The Physicians of Vilnoc

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Is it only you to care for them?” Pen asked.

  “My sister-in-law took all of our children to her mother’s when we realized this was that thing from the fort.”

  “That… seems prudent.” Or else it would spread the sickness to yet another household, but the deed was done and there was no benefit to worrying this woman further. It appeared the villagers had not, yet, taken to exiling the sick or their families beyond natural seclusion in their own houses.

  Aye, plagues can get ugly far beyond their medical courses, Des remarked. From experience, Pen feared.

  Contagion. Let’s just call it a contagion, in front of people.

  May be wise, for now.

  While the woman knelt between the pair and took it in turns to bathe their faces with a wrung-out cloth, Pen sat cross-legged and asked all three about their recent activities.

  The carters’ latest venture out of Tyno had been to take an oxcart piled with the possessions of a retiring fort officer back to his home village, up a valley lying next-south from Vilnoc’s. The trek had taken a week, but that had been nearly a month ago. Since then, they’d been busy locally, hiring themselves, their cart and their beasts to construction up at the fort.

  “Could we have brought this thing back with us as hidden cargo?” asked the younger brother, the less feverish of the pair, uneasily. His elder winced.

  “Given how recently you’ve been stricken, I don’t think it,” Pen reassured them. Truthfully, he hoped. “You should have been the first if that were so. No one else in your household has come down with it yet, right?”

  They both looked at the woman, wife of the elder, in worry. She shook her head. This nurse would not desert her post, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t frightened. She added, “I wondered about the sheets. Because of the laundress.” She gestured somewhat helplessly at the straw bedding. “This, we can burn later, but it’s not what I like.”

  “Boiling the soiled sheets should suffice,” said Pen. For the sheets and their next users, anyway. For the washerwoman handling them, it was less clear. “But there’s nothing wrong with this straw arrangement, in this warm weather.” Clever, actually; he’d have to suggest it to Rede.

  The set of her shoulders eased at this endorsement.

  Really, I am no authority to her, thought Pen, discomfited.

  Do not waste our advantages on pointless humility, chided Des. We may need every one before this is over.

  Mm.

  Duly reproved, Pen merely smiled, and moved on to kneeling at each straw-bedside. There, in a spirit of theological redundancy worthy of a bridgebuilder, he performed a prayer to all five gods, while covertly inserting as much uphill magic as they would take into each body. Performing seemed all too apt a term, but the audience, all three, seemed pleased enough with his delivery.

  He wished he knew whether it was enough. He’d better not promise to come back, given the uncertainties up at the fort, but he wanted to try.

  I know you do, said Des uneasily, but this had better not become another hillside for you to die on.

  I am advised, he returned vaguely.

  The sense of a snort.

  “This is so strange,” said the younger carter, frowning at the flush on his forearm discernible even though his sunbaked skin. “Do you think it was brought by those accursed Rusylli?”

  Scowls all around at this conjecture.

  “Have you heard of any sickness in their encampment?” asked Pen, alert. No one at the fort hospice had mentioned any, but then, their plates were full. Another place to check while he was down here? Adelis’s name would not provide a glad welcome there, though his authority would get Pen in.

  “No, but I haven’t been out to the market for a few days,” said the carter’s wife. “My sister and neighbors have been leaving food at our door.”

  The older carter, peevish in his fever, growled, “I’ve told the youngsters not to go over there, but I know they do, when our backs are turned.”

  Pen’s lips twisted in doubt. “But the Rusylli have been here, what, a year? If this was something they brought, it should have shown up much sooner.” He drove home the point with, “Just as if it was something from your cart trip, it should have shown up later.”

  This was taken in with brooding looks, but no one tried to argue.

