Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

Mostly the runaways went back home. They had nowhere else to go. Their families and their friends were all on the home place, wherever the home place was, like the villages in Africa from which their parents and grandparents had come. He remembered someone-his father?telling him about how in old times there'd been whole villages of escaped Africans in the ciprfere, the cypress swamps that lay behind the line of river plantations. They'd raised their own food, hunted, and set scouts, hidden from the eyes of the whites. But that was long gone even in his childhood.

Still, at Bellefleur where he'd been born, there were a couple of the hands who ran off two or three times a year, to live in the woods for a few days or a week. They never went far.

Maybe that was because they knew they wouldn't get more than a beating. A beating was worth it, as far as they were concerned. It was the price they were willing to pay for earth and peace and silence of heart. Try as he would, January could not recall whether his father had been one of them.

He let himself out the gate. Cora LaFayette-or whatever her name actually was-had vanished from the empty street. January strode quickly toward his mother's house, sweating in the penitential coat. Twice he looked around, as if he half expected to see the black, tall, smoky form of Bronze John himself stepping through the thin scrim of gutter steam. But he saw only H?lier the water seller, with his buckets and his yoke on his twisted back, calling out hopefully, "Water! Water! Clean cold water!" to the shut and bolted houses.

Benjamin January prayed that when he slept, he would not dream.

January drew the ragged sheet up over the face of the man on the floor before him and sat back on his heels. Toward the end the man had begged for something, January didn't know what, in a language he could not understand. Dr. Ker, the head of Charity Hospital, guessed he was a Russian, a sailor who'd jumped ship hoping for a chance of making a better life for himself ashore.

Poor fool.

"You stupid dago, I'm doing this for your own good!" January turned his head at the sound. Emil Barnard, a gangly young man who had styled himself "a practitioner of the healing arts" when he'd volunteered his services to Dr. Ker, backed nervously from the cot of a man who'd been brought in that afternoon. The patient's face was flushed the horrible orange of the fever, and black vomit puddled the floor beside the rude wooden bed. The sick man was cursing weakly in Italian, swearing that no priest should come near him, no murdering government spy.

"Own good, you understand?" yelled Barnard, more loudly. "You understand?"

It was quite clear, of course, that the Italian didn't understand. Probably even if he knew French when he was in his right mind, the fever's delirium had sponged such knowledge from his screaming brain. All he knew-he was shouting this over and over again now-was that he was in hell. In hell with all the murdering priests.

January closed his eyes. He knew he should get up and go over to them-his Italian was good enough to make himself understood-but exhaustion held him like a chain. Maybe they were in hell.

It was hot enough, God knew. In the long upstairs ward, the clotted black heat was imbued with the stenches of human waste and fever-vomit and the peculiar, horrible stink that reeks from the sweat of those in mortal fear. The long windows that gave onto the gallery were shut tight and heavily curtained in the hopes of excluding the pestilence that rode the air of night, and January's face ran with sweat as if he'd put his head in a rain barrel. Like hell's, the dark was smudged with fire. The lamps were too few and burned the cheapest oil obtainable; smoke hung beneath the high ceiling and the smell of it permeated clothing, hair, flesh. Like hell, even in this dead hour of the night, the room murmured with a Babel of voices: German, Swedish, English...

Like hell, it was a place without hope.

"He thinks you're a priest." January got to his feet, slowly, like an old man. "He has no use for priests."

"An Italian?" Emil Barnard straightened indignantly. He spoke the singsong French of the Midi, with its trilled vowels and rolled r's. "Absurd. They're all priest ridden, Romish heathens. You are mistaken." Yet Barnard did look a little like a priest, in his long, old-fashioned black tailed coat and his shirt of biscuit-colored calico that looked white in the lamp glare and smoke.

"He thinks that's the viaticum-the Host-you have... sir." In his days in Paris, January had called no man "sir" unless he thought they deserved it: the physicians at the Hotel Dieu, the wealthy men who had hired him to play, the Director of the Opera. It was hard to return to his childhood, to call even a street-sweeper "sir" if that street-sweeper happened to have been born white, to look down or aside so as not to meet their eyes. "What is it?"

"Onion." Barnard had a very long narrow face that was carefully shaved, light brown hair a trifle too curly for Nature's unaided hand. "Placed near or under the bed of a sufferer from the yellow fever, it is a sovereign remedy against the miasmatic influence of fever-air." He stepped aside a pace as a woman came to mop up the Italian's vomit from the floor by the cot; he didn't even look down at her as he continued his lecture. "The onion is a nearperfect remedy for all imbalances of the bodily humors. Its wonderful absorptive powers will draw forth the febrile vapors from the lungs and gradually purify the lymphatic and bilious systems. It was a common remedy among the great Indian nations that anciently inhabited these countries, and was written of in papyri of Egypt in the reigns of the Pharaohs, long before the birth of Christ."

"Get him away from me!" screamed the Italian. "Clerical scoundrel! Starver of babies! Thief of a poor man's belongings! You stole the bread out of the mouths of my children and left them to die!"

"Here, now, what have we here?"

Dr. Jules Soublet, in charge of the ward by night by virtue of having one of the oldest practices in the French town, approached them, a tall, brisk, bustling man only a few years January's senior. His coat of black superfine wool was expensively tailored over heavy shoulders, his linen immaculate-Soublet changed it every few hours. His servant followed him, bearing on a japanned tray a jar of slow-squirming brown leeches, six knives of German steel, an array of cupping-glasses and a bleeding-bowl whose white porcelain was daubed and splashed with red. "Mary, Mother of God, save me!" shrieked the Italian. "I have not loved those fat capons of Satan but I always loved Thee! Do not leave me in Satan's hand!" He began to vomit again, clotted black rivers of spew. Barnard and Dr. Soublet both stepped back in alarm;

January caught the man's shoulders to steady him, helped by the tall woman who'd been mopping up.

The vomit spattered her calico skirt. Her face, beautiful and impassive under an elaborately folded tignon, did not change, dark eyes like a serpent's, registering neither disgust nor pity.

"This man doesn't need your silly Thompsonian trash," Soublet said to Barnard, not sparing a glance for the sick man. "Weeds and vinegar and cinchona bark-fie! It's clear that his constitution needs to be lowered. Boy..." The doctor addressed January. "Hold him down."

Barnard backed away, clutching his slice of onion, which in the dim light did indeed resemble the Eucharist. The Italian, too spent to struggle, only wept a little as January gripped his right arm and shoulder, Soublet's servant his left. Soublet opened the patient's vein at the elbow. The blood was inky in the semidark.

"There. He should do now. Bind that up." Soublet turned away. "I'll leave instructions to Ker to take another pint at noon."