The Physicians of Vilnoc Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Physicians of Vilnoc

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Books by Lois McMaster Bujold

  THE PHYSICIANS OF VILNOC

  A Penric & Desdemona novella

  In the World of the Five Gods

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Dedication

  For all the practitioners through the long, long history of medicine who tried the wildest experiments, often failed, sometimes succeeded, and helped make our world.

  "The gods have no hands in this world but ours. If we fail Them, where then can They turn?"

  — Ingrey kin Wolfcliff, The Hallowed Hunt

  The Physicians of Vilnoc

  With four persons in three bodies competing for one infant, Penric mused, it was a wonder his new daughter Florina was ever allowed to touch her cradle. He tickled her cheek with one long, ink-stained finger, and smiled as she smacked her tender lips and turned her head.

  “Give her over, Penric,” said his mother-in-law, Idrene, genially. “Or is that Desdemona doing the doting?”

  “It’s me,” said Penric. “Novice fathers are allowed to dote, too. And Des is actually only about two-twelfths baby-mad.”

  “True,” put in his resident demon Desdemona, necessarily speaking through Pen’s mouth as she shared his body—the sole way such a being of spirit could maintain itself in the world of matter. Parasitical was not the right term, as she gifted him with his powers as a Temple sorcerer in return. Renter was not just, either. Rider and ridden was the most common metaphor, with the implication that an out-of-control chaos demon could reverse the position of power if the rider-sorcerer was weak or careless. Penric usually settled person, which was both conveniently vague, and had the bonus of gratifying Des.

  Desdemona gossiped on, “Litikone and the physician Helvia were always the baby-fanciers among us. Amberein and Aulia preferred children able to talk. Ruchia and Mira were indifferent to the nursery set. And Rogaska disliked everyone equally, regardless of age.” Not the full tally of ten women (and the lioness and the mare) whom Des had occupied and been imprinted by over the span of her two centuries in the world, but Idrene nodded understanding, while also taking the opportunity of Pen’s distraction to swoop in and snitch the sleepy Florina from his grasp.

  “I don’t recall the old general as doting,” Idrene remarked, securing her grandchild on her shoulder and patting her fondly. “More daunted, really. Which is odd, considering how fearless he was about army affairs. But then, like you and Nikys, he’d waited a long time for his firstborns.”

  “Thirty-three is not old,” asserted Penric. Well, not for him. Maybe for first-time-mother Nikys who, after a childless prior marriage ending in a premature widowhood, had feared herself barren. “Nikys’s papa was, what, fifty when she and Adelis were born?”

  “Around that. There, there, little Florie,” Idrene cooed as the infant stirred and daintily burped. “I’m glad you and Nikys gifted her with that name. My Florina would have been so honored.”

  Pen had been surprised to learn, upon his first acquaintance with Idrene, how cordial the much younger concubine’s relationship with her husband’s first wife had been, free of the bitter rivalry and jealousy reputed to be more common in such situations. Entirely to his benefit, as Nikys’s upbringing in that household had possibly prepared his wife for the complexities of living with two-personed Penric. Idrene as well, come to think.

  “I’ll hold out for Llewyn next time,” sighed Pen.

  Idrene’s dark eyes crinkled in amusement. Even on the high side of fifty, she was still a handsome woman, straight-backed, with warm dark copper Cedonian skin and black hair like her daughter, though her curls were salted with silver. “Next time, eh? I like the sound of that, but what if it’s a boy? I can’t always tell if those bewildering Wealdean names you favor are for boys, or girls, or both.”

  “My late princess-archdivine back in Martensbridge was a woman, but in fact that name could go to either sex. So I’m prepared regardless.”

  Through Penric’s open study door, a knock echoed faintly from the street-side entry downstairs. He relaxed as he heard their housemaid Lin answering it.

  Idrene, by contrast, raised her head with the perky alertness of a cat sighting a mouse. “Is that Adelis’s voice?”

