Inversions

3. THE DOCTOR

Master, you asked to know most particularly of any sorties which the Doctor made outside the Palace of Efernze. What I am about to relate took place the afternoon following our summons to the hidden chamber and our encounter with the chief torturer Nolieti.

A storm raged above the city, making of the sky a darkly boiling mass. Fissures of lightning split that gloom with an eye-blinding brightness, as though they were the concentrated blues of the everyday sky fighting to prise the blackness of the clouds apart and shine upon the ground again, however briefly. The westerly waters of Crater Lake leapt against the city’s ancient harbour walls and surged amongst the deserted outer docks. It made even the ships within the sheltered inner quays roll and shift uneasily, their hulls compressing the cane fenders to make them creak and crack in protest, while their tall masts swung across the black sky like a forest of disputing metronomes.

The wind whistled through the streets of the city as we made our way out of the Blister Gate and headed across Market Square towards the Warren. An empty stall had been blown over in the square and its sack roof flapped and tore in the gusts, clapping against the cobblestones like a trapped wrestler slapping the ground as he begs for mercy.

The rain came in blustery torrents, stinging and cold. The Doctor handed me her heavy medicine bag as she wrapped and buttoned her cloak more tightly about her. I still believe that this — along with her jacket and coat — should be purple, as she is a physician. However, when she had first arrived two years earlier the doctors of the city had let it be known that they would take a dim view of her pretending to this badge of their rank, and the Doctor herself had seemed indifferent in the matter, and so as a rule she wore mostly dark and black clothes (though sometimes, in a certain light, in some of the garments she paid to have made by one of the court tailors, I thought one could just catch a hint of purple in the weave).

The wretch who had brought us out into this awfulness limped on ahead, glancing back at us every now and again as if to make sure we were still there. How I wished we were not. If ever there was a day for curling up by a roaring fire with a cup of mulled wine and a Heroic Romance, this was it. Come to that, a hard bench, a tepid cup of leaf and one of the Doctor’s recommended medical texts would have seemed like bliss to me, compared to this.

“Filthy weather, eh, Oelph?”

“Yes, mistress.”

They do say the weather has been much more violent since the fall of the Empire, which is either Providence punishing those who helped overthrow it, or an Imperial ghost exacting revenge froze beyond the grave.

The cur who had lured us into this absurd mission was a hobble-legged child from the Barrows. The palace guards hadn’t even let her into the outer bastion. It had been sheer bad luck that some fool of a servant, bringing the guards a note of instruction, had overheard the brat’s preposterous pleadings and taken sympathy on her, coming to find the Doctor in her workshop — mortar and pestling her pungently arcane ingredients with my help — and report that her services were requested. By some bastard from the slums! I could not believe it when she agreed. Couldn’t she hear the storm groaning round the lanterns in the roof above? Hadn’t she noticed I’d had to light all our lamps in the room? Was she deaf to the gurgle of drain water in the walls?

We were on our way to see some destitute breed who were distantly related to the servants of the Mifelis, the chiefs of the trader clan the Doctor had worked for when she had first come to Haspide. The King’s personal physician was about to pay a call in a storm, not on anyone noble, likely to be ennobled or indeed even respectable, but on a family of slackwitted all-runt ne’er-do-wells, a tribe of contagiously flea’d happen-ills so fundamentally useless they were not even servants but merely the hangers-on of servants, itinerant leeches on the body of the city and the land.

Coinless and hopeless, to be short about it, and even the Doctor might have had the sense to refuse but for the fact that she had, bizarrely, heard of this sickly urchin. “She has a voice from another world,” she’d told me as she’d swirled on her cloak, as though this was all the explanation required.

“Please hurry, mistress!” wailed the whelp who’d come to summon us. Her accent was thick and her voice made irksome by her disease-dark snaggle teeth.

“Don’t tell the Doctor what to do, you worthless piece of shit!” I told her, trying to be helpful. The lame brute ducked and hobbled away in front, across the glistening cobbles of the square.

“Oelph! Kindly keep a civil tongue in your head,” the Doctor told me, grabbing her medicine bag back from me.

