The Physician's Tale Read online

  The Frenchman shuddered, then coughed. Alejandro’s eyes were upon him in an instant.

  “You are pale, colleague.” He came forward and placed a hand on de Chauliac’s forehead. “And you are feverish.”

  De Chauliac pulled Alejandro’s hand away. “Excessive emotion,” he said. “See how it affects one; you must take my advice and proceed in a calm and cautious manner, or it will take its toll on you as well.”

  Alejandro said nothing to this dismissal; it was de Chauliac’s nature to command him, and he would not allow himself to take offense, as he might have done long ago. He returned to his chair and lay back in the chair with eyes closed. The gravity of his situation descended upon him in a terrifying darkness. Once again, he thought miserably, I am torn from safety. Once again, I must flee.

  Four

  “Could it be just an anomaly?” Tom asked. “A statistical blip?”

  Janie hesitated for a moment before answering. When she did, her tone was equivocal. “Of course. There could be any number of explanations. Clusters of an unfamiliar bacteria don’t necessarily mean there’s a problem.”

  “We’ll talk to Kristina. Right after dinner.”

  A silence fell, the sort that settles over two people when each is engaged in private worry over the same matter. Each one would fret along a separate route to arrive at the same disturbing place, namely: How do we survive?

  Husband and wife walked hand in hand along the path that led to the lodge. They reached the same vista point where the sunset had beckoned to Janie; down in the valley through the still-bare trees, the last of the day’s light danced in orange and gold steps on the calm water. Tom tugged on Janie’s hand, holding her in place.

  “We need to get back,” she said.

  “Wait. Just enjoy this with me.”

  He pulled her closer; she leaned against him. A flood of warmth and safety rushed through her, dispelling her worry for one brief moment.

  “I wonder if the sunsets will be this beautiful when all the pollution filters out of the atmosphere,” Tom said.

  “What makes you think it will?”

  He gave her a surprised look. “No buses, no cars, no coal-fueled power plants.”

  “They might be out there somewhere.”

  “You’re a dreamer, my love. It’s all gone.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  Tom gave her hand a squeeze and said, “Well, I hope you’re right and that whoever is still out there is friendly.”

  They soaked up the glowing peace for a few moments. Janie said, very quietly, “I feel so small when I look out from here. I mean, I feel small in general these days, but this is a better kind of small.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. He slipped his arm around her waist. “Part-of-the-larger-universe small, not part-of-the-food-chain small.”

  That brought a smile to her face. “Speaking of food, there’s a chicken roasting, such as it is.”

  They left the sunset to its own demise and set out at a brisk walk.

  They were barely inside the door when Alex came running around the corner and leaped into his father’s arms, completely disregarding Tom’s one-boot-on, one-boot-off condition. Tom caught him up in a hug.

  Sarah wasn’t far behind; Janie put an arm around the girl’s slender shoulders. She looked down on the amazing red hair, the sea of freckles, and the gap-toothed smile.

  “Show me those dimples,” she commanded. Sarah complied by squeezing her eyes shut and grinning widely. Two distinct indentations, one on each cheek, were proof that she was Caroline Rosow’s daughter.

  “Wanna see me roll my tongue?” the little girl asked excitedly.

  “Show-off!” Alex said.

  “You can’t!” Sarah teased.

  “So what?”

  “That’s enough,” Caroline said as she came around the corner. “It’s not a talent, Sarah, it’s a genetic trait, and a pretty useless one at that. Get over it. Now go wash your hands. Dinner’s ready.”

  Alex stuck out his nonrolling tongue; Sarah wrinkled her nose up at him. Then she turned to her mother and said, “But we already washed our hands when we came in.”

  “Wash them again,” Caroline repeated, “or you can go sit in your dark bedroom while everyone else eats dinner.”

  Alex looked up at his mother.

  “You too,” Janie said.

  They ran off, grumbling. Janie smiled and said, “That was pretty medieval.”

