The Physicians of Vilnoc

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  He fantasized about burning his fraying vestments when he finally reached home. The women of the household would likely object to this disposal of their prior labors, wanting at least to make them into kitchen towels or, the last refuge of rags, braided rugs. He hadn’t read a letter from his correspondents in other realms or a book, new or old, in… weeks, yes, it had been well over two weeks this had been going on. Was there ever to be an end, or was he to toil on endlessly as if caught in some centuries-long curse from a nursery tale?

  His moaning to Rede in the mess, as the one man likely to understand his need to vent his frustrations, produced an unexpected reply.

  “Well, of course. Whenever you start to get ahead, you don’t rest; you just add in an extra pass. I’m going to start forcibly taking the improving men away from you soon. I can see the difference too, you know. More men are recovering, and recovering faster, since Learned Dubro’s arrival allowed you to increase the frequency of treatments. You said that would be so, and so it is.”

  “The opposite would also be true, you realize, if we get more sick in. How many today?”

  Rede’s lips stretched in a weird white grin. “Here in the fort? None.”

  “What?”

  “None.”

  “That… can’t be true. It’s probably an artifact of chance, and tomorrow we’ll get double, or some such.” Pen added, as if he were a moneychanger attempting to balance his scales, “There were two more sick in Tyno.”

  “How many there no longer need your magics?”

  “It’s so hard to tell when it’s safe to stop.”

  “I see.”

  But there were no more new cases in the fort the next day, either. Nor the following.

  “Are we actually beating this thing?” Pen asked Rede, more than rhetorically.

  “Maybe? Or it’s burning out on its own. Contagions do, sometimes. Well, always, eventually.”

  “Preferably not because there’s no one left alive. Sunder it! It was getting around, now it’s not getting around, and why?”

  Rede shrugged helplessly. “If you find out, tell me.”

  “You’ll be the first to know, I promise.”

  There were no new cases in the fort the next day, either, nor the next; a much more welcome mystery than the disease’s arrival, but still maddeningly obscure. Though for the first time, Pen found himself waking in his cot looking forward to his tasks. It wasn’t even that he might anticipate an end; it was that he could see that he was making a difference, that his effort was receiving its due reward of success at last. Most heartening.

  …And then Adelis rode back into the fort with thirty wounded, forty deathly ill cavalrymen, and two dozen sick Rusylli.

  * * *

  Over the next two days, Penric could see all the progress he, Des, and Dubro and Maska had made slipping through his hands.

  The fort hospice was designed to take in the sudden aftermaths of battles, although the sole clash near Vilnoc for over a decade had been at the port with a raiding fleet. With more cots set up, the patient chambers absorbed their new load but only just; by crowding, Rede was still able to assign the wounded and the sick each to their own wards. Not that the former couldn’t turn into the latter overnight. The Rusylli were sent back to their camp to be cared for by each other, and Penric had a sharp dispute with the exhausted Adelis as to whether he should go in after them.

  It was settled only by the Rusylli themselves, who assembled in a frightened, furious gang to turn Pen back at their gate; this, after having to argue with the greatly augmented Orban guard troop to let him pass within. Pen retreated walking backward up the road shouting instructions in Rusylli for how to send him a message should they change their minds, although he was very much afraid that by the point they did, he’d be unable to break away, the time for today’s visit being stolen from Tyno, and Tyno’s from the fort. He’d not been able to ride into Vilnoc at all, and his imagination had plenty of material to envision the relapses that must be taking place there, because they were taking place here.

  Atop it all, the fort was generating new cases again, at first from Adelis’s returned cavalry troop and grooms. Either they’d acquired the bruising fever a bit later than some of their comrades, or it took different periods to brew up in different men, or both. Pen was not optimistic enough to believe it would remain limited to that still-too-large pool of men.

  On the third morning, Dubro reeled in to report to Penric, “Maska won’t come when I call!”

  Pen looked them over. Maska cowered within his rider a little like Des in the presence of the Divine, but rather more like a whipped dog hiding under a bed. It was almost the opposite of a demon ascending, for a creature with no other way to retreat or escape. Pen could sympathize.

