by Celia Lake
“I am sure that the healer in charge of his case has his reasons.” She had a tone, though, that suggested she might be wondering about those reasons herself.
“Of course, ma’am. I can only report my observations.” Elen shifted slightly. It was not entirely feigned, she was uncomfortable. But looking as if she had been scolded and was taking it seriously wouldn’t hurt.
“If you were to discuss it with his healer, what would you say?” The question was almost idle, but Elen wasn’t falling into that trap.
“If permitted, I would ask what the goals of the potion were, and if some alternate might be tried, for a few days. As it is, Major Gospatrick has limited time to rebuild strength and stamina. Once he is fully awake, it is nearly luncheon, once luncheon is cleared, it is his hour for his bath and shave. Once that is done, there is an hour or two before supper, and then we are into the evening.”
“And if he were not so - slow - in the mornings, you believe he might regain his strength more quickly? Would you change his schedule?”
“I have, a few times, gotten him out into the garden. I was taught, and have found in my own previous positions, that being outside, when possible, contributes a great deal to long-term outcomes.”
“In a chair?” The administrator leaned forward.
“Yes, ma’am. Though I would hope to have him walking a bit, in the garden, and then expand the distance.”
“I will discuss the potion regimen with his healer.” The decision was rapid, crisp. “It may be a reduced portion, or some other adjustment. You will be informed. Begin taking him out in the garden as much as possible. I will see about rearranging the schedule so his bath might be before lunch, so you might go out for an hour or two afterwards.”
Elen inclined her head. “Ma’am.” she agreed. “Should I make a further report to you?”
“A week, back here.” The woman looked her up and down. “If anyone has questions, direct them to Sister Florinda.”
“Ma’am.” She stood, since that was clearly a dismissal.
“Nurse Morris,” That had a warning note. “See to your temple duties, in greater measure.”
That wasn’t mysterious, not at all. But Elen could only bob. “I’ll stop by on my way back, ma’am.” Of course, having said she would, she was then committed, and she had to take the long way down, through the side stairs, and off into the side of the main temple, along the long colonnade of pillars, into one of the side rooms.
She stopped at the pool fed by the healing spring deep underground, through some sort of ancient magic that no one had ever explained to her usefully. There, she washed her hands, ritually, using the wooden ladle to pour water over one, then the other, then splashing her face.
That done, she went and attended to the small tasks that any of them did as needed. She began by clearing the old candle stubs from the metal holders. Checking the small chalkboard tucked behind a curtain, she saw the offerings had not been changed today. She wrote in the date and time, doing her best to make sure the chalk did not squeak, and then replaced the eggs and wheat on the shrine from the small waiting bowl, putting the older offerings into a bucket that would go to the pigs.
Only then could she turn her attention to the actual shrine, and she knelt on one of the padded cushions. A more modern touch, the bare stone was likely more traditional. Closing her eyes, she did her best to calm her thoughts. She felt tossed around, pinned between competing needs, and not at all sure how to navigate. More than anything, she was frustrated by the constant inability to do her work.
The time in the shrine didn’t improve anything, not meaningfully. There were no bolts of sunlight, or claps of thunder, or the roar of a hundred galloping horses. But she felt, as she stood, a new certainty that whatever else she did, helping Roland was worthwhile.
Chapter 14
Wednesday, April 14th, the garden shrine
Roland wasn’t sure what had gotten into Elen in the past day. She had gone off for an appointment with only the barest excuse. He could read her well enough now to be sure she wasn’t looking forward to it, the way she’d been tightlipped and tense. It created lines at the corner of her eyes that made him wince, the implications of the stress and pain there.
When she came back, nearly two hours later, she was different, but he could not for the life of him put a finger on how, never mind why. It was the why that mattered, of course, and he couldn’t begin to guess. She might have been promised a way out of her work, for all he knew. It wasn’t that, not precisely, he was clear by now that she cared deeply about her healing work, when she was permitted to do it.
Something had changed, though, and it wasn’t just the schedule. The next day, Harry had come in to bathe him at eleven, the last slot before lunch. After the lunch tray had been cleared, she had brought out the basket chair, and said, “Come on, outside for us for a bit.”
He blinked at her but didn’t argue. It seemed quite a pleasant day out, from the glimpses he’d had from the window, and he’d caught a whiff of flowers here and there. “If that’s what you wish?”
“I think it would be good for you.” That was unyielding, to say the least. He was recovering enough to feel annoyed at people deciding what was good for him, even if he hadn’t recovered enough to argue with them about it. He suffered the mild indignities of getting himself into the chair, clumsy again, and of her pushing him outside.
As he expected, they went down to the outdoor shrine for Sirona, and she settled him near the bubble of the fountain, where he could look out at the rest of the garden. “Let me know if anyone’s coming, please?”
He blinked at her for a moment, then nodded. “I think I can do that.” Then, a bit more daring, he asked, “For a particular reason?”
“I have a few things to talk to you about.”
