Two weeks in, Inang Cora had opinions about the preparation area.
Specifically: the herbs should face the window, not the wall. The drying bundles should hang higher, above head height, where the air moved better. The labeling system — which Maricel had spent an afternoon building — was too small to read in low light and should be redone.
She expressed these opinions the way she expressed most things: not as suggestions, not as questions, but as statements of fact delivered with the calm certainty of someone who had been right about plants for longer than Maricel had been alive.
Maricel moved the herbs to face the window.
She rehung the drying bundles.
She redid the labels, larger, with a charcoal stick that Inang Cora provided from a supply she seemed to have materialized from somewhere.
"Better," Inang Cora said.
She had been sleeping at the grain store for four days now. Not by Maricel's invitation and not without one either — she had simply appeared one evening with a rolled mat under her arm and set it in the corner near the preparation area and said she would be more useful here than there. Maricel had not argued. The old woman's knowledge of the local plants was deeper than Marisol's memory and broader than anything Maricel had accumulated in two weeks of observation, and having that knowledge in the same room at all hours was practically useful.
Also, she made very good tea.
The day's cases were small.
A child with an ear infection — she irrigated it with the saline preparation she'd worked out from available materials and prescribed the antibiotic plant compound she'd been refining for exactly this kind of case. The child cried. Kiko held the lamp. Inang Cora held the child.
A man with a badly bruised knee who had decided to walk on it for three days before coming in. She told him what she thought of that decision briefly and without sentiment, applied a compress, and told him to stay off it for another five days.
He said five days was too long. She said it was less long than the alternative. He left.
A woman who thought she might be pregnant and wasn't sure. Maricel confirmed she was, at roughly eight weeks by her count, and spent twenty minutes explaining what to expect and what to watch for and which of the woman's current habits would need to change. The woman asked more questions than most of her patients combined, which Maricel found she appreciated.
By midday she had seen six people.
None of it was complicated. She'd had mornings in the hospital — before the hospital had a name and a reputation and a waiting list — when six patients by noon would have felt like a slow morning. Here it felt like a full one, and not because the cases were harder.
Because she knew all of them.
Not well. She didn't know their whole histories, didn't know their childhoods or their debts or most of what made up the substance of their lives. But she knew Romy's wife was named Berta and made very good vinegar, and that the man with the bruised knee had a brother who ran the southern boat route, and that the pregnant woman had been trying for a second child for three years and the relief on her face when Maricel confirmed it was something she hadn't expected to feel anything about.
She felt something about it.
She was still thinking about what that meant when Inang Cora set tea beside her without being asked.
She started watching the village properly sometime in the second week.
Before that she'd been too occupied with the grain store, with building what she needed, with learning enough about her patients to treat them. She'd seen the village as a logistical space — the well here, the households there, the headman's house with its carved post, the paths and their directions.
Now she saw it as a place where people lived.
The large tree at the center of the settlement had roots worn smooth by decades of use. In the afternoons, after the boat work was done and before dinner, four or five of the older men gathered there. They didn't seem to have a fixed agenda. They talked about the weather and the fish runs and, increasingly, about Romy's arm and whether Doktora's treatments worked on other things too. She knew this because she could hear them from the grain store doorway.
She didn't discourage it. Reputation here moved through conversation, and she needed her reputation to move.
The women had a different center — the well, and the shared work space near the eastern houses where the weaving and mending happened. This was a more active space. Things were decided here. She'd figured this out when Leonora began appearing at the shared work space in the afternoons, and the things she said seemed to become the things people did.
She had filed Leonora accordingly.
The children used the whole village as their operating space, which was reasonable. She'd started recognizing individual children by their habits — the pair of boys who were always at the edge of the water doing something that was probably not permitted, the small girl who had appointed herself observer of the grain store and could be found sitting near the door at various hours watching Kiko carry things.
She knew when the boats went out and when they came back.
She knew what the sky looked like before rain hit.
She had never paid attention to any of these things in her other life. Her life had been built of interior spaces — hospitals, corridors, the narrow world between home and work. She hadn't lived somewhere that had a weather pattern she cared about or a tree where the same people sat every afternoon.
