Pen made his way out to the main road and turned right, thinking about Rybi. Adelis had dumped the pregnant Rusylli girl upon Pen’s household—well, upon Idrene, whom he knew would be sympathetic to her plight—late last fall. She’d had a drearily familiar story: a soldier-lover from the fort, forbidden trysts, predictable consequences. Accusation on her side, denial on his, and a family who had beaten and forcibly ejected her. The uproar had worked its way up to Adelis, who didn’t have any more luck sorting out the truth than anyone else. Pen thought he and Des might have, given some time with the boy, but the Father of Winter, not the Bastard, was the god of justice, and Adelis’s army was not any responsibility of Pen’s. Although somebody had to be detailed to clean the latrines, and Adelis, for so many reasons not appreciating the ruckus one bit, had made sure the soldier’s officers knew who.
The anguished girl had slowly recovered over the ensuing months, bruises both physical and mental fading under Idrene’s and Nikys’s care. The Rusylli had no writing, so Pen had weighed in with lessons in both the Cedonian language, and reading and letters, in return for all those household chores. She’d given birth to a healthy boy about a month before Nikys had delivered Florina. Nikys had no need at all for a wet nurse, so Pen had found Rybi a place doing that at the Bastard’s orphanage in Vilnoc, where she and her child were well-fed, safe, and very welcome. She still returned to Pen’s house once a week for language lessons—not just hers, but his.
Rybi had taught him quite a bit about the nomads’ lives and customs, along with their vocabulary and peculiar grammar. Sadly, nothing about it led Pen to believe that mentioning his care of her would be of aid in the encampment, and more likely the reverse.
I think you’re right, said Des. Also, if they offer you a translator, it might be wise to conceal your command of their tongue, as well as how you acquired it. For much the reasons Adelis said.
Eavesdropping, Des? It was a ploy that had served Pen well a time or two before, true. We’ll see.
After a ten-minute walk down the road, a somewhat denuded grove of trees hove into view. It sheltered a collection of huts, formerly wagons, fifty or sixty of them. On this clear morning, the shafts of light filtering through the branches and the bright sun-dapple spangling everything made the place look more idyllic than it likely was.
Pen turned in past the cursory guard post kept there, just four soldiers. At least one of them recognized not only his vestments but Pen as the general’s sorcerous brother-in-law, because he braced and gave a military salute, saying nervously, “Learned sir. Sir.” With Adelis’s army brutes, Pen was never sure if this intimidation was from the brother-in-law or the sorcery part.
Pen returned a tally sign, and murmured, “Five gods’ blessings upon you all. I’m on an errand for Adelis,” and marched past, avoiding delays for interrogations, gossip, or anxious inquiries about what was happening in the hospice that he really couldn’t answer.
A few people were about, tending to chores in the shade. An occasional goat, chicken or pig wandered among them. A dog scratched itself and lay back down with a tired whuff. The army had seized their hostage-prisoners’ draft animals—oxen and beloved horses—for much the same reason as they’d removed the wheels from their traveling huts, but had left the smaller food animals. Pigs, ill-suited to keeping up with wide-ranging herds, were not normally a steppe meat, so Pen presumed they’d been added later. The Rusylli had no other objections to pork, being happy enough to steal it while raiding outlying farms, though horses and young women were more prized. At least they didn’t eat the last.
Pen’s arrival was noticed at once. Pen was inured to being stared at in the street, but not usually with such hostile suspicion. Though it wasn’t for his coloration; particularly in the far south, the Rusylli clans had their share of blonds and redheads, possibly a legacy of all those stolen wives.
A half-dozen sturdy men assembled on the rutted entry road. Bows and swords had been taken from them, of course, but the army had perforce left them knives and butchering tools. And cudgels, Pen knew, could bash sorcerer skulls just as well as they did ordinary ones. The men weren’t heavily armed; they just looked as if they wished they were. They wore a motley combination of traditional dress—well-fitted, bright-patterned weaves, leather straps, metal ornaments—and Orban army castoffs, variously mended.
