All Fall Down (33 page)

“We needed you!” she burst out.

“I know, Alcia, and I truly am sorry I could not have come before this. But Lord Shaine was gravely ill as well, and I have just come from—” I cast about for the word for “operate” and instead substituted, “I have come from cutting open the boil, so that the disease could come forth. I came here as soon as I heard that your father had need of me. May I see your brother?”

She hesitated, then pushed her chair back so I might approach and bend over him. As with the others, he burned with fever, and his slender frame shivered and shook from the resulting chills, even though the door was open to the room with the blazing fire beyond, and a brazier burned in here as well. I bent toward him, and he coughed again, each spasm seeming to tear at his lungs. He did have enough strength to hold a handkerchief to his mouth, and so I did not see the discharge that he brought up, but I knew what I would find if I inspected the handkerchief.

Even in the throes of the coughing fit, he struggled to get out one word. “Aur - Auren?”

I feared what the truth would do to him. He had never seemed to be an overly strong boy, and now the disease had its merciless claws in him, shredding at his lungs, overwhelming his body’s ability to defend itself. The news he desired could be the death of him. So I equivocated. “I have come from tending her. She is in her room.” Not lies, not at all, but of course the most important facts had been withheld.
 

It seemed he guessed I did not tell the whole truth, for his brow furrowed, and he opened his mouth again, only to be interrupted by another wracking fit of coughs.
 

“Don’t try to speak, my lord,” I told him. The cough could be soothed temporarily by the tincture of coltsfoot I had prepared earlier; I turned from him to pull it from my satchel, glad that I always kept a pewter spoon for such purposes with the rest of my kit. And as he opened his mouth to attempt a protest, I poured a dose of the tincture down his throat. He coughed again, but not as deep—he was more surprised than anything else. “Keep watch over him,” I told Alcia. “This should soothe his cough for a time, and I will come back to check on him as soon as I can.”

“You’re going?” she asked, the panic clear in her voice. I guessed she had thought she would only have to be his nurse until I arrived on the scene, and then she could be relieved of that duty.

“I fear I must, Alcia. I need to go to the kitchen, where I will be making what I hope is a cure. But I cannot help anyone if I do not go there now and tend to the process.”

She nodded uncertainly, as if she hadn’t quite understood what I had said but somehow knew better than to question me. That was sufficient; I sent an encouraging smile in her direction and went out to see their father, who paced in front of the fireplace as if he couldn’t find the strength to sit down and be still.

“His fever is high,” I said, “and the cough quite bad, but I have given him a tincture that should quiet the coughing for awhile, as well as tea that will help to bring down his fever. Alcia seems to be keeping good watch on him, but I must go. The only way I can truly help him—help anyone else in his situation—is to get back to the task at hand.”

“And what would that be?” From his expression, it was clear that Lord Marten thought the only task I should have at my hand was caring for his son.

“The cure to this pestilence,” I said, then turned and left him.

I hoped it would be that simple.

Chapter 18

At least Elissa had been diligent—when I arrived in the kitchen, I saw the table where Merime used to chop vegetables piled with all manner of moldy loaves and rolls. Truly, I had not thought we would have that much, but it was clear that housekeeping duties in the kitchen had fallen by the wayside without a guiding hand, and so food had begun to spoil that would never have gotten to that state under Merime’s watchful eye.

Elissa waited for me there, with another of the kitchen slaves, a girl even younger than Elissa, named Alinne. They both looked up at me expectantly as I entered the room, and I felt more than ever the weight of need. I could not fail them, or the man who lay recovering from his surgery in the tower above. The goddess had said the answer lay here, but she had given little more information than that. I would have to bring all of my knowledge to bear, and hope it would not fail me.

“You’ve done well,” I said. “Now what we must do is break off all the moldy bits, and gather them here.” I found a bowl on the lower shelf of the work table and set it on the tabletop. “Try not to take any extra bread with the moldy parts, if you can. We want to concentrate the mixture as much as possible.”

