He was interrupted by the arrival of a grim little procession. The deformed priest Iobhar limped into the courtyard, mumbling prayers and liberally suffusing the air with incense, and two gaunt figures dressed in black sackcloth followed after him, carrying the dead woman in on a litter. Those they passed drew back hastily, crooking their fingers in the ancient sign against misfortune.
Cuillioc frowned in the fierce southern sunlight. “What is the meaning of this?”
The acolytes, Maël and Omair, stopped moving at once and put down the litter, but Iobhar, white-faced and ghastly in his crimson robes, continued to hover ghoulishly over the corpse. “This woman died in an advanced state of wickedness,” he intoned portentously. “Therefore, we perform a rite of purification to cleanse the premises.”
The Prince raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Until the rest of us stop living in an advanced state of wickedness, I don’t see the use.”
Iobhar bared his yellow teeth, hissing out something under his breath. Three or four courtiers tittered appreciatively until Cuillioc cut the laughter short with a quelling glance, feeling faintly ashamed of himself for having provoked it.
Still, it was hard to see how the transgressions of a single slave woman—who did not even sin of her own free will—could amount to very much. A foreign slave at that, he noted idly, of a much darker hue than the warm-skinned natives, with a curious undertone to her lips and fingernails, which in death had turned an ugly blue-grey.
Sudden vertigo overcame him, standing there in the glaring sunlight. He sat down abruptly on a low marble wall encircling a fishpond choked with water weeds. At the sight of all the pale, flabby, perspiring faces gathered around him, Cuillioc felt more and more queasy. Too late, he thought. At the very least too late for any of the men who consorted with those women. He wondered how many might already be ill.
On the other side of the courtyard, the chamberlain was conducting a low-voiced conversation with two of the servants. The Prince summoned him back with a peremptory gesture. “I wish to know more about whatever it was that killed this woman. It might be anything: a plague, a murrain, a putrid fever. We know nothing of diseases that breed in this climate!”
“I promise you, Great Prince, you have no need for concern,” the chamberlain answered hastily. “The servants have just been telling me they recognize the symptoms, and it is a slave’s disease only. They say many are afflicted during the summer months, and most of those die, but it never touches the free citizens, not even those of the lowest class.”
Dabbling his fingers in the tepid water, Cuillioc caught a glimpse of something stirring below in the dark tangle of roots and stems. He leaned a little closer. Beneath a scum of dead insects floating on the surface, he spied three great carp, their armored scales gleaming bright orange, deepest indigo, and bloody crimson. In the ceaseless motion of their spotted fins and gossamer tails they appeared to be fanning themselves. Yet even the fish, he observed wryly, could obtain no relief. They were as glassy-eyed and enervated by the heat as he was.
Glancing up from the carp pond, he met the enigmatic gaze of the furiádh priest. “You are older than I by half a century, Iobhar, and you’ve seen more of the world. Have you ever heard of a disease like this one—so particular about who it strikes down?”
“I have not,” answered Iobhar, bowing his white head in elaborate humility. “It’s true that whenever there is an epidemic in a great city like our own Apharos, the ill-fed, the unwashed, and the ill-housed suffer the soonest, suffer the longest. But once any disease takes hold in the city, men and women of the highest rank are no more likely to be spared than anyone else. I find it difficult to imagine how it could be any different here.”
“That is what I thought, too.” With a languid gesture, Cuillioc motioned to one of his knights. “Find me a doctor of physick, Gerig. Discover, if you can, who is the finest physican in all Xanthipei, and bring him here to the palace to speak with me.”
With the excitement apparently over, the Prince returned to his shady spot under the fig tree and sat down again by the ivory game board. Studying the position of his playing pieces, he reached out absently for the silver cup he had left behind earlier. Finding the goblet almost empty, he put it aside with a grimace of disgust.
What business had he addling his wits for weeks on end with the strong southern wines, he asked himself sternly. Then he remembered a cooling drink they made here called julla, which seemed to be nothing more than rose petals and lemon juice added to cold water, and he thought that a man of sense might choose that beverage instead. He signaled to his page, the nameless urchin he had snatched from the galleys almost on a whim.
But by the time the boy stood before him, half sheepish and half defiant, Cuillioc had already changed his mind. He found himself wondering: was the water here safe? And he was suddenly appalled by his own negligence, for that was a question he should have asked weeks ago. If the usual conditions of war hardly applied here, that was still no excuse for such abominable carelessness.
“You have been in the kitchens,” he said to the boy. “Where do the cooks get the water they use in preparing our food? Are there cisterns in the palace? Are there wells?”
The urchin answered with a shake and then a nod of his head. He never spoke when he could avoid it; he was that wary of losing his place and being sent back to the galleys. When he did speak, it was only to parrot those things he heard in his capacity as the Prince’s spy. Of his own past, of his present doings, he said not a word, and no amount of kindness could win his confidence—nor could any amount of scrubbing or feeding, apparently, make him more pleasing to look at. He was as unlovely in the wrinkled silks of his newfound prosperity as he had ever been in the direst extremes of poverty. Yet, oddly, Cuillioc trusted him, if only because the boy’s best interests were so intimately linked with his own.
When the boy remained silent, one of the Prince’s opponents spoke up from across the chaet board.
“I’ve seen the servants soak leaves of some foul-smelling herb in their water before they drink it. If it tastes as bad as it smells—” He shuddered dramatically.
“It’s the same spice they put on everything they eat,” added the other player, a knight named Brihac.
“Everything they cook in the bazaar reeks of it.”
But Cuillioc was scarcely listening. That the water came from wells inside the Citadel was all he needed to know. He sent the boy to the cellars for a cup of the rose-scented julla, then returned his attention to the ivory game board.
The game went so slowly that after a time his attention began to wander. Stifling a yawn, he glanced around the garden. In the branches overhead he recognized a small green bird that sometimes raided crumbs from his breakfast table. She was beating her wings and darting about, trying to attend to the needs of a nestful of newly hatched youngsters. By his count, this was the third family she had attempted to raise since early spring, and if she seemed a little desperate in her efforts to provide for her brood it was hardly surprising—all of the previous fledglings had died before they left the nest.
All at once, Cuillioc’s drowsy sense of well-being fled, and again he felt nausea clutch at his stomach. In the midst of this superabundance of life there was too much death, too many fatalities to be quite natural, like the slave woman earlier, like the baby birds who died before they even learned to fly. Even the drowned dragonflies floating in the gilded basin of the nearest fountain filled him with a sudden sense of dread.