“But mistress!” I protested. At least, though, the Doctor had waited until our limping guide was out of earshot before chastising me.

She screwed up her eyes against the lashing rain and raised her voice above the howl of the wind. “Do you think we can get a cab?”

I laughed, then turned the offending noise into a cough. I made a show of looking around as we approached the lower edge of the Square, where the lame child had disappeared down a narrow street. I could just make out a few scavenging people scattered along the eastern side of the Square, flapping back and forth in their rags as they collected the half-rotted leaves and rain-sodden husks which had been blown there from the centre of the Square, where the vegetable market had been. Not another soul to be seen. Certainly not a cabbie, rickshaw puller or chair carrier. They had more sense than to be out in weather like this. “I think not, mistress,” I said.

“Oh dear,” the Doctor said, and seemed to hesitate. For one wonderful moment I thought she might see sense and return us both back to the warmth and comfort of her apartments, but it was not to be. “Oh well,” she said, holding the top of her cloak closed at her neck, settling her hat more firmly on her gathered-up hair and putting her head down to hurry onwards. “Never mind. Come on, Oelph.”

Cold water was creeping down my neck. “Coming, mistress.”

The day had passed reasonably well until then. The Doctor had bathed, spent more time writing in her journal, then we had visited the spice market and nearby bazaars while the storm was still just a dark brew on the western horizon. She had met with some merchants and other doctors at the house of a banker to talk about starting a school for doctors (I was consigned to the kitchen with the servants and so heard nothing of consequence and little of sense), then we walked smartly back up to the palace while the sky clouded over and the first few rain squalls swept in over from the outer docks. I fondly and quite mistakenly congratulated myself for escaping back to the comfort and warmth of the palace before the storm set in.

A note on the door to the Doctor’s rooms informed us that the King desired to see her and so it was off towards his private apartments as soon as we’d put down our bags full of spices, berries, roots and earths. A servant intercepted us in the Long Corridor with news that the King had been wounded in a practice duel and — hearts in our mouths — we made quickly for the game halls.

“Sire, a leech! We have the finest! The rare Emperor leech, from Brotechen!”

“Nonsense! A burn-glass veining is what is required, followed by an emetic!”

“A simple letting will suffice. Your majesty, if I may—”

“No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you — admit what you really love! Where’s Vosill? Vosill!” the King cried up the broad stairs as he started up them, left hand clutched round his right upper arm. We were just starting down.

The King had been injured in a duelling round and it seemed as if every other doctor of repute in the city must have been in the duelling chamber that day, for they were clustered round the King and the two men at his side like purple-coated chasers round a beast at bay. Their own masters followed at their heels, holding duelling swords and half-masks, with one large, grey-faced individual isolated near the rear presumably being the one who’d cut the King.

Guard Commander Adlain was to one side of the King, Duke Walen on the other. Adlain, I will record only for posterity, is a man the nobility and grace of whose features and carriage are matched only by our good King, though the Guard Commander’s appearance is swarthy where King Quience’s is fair — a faithful, loyal shadow ever at the side of our splendid ruler. But what monarch could wish for a more glorious shadow!

Duke Walen is a short, stooped man with leathery skin and small, deeply recessed eyes which are slightly crossed.

“Sir, are you sure you won’t let my physician tend to that wound?” Walen said in his high, grating voice, while Adlain shooed away a couple of the harrying doctors. “Look,” the Duke cried, “it’s dripping! The royal blood! Oh, my word! Physician! Physician! Really, my lord, this doctor fellow is quite the best. Let me just—”

“No!” the King bellowed. “I want Vosill! Where is she?”

“The lady would appear to have more pressing engagements,” Adlain said, not unreasonably. “Lucky it’s just a scratch, eh, my lord?” Then he looked up the steps to see the Doctor and myself descending. His expression became a smile.

“Vo—!” the King roared, head down as he bounded up the curve of steps, briefly leaving both Walen and Adlain behind.

“Here, Sir,” the Doctor said, stepping down to meet him.

“Vosill! Where in the name of all the skies of hell have you been?”

“I—”

“Never mind that! Let’s to my chambers. You.” (And the King addressed me!) “See if you can hold off this pack of bloodsucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician. Doctor?”

