The Physician's Tale

by Ann Benson

  “No,” he heard someone beside him say. To his great surprise, it was Philomène. She deliberately lowered her voice when she said, “First we must shift it, so his shuddering will stop. If we do not, then the cord that binds the rest of his body to his neck might be severed. We must be careful to do him no harm in trying to help him.”

  First do no harm. These words were part of the oath he had taken upon finishing his studies at Montpellier.

  He moved aside and let Philomène do her work. He glanced back at de Chauliac, who watched the soldier in disguise intently over the shoulder of his guard. The look on the Frenchman’s face was one Alejandro had seen many times himself: critical, appraising, pedantic, and, at the same time, proud. Alejandro knew then that he was not the only student in the party.

  Eight

  “What do you have on underneath that suit?” the woman asked Michael.

  “Underwear,” he said.

  “Then I guess you’ll have to leave it on.” She moved toward the horse; Galen did not protest as she poked at the saddle and rummaged in the saddlebags. She dwelled momentarily on the toothbrush containers with their cotton swabs but put them back in the bag. The extra clip of bullets went into one of her pockets. When she had apparently satisfied herself that there were no other weapons, she bent over, her eyes still trained on Michael, and picked up the gun that had fallen free. She examined it in the blink of an eye and tucked it into the other pocket.

  In response to his visible dismay, she said, “Don’t worry, it’s going to a good home.”

  “I feel ever so much better now,” Michael said bitterly.

  “You’re a Brit,” she said.

  “How kind of you to notice. You’re a Yank.”

  “And proud of it,” she said. “You can get back on the horse.”

  Michael did as he was told, though it was a mighty struggle in the bulky suit. She made no offer to help but motioned toward the peak with her hand. “That way.”

  “Where are you taking me?” Michael asked.

  She didn’t answer his question, saying only, “Stay on this path—it’s pretty clear all the way to the top; better than the road. I’ll be right behind you. Since you’re a cop, I’ll assume I don’t have to explain what will happen to you if you try anything stupid.”

  “No,” he muttered. “You don’t.”

  “Be careful,” she warned him. “The footing can be bad.”

  “I wish you’d been around to tell me that before,” he said angrily.

  “I was,” she said.

  He looked at her in surprise.

  “You just didn’t know I was there.”

  The remark seemed an insult, delivered as it was with a little grin. “When we get where we’re going,” he said, “perhaps you’ll oblige me with some lessons.”

  They progressed slowly up the slope. It was rough going, and several times Galen didn’t seem to want to move forward. Michael tried to reassure him with pats on the flank, but the horse seemed also to feel what his rider was experiencing—the raw sense of helplessness that comes with captivity.

  Finally they reached the peak. Michael looked out over the view and saw the valley below. Though he’d seen this view before, he’d never seen it at this time of year, when the trees were still bare of leaves. It was a perspective quite different from the one to which he was accustomed. He saw the far end of the lake, where it narrowed to the river, which, he assumed, was its origin. The cell towers that jutted up over the treetops seemed to have had their arrangement altered. Some, the older ones, were bare metal—dark, ugly reminders of progress on its previous mad rampage. Others were disguised as pine trees so as not to offend the drivers of the Benzes and Beemers that once roared through their shadows, hurrying toward God-knows-what urgent meeting.

  He listened for a moment. Again, it was birds and breezes—no cars, no trucks, no voices from a box, just the small sounds of nature. Even in distress, he could not help but be soothed. His captor did not protest the momentary respite, and he imagined that she, too, craved that kind of peace, however brief it might be.

  Eventually she said, “Let’s go.”

  They began their descent. After a short distance, the woman said, “The path divides not too far ahead. Go to the left.”

  “All right,” he said. He didn’t tell her that he knew of the turnoff; this was the path he would have taken to get to the spot where they’d first collected the suspicious active bacterium that had brought him out here again. He thought it best to keep the nature of his own journey to himself until it became necessary to tell.

  He turned backward as much as he could in the awkward suit. “Can I ask your name?”

  She did not answer immediately.

  “Lorraine,” she said eventually. “Lany, for short.”

  “Lany,” he echoed. “Last name?”

  Another pause. “Dunbar.”

  “Ordinarily, Lany, I would say, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ but in truth, I think I’d rather not. In any case, my name is Michael Rosow.”

  She said nothing.

  “My wife’s name is Caroline.”

  Again she was silent.

  “And we have a daughter, Sarah Jane. A lovely little redheaded—”

  “That’s enough chitchat,” she said. “Just keep moving.”

  Keep engaging her, he thought. Make yourself human to her.

  “And just when I thought we were getting—”

  He heard a click of metal. “I said, enough. Maybe you better take that helmet all the way off so you can hear me better.”

  Once again he realized that she knew what she was doing.

  For another hour they worked their way down the mountainside. At times the path was gently sloped; in some places, though, the going was so steep that Michael knew Lany Dunbar would have to look at the ground for balance, and those were moments when he considered bolting. If he were to ride off at a clip, would she shoot him? He had no way of knowing. What was it she wanted with him? Was she a single woman living by herself, in need of a man? If so, would he become her slave? How would she keep him captive if she needed him for labor—with leg chains?

