Daneh looked up from the sweating young man on the cot and nodded at Edmund and the woman accompanying him. Daneh hadn’t seen this particular reenactor before but she knew the type of old. The woman was about twenty kilos overweight, which with the current conditions and medical conditions before the Fall had required conscious work, and was loaded down with silver jewelry. Most of it consisted of zodiac signs or other occult objects and the rest consisted of crystals.
“Daneh, this is Sharron, she’s a herbalist,” Edmund said.
“I don’t think this is the time, Edmund,” Daneh said sharply, lifting up a bandage from the young man’s arm and wincing at the condition of the wound underneath. The young man had run afoul of an axe-head and the wound had almost immediately started to fester; modern human immune systems were strong but the skin was one of the hardest areas for the systems to access. Now the infected area had gone green-brown with gangrene and if she didn’t figure out some way to stop the spread it was going to kill him. Quick.
“Gangrene,” the woman said, leaning forward and sniffing with a disgusted shake of her head. “There’s naught an herb on earth that can cure that, you need sulfanomide or one of the cillins.”
Daneh turned and looked at the woman sharply at which the herbalist gave a grin. “Didn’t expect me to be dredging up those terms, did you doctor? But penicillin’s naught but a mold and sulfanomide, well that’s just tar that’s been worked over, hey?”
“Do you have any?” Daneh asked.
“No, but I just got here,” the herbalist said with a nod. “And I don’t think either would work here. Have you tried debriding?”
“Yes, but it’s getting ahead of us,” she said, waving at a fly. The damned things got in no matter what you did and they had an unpleasant tendency to land on open wounds.
“Leave it,” Edmund said suddenly, as she waved at another that was trying to land on the mangled flesh.
“What?” both of the women asked, then looked at each other sheepishly.
“Let’s take this outside,” Edmund said, gesturing to the end of the infirmary.
It wasn’t much of an infirmary, just an open bay with some cots and a “surgery” on one end that mostly consisted of a well-scrubbed table and some tools that made her think more of the inquisition than medicine. But it was getting better. And if this “herbalist” knew what she was doing they might get better still. Daneh was well aware that her knowledge of medicines, how they were made or administered, was barely theoretical. But between them, if the woman really knew anything, they might make one decent preindustrial doctor. She waved the fly away against his protestations and laid a fresh bandage on the wound, then followed Edmund out.
“What about flies is good, Edmund?” she snapped as they got outside. “They carry every imaginable sort of filth!”
“Yes, they do,” he said. “And they lay eggs in rotting flesh which turn into maggots. And what do maggots eat?”
Daneh stopped and thought for a moment then shook her head. “You want me to let maggots eat his flesh?!”
“Dead flesh, yes,” Edmund said uncomfortably. “Look, I know it sounds crazy. And, really, they’re supposed to be raised maggots, you raise them on clean dead flesh, meat. But we don’t have time for that, do we?”
“No,” Daneh said simply. “We’re going to lose him if we don’t stop it. The traditional response is high amputation to get ahead of the infection.”
“Can you make any of the stuff you were talking about, fast?” Edmund asked Sharron.
“No,” she replied. “I have to find penicillin mold, out of… millions of molds. I need dishes to make cultures. You can often find… tetracycline molds in old graves, but we don’t have any of those either.”
“Graveyard dirt?” Edmund said then shook his head. “The point is, maggots do work. We just have to worry about secondary infections.”
“What about…” Sharron said, creasing her brow. “What about finding a handful in… something and washing them?”
“Ugh!” Daneh replied. “I think I’d rather let the flies land.”
“Gangrene is an anaerobic infection anyway,” Edmund said. “Keeping the wound open would help more than hurt, I think.”
“Is there any way to… get more oxygen to it?” Sharron asked.
“Not short of a hyperbaric chamber,” Daneh replied. “Or some way to separate out oxygen, which is a high-pressure, supercold method. I’m not even sure it would get past the pressure protocols.”
“Sheida?” Edmund asked.
“She’s refused to give up any power so far,” Daneh said exasperatedly. “She has enough to go gallivanting all over, but none for medicine!”
Edmund shook his head at her in a meaningful way then sighed. “I think the maggots are the only choice.”
“That and some minor bacteriofacients I can come up with,” Sharron said. “There are some herbs. I can make up a wash pretty quickly. It won’t be as good as antibiotics but it will help some.”
“Do it,” Daneh said. “Please. And we need to get you a lab set up. Edmund?”
“I’ll see the glassier about getting the appropriate materials,” he grimaced. “He’s gonna love this on top of everything else.”
“Tell him that he might need it soon,” Daneh replied sharply. “That should center his thoughts nicely.”
“Sharron knows other herbs and medicines as well,” Talbot noted, carefully. “Including tansy.”
“Not something I recommend, short of absolute necessity,” the woman interjected. “It’s terribly dangerous from all I’ve heard. But there are others. I have some poppy seeds so as soon as we can get some poppies growing we’ll have opiates. Strong and addicting, but there’s few painkillers that equal it. And then there’s willow bark.”
“That one I know,” Daneh said with a chuckle. “But, really, that’s about as far as I can go. That and cherry bark.”
“I think you two will get on just fine,” Edmund said. “I’ve got…”
“Other things to do,” Daneh said dryly. “That’s okay. See you tonight?”
“Hopefully,” he answered, glumly. “You’re finally back and we never see each other.” With a nod he strode briskly away in the general direction of the town hall.
“Well, you at least get to sleep together,” Sharron said with a sly wink.
“No, we don’t,” Daneh replied.
“But… well…” Sharron stopped with a puzzled frown.
“Leave it,” Daneh said then shook her head. “Let me put it this way, I may be the first candidate to try tansy.”
Sharron looked at her for a moment until she realized the doctor was serious then blanched. “Oh, my Goddess.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The next morning there was quite a row between Cruz and Shilan. The reason Cruz had disappeared were some friendly gents running a dice game. He ended up losing every chit he had and hadn’t even had enough for breakfast. The burgeoning relationship between Cruz and Shilan was most definitely off, in her opinion. And Herzer had to wonder just what he had missed by playing the paladin.
He wasn’t able to find out, though, because Class A-5 was told off immediately to the sawmill. There was a short briefing in which they were solemnly informed that cutting and forming wood was the basis of industry in preindustrial civilization. They were so informed by John Miller, the sawmill manager, who was a somber and unsmiling man. When asked about the source of the wood, and whether it might be the basis of industry he had unsmilingly told them that any idiot could cut wood, but it took a true master to form it.