“After you, sir.”

“Yes of course after me, Vosill. I am the King, dammit!”

It has always struck me how well our glorious King resembles the portraits one sees displayed of him in paintings and in the profiles which grace our coins. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study those magnificent features that mid-Xamis, in the King’s private apartments, while the Doctor treated the duelling wound and the King stood, clad in a long gown with one sleeve rolled up, in silhouette against the luminous expanse of an ancient plaster window, face raised and jaw set, as the Doctor worked at his out-held arm.

What a noble visage! What a regal demeanour! A mane of majestically curling blond hair, a brow of intelligence and stern wisdom, clear, flashing eyes the colour of the summer sky, a sharply defined, heroic nose, a broad, gracefully cultured mouth and a proud, brave chin, all set on the frame both strong and lithe which would be the envy of an athlete in his prime (and the King is in his most magnificent middleage, when most men have started to go to fat). They do say that King Quience is excelled in his appearance and physique only by his late father, Drasine (whom they are already calling Drasine the Great, I am happy to report. And rightly so).

“Oh, Sir! Oh dear! Oh my goodness! Oh, help! Oh, what a calamity! Oh!”

“Leave us, Wiester,” the King said, sighing.

“Sir! Yes, Sir. Immediately, Sir.” The fat chamberlain, still alternately waving and kneading his hands, left the apartments, muttering and moaning.

“I thought you had armour to stop this sort of thing happening, sir,” the Doctor said. She wiped the last of the blood away with a swab which she then handed to me for disposal. I handed her the alcohol in exchange. She soaked another swab and applied it to the gash on the King’s bicep. The wound was a couple of fingers long and a couple of pinches deep.

“Ouch!”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Aow! Aow! Are you sure this isn’t some quackery of your own, Vosill?”

“The alcohol kills the ill humours which can infect a wound,” the Doctor said frostily. “Sir.”

“As does, you claim, mouldy bread,” the King snorted.

“It has that effect.”

“And sugar.”

“That too, sir, in an emergency.”

“Sugar,” the King said, shaking his head.

“Don’t you, sir?”

“What?”

“Have armour?”

“Of course we have armour, you imbecile— Aow! Of course we have armour, but you don’t wear it in the duelling chamber. In the name of Providence, if you were going to wear armour you might as well not duel at all!”

“But I thought it was a practice, sir. For real fighting.”

“Well, of course it’s a practice, Vosill. If it wasn’t a practice the fellow who cut me wouldn’t have stopped and damn near fainted, he’d have leapt in for the kill, if it was that sort of duel. Anyway, yes, it was a practice.” The King shook his magnificent head and stamped one foot. “Damn me, Vosill, you ask the most stupid questions.”

“I beg your pardon, sir.”

“It’s only a scratch, anyway.” The King looked around, then gestured at a footman standing by the main doors, who quickly went to a table and drew his majesty a glass of wine.

“How much less than a scratch is an insect bite,” the Doctor said. “And yet people die from those, sir.”

“They do?” the King said, accepting the wine goblet.

“So I’ve been taught. A poisonous humour transmitted from the insect to the bloodstream.”

“Hmm,” the King said, looking sceptical. He glanced at the wound. “Still just a scratch. Adlain wasn’t very impressed.” He drank.

“I imagine it would take a great deal to impress Guard Commander Adlain,” the Doctor said, though not I think unkindly.

The King gave a small smile. “You don’t like Adlain, do you, Vosill?”

The Doctor flexed her brows. “I don’t regard him as a friend, sir, but equally I don’t regard him as an enemy, either. We both seek to serve you in our appointed ways according to the skills at our command.”

The King’s eyes narrowed as he considered this. “Spoken like a politician, Vosill,” he said quietly. “Expressed like a courtier.”

“I shall take that as a compliment, sir.”

He watched her clean out the wound for a while. “Still, perhaps you ought to be wary of him, eh?”

The Doctor looked up. I believe she might have been surprised. “If your majesty says so.”

“And Duke Walen,” the King said with a grunt. “Your ears should burn when he talks about women being doctors, or for that matter women being anything other than whores, wives and mothers.”