That didn’t sound ominous at all. But all Roland could do was nod. “Go on, when you’re ready?” Some part of him had that sense of being a junior officer, drawing out one of the enlisted men, the times he’d been in a position to do that. When one was homesick, during training, but terrified of admitting it. Or once they’d arrived in France, and he’d been posted with the Bays, of navigating the gaps in prestige and power.
It felt like the tables were turned, he certainly had almost no power here. But she didn’t either. There was a moment where she clearly wanted to fiddle with the folds of her skirt or apron, and restrained herself.
“My meeting yesterday was with one of the administrators. Sister Florinda, she said her name was.”
He nodded, not sure why Elen was starting there.
“She asked me what I thought about your recovery. I mentioned that I had noticed your evening potions seemed difficult. That you took them, but that there were the small indications, visible to any attentive healer, that you did not care for the effects. This morning, I received a note with permission to give you a half dose.”
Roland blinked. “That’s good. Isn’t it?” He’d thought it was, he hated the leaden feeling it brought on. Even a half dose would be much better, he was sure of it.
“I still have not gotten permission to see your charts. Or even to talk directly to your healer. They send me away, when I ask. They don’t even let me be there on rounds. They send his junior, who just checks your vitals and asks you a few questions to prove he’s been there, and writes a few things down.”
Roland had to laugh, that was quite an accurate description of every time the junior men had come by, even though Elen was normally sent out of the room to help roll bandages or whatever nurses did when they weren’t needed for some other task. Or knitting. As if she read his thoughts, she pulled out her knitting bag, and set to work, with the needles clicking softly, without looking at it.
“Socks?” It came out a little cracked, and she blinked at him.
“A muffler. I don’t have to think about a muffler at all. If i get distracted and it’s a little longer than I’d meant, there’s no problem.”
He contemplated
that for a long moment. Socks could be used in all weathers, even the wristlets could be useful on a chilly spring or summer morning. But a muffler. “You think the war’s going to go on.”
She tilted her head, as if he were catching up with her, and from rather a long distance behind him. “I suspect so, yes. If I’m wrong, I’m sure there’s some poor soul in London or another of the cities who could use a muffler come winter. But I think it’s going to the trenches.”
Roland chewed on that. “Why?” Part of him hated asking, hating showing his weakness that way. If this were his tutoring house - filled with young and often merciless men from families with a long military history - he’d have been taunted.
At Schola, his head of house or one of the prefects would have led him with a brutal and rigid sternness, through the chain of thought that led to a thoughtless question. In his apprenticeship, his master would have raised an eyebrow, and that would have been a tonne of scorn, in one tidy package.
Elen did none of those things. Instead, she smiled, as if asking the question were the kindest thing anyone had done for her lately. Or the most thoughtful gift she’d been handed. And for him, her smiling hit him like a blow, the way she was open to it. Not rigid. Water, flowing around him, enveloping him.
She didn’t rush into the answer, she took a breath, before she went on. “Most simply? They would not be so anxious for you to heal and recruit others, possibly train others, possibly go back yourself, if they thought the war would end soon.”
That was another blow, and this time he felt himself shudder. He had to close his eyes against it. She was right, damnably right, and he hadn’t put it together, not at all. He clenched his hands, and then forced them to relax.
When he could manage to look at her, there was a quirk to her lips. “They haven’t given you a chance to see the whole picture, you know. With the drugging, and dragging you out to exhaust yourself whenever you begin to recover a little. As soon as you have a good day, they demand your time, your vitality, again.”
“I want to serve. The country, the magic, whatever you call it. I always have.” It came out of him in a rush.
She nodded once, as if she’d expected he’d say that. He didn’t think he liked being so predictable. “They’re relying on that.”
“They?”
She shrugged, her shoulder twitching for a moment before she went back to the even clicking of the knitting. “The generals. The people in charge. The Archiater. Your healer. The Council, for all I know. I don’t know, that’s the point. People like me don’t. We just know there are people, somewhere, making decisions they don’t have to think about again, for people who’ll be living with the costs for the rest of their lives. However long those were.”
That was cheerful. Or rather the opposite. He couldn’t argue with her, though, she remained damnably right. “Your meeting yesterday, it changed something?”
“Permission to bring you out here. More to the point, time to do so. That’s why your bath was at eleven today, so we could take the whole afternoon. I’ve made arrangements for one of the healing baths in a couple of days. I had to trade a few favours, I’ll need to leave you promptly after supper the next few nights.”
He held up a hand, as if to slow her. “Trade favours?”
Elen shrugged, the click of the needles pausing again for a moment, like a song coming to a breath, before it started up again. “That’s how things work. If you can’t tell people what to do.”
He supposed she divided the word into people who could tell you what to do, and people who did things. And he found himself uncomfortably straddling that line, in a way he hadn’t felt since his Schola years, and a scolding he’d heard about how to treat the house staff. Not to him, thankfully, but to one of his housemates.
“What did you trade, then?”