She did not expect to find this interesting.
She found it interesting.
She kept that to herself because she wasn't sure what to do with it yet.
The merchant arrived mid-afternoon.
He came up the coast road from the south with two pack animals and a manner that said he had been covering ground for several days and was prepared to cover several more. He stopped at the well to water the animals and looked around at the village with the assessing gaze of a man who had been in a lot of villages and was noting the relevant details of this one.
He noticed the grain store. He noticed the small line of people that had formed outside it by midday and dispersed by early afternoon. He noticed Kiko, who was restacking crates outside, and he asked him a question.
Kiko pointed in her direction.
The merchant came over.
He was somewhere in his forties, broad through the shoulders, with the weathered face of someone who spent most of his life in transit. He introduced himself as a spice trader from Dalampasigan, working the coast route north, and said he'd heard there was a healer in Panlaot.
"You heard in the last two weeks?" Maricel said.
"I heard in the last three days," he said. "From a fisherman I shared a fire with south of here. He said a woman in Panlaot had set a broken forearm in the dark with a fish-gutting knife and the man was going to keep his arm."
She considered the accuracy of this version of events.
"The knife was adequately sharp," she said. "The rest is approximately correct."
He looked at her with interest.
He had a joint problem in his right hand — she could see it from where she was standing, the slight asymmetry in how he held the reins. She didn't mention it. She was trying to get better at not diagnosing people who hadn't come to her for a diagnosis.
She mostly succeeded.
"Word on the coast routes moves faster than most people think," he said. "I'll be in three more settlements before the week is out. If you want your name to travel, you should give me something accurate to say."
"Tell them there's a healer in Panlaot," she said. "Tell them the grain store on the east end of the settlement, near the well. Tell them to come with their actual problem, not the version they've decided is less embarrassing."
He laughed at that. It was a real laugh — surprised out of him.
"That last part is specific," he said.
"It's consistently useful advice."
He watered his animals and bought a small amount of dried fish from Tandoy's wife and left within the hour. She watched him go up the coast road north.
Word was going to move now whether she did anything about it or not.
She went back to work.
Inang Cora found her at dusk going through the plant inventory.
"You should eat," the old woman said.
"In a moment."
"You said that an hour ago."
This was probably accurate. She had a tendency to lose time when she was working through something that required her full attention, and the plant inventory had problems she was still sorting — gaps she needed to fill, substitutions she wasn't certain about, two compounds she needed that she hadn't found good local sources for yet.
Inang Cora set a bowl of something on the worktable without further discussion and went to tend the evening ritual at the small shrine she'd established in the corner of the grain store, her own household's shrine relocated with the same matter-of-fact ease with which she'd relocated everything else.
Maricel ate without stopping what she was doing, which she recognized was not ideal behavior but was better than not eating.
Outside, the village finished its day. The sounds changed — boats secured, fire smells building, the specific quiet that came when the working hours ended and the evening hours began.
She had been here two weeks.
She thought about what the next two weeks would need to look like. More plants. More cloth. A better solution for the antiseptic problem. Romy's follow-up. Three patients she was tracking for longer-term issues that needed watching.
She thought about the pregnant woman and her three-year wait.
She thought about Romy's wife closing her fingers around the carved figure before she could refuse it, and the warmth the wood had held from so many hands.
She had not expected any of this.
She wasn't sure anymore what she had expected.
She was locking the grain store for the night when something landed at her feet.
She looked down.
A dead bird. Small. Brown. Very thoroughly dead.
She looked up.
Tigmamanukan was on the roof directly above her, in the last of the evening light, with the posture of something that had just accomplished something and was waiting for acknowledgment.
"That is not helpful," Maricel said.
The bird looked at her.
It looked at the dead bird.
It looked back at her with an expression that, on a face capable of expressions, would have been the face of someone who profoundly disagreed.
She picked up the dead bird with two fingers and set it to the side of the path.
"I know what a dead bird looks like," she said. "If you're trying to tell me something, you need a different method."
Tigmamanukan turned and looked out at the water.
This was, she had learned, the bird's version of having no comment.
She went inside.
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