by Lynn Abbey
Surprised, the healer looked around for the speakers. The ruler lifted an eyebrow.
“A mummer as well, you can throw your voice in two different directions. Give me a straight answer, and keep your ventriloquism to amuse those shite-eaters in the Maze. I want a straight answer.”
“I don’t know, ser,” Pel replied, getting his own voice back. “But I will try.”
“Good enough.” Arizak turned to the woman with the golden eyes. “Take him back.”
All the way through the dark streets, Pel wondered whence had come the voices that had spoken out in Arizak’s chamber. Once the bronze-clad lady had illuminated the room with the globe she now held shielded in her hands he could see no one but the four of them. The old man had seemed surprised but not alarmed, so it was no one concealed behind the walls. Clearly, Arizak believed Pel had manifested them.
Pel had a different interpretation, though he scarcely dared even to think it: Meshpri and Meshnom had spoken, there in the small stone room. The healing gods had watched over him, and given him the ability to heal, this he knew, but they had never before manifested themselves. What did it mean? In the gentle goddess’s eyes, all patients were the same, with rank, age, wealth having no impact upon her gift to them. Yet not only did the gods speak out regarding this patient, but they disagreed on his prognosis. It meant to Pel that Arizak was at a turning point, neither too ill to recover nor guaranteed to live, and that his life must impact the health and well-being of many others.
The Avenue of Temples was silent this dark night. Voices and footsteps rang from the depths of the surrounding city. Only the soft brushing of their feet on the stones could be heard. Pel paused. Was that another set of feet behind them?
He couldn’t tell. When he stopped, they stopped. It might have been an echo in the man-made valley of stone. If she heard, his guide made no indication. Just before they reached Pel’s shop, he thought he saw a very small figure, darker than the darkness, slip in between two of the ruined buildings. A spy? A would-be thief? A patient in need of Pel’s services who did not wish to reveal him- or herself yet?
Inside, the woman set down her blue stone. It glowed gently, then faded.
“I leave this with you, healer,” she said. “When my lord has need of you, it will burn with the blue fire. Follow where it leads. It may not be to the same place as tonight—I do not know. Will you come?”
“I will,” Pel promised.
“And no word?”
“None.”
She inclined her head, and slipped out into the moonless night.
Shiprisday bloomed bright and hot. Pel toiled as hard as any of his patients paying their debts; harder than some, of course. Once again, Miskegandros, fabric merchant and sufferer from gout from his overindulgence in the foods he loved and could afford, lounged at the side of the field shouting orders as though he was the master here. Pel should have insisted on cash from the Rankan, but Miskegandros was disinclined to part with any for his weekly dose, and, truthfully, Pel thought a day’s hard gardening would do the man more good.
“Up, good ser,” Pel said, playfully, urging the merchant to his feet with the flexible tines of the rake that the man had discarded. “By my reckoning you have five hours to go.”
“But it’s only four hours left in the day,” the Rankan pouted. “The others say they’re leaving by late afternoon.”
“And they’ve been working since midmorning,” Pel explained, with a friendly expression that brooked no disagreement. “Come along, you’re still several yards short of a suit.”
Grumbling, the Rankan lumbered to his feet and went back to raking. The pile of stones grew on the perimeter of the field where a small group of girls were fitting them into the gaps in the ragged wall. Once this had been a noble’s pleasure garden, Bezul had relayed from Percaro, the most recent of the land’s many owners. Around the five-acre plot ranged an ornamental stone-and-brick wall that had been ten feet high. Most of the stones aboveground had been removed by neighbors who needed them for their own walls.
It was too small to be a viable field for any of the farmers, because the footings of the wall were still too high to plow over, and were seated too deeply into the earth to dislodge economically. It was really of no use to anyone in these poor days but someone like Pel, who needed only a small patch of land for healing herbs. The wall would keep animals from wandering across it and destroying precious plantings. A couple of farmers had contributed fruit trees. Pel was especially pleased with the two decent sloes and a wild cherry bush, both old enough to produce next year if he could keep them from going into root shock. But he’d be a pretty poor healer not to prevent that, he chided himself cheerfully.