She shrugged. “Evening bandage duties in one of the other wards. Not pleasant, but someone’s got to do it, and I’ve a lighter touch than many. So that the person I’m trading with has something to trade with someone else, I’m not sure for what. But for that, we’re on the schedule weeks earlier than you might be otherwise. They’ve been using a lot of the baths for the gas victims.”
“And you think it will help?”
“It certainly won’t hurt. And I do think it might help. I think.” She frowned as if she’d dropped a stitch, because there was a long silence before she did something with the needles and started again. “I think there’s something tangled in your magic. I don’t know how to untangle it. But that’s why there are prayers. Gods. For the things we can’t figure out ourselves.”
It seemed a very pragmatic view of religion and also rather outside his experience. “A pool for Sirona, or someone else? You said there were a number, didn’t you?”
She glanced up, there was a flash of some expression he couldn’t read on her face. “I’ll be working that out. While you’re having your bath tomorrow, actually.”
Roland felt it would be best not to press her further. When he didn’t speak, they fell into a silence that lasted a good twenty minutes, long enough for her to establish the muffler as more than a narrow strip. That done, she spent a good hour nagging him into alternating walking a few steps, then resting, over and over again, until he was sure his knees would not hold him more.
She did it fiercely, but with a kind of patience he hadn’t known since watching an older mare on the home farm breaking in a young and rambunctious youngster yoked with her on one of the carriages, just using her weight and skill to pin him when he misbehaved.
He wasn’t sure what he thought of that at all. He was too tired.
Chapter 15
Thursday, April 15th, the healing baths
“What’s he like, your patient?” Elen had presented herself at the office that coordinated use of the healing pools promptly at eleven the next day. It was partly to make herself useful, and partly to figure out which of the rooms Roland might best use, of the available options.
The healer on duty was a short woman perhaps in her early fifties. She wore faded indigo linen robes, belted around a decidedly curvy and well-padded figure. They used the classical design that was little more than two lengths of fabric pinned and hemmed together, with a broad apron dyed in a medium blue to match around her waist. It was all very unlike the spaces above and the bright whites of their linens or the sharp points on the caps and collars. More practical around a pool, she supposed, and easy to change and hang to dry when it got wet.
The healer had introduced herself as Rhoe, the current healer seeing to the care of the pools and bathing spaces. They were in the lowest level of the temple, a labyrinth of stone rooms that had been there for centuries. Some people said they were Roman, though that didn’t actually fit the history of the city very well. Certainly of Roman design, though, with smooth pale grey stones slotted into a series of rooms curling around the path of the central corridor.
At the core, she knew, was the ancient healing well. She’d been told the stories, during her apprenticeship, of how you would put a pebble in, and read the bubbles to determine how the healing would go. It was an art she didn’t know, and she didn’t think it was much done in the current Temple. The well itself had its own shrine, protecting it in a blanket of quiet reverence.
In the middle, lit by charms, was the great bathing pool, far more public. She’d been there only a few times, shy of being around so many people, and not knowing who was who. When people had clothes on, it was much easier to figure out how to talk to them. There were cues to tell whether she ought to talk to them like a healer or a fellow nurse or a patient, or someone from the city itself.
The office, staffed by those devoted to healing waters in particular, was just outside the entrance to the main baths, with stained glass separating it from the more public spaces. Elen could see figures through the opaque glass, just enough to guess male from female by height and the amount of curve, and she found the movements rather distracting. The healer on duty cleared h
er throat.
“Pardon, sorry.” It came out automatically. “My patient doesn’t have a particular patron, from what he’s told me. I would have put him as a son of Mars, perhaps in one of his less aggressively martial forms, only...”
“Only?” The question seemed friendly enough. Elen certainly wasn’t going to trust a stranger with her thoughts, that had never worked out well for her, but it was a little encouraging.
“When I explained what I was arranging, his first comments were about service. About wanting to continue to be of service.”
“Perhaps not Mars, then.” The older woman agreed, taking out a notepad with a sketched-in map. “Would he take well to a more distant deity? There are several pools dedicated to various of the Egyptian gods at the moment, or Mesopotamian. A few Hindu.”
Elen blinked a little. She’d not known that, though she hadn’t much asked. She’d always just gone to Sirona’s pool, or the temple alcove or the outdoor shrine, depending on her needs and how busy things were. Looking at the map, though, she could see there were at least fifty small pools curving around the central main baths. Perhaps more than that, she didn’t have time to count them.
“I don’t think so? He seems very English, considering.”
That earned her a grin. “Not Welsh, then, or Scottish?”
“Northumbria, I think, is where his family is from. So the Marches.”
Rhoe nodded. “And his injuries?”
This was decidedly more delicate. “I have not been permitted to see his chart or to speak to the senior healer in charge of his case, but I have my own observations.”
Rhoe raised an eyebrow. “Ah.” It was a very disapproving sound, mild as it was. Elen could not figure out if the disapproval was aimed at her, or at the unnamed healer who’d made that decision. “And you are the sole nurse tending to him?”