Chapter Two: The Village

From

The Dossier of Dr. Brink, Volume One, Part One

Scur led me from the beach into their village. I dragged my ridiculous mattress sledge behind me, which I think might have been the single most humanizing thing I could have done. Nothing says not a threat quite like a creature visibly burdened by its own domestic arrangements.

The village was small, very small compared to even the most marginal settlements in my homeland, but carefully organized. Surrounding me were huts of woven reed and salvaged driftwood, a central firepit, a rack of curing fish, several smaller racks of gathered plants, at least a dozen more individuals—from this point forward I will call them Sauropsians—who regarded me with a spectrum of expressions I would learn to read, over the following days, as cautious curiosity. I found I had a minor talent for nonverbal communication. Scur possessed a wealth of patience and intelligence, which I recognized immediately as more valuable.

I read the rest of their society quickly enough once I started looking for it. Scur’s authority seemed to be plainly earned rather than imposed—the cook, the net-menders, and the spear-bearing escorts each settled into their roles with the unhurried confidence of people who had chosen their vocations, or comfortably grown into them, rather than having been assigned by command. The younger ones were permitted to chase each other shrieking around the huts with a freedom that spoke of a community that did not, whatever its other troubles, fear its own members. It appeared to be, by any reasonable clinical standard, a healthy society.

We—I, Scur, a handful of other villagers who cycled in and out as they took brief breaks from their activities—sat near the firepit for some time, I being reposed on my mattress, quite enjoying the warmth that was also, at last, properly drying the firewood I had gathered. I unpacked and ate another ration, again offering some to Scur, who again accepted, this time giving me a cooked fish and some fresh water in return. Sauropsian children periodically approached to curiously poke at the mattress and at me before being scolded and sent away by the adults. When the flames began to decline, I offered some chunks of wood, which they took unceremoniously and added to the fire. The second time, I threw them in of my own accord.

We communicated by the ancient method of pointing and making faces. At the time I found it laborious and occasionally embarrassing, but to some extent it worked. On reflection it was refreshing to operate on a different plane than that to which I was accustomed—delivering difficult medical diagnoses and prognoses. Plain verbal Opentongue was difficult enough; doing it via dictionary, in languages I barely knew, with all the wrong connotations and conjugations and declensions, was worse.

After several hours—at the particular moment the village fell into shadow as the sun descended fully below the headland that overlooked the cove from the west—Scur rose from the fire and gestured toward a larger hut at the southern edge of the village, one with a string of multicolored fish scales hanging over its doorway, and with a river I had not yet consciously noticed running only a few meters beyond. They made it clear, through a tilt of their head and a hand pressed flat against their own chest, that I was being invited inside. A formal audience with the chieftain, in other words, away from the rest of the village.

I understood the courtesy this required. Outside the hut I left my mattress lying on the sandy soil, then carefully retrieved my crossbow and quiver and placed them atop it. I slung my pack of other supplies over my shoulder, and I kept my scalpel and bone saw at my belt—honest tools of my trade as much as potential weapons, and I judged correctly that the distinction would not be lost on an individual of leadership. Scur watched me disarm and let out a soft, approving rattle from somewhere in their throat.

⁂

I graciously followed Scur through the door of hanging animal hide. The interior of their hut was a single open room of soft dry sand and driftwood, lit dimly by a recessed firepit burned down to its last orange embers. It smelled of smoke and brine and dried herbs, which I immediately found comforting. While Scur moved to stoke the fire, I did what any physician does upon entering an unfamiliar space: I observed, carefully, and let my eyes adjust before I let my guard down.