  “Your demon is spent,” Pen told him bluntly. “Take the rest of today and tonight off. Tomorrow morning, I’ll check him again.”

  “I could do more,” said Dubro, his aged face pinching. “We need to do more!”

  “I know, and you can’t.”

  “I could at least help out in the hospice? You know I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty.”

  Pen nodded with respect, but said, “Rede can get Adelis to conscript him more men for that.” At some cost in increased desertions, perhaps. “You need to stop and take care of your demon, which cannot be replaced.” Pen would filch a few minutes later to write more begging notes to his chapterhouse for sorcerers, any sorcerers, but he’d done that twice already, and Dubro had been the sole result.

  “What about your demon?” Dubro squinted in worry at Pen, although with Maska in this hysterical state, his Sight was unavailable to him. “Is she all right?”

  “Over two hundred years old. She has more endurance than I do, and has probably seen worse plagues.”

  Indeed, murmured Des. Still not fun.

  “She truly cannot ascend and make off with you? I’d swear she seems powerful enough.”

  “She could.”

  At our first acquaintance, yes. But you’ve been growing more powerful yourself, Pen. So, not such a foregone conclusion as it once was.

  Haven’t you been growing with me? The proportions should be keeping pace.

  Hah.

  “But she won’t,” Pen finished firmly. Collapse from fatigue, maybe; could a demon do that? He didn’t want to find out.

  Then there was nothing for it but to get back to work, from the sick-chambers to the abattoir and around again, with some side-trips to the kitchen’s killing room to pick off the poultry that Dubro would not be getting to today.

  That evening, he received a note from Tolga in town. She sounded frustrated and angry, either begging or commanding him to return, though futilely in either case. She went on to detail the progress, or regress, of his worst-off patients, confirming his imaginings.

  Pen stuffed the note into his sash, where it burned like a coal.

  * * *

  Maska was somewhat recovered the following morning. Pen gave Dubro a strict ration of a dozen patients to treat, and no more. For Maska’s sake it should have been half that, curse it. For the fort’s, double. This didn’t really buy Pen enough time to visit Tyno, but he went down anyway.

  There, not at all to his surprise, he found that some of his patients had backslid, one from the tanner clan into death. Which got Pen shouted at by her weeping husband.

  “Why didn’t you come back? I thought she was getting better! Why didn’t you come back sooner?”

  There was nothing to say to this but a useless if true, “I’m sorry.”

  Pen escaped from the grief and recriminations as swiftly as he could, and stood blinking in the half-deserted village street. The abattoir—he should march up there on his way back to the fort, see what poor innocent beast they’d saved out for him next. And then kill it.

  Instead, he found himself turning aside at the village temple.

  The Tyno temple was a neat little building just off what passed for the main square. Stone-built, w
ith whitewashed stucco on the outside, its sturdiness hinted that it had been designed and built with the help of the local army engineers. Its six sides supported a concrete dome with a round oculus in its center. The streetside face was devoted to the entryway under a portico. One leaf of the pair of wooden doors was hooked open for the day’s petitioners to enter and pray or, with luck, leave offerings.

  Penric ducked into the dome’s cool shade and made the tally sign. The pavement was mere flagstone, but made interesting with a clever pattern of subtle colors fitted together. The five altar-walls bore the familiar profusion of frescoed images associated with each god, more earnest than artistic. On the central plinth, the holy fire had burned down to coals, aromatic with incense. Pen fed it a fresh stick from the wood-basket in passing.

  A couple of villagers rose from their prayer rugs before the Mother of Summer’s altar, set them in their stack, and nodded warily at Pen on the way out. Nearly all of Tyno knew who he was by now. It didn’t, unfortunately, follow that they trusted him.

  Pen considered the Mother’s altar for a moment, then cast it his usual apologetic touch to his navel. He turned to the Bastard’s altar instead and pulled out a rug, made and donated by some devout village woman, to lay before it. He sank to his knees, then, after a moment, prone, in the pose of utmost supplication, arms outflung. It seemed less piety than exhaustion.