  All these questions, and dozens more, swirled through his consciousness. In the end, he knew that his most important goal was to stay alive so he could get back to his wife and child. The best means of doing that was compliance.

  And so he did what he was told. Captor and captive progressed down the road. A few hundred yards along, they came to the small cluster of buildings, a modern-day ghost town, where Michael would have collected the new samples had his journey gone as planned. Despite the compromise of his suit, he reached up quietly and pulled down the plexi, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  Not quietly enough.

  “Why did you close your visor?”

  He hesitated. “Allergies,” he said, after a moment.

  “Bull,” she said. “Tell me why.”

  Finally he told her. “There’s a hot spot near here.”

  She stiffened. “Where?”

  “I don’t know the full extent of it, but in that building up ahead there are live bacteria. Not DR SAM.” He pointed toward a dilapidated mill town Victorian with peeling white paint and a sagging porch. “The whole area may be contaminated, but I can’t say for sure.”

  He watched with mild amusement as she pulled a bandanna up over her nose and mouth.

  He thought about saying, It will just get in through your eyes, but kept the remark to himself.

  Her voice was now muffled by the bandanna, and his hearing was dampened by the closed helmet, but he understood that she said, “How do you know that?”

  We almost slipped out, but he caught himself. “I took some samples there, a few months ago. I was coming back to take a repeat batch when we—met.”

  “Coming from where?”

  Now it was his turn to smile and remain silent.

  “We’ll find out eventually.”

  She’d said we. She was not alone. It was alm
ost exciting, until he began to wonder how they would get the information out of him.

  They hurried through the rest of the town. After a torturously long time on the same road—Michael judged by the sun that it might be as much as three hours—they came to an intersection. The route sign was still there, but the once dark-blue color of the placard had faded to something that resembled stressed denim, and the pole was lurched to one side at a sharp angle. Remnants of the word Orange could barely be read; Michael recalled the former mill town that he’d once passed through with Caroline.

  They’d been traveling roughly north since Lany Dunbar had taken him captive, and even though they were at a much lower elevation than the compound, there was snow on the ground still.

  “Go right,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “But may I please ask your permission to stop for a moment?”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Ms. Dunbar, I need to see a man about a horse, if you get my meaning.”

  “Aren’t you wearing a CD?”

  He was momentarily stunned. How would she know about the capture device? He regarded her quizzically; there was an Oh, damn look on her face.

  There were two possible explanations: She had a close relationship with someone who’d worn the green suit, or—harder to fathom—she’d worn one herself.

  After a few moments of consideration, she said, “You’ll have to wait. But it’s not far now.”

  Michael hadn’t been in the midst of a crowd of strangers in a very long time. He found himself in the center of a large group of men, women, and children, all of whom stared at him as if he had recently arrived from Jupiter. The courtyard in which they were assembled was not unlike their own; a couple of buildings, tie-ups for the horses, stone pathways, patches of dead brush that would soon green up. Under the watchful eye and pointed gun of Lany Dunbar, the men helped him down off Galen. Their hands were friendly and careful, not at all rough. One of the men took Galen by the reins and led him off to a building that Michael assumed was a stable.

  “He needs the outhouse,” Lany said. She looked at one of the other women. “Linda, can you get him some clothes? He says he has just underwear underneath.”

  The woman she called Linda looked Michael over quickly and said, “I’ll get something of Steve’s.” She ran off toward one of the buildings.

  Then to another woman, Lany said, “He’ll need some help getting that thing off.”

  The woman nodded and came forward. Her hands were practiced on the suit’s fasteners; she asked no questions, but moved from snap to zipper to button without instruction.

  “You’ve done this before,” Michael observed.

  She met his gaze but did not respond otherwise.

  Just as the last snap came open, Linda returned with an armful of garments. He stepped out of the suit and took the offered pile. Modesty seemed inconsequential at the moment, but he blushed slightly at the notion of strange women seeing him nearly in the altogether and covered himself quickly.

  His boots were still on the ground, but when he reached for them, Lany said, “No. Leave them off.”

  “My feet will be bare. The ground is still frozen.”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t be doing much walking.”

  He tiptoed to the outhouse with an escort and did his business under the watchful eye of one of the men, to whom Lany had given Michael’s gun. Thoughts of escape screamed through his brain. Bolt backward, knock the man down, wrestle the gun away from him and run… but where would he go, shoeless and horseless in frigid March, in the time after, with bacteria waiting to eat his flesh?

  Stay alive, he reminded himself. He would be theirs until a good opportunity presented itself.

  When they heard the gate opening, the books for the children’s reading lesson went down fast. Janie and Caroline followed them into the courtyard. Kristina wasn’t far behind.

  As she took Jellybean’s reins, Janie looked up at Tom and said, “You’re back a lot sooner than I figured.”

  He explained about the roadblock. “I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Nature’s taking over again.”

  “What about Michael?”

