The Physicians of Vilnoc

by Lois McMaster Bujold

“Sometimes,” said Rede. His stare was still doubtful.

  “I don’t need help for this part, if you need to get back to your tasks. Or some sleep.”

  “I… no. I want to see what you’re doing.”

  To his patients as well, Pen guessed. “There won’t be much to see.”

  Rede opened his hand. “Nonetheless.”

  “All right, then. Follow me.”

  Rede ended up leading, to the middens outside the most-downwind postern gate of the fort. The gate guard let the physician through without demur.

  The manure pile lay to the left of the pathway, the kitchen waste to the right, both spilling down the slope of the fossa. The manure pile was much smaller than Pen would have expected for the number of horses, mules, and oxen kept within. He saw why in a moment—a villager at the bottom of the trench, shoveling up a load of good army rot into a hand barrow, to take off and spread on his garden or crops. Probably garden; if he’d wanted to manure a field he’d have brought a wagon. The flies were abundant on both piles, though no rats slinked about on this bright afternoon. He’d have to come back at night for those. Though a few crows and seagulls were picking over the kitchen trash, good.

  Pen waited for the villager to turn away and start dragging his cart up the well-worn path on the far side of the big trench, then waved a hand. The faint buzzing over the pile died away. The flies dropped like, well, flies.

  Rede stepped forward and stared down at the sprinkling of tiny, shiny black corpses. “That’s disturbing.”

  “It took some getting used to for me as well, but I’ve had to feed my demon for fourteen years, now. It feels almost housewifely.” Feed was a misnomer, the directed shedding of chaos being more a sort of elimination, but Pen had discovered that term went over much better with listeners than more messy material metaphors, all just as inaccurate.

  That had been a lot of flies, but their tiny lives were not going to be enough for this. Also, Pen was now fresh out of flies. Glumly, he selected and dropped a crow as well, which fell over in silence. And without pain, there was that consolation. A couple of its curious comrades hopped over and stared down at it, understandably perplexed. Did crows grieve? Their god did, Pen knew. He tapped his lips with the back of his thumb in apology, to what or Whom he was not sure.

  “That will do for the moment.” Pen wiped his wrist over his cooling forehead. “But show me where the grain and food stores are, while we’re over here.”

  Reentering, they were delayed by the gate guard demanding news of his sick squad mates. Rede, to his credit, gave a clear and honest, if brief, summation, though Pen wondered what distortions it would acquire when it came back off the soldier’s tongue in barracks gossip tonight.

  “I hope those idiots will bring themselves to me at once if they begin feeling ill,” said Rede, looking back over his shoulder as they continued on to the grain stores. “The half who aren’t malingerers to start with tend to claim they’re just fine, no problems, sir, till they fall over. Master Orides says”—a hitch of breath—“said they annoyed him far more than the first sort.”

  Pen made five more trips between the hospice and the middens and stores before the late summer sunset. He examined, treated, and prayed over every sick man once, but by the time he visited the first chamber for the second time, the courtyard was dark and he was reeling and famished. Without demur, he let Rede guide him to the hospice staff’s mess, where he wolfed down plain but abundant army food, and to a spare cot in the chamber where the orderlies slept. He wondered if it had belonged to the one who’d died.

  “Is this helping them?” Rede asked bluntly as Pen flopped down on the wool-stuffed mattress.

  “It’s too soon to tell. Though sometimes you can only tell if it’s too late. If a man dies, then it wasn’t enough. If he recovers, would he have done so on his own?”

  “Mm.”

  “I feel like a bucket brigade of one man, running back and forth from a well trying to put out a fire,” Pen complained. “I need a bigger bucket. Or a closer well. A pump and hose. More men.”

  Could he get more men? There was only one sorcerer-physician he knew of in Orbas, serving the Mother’s Order at Duke Jurgo’s winter capital, but a more junior sorcerer might be conscripted for this, under Pen’s supervision. The treatment was simple enough; not like the insanely finicky reconstruction of Adelis’s acid-boiled eyes. Demons did not work well together, but they might be made to work in parallel.