Des commented, I wonder if their reputation for screaming into battle dressed in nothing but riding chaps and tattoos is less bravado than their wives and mothers objecting to the wear, tear, and bloodstains on their shirts?
Not in the steppe winters, they don’t. Which Pen understood could get even more bitterly cold than his mountain cantons.
Around the encampment, a scattering of young women and girls whisked or were whisked into the huts. The old crones kept working, though they watched the proceedings narrow-eyed. A few young boys took up idle poses, and didn’t even pretend not to stare in curiosity. Pen wondered if they included some who’d sneaked out to play with the carter children along the riverbank.
Pen really wanted to talk with the old women, but apparently these mature men were who he was going to get. They were all here in the first place, Pen was reminded, because they were leaders who were disinclined to make peace.
“Good morning,” Pen began in Cedonian as they all stopped within speaking range. “Five gods bless and keep you.” He offered a tally sign, which was taken in with neither delight nor offense. The vagaries of Rusylli theology were a whole other dissertation, but they did recognize Pen’s god as one of the Five, not an abject reject of Four as the Quadrene heresy would have Him. Or Her, or Him-Her, depending on the tribal region; for a bodiless, if vast, being of pure spirit, Pen granted that the assignment of sex was arbitrary. These men could decode Pen’s Orban vestments, anyway. “I need to talk to someone.”
One of the group shouldered forward. Middle-aged—by Rusylli standards, which probably meant he was about as old as Pen—missing his right arm, so not a bowman or warrior. Anymore. He lifted his bearded chin at Pen.
“I’m Angody. I speak Cedonian.”
“Thank you.” Pen bent his head in a polite nod. He gestured to a circle of stumps and logs around a nearby cold firepit. “May we sit? This might take a bit.” Once seated, Pen would be harder to eject.
Angody glanced to another man, taller and with brown hair and beard in ornamented braids, who nodded permission. So, the translator was follower or retainer, not leader. They all shuffled over and settled themselves, not comfortably, but that wasn’t due to the makeshift furniture.
“Should I get a woman to fetch drinks?” another man, more warrior-like or at least still in possession of all his limbs, asked the leader in low-voiced Rusylli.
“No. Maybe he’ll go away sooner.”
A nod of understanding, and the fellow sat cross-legged and straight-backed, frowning at Pen. Guests were normally plied with food or drink in Rusylli camps; Pen, having heard vivid descriptions of these treats from Adelis, was just as glad to be spared the need to politely choke down, say, fermented mare’s milk.
Which they don’t have anyway, since their mares were taken away, Des pointed out. We’re safe.
Hm.
“My name is Learned Penric. I serve the Bastard’s Order in Vilnoc,” Pen began. He paused, but no return introductions were forthcoming. As they seemed to be skipping opening pleasantries, he continued directly: “Master Rede, the physician at the fort, wanted me to ask around. A number of his men have been taken with a strange fever, unknown in Orbas. Or Cedonia, or anywhere in the countries easterly, for that matter.”
He paused while Angody converted this to Rusylli, with tolerable accuracy. No reaction from the other men. Pen went on, “It begins as an ordinary fever, but then progresses to bleeding, under the skin, in the gut and lungs, and finally even from the nose, ears, and eyes. The skin all over darkens like a bruise—well, it is a bruise, technically—toward the end. It’s very painful.”
Angody’s
brows went up, and he repeated this, more rapidly. Now his listeners all flinched back.
“We’ve started dubbing it the bruising fever, for lack of any other information, but it must have a name somewhere. Wherever it comes from. Is this anything the Rusylli know, or that you’ve heard or even heard rumors about?”
“The blue witch,” muttered one man. “Her curse has come here?”
The braid-bearded man motioned him to silence.
“What should I tell him?” Angody asked the leader.
“Tell him nothing. Tell him we know nothing. Those army curs are always willing to believe that.”
“I don’t think this one is that stupid,” said Angody. “And not army. These eastern Temple-men are bookish fellows, aren’t they?”
“That doesn’t make them any less witless,” put in another man, the eldest if the sprinkling of gray in his beard was anything to go by. “Just more nearsighted.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky and they’ll all be cursed,” another said with venom. “The demon general first.”
