The Physicians of Vilnoc

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  No one had died in the night; no one was obviously on the road to recovery. In the course of this, he learned about a fourth household stricken, a family of tanners, so he visited them, too. By the time he made his way wearily back up the hill to the fort, body too hot and demon too tense, it was past noon, much later than he’d intended to be. Arriving at the hospice, he discovered that Rede’s thirty-five patients had grown to forty.

  I can’t do this, was his first dismayed thought.

  Or, came his second, not with what scant vermin remained in the fort from his prior hunts. It was time to arrange a more reliable chaos sink. Which was going to be awkward at best and at worst did not bear thinking about. He trudged off to find Adelis, who, for a change, was actually in his headquarters.

  “How did it go with the Rusylli?” Adelis asked at once. “I see you still have your ears.” One of the less grisly trophies Rusylli warriors took from their enemies; more portable than heads, Pen supposed.

  “Oh, yes,” sighed Pen. “As you guessed, they were not forthcoming, but I was lucky.” He detailed his visit, and its unexpected codicil with Rybi’s aunt. Adelis planted his elbows on his writing table, folded his fists, and rested his mouth against them, stemming interruption till Pen was finished.

  “The upshot,” Pen concluded, “is that the bruising fever may have come from the Rusylli tribes, or at least from the far western steppes, but not from your Rusylli. It is named, but not explained. By the way, I suggest we call it something other than the blue witch. That’s the sort of thing that could get perfectly innocent black-haired hedge mages murdered by their neighbors.”

  “I see.” Adelis frowned.

  “There were two more cases in the village last night,” Pen went on, “and five more of your men reported in to Master Rede. If I’m to go on, Des must have a better way to shed our discharge. Your fort cooks kill far more animals in a day that I ever could. I need you to order them to let me do some of their slaughtering.”

  Adelis’s forehead wrinkled like some wine-inked topographical map. “As you do for my sister in her kitchen?”

  A few times a week, depending on the menu, Pen relieved the scullion of the chore of killing the chickens, ducks, pigeons, or rabbits bought live in the market and destined for roasts or stews, depending on the age, price, and stringiness of the meats. Adelis had on occasion watched with fascination. He’d had the theological lecture often enough that he’d stopped asking Pen, somewhat enviously, why he couldn’t to this to enemy soldiers. “Yes, but scaled up.”

  “I must say, I was impressed by that thing Des does with the feathers. One pop, and you have a bag of feathers and a naked bird to hand to the cook. Very efficient.”

  “I am not using my demon to pluck chickens for your army, Adelis.” Thank you, murmured Des. “Time is of the essence here, or at least, my time is. The point is, people who are unaccustomed to me and my magics can get very disturbed by my processes. I had a special arrangement with a Martensbridge butcher, back when I was practicing medicine regularly there, and even he kept my visits, well, not quite secret, but private from his customers. A kitchen that serves several thousand meals a day being what it is, there’s going to be nothing private about this.”

  “Yes, the place is a maelstrom.” Adelis’s eyes narrowed. “Hm. I think I have a solution for that. Let’s go.”

  Pen found himself trotting after the general’s quick tread, threading through the fort to the side that housed the soldiers’ mess and the kitchen courtyard. The latter was much less serene than the hospice courtyard, crowded with its own fountain, an array of brick ovens, several firepits for slow-roasting large carcasses that were smoking aromatically, and a lot of scurrying men, shouting and swearing.

  A pool of startled attention formed ahead of Adelis, closing to uproar again as he passed through, like water around the hull of a ship. He tacked off to the colonnade, under which they found an open chamber filled with writing tables, invoices, accounts, and a harried mess-master and clerks.

  “Sir!” The mess-master rose and saluted Adelis. He was a swarthy, scarred, and grizzled fellow who’d come up through the ranks of army cooks, Pen guessed.

  “Good afternoon, Sergeant Burae. This is my brother-in-law, the Temple sorcerer Learned Penric. I’ve assigned him the task of slaughtering the chickens and whatnot for the officer’s mess tonight. I’ve watched him do this at his home. The animals that die serenely and calmly in the arms of his god taste much superior to those which die struggling in pain and terror.”

