Ariana Franklin: Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

Without them all she was rootless, adrift, especially with her occupation gone. If she wasn’t a doctor, she was nothing; even Allie couldn’t fill the space. Where to go? What to do?

The dark trout in the stream were as aimless as she was, and she became weary of watching them. She leaned her head back against the tree.

Damn it, she’d go back to Salerno. Introduce Allie and Gyltha to her beloved foster parents-they’d written to say they longed to see their grandchild. That’s what she’d do. She could earn her living again. Her old tutor, Gordinus, might take her back as his assistant, or she’d become a lecturer in dissection.

Yes, when she’d completed her obligation to Emma, she’d go home. Allie would receive a better education in Salerno than her mother could give her here-though, Adelia thought with pride, the child was already reading some Latin.

“And this time, Henry,” she said out loud, “I’ll make you let me go.”

So far the king had always refused her a passport. “The dead talk to you, mistress,” he’d told her, “and I need to know what some of the poor buggers are saying.”

If the king remained obdurate? Well, there were other ways of getting out of the country-fenland boatmen who were both friends and smugglers would sail her to Flanders.

With her eyes on the thin willow leaves above her, Adelia began to consider how she could pay her family’s way through France and across the Alps to the kingdom of Sicily… in a traveling medicine cart… attach herself to a pilgrimage as its herbalist…

She woke up, having dreamed that she was sitting in the Colosseum with the crowd around her delighting in gladiator blood and yelling for more. The scene before her was still peaceful, but the stream reflected the color of amber.

Dear God, the sun was beginning to go down, she’d been asleep for hours, and the howls of the crowd in the distance had become loud and shrill, indicating that somebody was hurt. She didn’t want to see it.

But she was a doctor.

Adelia got up, shaking off butterflies that had settled on her skirts. She put on her boots and hurried back up the path.

Nobody in the stand attended her return any more than they’d noticed her going. The kerchief in Emma’s hands was in shreds, her face white.

The two champions had faded from what they were; the sand had stuck to sweating skin and hair and darkened them so that in the failing light, the silvery hauberks almost seemed to move by themselves-slowly, very slowly, as if through treacle. Both men were limping; Roetger held his staff in his right hand only; his left arm hung, useless, by his side. His opponent seemed to have trouble seeing, occasionally flailing his staff in front of him, like a blind man feeling for an obstruction.

The crowd’s cry of satisfaction that Adelia had heard was fracturing into impatience. It would be dark soon, and neither champion had battered the other to death. Most unsatisfactory. The judges could be seen consulting among themselves. The God of Battles was letting everybody down.

And then the scene in the arena flickered. There were two cracks, almost instantaneous but not quite; one of them was caused by Master Roetger’s quarterstaff connecting at speed with his opponent’s head, knocking it sideways, and the other by Master Peter’s staff slashing at Master Roetger’s legs.

With Sir Gerald’s champion toppled, Roetger hopped forward and pressed the end of his staff into the other’s neck, pushing him flat to the ground.

There was a silence. A voice croaked, “Say it.” It was Roetger’s.

A murmur, sobbing.

“Say it. Loud, you say it.”

“Craven.” A curious shriek, a submission, the end of everything for the creature that made it.

The crowd exhaled in a howl that was not so much a cheer for the winner as contempt for the loser.

Somewhere the trumpet brayed again. The judges were standing. Emma was on her knees, her head in her hands. Perhaps she was thanking her god.

Adelia took no notice of any of it, not even of the wounded Roetger, who was using his staff as a crutch to hop off the field. She was watching a creature crawl through the sand into the shadows. “What will happen to him?” she asked Father Septimus.

“Who? Oh, that one. He will be infamous, of course. He’s been publicly shamed; he has declared himself a coward.”

That, then, was what “craven” meant, personal annihilation. Master Peter would not die, yet the essence of him had. And the man had fought for five hours.

They had all been shamed.

MASTER ROETGER LAY on a table in the champion’s pavilion, his squire standing helplessly beside him. A doctor poked tentatively at limbs and raised his head as the women came in. “Fractures to the arm and ankle. I can apply a salve, a marvelous mixture of my own from toads’ blood gathered at the full moon and…”

Adelia nudged Emma, who said, “Thank you, Doctor, that will not be necessary. We have salves of our own.”

“Not as efficacious as mine, I assure you, dear lady. And cheap, very cheap-only sixpence for the first application, three for any thereafter.”

“No, thank you, Doctor.”

While Emma ushered the man out, Adelia set about her own examination of the patient. Roetger bit into his lip but made no sound.

The humerus of the left arm was undoubtedly broken, but the other injury was not to the ankle. What she’d heard when Master Peter’s quarterstaff connected with Master Roetger’s foot hadn’t been the crack of a bone, more a “pop,” like something being pulled apart-not a noise she’d heard before but one she’d been told about at the School of Medicine. And the blow had been to the back of the leg

Sure enough, when she took his right foot in her hand, it flopped to the touch; she was able to bend it until the toes touched the lower shin.

“This is not a broken ankle,” she said. She looked at Roetger and then at Emma. “I’m afraid it’s the heel, the Achilles tendon.”

“What is that?”

“It’s… well, it’s like a piece of string attached to the muscles of the calf.” She was seeing it as displayed in a dissected leg on the great marble table where her foster father had carried out autopsies.

She would have liked to tell them about it, how marvelous it was, the thickest and strongest tendon in the body, which seemed to enable the foot to push downward in a run or jump. And why it was named after Achilles, whose only weak point it had been because his mother had held him by the heel when she made every other part of the hero invulnerable to injury by dipping him into the River Styx. But neither Emma nor poor Roetger would be interested in a dissertation at this moment.

“It’s ruptured, you see,” she said. “That last blow must have been tremendous.”

The champion made an effort: “How long?”

“Do we just strap it up?” Emma asked.

“We do, yes.” Adelia turned to Roetger. “We must ensure you don’t move it at all. As for how long it will take to heal…” She searched her memory for what the school’s lecturer on limbs had said-she herself had never treated this particular injury. “It may be a very long time, longer than the break in your arm… perhaps six months…”

Roetger’s eyes went wide with shock.

Aghast, Emma said, “Six months?”

Adelia grabbed her by the arm and took her outside the tent. “You can’t abandon him. What would he do? How could he return to Germany on one foot?”

Emma was indignant. “I don’t intend to abandon him. He was injured in my service. Of course I’ll care for him.”

Adelia sighed with relief. The gentle Emma of old still survived under the harsher surface of the new.

“But he’ll have to travel with us,” the newer Emma said sharply. “I may have a use for him after we get to Wells.”