City of Pearl

by Alys Clare

  He made the sign of the cross. Then, surreptitiously, added the hand gesture against the evil eye.

  A soft voice called out, ‘You take passenger to coast?’

  The shipman, hearing, paused. He named a price, far higher than the usual rate. The figure looked about to haggle, then nodded. The lad reached out a hand along the plank and the figure took it, accepting the assistance with a courteous smile.

  Then the plank was drawn up and laid down on the deck, the ropes that tethered the little craft to the quay were unfastened and, with barely a nudge from the skipper’s long pole, she was caught by the fast-flowing water and set off on her journey to the coast.

  TWELVE

  The fire was burning with a strange intensity. The blue flames soared into the sky. A vast, overpowering crackling noise pulsed out from whatever the blaze was feeding on, unlike anything I’d ever heard before.

  There were shouts, cries, screams from all around. Others were awake now. Of course they were – the lower slopes of the little town were close to the blaze, and nobody could have slept through the noise and the brilliant light in the sky. Besides that, there was something unnatural about the fire … Even from where I stood, some distance away from and above the inferno, I sensed it. I felt as if my skin was alive, as if soft fingers were brushing up and down my body, sending out tremors and tremblings of reaction.

  The strange thing was that the sensation wasn’t totally unpleasant.

  Hanan was beside me.

  ‘What is it?’ I breathed. ‘What’s happened?’

  She shook her head. ‘I do not know. I have seen fires before, but not like this.’

  ‘It’s blue,’ I said stupidly, as if she couldn’t see that for herself. ‘Why?’

  Again, she shook her head.

  There were more screams, piercing, horrible, and I thought they were coming from the area around the fire. My healer self took over. I drew on my clothes, braided my hair and covered it with my cap, picked up my satchel and slung it across my body. ‘Come on,’ I said.

  She nodded, understanding. Well, she would, for she was a healer too. As we reached the door and the steps down to the street, she touched my arm. Turning, I saw she had a folded veil over her arm, made from some fairly dense material.

  ‘I don’t need—’ I began. But then I realized it was wet – heavy with absorbed water – and that she had one for herself too.

  ‘I put them in a bucket of water when I first saw the flames,’ she said. ‘It is our normal practice, when attending the victims of fire. You cannot help others if you are burned.’

  If you are burned. It was a horrible thought. I drove it away, took the veil and flew down the steps.

  Others were making their way down the narrow, steeply sloping streets towards the fire. Some of the more level-headed townspeople, perhaps sensing the incipient panic and observing how the crowd was getting in the way of those who could help, tried to get them to return home. There were shouts and orders in different languages, few of which had any effect.

  We were close now.

  And then, just ahead, I saw a familiar figure. Short, rotund, bald dome of a head circled with silver-white hair.

  Gurdyman, on the arm of the tall figure of Salim, was hurrying to the fire.

  I ran on, catching them up. ‘You shouldn’t be here!’ I cried, grabbing his hand as if I would hold him back by force. ‘You shouldn’t have let him come!’ I yelled to Salim. ‘You know better than anybody that he’s not well!’

  Salim gazed at me impassively. We were still moving forward, partly under our own momentum, partly driven on by the crowd. His eyes softened for a moment with compassion. ‘I could not stop him,’ he said above the noise. ‘He is here for the same reason that you are. That she is.’ He jerked his head at Hanan. ‘That I am.’

  I was staring at Gurdyman, trying to see right into his face and read his expression. He was pale, and the blueish tinge around his lips was back. He looked utterly resolute, and I began to see that Salim had spoken the truth when he said Gurdyman wasn’t to be stopped. I met his eyes, and he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, leaning close to speak in my ear. ‘I understand the danger, and so we will all keep a careful eye upon him.’

  And then there was no more time for talk.

  We came round a bend in the road and the heat hit us.

  People were gasping, crying, screaming as the horrible sight came into view. A long row of low buildings was aflame, the fire roaring with great intensity and, as yet, confined to the structures already burning. There was no wind, which probably accounted for this, but, as if the fire resented being robbed of further fuel, it seemed to burn all the harder.

  ‘What were these buildings?’ I shouted to Salim.

  ‘Storage, stabling sometimes when outsiders – when guests have come to the town,’ he replied.

  I noticed the courteous amendment.

  ‘Not dwellings for people?’

  But he only shrugged.

  Stabling. Oh, no! I grabbed his arm. ‘My horse?’ I yelled. My sturdy little pony! Where was he?

  He smiled faintly. ‘No, he’s not down here. He is safe.’

  Hanan gave a sudden cry, and a soft wail emerged from her parted lips. I spun round to see what she had seen.

  There were two bodies on the ground, still moving despite the terrible damage, still trying to crawl away from the destroying heat.

  Together she and I leapt towards them, but strong hands held us back.

  ‘You can do nothing,’ said Salim’s hard voice.

  I tried to pull myself out of his grip. ‘We have our veils, soaked in water!’ I shouted, shaking my veil in his face.

  But he shook his head. ‘They would avail you nothing. You would burn and die too.’