  I could manage to tolerate one, for this, Des told him. How the other demon would fare, I can’t guess.

  Gods, that was right, Pen needed to send a report on all this to his Order, and to the Mother’s Order, in Vilnoc. It could be copied by scribes there and sent on to outlying chapterhouses. He should get up and go hunt quill and paper. He should.

  “Has this thing broken out anywhere else, do you know?” he asked the shadowed ceiling. “Through army couriers or the like?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Master Orides was going to write to—oh, I should look through his papers. I don’t know what he sent out before he was stricken himself.”

  Had Rede slept at all? Was he going to?

  Pen compromised: “Have an orderly wake me at midnight. I’ll make another round.”

  * * *

  In the morning, after not enough sleep, Pen discovered that while the soldier who had been too far gone to treat had continued his journey to his god—though no others had died, yet—three more sickened men had been brought in. With such arithmetic, he wasn’t getting ahead, here.

  Also, one of Master Rede’s orderlies had deserted in the night.

  Rede swore in fury when he was told this over their hasty breakfast in the staff mess; not, it turned out, at the disloyalty or cowardice, but at the chance the fellow might have carried the contagion off to wherever he had fled to hide.

  When he ran down from this muted tirade, he leaned his head back and asked either the plastered ceiling or Pen, “Which leads to the question, is this something a person gets only once, like some of the poxes, or is it something they could get over and over, like a catarrh or lung fever, with a chance of dying each time? Because if it’s the first, I could safely press those who have recovered into service helping those who have fallen ill. Otherwise…”

  Pen could only shake his head in equal doubt. Des, for once, had nothing to add.

  Pushing himself up from the table, Pen began, again, the wearying round of prayer and magic alternated with hunting around in odd corners of the fort for more allowable vermin to slaughter. The manure-bred flies would take a few days to renew themselves, but seagulls, it appeared, flapped in routinely from the nearby coast, which might prove a reliable daily delivery. A seagull was worth a bit more than a rat, each of which was worth several mice, each of which was worth a few hundred insects. But if this went on much longer, he was going to need something more. Larger.

  In between he ate, drank, and wrote urgent but frustratedly inconclusive notes to as many authorities as he could think of, for Adelis’s military couriers to deliver. Adelis, when Pen handed these over to him in his headquarters map-room-and-scriptorium, had some disturbing return news carried by this same service. It had been sent from the fort and town at the far western end of the long east-west road spanning the duchy, which guarded the three-way border between Orbas, Grabyat, and Cedonia.

  “From the description,” Adelis said heavily, handing over the note for Pen to peruse, “it’s the same Bastard-accursed thing we’re having here. No disrespect intended to your god,” he added as an afterthought.

  Pen absently tapped the back of his thumb to his lips. “I think He accepts curses the way most gods accept prayers, really.” He read the fort commander’s terse description of their affliction, phrased less precisely than Pen would have put it but recognizable all the same.

  Spurred, he sat down at the staff officers’ writing table and composed a note to go with the next courier, to be given to the western fort’s physician: briefly
summarizing what had been happening here at Vilnoc, recommending they find a local Temple sorcerer if there was one, and giving his best guess so far of what such a mage might do to help.

  “I wonder if this evil thing has turned up in Cedonia,” Adelis remarked from his stool beside Pen, where he’d been watching this composition and giving unsolicited advice. He propped his elbows on knees and glowered at his sandals as if he could threaten them into an answer. “And how we could find out, or how soon.”

  For all that his natal country had so brutally exiled the general, Pen thought, pieces of his heart still anchored him there. Not, to be sure, with the Imperial bureaucracy, but rather with Lady Tanar and her household near the capital of Thasalon. Adelis’s courtship of the young noblewoman had been disrupted by his arrest, blinding, and flight three years ago, but not, apparently, extinguished. A few secret letters had been smuggled across the border between them, Pen knew, because Adelis had shown them to his sister and mother.

  “This isn’t a hazard your sword arm could guard her from even if you were there,” noted Pen.

  “Is that supposed to be consoling?” said Adelis dryly.

