Before marching on the elevators, Tomas Reed insisted on entering the hospital tents at the eastern edge of the refugee encampment. He carried his master audit ledger and a clean sheet of heavy parchment to record the human cost of the missing four thousand crowns.
The hospital consisted of four large freight tarpaulins lashed together over bent willow hoops, anchored with heavy stones to keep the steppe gales from tearing them away. Inside, the air was stifling, thick with the smell of boiled vinegar, vinegar-soaked rags, and the sour, ammonia tang of failing kidneys.
Thirty patients lay on pallets of dry switchgrass covered with patched wool blankets. Most were children and elderly wagon drivers, their skin stretched thin and gray over hollow cheekbones, their ankles and hands swollen to twice their natural size from stone fluid retention.
A middle-aged woman named Martha, her fingers red and scarred from years of tending bitter salt stills, knelt beside a twelve-year-old boy whose breath came in shallow, rattling gasps. She looked up at Tomas with tired, reddened eyes.
“He drank from Well Number Three four days ago when the water barrel ran dry,” Martha whispered. He wiped the boy’s forehead with a damp rag. “The pain started in his back that evening. Now his urine is black as river mud. He can’t keep a spoon of barley gruel in his belly.”