  What should he pray for? Forgiveness? Not the white god’s specialty. More sorcerers, he supposed. Far more people begged the gods to do something for them than ever offered to do something for the gods, and he wondered if the Five ever grew tired of it. Maybe They were too vast, and so prayers fell like raindrops into the ocean. Pen tried not to bother his god more than he was absolutely forced to, not because he thought the Bastard wouldn’t answer him, but because he feared He might, and then what?

  He tried to compose his seething mind into a proper mode of holy meditation, open or baiting, he wasn’t sure. Slowly, he settled. There seemed more danger that he would simply fall asleep.

  Yawning and about to give up, he became aware that Des had shrunk within him to a defensive ball. Deprived of Sight, he extended his ordinary senses to their utmost. Nothing but the musty scratchiness of the rug beneath his cheek, the faint snap and scent of the plinth fire, distant echoes through the door and the oculus from the village life outside.

  A tickle on the back of his left hand.

  He turned his head to blink owlishly at a horsefly feasting on a drop of blood. The tiny wound did not hurt or itch; could the creature somehow subdue the pain in its victims to give it longer to feed? How, and was it something Pen might learn how to use…?

  As horseflies went, it wasn’t as big and ugly as some; its body and wings were a pretty iridescent blue.

  The connections fell in all at once, like a tower crashing down in an earthquake. Blood. Rede’s flea theory. The blue witch…

  Pen spasmed up, grabbing for the fly, which circled through the air and out the oculus. Sunder it.

  “Des! Was that accursed thing an answer to my prayer?”

  I don’t know, she gasped. I couldn’t watch. Slowly, she unfolded again.

  Unhelpful, Des!

  Pen shouted in frustration to the oculus, “You could stand to be less obscure, You know!” He ran outside and looked up, but the fly was long gone. Not that he could see such a speck at this distance anyway.

  No matter. Where there was one fly, there were bound to be a thousand more somewhere. If not up at the fort right now. He tried to think if it was of a kind he’d ever seen before. Perhaps not? Certainly not in the cantons, where he’d been enough of an outdoors boy to observe such things. The blue color was very distinctive.

  His brain picking at the problem, he walked distractedly back up to the abattoir.

  As he trudged past the building to the killing yard, raised voices reached him along with the reek. Jasenik had a good sergeantly bellow. The other’s was sharper and more whiny. He rounded the corner to see an overgrown bull-calf waiting in a chute, presumably Pen’s current ration, Jasenik, and a groom from the fort holding the lead line of a trembling horse.

  “I told the cavalry not to send those sick beasts here with my good food animals!” said Jasenik, irate. “Take it straight down to the tanners.”

  “Well, nobody told me!” complained the groom.

  “What’s this?” asked Pen, coming up to the group.

  Jasenik wheeled. “Ah, Learned Penric. This here’s a beast you can kill with my good will. Except not here. Let it walk itself down to the village, if it can.”

  “What?” said Pen. It looked to be a shaggy steppe pony, normally an incredibly hardy breed. Not now; its eye and coat were dull, its head hung down, and its legs shook. Blood was crusted around its soft muzzle.

  “It has the bloody staggers,” the groom informed him glumly. “We’ve been getting a string of them. We separate them out and put them down in a pasture by themselves as soon as we’re sure, and some of them come around again, but this one isn’t going to get better.”

  Des, Sight.

  If Penric hadn’t been head down for weeks at the closest range to an endless parade of people with the disease, he wasn’t sure he could have recognized it in an animal. But he had been and he did, near-instantly.

  “That’s not the bloody staggers. Well, I’m sure you call it that, in horses. It’s this accursed bruising fever.”

  Both men jerked back. “What?” said Jasenik. “People don’t get horse diseases!”

  Pen was shaken by a moment of doubt. It was a new idea to him, to be sure. Was it too wild, too desperate?

  Des, after a moment, offered, Thrush. Amberein once treated a poor fellow with a thrush infection in his mouth. Though I doubt he got it from licking the frog of a horse’s hoof, so I don’t insist on the connection.

