The Physicians of Vilnoc

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  He circled back via the abattoir, where some sheep that he’d have to greet on his plate tomorrow awaited. Really, he was going off meat. He explained about the imported horses and the invading steppe flies to Sergeant Jasenik and his men; Jasenik was both horrified and smugly validated in his views on sick livestock. In any case, neither sheep nor flies of any description were left alive behind Pen when he slogged up to the fort.

  Where, in the westering light of the entry court, a distraught cavalryman attempted to run him through with his lance.

  Pen was so tired by now that even with Des’s startled aid he almost didn’t dodge fast enough. The spearpoint, which the man had been trying to drive into his back, ripped through Pen’s tunic and skin and skittered over his ribs under his left arm. The shaft burst into sawdust and the point spun away, a moment too late to spare him the blow.

  “Bastard bite it!” Pen swore, turning around and preparing to disable the fellow’s legs through his by-now-practiced nerve twist. But a couple of shocked gate guards had run up and tackled the cavalryman for him.

  “Oh,” wheezed Pen. “Good.” He dabbed at the red wet on his side. It would start to really hurt in a minute, he supposed.

  “Learned sir! Are you all right?” A passing officer grabbed him anxiously by his arm.

  Do I look all right? Scarlet was seeping through his torn tunic and down his trouser leg, which would have to be mended and laundered now, blast it. Irritated, Pen shook him off. “Don’t get my blood on you. It might be contaminated.”

  The man recoiled.

  “Learned sir!” called a guard holding the struggling would-be assassin. “What should we do with him?” The cavalryman was still swearing at Pen. And weeping. Had they already started the sick-horse slaughter, and with his beloved mount? Evidently.

  The cavalryman was quite a young soldier, Pen saw, though past being a boy. Years younger than Pen. As the last in his family, not to mention bearing a centuries-old demon that would make anyone feel a child, Pen still felt awkward with seniority and the duty of care that came with it, for all that it could only become more common in his future.

  “Just take him to Captain Suran,” Pen sighed. “Tell him what happened. Maybe he can rule it a temporary madness.” Unless it happens again. Pen hoped not. “I don’t have time to deal with this.”

  “Can I escort you to the hospice, sir?” asked the anxious officer.

  Pen stared glumly at him. “I know my way by now, I promise you.”

  Oh, said the outraged Des, still a little frenzied from the sudden attack and defense, we could be a lot more sarcastic than that! Let me, let me!

  Settle down.

  Well, he’d wanted to report in to Master Rede anyway. Pen put his unwashed-since-the-abattoir hands behind his back to keep them there as he continued his trudge to the hospice. He wasn’t dizzy. Was he? Not from this shallow if ragged cut…

  Rede greeted him with interest and then, as he took in the gory details, horror, and rushed Pen to a treatment room. Pen sat gratefully on a stool and let himself be fussed at, although Des was already stopping the bleeding. That tunic’s done for, Pen thought as it came off at Rede’s hands and landed in a heap.

  “Does this hurt?” Rede asked, coming at him with a sponge of wine spirits.

  Why did people even ask that? “Like a bitch,” Pen gasped as the cleansing fluid hit. “It was all right before you got your paws on it.”

  “Aye, I don’t think so,” said Rede, swabbing grimly as Pen flinched. “Do you know you’re in shock, Master Not-really-a-physician?”

  “Am I?” said Pen doubtfully, and “Yes, you rather are,” put in Des aloud.

  “I see this in my army idiots. I don’t expect it of you.”

  “Ngh.” Pen added after a moment, “I was going to try to ride into Vilnoc tonight.”

  “And now you’re not,” said Rede firmly. His hands didn’t stop working.

  The room was turning. Then the nausea hit. Pen countered it with deep breaths.

  “Your demon was right when she told the general you wouldn’t know when to stop,” Rede complained on. Pen didn’t argue with him. There were very few people in the fort that poor Rede could vent his feelings upon at the moment, just Pen and, well… Pen. And Des, maybe.

