Gio began putting her herbs into her bag, considering all these possibilities. She would need these medicines no matter which path she chose. She had suffered to pluck and steal these cures and salves, bought from dark men who traveled in lands beyond the Church’s reach, who would not take Lazarro’s bread and wine.
Perhaps she would offer a few remedies to those with heavy purses. She could use the money for her journey. Reaching to the upper shelf that sat back in the shadows, Gio’s hand closed on the jar containing the dried mushrooms. Her wrist brushed against the cool marble bowl. Her pigments. These had been her greatest treasure, the only conjuring the Church allowed. She had birthed brilliant worlds out of the earth all around her. But she could not take them if she left. Every painter knew her skill and her instinct for colour; her lies would not hold up in a new land. They would know who she was. Her heart sank and she turned, facing the canvas that whispered to her.
The colours were too deep, the black too harsh. There was none of the blank canvas left, no spot of hesitation or apology. What had swept upon her that night? How could this be her story?
In the painting, a broken woman knelt at the feet of Christ, surrounded by an angry crowd carrying stones. The stones were pitted and sharp, some chiseled to a point by deliberate hand and some stumbled over on a bad path. The faces were hungry, like a dog panting as he surveys a dinner that he must steal. Their fingers strained as they held onto their stones. No crowd gave mercy.
Gio knew these stones all too well, used much pigment to make their punishing edges clear. The stones would pierce. The woman would not rise again.
But for Jesus: Jesus would not permit them to have her. He held out an arm above her. In the painting, she had shown His path behind Him, winding, disappearing over the horizon.
While they had been gathering stones, Jesus had been coming to save her.
Gio blushed at the thought and looked down. She should not have painted a gentle Christ. This is not what the Church taught. Not for women like her.
“Mistress Gio! Come at once! My mother is dying!”
Gio heard hysteria in a child’s voice, and she rushed out to meet him, avoiding the body again.
A boy was in the path, no colour in his face. He was shaking, and his eyes darting around as he waited for her to reach him.
“Come!” he called.
“Where is she?” Gio asked. “What are her symptoms?”
“Do not be angry with me,” he said, and before she could ask more, a sharp pain split across the back of her head. Gio fell to the ground.
Lazarro was trying to give the Last Offices to those who were still able to speak and respond. Others just moaned, a sharp fever stinging them, coughs rattling their bones. Children were coming, children who were not sick, walking around the steps of the church. The youngest of them held hands with the older ones. Some looked unwell, but Mariskka did not try to stop them. The children were searching for something. Mariskka watched their faces and understood. The children were looking for their parents. Some children found them, dead or dying, and collapsed with a wail of grief and trembling chins.
One band of three children, clasping hands, wandered among the victims but could not find their parents. Mariskka saw that the youngest of the children, a girl with a simple shift and a blue ribbon in her hair, had the black boils beginning to rise under her neck. She was still trying to suck her thumb, though her two older brothers were tugging at her to keep up. The boys looked, and looked again, and then looked around in all directions.
Mariskka ran across the street to the baker’s house. It was unlocked, the shop empty. She grabbed a few rounds of bread and ran them back to the children. Motioning for them to sit, she broke the bread and handed it to each, gesturing for them to eat. She stroked the girl’s head as the oldest boy stared at her. He could not have been more than ten. Mariskka had seen children coming into her hospice, in her former life, and was used to their reactions when surrounded by death. Most cried. Their eyes turned red, and then fat tears rolled out one by one, as their voices grew high and strained. An adult always laid an arm across their shoulders or gathered the child into an embrace. The child would grieve from a safe distance. The adult would let them see death, watch it at its work, viewing it from a distance like a patron watching a famous artisan at his worktable.
Mariskka saw it in the oldest child’s eyes. He knew. His parents were not dead, but they were gone. Mariskka guessed they had fled when they saw the spots forming on the girl’s throat. She took a big breath to say something, then let it go. The oldest boy wouldn’t understand. And what could Mariskka say even if she had the gift of words? No one had stood with her, either, when death came for her mother. Death had gone about his work while she lay whimpering, helpless, watching.
The boy’s hand reached out, resting on Mariskka’s arm. She looked up at his face, surprised that she had wandered in her mind, surprised that hot tears of her own were rolling down her cheeks. The boy looked at her with a somber expression. She lifted his hand and placed it, palm to palm, against her own, then one by one entwined her fingers with his. She closed her eyes and did something she had not done since that day. She prayed.
“God, help us.”
It was all she could think of.
There was more shouting from the village. The boy’s arm went around his little sister, and he helped her lean against his shoulder. Her face was flushing, and she resettled herself in his lap, her tiny body nestling down like a bird in its nest.
Her throat burning from the tears, Mariskka went to see the source of the shouting. Lazarro looked up, not stopping his work. He had found a needle and was lancing a dark abscess on a man’s inner thigh. The man groaned, his face turned away. Lazarro covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve to keep from breathing the rotted smell.