“The mixture?” Elissa asked.

“I’m going to brew a sort of—well, I suppose you could call it beer, for lack of a better word.”

“From this?” Her eyebrows lifted. She was not the type to contradict me, but I also knew that every village and hamlet across my homeland made its own brew, and very likely she knew far more about the process than I did.
 

“Yes, from this. I know it sounds strange, but in that mold is medicine that can help us to fight the plague. But we have to concentrate it, make it into a drink we can give to those who are sick.”

Alinne, whom I did not know well, slanted me a frankly dubious look. But as she had been raised to obey orders, she set about removing the moldy portions of the bread and popping them into the bowl. Since she was small and slender, and her fingers delicate and nimble as well, she proved well-suited to the task. Elissa set to work as well, picking out the bits of mold as deftly as she once used to braid Auren’s hair.

That thought brought a certain choking sensation to my throat, and I swallowed and turned away from them so they could not see the tears starting in my eyes. I could not think of that now, nor could I think of Lord Shaine, lying upstairs with only Raifal to look over him. The sooner I set about this task, the sooner I could bring him the help he so desperately needed.
 

I located a large, deep pan and went to the pump to fill it with water. Afterward, I set it on the trivet and swung it over the fire, which at least had been well-tended. Probably Elissa had seen to it merely to ward the morning chill from the kitchen, but whatever her reasons for building it up, it helped me now.
 
The water must be hot enough to increase the fermentation process, but not so hot that it would break down the mold and render it ineffective. How precisely any of these mechanisms worked, I could not say—I could only rely on my years of working with herbal remedies and the procedures my Order used to compound them. I didn’t know how they would translate into this new and strange ingredient I had never worked with before.
 

“Is this enough?” Elissa asked, and held up the bowl, which brimmed with bits of moldy bread in various shades of green and blue.

It will have to be
, I thought, but I only nodded and said, “It will do. Bring it here.”

She came around the table, holding the bowl in front of her with all the gravity of a temple acolyte bringing an offering to Inyanna’s altar. I took it from her and carefully tipped its contents into the pan of hot water. “A spoon, please, Elissa.”

At once she dashed away to fetch the requested utensil, while Alinne also sidled around the corner of the table and peered suspiciously into the pot. Her nose wrinkled. I had to confess the mixture didn’t look particularly appetizing, as the bread and its accompanying mold had begun to break down in the warm water, turning into a green soupy mess that looked rather like blended pond scum.

“Here, mistress,” Elissa said, and handed me a large wooden spoon. I took it from her with a nod and began to slowly stir the contents of the pan, keeping the viscous fluid moving so that the heat would be distributed evenly through it. When I compounded my tinctures, I usually tried to keep them at a simmer for at least an hour so the ingredients could mix properly, but I had no idea whether the mold would react the same way as the extracts of the various herbs and plants I used. Then again, mold did tend to like the heat, which was why it could thrive in a kitchen even in the heart of winter, as the kitchen hearth was usually the one fire that was never allowed to go out.

“What are you going to do with it?” Alinne asked. Apparently she had no great fear of me, or perhaps she had already seen so much that a woman physician was no longer the fearsome thing she might have once been. She was a pert little thing, with a sharp nose under its linen swathing and tilted dark eyes. In fact, she reminded me rather of an inquisitive little rat, although I supposed she was pretty enough, in a pointed sort of way.

“I’ll heat it, and then strain it. And then I shall give a measure of it to everyone to drink.”

“To drink!” she exclaimed. “How will you get anyone to swallow t
hat
?” And she pointed at the soupy greenish mass in the pan.

Well, then, that was always the question. I’d encountered many over the years who had no desire to take their medicine, even when they had evidence all around them that it would do them good. But I rather thought there wouldn’t be many at Donnishold who would refuse the concoction, not when the alternative was almost certain death—Master Wilys’ almost miraculous recovery notwithstanding.

“I’ll simply ask them if they would rather have the plague, if they give me any trouble,” I replied calmly, still stirring away at the mold mixture.
 

