Visions of Power

by Jeffrey Quyle

  He ran to them and grabbed Ellen’s arm. “Come back. You can stay with us. We’ve got an extra room and need cleaning help; don’t go back to Roger. Stay here and be safe for a few days. Get your bearings and we’ll decide what to do next,” he took her other arm as well so that she faced him directly.

  She looked up into his face for a long minute. “Just move in with a stranger? With my daughter? Leave everything behind? I can’t do that,” she said, shaking her head.

  “If you stay with us, I will not harm your daughter. I will not hurt you, or do…those other things to you. Leah is here and will be here and is going to be a mother herself soon, obviously. I see the pain you’re in. I do not want you or Hannah to suffer,” he looked down at her daughter, who he still had not heard make a single sound. “She can talk, can’t she?” he asked.

  “She can, but around men she’s frightened because Roger…” Ellen’s voice trailed away. “Alright,” she spoke up, “I’ll come with you. Some voice tells me it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Great!” Alec said. “That voice is the Lord talking to you. Just go wait in the back of the kitchen and we’ll talk after I take care of the other patients.”

  Back in his shop, Alec began going through the rooms, finding a variety of common ailments some of which he treated and some he asked Leah to treat. He splinted broken fingers, put ointments on rashes, gave herbal infusions to relieve headaches, and advised against eating cabbage to one man. Two others walked out rather than see someone so young, and one man walked away disappointed because Alec could not cure his impotence. All in all though, when the last patient was done hours later Alec felt good about using his abilities to help so many people. And he felt exhausted by using his health vision so constantly.

  Ellen and Hannah came out to join Leah and him in the front room as they closed the door. They had just began to talk about what to have for dinner when a shadow outside drew their attention to a large carriage that stopped in front of their shop.

  “Look at that, the seal of Trader Millershome,” Ellen said with respect. “The richest man in Goldenfields is in your neighborhood.”

  The door opened as a servant came into the room followed a moment later by Helen, looking frightened and upset. “Alec, pack a bag and come quickly. The Duke has been attacked, and I’m afraid you’re the only one who can save him!”

  Chapter 14 – The Duke’s Palace

  All three adults gaped at Helen in disbelief. “Late this morning assassins entered the Duke’s palace and assaulted him. He survived, but is just barely clinging to life with his physicians attending him. Natha and I agreed that you are the only one who can hope to save him,” she repeated and elaborated on her report. “Pack a bag quickly and my carriage will take you to the palace. Natha is waiting for you there.”

  Alec shook off his weariness and went downstairs to his supplies, where he quickly packed everything he could think of to battle infection, promote healing, and dull pain, and added the fine needles and thread he had bought that morning. He quickly ran back up the stairs.

  “Goodbye Leah, I’ll be back when I can,” he said as he kissed her cheek and went out the door after Helen. As soon as they climbed in the carriage she knocked on the front and the driver started them moving. Within minutes they had maneuvered their way to the bridge leading to the Duke’s island palace. There Alec saw many soldiers, probably including some of those he had seen heading in that direction during the morning. Their carriage was allowed through; they pulled to stop in a courtyard in front of the palace proper, and watched Natha come out to greet them. After a quick, private exchange with Helen, Natha shook Alec’s hand, then pulled him by the arm through the courtyard and into the palace.

  “This will be ticklish, a young fellow like you coming in where these learned doctors cannot help, Alec,” Natha counseled him quietly as they walked down a hallway with two soldiers escorting them. “Don’t worry about that. Just tell me anything you think will help and we’ll make it happen. Besides,” he added with bemusement, “those old doctors may prefer that you take over because they think it’s a helpless case and may prefer that you take the blame for his death.”

  “Not that I expect he’ll die, now that you’re here,” Natha added.

  Alec felt suddenly ill with anticipation of how badly this situation might turn out. He still felt exhausted from working with supplicants all day, and now something like this seemed unimaginable.

  They stopped in front of a door that one of the soldiers held open, and Alec was dragged in by Natha. In the dim room, a bed at the far cradled had a recumbent figure lying surrounded by five attendants, with three pairs of soldiers also stationed by the bed and around the room.

  “Make way, move aside,” Natha said authoritatively.

  The low voices of the bedside watchers stopped. They looked up, and seeing the face of the rich trader who was well known in court, they obediently stepped aside. “Alright Alec, save our Duke, please,” Natha whispered in his ear as they arrived by the bed.

  Alec looked down at the Duke. A very pale man, probably from loss of blood, lay under a sheet. He was stoutly built, but Alec saw little fat. He had a narrow mustache and a neat beard around his chin and mouth. Alec pulled the sheet down and saw several cuts and two deep stabs on his torso. The young healer took a deep breath and carefully scanned his health vision from head to toe, looking at the Duke’s body meticulously, looking for every clue he could find to the injuries suffered.

  Neither of the stabs had hit vital organs, by some miracle. There was a great loss of blood, and already some minor infections were starting to fester. But beyond that, beyond the pain that the unconscious mind was fighting, Alec saw three of the knife cuts, perhaps all made by the same blade, that glowed with the ugly look of poison.

