The Prince Who Was Already Mourned

One and two and three and four, down to the count of thirty, the heel of my hand finding the lower half of the breastbone the way it finds it in the dark, the way it found it on a stranger in a stairwell and a child on a kitchen table and a man twice my weight on a pub floor, the way it had not, the one time it mattered most, found anybody at all, because the one time it mattered most the body on the floor was mine.

I did not let myself have that. I have a place I put it, the part of me that knows I died alone because everyone competent in the building was me, and I put it there now and I counted.

The breastbone gave under my weight the way a breastbone gives, which is to say it felt like breaking him, because compressions that do not feel like that are not deep enough, and I have had to teach that to more frightened students than I can name: you are not hurting him, he is past hurting, the cracking you feel is the cost of the only chance he has. A third of the chest's depth. Let the chest come all the way back up between. Do not stop. The brain has four minutes, and after four it has a different conversation, and I have lost more people to a good-hearted pause than to anything the disease ever did.

"Devi." The captain's voice, somewhere over me, level the way a man keeps his voice level when he has decided to be useful in a thing he does not understand. "Tell me what to do."

That was the whole of him in four words, and I could have wept for it and did not, because weeping is a use of time.

"Count for me," I said, between compressions, not looking up. "Out loud. Every count of thirty you say my name and I do not stop until I tell you. If I stop before I tell you, you put your own hands here and you push the way I am pushing and you do not care that it feels like breaking him. Do you understand me. You do not care."

"I understand you."

So he counted, in the flat carrying voice of a man used to a drill yard, and the temple reader who had been easing the prince's passage stood at the foot of the bed with his litany dead in his mouth, watching a woman do violence to the holy Called body in the name of keeping it, and the High Jyotin Vyas did not move in the lamplight with his clean ledger of a face doing an arithmetic I did not have the attention to read, and somewhere below all of it, under my two hands, the prince who had been told the date of his own death at nine years old lay not breathing while I argued with the schedule the whole kingdom had written for him.

This was the moment, if you want to know, that I stopped being careful about what they called me.

There is a thing that happens in a code, a clarity, where the room narrows to the work and the work is everything and the politics and the fear and the watching faces go to a great distance, and I had not felt it since the floor of my own emergency department, and I felt it now, and it was almost a relief, the way coming home is a relief even when home is a burning building. I knew this. Whatever else was strange in this life, the body under my hands and the count in my head and the cold decision of how long to push before I changed tack, this I knew, and there is a terrible peace in being, for thirty seconds at a time, simply good at the one thing.

At the second count of thirty I stopped, two fingers at his throat, and there was nothing, and I went back down.

People believe, because they have watched the wrong stories, that you push for a moment and the man sits up and asks for water. He does not. You push for a long time. You push past the point where the watchers have privately decided it is over and are waiting only for you to be told the same, and you push past your own arms beginning to fail, and the truth that no one wants printed is that most of the time you are pushing on someone who is already gone and the pushing is a thing you do for yourself, a refusal, a fist shaken at a door that does not open. But not always. Not every time. And you cannot know which time it is until you stop, so you do not stop.

"Lady Devar," the captain said, on the count.

I did not stop.

The foxglove was burning off in him or it was not. That was the whole question and it was a question I could not answer, only outlast. A heart poisoned into chaos by digitalis can fall into the very rhythm I was feeling for and never find, or it can find it again on its own as the drug clears, the way a swimmer caught in a current can be carried out and out and then, past where you have given up watching, be set down on a far sand. My job was to be the current's argument. My job was to push his blood around a body that had forgotten how to do it, to keep the four-minute conversation from starting in his brain, to buy the heart the minutes it needed to remember, and to do that without a single one of the things I would have had in the bright clean room, no shock to stun the chaos back into order, no line into the vein, no drug to answer the drug, nothing but the heel of my hand and the count and the refusal.

"Lady Devar."

My arms were going. I changed my lean, drove from the hips the way you must when it goes long, and somewhere in the smoke-thinned room a woman was crying very quietly, a servant, and the temple reader had begun his litany again under his breath, not the easing this time but something older and more frightened, a man hedging, asking whatever he asked to forgive what he was watching.

"He is gone," Vaidya Ojha said, from the wall, from the captain's grip, and there was grief in it and under the grief something that might almost have been hope, because a prince who died now died of the season after all and took the word poison down into the ground with him. "Let him go. You cannot fight a Calling. You are only making it ugly."

I have been told to let people go by better men than Ojha, by men who were right to say it, and I have learned the difference between the patient you cannot save and the patient you have given up on, and the difference is sometimes only one more count of thirty.

"Captain," I said. "Count."

And on the next thirty, under my fingers at his throat, in the half-second I gave it before I went back down, there was a stair.

One beat where there had been none. Faint, and then a gap, and then, while I held absolutely still and did not breathe, another. Not a rhythm. Not yet. But the heart had remembered there was a thing it was supposed to do, and was trying to find its way back to the doing of it, the way you find a word that has been on your tongue, and I have felt this perhaps thirty times in twelve years and it has never once stopped being the thing I do this for.

"Don't," I said, to the room, to anyone moving. "Don't touch him, don't pray over him, don't do anything. Be still."

The stairs came closer together. Skipped. Came again. I had my fingers on his throat and my whole self poured down into the two square inches under them, reading a pulse the way I have read a hundred monitors, willing the next beat the way you cannot will it and do it anyway, and the captain had stopped counting and the reader had stopped his litany and Vyas had not moved at all, and into that held and total silence the prince Ishan Sura, who had been the season since he was nine, who had been mourned to his face his entire life, drew one ragged enormous breath of his own.

His chest rose. It rose without my hands on it. It fell, and rose again, ugly and shallow and his, and his eyes came open onto the rafters his court had arranged for him to die beneath, and they were not the eyes of a man waking. They were the eyes of a man who has been somewhere and has come back and does not yet have the words for either, and they moved, slow, across the ring of diya lamps and the frightened reader and the still grey face of the High Jyotin, and they found me.

I put two fingers back at his throat. The pulse was there. Bad, thready, skipping like a stone but there, a heart hauling itself hand over hand back up out of a well, and I would be at this bedside the whole night and into the next keeping it climbing, and I knew it, and I was glad of it, which should have frightened me more than it did.

"You came back," I said, low, only for him. "Stay. That's an order from your physician."

His mouth moved. It took him a long moment to make it work, and what came out was barely a thread of sound, dry even now, dry even back from the dead.

"Nobody," he managed, "has ever told me to stay."

And then his eyes went past me, over my shoulder, to the doorway behind me, and the dreadful unguarded waking flickered into something I knew far better than peace, which was fear, an old practised fear, the fear of a man who has spent his whole life learning exactly who in a room can have him killed, and I turned with my fingers still on his climbing pulse to see what a prince three minutes dead had found worth being afraid of, and a man I had never seen filled the doorway in a travelling shawl with the river-mud still on his boots, and behind him the captain went rigid, and his voice went suddenly very careful, and he said a name.

"Thakur Daman."