Good Time #2: Oh Susanna
The April sun glinted off the gray flagstones and slender columns of the high balcony. Below, the sea was calm, but seemed to hold a secret restlessness. As if a storm were waiting in the murk below the small, skittering waves, just barely held back. The old man sighed, letting the salty air he'd sucked down escape between his teeth. This would be his last day looking down from this balcony, onto the waves and foam spray he'd spent the last nineteen years coming to think of as his. That feeling of ownership was an illusion he'd always known he'd shatter the day he left for India. He simply hadn't expected it to be such a convincing one.
Perhaps it was simply that being near this sea reminded him of his country of birth. He hadn't thought of it as his homeland in nearly forty years, but the beige rocks and the murky sea still had a place in him.
Well. The woman behind him was patient, but they also both had more important things to do with their time than standing here staring. He raised his hands and pulled the saffron hood back over his neck, letting his snowy hair fall free, and turned around.
"It was a surprise decision," Straizo said as he strode back toward the table set with tea and cups, "with how little time you've spent at the monastery. But, Master Tonpetti rarely made mistakes."
The tall, black-haired woman lowered her head in a nearly invisible bow. "I hadn't left it in four years, until this month. Master Straizo."
"I know," he said, pulling back one of the bare wooden chairs and sitting at the stone table, motioning for her to do the same. "But I spent twelve there without leaving before I took up the mantle, and Tonpetti spent fourteen." He poured himself his first cup of tea before passing the pot across the table to his successor. "And you and I are both foreigners."
Her face, impassive to begin with, took on an almost stony appearance. Her blue eyes glared coldly from across the table. "They object to westerners," she said, her voice barely hiding its contempt, "holding an island in Europe?"
"Not that." Straizo said, putting down the cup after swallowing a hot, sweet sip and letting out a steamy breath. "Tradition holds that you'd succeed me in Bengal, just as you have here." He closed his hands around the glass teacup, staring into its orange murk. "It will not be my decision. That's why I'd rather prepare you for it now."
He looked up from his glass at the dark haired and fair skinned woman. She had put on her mirrored sunglasses, preventing him from seeing how her eyes reacted to his words. The rest of her face and statuesque body, at least, were unmoving.
"I don't much care," she said after a short pause.
He studied her a little longer. Was that really true? He'd been similarly tested, when the late Master Tonpetti had installed Straizo here all those years ago. It was, of course, a formality. No one would
really feel no resentment at being passed over. But still, the character of the new guardian must be beyond suspicion.
"Posso avere del tè?" A tiny, feminine voice asked in Italian from somewhere behind the table.
Can I have some tea?
Straizo was not startled. He was never startled. But this was probably the closest he'd come in multiple decades. The mouth of the woman across from him twitched, and her head bowed forward.
"Excuse me, Master Straizo." She looked down at someone hidden behind the stone table, and switched to her own broken Italian.
"Non ti avevo detto di aspettare dentro?" Didn't I tell you to wait inside?
Straizo said nothing. He just sat very, very still, and watched.
"È noioso!"
It's boring! A pair of child-sized hands threw themselves up, making their fingers visible behind the glasses near Lisa Lisa's chair.
"E freddo! Posso avere il tè?" And cold! Can I have tea?
Lisa Lisa raised her head slowly back toward the new master of the Ripple Order, her expressionless face finally showing a crack of embarrassment.
"Cara, per piacere, aspetta un momento." She said soothingly to the little girl beside her chair.
Wait, please, dear. As she spoke, she looked almost cautiously back at Straizo.
"E...Lisa Lisa," Straizo said, keeping his voice calm, quiet, and even, "why have you brought a child to this island?"
"I...didn't have anywhere else to leave her."
As Lisa Lisa's voice grew quieter, a small, silver-blonde head poked itself up over the table and turned its big, sullen eyes on him.
"Signore, posso avere del tè?" Can I have tea, mister?
Straizo stared at the little girl in a way that normally made armed men back down. She didn't seem to notice.
Brave child, if nothing else. Without responding to the girl, he looked back into Lisa Lisa's dark lenses.
"Never mind the secrecy," he said, letting his voice go icy, "or this island being no place for children. First, if you have nowhere to leave her, kindly tell me where you
found her in the first place."