  He turned to the two men closest to us, muttering a string of instructions. They nodded, then hurried away. They seemed to be going around the burning buildings in a wide circle, keeping a safe distance.

  ‘They are searching for others who might have escaped,’ he said. The compassion was in his eyes again, but now it was not for me. He was reaching into a pouch by his side, removing a bundle of soft cloth and a small bottle made of dark brown glass. He saw me watching. ‘You wish to help?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  He straightened his shoulders and walked towards the two figures on the ground. They had stopped crawling now. They had managed to get some distance from the fire, which was starting to die down, but I didn’t think that was the reason for the cessation of movement.

  They were still alive, but barely. All of their clothing and most of their flesh had burned away.

  Salim crouched beside one of the pair. He tore the cloth in two, handing half to me. ‘Do as I do,’ he said.

  He unstopped the bottle and put several drops of a darkish liquid onto the cloth. He gave it to me and I did the same. ‘Be very careful not to breathe in the fumes,’ he warned.

  Then very gently he put the padded cloth over what remained of the nose and lips of the man – or it could have been a woman – lying before him. Equally gently, I did the same with the other body.

  Salim’s victim struggled feebly for some moments. Mine was probably already dead, for I detected no movement at all.

  I didn’t realize I was weeping until I felt the tears running into my mouth.

  When it was done, Salim stood up, carefully put away the bottle and the pieces of cloth and stood up. He took my hand. He saw my tears and reached up to wipe them away. ‘It is an element of healing,’ he said gently, ‘to understand when the damage and the agony are too great for life to be tolerable.’

  ‘We killed them,’ I whispered.

  But he shook his head. ‘They were already far along the road to death,’ he said. ‘We merely put an end to the hopeless pain.’

  I sensed he was right. My head knew he was, anyway. But as we slowly walked away, I knew it would take my heart some time to catch up.

  And then all thought of the tw
o dead bodies flew out of my mind.

  Because Gurdyman sat slumped on the ground, Hanan’s arms around him and her worried face staring up at Salim and me in desperate appeal. ‘He collapsed!’ she cried. ‘He put his hand to his chest, gave a cry and fell!’

  I dropped to my knees in front of him, taking in the half-opened eyes, the blue lips, the pallor of the plump face from which so much flesh seemed to have fallen away. ‘Oh, Gurdyman!’ I whispered.

  In that moment I was not a healer, not a potential source of help for him. I was simply someone who loved him, thrown into a panic of anxiety and horrified distress because she thought she was about to lose him.

  Then the calm tones of Salim were giving orders. Somebody brought a door from a nearby house, removed quickly from its very basic hinges, and eager hands were raising Gurdyman up and carefully laying him on it. A woman handed me her shawl, and I bundled it up and put it under his head. Someone else provided a cloak and I wrapped him in it, for already his hands felt cold.

  Men stepped forward to bear him, one at each corner, and slowly, as if he were a king of old on his bier, he was borne away up the sloping street and back to Salim’s house.

  Gurdyman didn’t die.

  He was very ill, and I think it was only Salim’s profound knowledge and incredible skill that brought him back. It was his heart, of course, as it had long been, and Salim was quite right when he said that Gurdyman had been very unwise even to consider the journey all the way from England to the City of Pearl.

  ‘He would not be stopped,’ I muttered when he repeated this for perhaps the tenth time.

  Salim touched my hand. ‘It is not your fault,’ he said. ‘There are – other forces are at work.’

  But I was struggling with my guilt, for in my heart I believed I must be to blame – I should have made him go back! – and I barely heard him.

  I tried to suppress my emotions by observing everything that Salim did. I watched Hanan too, for she adopted the role of Salim’s assistant, and I came to understand that she knew almost as much as he did.

  In my time with the people of the City of Pearl I had already been astounded many times by the things they could do; by the answers they had worked out to the questions common to all human beings; by the love and the compassion they poured into everything they made and everything they did, as if in each moment of the day they were determined to do their very best; by their insistence on using the talents and the abilities they had been born with for the benefit of each other and for the community.

  And constantly, all the time, all over the city, they shared what they knew. There were schools and libraries like the cool, shady room where I’d been taught, where the older and the wiser men and women were happy to instruct others, and no question was too silly (I knew that from personal experience) and nobody was ever made to feel ashamed because they didn’t know the answer.

  In those days and weeks when Gurdyman lay so close to death, I learned more about the nature of the heart, the failings to which it is prone and the best way to treat them, than I had ever dreamed was possible.

  On the first day that Gurdyman sat up in his bed, Salim left him in Hanan’s care and took me off to his workroom. He had the heart of a stillborn calf in a bowl of some sharp-smelling liquid and, after removing it and patting it dry, he proceeded to cut it open.

  ‘I am dissecting it,’ he told me. ‘This is in order to show you how it works.’

  ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ I breathed. I didn’t know then that the heart had come out of a calf.

  He laughed. ‘Yes. It is not human, Lassair, but the anatomy and the method by which the organ operates are similar enough for our lesson.’