A moment of weirdly respectful fear slithered through the circle at this mention of Adelis. When Adelis had come back from his blinding as if risen from the dead, face exotically scarred and eyes turned garnet red, both enemies and allies found him newly alarming. Never a man to waste either time or an advantage, Adelis accepted this addition to his command mystique and let the fantastical rumors proliferate. His private feelings, no one witnessed save his sister and mother. And Pen, as his intimate healer.
“Yes, let our wicked foes be punished,” agreed the ill-wisher’s seatmate on his log, in piety of a sort Pen supposed.
“Now you’re talking foolishness,” said Gray-beard. “The blue witch has neither friends nor mercy. She takes men as blindly as a madwoman picking flowers.”
Braid-beard nodded grim agreement. “And if she’s there, she could come here.”
Pen kept his expression bland and mildly inquiring as he looked to Angody.
Angody blinked at his leader and said to Pen, “It sounds very frightening. But we don’t know it.”
“You’ve had no such sickness here in this camp?”
“No,” said Angody firmly. Not lying about that, at least. A man could make the five-fold tally as well with the left hand as the right, and Angody did. Although if the gods could avert any of this, Pen had seen no sign of it.
Des’s sly ploy had paid off, Pen had to grant her that. He wouldn’t be getting the half of this if the Rusylli knew he understood what they were saying. And he had the main information he’d come for; that the bruising fever hadn’t broken out here at all, let alone first.
Should he interrogate them further, revealing his eavesdropping? It sounded as though their understanding of the disease was shot through with wild tales, which however interesting to Pen as a scholar were of little use to him as a physician.
Perhaps not, said Des in doubt. Though odd clues do turn up in strange dress sometimes, in diagnoses.
Pen wanted more, but either coercing or tricking it from such reluctant informants would take him time and energy that thirty-five men in the hospice and a little boy in town could not spare. He contented himself with a, “Well, if you think of anything else, or hear of anything further, please send a message to me at the fort by way of one of the gate guards. They’ll be able to find me. I’m very interested. And especially if anyone here comes down with it. That would be a matter of utmost urgency. I can help.”
Which… was not yet proved. Upon Angody translating this, it didn’t look as though they believed him anyway.
Pen rose and took his leave of the Rusylli men with another polite blessing. They walked him almost to the road, seeing him out. Or off.
He was, to no surprise, now accosted by the gate guards wanting news of their comrades in the hospice. Trying to strike a balance between reassurance and honesty was awkward, but at least Pen was able to put in an authoritative word or two absolving these Rusylli of having anything to do with it, which might help prevent future trouble.
Pen strode back toward Tyno wondering if that was really true.
“Hey. Hey. God man,” he was hailed in a sharp whisper from the verge.
He wheeled and paused. The speaker crouching half-concealed in the weeds stood up. A Rusylli woman, by her dress and ornaments; older, a near-crone, work-gnarled but still hale, by the way she sidled up to him. She was guarded, or dogged, by a thin hound, its muzzle gray to match her head. It leaned into her skirts, watching Pen as anxiously as its mistress. Her hands flexed, as if wanting but afraid to grasp him.
“Rybi. Rybi. Demon general took. Alive? Dead? Rybi,” she said in broken Cedonian.
Bastard be thanked. Making an instant decision, Pen returned in reasonably smooth Rusylli, “The girl Rybi? Who left your camp last fall? Who are you to ask after her?”
At hearing her language, a look of relief crossed the woman’s worn features, and she came back with a term in Rusylli that meant something like a maternal sister of an older generation; great aunt, Pen decided, was close enough. He’d get the nuances from Rybi later. She went on, “They say the general took her away. They say she died.”
“She’s alive.”
“Where? How?” If Pen’s summer tunic had possessed a sleeve, he thought she would have tugged it in her urgency.
“Given that her brothers half-killed her, while her father egged them on and her mother did nothing, I’m not sure I should tell her family where to find her to finish the job.”
Taking this in, she nodded grimly. “It goes that way, sometimes.”
That particular flavor of sexually charged brutality was by no means unique to the Rusylli, although whether the neighbors condoned or condemned it varied from people to people. Pen was glad his god was implicitly on the side of condemned.
