The Infirmary
Wealthgiver 11
This is the ELEVENTH chapter of Wealthgiver, an alternate history serial romance about nationalism and cave-Thracians. For the back-of-the-book description and an index of chapters, click here. For the beginning, click here. For the previous chapter, click here.
Andrei spoke into the darkness. "Give me light."
"Ma." That meant 'no.'
He stood in the doorway to the mountain's pitch-black infirmary, holding the papery hand of the old man who had led him here. Brother Bogdan, Andrei was to call him when not speaking Good.
The old man tapped the floor with a foot, releasing echoes that bounced off the walls of what must be a rather large, rectangular space.
The air in the medical chamber was warmer than out in the corridor, and damper. The infirmary smelled nothing like anywhere Andrei had worked. Cold wet stone, a bit of sweat and sulfur. He wondered how the cave-Thracians managed to get rid of the smells of blood and vomit.
"Your patient is on the cot closest the door," he said in French. "You need only put out your hand and take a step forward.
"I also need light so I can examine my patient," said Andrei.
Brother Bogdan clicked his tongue in a way that suggested irritation and tugged Andrei back toward the door. "Novitiate, what you ask is not possible. The afflicted girl is a novitiate priestess, and so must be surrounded by purely chthonic influences. No light, no alcohol."
"What about medical spirits?"
Brother Bogdan didn't dignify that with a response. "We should not even speak in this outside language in her presence. Please speak only in Good."
"Vas em nir. Ti ié nir."
Brother Bogdan slapped him, but only gently.
"Bréma?" called a voice from inside the infirmary.
"Is that a child?" Andrei pulled himself out of the old man's grip and stepped away, arms outstretched.
"Tsi ésta?" It was the voice of a little girl. Who is it?
"Vas em…" But he still didn't know the word for doctor. "Vas em…um…"
"Ti duí ola múa."
He didn't understand.
"Ti duí mi déla."
Déla! He'd heard that word. You something protect me.
"Néi," said Andrei, thinking. Into whatever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick.
The corner of a cot made painful contact with his hip.
"I'm here," the girl said in Bulgarian.
"Neláha, madí ta fála ist," Brother Bogdan remonstrated.
"Mi fálsa, Brát Zesstáne," said the girl apologetically. "Zésam vu maí bass."
A reluctant pause from Bogdan, then. "She says she's feeling better."
"That is good." Andrei said in Bulgarian, groping toward her voice. "Because I cannot very much help you this way." Stumbled over a groove in the floor and barked his knee hard against the edge of another cot.
Andrei cursed in Russian and switched to French. "Unable as I am to examine my patient, give her half the medicines I might, and am only able to say to her, Vas em nir."
A squeak from the girl and another click from Brother Bogdan. "One does not embed the Good Language, novitiate."
"Does one allow a young girl to die because her doctor is blind?"
"I am blind," said Brother Bogdan. "Even under the Sun, darkness follows me, and yet I do my duties."
"I'm sure you're very proud of that, but I must see," Andrei insisted. "Surely you would rather bend your religious rules than allow this little priestess to die." Hopefully she didn't understand French.
Silence from Brother Bogdan until Andrei gave up. "What," he fumbled in Bulgarian. "What is the pain, little one?"
"Everyone calls me little, but I'm not a child."
She was right under him. The cot he'd struck was hers.
"I apologize, miss. What is your name?" Andrei felt for her hand.
"Vlada." She grasped his wrist. Those fingers were too warm. "I have scarlet fever. I was better this morning, but then I got worse. But now I feel fine."
"Vlada. A pretty name." Andrei brushed his fingers up the sweaty sheets until he found the side of her face. "A nice round cheek you have, too."
It was too hot, as well. The skin was rough, as if with rash. Vlada had diagnosed herself accurately. "Fever. When was your last…thing?" He used the Russian word, "Bout?"
"It was worse earlier. The Maiden came to me."
"That was nice of her." Andrei felt the girl's thyroids. Still a bit swollen, but not badly.
"The Maiden's voice is so beautiful," said Vlada, which gave Andrei an idea.
"Look," he said in French. "I mean, listen to me, Brother Bogdan. Your Maiden. She's the Light-Bringer, right? The Torch-Bearer?"
"Among many other things," came the old man's voice.
"So, I suppose she has some sort of special dispensation to bring light? Would you summon her if a doctor ordered it?"
Brother Bogdan spoke like a father asked for the dozenth time to buy a toy that he cannot afford. "That is impossible, novitiate."