  Then he showed me the chambers and the little tubes, demonstrating the pumping motion which made the blood flow. He unrolled a long scroll of parchment on which there was a drawing of a human body – it was similar to the drawings my dark little doctor had showed me – and pointed out the blue and the red tubes that went all through it, explaining how the beat of the heart made the blood flow right to the tiniest of them.

  It was all but impossible to believe him, but he insisted it was true.

  He showed me what happened if something made a blockage within the heart. ‘We believe this is what occurs when men like Gurdyman collapse in great pain and clutch at their chests,’ he said. ‘Those who survive say it is like a very severe cramp.’

  ‘Yes, I have treated such patients,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Well, the heart is made of muscle, so perhaps we should think of a cramp in our leg, reflect on how painful it is, and then multiply the intensity by ten.’ While I was still thinking of that, he went on, ‘You treat this condition with belladonna?’

  ‘Yes, but only when it is severe. Otherwise with digitalis.’

  ‘Yes, just as we do,’ he remarked. ‘I believe,’ he added, as if confiding a great secret, ‘that the drug thins the blood somehow, so that the proper flow is restored.’

  I wasn’t sure I believed that, either.

  Gurdyman was improving, but slowly. Salim had told me that this had been a bad attack, and that it was highly likely my beloved mentor and teacher would not recover fully. I was still struggling to accept that. For me, Gurdyman was invincible. I found it very hard to understand he wasn’t going to live for ever.

  But he was getting stronger. Now he was at last able to get out of bed and walk to the pail behind the screen in the corner that was kept for bodily waste. It was an important moment, and all of us – Salim, Hanan, Gurdyman, I myself – felt a lifting of the spirits.

  Then one day everything changed.

  I’d been given some time away from the sick room – both Salim and Hanan said I must have a rest from the anxiety and the work – and I was out in the city, exploring. I knew the central area well by now, after all the weeks and months, and today I planned to venture further. I’d dressed accordingly, putting on my own clothes and, instead of the soft little leather slippers we usually wore, my stout boots. As ever, I carried my satchel, in it my sister’s shawl and the shining stone. At the last moment, I picked up my cloak; although the morning was warm and sunny, I knew from experience that the wind often shifted round to the east later in the day and sometimes it even brought flurries of snow.

  I believe I knew even then, as I prepared for the outing, that something was about to happen.

  I went down to where a big bridge spanned the great gorge separating the city and the foothills from the plain, staring down into its depths and at the river that ran fast through them. I thought about home, and my heart gave a lurch of pain. I’d been far too busy and far too worried about Gurdyman to be homesick, but now he was getting better the longing flooded back.

  I thought about Jack. I wondered if he was thinking about me. No, I told myself. Of course he isn’t. When I get back, I’d like you not to be here. His hard words and the icy tone in which he’d uttered them were graven in my memory.

  I wandered back into the city, pausing to stare at the burned-out buildings. They hadn’t got to the bottom of what caused the fire. The bright blue flames, and the fact that they hadn’t spread to any nearby structures, remained a mystery. There had only been the two casualties, for the buildings were old and deemed unsafe and usually deserted. The bodies had been those of a young couple who had gone inside for some privacy, away from society’s stern eyes. I liked to think that their last moments before the flames took them had been happy, even joyful ones. Not that it was much consolation.

  I was still haunted by that moment when I had put the soaked pad over the burned face and known that life was extinguished.

  Abruptly I turned away from the ruins and began the climb back into the heart of the city.

  I went on past the shady corners where people congregated to eat, drink and talk. I went on past every street, alley and square that I knew, ever upwards through increasingly narrow lanes and passages until the houses grew sparse and were set further and further apart and
the foothills rose up before me. Here were the pastures and the small fields where crops grew, where little streams tumbling down from the mountains soaring behind the city watered the sun-warmed, south-west-facing land so that it provided in abundance for the people of the City of Pearl. Here cattle, sheep and goats grazed, and in places horses raised interested heads to see the stranger walk by.

  I’d been climbing for ages and I had lost all track of time. I paused to drink from a stream, and suddenly remembered Gurdyman saying we’d been poisoned; that someone had put some substance into the water I’d fetched from the stream down in the plain.

  The drama of his collapse and sickness had driven it, as well as so much else, from my mind. My life in the City of Pearl had become all-important, almost as if the recent past had been obliterated.

  Now, perched on a rock high above the city, I turned my mind back to what had happened on our awful journey.

  Who had wished to harm us?

  Who had whispered outside our lodgings in the village where Gurdyman’s parents’ inn had been? Where it had burned down with just the same blue flames, if the accounts were to be believed, as those that had recently destroyed the old buildings in the lower reaches of the City of Pearl …

  Brujo. That was the word that had been whispered. Gurdyman had told me that brujo meant magician. But what about llama azul? I had heard that whispered, too, outside the window and again as we were driven away.

  Why had they thrown stones?

  Was it the same person – or people – who had poisoned the water? Who had caused me to see that terrible vision of the single huge eye and the claws scratching at my clothes and my flesh?

  Why? Why?

  I folded my arms on my knees and dropped my head on them.

  And, some time later, I sensed someone sit down beside me.

  I raised my head, turning to see who it was.