  No, they don’t, said Des. They’re all the same. Though Pen was just as glad that his food didn’t have to suffer further for its sacrifice to his table.

  “Mind, these are to be reserved for officers only,” Adelis emphasized. “Don’t get them mixed up with the men’s mess.”

  Burae looked confused but impressed. Pen muted a grin, and Des said, Ah. Clever lad. By tomorrow, they’ll be begging you to kill their poultry, and sneaking it away for the kitchen rowdies to sample.

  “I’ll leave you two to get on with it,” Adelis finished. “Penric will tell you what he needs.”

  “Sir!” The mess sergeant saluted again as Adelis took his leave. He turned more uncertainly to Penric. “Learned sir…?”

  Burae led Pen through an arch in the colonnade to the kitchen’s slaughtering space, a tiny courtyard open to the sky, paved with flat stones angled toward drainage channels. A pair of kitchen lads were engaged in dispatching crates of doomed poultry through the traditional method of grabbing the bird by the head and swinging it vigorously around, snapping its neck in the instant, until the body flew apart from it, wings still flapping wildly for a minute or so. Even for young rowdies like these boys, the novelty of this entertainment had clearly faded after the first few thousand chickens.

  “This fellow is the general’s tame sorcerer,” Burae told his lads, evidently all the introduction he thought they needed. “He’s here to kill the chickens for the officers’ mess. Somehow.” His stare at Pen was very doubtful.

  To make it apparent to his agog observers that he was actually doing something, Pen made the tally sign, tapped his lips, and waved his hand beneficently over the remaining birds. Three dozen chickens fell over silently in their crates.

  Ohh, said Des, a very corporeal-seeming sigh. Oh, that helps so much. Pen controlled a perfectly imaginary urge to belch.

  More? Pen inquired.

  Bastard avert, no. How would you feel if you ate that many chickens at a sitting?

  That seemed all they could do on one visit, then. How long do you think it will last us?

  A hesitation. Maybe not forty men.

  Or however many had turned up at the hospice by now. Understood.

  “That’s all I can do at present,” Pen told Burae. “I’ll be back later this afternoon. Please save me some work if you can. About that much again.”

  Bewildered but, thanks to Adelis and habits of army discipline, pliant, Burae nodded and saw his visitor out. Pen winced to imagine the garbled kitchen and barracks gossip that was going to arise from this episode.

  He headed back to the hospice court. Really, if this worked out smoothly enough, he might not have to visit the fort’s main abattoir, located outside the walls. There the large animals, cattle and pigs, were slaughtered; hides, horns and hooves removed and sent to the tannery and other local workshops, dismembered joints carted up to the fort ready for the cooks to further break down into the dozens of ways every bit of an animal was used. Skipping the slaughterhouse would be fine by Pen. He was keenly aware that he was good at this task, but he disliked it and was happy to leave such killing to other men. Rather like the practice of medicine, with which, for him, it was so weirdly, intimately bound. Not a useful thought right now, that.

  * * *

  Rede’s forty patients had grown to forty-one by the time Pen, still not done working through the initial roster, had to break off due to overheating and Des’s growing frenzy. Back at the fort kitchen,
he discovered that its mess-master had found time to collect gossip and think.

  “You’ve been working in the hospice.” Standing up to Pen, Burae sounded scared but stern. “I don’t want sick men in my good kitchen. No matter what the general thinks about his dinner.”

  “I’m not sick, but I appreciate your point,” said Pen, startling Burae a trifle; had he imagined Pen would argue? But Pen needed his food animals, or some animals. “I can think of two compromises. You could have your lads bring the crates of creatures to the courtyard entry, and I wouldn’t have to come within. Or, better”—from Pen’s viewpoint, as he didn’t want to be putting on a show for every passerby—“if there’s a back entry to the slaughtering room, I can use it.”

  “There is,” said Burae slowly. “I suppose at least you wouldn’t be trailing through our whole working space.”