  “I suppose not. Though it’s true.

  “Hnh.”

  Pen’s magic might help, but he had households much closer than Thasalon to concern him. “Have there been any reports of cases from the village besides the laundress?” Who had worked in the hospice. “Or from Vilnoc?”

  “Not Vilnoc so far, five gods avert.” Adelis made a less perfunctory than usual tally sign. “Some carters from the village, I’d heard.”

  Such men also frequently worked for the fort. Was there a connection? “I’d better go down and look at them, too.”

  Adelis frowned. “My men should come first.”

  Pen gave him a side-eye. “I serve my Order, and the archdivine. Not the army.”

  “They all owe allegiance to Duke Jurgo.”

  “The white god doesn’t. Nor would the duke be wise to wish Him to.”

  Unable to gainsay this, Adelis just grunted.

  A soldier came to the map-chamber door and called, “Sir, they’re ready.”

  “Right.” He rose and swung his red cloak over his shoulders; the soldier helped him set the bronze cloak-pin.

  Pen followed them out, to discover that the reason for Adelis’s military finery was the funeral just setting up at the temple across the main courtyard.

  “Services for Master Orides,” murmured Adelis. “Shall you attend?”

  “I think my presence would distract your fort’s divine, and Des would disturb the sacred animals.”

  Would not, protested Des. But I suspect even Orides would prefer a more effective use of our time. “We know he’s gone to his goddess already,” she added aloud.

  Adelis glanced aside, as if trying to parse which one of them had spoken, then just shrugged.

  Pen spotted Master Rede and a couple of his orderlies, who had also donned their military uniforms for this, trudging in from the direction of the hospice. Pen waved a hand at Adelis by way of farewell and angled toward them. Rede motioned his subordinates on, stopping by Pen.

  “I’m about to walk down and take a look at any sick in the village,” Pen told him.

  “Oh. Good.” Rede squinted in the bright sunlight. His eyes were bloodshot, but Pen trusted that was just fatigue and not a symptom. “Anything you can learn, bring back to me. I had a chance to look at Master Orides’s papers. He’d been working on making a kind of list or grid of all who had come down with this thing, laying out everything known about them and looking for a pattern. I’m going to try to continue it later this afternoon.”

  “Sensible.” Pen glanced across to the temple portico, where the sacred animals that signed which god or goddess had taken up the soul of the deceased were being brought out by their soldier-grooms. “You inter your dead whole here, yes?” A military cemetery lay outside the fort’s walls, in the opposite direction from the village. “Should those who’ve died of this be cremated, instead, d’you think?”

  Rede grimaced. “I just don’t know. The weather is dry, so there should be no ground seepage from the cemetery. And wood is dear, if much would be required.”

  “In the cantons and the Weald, wood is abundant and cheap, but people still mostly bury.” Des added as a cheery afterthought, “Except in certain special cases where burning is required to prevent spirit-possession of the corpse.”

  Rede looked taken aback. “That’s real? Not a tale?”

  “Death magic? Very rare, although dealing with it does fall as the duty of the Bastard’s Order, so I was taught about it. Nothing I’d expect here.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Pen tapped his lips in either a blessing or a gesture of averting—with the white god, much the same thing—nodded wryly, and turned to make his way to the front gate.

  * * *

  It was a short walk downslope to the dusty village of Tyno, which hugged, and hogged, the riverbank. It would have been shorter, but Adelis, when he’d taken over here two years back, had spearheaded one of the periodic removals of buildings that had encroached upon his defensive perimeter. This had not made him popular with the villagers, but since then his stern fairness, not to mention some compensation from Duke Jurgo’s purse, had won the new general a grudging respect.

  The main east-west road that—along with the river approaches to Vilnoc—the fort guarded ran through the upper outskirts of the village. Here clustered the taverns, Tyno’s most lucrative trade; a few attendant inns, mostly for more modest visitors who couldn’t afford lodging within Vilnoc’s walls; and the brothels—prostitutes were among the Bastard’s flock of human oddments, so in theory under Pen’s care as a divine. A livery and a smithy also stood convenient to the road and its travelers.

