Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) (15 page)

Tristan’s lips draw into a snarl. “He will die if we leave.”

“He will probably die whether you leave or not,” Paul says. “The stars aren’t in his favor.”

I am dying already. I think I can hear the angels singing in heaven.

“I’m finished with this,” Walter says. He motions toward the door with his crossbow. “Get out. All of you. And take Sir Edward with you. Ride away somewhere and don’t return.”

Tristan speaks with a calmness that terrifies me. “I will not leave until Sir Edward’s wound has been treated.”

“I told you not to let them in.” Roger aims his crossbow at Tristan. “Didn’t I tell you not to let them in?”

“I am finished with this too.” Paul sets the saw down on the bed and walks toward the open doorway.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Tristan shouts, and this time the steel is not in his voice, but in his hands. He pulls Paul back to the bed by the hair and places a dagger blade under his throat. The doctor stops moving, his eyes wide as eggs.

Belisencia gasps. “Tristan, no!”

Walter’s face reddens, his neck pulses. “Take your hands off our leech.” He steps forward and jabs the crossbow toward Tristan. “Let him go!”

“God’s bones, Walter!” Roger shouts. “You had to allow them in, didn’t you? You couldn’t listen to me, could you?”

Paul gropes backward with his hand until he finds the saw and tries to strike at Tristan with it. Tristan grabs the doctor’s arm and twists it behind the man’s back. Paul shrieks and drops the saw, but Tristan does not let go. “What do the stars say about broken arms, Paul? I hope you weren’t born under Gemini.”

“Let him go!” Walter aims the crossbow at Tristan’s forehead. “Let him go or I swear I will make you a unicorn!”

Roger slips forward, his crossbow inches from Tristan. “Let go of him and get out!”

It is crowded at my bedside.

The voices of the angels grow louder in my head. I wonder if Elizabeth’s voice is among them.

“I’ll let this gong farmer go when he heals Edward!” Tristan shouts.

The song of the angels swells to fill the room. But they are not angels, they are dancers. Dancing men and women shuffle into the cottage. They hold hands and sing and weep and look at us with tortured eyes. The line is led by a woman with a blue silk veil wrapped around her head. She sobs and weaves between Belisencia and Roger, then knocks Walter backward and leads the line between him and Tristan.

Walter does his best to ignore them. “
Let him go
!”

Belisencia covers her ears and shrieks. “Stop it! Stop it all of you!”

“Everyone…everyone stop…” I feel faint from sitting up.

The dancers wind though the room like a living serpent. A man wearing a green muffin cap kicks Paul’s trestle table over. Metal tools fall jangling to the floorboards. Ceramic jugs shatter, splashing fluids across the room. Linen bandages and leeches, silk thread and metal knives, needles and spoons—they fall in a rattling shower onto the wooden floor.

“This will accomplish nothing!” Roger shouts. “
Release him
!”

“I’m going to shoot!” Walter shouts. “I’m going to send you to hell!”

“Please, Tristan!” Belisencia cries. “
Please
!”

I can’t make sense of what is happening. Everyone is shouting at the same time. Belisencia is crying and pulling at Walter’s arm. Roger is trying to aim over her shoulder with his crossbow. The dancers are making a mess of the room. Tristan is screaming about astrology and gardening. And Paul shrieks as the dagger blade touches his skin.

A woman with fair hair meets my gaze, her blue eyes blurred with tears. She twines her long fingers in front of her face. A small silver cross dangling from her neck bounces and twists against her dress as she leaps and twirls.

I look at the fallen trestle table and spot a loaf of green bread on the floor.

God helps those who help themselves
.

“Kill him, Walter!” Paul screams. “
Kill him
!”

It takes all of my strength to slip out of the bed on the side farthest from the cacophonous dispute. The fever has leeched me of my energy. I pick up the loaf.

Bolts of pain shoot through my head when I bend down to pick up a steel knife. The metal blade feels like ice in my warm fingers.

“Let him go, Tristan!” Belisencia shrieks. “This isn’t helping!”

“All he has to do is say he will treat Edward,” Tristan replies. “That’s your way out, Paul.”

Walter fires his crossbow.

I glance up but the bolt has buried itself in the wall.

“The next one goes in your head!” Walter shouts to Tristan.

“The next one will make me jump,” Tristan says, “and Paul will have another mouth. Tell him to treat Edward. Properly!”