Andrei ran his hands down the girl's arms, feeling the rash there. Very probably, the girl was past the point of crisis.
He should be relieved he had been given a patient who hadn't been blown to pieces. All Andrei had to do was keep her fever down tonight and she'd be recovered by morning. But what about next time?
Will there be a next time? Do you intend to become the doctor to these people?
Andrei turned his head toward the sound of the other man's voice. "What if, Brother Bogdan, your god the Wealthgiver demanded to see his Maiden?"
A little chuckle. "Do you think He speaks through you? In French?"
Andrei considered. This girl wasn't really ill. Was that Andrei's good luck, or the cave-Thracians' test? To see if Andrei would be a good Pluto. Cold shivers. Did they expect him to kill this child?
No. Andrei massaged his temple, staring into the nothingness. He was thinking wrong. This wasn't about him. He'd been in situations like this, where he got nonsensical, contradictory orders because of some bureaucratic snarl further up the chain of command.
A turf war. One faction of priests against another. The sibyl versus the priests. Kori Chthalmali seemed to want to open up the Mountain. Tell the world about the cave-Thracians. She thought Andrei could help with that. Look, we captured this outsider and didn't execute him. We must be all right after all.
Except there was more to this than politics and pragmatism. The cultists really thought he might be an embodiment of their god. Or could be made into one.
Andrei looked down at the purple-green blobs floating in his inner vision. His hands. He flexed his fingers over the little girl, or at least where he imagined she might be.
"We'll have to wash these sheets. Thoroughly. Boil them to avoid contagion, but the very first thing this patient needs is water."
The Russian word was close enough to the Bulgarian for Vlada to understand. "I'm not thirsty."
"And yet you'll drink. Brother Bogdan, please go get me towels and cold, clean water. If you don't have that, you'll have to boil—" He stopped. The old cave-Thracian was chuckling.
"You have a cold water spring in the room with you, as well as hot," said the old man. "Make sure you use the silver ladle to fill the silver bucket and dip the cloth in that, for the living water may be touched by nothing but silver."
Andrei straightened, turning his head uselessly to survey the featureless blackness. "Where is it?"
"Follow the sound of water," said Brother Bogdan with an air of strained patience.
Knocking his feet about, Andrei realized there was a pattern to the cots. They were arranged in neat, ordered rows, aligned with grooves cut into the stone floor. Andrei could follow a groove and be sure he wasn't about the bump into anything. How convenient.
The trickling of water grew louder, but with it the smell of sulfur. Andrei didn't even try to find the water, he could feel the heat of the hot spring from where he stood.
"The cold water is on the other side of the room," said Brother Bogdan. Of course the old man had heard the tapping and grunting of Andrei's progress, and so knew where the doctor had strayed. Funny he hadn't said anything until Andrei had gotten all the way to the wrong side of the room.
Andrei turned. This time he risked a faster walk across the room, trusting in the floor-groove. The sound of water fell and rose again, this time with a smell less of sulfur than of stone. But now what?
Andrei shuffled his foot in the groove on the floor. Whoever had designed this room had possessed a soul more generous and helpful than that of Brother Bogdan. Could that long-ago mason have added more clues?
Andrei put out his hand and found the wall. Indeed, he didn't have to brush his fingers far to find more grooves there, as well as narrower troughs and curves that might represent letters. He ignored those. The grooves were enough. They had been cut at slants, all slightly different angles, converging on a spot downward and to the right. Andrei followed them to a wooden panel cemented to the wall. An icon?
His fingers brushed over a face, and another. He blinked away visions of curled hair, lowered brows. A mouth that did not smile, although Andrei suspected that the god saw much that amused him.
A hook had been screwed into the wood between the carved figures, and from the hook there hung a cold, stiff, slippery thing that must be the handle of the silver ladle. Below that was the bucket. Andrei made a mental note to replace them exactly where he had found them.
Then he remembered that he didn't have a towel to soak in the living water.
Andrei cursed.
"Oh!" said Vlada.
Andrei twisted around. The girl had propped herself up on her cot and was looking at the door and the scowling Brother Bogdan.
"Uh, forgive me for the, um, bad words," he said in Bulgarian, and switched to French. "Brother Bogdan, where are the towels?"
The old man turned his face toward the sound of Andrei's voice, and Andrei knew it! He knew that Vlada was smiling and Brother Bogdan frowned. How?
"You didn't take them with you? Don't be a Fool," said Brother Bogdan. "The towels are in the shelf under the cot."
Andrei gasped. Shut his eyes. The visions of Brother Bogdan and Vlada vanished.
