Blood Feud (20 page)

We heard a beating on the door, and voices below, and Anna’s shuffling footsteps on the stair. She came into the stairway arch, puffing a little with the hurried climb. ‘Jestyn Englishman, there is a man at the street door asking for you. He will not come in out of the rain, but bids you to come out to him.’

So I went down the stairs and across the entrance chamber. I had long ago ceased to notice the unevenness of my own footfall on the tiled floor. It was blue dusk in the street beyond the open door. Cold air came in, but no sound save the hushing of the autumn rain. The man was waiting, a darker shadow in the sodden dusk. He loomed forward in the doorway, into the fringe of the lamplight; drenched and ragged, gaunt with a gauntness like something that has strayed after many days out of its grave.

He said, as though he had not quite enough breath for speaking, ‘I knew that if you lived, you would wait for me. Has it seemed long, the waiting for Anders Herulfson?’

I KNEW THE
man in the instant before he spoke; a sudden flash of recognition quicker than sight; and realized in the same splinter of time, that I had no knife on me. The smell of danger should have come to me with Anna’s message, but some part of me must have been asleep . . . The lamplight showed me the flash of his dagger, and I flung myself sideways just in time to hear the blade cut wind past my shoulder.

Behind me, Anna was shrieking like a stuck pig as I went for his dagger hand. I got him by the wrist, trying to twist it backward. For a few moments he fought like a bare sark, like a barrow wight; his left arm was round me, crushing out my breath; while I forced my forearm across his throat, thrusting up his chin with all the strength that was in me. We reeled and trampled to and fro; and then he began to cough, and the knife went spinning from his grasp, and in the same instant he seemed to lose strength and almost crumble. I got my sound leg behind his knees, and hooked his legs from under him, and we crashed down together, with him underneath. If the knife had been within my reach, the thing would have ended then and there, but it had been kicked far across the floor; and I was squatting on my good knee and bending over him, shouting for Anna to stop screaming and bring the lamp. I was hauling him further into the room – he had fallen across the threshold and lay half in the street – but Anna’s shrieks had fetched Alexia running, and it was she who brought the lamp, and knelt down at his other side.

He seemed to be nothing but bones and sodden rags, and the lamplight on his face cast great shadows into his eye-sockets
and under his jagged cheek-bones; and a little blood and pus, that certainly had nothing to do with my blows, was trickling from the corner of his mouth. His eyes began to open, and he fixed them on my face, those odd eyes, one blue, one grey, burning bright with fever in their discoloured pits.

‘I came to – finish the feud,’ he said, in that same breathless tone, yet only slurring his words a little. ‘But it seems that I’ve left it – just too late.’

And I saw that he expected me to finish it, and was ready. It would have been easy now to reach the knife . . .

‘We can speak of that later,’ I said. And to Alexia, ‘We must get him into the night-room, and those wet rags off him, he is sick enough without their help.’ But that was the voice of Demetriades’ training, and under it, a small cold voice deep within me was saying: ‘The Norns have given him into your hands. He will be easy to kill, too easy. Then the old feud will be finished indeed.’ And part of me thrust the voice away, and part of me listened.

He was horribly light to carry; and soon enough, he was lying on the cot in the small white-walled room behind the surgery, stripped of his drenched rags and wrapped in blankets.

There was an old scar white under his ribs on the left-hand side, and as I looked at it, I remembered the field armoury in the hills beyond Berea, and Anders saying, ‘As good as new, save when something still catches me under the ribs – like a bee-sting – when I laugh.’ Thormod’s dagger must have pierced a lung and done some kind of damage that had not healed through the years. Or maybe it had healed and then something had torn the inner scar-tissue, though the outer scar was slim and silvery as the vein on a poplar leaf. Now, there was some kind of lung fever on him; no doubt as to that. Also he was three parts starved. When Alexia returned
from quieting Anna, I asked her for some broth, and between us we managed to get a little down him, though by that time he was not much more than half-conscious again. And when that was done, I set to work to find out if that might be what the mischief was, and how bad.