  Tom looked directly at Caroline. “He went up the rest of the way without me,” he said. “Galen was doing better than Jellybean, so I turned back earlier than we’d planned. I didn’t want to put too much strain on her ankle.”

  Caroline’s brow tightened.

  “He was fine,” Tom reassured her. “He’ll be fine.”

  There was nothing more to do than to go about the tasks of living, but a mist of uncertainty settled over the day.

  Every few moments, as she and Janie prepared dinner, Caroline would glance out the window toward the gate, hoping for a sight of the neon-green suit. Sunset was no more than an hour away.

  “He should have been back by now,” she said.

  Janie tried to put a hopeful cast on the situation. “Not necessarily. He might have found something worth bringing back.”

  “He’s been down that route a number of times. If there was something worth scavenging, don’t you think he would have found it before?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Try to relax—he’ll be back any minute now.”

  She looked out the window once again. “I hope you’re right.”

  The hour passed with painful slowness. The pork was done, and the sun left the sky. The children finished their lessons and came, with Kristina in tow, to the dinner table. The table was set and ready, but dinner had not been called.

  What few smiles Caroline managed were forced and brief. She tried to put a good face on the situation for the sake of the little ones, but it was not an easy task. When Tom came in from the barn, Janie took him aside and asked quietly, “What should we do?”

  “Wait” was all he could offer. “We eat dinner, just like we would if he was here. And we wait.”

  “Maybe someone should go out after him.”

  “It’s too soon for that,” he said. “Michael can take care of himself. Maybe he doesn’t want to push Galen too much. He’s probably just holed up somewhere in a barn for the night, and he’ll be back in the morning.”

  “Could you sleep in that thing?”

  Tom didn’t answer that question. “I’m sure he’s okay. He’s a smart man.”

  Not very smart to let yourself get caught like this, Michael thought to himself. He paced angrily back and forth in a small room inside the largest of the buildings, a farmhouse that had, at some point in the time before, experienced a loving restoration to what he imagined was its original condition. The floors gleamed with lacquer, the walls were clean white and unblemished. One wall was lined with tall bookshelves stuffed with all manner of volumes; it pleased him, until he recalled that this library was his prison. There was a narrow window with lace curtains, through which the low rays of the sun streamed in; he considered smashing it until he looked out and saw the young man who stood guard outside. The fellow had shoes: a distinct advantage.

  Not to mention youth and knowledge of the home ground.

  But he’d seen no one in leg chains, and they’d treated him surprisingly well, so he began to think that he would not be hurt. Best to settle down and rest, he thought, while the opportunity presented itself. In his agitated state he wouldn’t sleep, so he tilted his head to one side and read through the titles on the shelves until he came up with one of value: The Dairyman’s Guide to Cheese.

  He was halfway through a discussion of the various forms of rennet—not that he could concentrate—when the door opened. One of the men from the original greeting party came in with Michael’s gun in his hand, followed by the woman Linda, who carried a tray of food. Michael could see steam rising, and the smell of food filled the air; he began, quite involuntarily, to salivate. On the plate were corn, chicken cut into small pieces, and something that had once been green—perhaps spinach. A plastic spoon rested to one side of the plate; its surface was dull with age.

  Linda set the tra
y down, then backed out the door.

  “We thought you might be hungry,” the man said. He had a slight Southern drawl. “Go ahead and eat something.”

  Michael ignored the tray and stood up. “Who are you?” he demanded. “And why am I here?”

  The man smiled and pointed at the food. “My wife doesn’t take kindly to having her efforts wasted, so you best eat what she made for you.” He backed away and stepped through the open library door. Before closing it, he said, “We’ll be asking you the same questions in a little while.”

  Tom hung the lantern on the hook over the door and scraped the spring muck off his boots. As he undid the laces he heard the quiet voices of Janie and Caroline. He set his boots on the mat and padded into the main room in his socks. The two women stopped speaking and turned in his direction when they heard him, and he saw immediately that Caroline had been crying.

  On most nights, when he and Michael and the other men came in after bedding down the animals, they would find the ladies sitting with their tea—thank God for the greenhouse—while working quietly at the vital chores of their new world. There was always a hole to be mended or a mitten to be replaced, a new pot scrubber to be crocheted, a doormat to be woven. Tom often marveled that his wife, a woman of immense education and accomplishment, seemed to find satisfaction—most days—in these simple tasks. She, who had touched the open brains of hundreds of human beings, now used her exquisitely sensitive fingertips to knit and weave and stitch the necessities that they all once took for granted. She never complained about what others might consider a diminished station in life. Often the men would play cards or Scrabble; if one was tired or under the weather, another would sub in.

  Tom glanced around the room but did not see his daughter. “Where’s Kristina?” he said.

  “In the lab,” Janie answered. “She has a couple of projects to check on.”

  It was her graceful excuse to escape the discomfort of waiting. He knew that his daughter had never been fond of emotional discomfort; it confused and upset her. The fret of Michael’s delayed return hung in the air heavily, and it was visible on all the women’s faces. The evening’s conversation would not have been pleasant.