…
The first major influenza outbreak since 1919 had hit Venice hard. It did help, she was sure, that they didn't have a simultaneous war to fight this time. Even so, the city was short on first aid personnel, which meant that the crew and passengers of the aging ferry boat
Santa Lucia had precious few rescuers when her steam engine exploded. If the sun had still been up when it happened, Lisa Lisa was sure, a plume of black smoke could have been seen over the harbor, rising from behind the rows of terraces and bridges. It being late evening, however, only the bone-jarring
boom had been sensed from the shore, followed by the racket of horses and motor ambulances rushing to the docks. With everyone speaking even faster than Italians normally did, she could only understand perhaps a quarter of the words being shouted and babbled back and forth around her. When she strode purposefully up to the approaching rescue boat, a uniformed man had gotten in her face and started asking frantic, incomprehensible questions. She had remained calm, looked down at the officer, and said the words "
Infermiera. Americana. Io non parlo italiano."
His sweaty, disheveled face had relaxed at that, and given her a series of equally incomprehensible instructions while remaining directly between her and the arrival. She gently picked him up and placed him back down a few feet to the left, trusting him to be too scared to struggle overmuch. He did not disappoint her. She moved on into the crowd, and found no shortage of patients being brought ashore. Some burned. Some soaking wet. Some simply appearing trampled and suffocated.
She took a deep breath, and held it inside her for exactly one and a half heartbeats before curling her tongue to channel it out between her front teeth. She always did that with her first breath, to help the charge build faster over the next three or four. It felt good, sick though it sounded. Feigning interest in the Venetian music and night life had exasperated her into giving up nearly an hour ago. She wondered, at times like this, how ill suited she would be to a world without disasters. By the second breath, her skin was warm and tingling. By the fifth, she was having to rhythmically tense and relax her arm and leg muscles to prevent the capillaries from bursting from the turgid blood. Having to heal those as she worked, Lisa Lisa had learned, resulted in marginally worse efficiency than taking the trouble to tense and relax. At least for her.
The burn victims were surrounded by paramedics. Pushing herself into place beside them would have caused more disruption than it was worth, probably. Ripple healing was less efficient against burn wounds anyway. Instead, she turned to a gurney being brought toward a horse carriage. The man laying in it was moaning softly, his face wrapped in blood-soaked bandages where he'd fallen or been knocked down or something of the sort. From the smears on the sides of his mouth, it looked as if he'd been narrowly saved from drowning in his own blood.
"Mi scusi," Lisa Lisa said to the woman rolling him forward as she accidentally bumped into her, nearly knocking the nurse over. With an apologetic smile, she looked down at the patient, and laid her fingers around his head and neck. When the Italian nurse had recovered, her eyes widened at the sight of the patient climbing off of the gurney and pulling the bandage off of his face with a confused expression. The nurse's jaw dropped, hands hovering motionless in the air, whatever she'd been about to say forgotten. Lisa Lisa indicated the burn victims who, really, probably needed more urgent attention in the first place, and went on to her next patient.
The next body that Lisa Lisa laid her fingers on was, technically speaking, dead. The fair haired little girl - no more than six or seven - wasn't breathing, and Lisa Lisa's trained fingers felt no pulse when they scanned her carotid artery. However, the little body was still warm. The lungs might have still had water in them, but that was a solvable problem as long as she had an intact diaphragm to work with and the nerves hadn't yet had time to decay.
She hadn't actually done this before. But she'd been walked through the process by people who had. If she failed, it wasn't as if the child's situation would get any worse.
The first step, of course, would have to be letting the body process air again. It needed oxygen, and - Lisa Lisa had learned from more esoteric sources - it needed the invisible power left in those molecules by the previous day's worth of sunlight. Fortunately, an intact diaphragm was easy to take the wheel of, assuming you knew what you were doing and had the ripple output to light those nerve endings. She pulled up the little girl's shirt and placed her fingers carefully around her lower chest and upper stomach. Sharp ripple pulses, accompanied by sharp - but not too sharp - jabbing motions into the underside of the muscle. The chest heaved, and a malformed, gurgling cough that almost made Lisa Lisa wince emerged from the parted lips. She pushed down again, after sending out another ripple pulse, and this time she felt the diaphragm contract sharply. This cough was louder, and uglier, and accompanied by a volume of foul seawater that exited the child's mouth and nostrils.