I had no need to feel for the pulse at the base of the throat, for Anders was so thin that I could see the life beating there, fast, much too fast; I could hear the painful breathing that only half-filled his lungs as though the top of each breath was cut off with a knife. He had been sweating when I put the blankets around him, now he began to shiver; long agonizing shudders that ran through him, shaking the narrow bed; and yet his body when I touched it was as burning hot as ever. And I noticed how, even half-conscious, he lay curved a little to the left as though drawn down by pain in his left side. Demetriades had long since taught me how to listen to the sounds under men’s ribs, by tapping with a finger of one hand on a finger of the other spread against the chest wall. I did that now, and all down the left side of Anders’s ribs the sound that came back was dull and sodden, instead of the clear drum note that should answer to one’s fingers there.

I was too intent on what I was doing, to hear a footstep, and movement beside me, but suddenly Demetriades was there. He bent over Anders, and set a hand on his forehead, then felt the painful knot of life beating at the base of his throat. But he only said, ‘Who is he?’

‘A man I knew in my days among the Northmen. Anders Herulfson. It is the lung fever.’

Demetriades had his hands on either side of Anders’s chest, feeling the difficult breath come and go. ‘An old enemy?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I think, not an old friend – Anna was telling me something concerning a dagger.’

‘He was delirious.’

‘So, and delirious, just chanced to find his way to this house and ask for you by name?’ His hands were moving here and there, testing, probing. ‘No, I’ll ask no more questions.’ He began to tap, the finger of one hand over the finger of the other, as I had been doing, returning again and again to that dull-sounding left side that told of fluid where there should be air, returning to one particular spot in the left side, not far from the little silvery scar.

Anders coughed again, and more blood and pus came out of his mouth, and I wiped it away.

‘He has the lung fever,’ Demetriades agreed, as though I had just said it, and there had been nothing else in between. ‘Do you know why?’

Even now, he did not cease to be the teacher.

‘That scar –’ I hazarded.

The physician nodded. ‘That for the first cause, I should think at least two years ago. Now, a lung abscess. Oh, it may have been lying dormant a long while, many months, but now, a lung abscess. You should not have missed that.’

‘I have not yet had so long practice as you in hearing through my fingers,’ I said.

‘Did you not look at his hands? Look at them now.’

I looked, and saw that the finger-nails that should have been straight, were curved over at the tips, and the part between the base of the nails and the top joints swollen, so that they had a clubbed look. No one knows, though maybe we shall one day, why that happens with a lung abscess. ‘I have looked,’ I said. ‘And I will remember another time.’

Demetriades stood back from the cot, I with him. ‘He must remain here,’ he said. ‘If he has a chance of life, to move him now even over to the hospital, would destroy it.’

‘Has he a chance?’

He was silent a moment, then he said, ‘Even Lazarus had that. If we could cause the abscess to burst and drain . . . We
will try linseed poultices, at least they can do no harm, and may ease him somewhat.’ He began to turn back his loose sleeves as he spoke.

‘Go to your bed, Master,’ I said. Indeed he looked as though he might drop himself, with weariness. ‘I can handle that.’

He hesitated. ‘It is true that you can do as much for him as I can, at this stage.’

Something made me look at Alexia standing in the doorway. It was as though she had called to me in some way that made no sound. Called with her eyes maybe, for they were fixed on me intently enough for that, with a strange questioning in them. She knew all that her father did not, about Anders Herulfson. Just for the moment, our gaze met, and then, as though she was satisfied, she looked away.

Demetriades was giving me my instructions, for the poulticing, for giving him the poppy drink if the restlessness or pain increased, and oil of the dried Indian root the Turks call Altum Koku to cool the fever and help to bring up the evil humours in his chest.

‘But if there is any downward change, call me at once,’ said the old physician. ‘Come, Alexia, there is no more work for you here, at the present time.’

And then I was alone, as I had been time and again in that room with sick or injured men. But this time it was different. This time, the man was Anders Herulfson.

I remember standing and looking down at him, and thinking that he had killed Thormod and now the thing was between him and me. Through all the time since the ambush in the Thracian hills – and surely they had been evil times – he had nursed the thought of killing me, as I waiting here in the city, had nursed the thought of killing him. It could be finished so easily now; a little pressure on the windpipe, and I would feel the life go out, under my hand. And I knew that it was too late; for me as well as for him, it was too late.