  He stepped back and let his mind begin to sort through its divinely imprinted collection of memories and remedies, trying to sort out the right steps to take, and the order to administer them in. He thought about what he had brought, calculated what additional things he would need, and decided on a course of action.

  He placed his hands over the Duke’s heart and began to pray. “Lord, through your son’s blood we all are saved and our sins are removed. Please save this man, eripio. Cleanse his blood, purgo, defaeco, replenish it, plenus, victus. Heal his wounds. Show him the miracle of your love Father. Amen.” He felt the same sense of grace he had felt at Annalea’s bed. To those in the darkened room, it appeared that a slight nimbus flared around Alec and the Duke following the prayer, though some later insisted it couldn’t have happened.

  “We need a bishop and twelve holy men to come say prayers around this bedroom tonight, Natha,” Alec said when he straightened back up. “I need a pitcher of boiling water and four bowls. I need some herbs I have back at my shop, unless you have them here – Lion’s Mane, root of woodstalk, greenberry bush, and leaves of velvetleaf. I also need extract from the flower of the rose of the south, and some dried sap of northern cedar and a glass of milk. I’ve brought everything else I need. Can you get those for me?”

  Natha looked at one of the silent men against the wall of the room. “Martin, you’re the Duke’s pharmacist, how long will it take to assemble those items?”

  “I could have all but one here in an hour, but those aren’t going to help this situation, any more than those priests are going to do anything besides pray for his soul after he dies,” a tall man said with scorn.

  Natha looked at one of the soldiers by the door. “Escort this man to his rooms so that he retrieves everything he can and have him back here in an hour. Take two other soldiers with you, and slice off one of his toes for every minute he is late. Go quickly!”

  Alec looked at the man, who grew pale at the command, and the apparent willingness of the soldiers to obey. “What item won’t you have?” Alec asked.

  “There’s no extract of the rose of the south here…” Martin replied before being cut off by Alec.

  “In tha
t case, bring Gilgiad’s ointment and lexgreen leaves.”

  The soldier took the man’s arm and headed out the door, calling for others to join him.

  Alec opened his bag and took out the ingredients he had available. He mixed together two small piles of dried leaves, and shredded a root over one of them, scraping his own knuckles repeatedly on the shredder in his hasty actions. He put one pile in his small stone bowl and used his pestle to mash the ingredients into the finest powder he could manage.

  A servant arrived with the boiling water in a pitcher, and a stack of bowls. Alec poured a small amount of the water into one bowl, and added the powdered concoction he had just ground.

  “Could you go to the kitchen and get some cooking oil and some corn starch or some egg whites?” Alec asked the servant. He realized that he’d need to set his infection-fighting medicine in some form that wouldn’t drip away between treatments overnight.

  He saw a pitcher with drinking water on a table in the room, and added some of the water to cool the temperature of his mixture. With that ready, he applied it to all the cuts he saw on the Duke.

  “Are there any cuts on his back?” he asked the attending physicians who still stood by the wall silently watching him. The servant arrived with the items he requested and placed them on the foot of the bed.

  “No, the, the assassins... never got behind him apparently, or didn’t try,” one doctor said.

  Alec noticed the hesitation in his speech but couldn’t take time to decipher its meaning.

  “Natha, would you send a message to Leah to let her know I’ll not be back until tomorrow night at the earliest?” Alec asked his companion.

  “Certainly. You’ll be alright here for a few minutes while I take care of that, won’t you?” he asked loudly so that everyone heard the question. He stared pointedly at one of the remaining soldiers, who imperceptibly nodded. Without waiting for an answer, he left the room. Moments later, two more soldiers entered and took up stations beside the bed.

  Alec selected one of his finest needles, and picked up the silk thread. While waiting for the other ingredients to arrive, he decided to try to stitch some of the open slices closed. He selected one on the arm and sprinkled more of the infection-fighting liquid on it.

  “You don’t think the Duke will mind if we close these wounds so he doesn’t have such gaping scars do you?” he asked the soldier closest to him, an officer. “Maybe we could leave a couple of the more impressive ones so he’ll have something to show the ladies, eh?”

  The soldier grinned for a moment, but kept his eyes on the doorway and the men in the room, not stopping to make eye contact with Alec.

  Alec began to stitch the sliced flesh together. He could tell that he’d been called in too long after the attack to make the stitches work as well as possible, but they would be some help in the healing.

  As he finished repairing the third cut Natha returned to the room. He looked around, satisfied with all he saw. “The message is on its way to your shop, and another has been delivered to the bishop. Your pharmacist will be here in less than twenty minutes or he’ll be hobbling in with a few toes missing.” The trader looked closely at what Alec was doing and turned pale, then turned away. “I’ve never seen any of our doctors sew flesh together like that. Does it help?”

  “It will help it heal faster, with less scar tissue to form,” Alec said. “It would have worked best if it had been started hours ago, but this will still do some good and I can’t do much else until the other things arrive.”

  As he finished the next cut the medical ingredients arrived, securely escorted by the soldiers.

  “Do you need anything else from this one?” Natha asked about the pharmacist.

  “No, not from him for the rest of the night. I’ll see what we need tomorrow,” Alec said as the man stumbled back over to the group of observers who remained huddled together in the corner.

