I hesitated. And Demetriades, still drying his hands and forearms, glanced at me and seemed to understand something of all this.
‘In a while,’ he said. ‘I think that after all, Jestyn Englishman and I have a word to speak with each other first.’
And as Alexia left the room, he led the way back into the small inner chamber.
Behind the deep drugged breathing of the man on the narrow cot, it was a very quiet room. One small window, full now of darkness, high on the lime-washed wall above the bed; a light burning crocus-flamed below a plain black wood crucifix. Suddenly I wondered how many men had died in that room, whether any had been born in it. It seemed a place very near to such things.
Demetriades bent over the man, feeling the pulse in the base of his throat, then straightened and turned to me. ‘Thank you for your help tonight, you have the healing gift in your hands.’
‘If so, it was learned on cattle,’ I said.
‘No. The skill was learned on cattle; the gift is from God.’ He hesitated, his eyes on my face, then seemed to make up his mind. ‘An hour – two hours since, I had not thought to say this to you. A few moments ago. I had thought to say it tomorrow when you had slept. Now, it seems to me that this is the time to say it.’
I waited, while the quiet of the room sank into me; and after a moment he went on. ‘I have always preferred to have a free man, rather than a slave, for my dresser. A few days since, my dresser, being a free man, left me as a free man may, to better himself with a master who can pay him more than I. I have found no one to take his place, until tonight; now it seems to me possible that I may have done so.’
I looked at him, stupid with weariness, not sure that I had his drift. ‘Would you mean – me?’
‘If you will take his place. He was a good dresser, it would be a place worth the taking.’
‘I learned my skill on cattle,’ I reminded him.
‘He was a good dresser, after I had taught him all his skill – as I will teach you.’
‘But – but you know nothing of me.’
‘Enough, I think. Maybe one day you will tell me more.’ Suddenly he smiled, the light of the lamp below the crucifix making a network of fine lines round his eyes. ‘Will you not give it fair trial for a month – say, two months? – at the end of that time, if it does not go well, we will talk further concerning Michael and his need for more help on the farm.’
21 ‘For you too, there was a Patroclus’
SO I BECAME dresser to Alexius Demetriades, in the tall house in the Street of the Golden Mulberry Tree. And after a few days, when I had time to think, I went back to the small dark church, and bought a candle to burn before the picture of the still-faced Madonna. And I prayed. ‘Since I am not damned, receive now my thanks.’ I almost prayed, ‘But let me not forget in all this, that I am waiting for Anders Herulfson. Let me never forget what is on my forehead.’ But I knew that there was no need to trouble God or His Mother with that prayer. While I remembered Thormod in his shallow grave in the Thracian hills, I should remember what I owed to Anders Herulfson; and Thormod was a part of me . . .
At first, my tasks were to fetch and carry for Demetriades, and clear up after him; follow him with his case of drugs and instruments when he went every morning to the great hospital that was part of the Monastery of St Sebastian; keep his instruments clean and in order; then, later, grind and prepare the simpler drugs, and hold the edges of a wound while he sutured it. And all the while, I watched what he did and listened to his quiet explanations, learning that these were the signs of a diseased heart and these showed forth a sickness within the ears; that this meant no more than the need for a purge, while this was the beginning of death as yet far off. That this fever should be treated with Oil of Ngai Camphor, and this, with an infused mixture of vervain and yarrow. I worked hard, and I learned, I think, none so ill. And at the end of the first two months, there was no thought in me or in my master, that I should go to help Michael on the farm.
Learning of another kind, I gained also – though it too was needful to the craft of medicine. For Alexia taught me to read and write, in the strange Greek script that was different from what little writing I had ever seen before. Greek translations of the books of Arab physicians, Hunayn ibn Isaak, and Rhazes’ Encyclopaedia of Medicine. It is sad that so many of our greatest medical books are still translations from the Arabic and Persian – other books also, from her father’s library that had nothing to do with the theory and practice of medicine, but were simply for joy, such as the writings of the long dead Greek poet, Homer.