  “This is why medicine can’t be my calling,” said Pen dimly. “The demand is endless, and I’ve learned I am not. Only the gods could deal with all the world’s pain, all at once, all the time. It’s a wonder they’re not driven mad. Unless they have been, which would explain some things. Theologically speaking. Even a sorcerer can’t be a god, not all by himself. Although desperate people will try to make him so.”

  “Nor can a physician,” sighed Rede.

  “Aye.”

  * * *

  The all by himself problem was partially addressed for both of them, late the following morning, when a large traveling coach rolled up to the fort gates and disgorged, of all the people Pen had stopped expecting, the senior sorceress-physician from the Mother’s Order at Jurgo’s winter capital. Along with a crew of her aides.

  Learned Master Ravana was a small, aging woman radiating the dense presence within her of a demon at least four generations old. For once, Des had no sly jibes about the rival. Pen had the sense of exquisitely polite bows exchanged between high-level diplomatic enemies being escorted to a negotiating table. In any case, after Pen and Rede came dashing out to welcome them all, Ravana’s demoness did not interfere with her rider’s determined and efficient introductions.

  There followed the fastest tour through the sick-chambers that Pen could arrange, along with a clipped description of all that they had discovered. By Ravana’s pertinent questions, she had little trouble understanding events. Then Pen ruthlessly commandeered her and her coach to drive them into Vilnoc where he could toss her to the beleaguered Master Tolga.

  Given their many commonalities, Pen thought the two Mother’s physicians might get along well. For one thing, Tolga wouldn’t start already angry at Ravana as she was at Pen for not coming lately, even though he’d been there and the sorceress never had. Because people were illogical like that. Some days, Pen really preferred demons.

  Why, thank you, preened Des.

  Hush.

  Pen might even be able to set the senior sorceress on Jurgo, now wouldn’t that be a boon. She’d worked for the duke much longer than Pen had.

  Pen tucked himself into a corner of the coach, grateful to be sitting down. “Apologies for sitting so close, Learned.” His vague gesture took in their two powerful demons, each studiously ignoring the other like two strange cats.

  She waved this away. “It can’t be helped.” She sat back, her eyes narrowing at him. At them. “So, you are the one Duke Jurgo has told me about. I’m pleased to finally get a chance to meet you, though sorry the occasion is so fraught.”

  “And I, you.” It had been Pen’s second summoning, she’d told him earlier, backed by a note from Jurgo himself that had torn her out of her own sticky matrix of responsibilities in order to travel to Vilnoc. That, plus the very real possibility that if the bruising fever should jump to the winter capital, she might well find herself dealing with it there, and she’d wanted to be beforehand. She’d been very frank about that, for which Pen was grateful.

  Ravana took this chance to ask a few more shrewd questions about the fever, while the aide who’d accompanied them, herself a physician, listened closely. Pen was just glad for a chance to sit down, though as the coach rocked through a rut, he touched his ribs and winced.

  Ravana nodded to his side. “And just what happened there? The wound looks fresh, even with uncanny healing.”

  Pen was wearing his old house tunic this morning, but she’d recognized his status instantly upon meeting due to his dense demon. His injury was doubtless as bare to her Sight beneath the cloth and bandages as anyone else’s would be to him and Des. He sighed and recounted the incident with the murderously upset cavalryman.

  Her lips tw
isted in resigned understanding. “So sad about the horses. But I have to believe you are doing the right thing in removing them as swiftly as possible. Poor young fellow! Will they hang him?”

  “I’ve asked them not to. His captain, though furious, was sympathetic to his plight, so I think they’ll listen to me.”

  “I see.” She frowned out the window, tapping her knee, then turned a more considering gaze upon Pen. “So. Your Darthacan translation of Learned Ruchia’s two volumes on sorcery came to my hands last year,” she went on. “Duke Jurgo kindly sent it over.”

  That must have been the version printed back in Martensbridge several years ago, which had traveled as far as Pen had; possibly one of the very sets Pen had gifted to his patron. “Ah! You read Darthacan?”