This part was working. Lisa Lisa hadn't doubted that it would, though. The part of the operation she was most worried about was restarting the heart.
She repeated the process for two more pulses. The next cough had less water coming up. The one after it had none. That was probably as clear as the lungs were going to get, then. Now, to direct a charge straight into the heart and hope the nerves connecting it to the brain were still in good enough shape. She adjusted her hands upward, looking for the heart area, when the little girl opened her eyes.
Lisa Lisa's hands stopped in place, half an inch from the child's skin. But...how could that? Some sort of autonomic reaction? Did she channel the energy more clumsily than she realized, and somehow reach all the way up to the eyelids?
No, no that wasn't it. The girl coughed. On her own. No further input from Lisa, or even physical contact with her skin. Then, a rattling, choking breath, air coming in and then being sputtered out. The girl's torso wriggled. Not a sharp twitch like you would get from energizing the nerves from outside. She was clearly
trying to move.
She had no idea how this could have happened, or even exactly
what had happened. But, she knew, as soon as she felt the weak vibrations of the girl's heartbeat unsteadily rising, that helping her breathe on her own was the best she could do. Murmuring words that the child almost certainly couldn't understand in the most comforting voice Lisa Lisa could manage, she turned the girl over to make sure no water trickled back down her trachea, and kept a continuous, low intensity ripple-to-waves pattern in her own breath to help the body heal if it could.
…
"Ha detto che ho assorbito la magia come una spugna!" The girl chimed in, jumping up onto her tiptoes and grabbing the edge of the table to look at Straizo again.
She said I soaked up the magic like a sponge!
Straizo locked his eyes on the beaming pair at the table's edge, and narrowed them slightly before looking back at his successor. "She understands English?"
Lisa Lisa was silent, but not in her usual, stony way. More like she was actually on the spot and at a loss for words. "I...it seems that she does."
Straizo looked back at the upper half of the little girl's face where it peered up from between her hands. "Do you understand what I'm saying to you, child?"
The girl stared at him blankly.
He waited a few moments to see if she changed her expression, or said anything at all in the way of a response. When she didn't, he addressed Lisa Lisa again without taking his eyes off the girl. "She understood a word like sponge? That's rather esoteric, for beginner's English."
"Ah. No." Lisa Lisa said. "She asked me what I was saying when she regained consciousness, a few hours later. I had to use an Italian dictionary."
He was quiet for an even longer minute. This time, he kept his attention on both of the others, not sure which of them to trust less at this point. His tea was probably getting cold, but he could hardly care. When the silence was broken, it was by the little girl again.
"Allora, POSSO avere del tè? Per favoooore?"
Straizo pushed his own half-empty cup across the table and left it a few inches from the far edge. Lisa Lisa, after giving him a silent request for permission and being given an impatient scowl in return, picked up the glass and held it within the child's reach.
"Fai attenzione, Susie," she said in her halting Italian,
"è bollente." Be careful, Susie, it's hot.
Straizo didn't respond as the little girl, Susie, thanked him enthusiastically and proceeded to spit out a gulp of tea that must have been a little warmer than she'd expected. As the fluff of silvery blond hair disappeared back behind the table, he asked Lisa Lisa "Why do you think she came back to life on her own?"
Tearing her concerned face away from the sputtering girl and trying to look businesslike again, Lisa Lisa replied "The only explanation I can think of is that she has a familiar spirit."
Straizo nodded his head, glad to see that Lisa Lisa hadn't forgotten her knowledge along with her propriety. "She does," he said quietly, "of that there can be no doubt." Lisa Lisa must have known what he was going to say next, but he said it anyway. "Spirit masters do not always react well to our art."
Lisa Lisa pushed her lips together more tightly. "Well, in this case…"
…
The pigeons took panicked flight, leaving a small cloud of feathers rolling through the air to the pavement behind them. Susie's hand closed around one of them, and she looked up at the escaping birds with a frown.
"L'avevo quasi preso stavolta! Quasi!" I almost got him that time! Almost!
Lisa Lisa stopped in place, halfway between the fountain she'd been sitting by when the child suddenly dashed away, and the girl in question. The morning sun caught in Susie's hair, making it shine almost like real electrum after the brushing and combing Lisa Lisa had given it. A couple of passers-by stared at the rambunctious child, but not nearly as hard as Lisa Lisa.
