In the Taino mountain village, the bustle of treatment went on without end. The Taino Pockmarked burned grass-and-wood ash, charcoal, and earth, and kept carrying water back from the riverside. Figures tending the sick hurried back and forth, while faint groans of pain drifted through the village—some in the accent of the Mexican highlands, some cries from the Wasteland, and some the wails of local tribes.
"Main God! Let me die! I've already... become a rotten fish, a rotting... salamander..."
"Red Earth Mother! I... want to split my body open and let my flesh and blood... return to your embrace..."
"Ancestors... it hurts... it hurts so much! I'm going to die... let me... take one more puff of Cohiba..."
Warrior Captain Copilli stood shoulder to shoulder with Priest Martin, watching the situation in the village from afar, watching the order within the chaos, as if there were a backbone holding it all together.
Several surviving Taino elders were chewing bitter grass, then mixing it with ground balsam and charcoal powder to make some kind of herbal paste. Then others took the medicine and gently smeared it on the patients' foreheads and limbs. The surviving women ladled stream water with wooden bowls, adding roasted bark, chili, and cassava flour into a boiled food-medicine broth, then took turns feeding it to the sick. There were also able-bodied men guarding the fires, putting anamu roots gathered from the mountains and guayacan bark into clay jars to simmer, sending out a pungent yet calming smell. After the long boiling, it would produce the pitch-black wound medicine passed down by the Taino, which was very effective.
"The herbal paste is for applying to wounds. Anamu and guayacan can keep the pus from getting so bad! And only by eating something hot can they hold out