I toss the bread and knife onto the mattress and climb back into bed. I think of all the men I know who have died of battle wounds. For every two who died from rotting wounds, there was one who lived. One whose sickness healed. Battlefield surgeons had no time for astrology. They learned long ago that stars are fickle. That the gods of astrology do not care about the dying and the dead. It did not matter if the patients had been wounded when Venus was transitive or the moon full. The surgeons treated them in the same way. With moldy bread and cobwebs. With wine and leeches. And sometimes, the patients lived.

The woman in the blue veil dances out of the room. The other dancers follow her path, like colorful echoes, and snake back outside. I watch the blonde woman spin and prance out the door. Listen to their song fade away.

I will not die. Elizabeth’s life depends on me. I will cut off my own arm if I must, but I hope it will not come to that.

“Walter, kill him!” Paul shouts. “Roger, for God’s sake, help me!”

“I’ll slit his throat, I will!” Tristan holds his head at an angle, his eyes wide like a madman’s. “I’ll paint the floor red!
By God, I’ll make this room taste like Paul!
”

I pat the bed until I feel the cold steel of the knife. I take it in my left hand and cut into my wound. It hurts like the devil’s pitchfork but I open the gash and let the pus run. I squeeze until I cannot take the pain anymore, allow myself a few breaths, then squeeze again.

The shouting ceases slowly.

Walter and Belisencia stop first, then Roger, and finally, it is only Tristan bellowing threats. I look up. They are staring at me. Tristan follows their gazes and falls silent. Paul still has a dagger blade at his throat. The crossbows are still aimed at Tristan. Belisencia’s hands are still in her hair. But they watch me.

Paul shakes his head. “You shouldn’t be doing that,” he says. “You haven’t been trained.”

“I need…wine,” I mutter. The room seems too bright. Voices seem to echo. Fire surges from my wrist to my shoulder.

“Do you know what you are doing?” Paul asks.

“No,” I say. “But…I’m a…clever chicken. I’ll do what I can.”

“Please, Paul,” Belisencia says. “Can’t you treat him? We can pay you for any supplies, and for your time. Just…please don’t take his hand.”

Paul scoffs. “Coin is worthless.”

“We have food,” she says, “and the knights have swords.”

“Yes,” Paul says, “and daggers. I don’t need weapons. I’m a doctor.”

“Surely there is something we can trade?” she asks.

Paul sweeps his eyes along her body again. “Now that you speak of it, there is something.”

Belisencia takes a back step. “Wh-what?”

“You are a handsome woman, Belisencia.”

“Paul…” She shakes her head.

“The next words you speak may be your last, Paul,” Tristan snarls.

“A kiss,” Paul says.

“No!” Belisencia shouts.

“A kiss?” Tristan cocks his head to one side. “All you want is a kiss?”

Paul holds one hand out toward Belisencia. “One kiss from you, my lady, and I will do what I can for Sir Edward.”

“Paul, I’m a nun,” she says.

Tristan looks at the ruins of the doctor’s mouth and smiles. “I think one kiss is entirely reasonable.”

“No,” Belisencia says. “Tristan, stop it.”

Tristan taps his ear. “My apologies, Bel, I am half-deaf and I can’t hear you.”

Paul leans toward Tristan and shouts, “On the lips!”

“Absolutely not!” Belisencia says.

Tristan nods and takes the dagger from Paul’s throat. “Fine, but there will be no
pruning
in Edward’s treatment.”

Paul nods, leans in close to Tristan and shouts, “A long kiss!”

“Fine,” Tristan says, covering his nose. “But we need medicine and bandages to keep the wound clean on our travels.”

Paul nods again, his gaze locked on Belisencia. “A long kiss on the lips and it is agreed!”

“You think she’ll kiss Paul and everything will be right between us?” Walter snarls.

“We could go back to pointing weapons,” Tristan replies.

“I am not an ox to be bartered!” Belisencia shouts.

“She kisses him, Paul heals your friend, and we never see you again,” Walter says.

Tristan nods. Walter lowers his crossbow.

“I don’t understand why everyone is talking to Tristan,” Belisencia says. “If anyone decides whom I will kiss, it is God, and God says nuns do not kiss men.”

“I don’t remember anything in the Bible about nuns not kissing doctors,” Paul replies.