“I gather that she crawled off to die in front of the fort gates by way of reproach, which is how she came to General Arisaydia’s attention.” He’d near-tripped over her, by the tale he’d told Idrene and Nikys. “I can tell you she’s recovered, doing well, and in a safe harbor.” Should he mention the healthy infant, or would that just multiply the targets?
“Can you speak to her?”
Cautiously, Pen chose, “I might be able to relay a message.”
“Then tell her, her Auntie Yema cares for her still. Tell her, live and be well. Don’t come back. Don’t look back.” She nodded decisively.
Rybi had pretty much figured all that out for herself by now, Pen thought, except for the part about her aunt’s regret, so he merely said, “I will.”
A huff of relief.
Pen, murmured Des. Don’t waste this opportunity.
God-given or no, right. “I didn’t come out here about Rybi. I came to ask about a disease that has turned up in the fort, that I hear is known to the western Rusylli people. The men wouldn’t speak to me of it. Will you?” She stood poised, tense, but not running off, so Pen again went on to describe the bruising fever. “They named it the blue witch, or the curse of the blue witch; it wasn’t clear how they thought of it. Though I can say with confidence that there’s nothing uncanny to it. It’s just a disease, if a gruesome one.”
Yema scowled, taken aback. “Is that so, god man? I’ve never seen it myself. I’ve met folk who lived through it.”
So, people were known to survive it; encouraging. “Oh?”
“Sometimes it killed whole camps, they say, out in the far west. Sometimes only one or two folk. But only in the summer. Other sicknesses kill us in the winter. The survivors are shunned, so they stay with each other, as best they can.”
Alone on the steppes was a good recipe for dead on the steppes, Pen had no doubt. “I see. Important question: do you know if people get it just once, or more than once?”
Her brow wrinkled. “I’ve never heard of anyone stricken with the blue curse twice. If they’re weakened enough, they sometimes die of other things later.” She shrugged. “As do we all. Though the warrior lads don’t
want to hear of it, as if death in battle is the only one that counts.”
“The five gods count them all, Auntie Yema.”
“Do they, now.” Her first worries quelled, she stared him up and down with more open curiosity.
“I’m sure of it.”
Her lips pursed. “The red-eyed general—do you know him?”
“Uh, yes?”
“Is it true he commands demons?”
Not exactly. There’s only the one, though she’ll do him favors now and then. If he asks nicely and she feels like it. Probably more detail than Yema needed. “No. He’s not a sorcerer. Temple or hedge.” Did she not realize that Pen was? He was becoming unsure, but it would explain her boldness.
“Huh.” Her gaze flicked toward the grove, and back. Her voice dropped to a rough whisper. “Will he ever let us go?”
Adelis, Pen knew, would be delighted to be rid of the Rusylli clan—actually, portions of four different clans—dropped on his doorstep. It doubtless wouldn’t do to say it so bluntly. Pen temporized, “It’s not up to General Arisaydia. He obeys Duke Jurgo, who keeps you as a favor to his ally Grabyat. If your countrymen ever stop raiding across the Uteny River, maybe the High Oban will relent.” Not up to me, either, Pen hoped she understood. If not, time and people being what they were, a century from now this encampment might be just a village of Orbas with a population that spoke an odd dialect.
She grunted at this unhelpful, if true, answer, then looked over her shoulder, as though afraid of being spied out from the grove. Granting Pen a short nod—half salute, half thanks—she scurried away into the scrubby trees, her skinny old dog at her heels.
Pen walked on, his mind churning.
* * *
The little boy in the village was still alive this morning, Pen discovered to his relief when he diverted to stop in and check him. If uncomfortable, whiny, and restless, possibly a good sign; he’d been panting and quiet yesterday. Another prayer-treatment seemed to be smoothly absorbed. Because she was right there, he went on to minister to his feverish servant mother, and then, unable to forbear, made the rounds of the three houses he’d visited yesterday. If only to examine and record what changes his simple magics had produced so far, he persuaded himself.
The Physicians of Vilnoc Page 5