Harry Turtledove - Justinian

He returned some little while later, by which time I had done formidable damage to that part of the cake which had not been served out at once. In the lamplight, his face was shiny with sweat and a little pale as he sat down once more. "Are you all right?" my mother asked, for he had been fine when he left.

His chuckle sounded both forced and self-conscious, which last was most unlike him. "Perhaps I should have listened to you about the fish sauce, dear," he said- again, the sort of admission he seldom made. "That was- unpleasant."

He picked up his slice of honey cake and began to eat, but had taken only a couple of more bites when he had to rush away again. "There, do you see?" my mother said severely when he came back once more. "You've gone and given yourself a flux of the bowels."

"So I have," he said through clenched teeth. He made no move to finish the cake now, but gulped wine, no doubt hoping it would restore him. A little color came back to his face, a hectic splotch of red over each cheekbone. He breathed slowly and carefully, as if each inhalation hurt.

"Maybe you should go to bed, Father," I said, for he had not looked much worse during his most savage attacks of stone.

"Yes, maybe I should," he answered, and I knew then he was seriously ill. He rose and started for the door. Halfway there, his departure turned into an undignified dash. With that gait, he was running for the latrine, not the bedchamber.

"I'm going to send for the physician," I declared, as if I expected my mother to argue with me. Had she argued, I would have overridden her. But she said not a word. She nodded to me, her eyes wide and worried. I pointed to a servant and told him to fetch Peter at once.

Instead of leading Peter to my father, the idiot brought him back to the dining room. The physician looked first at my mother, then at me. "Dyspepsia?" he asked. He could be more cutting with fewer words than any other man I have known, the others approaching him also mostly being physicians. Seeing so many sick and dying people they have but small chance of helping does something to their spirits, just as experience in war inures a man to gore.

"We are well, thank God," I said, resolving to have the servant whipped for his stupidity, which I did the next day despite the chaos engulfing the palace. "You need to attend my father." I explained the symptoms, and how they had suddenly come upon him.

Peter looked grave. "You did well to call me. Anything with bad fish in it is not to be taken lightly." He bowed to me, then to my mother, and hurried off toward the imperial bedchamber.

Now I drank unwatered wine, a large goblet, though in hopes of restoring my spirit rather than my body. My mother spent the time until the physician returned praying quietly to God and to the altogether immaculate Virgin. I prayed, too, wishing all the while I could do something more. For as long as I can remember, I have been one who prefers acting to waiting for the actions of others. Here, unable to act, I felt it acutely.

When Peter returned, I did not like the flat, blank expression he wore like a mask. "Well?" I demanded, my voice cracking; I was, after all, but newly turned sixteen.

"He is not well, Prince, not well at all," the physician answered. "He suffers from a violent derangement of the entrails, with the bloody flux typically accompanying such derangements."

"I told him not to drench his kid in fish sauce," my mother said.

Peter bowed. "Would that he had listened to you."

"What can you do for him?" I asked, always the critical question when dealing with a physician. Identifying an illness is oftentimes easier than treating it.

"I have given him a large dose of poppy juice," Peter answered. "Not only will this relieve some of the discomfort from which he suffers, but its constipating action should to some degree oppose his diarrhea."

"To some degree?" I said, surprised. Like anyone who could afford it, I used poppy juice to fight disturbances of the bowels. It always plugged me tighter than the bung driven into a barrel for days at a time.

But the physician replied, "Yes, to some degree, Prince. As I said, this is a violent derangement, and I would hesitate to offer a prognosis before seeing how nearly the poppy brings the flux under control."

With a small shock, I realized he was telling me my father's life was endangered. My mother grasped that a moment after I did, and let out a keening cry of despair, as if my father had already passed from the world of men. My father had been strong for her when Herakleios died. Who now would be strong if my father died? No one but I could do that. Becoming a man, I discovered, had aspects less enjoyable than hiking up a maidservant's tunic and yanking down her drawers.

"It will be all right," I told my mother, though I knew nothing of the sort. She nodded, trying to reassure me as I was trying to reassure her. I got up from my seat. "I'll go see him now."

"And I," my mother said, her voice small but determined.

Peter hurried ahead of us. I started to order him back, then held my tongue. My father might tolerate a physician catching him squatting over the pot, but would not want me or my mother to see him in the throes of such fleshly weakness.

After going into the bedchamber, Peter emerged and nodded. "The drug has begun to take effect, at least on his spirit," he said. "He does want to see both of you, though." As if he were a common servant himself, he held the door open for my mother and me.

Even before I went inside, the sickroom stench hit me. I knew it all too well from my brother's room: a combination of the chamber pot, sour sweat, and medicaments of one sort or another. Here, though, the odor was sharper, harsher than I had smelled it before; it had a metallic stink I could not place till I remembered the doctor had spoken of a bloody flux.

My father lay on the bed as if he had been poured there, as if not even an earthquake that threw the palace down around him could make him get up and move. His eyes traveled slowly from me to my mother and back again. The lamps were not bright, but his pupils were so small, he might have stood in noontime sun: an effect of the poppy juice, I learned later.

"Bless you," he said to both of us. His voice was thick and slow and slurred, as if he were drunk. "Pray for me. I have- things- left to do." He seemed to want to say something more, but his eyelids slid down over his eyes. A moment later, he began to snore.

"How large a draught of the poppy did you give him?" my mother asked.

Peter had spirit, answering, "As large as I judged he could stand. If his dysentery is not abated…" He spread his hands. "If God grants my prayer, he will sleep the day around and be better when he wakes."

"And if not?" I said roughly.

Before the physician could reply, my father grunted softly in his drugged sleep. The latrine stink grew gaggingly thick; so did the iron odor of blood. "He's fouled himself!" my mother cried. She rushed to tend him with her own hands.

As she gently stripped my father of his robe and wiped the blood-streaked dung from his buttocks and legs with cloths she wet from a pitcher, I looked to Peter and saw him make the sign of the cross. He caught my eye and murmured, "Pray indeed, Prince. It's out of my hands now." He pitched his voice low so my mother would not hear, but how could she help but understand that for herself?

For the next three days, she cared for my father herself, driving away the servants who tried to help. Me she tolerated, and Peter the physician, though him just barely- and less and less as it became clear his nostrums would not make my father well. She must have slept some during that time, but if she did, I did not see it.

My father's life flowed out of him in a foul-smelling tide. If the poppy juice could not stem the dysentery, it did keep him from feeling any great pain. When he was awake, which happened at irregular intervals by both day and night, he knew who my mother and I were.