  “Not as well as I’d like, and most of my apprentices, less. I understand from Jurgo that you are working on a translation in Cedonian?”

  “Oh! Yes.” Pen brightened. “The first volume is done and waiting for me to recopy onto the metal printing plates. The second, I am still translating.”

  “The one on medical sorcery, yes?”

  “Yes. It’s a much thicker and more complicated volume, and so is taking longer.”

  “Such a work would be a boon to my apprentices.”

  “That’s my hope. When I was in seminary at Rosehall, the scarcity of texts was a source of much contention. And once, a lurid stabbing. That was what first inspired me to develop the plate-making method. Which I describe in the codicil to the first volume. Although not the part about the stabbing.”

  “I read that.” She sat back and favored him with a peculiar smile. “I want copies for my students. And myself.”

  “You should be able to extract them from Jurgo. It will be his ducal press producing them, if all goes well.”

  She nodded firmly. “Pray do not let anyone else run you through before it is finished, Learned Penric.”

  Accidentally implying they’d be welcome to turn him into a pincushion after? Pen, remembering the state in which he’d left his study, could almost endorse the sentiment. He returned a sheepish grin. “I’ll try not, Learned.”

  Then the coach arrived at the Mother’s Order, and all was urgent bustle again. The harried Tolga greeted this relieving force with all the joy Pen had hoped, and even spared a smidgeon for him as he detailed the story of the sick horses and the blue flies. It was quickly evident he could leave the women to get on with it, so he begged the loan of a chair and bearers to carry him back to the fort.

  It wasn’t exactly malingering. The spear cut still throbbed, and he could lie back, close his eyes, and extend Des’s range and sensitivity to its maximum to slay a swath through every biting insect along his route through Vilnoc to Tyno. After this was over, he never wanted to kill another domestic animal in his life, but he thought he could cheerfully make this bug-slaughter a routine wherever they traveled. It was a start.

  * * *

  In five days, new cases trickled down to none. By ten, Pen and Dubro and Rede were able to move the last of the victims from the sick-chambers to the recovery barracks. With fewer deathly ill men to spread the magics upon, they healed faster and faster. This left Pen more chances to circle Tyno, with a similar result. Ravana and Tolga reported a matching course of events from the Mother’s Order in Vilnoc.

  In the middle of all this the Rusylli encampment finally sent for his help, and he took Dubro along, not solely in case of more angry spears. To his bemusement, the sick Rusylli responded to the older sorcerer, who spoke not a word of their language, with more trust than they gave the more powerful but younger-looking Penric—Pen was reminded of his obstreperous patients in the fort who had yielded to that same grandfatherly air. It would have been better, always better, if they’d been able to start the treatments earlier, but with the source of new infections cut off, they at least stood a chance of catching up, and within two days Pen was able to leave the Rusylli to Dubro as his special charge.

  This also gave him ten days to be very, very sure Des had managed to clear the disease from his own body, because, yes, of course that horsefly in the Tyno temple had been infected. Pen wasn’t even surprised when his fever began. But since soldiers persisted in eating, no doubt to the dismay of the army ledger-keepers, there was a never-ending parade of beasts in the abattoir to divest chaos upon. Pen added his own body’s incipient disorder to the discharge, and his ailment passed off with no other symptoms.

  Thirty-six days after he had left home for a two-hour visit to the fort, Pen stood before his own front door once more.

  Had the cheerful red-orange paint been peeling this much before? Pen had barely time to wonder if he should get someone on that before it was flung open and Nikys bolted into his arms.

  “Oh, you’re back, you’re well, you’re alive, you’re here!” she cried in excitement, pulling him into the atrium.

  Pen let himself be hauled, helpless against his spreading grin, and her. “Hey, hey, I sent you a note yesterday, it shouldn’t be a surprise…”

  “We’ve been watching out for you all morning. I promise you, I didn’t let Lin touch your study.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can’t remember what I was last doing there anyway,” he assured her. For all that he wanted to cling to his writing table like a barnacle and never be scraped off again.