So autumn passed, and winter turned to spring, and the trained fig-tree behind the house broke out into leaf buds that were like jets of green flame. And then it was early summer. And Michael had come in from the farm on his weekly visit with eggs and vegetables and the like; and when he went back in the morning, Alexia would be going with him.
It was one of those evenings when the air is like warm milk against the skin. The last egg-shaped sun-spots dappling through the broad leaves of the fig-tree scarcely moved on the page of the Iliad open on the table between us. There was a twittering of young swallows under the eaves high overhead, and the deep boom of bees among the red pomegranate blossom. And suddenly I knew how much I should miss these evenings, tomorrow when Alexia was not here.
And not really meaning to, I looked up from the page and told her so. ‘I am little of a scholar, but I shall miss this reading together in the evening.’
‘You have enough skill now to practise alone,’ she said gravely. ‘And I shall be back soon, and to and fro all summer. I cannot leave my father for long at a time.’
‘Does he go out to the farm sometimes?’ I asked.
‘Very seldom. He says he is too busy, and that is true. But – the farm came to him with my mother. I was born out there, and she died. Now, I do not think he can bear to go back often, it hurts him too much.’ She began to gentle the ears of the gazelle lying beside her. ‘We must go on with the reading, or dusk will find us still here.’
So I went on with the reading. It was the twenty-second book of the Iliad, telling of Achilles’ vengeance for the death of Patroclus, his friend.
‘Achilles saw that Hector’s body was completely covered by the fine bronze armour he had taken from the great Patroclus when he killed him, except for an opening at the gullet where the collar-bones led over from the shoulders to the neck, the easiest place to kill a man. As Hector charged him, Prince Achilles drove at this spot with his lance, and the point went right through the tender flesh of Hector’s neck, though . . .’
Suddenly I could not go on; and I left the sentence unfinished. I mind sitting and rubbing my knee, which was aching, as it still does after an especially hard day’s work.
‘What is it?’ Alexia asked. ‘Have you hurt your knee?’
I shook my head. ‘Just tired. There was a little girl in the hospital today – we couldn’t save her – even your father couldn’t save her.’
‘Even my father is not God,’ she said, with that quietness of hers that had always seemed to me like shade on a hot and dusty road. ‘And truly, I was right, the first time I ever saw you – you are a most unlikely Varangian.’
I gave her back look for look. She had an elbow on the table, her long chin cupped in her hand. Her eyes stayed on my face.
‘I think that I should never have carried my sword in the Barbarian Guard, but that I followed a friend,’ I said. ‘Yet it was a good time, and I would not be without the memory of it.’
‘And this friend? He is not here in the city?’
‘He is dead. In Thrace, at the same time as I got my knee.’
I saw her face flush. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I am so sorry, I should not have asked. I think it’s because I am going away tomorrow.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I am not minding, not now.’ And – I suppose that also was because she was going away tomorrow – I began to tell her – oh, so many things that were nobody’s business but m
ine. About my boyhood and the shore-killing, and how Thormod had bought me for six gold pieces and a wolfskin cloak, in the Dublin Slave Market. Of the home-coming to Sitricstead, and the Blood Feud that we carried down from the north, and the ambush among the Thracian hills.
When I had done, we were silent for a while. Alexia was always a good person to be silent with, like Thormod. And then she closed the book, very gently, and said, ‘And so for you, too, there was a Patroclus.’
It must have been about a year went by, and it seemed as though my time with the Varangians was many more years than one behind me. I still saw the faces of men I knew in the streets; but the Varangians were beginning even then to be a People unto themselves. Now, they have made one whole district of the city their own; they have their own church; they form all their bonds of friendship and brotherhood among themselves. It was not yet quite like that, but it was already beginning. If you were one of them, you were of the Tribe, the Family; if you were outside, you were on your own. So the men I passed in the street or found drinking at my elbow in the wine-shop belonged to a different world from mine, and we no longer knew how to talk to each other. We spoke each other’s names and made a few falsely hearty noises, and then looked away; always looked away.
