"Mama," he muttered.
"Not quite. But with a lot of rest and feeding up you'll probably live."
"Ever the optimist, aren't you, Lizbeth?" Wade looked over her shoulder at the boy.
The boy's eyes popped open. "Papa, Drina! Where are they?"
"Shit!" Elizabeth muttered in English. "He has family out there." Then switching to German, "This man behind me and I will find them and bring them here. Is it just the two of them or are more with you?"
"No, only two. Only Papa and Drina." He struggled to get up but Elizabeth stopped him with a hand on his thin chest. "We will find them and bring them here. You drink this broth and rest. We will bring them."
"Is Grantville?" the boy asked, looking around the small room.
"This is Grantville," Wade responded. "The city is not far. We will find your family. We will bring them here."
"Grantville." He sighed and laid back, relaxing into a sleep.
"If he was the strongest, God help his father and sister," Elizabeth said, quickly dipping broth from the kettle into an insulated flask. "We will follow his trail back. Put on snowshoes and grab some blankets."
"Teach your grandma to suck eggs," Wade muttered inaudibly as he strapped on snowshoes. Damn bossy women! Only reason he…
It was midmorning when the light shining through the single window in the small cabin hit Joshua's eyelids and woke him. Drina's small dark head was visible in the cot opposite his.
"Awake, are you?" Elizabeth's feet were propped up and her chair tipped back in the corner of the room where she'd been dozing. She'd kept watch outside alone from midnight until dawn while Wade slept. Now Wade was on watch. She pushed a chamber pot towards Joshua with her boot. "Use this or go outside. Doesn't matter much up here but down in the city, well, you'll see the difference."
"But where's Papa?"
Elizabeth sighed and shook her head. "He didn't make it. We found your sister wrapped in his arms and the blanket that should have gone around both of them was doubled across her. It was a very loving thing he did for her. Just for the record, what was his name?"
"Moses. Moses Amramsohn," Joshua answered and began sobbing.
Two days later, the sky was a bright blue and the morning sun reflected off the snow into Wade's eyes. He stood with his arms folded next to the much shorter Elizabeth as they watched Joshua and Drina walk with the medic down the hill. "The folks at the synagogue will take them in."
Wade took a breath and put his arm over her shoulders. "Going to America wasn't always easy," he slowly began. "Back when I was growing up you'd see reports of Haitians drowning, trying to cross a few miles of ocean to get to America. Chinese dying in cargo containers and Mexicans dying of thirst in the desert, all for the chance of a better life, mostly for their kids. The first generation of people coming in illegally generally had it really hard."
He lightly gripped Elizabeth's shoulder and she looked up at him. After a short pause she said, "Our reliefs are coming up this afternoon for their week at the fire. I want a long shower, clean clothes, food I do not have to make and four large beers. What do you think?"
Wade bent over, kissed her at the hairline and shook his head. "Two beers. You fall asleep after three."
Malungu Seed
Jonathan Cresswell-Jones
A telephone rang in the seventeenth century.
Nearly three years after his adopted town had changed times and changed a world, James Nichols heard an interruption, not a miracle. He laid aside a handful of Leahy Medical Center charts, reaching past his study's desk-clutter to the phone. "Yes?"
"Good morning, Herr Doctor, it's Margritte. There is a man here, a new arrival, who wishes to see you."
His Thuringian-born receptionist was cheerful, efficient, trilingual, and possessed of a voice that could melt men like taffy. Nichols' own German was serviceable and attractive-perhaps, to crows; he stayed with English. "Margritte, I have rounds this afternoon at the center. I am working on a public health plan for next spring…" He suppressed the edge that wanted to creep into his voice. His heart knew that he was sitting in an empty house shuffling paper, while Melissa was a king's prisoner in London. In his own time, that distance meant an hour's flight; here, a month of storms and bandits.
"You know you must not call me-very much not call me at home-for every refugee and, and, carpetbagger that has a speech for me. That is what the bureaucracy is for. You must deal with it just as I do. You deal with it better than I do." He grabbed left-handed at a sliding chart, caught it.
"I apologize, Herr Doctor. But he wears the robes of a Jesuit, and this man… well, he looks like you. And so rarely have I seen a man who looks like you."
Nichols stared blankly at the chart he held. The white paper stood out sharply around the creased ebony skin of his thumb, cracked and rough from a surgeon's hygiene; as stark a contrast as his own color within this town, this province-this entire United States of Europe.
So rarely have I seen a man who looks like you.
"Herr Doctor?"
He thought of the half-hour walk to the center, its noisy offices, the urgent to-do lists: Translate appendectomy procedure notes. Find paper clips. Stop bubonic plague.
"Margritte," he said slowly, "you must almost never call me at home. Or bring anyone here to meet with me. I think this is one of the times you should do both." He set the chart down.
"To your house? Like a fine guest? He is only a traveler, Herr Doctor-a lay Jesuit, not a Father. He arrived with no ceremony at all! That coachman with the beard brought him in; Heinrich, that is, the fellow who married my second cousin in the summer, after…"
Nichols let his gaze drift across the study-formerly a living room, but the house wasn't large and his workload and cobbled-together library had swamped it. Borrowed books in a borrowed house; all that he'd once owned had been left in twentieth-century Chicago when the world changed. An ember popped in the fireplace, the only sound in silence. His daughter's hand-copied paramedic certificate hung over the mantel; Sharon was in Venice, stagnant lethal Venice, as far away as Melissa in London. Two travelers in foreign lands, with no safe home as he had.
"There's room," he said softly. "Plenty of room."
At the second knock, Nichols cracked the door onto freezing air and two backlit figures.
Margritte nodded. "Herr Doctor." Beside her genial bulk, a taller, thinner man hunched in a tightly-wrapped coarse robe, probably once black but faded now to a scuffed brown lighter than Nichols' own complexion. October sun was not kind to him; that complexion showed chalky highlights where strong features shaped, sharp-cut shadows. The dark, bloodshot eyes seemed calm enough, intently focused, but something in them…
Nichols' greatest pride-when he had time for pride-was that Grantville hadn't seen a refugee with that look for a year; they'd done that much good, at least. He'd seen thousands of eyes in 1631 and '32 with what he'd learned to call in his own time, in Vietnam, a thousand-yard stare. Not every wound hurt the body.
The traveler waited with stoic patience, robe ruffled in the wind. Nichols realized something belatedly. "I speak an inferior Latin," he said. "Physician's knowledge."
Hesitating a moment while he clearly parsed the words, the traveler inclined his head towards Nichols; a crucifix glinted in his robe at the motion. "Guten tag, Herr Doctor," he said in a soft-accented rumble. "Matthias Mbandi, via Asuncion. Sprechen sie Deutsch?"
"Ah. Yes. Yes, I do." Nichols blinked. "Is that his?"
Margritte hefted the satchel. "Yes, Herr Doctor. I have checked it, there are only clothes and a bag of spices. Is there anything I may help you with here?"
Nichols knew from experience that Margritte's gifts included a love of gossiping over anyone not actually a patient. He couldn't help taking a harder look at the stranger, at Mbandi, checking shoulders and stance and hands; his own hands were chipped with marks much older than incessant scrubbing, older than his time in the Marines. Ten, fifteen years younger than himself, probably. Longer reach-but worn thinner than his robe. Mbandi returned the gaze without fear or challenge; Nichols eased to a smile, nodded, and glanced over. "No, thank you. I will see you at the center, and I will telephone if I need arrangements."