Several clay pots, corked and waxed, sat on a shelf made from a salvaged plank, beside a stone mortar stained green from long use. A scrap of cured animal skin was pinned to the wall with sharpened fish bones, and on it, in charcoal and chalk and red clay, was a crude but careful map of the cove and the coastline beyond—our position marked in dots, the river traced as a wavy line running eastward out of the forest toward us, what appeared to be a long line of coastal cliffs some distance north of where I had awoken, and three other symbols that concerned me: a fanged, monstrous fish marked in the deep water beyond the bay; a reptilian skull far upriver, deep in the forest; to the southwest, the rough sketch of an insectoid figure with too many legs, needle-thin. Scur was a cartographer of their village’s dangers, and a tidier one than most ships’ captains I had served under.

Scur noticed me noticing. They gave a slow, deliberate nod—acknowledgment, not offense—and reached to retrieve one of the clay pots on the shelf. They motioned for me to take a seat on the ground, which I did. Then they uncorked it and held it out to me. The smell that reached me was complex: brine and fermentation, and underneath that, something faintly herbal and mineral.

I did not drink it immediately. I am—whatever else may be said of me, and there is much—a scientist first, and an unanalyzed substance handed to me by a stranger is an epistemic emergency rather than a social nicety. I turned the pot around in my hands, tried to glimpse the liquid inside, gave it a shallow, careful sniff, and inhaled far more of it than I intended. The fumes went straight to the back of my skull and unseated several of my more reliable faculties all at once.

I could not have told you, in that moment, whether I was holding a poison, a sacrament, or simple moonshine. I only knew that Scur was watching, and they had theretofore shown me remarkable grace and hospitality, and the pot was heavy in my hands, and to set it down now, untasted, seemed a potentially grave insult that might have produced a far worse outcome than almost any other. So—I just drank it.

I downed all of it, in a single motion, on the theory that half-measures are frequently worse than wholehearted commitment. It tasted as though a thunderstorm had curdled: fire, fish, mint, mud, and somewhere underneath all of it, something I can only describe as triumph. My stomach twisted and attempted a brief uprising. I held the line—the constitutions of my people are not famous, but they are sturdier than they look—and the dizziness and cramping and burning in my throat soon passed, replaced by a loose, mellow warmth that chased any and all remaining sea-chill from my bones. I set the empty pot down, harder than I meant to, and produced a belch I am not exactly proud of but do not regret in the slightest.

Scur’s jaw actually dropped. Then they began to laugh—a low, rolling series of clicks I would come to recognize, over the following days, as delight—and whatever wariness remained between us simply evaporated on the spot. I had seemingly been tested, without ever being told I was being tested, and had passed in the most undignified manner available to me. It is, I have since found, an excellent way to make a positive impression in any society, on any mindful species.

⁂

In the wake of my imbibition and shortly after Scur finally stopped giggling at my audacity, I noticed something lingering at the back of my mind. I retrieved the vial of seawater-fouled luminescent spores from my pack and held it out to Scur—both an offering and a question. They took it, turned it over in the firelight, uncorked it, sniffed, gave me a quizzical look that asked, as plainly as one can, what is this and what should I do with it? I returned the same sort of expression and shrugged. Scur carried it over to the stained mortar and shelf of pots, looking over them, then back at the vial, seeming to contemplate.

It was then that I felt a flash of intuition, or perhaps more of an impulse. There is a sort of practice in my homeland that involves intense concentration, in which an individual may learn to focus their intention in such a way as to mentally manipulate the fabric and manifest some specific desired effect within the world. It is extremely difficult—the skill is often developed over the course of an entire lifetime—and alchemical techniques, despite their own numerous intricacies, are typically employed as the more accessible alternative. I would come to learn over the next couple of days, starting at that very moment, that something about this land makes it far more conducive to this practice than the land of my origin.

I carefully recalled a particular application of the practice that I had once attempted to learn for the purpose of psychiatric care before largely giving up on it. I followed Scur over to the shelf, touched their forearm, and uttered a phrase in Fabrican that means something I cannot so confidently translate here. Rather more abruptly than I had anticipated, a peculiar glow began to emanate from my hand and shine upon Scur before they could think to flinch away entirely. Whatever idea had been sitting half-formed in their mind apparently snapped into focus at once, because they expeditiously took a minute pinch of dried, gray-green herb from one pot and some coarse ocher-colored dust from another, ground them both fine within the mortar, and tipped the resulting powder into the vial.