“Indeed, sir,” the Doctor said through gritted teeth. She looked to me to ask for something, then saw that I already held the appropriate jar in my hand. I was rewarded with a smile and a nod of appreciation. I took the alcohol-soaked swab and dropped it in the rubbish bag.

“What’s that?” the King said, brows furrowed in suspicion.

“It’s an ointment, sir.”

“I can see it’s an ointment, Vosill. What does it— Oh.”

“As you feel, sir, it dulls the pain. Also it fights the particles of ill humour which infest the air, and aids the healing process.”

“Is that like the stuff you put on my leg that time, on the abscess?”

“It is, sir. What an excellent memory your majesty has. That was the first time I treated you, I believe.”

The King caught sight of his reflection in one of the great mirrors which adorned his private resting chambers and drew himself up straighter. He looked at the footman by the door, who came over and took the wine goblet from him, then the King lifted up his chin and pushed his hand through his hair, shaking his head so that his locks, which had been flattened by the sweat under his duelling half-mask, fell bouncing free again.

“That’s right,” he said, inspecting his noble outline in the looking glass. “I was in a poor state, from what I can recall. All the saw-bones thought I was going to die.”

“I was very glad your majesty sent for me,” the Doctor said quietly, binding the wound.

“It was an abscess that killed my father, you know,” the King told the Doctor.

“So I have heard, sir.” She smiled up at him. “But it did not kill you.”

The King smiled and looked ahead. “No. Indeed.” Then he grimaced. “But then he did not suffer from my twisted guts, or my aching back, or my other aches.”

“He is not recorded as mentioning such things, sir,” the Doctor said, rolling the dressing round and round the King’s mightily muscled arm.

He looked at her sharply. “Are you suggesting I’m a whiner, Doctor?”

Vosill looked up, surprised. “Why, no, sir. You bear your many unfortunate ills with great fortitude.” She kept on unwinding the bandage. (The Doctor has bandages specially made for her by the court tailor, and insists upon the cleanliness of the conditions of their manufacture. Even so, before she will use then she boils them in already-boiled water which she has treated with the bleaching powder she also has specially made for her, by the palace apothecary.) “Indeed your majesty is to be extolled for his willingness to talk of his ailments,” the Doctor told him. “Some people — taking stoicism, manly pride or simple reticence beyond its fit limit — suffer in silence until they are at death’s door, and then promptly pass over that threshold, when a word, a single complaint at a much earlier stage in their illness would have let a doctor diagnose the problem, treat it and cause them to live. Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders.”

The King gave a small laugh and looked on the Doctor with a tolerant, kindly expression. “Your cautionary military metaphor is duly appreciated, Doctor.”

“Thank you, sir.” The Doctor adjusted the bandage so that it would sit properly on the King’s arm. “There was a note on my door which said you wanted to see me, sir. I assume whatever that was about must have predated your fencing injury.”

“Oh,” the King said. “Yes.” He put one hand up to the back of his neck. “My neck. That stiffness again. You might look at it later.”

“Of course, sir.”

The King sighed, and I could not help noticing that his stance altered, so that he was less upright, less regal, even. “Father had the constitution of a haul. They say he once took on a yoke and pulled one of the poor beasts backwards through a paddy.”

“I heard it was a calf, sir.”

“So? A haul calf weighs more than most men,” the King said sharply. “And besides, were you there, Doctor?”

“I was not, sir.”

“No. You weren’t.” The King stared into the distance, a look of sadness on his face. “But, you’re right, I think it was a calf.” He sighed again. “The old stories talk of the kings of old lifting hauls — adult hauls, Doctor — lifting hauls above their heads and then throwing them at their enemies. Ziphygr of Anlios ripped a wild ertheter in half with his bare hands, Scolf the Strong tore off the head of the monster Gruissens with one hand, Mimarstis the Sompolian—”

“Might these not be simply legends, sir?”

The King stopped talking and looked straight ahead for a moment (I confess I froze), then he turned as far round towards the Doctor as he could with the bandage still being wound. “Doctor Vosill,” he said quietly.