  “Good thinking.”

  Partially reconciled, the mess-master led out and roundabout to show Pen the delivery door. The lads had reserved him a couple of crates of rabbits, which would do nicely, rabbits being, for some reason, an ever better sink than poultry. Someday, when he had time to think, Pen wanted to work out a creature-ranking for this effect to see if it would reveal an underlying pattern, but today was not that day. By its end, he’d probably be too tired to walk, let alone think.

  Des’s burden relieved, Pen headed back to the hospice, wondering about scheduling. Slaughtering was normally a morning task for the kitchen, and it looked as though he’d be working the night around.

  They start very early, said Des. Still night by your scholarly standards. And even you must sleep sometime.

  I suppose…

  * * *

  The fort’s officers having not fallen over poisoned in the night due to sorcerous meddling with their food, Burae seemed less worried the next morning, leaving his lads with Pen to carry on. As a result Pen spent a long, miserable, unimpeded day ferrying death back and forth across the fort. He was able to slip down to the village once, in the late afternoon.

  One sick woman, an acolyte at the village temple and so better educated than most, twigged to the fact that Pen was delivering magic along with his prayers. Either Pen’s forced explanation reassured her, or fear of the fever proved greater than her fear of sorcery. But the news, necessarily decanted in front of the sister who was caring for her, would be all over the village by tomorrow. Would the infected households turn him away in alarm? Pen wasn’t sure what he’d do then.

  Let ’em rot, advised Des, her crankiness hinting she was getting to her limit again. You’ve no shortage of other work.

  You know we can’t stop. If anyone I’ve touched or even come near dies, they won’t blame the disease for killing them, but me for not saving them. Or worse, as rumor chewed and spat out frightened nonsense.

  Don’t borrow trouble. The interest rate is much too high. One day at a time, here, Pen.

  Or one hour. He shook his head and trudged uphill again.

  * * *

  Upon returning to the hospice court, Pen traced Rede to one of his treatment rooms, wondering what fresh bad news the physician might have to impart. He found Rede with a small pile of bandage scraps, scissors, and a flask of wine spirits, suggesting he’d just concluded some wound care, but standing scowling down into a high-sided wooden box on the table. Approaching to look over his shoulder at the source of his displeasure, Pen discovered it contained a large, elderly, and very sick rat.

  The mangy creature lay on its side, panting in irritation, not even trying to escape. Some rats, if they were young and healthy, could be rather attractive little animals, bright-eyed and inquisitive. This… was not a cute rat.

  “Is that for me?” asked Pen, a trifle confused. “Because I’m not looking for more rats, now that I’ve worked out my arrangement with the kitchen. But I can kill it for you if you like.”

  “No!” said Rede, with a sharp deterring gesture. “Don’t. I want to save it.”

  “Er… did you want Des to heal it, then?”

  Rede cast him an exasperated look. “Of course not. I want to save it to watch. Study.”

  “Where did you come by it? I didn’t think I’d left a rat or a mouse alive in the whole fort.”

  “A soldier brought it in. Quartermaster’s clerk. He’d been bitten. In the archives, where he’d gone to hunt up some record or another. Rats and mice lurk there—going after the old parchment, probably. He saw the beast was sick, so he caught it in a cloth and brought it to me along with his bleeding arm. In case I could tell anything. He was worried it might have given him some disease, maybe the bruising fever. I can’t see if the wretched thing is bruised or not, though.” He glanced aside at Pen. “Can you?”

  “Uh…” The creature had dark fur, what there was left of it, and black skin, except for its pale feet. In the bruising fever, the extremities darkened first. Des?

  Really, Pen. The things you ask of me. A pause. Fevered, yes. Bruised, no. Apart from where it was manhandled in its capture.

  “Nothing distinguishing. Yet.”

  A short nod. “Which is why I want to hold it aside and watch it.”

  “I… Huh. Had any other of the bruising-fever patients reported rat bites? None were mentioned to me. Rat bites seem the sort of thing people would notice.”

  “Not the rats,” said Rede, his eyes narrowing. “Their fleas.”