I began to make a new friend, here and there, in my new world; and for the rest, I worked. Now Demetriades trusted me to dress a flesh-wound or carry out simple treatments when he was elsewhere, though for the most part my work lay still in fetching and carrying and holding; and acting in general as a kind of spare right hand. More than once I spent the night in the small white room behind the surgery, watching over some sick or injured man.
On the morning of one such night, Demetriades said to me, ‘Do you remember, nearly two years ago, I said to you that you had the Healing Gift in your hands, and you told me that what skill you had, you had learned from old Gyrth and the cattle? Now, I have taught you more of skill even than old Gyrth ever knew, and the Gift is still there, grown stronger.’
I stood before him, and waited for what would come next.
‘With more training, you could become as skilled in medicine as I am myself.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe more so. Many’s the student who has outrun his master. Every man, I suppose, wishes for a son to follow after him in his craft; and since I have no son, I would gladly give you the training that I would have given him.’
Still I waited. I had known, I think, what he was going to say, yet I was unready, all the same. Part of me cried out ‘This is the way for you! Take it and follow it!’ But part of me knew that by taking it, I should bind myself, not only to Demetriades but to a whole way of life. I who still had the mark of the Blood Feud on my forehead; who was bound to that before all else.
So I shook my head.
‘Why not?’ Demetriades asked, after a moment.
‘Your last dresser was a free man, and as a free man may, he left to better himself,’ I said slowly, remembering the words with care. ‘But if he had become your student, he would have ceased to be free. And I must be free. For a time at least, I must be free.’ I struggled for the words I needed. ‘No, not even free; it is that I am bound by an older bondage.’
‘If it is the need to go away for a time –’
‘No,’ I tried desperately. ‘If it were that, I could go, and come back. If I were to take this way you offer, I must needs take it with a whole heart. And that I cannot do, for there is another thing that must always come first with me.’
‘Can you not tell me what it is?’
But I could not. I don’t know why. I had told Alexia.
‘If I may be your dresser still, I will do that, and be glad.’
He looked at me long and searchingly, and then bent his head. ‘So be it. If one day you should be free of this “older bondage”, come to me and tell me so.’
So I went on being Demetriades’ dresser; and the months went by, and neither of us spoke again of my training to become a physician. I did not forget. I longed to accept what he offered, but I could not; not with less than my whole self; and no man can give a whole self to serving life, when the thing that comes first with him is the death of another man.
And more months went by, and an autumn evening came. So many of the things that have turned my life seem to have happened in late summer or early autumn. Rain had brought a dank chill to the air, and it was good to feel the warmth of the freshly-lit brazier in the room above the entrance chamber. There was olive wood on top of the glowing charcoal, burning with a clear blue flame, like a driftwood fire but without the salty sparkle. Alexia and I had returned to our reading together at the day’s end; though now we read for the most part simply for a shared pleasure, whenever there was a little time to spare, as there was this evening, when Demetriades was out late visiting a patient, and had not bidden me to go with him.
We heard a beating on the door, and voices below, and Anna’s shuffling footsteps on the stair. She came into the stairway arch, puffing a little with the hurried climb. ‘Jestyn Englishman, there is a man at the street door asking for you. He will not come in out of the rain, but bids you to come out to him.’
So I went down the stairs and across the entrance chamber. I had long ago ceased to notice the unevenness of my own footfall on the tiled floor. It was blue dusk in the street beyond the open door. Cold air came in, but no sound save the hushing of the autumn rain. The man was waiting, a darker shadow in the sodden dusk. He loomed forward in the doorway, into the fringe of the lamplight; drenched and ragged, gaunt with a gauntness like something that has strayed after many days out of its grave.
He said, as though he had not quite enough breath for speaking, ‘I knew that if you lived, you would wait for me. Has it seemed long, the waiting for Anders Herulfson?’