“Sir?”

“You do not interrupt the King.”

“Did I interrupt you, sir?”

“You did. Do you know nothing?”

“App—”

“Do they teach you naught in this archipelago anarchy of yours? Do they instil no manners whatsoever in their children and their women? Are you so degenerate and impolite that you have no conception of how to behave towards your betters?”

The Doctor looked hesitantly at the King.

“You may answer,” he told her.

“The archipelagic republic of Drezen is notorious for its ill manners, sir,” the Doctor said, with every appearance of meekness. “I am ashamed to report that I am considered one of the polite ones. I do apologise.”

“My father would have had you flogged, Vosill. And that was if he’d decided to take pity on you as a foreigner and therefore unused to our ways.”

“I am grateful that in your sympathy and understanding you surpass your noble father, sir. I will try never to interrupt you again.”

“Good.” The King resumed his proud stance. The Doctor kept on winding the last of the bandage. “Manners were better in the old days too,” the King said.

“I’m sure they were,” the Doctor said. “Sir.”

“The old gods walked amongst our ancestors. The times were heroic. Great deeds could still be done. We had not fallen from our strength then. The men were greater and braver and stronger. And the women were more fair and more graceful.”

“I’m sure it was just as you say, sir.”

“Everything was better then.”

“Just so, sir,” the Doctor said, tearing the end of the bandage lengthwise.

“Everything just gets… worse,” the King said with another sigh.

“Hmm,” the Doctor said, securing the dressing with a knot. “There, sir, is that better?”

The King flexed his arm and shoulder, inspected his bulging arm, then rolled the gown’s sleeve down over the wound. “How long till I can fence again?”

“You can fence tomorrow, gently. Pain will let you know when to stop, sir.”

“Good,” the King said, and clapped the Doctor on the shoulder. She had to take a step to one side, but looked pleasantly surprised. I thought I saw a blush on her face. “Well done, Vosill.” He looked her up and down. “Shame you’re not a man. You could learn to fence too, hmm?”

“Indeed, sir.” The Doctor nodded to me and we started to put away the instruments of her profession.

The sick brat’s family lived in a pair of filthy, stinking rooms at the top of a cramped and rickety tenement in the Barrows, above a street the storm had turned into a rushing brown sewer.

The concierge was not worthy of the name. She was a fat drunken harridan, a repulsively odoured toll-taker who demanded coin from the Doctor on the pretext that our coming in from the street with such filth on our feet and hose would mean she’d be put to extra work removing it. Judging from the state of the hallway — or as much of it as could be made out in the one-lamp gloom — the city fathers might as well charge her for bringing the muck of its interior out on to the streets of the city, but the Doctor just tutted and dug into her purse. The harridan then demanded and got more coin for letting the crippled child up the stairs with us. I knew better than to attempt to say anything on the Doctor’s behalf, and so had to content myself with glaring at the obese nag in the most threatening way I could.

The way up the narrow, creaking, alarmingly pitched staircase led us through a variety of stenches. I experienced in turn sewage, animal ordure, unwashed human bodies, rotting food and some foul form of cooking. This medley was accompanied by an orchestration of noises: the buffeting screech of the wind outside, the wail of babies crying from what seemed like most of the rooms, the shouts, curses, screams and thuds of an argument behind one half-splintered door and the woeful-sounding lowing of beasts shackled in the courtyard.

Raggedly dressed children ran up and down the stairs in front of us, squealing and grunting like animals. People crowded on to the cramped and ill-lit landings on each level to watch us pass and make remarks about the fineness of the Doctor’s cloak and the contents of her big dark bag. I kept a handkerchief to my mouth all the way up the stairs, and wished I had soaked it in perfume more recently than I had.

Achieved by a final flight of stairs even more fragilelooking and shaky than those we had encountered on the way up, the top floor of this cess-pile was, I swear, swaying in the wind. Certainly I felt dizzy and sick.

The two cramped, crowded rooms we found ourselves in were probably unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The wind howled through two small windows in the first chamber. They had probably never had any plaster in them, just a frame with material for blinds and perhaps some shutter-planks. The shutters were long gone, probably burned for winter fuel, and the ragged flaps which were all that remained of the blinds did little to keep out the gale’s blast, letting wind and rain billow in.

