Thux was ready. Swaddled in his protective suit and peaked hat he was barely recognisable. But his eyes creased when he smiled at her behind his mask.
She took his head and kissed the top of his hat. ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘One mistake out there – that’s all it will take.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Just make sure you are, or you’ll have me to answer to. Now go.’ She turned him around and pushed him towards the elevator to the roof.
16
When she made it to the Wall Ywa toured the ground-level doorways, and the main staircases and elevator shafts. There were injured folk pouring into the Wall’s Etxelur District from all over the adjacent part of Northland, even from Old Etxelur. They came with broken bones from falls, crush injuries from collapsed houses, frostbite – or they came just looking for shelter, the already ill, the very old and very young, nestspills weakened by hunger, and some in what the doctors described as a state of deep cold, the very cores of their bodies losing essential heat.
It was soon obvious that the Wall’s hospitals couldn’t cope.
Ywa made some fast decisions. First she sent for Ontin, a distant cousin, not the most senior or learned medical professional in Northland but the family doctor she had always trusted herself. Then she went to the Hall of Annids, the largest single chamber in the District. Maybe this place could be used to house the influx.
She found her way barred by a pompous official. To her astonishment she learned that a poetry competition was proceeding in the Hall, a handful of elderly men of the House of the Wolf declaiming bad verse to each other in archaic tongues. Ywa pushed the doorman aside and strode in. The big room was colder than usual – and darker, too. When she glanced up she could see snow gathering on the big glass panes of the roof. She broke up the competition, and co-opted the poets to help get the chamber set up as an emergency receiving hospital. To their credit, as soon as they realised how urgent the situation was they ran to help. ‘Why,’ said one well-spoken gentleman, ‘I hadn’t even noticed it was snowing.’ Others came as word spread, with pallets, chairs, boxes of medical supplies such as bandages, splints, medicines, surgical instruments.
And soon the wounded, ill and displaced began to trickle in.
Ontin showed up, carrying his own bag of instruments. A small, pot-bellied, balding man of about sixty, he looked taken aback when he saw the number of cases already here.
More volunteers started to arrive. Rina’s son Nelo came stumbling in, with that cocky young Carthaginian – what was his name? – Mago. Between them they were carrying an injured woman, filthy and in rags, her leg obviously broken; she cried out with every step. But she held a baby against her chest, swathed in dirty cloth. The boys laid the woman down on a pallet, and the well-dressed daughter of an Annid came hurrying over to help her.