  “Hey, they knew how to raise kids back then.” She turned to Tom. “How’s Jellybean doing?”

  “The hoof still seems to be a little tender, but I saw Ed walking her this afternoon and she looked like she was doing well. The crisis seems to have passed, thanks to your TLC.”

  “That’s a relief. Well, we should probably eat.”

  They all went off in different directions momentarily, but within a few minutes the occupants of the compound began to drift to the long table, drawn in by the sounds and smells of supper. Flour-dusted Elaine and wood-scented Terry worked at settling his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother into a chair at one end of the table. She would not lift her leg over the bench, even though she could, so the same chair was always reserved for her. Elaine and Terry’s daughter, Patricia, sat to the old woman’s right. She tucked a napkin into her grandmother’s collar and patted her fondly on the shoulder. Ed Golochuk, a former FedEx driver who’d always been a bit of a loner, squeezed in next to her and gave her a little smile. Food was passed politely from person to person; conversations began about the day’s activities.

  Positively Waltonesque, Janie thought as she regarded the scene from the kitchen door. The news she had to deliver after dinner would alter that precious and ethereal dynamic, so hard-won among a “family” as large as theirs. She grabbed the last of the platters, this one loaded with mashed turnips, and slipped into the space that Tom and Alex had left between them just for her.

  Janie could see the relief on Caroline’s face as Tom elaborated on his report about the mare, which was bolstered by Ed’s agreement. The task of treating the ailments of the horses might more naturally have fallen to herself as a physician, but they’d learned in short order after arriving at the lodge that chores were often better doled out by passion than time-before vocation. Caroline, a research biologist, didn’t want to be in the lab, but she’d happily taken on the job of caring for the occupants of the barn and the stables. She milked the goats, sheared the sheep, and hovered maternally over the last two cows of the twelve they’d originally had. In time they determined that a mutation of the DR SAM bacterium had felled them, starting as an infection in the udder of one animal. The disease had spread from one stall to the next, showing symptoms that mimicked the human version of DR SAM. When there were seven left, they isolated them all, in the hope of staving off the spread. Five more died anyway.

  Janie watched and listened as her husband spoke about the horse’s foot. This kind and generous man had once been on the short list for a vacant seat on the federal bench; in the time after, he had become the clan’s tinkerer. Tom fixed and fashioned with limitless energy, showing patience that amazed everyone as he worked and reworked and then re-reworked his creations until each device was as sublimely functional as it could be. He’d put together carts with removable wheels to move the dead cows; the wood slabs on which they were transported would have to be burned along with the carcasses. They had a whole forest full of wood, but only a few wheels.

  Janie heard deep laughter from the other side of the table as Michael Rosow responded to his daughter’s rolled tongue. On a sharp glance from Caroline, he winked at Sarah and said, in his thick English accent, “Put that thing away, will you, love, and eat your turnips?” He gestured with his continentally held fork toward the steaming golden pile on her plate. “Ed and I went to a lot of trouble to grow them nice and tasty just for you, so be a good girl now and eat up.”

  Michael was one of their two farmers—a far cry from the cop he’d once been, but he would often
say, with his patented flirtatious wink, “Once a copper, always a copper.”

  But Janie would forever and always think of him in a more defined way, as a biocop.

  The green suit he wore in the time before was packed carefully away in protective plastic bags, each little part thoroughly scrubbed. Some of the parts to that amazing suit—the ones that could withstand the heat—were steamed before storage. He’d had it on only a few times since they’d come into the compound; one of those times was the day they dragged the cows out for immolation. Janie knew that it could not have been fun to do that heavy work inside a sealed suit on a hot day, but there was only one suit, and he was the only one who knew how to use it. The others—especially the men—watched guiltily, as he labored for the benefit of the entire group.