In this room ten or more people, from babes-in-arms to shrunken ancients, huddled on the floor and a single pallet bed. Their hollow eyes watched as we were ushered quickly towards the room beyond by the crippled waif who’d brought us to this midden-rack. We entered this next chamber by pushing through a tattered fabric door-covering. Behind us, the people muttered to each other with a harsh, lisping sound that might have been a native dialect or a foreign language.

This room was darker, its shutters just as absent as in the room before but its windows covered with the bellying forms of coats or jackets pinned across the frames. Rain had collected in the sodden fabric of the garments before flowing in little rivulets from their bottom edges down the stained plaster of the walls to the floor, where it had pooled and spread.

The floor was curiously sloped and ridged. We were in one of those extra storeys that are added to already cheaply built tenements by builders, landlords and residents who value economy above safety. There was a slow groaning noise from the walls and a sharp cracking, snapping noise from overhead. Water leaked from the sagging ceiling in a handful of places, dripping to the grimy, strawcovered floor.

A thick-set, wild-haired woman in a gruesomely filthy dress greeted the Doctor with much wailing and crying and hoarse, foreign-sounding words and led her through a press of dark, foul-smelling bodies to a low bed set against the far end of the room beneath a bowed wall whose lathe showed through straw-hung lumps of plaster. Something scuttled away along the wall and disappeared into a long crack near the ceiling.

“How long has she been like this?” I heard the Doctor ask, kneeling by the lamp-lit bed and opening her bag. I edged forward, to see a thin girl dressed in rags lying on the bed, her face grey, her thin dark hair plastered to her forehead, her eyes bulging behind her tremulous, flickering eyelids while her breath came in quick, shallow gasps. Her whole body shook and quivered on the bed and her head twitched and her neck muscles spasmed continually.

“Oh, I don’t know!” wailed the woman in the dirty gown who had greeted the Doctor. Under the unwashed scent she smelled of something sickly sweet. She sat down heavily on a torn straw cushion by the bed, making it bulge. She elbowed a few of the other people around her out of the way and put her head in her hands while the Doctor felt the sick child’s forehead and pulled one of her eyelids open. “All day, maybe, Doctor. I don’t know.”

“Three days,” said a slight child standing near the head of the bed, her arms clamped round the thin frame of the crippled one who’d brought us here.

The Doctor looked at her. “You’re…?”

“Anowir,” the girl replied. She nodded at the slightly older girl on the bed. “Zea is my sister.”

“Oh no, not three days, not my poor dear girl!” the woman on the straw cushion said, rocking back and forth and shaking her head without looking up. “No, no, no.”

“We wanted to send for you before now,” Anowir said, looking from the wild-haired woman to the stricken face of the crippled girl she was holding and who was holding her, “but—”

“Oh no, no, no,” the fat woman wailed from behind her hands. Some of the children whispered to each other, in the same tongue we’d heard in the outer room. The thick-set woman ran her grubby fingers through her unkempt hair.

“Anowir,” the Doctor said in a kindly fashion to the girl holding the crippled child, “can you and some of your brothers and sisters go down to the docks as fast as you can and find an ice merchant? Fetch some ice. It doesn’t have to be in first-quality blocks, crushed is fine, in fact it’s best. Here.” The Doctor reached into her purse and counted out some coins. “How many want to go?” she asked, looking round the host of mostly young, tearful faces.

Quickly a number was settled on and she gave them a coin each. This struck me as far too much for ice at this point in the season, but the Doctor is unworldly in these matters. “You may keep any change,” she told the suddenly eagerlooking children, “but you must each bring all you can carry. Apart from anything else,” she said, smiling, “it’ll help weigh you down in that gale outside and stop you blowing away. Now, go!”

The room suddenly emptied and only the sick child on the bed, the fat woman on the cushion — whom I took to be the invalid’s mother — and the Doctor and I were left. Some of the people in the outer room came to peer through the tattered door-cloth, but the Doctor told them to keep away.