A few breadths of intact wall still remained, too fragile to disassemble without destroying the lacelike brickwork. In the shade of the widest of these Pel treated laborers with sunburn and a few patients who had ventured outside the city walls in need of his services. A new pipe driven down into an old well dribbled a meager throb of water over his hands as he cleansed the matter from a nasty boil on the arm of an elderly Ilsigi woman. Her blood was slowing, as was the way of extreme old age, and she considered stimulants a plague and a nuisance.
“Try to fool this old body?” she had said, as she rose from the sparse grass with a rustle of skirts and fragile bones. She tapped the side of her head. “It’s the old mind you can’t trick.”
“I bow to your wisdom,” Pel said, springing up. She laughed, a dry cackle, and hobbled away.
He wasn’t done with physicking just yet. One of the girls detached herself from the group within the garden and made her way over, the tilt of her head just a little too casual, her saunter just a little too deliberate. Ilsei had eaten green berries a few weeks ago that gave her incessant diarrhea. Another youngster who pleaded with him not to tell her parents, she had volunteered for a half day’s work to pay for the medication, but the flux had been cured weeks ago. She sent a cocky smile to her friends, then crouched down by Pel’s side.
“Healer,” she whispered tentatively, after glancing about to make sure no one was listening, “what does it mean when one bleeds twice in the moon?”
A boy Pel guessed to be Ilsei’s age came to hover over the two of them. Pel glanced up.
“Can you wait over there a while, please?” he asked, pointing to the remains of a bench against the bricks about twenty feet away, and turned his attention back to Ilsei, but her face was frozen in embarrassment. Pel looked up again.
“I’m not used to waiting,” the boy said, putting a hand automatically on the dagger at his belt. Pel recognized him as Raith, youngest of Arizak’s three sons. He was a good-looking youngster, graceful in the way of men who have used their muscles.
“I’ll go!” Ilsei exclaimed, scrambling to her feet. Pel stood and took her hand. He met Raith’s gaze firmly with the confidence of the priest who was used to rambunctious and uncontrollable acolytes.
“He can wait. We will walk over here and finish our consultation.”
The expression in his eyes must have surprised the Irrune prince, for he kept his mouth shut. The girl could hardly choke out another syllable as she kept looking over the healer’s shoulder at the impatient Irrune. At last, Pel let her go, after she had promised to come to his shop on the morrow with her mother.
“Now, ser,” he said, turning to Raith with a pleasant smile. “How may I serve?”
The boy’s mouth twisted, as if deciding whether to spit out a sour mouthful. “You’ve got balls. I came to give you a warning.”
Pel raised an eyebrow. “For what?”
The mouthful came out in a blurt. “For my father. I know you were at the palace the other night. Who brought you? What did you do?”
“That,” Pel said, with more calm than he felt, “is none of your business.”
“Don’t give me your Wrigglie evasions,” Raith snarled, though he stayed where he was. “My father is gravely ill. I know about you healers. You pretend you have sk
ill, but you keep him ill for your own purposes. You make vegetable soups and stinking pills that do nothing.”
“Have you tried them?” Pel asked. “Stop your bristling, young man. I am not being flippant. I will not tell you anything about any patient I have, in the palace or outside it. You would welcome the same discretion if you came in search of my services. Anyone would tell you the same.”
“Well, I will tell you something, then,” Raith said, his face as red as his hair. “I know how devious you Wrigglies are. If you are attending my father, and if you are thinking about using your skills for anything except healing him, and if he dies before I … if he dies and I can trace the reason back to you, you won’t need a fellow healer, you’ll need a hole in the ground for your remains.”
“Ser, there is no need to threaten me,” Pel said, gently. “My task is to give aid to the sick. I do not kill. I never sell or use poisons. On that you have my sworn word.”
