The holiday mood fell away when we came to the approach to the Pont Berkor. It was the last bridge downriver from the wharves, with a high arching span to let the barges under. Further downriver you could only cross with boats. We could see the knot of crimson-coated soldiers stationed at this end with two more sentries watching at the highest point of the arch, keeping an eye on the tangled barricades that had been thrown up at the far side.
Another time I might have admired how elegant they looked, especially after so many days seeing nothing but rumpled, mud-stained clothing. But I looked at their stony faces and the stiff way they held their guns at the ready and my hands grew sweaty on the handle of the cart.
Mesner Aukustin hesitated a moment when they looked our way, then stepped forward and called out to the commander, “Captain Atilliet!” His voice had the barest quaver.
The captain was the sort of man girls were expected to sigh over: tall with red-brown hair and a neat little moustache. I remembered Maisetra Iulien blushing when she pointed him out in the Plaiz once. He strode toward us with a frown.
“Yes, cousin?” His voice was low and he looked back at his companions like he didn’t want them to hear.
Mesner Aukustin’s voice had gone all stiff and formal again. I think Maisetra Iulien would have found better words, but she wasn’t the one who held out the papers that could get us past.
“Captain Atilliet, I have come escorting these people to bring aid against the fever in the lower town. Will you let us pass?”
If the captain’s words had been fit to his face as he examined the papers, I think they would have been something like, “You little fool.” But what he said was, “Us?” all quiet-like.
That was the first I knew he planned to go with us all the way. Maistir Brandel started to protest, but Mesner Aukustin waved him quiet, then pointed across the bridge. “Our people are suffering.”
It was like watching actors making speeches on stage. But if it was a play, you knew how it would end.
The captain was still speaking softly. “That isn’t in your orders.” He handed the papers back. “They can pass. Not you. What were you thinking?”
Mesner Aukustin’s voice wasn’t stiff any more. It was hot and angry. “I’m tired of being treated like a child when there’s work to be done. I’m thinking that guns don’t help the sick. I’m thinking that I could make the difference between bringing this cure and seeing it fail. Will you let me pass?”
“Don’t ask that of me.” The captain was heating up too. “Don’t you think I know how bad the fever is over there? Do you think I don’t care? I have my duty. Anyone who crosses can’t return until the fever’s run its course. And you know who they’ll blame if you die sweating and shaking in some flooded warehouse because you wanted to be a hero.”
“I don’t want to be a hero. I want to help.”
Captain Atilliet looked around at our little procession. “This is help?”
Mesner Aukustin flushed. “We have Saint Rota’s protection against the fever. I’m not afraid. You have your duty and I have mine.” Now he tried begging. “Please, Efriturik? Can you stand there listening to the bells counting out the deaths? The people should see that one of us is willing to share their suffering. You’re under orders, but I’m not.”
I liked how he talked like someone in one of Maisetra Iulien’s stories. He believed it all: that speeches and fancy words could make a difference.
Maybe fancy words were what we needed. Captain Atilliet frowned more thoughtfully and asked, “What is it you have on that cart that’s worth the risk of your life?”
Then Maisetra Iulien explained about Saint Rota’s well and Celeste’s charm, while Celeste looked away like she’d rather be anywhere else. But Iulien told about curing Liv’s nephew without quite mentioning that we’d crossed the river against orders to do so. And about how she’d cured Mesnera Chazillen’s daughter.
He looked startled at that. “Antuniet approves of this?”
Maisetra Iulien pulled out the purse of alchemical stones we’d been given and handed him one to feel the cold. “She gave us these to help with the work.”
It wasn’t properly an answer to his question. He looked more troubled and glanced back over his shoulder across to the far side of the river.
“If I let you go—even if Princess Anna had approved it—your mother would accuse me of plotting your death.”
Mesner Aukustin had one more speech to try. “If you stop me, I’ll say it’s because you’re afraid my success would challenge your claim to the throne.”
“So I’m to be blamed whatever I do,” the captain muttered, but the corner of his mouth turned up in a grim smile and he sounded less sure. His gaze fastened on Maistir Brandel. “You. You’re Saveze’s cousin, aren’t you.” It didn’t seem a question and he didn’t wait for an answer. “Are you carrying a sword?”
Maistir Brandel shook his head. “Only when I’m on duty for the baroness.”
The captain unbuckled his sword and held it out. “You’re on duty now. I don’t expect you to protect him against the fever, but I charge you to see him safe against the rest of it. Will you swear?”
I felt a shiver when Maistir Brandel repeated the words Captain Atilliet said. It was like a church mystery. I could see him change as he buckled on the sword and adjusted the straps. I knew he was training for an armin, but now you could see that thing that Tavit and the others had. Just…a way of being ready, like a wound-up clock spring.
Captain Atilliet turned to Mesner Aukustin and hugged him tight. “God keep you! Come back safely for my sake, if not your own.” And then more sharply, as if he were embarrassed, “Follow me. I won’t report this before you have your chance, but if I’m asked, I won’t lie for you.” He led us up past the first knot of soldiers.