Then she turned to the wild-haired woman. “You must tell me the truth, Mrs Elund,” she said. She nodded to me to open her bag while she pulled the sick child further up the bed and then had me bunch the straw mattress up underneath her back and head. As I knelt to this, I could feel the heat coming off the girl’s fevered skin. “Has she been like this for three days?”

“Three, two, four .. . who knows!” wailed the wildhaired woman. “All I know is my precious daughter is dying! She’s going to die! Oh, Doctor, help her! Help us all, for no one else will!” The thick-set woman suddenly threw herself, with some awkwardness, off the cushion and on to the floor, burying her head in the folds of the Doctor’s cloak even as the Doctor was unfastening the garment and trying to free herself from it.

“I’ll do what I can, Mrs Elund,” the Doctor said, and then looked at me as she let the cloak fall off her shoulders and the girl on the bed started to splutter and cough. “Oelph, we’ll need that cushion, too.”

Mrs Elund sat up and looked round. “That’s mine!” she cried as I gathered up the burst cushion and stuffed it behind the sick girl’s head while the Doctor held her upright. “Where am I to sit? I’ve given up my bed for her already!”

“You must find somewhere else,” the Doctor told her. She reached down and pulled up the girl’s thin dress. I looked away as she examined the child’s mid-parts, which appeared inflamed.

The Doctor bent closer, rearranging the child’s legs and taking some instrument from her bag. After a while she put the girl’s legs back together and pulled the patient’s dress and skirts back down. She busied herself with the child’s eyes and mouth and nose, and held her wrist for a while, eyes closed. There was silence in the room save for the noises of the storm and the occasional sniffle from Mrs Elund, who had settled on the floor with the Doctor’s cape wrapped half around her. I had the distinct impression the Doctor was trying to control a desire to shout and scream.

“The money for the song school,” the Doctor said tersely. “If I went to the school now, do you think they would tell me it had been spent there on Zea’s lessons?”

“Oh, Doctor, we’re a poor family!” the wild-haired woman said, putting her face in her hands again. “I can’t watch what they all do! I can’t keep watch on what she does with the money I give her! She does what she wants to do, that one, I tell you! Oh, save her, Doctor! Please save her!”

The Doctor shifted her position where she knelt and reached in under the bed. She pulled out a couple of fat clays, one stoppered, one not. She sniffed the empty clay and shook the stoppered one. It sloshed. Mrs Elund looked up, her eyes wide. She swallowed. I caught a whiff from the clay. The smell was the same as that on Mrs Elund’s breath. The Doctor looked at the other woman over the top of the empty clay. “How long has Zea known men, Mrs Elund?” the Doctor asked, replacing the clays under the bed.

“Known men!” the wild-haired woman screeched, sitting upright. “She—”

“And on this bed, too, I’d think,” the Doctor said, pulling up the girl’s dress to look at the bed’s covers again. “That’s where she’s picked up the infection. Somebody’s been too rough with her. She’s too young.” She looked at Mrs Elund with an expression I can only say I was devoutly glad was not directed at me. Mrs Elund’s jaw worked and her eyes went wide. I thought she was about to speak, then the Doctor said, “I understood what the children said when they left, Mrs Elund. They thought Zea might be pregnant, and they mentioned the sea captain and the two bad men. Or did I misunderstand something?”

Mrs Elund opened her mouth, then she went limp and her eyes closed and she said, “Oooh…” and fell in what looked like a dead faint to the floor, folding herself on to the Doctor’s cloak.

The Doctor ignored Mrs Elund and busied herself at her bag for a moment before bringing out a jar of ointment and a small wooden spatula. She drew on a pair of the rike’s bladder gloves she’d had the Palace hide-tailor make for her and pulled the girl’s dress up once more. I looked away again.

The Doctor used various of her precious ointments and fluids on the sick child, telling me as she did so what effect each ought to have, how this one alleviated the effects of high temperature on the brain, how this one would fight the infection at its source, how this one would do the same job from inside the girl’s body, and how this one would give her strength and act as a general tonic when she recovered. The Doctor had me remove her cloak from underneath Mrs Elund and then hold the cloak out of a window in the other room, waiting — with arms that became increasingly sore — until it was saturated with water before bringing it back inside and placing its dark, sopping folds over the child, whose clothes, save for a single tatty shift, the Doctor had removed. The girl continued to shake and twitch, and seemed no better than when we had arrived.