"What are you waiting for? Why are you breathing like that? Don't tell me someone forgot to replace the ladle."
Andrei opened his eyes again, and there they were: two people illuminated by a beam of white light shining down the hallway and through the open door. Tears came, his relief was so great. He wasn't hallucinating. This wasn't a vision; it was just sight.
Brother Bogdan cocked his head and turned. "Bréma," he said. "Tsi gass? Bátsa?"
The light bobbed and grew brighter.
"Is that, is that the Maiden?" He looked down at his robe, which he could now see was brownish, with a very unflattering cut.
"Da, déla ni." said Brother Bogdan sourly. And in French, "If only the plague had not carried off everyone in the Mountain with sense."
Andrei did not have time to think about why the priest might have directed that comment at him. He was thinking how now was a good time to get those towels. He wanted to look busy. Important. Or at least competent.
He hurried to Vlada's cot as the light grew brighter. It moved with the cadence of footsteps, and now Andrei could hear the clicking of metal tacks. One pair of slippers? A very long stride.
Light dawned.
"Oh," said Andrei. He composed his face and turned, towel in hand. "Good evening, Nikolai Igorevich," he said in Russian. "Or is it good morning?"
"Good evening," responded the priest. "The Maiden sends her regards, encouragement, and this." He reached up to his forehead and removed a small miner's lamp. Shadows shifted across the high priest's face as he lowered the lamp and held it out to Andrei.
Andrei hesitated, staring. Nikolai looked nothing like Andrei had imagined.
During their lesson in his cell, Andrei had imagined a gaunt and wild-eyed mystic, the sort of charlatan so greatly loved by the ladies of the royal court.
Instead, Nikolai was young. Younger than Andrei, and with a soft-cheeked, round-chinned face that made him look even younger. His hair was blond and curly, his eyes large, with long lashes. He looked like he should be strumming a guitar in a fashionable students' coffee house, staring soulfully at some girl who was too good for him. His muse, he'd call her.
Brother Bogdan, who looked exactly like the shrunken old man Andrei had imagined, said something grumpy in Cave-Thracian.
"Knéssam," said Nikolai. "Kápa sága." His voice was deep and rasping, exactly what a high cave-priest's voice should be. It was totally at odds with his face.
"But is ours the same as the Maiden's?" asked Brother Bogdan in Russian. "I have grown accustomed to uncertainty in my own mind. The clarity of the Unseen One is beyond mortal apprehension. His is not the realm of chaos above these Sacred Depths, where we will fight this war of yours."
"I share your feelings, if not your doubts." Nikolai's face held an expression of petulant annoyance, like a little boy told to finish his lessons before he went outside to play. "I too detest chaos. Soon, I promise you, our order will win out." And as reassuring as those words might sound, the smirk Nikolai turned on Andrei was anything but.
Did the priest not know that Andrei could see his expressions?
"Will you take this thing from me?" said Nikolai.
And why was the priest even here? Was it a coincidence that Andrei had asked for light, and up walked Nikolai with a lamp? Or did the walls under the Mountain have ears?
Andrei hid his disquiet and walked up to the high priest. He was a tall man, if baby-faced.
"Thank you," Andrei said, taking the lamp. It was the kind with a small gas cylinder and flintlock. From its weight, it didn't have long to burn.
"Infection," said Nikolai. "This is what we get for impurity."
"Pardon?" Andrei looked up, saw the direction of Nikolai's gaze, and turned toward little Vlada. "Oh. Yes, I'm sure coughs and colds burn through this mountain like forest fires."
"They did," said Nikolai. "I have installed better sanitation and air ducts."
"Oh?" was all Andrei could think of to say.
"The Good used to believe that darkness was a substance opposed to light. I told them they were wrong. Darkness is the absence of light, just as purity is the absence of filth, sanity the absence of madness. Do you understand me?"
He seemed so desperate, Andrei told him he did.
A poet's face, a chief inquisitor's voice, and the brain of a municipal sanitation manager.
They stared at each other until Nikolai curled his lip and shook his head. "Don't you have work to do, Doctor? Brother Bogdan?"
The old man bowed and tapped off into the dark hallway while Andrei fixed the miner's lamp to his own head. There was the little girl on the cot, the grooved walls and the hot and cold running shrines. On the opposite wall, cabinets presumably contained medical equipment.
"Wait," said Andrei. "What is that in the corner?"
A metal tripod held the end of a hose, which led to a canister. At the end of the hose gleamed a piece of stone, white as chalk.
"That's a calcium light," said Andrei. "I could have just used that."