But Raith had made up his mind to be offended. Pel realized he had stepped on a tender nerve. He knew that this youngest of Arizak’s three children had no less ambition for the throne than the other two. And he was a boy, no older than the sword-fighting youths who were pulling up roots and raking stones just on the opposite side of the ancient brick wall.
“I will tell you what,” Pel suggested, as Raith glared at him. “If you notice that your father is unwell, come to my shop. I would be glad to call upon him at your bequest. If he gives permission, you may even oversee the treatment.”
A snort told Pel how likely it was his father would ever let him watch, but Raith was appeased.
“I’ve got my eye on you,” Raith said, pointing a finger at Pel’s nose, though he had to point upward to do it. “I have watchers everywhere. If my father dies, you die.”
“I understand, ser,” Pel replied. Raith swept his cloak in one arm and attempted to retreat in a dignified manner, but the heaps of stones made the stride into a series of tiptoeing hops back to where a man-at-arms waited with the boy’s dancing stallion. Raith shot him one more look meant to warn, then spun the horse around. Pel sighed and went back to mixing sun-cure. So he had been followed that night. Raith had wasted a trip warning him to do what he was going to do anyhow.
With Shiprisday safely over, some of Pel’s payment-backward patients came out of hiding.
“My spots came back in only three days!” Whido the baker protested, banging his hand on the old stone altar that served Pel as a shop counter, mixing palette, and operating table in one. He plunked himself down on the tall stool to which Pel gestured him. “Call yourself a doctor, eh? The sisters in the ruins up there,” he gestured in the direction of the Promise of Heaven, “said it’s a condition that goes away in time. Have you been making them come back so you can wring more padpols out of me?”
“Not all acne goes away, you mindless pud,” Pel countered, amused. He had respect for the Rankan women who had moved in to aid the unfortunate of Sanctuary. With an eye for a bargain, or just worried about the best care, many a local had tried to play the knowledge of one against the other. Pel found the ladies to be good neighbors. “Sometimes it stays with the victim for a lifetime. It can only be treated, not cured. Didn’t they tell you that, too?” The expression on Whido’s face told him they had; he was just trying to bring the price down again, for the sixtieth time. Just see what outrage he’d wear if Pel tried to bargain down the price of fresh bread! -
Whido shot a glance at the knot of Irrune men loitering casually by the door. “Well, do something! People think I’m infecting my goods.” He waggled a hand at his flourdusted face. The oil from his pores caused it to cake in runnels.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Pel said, crossing his arms and leaning back thoughtfully. “You look like one of your own crumb cakes. Isn’t that a good advertisement?”
“Pel!” Whido sputtered.
The healer couldn’t help but laugh.
Once more, he handed over a salve and a draught in a rag-stoppered clay bottle. He didn’t need to tell Whido what to do with it, but this time he put out an upturned palm. “Eight padpols. Four for today, and four for last week. I’ll get the accounting for your other missed weeks next time I see you.”
“Pel!”
The healer folded his long arms and fixed him with a bright blue eye.
“No argument. You didn’t come to help yesterday. I don’t walk in shite twice on purpose. Payment at the time of service. We’ll discuss credit again when you’ve been up to date for a few months.”
Grumbling, Whido felt in his scrip. He plunked down eight blackened shards of silver and stomped out. The brown-cloaked man just inside the door came to take his place on the stool. Pel judged him to be around thirty, silky brown hair and beard framing a weather-bronzed face. He held out a hand. The fingers were swollen and bruised, causing the gash across the back to stand out proud.
Pel began to pick the clods of earth and stone fragments out of the torn flesh and swab it with a cleansing solution. “How’d you do this?”
“New horse,” the Irrune gritted. “Bashed me into a wall then tossed me off. Rubbed my glove into my hand. Does that stuff have to sting?”
“Yes,” Pel said. “I’ve never found a mixture that worked that didn’t. It’ll go numb in a moment. Hold still, this won’t take long.”