  “Sounds like it,” agreed Pen as a low rumble, too distant to make out the words, wafted up through the atrium. Yes, confirmed Des, whose demonic senses left her in even less doubt than Idrene’s maternal ones.

  “Oh, Nikys will want to know. Where is she?”

  “Setting up her loom in her workroom.” Which had been how he’d managed to capture Florina, briefly.

  “I’ll tell her,” said Idrene, marching out still holding her prize. “You can go down.”

  “Adelis is more likely have come to see you two than me,” Pen protested. But, abandoning the mess of correspondence on his writing table that he’d been ignoring in favor of his much more fascinating daughter, he rose amiably and went to descend the gallery stairs. The stone-paved atrium in this leased row house was scarcely wider than the hallways in the wooden houses of Pen’s home country, but it served to let in light and air. And rain, which Pen had needed to grow used to, as it rather violated his notions of indoors versus outdoors. Snow, in the duchy of Orbas, was not a hazard.

  The sturdy front door gave directly onto the street. Penric did not keep a porter to guard it, as the knowledge that the house belonged to a sorcerer was usually enough to buffer unwanted intrusion.

  Lin ducked her head at him as he strode up. “Learned, General Arisaydia is here. But he refuses to come in!”

  “Hm?” Pen poked his head out his doorway.

  His brother-in-law, dressed in standard-issue tunic, trousers, and boots, but dispensing with his leather cuirass and the red cloak of his rank on this warm summer day, hovered at the base of the few steps gripping the reins of his horse. A younger man, aide or groom, stood holding the reins of two more, army-saddled likewise.

  “Adelis, pray enter. Nikys and Idrene will be glad to see you. Your niece is awake, by the way.”

  Adelis made an unexpected averting gesture, and said, “No!”

  “…What?”

  “I mustn’t come inside,” Adelis went on, looking very determined about it. Adelis being capable of impressive stubbornness, Pen didn’t argue.

  “In a hurry, are you?”

  “Yes. I need you to ride out to the fort and look at something. Now.”

  Pen blinked, taken aback at this vehemence. The post that the young general commanded for the duke of Orbas lay about a mile inland from the town of Vilnoc’s own walls, up the valley and overlooking the main road west. It had once stood closer, Pen understood, centuries back when Orbas had been a province of the Cedonian Empire, and before the port had followed the slowly silting river mouth downstream. Duke Jurgo tried to maintain most of a legion there when at residence in his summer capital, although his main defensive interest lay on the harbor side with his navy. With several thousand men and camp followers, the fort was almost an outlying town in its own right.

  Adelis would hardly be consulting Penric, with such urgency at that, on military affairs. This left something theological, unlikely; something to do with a translation problem, possible in light of his scholar’s command of languages; or some suspected magical problem, usually mistaken but, rarely, real, and thus interesting. Or…

  “A number of my men have contracted a strange fever.”

  Or that.
Yes. Agh. “Don’t you have army physicians for such? Experienced with camp dysentery and so on?”

  “It’s not that. Anyway, we keep our barracks and wells and latrines clean, and our rations fresh. My physicians can’t identify it. A couple have come down with it, and some of the orderlies, too.”

  “You know I do not practice medicine,” said Pen stiffly. “Anymore.”

  Adelis made a swipe of his fist, dismissing Pen’s aversions. “Four men died last night. More men. Six in the previous few days.”

  Pen hesitated. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Ten days for certain. How long before that, no one is quite sure. But it’s recent, it’s spreading, and it is much more lethal than dysentery.”

  “Who survives it?”

  Adelis scowled. “It may be too early to tell.”

  That does not sound good, observed Des.

  Truly. Any virulent disease that infected the fort was sure to jump to the port, and that included Pen’s front door, and the human treasures behind it. Adelis standing well away from that same door told its own tale.

  “I’ll fetch my case,” sighed Penric.