  Across the Atlantic he’d come, tracking her and Caroline from London to the Berkshires. His superiors hadn’t wanted him to follow the lead in the mysterious plague incident to America; there was too much red tape involved in traveling from one country to another in the era of DR SAM, even when it was official business. But she and Caroline had information on the death of an old man in London, so the British biocops let Michael go, and he’d found Janie and Caroline rather handily with a few clicks on the keyboard in a state-police barracks. He showed up on Janie’s doorstep one afternoon and, after a polite and proper introduction, explained that he was in need of additional information on the demise of one Robert Sarin.

  We questioned your friend Dr. Ransom on the matter already—picked him up at Heathrow when he was bounced back by your Customs—but he wasn’t able to tell us much.

  Though she didn’t fully understand why she was inclined to trust him, Janie let Michael Rosow in and promptly called Caroline. Many times since then, Tom had chided her. You should have called your lawyer—that would be me—first.

  “But it turned out okay,” she’d replied in her own defense. “Well, in fact.”

  Luckily.

  Janie recognized the attraction between Michael and Caroline instantly, though it took the pair themselves a bit longer. It was Tom who arranged the necessary visas, allowing Michael to stay in the United States. He went back to the familiar green suit, but this time in a strange new land.

  But he was still a British biocop when he first questioned them. “You dug the sample out of the ground near Sarin’s house, and then you sent it to the lab to be tested. For plague, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  In retrospect, their explanation seemed absurd. She could hear herself still, cringing as she recounted the events, pleading to be believed.

  I was working on a paper, and I needed to determine if the Great Fire of 1666 had a purifying effect on the soil. I needed samples from a grid of locations throughout London. One of them landed there, in that park near where he lived.

  And it got loose from the lab at the institute?

  Unfortunately.

  Was Dr. Ransom involved in that incident?

  No! It was his boss who caused the accident. Bruce was really just trying to contain it.

  He finally came to believe her after she showed him Alejandro’s journal, before she brought it to Myra for safekeeping in the Hebrew Book Depository. But every now and then, Michael would still ask questions. Across the table, he and Sarah were trading funny faces. Farther down at one end, Tom’s daughter, Kristina, smiled and laughed to watch them.

  It was Kristina who had deciphered the puzzle of the mutation that got the cows—she with her incredible brilliance, who could recite the periodic table of the elements and write out the genetic-code sequence of DR SAM from memory—the same young woman who had to write down her own birthday because the neural path that once led directly to that memory was no longer in existence. And despite the odd, sometimes debilitating flaws in her memory, it was she to whom they would present the problem of the bacterial cluster. As soon as they all got through washing and drying the dishes.

  There was never any food left after a meal, so the cleanup was quick. No one was fat; body energy was more easily acquired and spent than electricity, though their generator and windmill produced just enough of that for the essentials.

  And my fruit trees, Janie thought as she turned on the fluorescent bulb in the small table lamp that would illuminate their discussion. The light of the fire would not be enough tonight. The adults—Kristina was twenty-five, depending on how you counted—gathered around the table with a slab of white enameled metal, a drop leaf from a table someone had brought along. They discovered, quite by accident, that pencil markings could be washed away, leaving the surface white and writable. Alex had initially been scolded for the act that led to this discovery, but he’d been thanked many times since. Paper was no longer an option.

  Janie began by explaining what she’d found and why it seemed remarkable to her. “The numbers were going down consistently, and all of a sudden there’s this new thing. It looks a lot like the bacteria that causes plague, but it can’t be, not at this time of year. I don’t know if it’s a mutation of DR SAM or what. It just seems unlikely that it would be a natural anomaly.”

  “But it could be, right?” Tom looked back and forth between Janie and Kristina.

  The two women glanced at each other for a brief moment, then looked around at the hopeful faces of their clanmates.

  “I’m not sure,” Janie said. “I didn’t take enough statistics in school to answer that question.”

  “Could be,” Kristina said after a moment.

  A small sigh went through all the others.

  “But I’m guessing it’s not.”

  In the silence that followed, she gave an explanation, accompanied by a John Maddenesque map on the enamel, with circles and arrows and paths of progress. She pointed out the locations of previous sampling points, then scribbled a tight circle to indicate the location of the one Janie had examined. It was well inside the rough ring of previous samples.