  Alec began mixing together the ingredients he needed as antidote to the poison. He didn’t have a great deal of time left to administer it, and after that he needed to address the lack of blood with another treatment, and then he hoped to administer something to induce a long, long deep sleep to allow thorough healing without the pain interfering. He felt nervous about the narrow margin of time available to work, and twice dropped instruments on the floor in his haste.

  As soon as the antidote was ready he asked for servants to sit the Duke upright so that he could administer it as a drink. The procedure needed to prepare it had taken a long time to go through the steps to mix the items together in the proper sequence with the proper pauses for reactions, and there was no time left.

  He held the Duke’s mouth open and gently slipped a small amount in. The Duke coughed momentarily, then swallowed. Alec poured more, and it went down smoothly that time.

  As he continued to administer the antidote, he heard the door behind him open, and someone entered the room, followed by several others, it seemed from the sounds he heard. He didn’t bother to look, but finished administering as much antidote as he felt appropriate, keeping some set aside for direct application to the wounded flesh where the poison had entered the Duke’s bloodstream.

  Climbing off the bed he turned around to face the bishop of the cathedral flanked by several priests, all craning their necks to see what was happening.

  Alec spoke to the bishop, a more kindly old man than he had expected, and requested that the clerics spend the night performing an ancient church chant that probably hadn’t been heard sung as part of a public ceremony in sixty years. The bishop’s eyes flickered in brief surprise that Alec even knew the name of such a chant, then he set his priests to work filling the room with an ancient tongue that invoked a sense of peace and serenity in the room.

  Alec turned back to the Duke. He soaked small bandages in the poison’s antidote, then laid those atop the wounds where the poison had entered the Duke’s flesh. He tied strips of other bandages around them to hold them firmly against the cuts.

  He then began mixing ingredients to strengthen the Duke’s blood. The ingredients were easier to mix together than the antidote for the poison had been. With soldiers’ help he again propped the Duke up and fed him the liquid in small sips.

  Finally he prepared a small amount of sleep-inducing potion. That too was administered.

  He then returned to working on the antibiotics. Most of those who had been in the room when he arrived had left already, and new observers had entered. All the solders except the two who were at the bedside with him and their officer had also changed positions, but those three refused to be relieved and stayed with Alec and the Duke. With the egg whites he foamed the antibiotics into a thick preparation. He stitched up more wounds and slathered the gooey concoction onto those under bandages. Finally he was satisfied that that work was done and he asked the soldiers to turn the Duke on his side so Alec could examine his back. Just as he had been told, there were no wounds there.

  Exhausted after working long hours into the night, Alec barely noticed the commotion at the door as a new person entered.

  “Boy, remove your hands from my father,” he heard a voice over his shoulder loudly speak, and a hand pulled his shoulder backwards. Alec looked up at a man standing over him, a man with long, well-coiffured hair and fine features, dressed like a dandy at this early hour of the soon-to-begin morning.

  “Who are you to be abusing my father’s body in his last hours?” the young man demanded. “Cannot his body be respected and allowed to peacefully pass to the next world?”

  The chanting of the priests, which had been such a soothing background sound, faltered.

  “What last hours do you mean?” Alec replied, feeling indignation rise through his exhaustion. He found himself too tired to restrain the angry response that came to his lips. “The Duke only needs to rest well and be tended for the next week or so and he’ll be fine. He’s in no mortal danger. Your meddling in this affair is more of a threat to him than anything else right now,” Alec
said, his voice continuing to rise in fury at the notion that one of the Duke’s own sons would interrupt him in such a manner.

  He saw the two soldiers nearest him stand more upright, growing tense over the situation. Who they thought was right or wrong he didn’t know.

  “Don’t try to bluff me child. I’ve hurried back here at a breakneck speed because I was told my father was dying,” the son replied. “Surely no stripling like you is doing him any good. Why are these priests in here singing a dirge if he’s not on death’s doorstep? Why are you here at all? How did you get in here? Did the embalmer send you in too early?”

  “I was brought here by Natha Millershome, who knows my medical skills. The holy men are providing words of a healing prayer from the days our Savior was in our land. And you must have either come from a party or you stopped to dress like a dandy before coming to presumably weep for your father, though I’ve seen no tears,” Alec shouted forcefully, all self-restraint eroded by his exhaustion.

  He heard murmurs of assent from somewhere else in the room, and watched the princeling flinch, then recoil from the accusation about being at a party. His face grew red.

  I’m done for now, and will take my leave, but the Duke will need tending later this morning,” Alec said in a quieter voice. “If Natha wants me back to treat the Duke it will be my pleasure.”

  With that he turned his back on the intruder and began to pack up his supplies and materials; his hands were trembling. He turned to the priests, “Continue your chants until the sun rise is visible in this room. Your voices and their holy words have done good work tonight.” Then he opened the door and walked out in the hallway.

  As soon as he was there he realized he had no idea of where to go. “Come with us lad. We’re going to take care of you. You need to rest after your night’s labors,” a hand on his elbow turned out to be that of the bedside officer who had stood watch with him through the night.