slid a calming caress around the spirit woman’s arm.
“This is why I wanted the other one,” she said to the snake. It tasted the air and lunged upward to wrap a coil around its mistress’s neck.
Mami-Wata caught the snake just behind the eyes. She lifted it to her face and hissed at it. Then gently unwound the coils and released it into the water. An imprint of tire tracks mottled a tattoo pattern on the snake’s skin a few feet beyond the head and again about a car width’s later on the long snake’s body.
Maurie’s pain eased as if Mami-Wata’s momentary distraction thinned the intensity of the fever dream.
Maurie uncurled from her fetal position and slapped her arms and legs to return feeling to them in case the snake spirit decided to slither in her direction, and she needed to run for her dream life. The size of the monster snake gave Maurie a disturbing pang of empathy for a field mouse at dusk who could hear the sounds of soft scales rustling against the grass between her and her burrow.
Mami-Wata petted the passing length of the snake with affection as it disappeared into the dream fog.
“That one was a boa before,” Mami-Wata said offhand, “hasn’t got a handle on spirit life yet.”
“Aren’t you supposed to have water snake familiars? Or be a water snake yourself or some nebulous spirit of the water thing?” Maurie’s aching face wasn’t helping her think.
“Are you trying to talk me into murdering you?” Mami-Wata flicked out a forked tongue and then made a very human expression of disgust. “I could still swallow you. You might wake up after, but you wouldn’t enjoy it.”
The impression of fire flared around Mami-Wata’s form. The pain howled back.
Maurie curled into a tighter ball. She forced out an objection through teeth chattering with renewed fever chills. “Do whatever you have to, delusion.”
“I hate unbelievers,” Mami-Wata replied.
Wet splattered Maurie’s head and arms. Drips ran down her spine. The venom tingled but didn’t burn like the bite had. “And my subconscious hates me,” she translated to herself. “That and it does not understand snakes at all. Since when do water snakes spit cobra venom?”
Mami-Wata grabbed Maurie by the back of the neck and shook her. “What kind of idiot meets a spirit creature in a fever dream and thinks physical laws have any power here?” Her snake tongue flicked out.
“Point,” Maurie acknowledged.
Mami-Wata shook her again in exasperation. She dragged Maurie down the embankment.
“This doesn’t seem like much of a spirit world.” Her trailing foot caught on a root in the mud, and Mami-Wata had to yank her up higher to free her from it.
“Yes, well, it’s your subconscious,” Mami-Wata said. “And besides this isn’t the spirit world. You’re dreaming, remember?”
The spirit woman dunked her. Water, murky and deep, surrounded her. Mami-Wata’s strong arm dragged Maurie up to the surface.
The spirit woman laughed. “Finally, she’s speechless.”
Mami-Wata brushed the water out of Maurie’s eyes. “Bitten, blinded, drowned. Three times cursed. Or blessed, perhaps. You are one of mine now.”
She pushed Maurie backwards. Maurie’s feet slid on a smooth cement porch, and a solid concrete clinic wall broke her backwards tumble. She slid down to a seat on an old wood-carved stool.
“No other spirits can claim you. Much as they’ll want to, you’re mine.”
Maurie ran a hand over her feet. They weren’t muddy at all, though she was dripping. “I’m already baptized.”
“Yeah, well, maybe the regular angels were busy.” Mami-Wata tapped her on the nose. “God works through all things, blah, blah, blah.” She stepped off the clinic’s porch but paused to turn back and add, “Though even devils can quote scripture.”
“Which are you?” Maurie said.
“Haven’t decided yet,” Mami-Wata replied. “You figure it out.”