  “You’ve grown so thin!” She unhanded him just enough to scowl down the length of his body. “You could hardly afford that. Des, didn’t you make him eat?”

  “Army food and general madness,” Des defended herself. “Not my fault.”

  “Well, you’ll find neither here.”

  “Five gods be praised,” Pen told her. Footsteps and a faint mew drew his attention beyond her, where Idrene stood holding Florina and smiling. “Oh my word. Her head’s grown so much!”

  “They do that, about the fourth month,” said Idrene placidly.

  “Well, yes, I knew that, or Des did—six of her prior riders had been mothers, did I ever say? Before they contracted a demon, of course.” His reach toward the sleepy infant was briefly thwarted by Idrene stepping back. “No, I’m clean, I wouldn’t be back here if I weren’t.”

  He pried his child away from her and fixed her on his shoulder, stroking the fuzzy head in wonder. “It’s just… marvelous. To marvel at. You are a marvel, yes you are…” He was fairly sure his expression was completely foolish. He was fairly sure he didn’t care.

  His glance around the atrium found it all… exactly the same, clean and serene, and when had that become a miracle? He spared an arm to snag Nikys. “I have so much to tell you.”

  She choked on a laugh. “I have so little!”

  “No… no… everything here is marvelous.” He breathed in her curls. “Everything.”

  Epilogue

  “So,” said Rede, fingering the metal rectangle. “This is what a magically finished printing plate looks like.”

  “You can pick it up,” Pen said cordially. “It won’t break.”

  Endlessly curious, Rede separated it from its stack and did so, tilting it this way and that in the bright light from Penric’s study window.

  “That’s still the Cedonian translation of Volume One, which I’m well along with, but I broke off to add a chapter on the bruising fever to Volume Two,” Pen told him. “I will be very pleased to have you read the first draft and check it for accuracy, as there’s scarcely anyone with more expertise on that subject right now than you, hard-won as it was.”

  “You,” Rede pointed out. “And Master Tolga and Learned Ravana.”

  Pen nodded concession. “But you’re here. Anyway, my plan is to first make it a separate little chapbook, for the palace printer to send around to the relevant Orders in Orbas. Because it seems more locally urgent.”

  Rede said wistfully, “Do you think all the blue flies have really been eradicated?”

  Pen grimaced. “I’ve been murdering ordinary flies for years, and haven’t made a dent in their legions yet. More to t
he point, wherever the evil things came from, out there among the western Rusylli tribes, they’re likely still there. As long as the western Rusylli press on the eastern, and the eastern on the borders of Cedonia, Grabyat, and countries south, they’re bound to turn up again.”

  “Let’s pray not for a long time,” sighed Rede. Pen vented an agreeing hum, more in hope than belief.

  The sounds of Lin admitting a visitor drifted up from the atrium and through Pen’s study door, open to catch whatever draft might relieve the heat of this early autumn day. “It’s important,” said Pen, “but not actually what I invited you here to talk about today. And here’s my other guest.”

  Pen rose to greet Learned Dubro as Lin ushered him into the study. Dubro looked around with great interest. “Ha. This looks a proper scholar’s lair.”

  Pen grinned. “I’d apologize for the mess, but I’m not in the least sorry. Here, sit, sit.” Pen cleared a chair of scrolls and pulled it close to Rede’s.

  The two men exchanged what Pen was fairly sure were mockeries of military salutes. “Good to see you again,” said Rede, and, “You as well,” said Dubro. There followed a short, social delay while Lin brought in a pitcher of cooled tea and a plate of spiral cakes, curled around spices. Dubro seemed to find their delicacy somewhat alarming, and sat more carefully on his chair as he consumed them.

  “So.” Pen took a swallow of tea and cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking about this for some time. And I’ve concluded that Master Rede would be an ideal candidate to receive Learned Dubro’s demon, upon his passing, and so become Orbas’s next sorcerer-physician.”

  Rede made a taken-aback sound.

  Dubro seemed less discomfited. “Don’t look like that, young fellow. We all have to go sometime. And I’d be pleased to know I was leaving Maska in such good hands.”