Angry screams were growing louder. Mariskka hurried. The stone lanes were confusing, all shooting out at crazy angles from the church steps in the center of the village. Echoes carried only a moment in the sky above her. Mariskka listened again and chose a lane.
Armando had a skinny man by the neck, slapping at his sides with the flat end of his sword. The man was twisting and screaming as his companions watched from a distance. Coins and jewelry were falling from the man’s pockets onto the street.
Armando released the man, screaming a threat to the others. All fled, though not with shame. They would return once Armando was gone.
“Do you come to loot?” he yelled at her.
Mariskka showed him her empty hands, shaking her head. In the sunlight she saw a red indentation on her wrist, the usual spot her watch rested. The watch she had stolen from a dead patient. Her guilt made her sick. Her memories punished her. Mariskka tried to remember she had been forgiven.
“Come!” Armando commanded her. Tucking her wrist into her robe, Mariskka hurried to him.
“Go into the houses. If anyone be ill, close the door upon them, upon all who are inside. None is to leave that house.”
Mariskka shook her head no.
“Do you want to die?” he yelled at her.
She shook her head no again.
“Neither do I,” he said. “Do this at once. I will send others to help.”
Mariskka nodded.
“In every lane, look for women who will help you. Care for whom you can, but do not forget you must save the living.”
He was gone before she even caught the last of his words. She furrowed her brow, looking at the smooth stones under her feet, the dirt and food scraps that collected in the gaps between each.
Armando treated her with respect, though she was not capable of earning it, not as a woman who lived in this age. A broken, mute woman.
Armando was a man who would do well in any generation, she thought. God bless the Armandos of this age, Mariskka thought, and of every age.
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br /> Mariskka looked around at the houses. Those who could flee, already had. Heavy furniture and lumpy sacks were scattered in the lanes ahead; within a few hundred yards their possessions had become too heavy, and the wealthy had to flee without them. These things were worth a fortune, she thought. Medieval furniture? Medieval silver bowls and woven tapestries and bed stands carved with dragons’ wings? If only there were a way to get these back to her world, she thought.
So much was going to be wasted.
Mariskka pulled up her coarse brown robe and crept down the lane, stopping and listening every few yards.
A wood door, plain and cracked, was ajar, windows rising above it. Mariskka guessed the house had three narrow stories. No one appeared in the windows, no sounds of movement came from the house, save one soft moan. Mariskka’s stomach tightened and she licked her lips, breathing out as she pursed them.
She had walked into many rooms with dimmed lights. Dimmed lights meant someone was close to death. (And the irony, she thought, was that labor and delivery rooms were so bright that babies had to squint, shielding their eyes from the pain. Let the dying have strong light, she thought. Babies should be brought into a softer world.)
Picking her way across an uneven wood floor, she let her eyes adjust to the darkness. A moan just to her left guided her deeper in, and she saw the stairway, no wider than her own hips really, going at a sharp angle up to the next floor. It offered only the stone wall along its side for support, and she braced herself with her left hand as she felt with her foot, searching for a safe landing with every step. God bless the guy who came up with modern building codes, she thought.
One more step and Mariskka saw her. At first she thought someone had dropped a sack in their hurry to flee. The family had fled this house, that was clear, but this sack moved and Mariskka hurried those last few steps to it.
An elderly woman was lying, spread across three steps, hanging upside down.
Mariskka cradled the woman’s head and tried to lift her without injuring her, moving her head back above her body, smoothing out her legs and arms. Mariskka took long, gentle strokes across the woman’s thin, slipping skin, hoping her touch would communicate her intentions.
The old woman’s eyes were watering, an ugly tumor along one eyelid pressing against her cornea. It was not a swelling of plague. Mariskka looked her over. She was not ill, but she was very old, too old to survive alone. Too frail to flee unless someone carried her. From the empty house, Mariskka knew someone had decided to carry a piece of furniture instead.
“They left you, didn’t they?” Mariskka asked.
The woman turned her head, not understanding.
Mariskka pointed to the door. The old woman followed Mariskka’s finger with her eyes, and nodded.
How can I get this woman down these awful steps? Mariskka thought. She needs food and water. She needs to get away. She doesn’t deserve to die just because she cannot fight death. The old woman might be helpless before her own death, she might even think she should welcome it, but death had no absolute right to the weak. The weak belonged to Christ.
Mariskka tried to focus again on taking the woman’s pulse. She felt a wet, hot breath on the back of her neck, and the woman’s eyes opened wide in terror.
A tall, heavy man of no more than twenty years stood over her, dark hair covering his arms in a dirty thatch. Underneath his open linen shirt, stained with sweat and the soil of the village, she saw them: black rising swellings, looking like black shiny eggs popping up, straining against his skin.
“I bring you good news, ladies,” he said.
If he knew she was mute, and alone with this elderly woman, they would both die. No creature could be more defenseless than a woman without her voice. Mariskka wiggled her eyebrows as if she didn’t care what he said or why he was there.