"But you did not know it was there," said Nikolai.
"You did! Why didn't you tell me?"
A chuckle from Nikolai. "Yes, the Wealthgiver offers us lessons in all things, but we so rarely recognize and make use of them."
"I apologize, Nikolai Igorevich." Andrei strode to the girl's side. "If you please, I'll examine my patient."
He'd meant to get rid of the man, but Nikolai didn't leave. "By all means," he said, and walked up to join Andrei at the side of the cot.
Vlada was small for her age, with dark hair and eyes and rather pronounced eyebrows and ears. She drank willingly enough when he held her up and put the silver bucket to her lips.
"Bréma, Bátse," she said to Nikolai, when she was done. Hello, Elder Brother.
Nikolai only looked down at her.
Andrei cleared his throat. "Vlada is a Bulgarian name, isn't it?"
"Bessíkit mi min ésta Vágla," said the little girl. "But I'm not allowed to use that name when I speak Bulgarian."
"Was your family Bulgarian?" asked Andrei, rummaging under her cot for towels. These, too, were finer than anything he'd had the pleasure of using before.
"Yes. They live in Tatar Pazardzhik. They sent me here to learn to be a Good."
Andrei carried the towel to the cold spring. "And you, Nikolai Igorevich. You weren't raised in a cave, either. You grew up in a mansion, if you're accent is anything to go by."
He turned and met the priest's glare. "I grew up mostly in boarding schools," said Nikolai, looking away.
"Maybe that explains why you were eager to go hide in a hole in a mountain."
Nikolai scowled furiously. But all he said was, "Why do you ask?"
Andrei sponged cold water down his patient's arms and legs. "They kidnapped you too, didn't they?
Nikolai was silent for a moment. "Fools," he said, "that is to say Christians, speak of inspiration. This derives from the Latin spirare, implying that the divine breathes into one." He clicked his tongue and nodded toward the hot spring on one side of the room. "But we Good believe that it is the water of the gods flows through us. Influx, one might say."
"Inundation?" asked Andrei.
"Don't be silly. The water springs from its source high in the mountain, but it flows down into the pits of human depravity. Carnal, grasping selfishness. The animal urges that pollute the sweet waters of the Earth. Turn them into muck. Into sewage!" Nikolai clenched his fists. "What must we, therefor, do?"
Andrei squinted. "Build a…sewer system?"
"Exactly!" Nikolai nodded eagerly. His robes rustled as he gestured wildly. "One encloses the waters and redirects them. Away from the valleys. Towards the peaks! If the water will not flow, pressurize and pump it. Seal the cracks in the pipes. Force the water into its proper shape. The shape of utility!"
Andrei remembered a conversation with his brother the monk. They had been both toward the ends of their respective studies and were talking of germ theory. Or at least Andrei had told his brother about germ theory. Remembering that conversation now, he realized that his brother had responded with a sermon on purity. How can it be that invisible vectors of disease surround us? If so, nothing is clean, nor anyone! There must be something wrong with your theory.
His brother had seen something dark and terrible in germs, but Andrei had seen hope. The problem is large, but now that we know about it, we can take steps.
It was not the moment he had decided to become a doctor, but it was the beginning of Andrei's devotion to that work.
He looked down at Vlada, who squinted into his light. "How do you feel, little one? Are you cold?"
"I like the cool water."
"I'll get you more. You'll be fine."
With much more confidence this time, Andrei strode to the wall with its spring and silver ladle. He could keep inventing work for himself all night if he needed to, but the question was, should he? Or should he declare the patient well and go back to his cell to await his next language lesson?
"Andryusha," Nikolai whispered in his ear.
Andrei dropped the ladle and spun around. He hadn't heard a footstep. He hadn't even felt the priest's breath on the back of his neck. How could he have let his mind wander while his enemy snuck up on him?
As if he'd heard the thought, Nikolai said, "I'm on your side."
"My side?" Andrei tried to think. "What do you mean, Your Serenity? What about Hades?"
A smile. "What if you are no fit vessel for the Unseen, Your Well Born?"
"Then I suppose you'll let me stay in the infirmary and do you some good."
"We have our own Good." Nikolai tapped the lamp. "They do not need light."
"Your Maiden seems to think I can do the job." Andrei kept his face turned toward his patient, hiding his expression.
"The Maiden is not our goddess. She only speaks with her voice. When she does not, she is as capable of error as any of us mortals."
Andrei swallowed. What would happen to Kori if the priests decided their prophetess was wrong?
"We both want you out of the Depths," Nikolai continued. "We can help each other."