Immediately the sample fizzed and cleared; crystalline minerals precipitated out of the solution and sank to the bottom, and the glowing spores floated to the top and blazed brighter than they had even at the beach. They had been purified by a recipe I hadn’t taught Scur and was not cognizant of myself. I recognized here, with clear eyes, that the chieftain was a fellow alchemist. They gazed lovingly at the vial, at me, at the vial again, and let out a quiet purr that I assumed was one of gratitude. While I was catching my breath, dazed, significantly exhausted by my contribution, they delicately set the vial on their own shelf with the quiet satisfaction of a colleague who had been entrusted with someone else’s sloppy draft before improving on it together.

⁂

It was only after this that Scur turned to the map in earnest, and the paramount business of the evening began. They pointed to the river, then made a series of gestures I had to decode in the moment. They pantomimed drinking, then illness—clutched their throat, staggered, dropped their head—then pointed to the skull inland to the west. They ran to the far corner of the room to fetch something and returned with a dead fish, presumably from the river, and held it up over the firelight for me. Its scales were greasy with an iridescent slickness that was immediately wrong to my eye. Scur repeated the sick-gesture, this time more emphatically.

I understood the diagnosis. The river was poisoned, certainly restricting the Sauropsians’ supply of fish and fresh water, and the cause was upstream. I also understood that I was being told this for a reason. Scur was not casually complaining; they were desperate enough to explain, to a near-complete stranger, the ongoing tragedy that had bunched up in the fabric and descended upon their village. I had earned enough of their trust, and they were asking me for help.

My deliberation was swift. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath—still quite dizzy—and nodded. I am a healer; the venue may change, but the calling does not. I turned back to the map and tapped Scur’s chest, then my own. You and I. I traced a line with my finger from the village, along the poisoned river, to the skull. We will go there. Then I drew my scalpel, and in the dim light of the hut, with the same steady hand I would have used over an operating table, I cut a clean, symbolic line through the air above the mark on the map, severing it from both the river and the village. We will remove this poison.

Scur’s breath caught audibly—a gentle hiss through their teeth—and I gleaned that they had followed my symbolism all the way down to the surgery in it. They did not offer their hand the way the people of my homeland would. They reached out and clasped my wrist instead, with a hand that was scaled and dry and stronger than their frame suggested, and I clasped their wrist in turn. Whatever this was—contract, alliance, the beginning of a friendship neither of us had words for yet—it was sealed now, in a gesture older and broader than either of our languages. We held like this for a lingering moment before releasing and continuing to just gaze at each other.

Then I did something that must have seemed very strange. Another impulse—I raised my arms in the direction of Scur, who just watched me without moving a muscle. I slowly leaned in and, over the following several seconds, enveloped them in an embrace. I am not sure how much rational forethought led to my decision to do this. I can only assume that it just felt right, which I have since come to regard as, for certain actions, sufficient. Scur remained motionless for perhaps half a minute, then gradually reciprocated. I gave them several small pats on the back. They did the same, tentatively. Then I released the hug—my face likely flushed pink—and backed away.

⁂

I ate fish that night by Scur’s fire, resting on my mattress in the chieftain’s hut, playing them a few simple melodies on my thumb piano, and I thought about the nature of trust between strangers who cannot speak to each other. It reduces everything to the essential—action and consequence, all visible and clear. There is a kind of clarity in it: you cannot perform nuance when you have no words. This musing would only be validated by way of stark contrast over the course of the following week, but until that time came, there was only Scur, me, and a village, and a problem to solve.

I decided, lying on my mattress in the corner of the hut, drifting off to sleep for the very first time in this land, that I very much liked having a colleague.