  “Uh.” Pen paused, taken aback. “That would seem to have the opposite problem. Nobody’s been bitten by rats. Everybody is bitten by fleas.” Well, not Pen. Nor anyone for a block around his house. “But not everybody has the fever. Thankfully.”

  “Blood. You were talking about blood being still alive once it’s left the body. If you’ve ever managed to kill a flea that’s just fed on you before the little bugger jumps away, it smears out blood. Just like a mosquito or a tick. If the blood is alive, and the contagion is alive, maybe the contagion is alive in the blood. At least until the flea digests it.”

  “That…” is a brilliant idea, Pen did not say aloud. It had to be flawed, somehow. “How in the world would you ever show if such a thing was so?”

  “I’m not sure. How long would the blood, and the contagion in it, still be alive? Maybe a person would have to let a flea feed on a sick man, and then feed on himself.” Rede’s frown deepened. “It would have to be me. I couldn’t ask this of anyone else.”

  “It most certainly could not be you!”

  He looked up at Pen. “If I contracted the fever that way, could you save me?”

  “I don’t know. And that’s just the first problem.” How could he talk Rede out of this horrifying idea? “Anyway, it couldn’t be you, or anyone else who has been up to their armpits in the sick. Because how could you tell if it was the flea bite, or your contact with the soiled linens or the vomit or the blood in the basins? It would have to be someone who was pristine with respect to this mess. Which is nobody in the whole fort, for a start. Or in the village, by now.”

  “Agh.” Rede rubbed a weary hand over his face, shoulders slumping.

  Pen sighed, hoping he’d thwarted this insane plan. “Anyway,” he said after a moment. “If it really is the rats or their fleas spreading it around, new cases ought to tail off in a few days.” Beguiling thought. “There being no more rats.” Save this one, apparently, hidden out of the way.

  “Or you’ve just destroyed all the evidence.”

  “I’d take that trade.”

  “No—well, yes—but…” Rede made a frustrated swipe. “Never mind.”

  “Have any new cases reported in here while I was gone to the village?”

  “One. And the provisioner’s ox-driver died.”

  Pen grimaced. He felt like a man treading water with no shore in sight to swim for. “I swear to all the gods, I truly don’t know if I’m saving lives, or just prolonging deaths.”

  Rede looked at him in surprise. “Two men seemed sufficiently past the crisis that I moved them to the recovery wards.”

  “We
have recovery wards?”

  “Oh. I suppose I didn’t take you in there. Yes, because we don’t know whether a person can be reinfected. I try to move the ones who seem to be improving out with each other. And the ones who are better still, the same again.”

  Pen should have noticed. Realized. He’d been head-down among the dire cases…

  “You’re so pressed, I didn’t think I should waste your attention upon men who are getting better, or who’d had milder cases and seem to be recovering on their own.”

  “Oh.” Oh, Bastard’s teeth. This was going to be just like the nightmare of Martensbridge all over again, wasn’t it. Only the worst cases, all the worst cases, and never any easy victories. Because that would waste Pen’s time, which was better directed toward… another worst-case. Inescapable logic. “I see.”

  And when had people started flowing under his hands as indistinguishably as the waters of a river? Except for those who’d died, sticking up like boulders with memory eddying around them in agitation. Pen had mainly been tracking the total of sick, the work set before him this hour, which had never gone down, only up. Had population of their chambers turned over at least once by now? Maybe twice? Rede would know the numbers. Pen didn’t ask.

  A little silence, while two tired men stared at nothing much. The dark tunnel of their future, Pen supposed. “I’d best get back to it, then.”

  “Yes. Me as well.”

  But when Pen made his way out, Rede was still gazing speculatively down into his rat-box.

  * * *

  Penric, exiting the second sick-chamber of the following morning’s round and wondering if Des needed to go back to the kitchen yet, found a man waiting for him just beyond the colonnade whom he dimly recognized as one of Adelis’s headquarters clerks. The fellow extended a long arm with a letter held out delicately between thumb and finger. “This came for you, Learned Penric.”