When Mrs Elund made the noises that indicated she was coming back from her faint, the Doctor ordered her to find a fire, a kettle and some clean water to boil. Mrs Elund seemed to resent this, but left without too many curses muttered under her breath.

“She’s burning up,” the Doctor whispered to herself, one graceful, long-fingered hand on the child’s forehead. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that the girl might die. “Oelph,” the Doctor said, looking at me with worry in her eyes. “Would you see if you can find the children? Hurry them up. She needs that ice.”

“Yes, mistress,” I said wearily, and made for the stairs and their mixture of sights, sounds and smells. I had just been starting to think that parts of me were drying off.

I exited into the loud darkness of the storm. Xamis had set by now and poor Seigen, somewhere beyond the clouds, seemed to have no more power to penetrate them than an oil lamp. The rain-lashed streets were deserted and gloomy, full of deep shadows and buffeting squalls that threatened to bowl me over into the gurgling open sewer overflowing at the centre of each thoroughfare. I headed downhill under the darkly threatening bulk of the over-hanging buildings, in what I imagined must be the direction of the docks, hoping that I could find my way back and starting to wish that I’d taken one of the people in the outer room as a guide.

I think sometimes the Doctor forgets that I am not a native of Haspide. Certainly I have lived here longer than she, for she only arrived a little over two years ago, but I was born in the city of Derla, far to the south, and passed the majority of my childhood in the province of Ormin. Even since I came to Haspide most of the time I have spent here has been not in the city itself but in the Palace, or in the summer palace in the Yvenage hills, or on the road to it or on the way back from it.

I wondered if the Doctor had really sent me out to look for the children or whether there was some arcane or secret treatment she intended to carry out which she did not want me to witness. They say all doctors are secretive — I have heard that one medical clan in Oartch kept the invention of birthing forceps secret for the best part of two generations — but I had thought Doctor Vosill was different. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she really did think I’d be able to make the ice she’d requested arrive quicker, though it seemed to me there was little I could really do. A cannon boomed out over the city, marking the end of one watch and the start of another. The sound was muffled by the storm and seemed almost like part of it. I buttoned my coat up as far as I could. While I was doing this the wind whipped my hat off my head and sent it tumbling down the street until it fetched up in the street’s central drain. I ran after it and lifted it out of the stinking stream, wrinkling my nose in disgust at the smell. I rinsed it as best I could under an overflowing drain, wrung it out and sniffed at it, then threw it away.

I found the docks after a while, by which time I was thoroughly soaked again. I hunted in vain for an ice warehouse, and was told in no uncertain terms, by the odd sea-faring and trading types I discovered in a few small ramshackle offices and a couple of crowded, smoke-stuffed taverns, that I was in the wrong place to find ice warehouses. This was the salt-fish market. I was able to confirm this when I slipped on some fish guts lying rotting under a windruffled puddle and was nearly pitched into the troubled, tossing waters of the dock alongside. I could have got wetter as a result of such a fall, but unlike the Doctor I cannot swim. Eventually I found myself being forced — by a tall stone wall which started sheer on a wind-whipped quay and extended off into the distance — to walk back uphill into the maze of tenements.

The children had beaten me to it. I arrived back at the accursed building, ignored the frightful threats of the foul-smelling harridan at the door, dragged myself up the steps past the smells and through the cacophony of sounds, following a trail of dark water spots to the top floor, where the ice had been delivered and the girl packed in it, still covered in the Doctor’s cloak and now again surrounded by her siblings and friends.

The ice arrived too late. We had arrived too late, perhaps by a day or so. The Doctor struggled through into the night, trying everything she could think of, but the girl slipped away from her in a blazing fever the ice could not alleviate, and sometime around when the storm started to abate, in the midnight of Xamis, while Seigen still struggled to pierce the tattering dark shrouds of the storm clouds and the voices of the singers were carried away and lost on the quickness of the wind, the child died.