She was dead less than twelve hours ago. You don't almost catch a pigeon less than a day after that. You don't even want
to catch pigeons at that point. Not even if you're her age.
It had been flabbergasting enough when Susie asked if they could go on a walk. Now, just fifteen minutes later, this.
"Signora Lisa Lisa!" Susie's disappointed expression lightened in a flash as she turned back toward the woman who had played at least
some role in her resurrection, even if Lisa Lisa wasn't sure exactly how much of one.
"Tenga questa piuma!" Lisa Lisa didn't actually know the word
piuma, but the way Susie waved the pigeon feather in front of her as she ran back toward her made its meaning obvious. Five feet away from her, the girl tripped over her own feet and sprawled out across the pavement. There was a moment of silence that Lisa Lisa knew - as anyone who had ever been around children that age would know - was about to be broken by crying. Hoping to stop that before it could start, Lisa Lisa dashed the rest of the way to the fallen Susie and cycled some quick ripple breaths as she knelt over her.
Susie did start crying, but it barely lasted ten seconds before the girl realized that the pain had stopped. She pushed herself up onto her no longer skinned knees, and then stood.
"Come ha fatto?" she asked, looking up at Lisa Lisa's sunglasses with wonder on her little face.
How did you do that?
"Magia." Lisa Lisa gave her the same answer as last time. She knew she'd never be able to explain the Ripples of the Sun and the art of channeling them in Italian, even if the laws of the Order didn't restrict her from speaking of such things so openly. "Magic" was a good enough explanation. And, to be perfectly honest, Lisa Lisa always felt guilty about letting ignorant people go on not believing in magic.
"Wow." Susie lowered the pigeon feather and stared at the tall woman in renewed awe.
"Diceva la verità." You were telling the truth.
Lisa Lisa couldn't help but smile. This was what, her fifth smile of the morning? Her sixth? That was more than she'd had in at least the preceding week. A pang of guilt immediately followed that realization, but she quickly stamped it out. No. She wouldn't let her mind go back there. She had no more excuse for it, after all these years.
"Mi sento tutta…" I feel all… Susie said a word whose meaning Lisa Lisa didn't know. The girl was grasping her own wrists in turn, and giggling a little, as if something were tickling her just slightly.
"È questa la magia?" Is that the magic?
Lisa Lisa's smile came back before it had finished fading away, and she shook her head.
"No." She'd given Susie a very small infusion, just enough to heal the abrasions on her knees and palms.
"Davvero?" The freckled little face grew concerned.
"C'è qualcosa di strano allora. Mi sento strana. Come se…" There's something wrong then. I feel weird. Like I'm… more words followed that Lisa Lisa didn't understand.
Some aftereffect from whatever happened last night? Weakness and tiredness from the resuscitation coming back to hit her all at once, after its mysterious day-long absence? Beginning to become concerned herself, Lisa Lisa put a hand to Susie's forehead, feeling for any changes in temperature or heartbeat. She felt neither of those things, however. Only the tingle of ripple energy flowing back from Susie's body into her own.
For the second time in less than a day, Lisa Lisa nearly startled back away from the girl. That didn't make any sense. The amount of energy she had given the girl's body should have been nearly all used up healing the scrapes, and any leftover would have diffused out into the air around her body within a few seconds at the longest. She'd have to have used an advanced Shifting Of Sand maneuver to make it stay coherent outside of Lisa Lisa's own body any longer than that, unless Susie was ripple-activated herself. Which she wasn't. Lisa Lisa had checked.
"Mi sento meglio ora." Susie said.
I feel better now.
As she stared in bewilderment at the child, Lisa Lisa thought back to last night, when she'd pumped the water out of her lungs.
Her heart started on its own, I thought. Maybe I was wrong. If her body is some sort of...natural ripple reservoir
, for some reason...then when I charged her diaphragm…
"Lasciami provare una cosa," Lisa Lisa whispered to the girl.
Let me try something. Susie looked excited, and stood up straight as Lisa Lisa took a deep breath in through her mouth and forced it out quickly between her teeth. She'd give the girl a slightly bigger infusion, and then see how long her body stayed charged.