  The batch of Rusylli prisoners of war from last year’s campaign lived in an odd limbo, here at Tyno. Too important to sell off as slaves; not high enough to be held close as key hostages by Duke Jurgo’s ally-in-law the High Oban of Grabyat. How Adelis had allowed himself to be lumbered with them, Pen was not sure. Nevertheless, several hundred Rusylli—minor tribal leaders and their immediate families—had been dropped downriver of Tyno and anchored there in a makeshift village by the expedient of the military engineers removing the wheels from their big house-carts.

  Some people, Pen knew, romanticized the nomadic warriors. But then, some people romanticized pirates. Pen was not one of them, pirates on horseback seeming no more appetizing to him than the seafaring sort. As long as the Rusylli clans contented themselves with raiding each other, Pen had nothing to say to it, but when they took to preying on their settled neighbors, in western Grabyat and southwestern Cedonia, trouble started. Which kept men like Adelis employed, he supposed.

  Des, in her prior lives in Cedonia, had not much encountered them. So even if not suffering from this malady, they might know something more, or at least other, than her long experience provided. Putative enemies, yes, but disease recognized no borders or boundaries. Rather like gods, that.

  Pen hauled himself up and took his leave with a few more harmless sops of blessings all around, for which everyone seemed more grateful than Pen thought justified. He did not allow himself to frown in new thought until he had been seen out by the anxious wife and turned down the street, heading to the next stricken household on his list.

  * * *

  The sun was low by the time Pen emerged from the last of these, and he was overheated, fretful, and fatigued. The other families had offered the same maddeningly random assortment of victims, including one child. Pen had poured all he could into the boy, fearing it too little. He must squeeze time for a repeat visit to that household tomorrow, if no others. He hoped Rede would be able to make more of his observations than he did, so far.

  He paused at the corner, needing to make a decision, which seemed slower in coming than it should.

  That’s because you need to decide to go eat, Pen.

  Likely so. What he wanted was to go talk to the folk in the Rusylli encampment. But should he grab some bite from one of the nearby taverns, exposing them to whatever contaminations he might now bear, even if he ate it out of hand while walking down the river road? He wasn’t sure if visiting the Rusylli after dark was a good idea. They’d be wary enough of him in daylight. Tomorrow morning might work better.

  Return to the hospice mess, then, where they could all be contaminated together. He also very much wanted Rede to show him Orides’s notes. He headed uphill in a weary trudge too like how his magic was starting to feel.

  To Des’s maternal approval, he got himself around some solid and abundant army food—all the olives you can eat wasn’t that many for Pen, and he still could not like the dried fish planks, but the ox jerky and barley cakes were good, and the harsh red wine, once watered, more than acceptable. Sustained again, he tracked Rede down to Orides’s writing cabinet adjoining the treatment rooms. Now Rede’s writing cabinet, as the new commander of this careening disaster, though Pen wasn’t quite sure if the man had assimilated that yet. Perhaps the funeral would have helped center him.

  At Rede’s beckoning, Pen sat down in the yellow lamplight of Orides’s desk to share perusal of the late master’s half-written reports on the autopsies and other case logs.

  “Is an autopsy something you’d wish to repeat for yourself?” asked Rede, as Pen squinted at the inky scratches. He’d worked with worse handwriting on ancient manuscripts, but really, wha
t was it about physicians? “Because we have a fresh body. The catapult sergeant died about two hours ago.”

  “Oh. I thought he might.” Pen made the tally sign. “His internal disintegration did seem too far advanced to make anything of my help.” Though Pen had tried, Bastard help him, in his last cycle through that sick-chamber. Just in case…

  “But with Des’s Sight, I don’t need to open or even touch a body anymore to find out what’s going on inside. Although my anatomical training, and Helvia’s and Amberein’s, were invaluable for putting a foundation to my understanding. Spirit-sight is not a match for what you’d see with your eyes or a magnifying lens, and it takes some practice to reliably connect the meaning of all those moving colors with their material substrate.”

  Rede sat back and stared at him with frank envy. “It sounds a wonderful skill for a Temple physician to possess.”