  He returned upstairs to the bedchamber that he shared with Nikys and, now, Florina’s cradle. The case containing the tools of his third, no, fourth trade—after learned divine, sorcerer, and scholar—rested in a chest out of sight and preferably out of mind, but should he want them at all, they were of finer make than army-issue. He shucked off the comfortable, threadbare old tunic he’d been sluffing about the house in this morning, and donned his second-best summer vestments for a divine of the Bastard’s Order.

  Slim tan trousers. Sleeveless cream tunic split at the hips falling to panels fore and aft his knees, hems decorated with a frieze of embroidered holy animals; secured by the sash at his waist with a silver cord in its braid denoting, or warning of, his calling as a sorcerer. He left the silver-plated torc for the tunic’s high collar with his first-best togs, reserved for court ceremonies and holy days, in the chest.

  He stuffed his old clothes, along with a change of smallclothes, into a sack. He hoped he wouldn’t need to be gone overnight, or longer, but one never knew. He could borrow clean army garb from Adelis in a pinch, but any trousers would fall hopelessly short of his ankles.

  Upon reflection, he wrapped his long blond queue in a knot at his nape, fastening it firmly. He didn’t need it falling forward and trailing through the messes sick men leaked. He was just finishing this task when Nikys hurried in.

  “Penric! What’s going on?”

  “Your brother wants to drag me out to his fort to see some of his men who’ve come down ill.” Pen decided not to mention the death count.

  “He knows better than to tax you with that sort of task.” Her frown deepened. “Which means this is something out of the ordinary, doesn’t it.” Swift deduction, not question.

  “Well, I won’t find out till I—and Des—take a look at it. I’m rather counting on Des.” Who had much longer experience than he did.

  Entering his arms, Nikys took a deep breath, pleasantly ample to hold—Pen allowed himself a moment of covert appreciation. “Then I’ll count on her as well.” She laced her hands around his narrow waist in turn. “Don’t let him get in over his head, Des.”

  “I’ll do my best, love,” said Des through Penric’s mouth.

  One of the many delights of his delightful wife was the ease she had developed in telling them apart, and she nodded without confusion. “How long will you two be gone?”

  “Not sure,” said Pen. “An hour, a day, a week? I may need to intern myself for a bit before I come back here.”

  “It’s that contagious?” Her deep brown eyes widened, looking up at him in alarm.

  “Mm, perhaps not for me. I didn’t contract tertiary fever during my year in Adria, and it’s endemic there. I haven’t even caught a cold since I came to the Cedonian peninsula.” Being knocked on the head and tossed into a bottle dungeon or suffering magical attack from that out-of-control Patos sorcerer did not count as diseases, and Des had healed him of those injuries, too. But Nikys, nursing, was indivisible from their infant daughter in terms of exposure to anything chancy. He was confident she’d share his caution.

  “So don’t fret if you don’t hear from me. It just means Adelis is keeping me busy.”

  “Humph. Don’t let him treat you like one of his army mules, or I’ll have his ears.”

  He kissed away her sisterly scowl, following up with kisses to her elusive dimples—ah, there, much better—and reluctantly took his leave.

  * * *

  Adelis kept them to a swift trot on the short ride, impeding conversation, just as well. He was a tactician, not a physician. His army medics would inform Pen of the messy details soon enough, in their mutual language of the healing arts.

  Penric had only been out to the fort once before, for Duke Jurgo’s ceremony honoring his new general upon his successful return from the campaign against the incurring Rusylli. Devised to impress the assembled troops, no doubt, but Pen suspected Adelis had been more gratified by his witnessing family, small though it was: Idrene and Nikys and, yes, Pen and Des.

  The fort spread over a low hill, with much less elevation than the castle-crowned crags of Pen’s home country, but then, the old Cedonian military engineers had always been keen to assure access to water in these hotter lands. They’d made up for it by digging a large fossa around the extensive perimeter, a ditch that had to be periodically cleared of silt, debris, and villagers trying to build right up to the walls.

