“Water and wine,” Pel replied, untying packets. “This will take more than one treatment, probably many. Best would be water drawn from an open stream under a waning moon, to assist in closing the injury. But we must heal the infection first, not shut it away inside your flesh.”
“Shut away, like me in this frog-filled city,” Arizak growled. “Go ahead, then.”
He sat back in the big chair. Pel could now see that it had been carved out of a single piece of wood, a master’s work. Dragons reared their heads under each of the ruler’s big hands, and another loomed up to form the chair back. From all accounts that was the way Arizak lived: surrounded by dragons, not one as benevolent as the wooden ones who supported him. Perhaps his truest supporters were here: the silent serving woman and the gold-eyed lady who waited in the dark.
The serving woman brought him a small table, and set the pitcher of wine upon it. A small metal pan, bronze by the glints of light the fire struck off its sides, was placed on the brazier to heat. Pel willed himself to concentrate, to allow his mind to step away from this dark and troubled place, to the hamlet where his life had started over. Instead of the Irrune ruler, he pictured a farmer whose leg had been sliced by his plow blade, and had been too stubborn and too busy with the planting to come in to have it seen to until his wife forced him. He glanced up into the golden eyes of the woman waiting by the wall, and guessed that this case was much the same.
Pel stood up and exercised his long back. Arizak had drained the cup of medicine he had mixed and was watching him with speculative eyes.
“What do you make of it, healer? You’ve eased some of the pain. Good start. Can you cure my frog-rotting leg?”
Pel opened his mouth to speak.
“Yes,” a woman’s voice interrupted him, at the same time a young man’s voice said, “No.”
Surprised, the healer looked around for the speakers. The ruler lifted an eyebrow.
“A mummer as well, you can throw your voice in two different directions. Give me a straight answer, and keep your ventriloquism to amuse those shite-eaters in the Maze. I want a straight answer.”
“I don’t know, ser,” Pel replied, getting his own voice back. “But I will try.”
“Good enough.” Arizak turned to the woman with the golden eyes. “Take him back.”
All the way through the dark streets, Pel wondered whence had come the voices that had spoken out in Arizak’s chamber. Once the bronze-clad lady had illuminated the room with the globe she now held shielded in her hands he could see no one but the four of them. The old man had seemed surprised but not alarmed, so it was no one concealed behind the walls. Clearly, Arizak believed Pel had manifested them.
Pel had a different interpretation, though he scarcely dared even to think it: Meshpri and Meshnom had spoken, there in the small stone room. The healing gods had watched over him, and given him the ability to heal, this he knew, but they had never before manifested themselves. What did it mean? In the gentle goddess’s eyes, all patients were the same, with rank, age, wealth having no impact upon her gift to them. Yet not only did the gods speak out regarding this patient, but they disagreed on his prognosis. It meant to Pel that Arizak was at a turning point, neither too ill to recover nor guaranteed to live, and that his life must impact the health and well-being of many others.
The Avenue of Temples was silent this dark night. Voices and footsteps rang from the depths of the surrounding city. Only the soft brushing of their feet on the stones could be heard. Pel paused. Was that another set of feet behind them?
He couldn’t tell. When he stopped, they stopped. It might have been an echo in the man-made valley of stone. If she heard, his guide made no indication. Just before they reached Pel’s shop, he thought he saw a very small figure, darker than the darkness, slip in between two of the ruined buildings. A spy? A would-be thief? A patient in need of Pel’s services who did not wish to reveal him- or herself yet?
Inside, the woman set down her blue stone. It glowed gently, then faded.
“I leave this with you, healer,” she said. “When my lord has need of you, it will burn with the blue fire. Follow where it leads. It may not be to the same place as tonight—I do not know. Will you come?”
“I will,” Pel promised.
“And no word?”
“None.”
She inclined her head, and slipped out into the moonless night.
Shiprisday bloomed bright and hot. Pel toiled as hard as any of his patients paying their debts; harder than some, of course. Once again, Miskegandros, fabric merchant and sufferer from gout from his overindulgence in the foods he loved and could afford, lounged at the side of the field shouting orders as though he was the master here. Pel should have insisted on cash from the Rankan, but Miskegandros was disinclined to part with any for his weekly dose, and, truthfully, Pel thought a day’s hard gardening would do the man more good.
“Up, good ser,” Pel said, playfully, urging the merchant to his feet with the flexible tines of the rake that the man had discarded. “By my reckoning you have five hours to go.”
“But it’s only four hours left in the day,” the Rankan pouted. “The others say they’re leaving by late afternoon.”
“And they’ve been working since midmorning,” Pel explained, with a friendly expression that brooked no disagreement. “Come along, you’re still several yards short of a suit.”
Grumbling, the Rankan lumbered to his feet and went back to raking. The pile of stones grew on the perimeter of the field where a small group of girls were fitting them into the gaps in the ragged wall. Once this had been a noble’s pleasure garden, Bezul had relayed from Percaro, the most recent of the land’s many owners. Around the five-acre plot ranged an ornamental stone-and-brick wall that had been ten feet high. Most of the stones aboveground had been removed by neighbors who needed them for their own walls.
It was too small to be a viable field for any of the farmers, because the footings of the wall were still too high to plow over, and were seated too deeply into the earth to dislodge economically. It was really of no use to anyone in these poor days but someone like Pel, who needed only a small patch of land for healing herbs. The wall would keep animals from wandering across it and destroying precious plantings. A couple of farmers had contributed fruit trees. Pel was especially pleased with the two decent sloes and a wild cherry bush, both old enough to produce next year if he could keep them from going into root shock. But he’d be a pretty poor healer not to prevent that, he chided himself cheerfully.
A few breadths of intact wall still remained, too fragile to disassemble without destroying the lacelike brickwork. In the shade of the widest of these Pel treated laborers with sunburn and a few patients who had ventured outside the city walls in need of his services. A new pipe driven down into an old well dribbled a meager throb of water over his hands as he cleansed the matter from a nasty boil on the arm of an elderly Ilsigi woman. Her blood was slowing, as was the way of extreme old age, and she considered stimulants a plague and a nuisance.
“Try to fool this old body?” she had said, as she rose from the sparse grass with a rustle of skirts and fragile bones. She tapped the side of her head. “It’s the old mind you can’t trick.”
“I bow to your wisdom,” Pel said, springing up. She laughed, a dry cackle, and hobbled away.
He wasn’t done with physicking just yet. One of the girls detached herself from the group within the garden and made her way over, the tilt of her head just a little too casual, her saunter just a little too deliberate. Ilsei had eaten green berries a few weeks ago that gave her incessant diarrhea. Another youngster who pleaded with him not to tell her parents, she had volunteered for a half day’s work to pay for the medication, but the flux had been cured weeks ago. She sent a cocky smile to her friends, then crouched down by Pel’s side.