  Really…? Pen fought off the distraction; also the repulsive image. “How long ago did you have these sick horses show up at the fort?” he demanded of the groom.

  The fellow squinted in thought. “A month ago? No, two? Not more’n two.”

  Within days of the first outbreak, then. “Where did they come from?”

  “Well, this lot”—he jerked his thumb at the trembling horse—“came in with a string of war prizes from Grabyat. But, y’know, any horse seems to get it. And one mule, so far.”

  “Oxen? Other animals?”

  “Not so far as I know. Just horses. The cavalry master is fit to be tied.”

  “And nobody thought to tell Master Orides, or Master Rede?”

  The groom stared. “They don’t treat horses.”

  “Brought down the western road from Grabyat?” Past the border town and fort that also reported struggling with an outbreak of the bruising fever? Nothing so likely as for such live battle booty to be set to rest a while at such a fort before being sent on to walk the breadth of a duchy.

  “How else? Nobody’s going to ship them all the way around the Cedonian Peninsula by sea.”

  “Where do you sequester—keep apart—your sick horses?”

  “Up t’ road”—the groom pointed upstream—“at the farthest pasture, beyond the woodlot.”

  “I have to see them.” Pen turned, turned again. “Don’t give that horse to the tanners. It has to be buried whole and untouched someplace away from people, deep enough the dogs don’t get to it. No one should get its blood on them. …I might be able to get back to kill it bloodlessly for you by the time you round up some men and get a trench dug somewhere.”

  “What, nobody’s going to do that on my say-so!” said the groom, startled by Pen’s vehemence.

  “Not yours. Tell the cavalry master Learned Penric ordered it.” That Penric was nowhere in his chain of command wasn’t something to point out just now. “I’ll be back later to explain it to Adelis. And everyone. If I can prove what I think is so.”

  As he turned again toward the road, Des moaned, Pen, please.

  Oh, right. He waved at the bull calf, whic
h dropped in its tracks. Des sighed relief.

  Then he just ran.

  * * *

  Pen strode and jogged and didn’t stop till he reached the far pasture, which turned out to be a good two miles up the road. He leaned on the gate and caught his breath, studying its occupants. The equine equivalent of the hospice, Pen supposed.

  About a dozen disconsolate horses, and one mule, drifted listlessly about, or stood with their heads hanging down but not grazing. One gelding lay on its side, clearly at its last gasp. Pen let himself in and started hunting strange blue flies.

  Normal horseflies tended to swarm in their damp breeding places, disgusting enough for anyone encountering them. If one fly was repulsive, dozens of the big buzzing things stooping at you was dozens of times worse. For a few minutes, Pen wondered if he’d flown off the handle about this theory, but then he began to spot the blue intruders, in shy singles clinging quietly to the horses’ undersides, or in the inner shadows of their loins. In a few minutes, he’d collected and killed a whole handful. He plucked out fabric in his sash to make a temporary pocket, and tucked them gingerly within.

  He then set Des to slaying every fly and parasite of any kind in the pasture, and picked out the least-sick horse there, a black mare that would have been quite comely when well. Pen transferred the biggest blast of uphill magic to the mare that Des could manage. The mare snorted and shied, but thankfully didn’t drop of a heart attack; he dumped the chaos into the dying gelding, speeding its demise. Following this up with a strong shamanic compulsion upon the mare to obedience, which he was going to pay for with a nosebleed shortly, Pen shoved her out the gate and scrambled aboard boosted by a foot to the fence. He grabbed mane and kicked her, bridle-and-saddleless, to a canter down the road.

  He didn’t stop or turn aside at Tyno, though the mare briefly tried to dodge toward the fort; cavalry mount, right. She probably wanted to go home as much as Pen did. He kept her moving at the best pace he could force until they reached the guard post at the Rusylli camp. He was just as out of breath and disheveled as if he had run the whole way, his face and tunic smudged with blood, but at least he’d got here faster. The mare stood puffing, sweating, and trembling as he slid off her bare back, but nudged him and tried to follow as he strode up to the gate guards. Who stepped back in alarm.