…
"It's like she said herself, Master." Lisa Lisa took the empty cup back from the girl named Susie and poured it full again before handing it back to Straizo. "She's a sponge. Her body uses any ripple it absorbs more efficiently than mine does, and any excess
stays in her until it's used for something else."
Straizo said nothing. Spirit-masters were rare. Ones who had beneficial reactions to the ripple, rather than detrimental or simply bizarre ones, were rarer still. The threads of destiny were showing themselves before him. As a young man, he'd have ignored them. After certain events he'd witnessed thirty-two years ago, and lessons taught to him by Master Tonpetti in the time since, however, he'd learned better.
Lisa Lisa took the final sip from her own glass, and waited longer. Finally, Straizo decided it was on him to speak now.
"I see." He wrapped his thin old hands around his refilled glass and looked down at the part of the table Susie was likely behind. "It would be a waste not to train her."
"My thoughts exactly, Master." The big woman looked relieved, though she was trying to hide it. He supposed she was right to be nervous about how he'd react. Especially since she hadn't let him know about this beforehand. That, by the way, was something she
should have done.
"You've spoken to the girl's family, then?"
Lisa Lisa shook her head, causing her long, black hair to shimmer in the sunlight as it swished before her broad shoulders. "She's an orphan."
Ah. That might be fortuitous, sad though it no doubt was for the child. "You've spoken to her caretakers, then?"
The expression on his successor's face looked pained. Behind the sunglasses, he knew, she was probably wincing. Straizo's own eyes narrowed, and his fingers tightened around his glass.
"You've spoken to her caretakers, then?" He repeated, slowly and icily.
Her head hung. As if twenty years had just been stripped away from her, and she was an awkward teenaged novice at the monastery once again. Straizo felt his pulse in his head. There were easy techniques for calming himself down, but this situation did not call for calm.
"She ran away from her orphanage," Lisa Lisa said, still looking down at the floor between her feet, "and snuck aboard that ferry. I asked her which orphanage it was and…" she shuffled uncomfortably, almost long enough for Straizo to open his mouth again, before continuing "...she said she couldn't remember. She might be lying, but if she is I can't get her to tell the truth."
He still felt his pulse. Lisa Lisa raised her head partway again, risking a look at the new grand Swami of the Ripple Order. Straizo looked down into his murky orange tea. Slowly, he let out a sigh.
"You kidnapped an orphan girl."
"It was her idea."
"You took your directions from a seven year old girl over
the law."
"I told you, I didn't have anywhere else to leave her."
Straizo glared at her, harder and sharper than he ever had before. She wouldn't be able to deny it, when he made his accusation. They both already knew it would be true, and that she'd have no answer to it. Seconds ticked by. Overhead, seagulls called. A cloud passed over the sun, turning the deck a darker shade of gray and changing the tea from murky orange to something like crimson.
"You," Straizo said, keeping his voice very carefully measured, "will ask at every orphanage and cottage in Venice until you have found the one Susanna came from. When you have found it, you will contact me immediately and await my instructions." He wondered, as he spoke, what the most prudent decision would be, when that happened. Lisa Lisa's immigration status in Italy was not something they wanted scrutiny applied to. One of the underlings that sometimes stayed here with the Guardian of the Aja, then? He'd have to review the possible candidates. The best option would be to move the child to Bengal, but the legality of that would be more complicated still.
"You don't want me to just put her back?" Lisa Lisa had regained her composure, for the most part. But there was still more emotion, more reflexiveness in her voice, than she usually showed.
Straizo pursed his lips. "Of course not. What if someone adopts her?"
Lisa Lisa raised her head the rest of the way back up. "Thank you, Master," she said, her voice quiet.
"Hmm." He took a sip from his second cup of tea and looked over across the deck, at where Susie was now standing. The girl was watching a seagull perched on one of the battlements, a predator's steely gleam in her eyes. "I can't say this is a
good start to your career as Guardian." He pursed his lips again, and adjusted his saffron hood where it had started bunching up behind his neck. "But if you can be entrusted with the Aja, I suppose you can be trusted with her as well."
Lisa Lisa adjusted her sunglasses. She'd regained her composure fully now, sitting sternly in her own tall, imposing frame once more. Across the deck, a panicked seagull took flight, having just narrowly evaded capture.
"We won't let you down."
...
Author's Note: Special thanks to Suppergiulia for her help with the Italian.