  “These are all DR SAM spots,” she said. “They’re close to the places where we found this new one. Maybe this is a mutation, but I don’t know….”

  Michael was the first one to lean back out of the light so he could process his thoughts; the others all followed shortly. After a few moments, Kristina spoke again. “I think we need to go to these two spots and take additional samples.” She pointed to two locations on the map. “Something’s coming back, or starting up, whatever this is. We need to verify it.”

  “But how?” Terry said. “And why now, after all these years?”

  “One problem at a time,” Patricia said. “Let’s concentrate on if before we give any energy to how and why.”

  There was silence in the entire group for a short while. Finally, Michael rose up. “Well,” he said, “guess what day tomorrow is?”

  People glanced back and forth at each other in mild confusion, wondering why such a question would be asked at this moment. Finally Caroline said, “Someone’s birthday?”

  He gave her a smile that seemed almost sad. “No, love. It’s March seventeenth. Saint Patrick’s. A good day for the wearing of the green.”

  Five

  The high-stepping horses ridden by the papal guards wore the same red regalia, matching the mantles of their riders, as Alejandro recalled from fifteen years back. But before they’d gone ten leagues, the fretted borders with gold fleurs-de-lis were caked and brown by the splatter that rose up from their hooves. Then, as now, he rode in the company of the pope’s soldiers, but this time—unlike before—he was dressed in the simple traveling garb of a common man, not the embroidered mantle and breeches he had worn as the pope’s emissary to the English court. And on this journey, de Chauliac himself was among the travelers. As befitted his station, the Frenchman wore the flowing burgundy-colored robes and squared hat of a master physician. His white hair stuck out in stark contrast. He would attract all the notice as they passed through town after town; no one would pay any attention to the quiet dark-haired man at the rear of the procession, who carried a small chi
ld on the horse with him.

  Guillaume was quite subdued and grew more contained as the distance grew between him and the only home he’d known. His customary exuberance was replaced by a staid and somber demeanor. For miles at a time, he said nothing, and though his grandfather was relieved—we must not do anything to attract attention to ourselves—he was also concerned and a bit saddened to see the change. He was pained as well that though he and de Chauliac were at long last reunited, they could not speak of their shared passions during their travel. He longed for an opportunity to discuss the things they had each learned, separate from the other. Their secret correspondences had been precious, detailed, and satisfying, but they were limited to parchment, without the spontaneous give-and-take that had marked their discussions. To have the friend there in person—to provoke, respond, and challenge—would have been glorious. As the familiar road unfurled before them, Alejandro considered that when he first rode this way, de Chauliac had been the master, and himself the pupil. He had been in awe of the depth and breadth of his mentor’s knowledge. Yet, it was Alejandro Canches who stunned Guy de Chauliac with the insight that would prompt their most compelling discourse.

  Rats.

  What do you mean, rats?

  It is rats that cause plague.

  Nonsense!

  Think of it, de Chauliac. Where there are rats, there is plague.

  De Chauliac promptly pronounced the assertion an insanity:

  There are rats everywhere.

  “Precisely,” Alejandro said aloud.

  Guillaume turned his head and made a curious face, as if to ask, What did you say?

  “Nothing,” Alejandro said, knowing the boy’s question without hearing it. “Nothing of any import.”

  Not far north of Avignon, they were put upon a barge and poled up the Rhône until the cascade of spring flow from le Massif Central made the current too much to battle; they put back ashore again and continued their journey on horseback until they came to the village of Valence, still on the river. Therein lay the monastery where they would pass the first night of their travel. De Chauliac was bowed into the courtyard by several footmen and a dozen or so brown-clad monks and then promptly disappeared through the door in the company of a prelate in a red robe and a mitered cap. His fellow travelers—Alejandro and Guillaume among them—were left in the care of a groom, who showed them to the stables where they would bed in straw among the horses.