22 The End of an Old Bondage
I KNEW THE man in the instant before he spoke; a sudden flash of recognition quicker than sight; and realized in the same splinter of time, that I had no knife on me. The smell of danger should have come to me with Anna’s message, but some part of me must have been asleep . . . The lamplight showed me the flash of his dagger, and I flung myself sideways just in time to hear the blade cut wind past my shoulder.
Behind me, Anna was shrieking like a stuck pig as I went for his dagger hand. I got him by the wrist, trying to twist it backward. For a few moments he fought like a bare sark, like a barrow wight; his left arm was round me, crushing out my breath; while I forced my forearm across his throat, thrusting up his chin with all the strength that was in me. We reeled and trampled to and fro; and then he began to cough, and the knife went spinning from his grasp, and in the same instant he seemed to lose strength and almost crumble. I got my sound leg behind his knees, and hooked his legs from under him, and we crashed down together, with him underneath. If the knife had been within my reach, the thing would have ended then and there, but it had been kicked far across the floor; and I was squatting on my good knee and bending over him, shouting for Anna to stop screaming and bring the lamp. I was hauling him further into the room – he had fallen across the threshold and lay half in the street – but Anna’s shrieks had fetched Alexia running, and it was she who brought the lamp, and knelt down at his other side.
He seemed to be nothing but bones and sodden rags, and the lamplight on his face cast great shadows into his eye-sockets and under his jagged cheek-bones; and a little blood and pus, that certainly had nothing to do with my blows, was trickling from the corner of his mouth. His eyes began to open, and he fixed them on my face, those odd eyes, one blue, one grey, burning bright with fever in their discoloured pits.
‘I came to – finish the feud,’ he said, in that same breathless tone, yet only slurring his words a little. ‘But it seems that I’ve left it – just too late.’
And I saw that he expected me to finish it, and was ready. It would have been easy now to reach the knife . . .
‘We can speak of that later,’ I said. And to Alexia, ‘We must get him into the night-room, and those wet ra
gs off him, he is sick enough without their help.’ But that was the voice of Demetriades’ training, and under it, a small cold voice deep within me was saying: ‘The Norns have given him into your hands. He will be easy to kill, too easy. Then the old feud will be finished indeed.’ And part of me thrust the voice away, and part of me listened.
He was horribly light to carry; and soon enough, he was lying on the cot in the small white-walled room behind the surgery, stripped of his drenched rags and wrapped in blankets.
There was an old scar white under his ribs on the left-hand side, and as I looked at it, I remembered the field armoury in the hills beyond Berea, and Anders saying, ‘As good as new, save when something still catches me under the ribs – like a bee-sting – when I laugh.’ Thormod’s dagger must have pierced a lung and done some kind of damage that had not healed through the years. Or maybe it had healed and then something had torn the inner scar-tissue, though the outer scar was slim and silvery as the vein on a poplar leaf. Now, there was some kind of lung fever on him; no doubt as to that. Also he was three parts starved. When Alexia returned from quieting Anna, I asked her for some broth, and between us we managed to get a little down him, though by that time he was not much more than half-conscious again. And when that was done, I set to work to find out if that might be what the mischief was, and how bad.
I had no need to feel for the pulse at the base of the throat, for Anders was so thin that I could see the life beating there, fast, much too fast; I could hear the painful breathing that only half-filled his lungs as though the top of each breath was cut off with a knife. He had been sweating when I put the blankets around him, now he began to shiver; long agonizing shudders that ran through him, shaking the narrow bed; and yet his body when I touched it was as burning hot as ever. And I noticed how, even half-conscious, he lay curved a little to the left as though drawn down by pain in his left side. Demetriades had long since taught me how to listen to the sounds under men’s ribs, by tapping with a finger of one hand on a finger of the other spread against the chest wall. I did that now, and all down the left side of Anders’s ribs the sound that came back was dull and sodden, instead of the clear drum note that should answer to one’s fingers there.