“I offer you a way of escape from this new death,” he said. “For today it has come to your house.” He coughed, holding his hand against his sides to brace himself from the pain.
Mariskka felt the tiny blood drops splatter on her face.
“You tell me where the treasures of this house are kept, and I will let you escape with your lives.”
Mariskka looked at the old woman, whose pupils were dilated to an extreme. The woman was going into shock. She would be dead within minutes.
The man shifted his weight on his feet. Mariskka wondered how he found the strength to even stand—most victims could not rise from their beds when the symptoms began.
Mariskka’s stomach constricted around something hard and cold. He was greedy. Greed had forced him from his bed, forced him to steal. Mariskka saw herself in him. She could not hate him.
Reaching out her hands, Mariskka felt his forehead with the back of her hand. His fever was well over 100 degrees, perhaps 105 or 106. He would be dead within hours, and he was not free. She saw a dark spirit hovering behind him, ready.
He laughed at her, pushing her hand away, but she brought them together, running her hands over his cheeks, stroking away a spot of blood with her thumb. He turned his head to avoid her eyes, his body stiff with anger, but he did not take a step back. She stroked his arms until she could feel him beginning to calm, then peered into his shirt at the black welts. Every one was almost transparent, a sign that the abscesses were about to burst. His time was short. Though he had been strong, he would die like the weakest among them. Greed had probably lengthened his life, she thought, unwilling to let him go so soon, wanting to twist the knife again and again.
Anger flushing through her cheeks, she felt it setting her lips. No one would die like this in her arms. No one would die without a chance to live.
She bent down, drawing on the dirt floor, the only symbol they shared across seven centuries.
Straightening, she again took his face, stroking her fingers against his forehead to whisk away the sweat, waiting for him to look in her eyes.
When he did, she pointed to the floor.
“Are you mad?” he said.
He pushed her away with one sweep of one hand, knocking her several steps off. She came at him again, but he jabbed his palms into her face.
“Look at them!” he screamed.
Mariskka took his hands into her own. Each hand was the size of a plate. Studying them, she could see nothing.
“They are unclean. I am unclean,” he said.
She knelt down, smearing away the image of the cross, scooping the dirt of the cross into her palms. She poured the dirt over his hands, scrubbing hard until dirt covered his skin.
“I can’t even see my hands now,” he said, as if he were trying to joke.
She looked up, breathing hard, then lifted these hands to her mouth, kissing them and laying them against her own cheek.
He did not pull them away. “I can’t tell my hands from this dirt,” he said. He was starting to say words in tight little bursts. The plague had gotten to his brain. “I am covered in it.”
He looked at her and she knew. He understood. He was covered in the cross.
He slid to his knees, crying out for God’s forgiveness, then slumped over. He was gone.
Mariskka checked the old woman’s pulse and, finding none, closed her eyes.
Her own heartbeat was becoming steady and firm. She understood more big truth.
A woman’s shriek from just beyond the door made Mariskka lurch and say a curse word that would have made Crazy Betty from the hospice blush.
“Don’t hold anything I say against me, okay?” Mariskka hoped that counted as a prayer, even though she wasn’t folding her hands.
Mariskka knew God didn’t have a reputation of answering the general sort of questions. She asked anyway. “What’s out there?”
Chapter Fifteen
Gio woke up, her face pressed into the cold dirt, her arm tucked
under her body, pinning her hand at a bad angle. It was burning with pain.
She used her good hand to force herself up, rubbing the throbbing hand, trying to blink, or scowl, or move her face enough somehow to clear her vision and make sense of this. Everywhere around her were wide columns, set into the dirt, rising to wooden beams above. She could hear noises from above but could make no sense of them.
Her bags were there. She grabbed one, pulling it close and opening it. Everything was there, even some items she did not remember packing. Some items she would never use, like the bat teeth she had bought from a desperate boy. She knew his type too well, always wandering, searching for odd elements that a healing woman or alchemist might use. She had no need of them; there was no magic in teeth of any kind, only decay. But she had paid well and he had been a faithful merchant, always bringing to her first the treasures he found in sleeping villages and stark countrysides.
She stood, trying to see behind the dozens of columns. Mist moved along the far walls, and her steps echoed.
“Greetings?” she said.
Nothing.
In one corner was a straw mattress and table, one of its legs propped up by a collection of old, broken plates. It did not look steady and she feared for the beer mug stationed upon it. Who would live this way?
Whoever slept there was gone. She felt the bed, and it was cold.
A rattle of chains and a dull scrape made her twist around in time to see a brilliant light shining down a shaft.
A woman emerged in the light above her, with a gown of blue silk that radiated its own light. Gio knelt in confusion. She had never been admitted to a high court of men, much less been approached by one so radiant. Gio wondered if she had ever seen this woman in the square. She had never been allowed so close to a noble, not since her youth.
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