He took a strand of gut out of the bowl where he kept it soaking and threaded it into a needle cleaned and heated in candleflame. The man tensed as the needle went into his skin, then relaxed visibly at the promised numbness. As Pel worked on closing the deep gash, the man’s companions wandered about the shop. No other patients were waiting, so they spoke to one another loudly in their own language.
“Eh?”
A brown hand reached past Pel’s elbow. He thought nothing of it, until he saw the hand close around the blue stone that Arizak’s lady had given him. He glanced over his shoulder and recognized the mustachioed face of the man holding it: Naimun, son of Arizak and brother of Raith.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Pel asked, as the man examined the stone, turning it over and peering into it.
“Indeed it is,” Naimun replied smoothly, tossing the stone from one hand to another. He was far taller than Raith, and had a fluidity of movement that went beyond grace, to almost a snakelike sinuousness. “My father’s first-wife likes blue stones.” His eyes rose suddenly to Pel’s. “This one is a great deal like one she has. May I bring her this one as a gift? I will pay you for it.”
Pel took up too much flesh in his next stitch, earning a grunt from his patient as he hit a non-numbed portion. He swallowed hard, and dabbed a little more deadening salve on the skin. “I must decline, good ser,” Pel said, uneasily. He prayed Meshpri’s kindness that the stone would not begin to glow now. “It was a present from a lady.”
“Would she be pleased to see her gift used to hold down paper, instead of holding a place of honor in your home?” Naimun asked. “But, I see you live here.” He gestured around the renovated temple. Pel noticed his eyes picking up details of sacks of herbs and grasses, the store of wood, and the multitude of baskets, just the things one might concentrate on if one was planning to wreck or burn a home.
He tied off the knot at the top of the scar, and covered his work with a patch of clean lint that he knotted into place with a length of boiled linen. The man reached into his scrip for a couple of soldats and put them down. Naimun swept up the silver and replaced it with a round, bright disk that glittered unexpectedly in the dimness of the temple. Gold. Pel glanced at the bright coin, then gave the prince a curious look.
“For your services, healer, and maybe for more later on.”
“Do you ail, ser?” Pel asked. “How can I help?”
“Not I,” Naimun said. He flicked his fingers, and the wounded man strode to the front of the building, out of earshot “You have heard that my father is gravely ill.”
“I had heard he lost a leg,” Pel equivocated.
“A foot. But he continues to s
uffer from the wound. In fact, so much that it might be a mercy if the gods were to gather him into their bosom.” Naimun shot him a sideways glance.
“Each man and woman goes in good time,” Pel said, knowing perfectly well what the prince was asking of him, and knowing just as clearly that Naimun knew he understood. “Besides, he has healers and magicians in plenty. I have heard stories of the great shaman …”
“A fraud,” Naimun purred. “But I know your reputation. You are good at your craft. I appreciate that.” He tossed the smooth blue stone from his left to his right hand. He set it down where he had found it and smoothed it with deliberate fingers. “A fine tool, perhaps, to be used by the right craftsman. To use toward the right outcome, eh?”
“I am afraid I don’t understand, ser,” Pel said, his heart rising into his throat. “It’s only a stone.”
“Of course it is. And you are only an apothecary, a herbalist, who dispenses drugs for the well-being of your patients. But what if they are in so much pain that they wish to die?”
“I never use poisons,” Pel stated firmly.
“But the ease into long sleep …” Naimun suggested smoothly. “What do you do for the ones whose every moment is a misery? Do you never give them enough poppy to help them go?”
Pel hesitated. “I am guided by their wishes.”
“But what if I could assure you that a patient does wish it, but is incapable of expressing such a wish? Whether by infirmity or pride?”
“The patient would have to be the one to tell me,” Pel said. “My craft demands I do no harm.”
At that moment the blue stone burst into life, radiance shooting out from between Naimun’s fingers. They both stared at it. Naimun pulled his eyes away from the stone and fixed them on Pel.
“I don’t know why it does that,” Pel blurted out, desperately. “I’m sure it’s magical, but neither of us knows what it’s for. It suddenly lights up, for no reason. I wish it would do that at night.”