"Help each other escape?" Andrei straightened and turned, hope rising.
Then he saw Nikolai's face.
The high priest's eyes flicked away from Andrei's. His brows smoothed out and his eyelids slid back down. The tip of his tongue hid behind his teeth, and once again Nikolai looked like a love-sick guitarist. No longer a demon, ravenous for its next soul.
"Escape. Yes. Exactly." Nikolai's voice was perfect. If Andrei hadn't just seen the man's expression, he would never have known Nikolai's real intention.
To rip you apart with his teeth, by all signs. Good thing you had a light on, Doctor.
"Y-yes," Andrei tried, but as soon as the word was out, he knew it wouldn't work. He was no better at play-acting than this cave-educated orphan.
Nikolai's eyes slitted. His papery smile rippled over the snarl it concealed. His fingers spread over the handle of the sickle at his hip, as if the priest was considering slitting Andrei's throat open here and now.
But Nikolai said, "Andryusha. Don't you trust me?"
Andrei couldn't continue the farce. Enough games in the dark. What about something real?
He lifted his fist. "Don't you call me 'Andryusha,' you slithering, pasty-faced back-stabber. How stupid do you think I am? You stand there grinning at me like that while you hiss lies in my ear?" A line from their Thracian lesson surfaced in his mind, and Andrei said, "Ta knéssa ápartka u áprake." To know a narcissus from a viper.
Nikolai's hand went to his face, as if putting on an invisible mask.
"You," said Andrei, "are an orphan. You looked for a family under this mountain, didn't you?"
Nikolai shook off his shock and snarled back at Andrei. "You know nothing of me! Fool! You know nothing of us. We are the Good, and our god is Death himself."
Andrei looked into Nikolay's sneer and spoke the words he'd wanted to say to the Major General. "What do you know of death? How many times have you actually used that over-sized scalpel you carry? How many bodies have you seen turn to clay under your hands? Do you know that some go eagerly, and some fight to stay even after fighting should be impossible?" Andrei allowed the laugh in his belly to bubble out. "Do you know that some go, and then come back?"
A thump. Nikolai had backed into a cot. His face was pale, except for two spots of color high on his cheeks. It made him look even more clownish.
"No," he said. Then, as he pointed a shaking finger at Andrei. "No! Fool! Do not think you can trick me, the high priest of the Holy Mountain."
Andrei paused. "Trick you? Who's doing what to whom?"
"You are not the Shrouded One!" Nikolai squeezed his eyes shut like a frightened child. "You are not my Master, the Host of Many! You're some half-educated pig who stumbled into our corridors, dragging your filth into the sacred pools and…and…"
"And you can't bring yourself to worship me." Andrei laughed again. This was the funniest thing that had happened to him since San Stefano. Here he was again with an officious little schemer making threats at him across a table.
"There!" shouted Nikolai. "You see! The Wealthy one is dark and grim. He seized the Maiden and carried her off so that she would bring laughter to his house because he, himself, never laughs!" Nikolai drew himself up. "I'll have you executed, Andrei Trifonovich. You have proved yourself to be no fit vessel for the Wealthgiver. You've given me all the evidence I need to convince my brother priests. I'll see you dead."
More posturing. Andrei felt suddenly tired. "You should have cut me down with that sickle you keep fingering. You should beg me for help. But you didn't." He waved a hand at the high priest of the satanic assassin cult. "So go away and stop wasting my time."
Andrei turned his back and returned to his patient. Let the priest attack him. He'd beat the twit to mince. Perhaps Andrei should attack. Leap on the priest, kill him, and run out into the dark corridors?
Run out?
Andrei looked up, swung his lamp around, and saw he was alone.
There was the door, through which Nikolai had fled in some sort of religious frenzy. Leaving Andrei unguarded. With a lamp strapped to his forehead.
Andrei reached up and twisted the valve closed. In the darkness, and as silently as he could, he removed his clicking slippers and rustling outer robes.
"Doctor? Why were you angry at the Elder Brother?"
Andrei put his hand to his chest. It was only the little girl. "Because he doesn't like me," he said. Was that a wise thing to say? Who knew who might be listening. Who cared? "He only pretended he wanted to help me."
"Pretend?"
Andrei had used the Russian word. "Like a little boy paying a game."
"That's what everyone is doing here." Vlada murmured. "Except the cook."
Andrei smiled. "And except me, I hope."
Her only response was deep, slow breathing.
Andrei patted the edge of the girl's cot, then made good his escape.
Next: Chapter 12: I Echo
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