  No denying that; Pen shrugged. “Also, curiously, Des can tell contagion from poisoning, even when the gross symptoms are similar. Each can be diffuse, but there is something alive about contagion that poisons don’t share. I keep thinking about that. Too diffuse for Des to separate, or it might be possible to kill the disease but not the person, the way I can kill fleas on a cat but not the cat. I like cats,” he added muzzily. Gods, he was getting tired. Soon he’d be making no sense at all. This day felt a year long, and he still wanted to make another pass through the infected chambers.

  Rede, charitably, ignored this last haphazard remark, unless he was growing as tired as Pen. But his black brows drew together in new thought. “Could such a thing have to do with how the saints of the Mother effect their miraculous cures?”

  Pen’s heart lifted at this rare sign of understanding. “I’ve had that exact notion. A task too fine-grained for a man or even a chaos demon should not be too fine for a goddess. If ever I run across a saint of the Mother again, I want to ask”—if Des could refrain from going into conniptions at the divine proximity—“though it’s possible the saint may not know. It’s emptiness, not knowledge, that allows a person to channel a god. Howsoever, the Mother’s Order in Vilnoc does not possess such a blessing, that I’ve heard.” Although might the letters he’d sent off earlier today turn something up? It was too distracting a hope. “For now, we’re on our own.”

  Rede nodded reluctant agreement.

  Pen tapped the papers scattered across the table. “You’ve been observing this for longer than I have. Any thoughts? Speculations? Wild guesses?”

  Rede scrubbed a hand through his scalp, spiky black hair overdue for a military haircut. “I don’t think this disease starts in the lungs or the gut—those symptoms come last. It doesn’t seem to travel in the breath, or people would have it in batches, especially in the barracks. Instead, it’s one man out of dozens. Given all the vile things sick men emit, you’d think it would move in soiled linen, or vomit, or feces, but we’ve all been handling those, and only a few have taken ill. One laundress dead in three days, the rest fine, though several have refused to come back to work. I need to ask General Arisaydia to find us volunteers to help scrub. If there are not enough, conscript some, though that won’t go happily.”

  “Mm.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the blood,” Rede went on. “Master Orides would have been more exposed to that than anyone, during the autopsies.”

  “Did you assist at those?”

  “I’d been detailed to other duties.”

  “Did anyone else, and have they been among the ill?”

  Rede shook his head. “Once they’d set things up, Orides ran his helpers out. He said no one else needed to get that close.”

  Pen grimaced. “If you’re asking if this disease is in the blood, yes, to be sure—the gross symptoms tell us that. Whether it starts there… I’ll try to attend more closely to that question as I make my way around. Blood is peculiar stuff. Do you know it’s still alive when it leaves the body, till it dries?”

  Rede’s brows flicked up in interest. “Oh?”

  “I learned a lot about it, even beyond what most Temple physicians know, back when I took a year to train with the royal shamans of the Weald. Who use blood and the sacrifice of blood routinely in their magics, as demons use chaos and order. We had debates about connections, generally in their dining hall over late-night beer, but I can’t say we found conclusions.

  “I’m not sure where in my body my chaos demon is domiciled, but the shamans’ Great Beasts definitely live in their blood. This has been known for a long time, which is why the execution of a shaman back in the days of the forest tribes used to involve hanging him upside-down and butchering him like a hog. They believed it drained him of his powers with his blood.”

  “That… would work on anybody, really,” Rede pointed out.

  A spurt of laughter escaped Pen’s lips. “True. Anyway. This bruising disease does seem alive in the blood, not unlike those lethal infections that sometimes follow wounds. …Though the shamans would be quite offended to have their Great Beasts dubbed a blood disease.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, should I ever meet one.” Rede had a dry humor hidden in there, if battered at the moment.

  They turned once more to Orides’s writings, coming to the end too soon, like their author. The case notes, meticulous in the beginning, grew ever more abbreviated. Bastard’s teeth, another one, read one of the last. The physician’s observations seemed keen to Pen, but included nothing he hadn’t seen for himself by now.

