Chapter 7 #2
He asks this in a rush with the exaggeration of someone who has been practicing the sentence the whole way here. Then, before Indrie can answer, he adds the question he actually came to ask, and it is more entreaty than inquiry.
"Does that mean you've had time to think about continuing my training?"
Indrie smiles at him. Genuinely, warmly, with the full force of the affection he has developed for this earnest, eager boy who followed him around the ship asking questions and took notes in a leather-bound journal and once attempted to bandage his own ankle to practice wrapping technique and had to be cut free by Dagny.
"I would love to have you as an apprentice, Ermin."
Ermin's face splits into a grin so wide it looks like it might hurt. His whole body seems to lift, shoulders up, chin up, chest expanding with a breath that is half relief and half unbridled joy, and for a moment Indrie thinks the boy might actually levitate off the threshold.
"Really?"
"Really."
"Starting now?"
Indrie laughs. "I can't think of a better time."
They spend the morning going over the basics.
Indrie begins where his mentor began with him, with the hands.
He teaches Ermin proper hand-washing technique, which sounds rudimentary but is the foundation everything else is built on.
He shows him how to scrub each finger individually, how to clean beneath the nails, how to rinse and dry without recontaminating.
"A healer's hands are his primary instruments," Indrie tells him, watching Ermin scrub with focused determination. "Before you touch a patient, before you touch a tool, before you touch anything, your hands must be clean. A dirty hand can kill as surely as a blade."
Ermin nods with fervent gravity and scrubs harder.
They move on to identification. Indrie lays out his stores on the examination table, every herb, every dried flower, every bundled root, and goes through them one by one.
Name, appearance, smell, taste, preparation, use.
Ermin carries his leather-bound journal and takes notes with dedication, his handwriting growing increasingly illegible as he tries to keep up with Indrie's steady flow of information.
Indrie teaches him how to take a patient's temperature, the back of the hand against the forehead, the cheeks, beneath the jaw.
How to check a pulse, two fingers pressed to the inside of the wrist, counting the beats against a steady rhythm.
How to ask the right questions. When did it start?
Where does it hurt? Has this happened before? What have you eaten?
"The questions matter more than the medicine," Indrie tells him, and Ermin writes this down and underlines it twice.
In the afternoon, Ingrid shows up at the clinic door with a woven basket over her arm and a calm smile on her face.
She is wearing a simple dress the color of autumn wheat, her long blonde hair braided over one shoulder. She looks past Indrie to where Ermin is carefully labeling jars on the far shelf, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration, and her smile widens slightly.
"We're going to pick herbs," she tells Indrie.
It is not a question.
Indrie looks at Ermin. Ermin looks at Indrie. Indrie turns back to Ingrid and opens his mouth to explain that he has patients to see, supplies to organize, labels to write.
Ingrid raises one eyebrow. It is a subtle gesture, barely a millimeter of motion, and it carries the full authority of a woman who has been married to Dagny for years. The eyebrow says: You are coming. This has been decided. Your participation in the decision is decorative.
Indrie turns to Ermin. "Don't do anything vital while I'm gone."
Ermin straightens with an eagerness that immediately makes Indrie nervous.
"Triage patients and I'll be back soon. If someone is bleeding, apply pressure and send someone to find me. If someone is not bleeding, give them water and tell them to sit down."
"I can handle it," Ermin says, with the supreme confidence of a person who has been studying medicine for approximately four hours.
Indrie gives him a look that communicates, in the universal language of mentors everywhere, I am trusting you with this and if you break anything I will know. Then he grabs his scarf and follows Ingrid out into the sunshine.
They walk together beyond the city walls and into the surrounding countryside, and Indrie stops breathing for a moment.
He has seen Valen from the harbor. He has seen it from the streets, the green hills rising behind the rooftops. But he has not been outside the city until now, and the sheer abundance of life spreading in every direction slows his feet and makes his eyes sting.
The meadows are thick with late-summer wildflowers, their colors muted by the approach of autumn but still vivid, gold and rust and deep purple and a white so bright it seems to glow against the green.
The grass is long enough to brush his knees and it moves in the wind in long slow waves, and beneath it the earth is dark and rich and smells of rain and growth and something ancient and alive.
Ingrid leads him along a stream bank where herbs grow in abundant clusters.
Wild chamomile starring the grass, yarrow in white-topped clusters, mint growing in dense patches near the water's edge.
She moves through the plants with a familiarity that tells Indrie she has been here many times before, and she bends and picks with ease, never hesitating over what she is reaching for.
She knows an impressive amount about plants. Indrie learns, as they work side by side with her basket between them, that she has already begun planning a medicinal garden behind the clinic.
"Comfrey along the back wall, where it's shaded," she says, without looking up.
"Valerian beside it, because it spreads and the wall will stop it.
Chamomile in the sunny patch by the gate, and I want the mint in a pot and not in the ground, because mint is a menace and will eat everything you love. "
"You've put a lot of thought into this."
"I've thought about very little else for six days,” Ingrid says and looks a little embarrassed to admit it. She gives Indrie a wry look and adds, “I can be a little obsessive.”
They move further through the meadow and Ingrid stops them again.
"This one," she says, holding up a spray of small purple flowers, "we call sleepwell. It grows everywhere along this stream." She turns it in her fingers, examining the delicate petals. "My grandmother used to brew it into a tea for restless nights. It doesn't taste good, but it works."
Indrie takes the spray and lifts it to his nose. The scent is faintly sweet, almost floral, with a deeper earthy note beneath. He recognizes the family, a relative of valerian, adapted to the northern climate. "How do you prepare it?"
"Dried, crushed, steeped in hot water." Ingrid tucks another spray into her basket. "You can add honey. It helps with the taste."
They work in companionable quiet for a while, the only sounds the rustling of grass and the burble of the stream and the occasional distant call of a bird Indrie cannot identify.
The sun is warm on his back. His hands are stained green from the herbs.
The basket between them is filling with chamomile and yarrow and the small purple flowers, and Indrie feels, in this meadow beside this stream with this gentle woman, something very close to happiness.
"How did you meet Dagny?" he asks.
Ingrid flushes, a soft pink across her pale cheeks, and the way her eyes soften and her mouth curves into a smile that is half memory and half present joy tells Indrie everything he needs to know before she opens her mouth.
"I saw her come off the ship from an excursion.
Five years ago now." She is holding a sprig of chamomile and turning it between her fingers, not looking at Indrie but at the flower, as though the memory is easier to tell if she speaks to something small and golden.
"She came down the gangplank with her red hair wild and her swords at her hips and a grin on her face, and I–"
She laughs. A soft, private sound.