“That’s because there is nothing in the Bible about nuns not kissing doctors,” Tristan says. “She should give you several kisses, really.”

Belisencia gives him a look that could wither plants. She looks at Paul, her gaze settling on his twisted teeth. Paul smiles. His gums are rotted and so dark they are almost brown. She sighs and shakes her head softly, the black waves of her hair rocking.

“If I kiss you,” she says, “you will heal Edward?”

“With a kiss from you, I think I could heal the plague, my lady,” Paul says.

She nods. “Heal him then. And I will kiss you.”

Paul shakes his head. “I’m sorry my lady, kiss first.”

Take while the patient is in pain
.

Belisencia sighs. “You won’t cut off his hand?”

“I will not,” Paul says. He turns to me and smiles. “I’ll do all I can for you, Sir Edward.”

I turn my head away. His breath smells like a bedpan that has not been changed in days. He turns back to Belisencia and she makes a face. She is more hesitant to kiss this fool than she was to accept Hugh the Baptist’s bite. But then, Hugh’s lips promised heaven. And Paul’s will be hell.

Belisencia sits and takes a deep breath. Paul drifts toward her and turns his head; he makes faint sucking sounds as his tongue moistens his lips. I watch his profile as he forms the faintest of puckers with his lips. Belisencia wrinkles her nose and leans closer, touches her lips to Paul’s with a whimper.

The leech puts one hand on the back of her head. He runs his tongue across her mouth. Belisencia wails from her throat and tries to break away, but Paul holds her to him. His tongue explores her lips, drives between them. She cries out again and breaks free.

Tristan slaps the doctor in the side of the head. The blow sounds like a book falling on dirt.

Paul rocks to one side and wraps both arms around his head. “Why did you hit me?”

“Because something was wrong with your tongue,” Tristan replies. “Thank the stars my blow put it back in its place.”

Belisencia wipes at her lips with her robe. She scowls at Paul. “You got what you wanted. Now heal him.”

Paul shrugs. “I’ll do what I can. But he will most likely die anyway.” He looks at my wound, pinches the skin around it hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.

I despise doctors.

Chapter 21

Paul cleans my wound with water and wine, then applies three leeches. I am not fond of the worms, but I feel nothing as they are attached. My surgeon at Bodiam told me the leeches have something in their saliva that keeps their bite from causing pain. Elizabeth was with me during the explanation, and she suggested that all knights should put leech saliva on their swords.

She is a gentle soul, my Elizabeth. When she wakes, I must never tell her of the multitudes I have killed in my quest to find and save her. She would never sleep again.

When the leeches are placed, Paul proclaims that I need rest, and everyone leaves the room. I lay in the bed, alone, for a long time. I think about the last bad wound I took, in Caen. The skirt of my armor had been torn off and a spear pierced the mail just below my backplate. Tristan says I was stabbed in the arse, but it was six inches too high for that. When I came limping home, Elizabeth told me I was never going back to France. But a year later, I was off again. I looked at her in our bed before I left, with her adoring terrier at her side, and told her I loved her in French. I thought it clever.

“
Je t’aime
,” I said.

She smiled, but it was the impish smile. “No,” she replied. “You are not tame. But someday, you will be. Someday you will tire of being away from me, and you will come home forever.” She stroked her little terrier and spoke to it. “We will tame him, won’t we, Monty?”

That was six years ago, and since then I have made three more trips to France with Tristan and Robert Knolles. It is how I have made my fortune, and how we can afford our castle. But I am done now. When Elizabeth comes back to me, I will stay home forever.

I fall asleep thinking about our castle. Elizabeth and I will make the strongest and most beautiful fortress in all of England. And we shall never leave its sheltering embrace. My dreams show me my castle as I will build it, rising from a moat in crenellated splendor. Four round towers and two square ones. No keep, for we shall live within the very walls. But in my dream those walls bleed. Bloody waterfalls that turn the moat crimson, spill over, and wash all of Bodiam with the stain of my sins.

When I wake the bed sheets are soaked with my sweat and I am shivering. Paul hovers over me, examining the wound.

“How long…have I been asleep?”

“Two hours or so,” Paul says.

Two hours? I was hoping to be at Hedingham by now. Two more hours of my angel’s life have passed.

Walter stands by the door, holding his crossbow. Tristan stands next to Paul and looks at me with concern, but he smiles. Perhaps I look better.