Maistir Brandel had reached for the cart handle, but Celeste elbowed him aside to take it. You couldn’t have a lord’s armin pulling carts. And when Maisetra Iulien began to push at the back to help us up the steep part of the bridge, two of the soldiers fell in and helped us along. It was easier going down the other side toward the boards set up as a barricade. It wasn’t anything that would have kept people out on its own. A line drawn across the road telling the handful of men hanging about on the other side where trouble would start.
The soldiers pulled enough of it aside that we could get the cart through, and then there was nothing but the stone roadway diving down into the muddy, rippled water on the other side. They closed the barrier behind us.
The men on the other side of the barricade watched as we picked our way into the water. It wasn’t as deep as the cart’s axle but barely. If it wasn’t for being busy with the handles of the cart, I would have reached over to squeeze Celeste’s hand for comfort. Everyone knew that quarter was full of the roughest men in the city. It was different when we came past the warehouses in Liv’s boat. This was her home and they knew her. They didn’t know us, except we probably looked like we had something worth stealing. One man a bit taller than the rest came forward, and I saw Maistir Brandel go all tense and ready.
“What’s your business here?”
I could tell Mesner Aukustin was working out what to say, but his fancy words would be all wrong here. Maisetra Iulien knew it too, because she waded out in front and announced loudly, “We’ve come with charms against the fever. Take us to those who need them.”
“Charms!” the man said with a snort. “What are you asking for your charms?”
“It’s for charity and the love of Saint Rota,” Maisetra Iulien answered. She held out the alchemical amulet that she’d shown to Captain Atilliet.
It was the best thing to do. Celeste’s charm would take time to prove itself, but anyone could feel the cooling in the stones and believe us. His eyes grew wide as he held it in his fist. Then he jerked his head. “This way!” The crowd of men led off beside us like they were guards marching, but not in neat lines.
I hadn’t thought about how we would go
about things once we got here. Celeste had promised to return to the rivermen’s street, but we couldn’t push past the men after telling them we had a fever charm. None of us knew the lower city well, not with most of the streets still deep enough in water that only shallow boats or long-legged men could pass. We’d need their help.
They took us to the upper floor of one of the warehouses where people had gathered to stay out of the wet. We couldn’t take the hand-cart up the stairs, so Brandel and Mesner Aukustin stayed down on the street. Five sick people were lying on a nest of pallets together, all pale and shaking, the women looking strange with their hair cropped close for the fever. Celeste started laying out her candles and charm-papers and whatnot while Maisetra Iulien worked out how to bind a fever-stone to those who weren’t strong enough to hold it on their own. The stones needed to touch skin to send out their cooling. I picked up the hand of the fifth man and he was already cooling on his own. I gave a little moan and someone came to wrap him in a blanket for a shroud and pull him off to the side.
In Liv’s house it had taken hours to work the charm, trying first one thing then another. This time Celeste worked quickly. Not too quick. Even the simplest charm needs its rhythm, and for all we’d practiced the words and actions the day before, it wasn’t the same as a charm you’d done your whole life—one you knew as well as your prayers. And they were prayers. Celeste had bound together all the familiar prayers with calling on Saint Mauriz as protector of the city, but at the heart of it all was begging Mama Rota to wash away the fever and let strength flow through her children like the river flowed through the city, with a drop of water from her well on the tongue. The carefully written charm-papers were pressed to the heart or the brow of the sick person to draw out the fever, then burned in the candle flame to pull the heat out. It all made sense in my mind when Celeste explained it, but without her putting it all together it would have been nothing more than words and ash. Then we waited. Celeste said we’d done what we could, but it was almost an hour before the fevers broke and the warehousemen heard their comrades speak their thanks in weak but sensible voices.
Then there was a house with another room of sick people and another. We were guided from one to another, passing along a cluster of buildings penned in by the flooded streets. It might take days to keep our promise that way.
I took one of the watchers aside and tried to borrow every scrap of authority I remembered Charsintek using. “Go to the street of the rivermen,” I told him. “Ask Liv Hald to bring her boat.”
Liv was waiting for us when we’d finished at the next house. Her brother came with his boat too, which was a good thing because we’d have been even more crowded than we were on that trip up the chanulez to Saint Rota’s well. With the contents of the cart loaded into the boats things went easier. Once we’d finished at the rivermen’s street, they took us where the fever was worst.
It was all getting tumbled together in my head by the end of that long day. We’d found a way of working, something like how Celeste and I would share the sewing tasks. Iulien learned how to help prepare the charm-papers. She had the neatest hand of us all and Celeste said they worked even though Iulien protested that she had no talent for mysteries. My job was to stand by to hold what Celeste or Iulien needed.
I didn’t know what to expect from Mesner Aukustin once he got us past the bridge. He didn’t know anything about charmwork or sick-nursing, and Brandel fussed around him like a mother hen. But when the word went round that the son of Prince Aukust rest-his-soul had come to see to those sick with the fever, well, it made a lot of things easier that I hadn’t expected. They always said it like that: “Prince-Aukust-rest-his-soul,” like it was all his name.
I didn’t know much about old Prince Aukust. He’d died years before I came to Rotenek. The older folks had good words for him, but it’s always easy to think kindly of someone who’s gone. At first the rivermen and the others guiding us around might have put up with Mesner Aukustin for memory of his father, but they warmed up to him for himself.