  Either would be tied into the town’s gossip net. Smiths could run to either taciturn or usefully garrulous, but in either case were like to be busy. Liverymen, on the other hand, had to talk to their customers, and would also know where to find the sick carters. Pen strolled through the broad, open doors into the shaded stable. He left Des to snack on the available flies without his oversight.

  A man advanced from the aisle between the straight stalls, propping a pitchfork aside and wiping his hands on his trousers. Ostler or owner, it didn’t matter. “Good afternoon, sir,” he began. “Whether it’s a good riding horse or a nice, calm cart cob you’re wanting, you’ve… five gods.” He stopped short and stared wide-eyed at Pen, whose height, bright blond hair, blue eyes, and milk-pale skin were unusual for Orbas, if common in the cantons.

  Or it’s your pretty face, love, Des quipped.

  Hush.

  Thanks be for recognizable Temple vestments, or at least mercantile manners, because instead of falling into the usual wearying interrogation about Pen’s looks, he recovered himself and went on, “Uh, learned sir? May I help you?”

  “I hope so, although not to a horse, sorry. My name is Learned Penric, of the Bastard’s Order in Vilnoc, and General Arisaydia asked me to examine the people who have fallen sick here lately of the strange bruising fever. A couple of carters, I was told, and perhaps others by now. Can you tell me names and where to find them?”

  Arisaydia’s status was even more useful here than the Order’s, Pen guessed, because the man merely said, “Oh,” and gave Pen directions to a house a street over.

  “This bruising fever isn’t one of our usual summer sicknesses,” the liveryman added, swallowing uneasily. “Very fast and frightening, striking down grown men, not just the old or the infants. Does the Bastard’s Order suspect a curse?” Holy or otherwise lay implied.

  It wasn’t an altogether unreasonable question, but it could be a dangerous rumor to let get started. “No,” said Pen, more firmly than he felt. “It’s a nasty disease, but there’s nothing uncanny about it.”

  Agreed, said Des.

  “But wouldn’t a divine from the Mother’s Order…”

  “The fort’
s physicians are working hard,” Pen diverted this. True enough. He decanted what the man knew of other sick folks here—three more households already, gods—and made his escape before he had to field further awkward speculations.

  The carters’ place, belonging to two brothers who lived together, lay in a row of houses that turned plain, whitewashed stucco faces to the street, not unlike a reduced village version of Pen’s home. Pen knocked on the green-painted wooden door; waited; knocked again. He was just contemplating the horrid possibility that there was no one left alive inside, and if it would be acceptable to use Des’s powers on the lock to intrude and check for corpses, when the door squeaked open.

  An exhausted-looking middle-aged woman stared blankly up at him. “I… what?”

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. I’m Learned Penric of the Vilnoc Temple. General Arisaydia asked me to look in on the ill folk here in the village.” All right, not quite what Adelis had said, but there was no harm in making him sound charitably concerned.

  She looked Pen up and down. She evidently knew enough to read the details of his garb, for she said in some bewilderment, “Why did he send a sorcerer? If the Vilnoc Temple is trying to help, I want someone from the Mother.”

  Des put in, before Pen could speak, “I’m married to his twin sister.”

  “Oh,” she said, her inflection somehow combining surprise and reassurance. She opened the door to admit him.

  What’s Nikys got to do with it? he asked Des, a little bewildered himself.

  It worked. She’ll trust you across her threshold. Don’t complain.

  Wouldn’t dream of it.

  Fibber. You complain all the time.

  Turnabout, fair play…

  The carter’s wife led him into the usual inner courtyard, ringed by the rooms of the house and used for every task from dining to sewing to washing, leatherwork, or minor carpentry. Right now, it was converted to a chamber for the sick, judging from the two beds of fine straw laid out on the flagstones. Upon them lay two men of sturdy build, but weak and flushed, glazed of eye. One redder than the other but not darkened to bruising yet; maybe Pen could still help? A basin of water and washrags, and another for vomit, sat between them.