  Pen bit his lip and sat back. “Were you able to make anything of that comparison-grid he’d started?”

  “I added the newer cases to it. They’re all over the map, or at least all over the fort. I ranked the numbers by company. There may be a slight bias to the cavalry, but that doesn’t explain the laundress. Or the people in town. Oh. I should include them.” He scratched in Pen’s accounting from the village and handed the page across to Pen.

  Indeed, any clustering seemed slight. “I suppose more numbers might make it clearer, but that’s not something to wish for.”

  “Five gods avert,” said Rede. And then, after a pensive moment, “Do They?”

  “Not that I can tell,” sighed Pen. “I’ve sometimes wondered if the gods regard death not as a dreaded ending, but as a welcome beginning.”

  “Of what?”

  “I am deeply not sure. Which doesn’t stop people from making up a thousand tales.” Or maybe the gods provided a thousand versions, tailored to each soul. Pen wouldn’t put it past Them. “There doesn’t seem to be any need to rush to find out, though. The gods wait all the same.”

  Rede signed himself; Pen didn’t bother. They both shoved up to return to the sick-chambers.

  * * *

  Pen washed himself the next morning at the hospice courtyard fountain, stripping to the skin and applying the camphor soap liberally, including his hair. His summer vestments, much the worse for the past two days, he tossed into a bucket for Des to deal with. The price of even a few insect lives for his laundry seemed dimly wrong to Pen, but this was a special case.

  Even with Des’s help, he didn’t think he could wash enough to risk returning to his Vilnoc home, and Nikys and Florie and Idrene, not until they’d come to understand how the bruising disease passed from person to person. When he’d answered Adelis’s plea for aid, Pen had not anticipated so profound an exile.

  He shook out the de-bloodstained whites for Des to speedily stream dry, trusting the passing orderlies would be too distracted by their duties to notice his odd activities, redonned them, and fastened his hair back in a simple queue. Slipping on his sandals, he clipped off to find Adelis.

  He tracked the general down in his quartermaster’s office. At Pen’s wave, Adelis interrupted his business and came to the doorway. Pen led him out under the colonnade.

  “Have you heard of any cases of the bruising fever in the Rusylli camp?” Pen began. “Master Rede hadn’t.”

  “Hm. The quartermaster’s grain deliveries to them are made weekly
, and one of their tasks is to report back to me the on state of affairs there. So not unless something has popped up in the past few days, no.”

  “I’m going to walk down there and see if they know anything about this disease that we don’t.”

  Adelis shrugged. “I shouldn’t think they’d be very willing to talk to you, but I suppose you can try. Hold a moment, and I’ll detail you some guards.”

  “I don’t need them, surely. I mean… we don’t.”

  “I don’t underestimate your ability to defend yourself, Penric. Yourselves. But the presence of a few of my men will reduce the temptation to ambush you, avoiding the problem in the first place.”

  “Mm, and doubtless make the Rusylli even more closemouthed. I think not.”

  Adelis plainly misliked this plan. “Then take my translator, at least. The Rusylli have several of their own Cedonian speakers, but at least you’ll be able to know if what you’re told is what is actually being said.”

  “Same problem, and also not needed. All those Cedonian language lessons I gave to Rybi the Rusylli girl last winter didn’t just go one way.”

  “Really?” Adelis’s brows rose. “I thought you inherited your gifts of languages from Madame Des.”

  “I did, but I haven’t let them lie fallow and uncultivated. Also, it turns out languages are like children. Once you have six, adding a seventh hardly makes any difference. Or so my mother used to say.” He added after a moment, “Me being her seventh, you know.”

  “I’ll take her word for it.” Adelis’s mouth ticked up at the corner. “Report back to me if you learn anything new.”

  “Of course.” Pen escaped before Adelis could come up with more objections. To be fair, the man wasn’t just being a fusspot. He’d been ambushed by Rusylli a lot.