Mesner Aukustin quickly stopped being stiff and bossy. He didn’t have that knack Iulien did of talking people around. It was more like he listened them around, asking a few questions, then nodding while people grumbled about what they needed and everything that had gone wrong. He never promised anything or said the slightest word against Princess Anna, but with a solemn, serious look he’d say, “I’ll see what can be done.” Then they’d harrumph and touch their caps, but they’d look satisfied.
So he coaxed the crowd into order and kept them from pushing too close to Celeste as she worked and suggested—never ordered—that some of them go ahead and do what they could to bring all the sick people together in a room close to the street where Celeste could work. It was hard on the sick to move them, but it meant we could do the charm on more people at once. The bits of the charm with the water and written signs had to be brought around to each person, but the prayers could all be said at once, with more people to echo the responses along with Iulien and me.
It still took almost an hour from when we first came into a sickroom and began putting Mesnera Chazillen’s fever-stones into the hands of the worst off—the whimpering babies and shivering old women—until we collected them up again at the end, watching the faces relax in the beginning of comfort or plucking the stones from the loose fists of children who were sleeping natural-like for the first time in days. But in the same amount of time we could take care of two people or twenty or maybe even fifty if there had been a room to hold that many.
By the time it was full dark, we’d worked a path from the rivermen’s street across the warehouse district with its tenements and taverns. Then we set up lanterns at either end of the boats and kept going. I could only imagine how small a part of the lower city we’d seen so far.
Throughout the night we moved along dark waterways that had once been streets, looking for watchers who signaled where to tie up for our next stop. Then there would be another crowded room, just like the last one. It was too late for some. I’d go to tuck a fever stone in a hand and the fingers would lie limply, already cooling on their own. I’d see Celeste bite her lip and try not to cry in frustration. Some were too weak to be brought to the fever rooms and we’d have to choose between passing them by or coming too late at the next house.
I still noticed being tired that night. Liv couldn’t leave her boat easily, so she’d curl up there and sleep while we were working. Once Aukustin had sent people off to arrange the next sickroom and Iulien had helped write out the charm-signs, they and Brandel would find a place in a corner somewhere to sit leaning against each other and close their eyes for a bit. Every once in a while Brandel would come awake with a jerk. I knew he felt guilty for sleeping when he should be on guard, but I doubt there was anyone who would have touched them.
For Celeste and me there was a brief rest as we moved from place to place, and that only if the water was still deep enough that we could ride in Liv’s boat, alongside the bottles of Saint Rota’s water and the chest with the supplies. I’d put my arm around Celeste and draw her head down into my lap and hold her close to let her get a wink or two while she could.
It was easier after dawn when it was light again, though there’d been hours when I thought it would never come. I stopped remembering faces. I stopped remembering almost everything, at least, how it connected together. There are bits and pieces I still recall. It’s like one of those paintings that has so many little details it looks like real life, but it’s flat and fixed, with nothing moving. I remember how, more and more, the word had run ahead of us. Especially at night, as the oars splashed slowly down the street, feeling for the depth of the water to make sure we didn’t run aground, there would be a string of lanterns held up to light our way and show us the safe path.
Sometimes I heard voices in the dark. “Mama Rota’s coming! Mama Rota’s coming!” It was funny that they said it that way, but I didn’t think about that until much later.
I re
member when we returned down a broad street and Liv could tell from the shape of the ripples that the flood waters had drained away too low for the boat to pass. That should have been a good thing. The rest of us got out so that Liv could cross back into the nearest chanulez. The floodwater had been our road. We still had to deal with wading through the muddy water, and now we needed to bring all the supplies farther from the boat to where the sickrooms were set up.
We caught snatches of sleep and ate when someone put a crust of bread into our hands. I don’t know where they were finding bread or who was going hungry to give it to us. We didn’t count the hours or the days, but we counted the empty bottles of Saint Rota’s water. Four by six bottles in a wooden case. Two cases filled from the cask we’d brought out of the wine cellar. We filled them once from what remained in the cask, asking for help to hold it steady so we wouldn’t spill any drops. It seemed as if the bottles emptied more quickly now. Maybe they did. We worked more quickly and the sick were brought together in larger crowds.
I remember the church of Sain-Estefen where so many had come in hope of a cure that we emptied a whole bottle in a single working. I remember Celeste holding it afterward and looking at me with a kind of terror as we both thought of the same thing. What would we do when Saint Rota’s holy water ran out? How could we tell people that there was no way to get more? No way to cross back to the upper city, never mind back into the palace cellars.
We’d run out of ink and paper to write the charms. Celeste cried in frustration for a bit, then went back to poking and picking at the charm. There was nothing special in the ink or the paper, she said, so Iulien made ink out of lamp black and oil and we brushed the charm-signs directly onto each fevered brow. Aukustin and Brandel tried to learn the signs, but Celeste said no one but Iulien had them right. My hands shook too much to try. There was no charm-paper to burn in the candle afterward, so Celeste would press her palm to the inked signs then pass her hand over the flame to release the fever.
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