Before I could find a response, she was gone, gliding towards her husband, who was smiling at her. Disturbed, somehow, I turned to look again at the young woman Tressa, but she had gone as well, and then I realized that she was close beside me, less than a pace from me, smiling.
"Mester Cahy, c'n I fetch thee to drink?"
Flustered by her sudden proximity, I managed to thank her graciously, refusing her offer, raging at myself internally for the damnable redness I could feel flooding my face. She appeared not to notice; instead she kept her eyes fixed on mine, smiling at me as I stammered out my words. When I had done, she nodded pleasantly, and I had to fight against the urge to watch as she walked away.
A short time after that I saw her again across the hall, talking to Jonathan, and as I looked, she raised her head and her eyes looked directly into mine. Before I could avert my gaze she smiled again and dipped her head in the slightest nod before returning her eyes and her attention to Jonathan. A moment later, while I was still watching her, I heard Donuil's voice addressing me and I turned to find his wife gazing at me from beside him, a small, secret smile on her lips. I felt a strange surge of anger towards her but recognized it as being unreasonable and stifled it. Very shortly after that, I went to bed, where I fell asleep with Tressa's good-natured, disconcerting smile hovering in my mind.
The following morning, as dawn was breaking, we prepared to bid farewell to Ravenglass again and turn our steps towards our hilltop home. Those of our new neighbours who were sufficiently free of duties, obligations and other encumbrances—slightly more than half the newcomers—accompanied us. The others would follow within the next few days, as and when they were able to. Ambrose and Ludmilla rode with us too, both of them keen to see what we had made of our own private fortress among the towering Fells.
As I sat watching our assembling party that morning, my thoughts were split in two directions: the greater part of my attention was bent upon organizing our train, which had now swollen from the four wagons we had brought down empty with us—they were now all filled to capacity—to include the transportation for another thirty- some adults and children. This hotchpotch of vehicles ranged from ox-drawn carts, to wagons drawn by horses and mules, to light carts, with high, narrow wheels that were evidently intended to be pulled along by hand. These latter vehicles, and there were four of them, I eyed askance, thinking it would be a major undertaking to push or pull them up the steep, narrow gradient leading from the river vale to our rocky plateau so far above. I knew, however, that it would matter nothing to me, and these people were native to the land, so I assumed they knew the task that lay ahead of them in climbing up to Mediobogdum.
Conflicting with the need to concentrate on preparing for departure, however, was an equal, or perhaps an even greater need to dwell at length upon the brief discussion I had had, an hour or so before, with Lucanus. My mind had not yet adjusted to the news that he had delivered, and as I sat there on Germanicus, high up and securely mounted in my saddle, I felt a surge of giddiness that might have sent me crashing to the ground had I not braced myself and sucked in a mighty, belly-deep breath.
Luke had approached me as I broke my fast on a mess of boiled wheat and oatmeal with milk and honey, in Derek's kitchens. Returning my nod of greeting, he had sat down across from me and helped himself to a slab of heavy, fresh-baked bread, smearing it with some of the thick honey I had been using to sweeten my oatmeal. We both sat silent for a while, absorbed in the task of eating/Finally, however, Luke sat back, rubbing his hands and wiping a smear of honey fastidiously from the corner of his mouth with the tip of a little finger, and he stared at me wordlessly until I grew uncomfortable, sensing that he had something momentous to say.
"What? What is it?"
"That thing on your breast, the mark."
My stomach swooped and I felt goose-flesh break out across my shoulders.
"What about it? What have you discovered?"
"It's what I thought it was, some kind of skin blemish, almost definitely harmless."
"You have read the scroll, then, the one from the wooden chest in Camulod?"
"Of course, and it contained nothing of relevance to what you described about your experience with Mordechai — nothing at all that might confirm your fears. You have a blemish there, not any kind of lesion, and, in my belief, most certainly not leprosy."
I heard a roaring in my ears and the room began to spin about me, so that I had to grip the edge of the table with both hands and breathe deeply. Luke sat watching me, a faint smile playing about his lips. When I had control of myself again, and my breathing had returned to normal, I let go of the table's edge and sat up straighter, expelling one last, deep breath in a great "whoosh" of air. His smile grew broader then and he clapped his hands together.
"I can see you feel better already."
I nodded, not yet prepared to trust my voice to speak without wavering.
"Excellent, now hear what I have to say. In any normal case, I would have prescribed exposure to the sun and air for such a thing. But your fears to date have rendered your affliction abnormal to the point of precluding such treatment, in addition to which it has been winter, too cold to go bare-chested. All of that has changed now and the warm weather is coming. From now on, as much as you are able in fine weather, I want you to go unclothed above the waist. The browning effect of the sun will likely mend what ails you, no matter what it is, and render the thing less conspicuous."
"I may do that?"
"May? Of course you may! There is nothing wrong with you, Caius, nor has there been. My original diagnosis now holds true. The sum of my experience, and that of my colleagues down the ages, tells me that you have never been exposed to contagion for long enough to have contracted leprosy, so will you accept that now, once and for all?"
I nodded again, more slowly now, aware of the incredible sensations of relief and delivery from danger that were surging riotously through my breast and in my mind. "Thank you, my friend," I said, my voice almost inaudible even to me. "You will never know the extent of my gratitude to know that I am clean and unfouled." An image came into my mind, filling my awareness—the image of his lovely, deeply carved and glowing citrus wood chest. For all this time, throughout my agonized imaginings, it had contained the healing balm that would put my mind to rest. And then my curiosity stirred.
"So what did the scroll have to say about blood and contagion?"
"Nothing directly concerned with your condition, as I said." Luke folded his arms and leaned back against the wall behind his bench. "It was written by a physician called Oppius, Quinctilius Oppius, a renowned and celebrated teacher in the diagnosis of disease, at Alexandria during the reign of the Emperor Galerius, a hundred years or so ago. Oppius was a great admirer of the work of Galen— have you heard of him? Well, Galen was the greatest physician who ever lived, greater even than Aesculapius. He was born in Pergamum, where his father was an architect, and he studied anatomy in Alexandria before going to Rome, where he remained for forty years, first as personal physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and then, after Marcus's death, to the emperors Lucius Verus, Commodus and Septimius Severus. Galen was a wondrous writer, inscribing all of his findings and theories on the practice of his art. His treatise On Anatomical Procedure is the greatest medical text ever written, but he wrote also on healing methods, De methodo medendi, and on the natural faculties, and on the movement of the muscles.
"Galen had been dead a hundred years before Oppius began his work, following the great physician's methods and procedures. It was while Oppius was engaged in working in Asia Minor, at a time when a military action concurred with an outbreak of plague and the medical facilities were overwhelmed, that he became aware of an anomaly that caused the spread of plague infection, in a military ward, among legionaries whose wounds should never have become infected. Oppius formed a theory that these infections might have been caused by the overuse of bandage wrappings that had previously been used to bind plague victims. The wrappings had been washed between uses, of course, but apparently they had not been boiled, which would have been mandatory in less hectic times. We have known for centuries that boiling water cleanses it of impurities. Anyway, Oppius launched himself upon a program to explore this theory of his, and later wrote the treatise that I found long afterward, contending that the careless application of bloody, pus-stained bandages, improperly washed, to open wounds could spread contagion."