  They clopped across the drawbridge and through the main gate with its flanking stone towers. Inside, they dismounted and handed the horses off to the aide, who towed them away to the cavalry stables. The elite mounted troops and couriers lodged with their beloved beasts on this side of the fort, along with most of the workshops, the smithy, stores, and the armory, though the bulk of the remounts and draft animals were pastured down by the river. Adelis led Pen through to the open central space, more than courtyard, less than parade ground, used for mustering, returning salutes from a few soldiers along the way, a brief tap of the right fist to the chest.

  As they strode past, Adelis spared a five-fold tally sign for the fort’s temple, which faced his headquarters across the square. Pen, belatedly, copied him, waving his hand down forehead, mouth, navel, and groin, but spreading it properly over his heart, as this temple was dedicated to the Son of Autumn, god of comradeship and thus, alas, war. And then Pen’s habitual extra tap of the back of his thumb to his lips, for his own god’s ambiguous blessing.

  The activity under the sacred portico suggested preparations for a funeral. Not unusual, given the population here, but still…

  They angled around the rows of barracks to the back corner of the fort given over to its hospice. It had its own small gate leading to a colonnaded court, and just inside a shrine to the Mother of Summer, patroness, among other things, of healing. Rather the opposite of the aim of an army, Pen fancied, but he glimpsed what seemed to be an unusual number of supplicants perched on the prayer rugs spread out before Her shaded altar.

  Treatment rooms, stores, an apothecary, and its own bathhouse and laundry ringed the sunny court. The quiet far side, under its colonnade, was lined with chambers for patients, each door in the row made—somewhat—private by a leather curtain. Four to ten cots per chamber, depending on demand, so the place, Pen had been told, could accommodate up to two hundred sick or injured men at a time.

  Adelis went to one of the leather curtains and pushed through, Penric on his heels, and the bright serenity of the courtyard was abruptly replaced with a shadowy scene of turmoil.

  His eyes adapted quickly enough without Des’s proffered help, though the details were no reward. Six cots set up, all occupied, five by groaning, restless men, one by a figure gone too still. Kneeling at its side a young man bent weeping, his shoulders shaking as he choked his grief into silence.

  “Oh, no,” breathed Ad
elis, stopping short. “Not Master Orides. I’d hoped you could save him at least, Pen.”

  Pen suspected Adelis hoped for a lot more than that, and flinched in prospect.

  Orides was the senior physician of the legion. Pen had met him but briefly at the campaign celebration last year, finding the officer level-headed as only years of experience could bestow, a trifle dyspeptic—possibly also from the years of experience—but with a sly wit. The crow-visage jutting up from its pillow bore no humor now, humanity fled with life’s warmth, the darkened flesh shrinking to its bones seeming prematurely mummified.

  Des, Sight.

  His demon lent him her spiritual perceptions only at Pen’s request, because the dual vision could be overwhelming, and his reacting to things no one else could see alarmed those around him. Ghosts, for example, although when he’d last been out here the fort had not been more rife with sundered souls than any other building of like age. But Orides, it seemed, was already gone to his goddess, gathered up like the valued child he must have been to Her. The scent of that passing divinity was fading like a whisper of perfume. That much grace, at least, in this graceless moment.

  The young man looked up at the sound of Adelis’s voice and scrambled to his feet, visibly pulling himself together. He tapped his fist over his heart, and in a squeezed voice said, “Sir!”

  There was this to be said for military garb; you could tell who a person was, or at least their function, at a glance. Temple robes likewise, Pen supposed. This one was a young medical officer, by his green sash and somewhat stained, sleeveless, undyed tunic. In his early twenties, perhaps? His coloration was typical of this region: dark coppery-brick skin, black hair, brown eyes; his build average, his height a little under Adelis’s muscular middle stature. His drawn, exhausted face was not standard-issue, nor his heartbroken whisper: “You’re too late.”