 
That seemed to mollify her; she appeared to swallow, and bite her lip, and suddenly seem very interested in the tips of her toes in their scuffed low boots. I guessed that, like Raifal and his comrade—and most likely everyone else in the hall—she had been counting the minutes and wondering when it would be her turn for the hollow cough to descend, for her forehead to flush with fever.
 

“You can test it on me, mistress,” Elissa said in stout tones, with a sideways glance at Alinne. I got the impression she didn’t have much use for the other girl.
 

I smiled then, and said, “As to that, I always taste my tinctures first, so that I am not inflicting anything on my patients that I would not take myself. But you should have the first dose after that, so I know you are protected.”

“How does it work?” She peered over my shoulder into the pan; despite everything, she still smelled good, of the chamomile and peppermint hair wash I had mixed up earlier in the fall.
 

A very good question. One might as well ask how the plants grow, or why the sun rises in the east. To these and so many questions, neither I nor the members of my Order had the true answers. Oh, we knew that a cough could be soothed with coltsfoot, and a fever with willowbark; that packing a wound with honey speeded its healing, and that peppermint—besides adding a sweetness to soaps and hair tonics—was a sovereign cure for an upset stomach. But why these things worked, how they interacted with the body and effected these cures, we still had very little idea.

I knew, though, that to confess my ignorance would only bolster Alinne’s suspicions, and would of course set Elissa somewhat less at ease, and so I attempted to manufacture a reply that settled the matter to both their satisfaction. “In my order, we are taught that disease and contagion are carried in the air, and in the blood, by tiny specks one cannot see with the naked eye. And there is something in some cures that fights these specks, and drives them forth from the body. Not all cures work for all ailments, which is why I would not dose Merime’s weak heart with feverfew, nor give a patient with plague an infusion of foxglove. And because the plague is so rare, and so pernicious, it requires a very special medicine to treat it.”

Elissa seemed to accept this explanation without question. She nodded, and returned to watching me swirl the greenish mold mixture. Now, after some time over steady heat, the bread had almost broken all the way down, and the solution had taken on the consistency of very watery oatmeal. Alinne seemed rather less convinced, as her eyes had narrowed when I spoke of the tiny specks that carried disease, but she forbore from saying anything else.

“Alinne, do you know if Merime had a strainer?” I knew it was better to ask her, as she had been assigned to the kitchens, whereas Elissa had spent very little time there. It was something that the laboratories and stillrooms of the Order took for granted, but I knew it was not the sort of thing one might readily find in every kitchen because of the expertise required to make such fine screens. These things were easily procured in Lystare, whose factories churned out an astonishing amount of useful items, but in Seldd they did not have such resources.

As I feared, Alinne hesitated, then shook her head. “I do not know what that is. When Merime wished to strain something, she used a length of cheesecloth.”

It made sense, I supposed. After all, linen in all weaves was the one thing of which there was no shortage in Seldd. “It will have to do. Please bring me several lengths of it, and several clean pans.”

Pert or no, the girl was used to following orders. She stepped away from the hearth and went to a cupboard at the far end of the kitchen, from which she drew forth a pile of the thin, open-weave cloth. On her way back to the fireplace, she stopped and retrieved two more pans, both of which looked clean enough, although I would still have to make sure they were thoroughly cleansed. It would do those suffering from the plague no good to be introduced to more illness because I could not be bothered to make sure all my pans were clean.

To that end, I set Elissa to fetching another large pan of water, and moved the trivet to one side so she could set it over the fire on a second trivet. As it heated, I bade Alinne continue stirring the mold mixture so I could steal a few minutes to look in on those in the hall. All around me was the sound of coughing, and haggard, hollow-eyed faces. But the women there seemed to still have things in hand, and I could do little except administer some more tea, and murmur a few reassuring words. At least no one seemed materially worse than they had been a half-hour before, and I prayed they would hold on long enough for me to administer the brew I was concocting.