I was sick and shaking, and there seemed to be a tight band round my forehead. How long I stood there, I don’t know. I found that I had thrust a hand into the breast of my sark, and was clinging to Thormod’s piece of amber on its blood-stained thong. I loosed my grip carefully, as though I were loosing somebody else’s, finger by finger; and turned and went out to the kitchen quarters to ask Anna for boiling water and to leave the fire made up so that I could boil more as I needed it, through the night.

Then I went back, got a little of the Altum Koku down Anders, and began to make ready the linen cloth and linseed.

The night went on its slow way. Anders was restless, shivering and sweating by turns, muttering of things that made sense to him in the twilight place that he had wandered to, but made none to anyone listening. I kept up the poulticing, rubbed him down with tepid water to cool the fever that was burning him up, wiped away the blood that came when he coughed. It seemed so little, but there was nothing more, save wait, and watch for any change.

And in the darkest hour of the night, a change came. At the time it seemed a wonderful thing. Suddenly he drew a deep breath, deeper than any I had seen him take that night, and coughed up a great mass of blood-stained filth. The poulticing, it seemed, had done its work, and the abscess had burst! Laying him down again – for I had been holding him while the coughing lasted – and cleaning up the mess, I wondered whether I should call my Master. But there was no need, the abscess had burst; now, if it drained properly, the fever should abate of its own accord; now there was a chance of life for Anders which had not been there before; but in all this, there was no cause to go breaking into Demetriades’ much needed rest.

Sure enough, Anders’s breathing grew easier, and the fever began to go down almost at once, and not much more than
an hour later, turning from measuring out his next draught, I found Anders watching me, eyes bruise-rimmed in skeleton face, but perfectly awake and aware.

‘This is an unlikely place and – an unlikely task, to be – finding you in,’ he said, low and dry.

‘Let you not talk,’ I said, almost without thinking. I had said much the same thing to so many sick folk before.

He gave a broken breath of laughter. ‘But I want to talk, and I’ll do what I want – while I can. It can make – but little difference now.’

‘I’d not be so sure,’ I said. ‘You are better. Drink this – it will loosen your cough and help you clear the filth out of your chest.’ And I raised him against my shoulder, and held the Altum Koku to his mouth. He looked at me, and I at him, and for the moment not as enemies. It was as though there was some kind of truce between us. Then he drank, and I laid him down again.

His gaze was still on my face. ‘I thought about this – reunion – all the while I was in – the Bulgars’ hands. Oh yes, they captured me. I’d not be knowing – why they didn’t kill me, save that they – were short of pack animals . . . So I served as a pack pony among the mountains until – I escaped in the spring. A thunderstorm stampeded the ponies, and – I took my chance. I knew – I’d not likely get another.’

‘How did you know I was in Miklagard?’

‘I didn’t. But with a crushed knee – I reckoned you’d not be on campaign in the mountains – any more. I reckoned if you were – still above ground, the city was the – most likely place to seek you. It’s taken me – all summer, but I got here three days ago, and went to – to the Varangian Barracks for word of you. They told me. Old Thunderfist told me – where I should find you –’

‘You went to the Varangians? Knowing there might be those among them who saw how Thormod died?’

‘Why not? I am changed. I knew there was little chance that – any would recognize me if I did not shout my name.’

‘I recognized you,’ I said. ‘I knew you in the dusk, before you spoke your name.’

He was silent a moment, his eyes still on my face. ‘As I would recognize you,’ he said at last. ‘But then, there is a thing between you and me which is as strong as love.’

By morning, the fever was a good way down, and Anders was sleeping fitfully. ‘If the evil humours do not build up again,’ Demetriades said, tapping with his fingers and listening once more, ‘it seems possible that we shall yet save this man who is not your enemy.’

That day, going about my ordinary work, everything seemed unreal to me. I do not think I killed any of my Master’s patients; but half of me was all this while in the narrow white-walled room behind the surgery where Alexia and old Anna were tending Anders Herulfson. Three times during that day, I snatched a moment to see for myself how the thing was going; and the first twice, it was going none so ill, but by evening the fever was mounting again, and when I went to take up my night watch, he was clearly growing weaker. The bursting of the abscess had been only a respite, after all; and the respite was over.