medicine cart… attach herself to a pilgrimage as its herbalist…
She woke up, having dreamed that she was sitting in the Colosseum with the crowd around her delighting in gladiator blood and yelling for more. The scene before her was still peaceful, but the stream reflected the color of amber.
Dear God, the sun was beginning to go down, she’d been asleep for hours, and the howls of the crowd in the distance had become loud and shrill, indicating that somebody was hurt. She didn’t want to see it.
But she was a doctor.
Adelia got up, shaking off butterflies that had settled on her skirts. She put on her boots and hurried back up the path.
Nobody in the stand attended her return any more than they’d noticed her going. The kerchief in Emma’s hands was in shreds, her face white.
The two champions had faded from what they were; the sand had stuck to sweating skin and hair and darkened them so that in the failing light, the silvery hauberks almost seemed to move by themselves-slowly, very slowly, as if through treacle. Both men were limping; Roetger held his staff in his right hand only; his left arm hung, useless, by his side. His opponent seemed to have trouble seeing, occasionally flailing his staff in front of him, like a blind man feeling for an obstruction.
The crowd’s cry of satisfaction that Adelia had heard was fracturing into impatience. It would be dark soon, and neither champion had battered the other to death. Most unsatisfactory. The judges could be seen consulting among themselves. The God of Battles was letting everybody down.
And then the scene in the arena flickered. There were two cracks, almost instantaneous but not quite; one of them was caused by Master Roetger’s quarterstaff connecting at speed with his opponent’s head, knocking it sideways, and the other by Master Peter’s staff slashing at Master Roetger’s legs.
With Sir Gerald’s champion toppled, Roetger hopped forward and pressed the end of his staff into the other’s neck, pushing him flat to the ground.
There was a silence. A voice croaked, “Say it.” It was Roetger’s.
A murmur, sobbing.
“Say it. Loud, you say it.”
“Craven.” A curious shriek, a submission, the end of everything for the creature that made it.
The crowd exhaled in a howl that was not so much a cheer for the winner as contempt for the loser.
Somewhere the trumpet brayed again. The judges were standing. Emma was on her knees, her head in her hands. Perhaps she was thanking her god.
Adelia took no notice of any of it, not even of the wounded Roetger, who was using his staff as a crutch to hop off the field. She was watching a creature crawl through the sand into the shadows. “What will happen to him?” she asked Father Septimus.
“Who? Oh, that one. He will be infamous, of course. He’s been publicly shamed; he has declared himself a coward.”
That, then, was what “craven” meant, personal annihilation. Master Peter would not die, yet the essence of him had. And the man had fought for five hours.
They had all been shamed.
MASTER ROETGER LAY on a table in the champion’s pavilion, his squire standing helplessly beside him. A doctor poked tentatively at limbs and raised his head as the women came in. “Fractures to the arm and ankle. I can apply a salve, a marvelous mixture of my own from toads’ blood gathered at the full moon and…”
Adelia nudged Emma, who said, “Thank you, Doctor, that will not be necessary. We have salves of our own.”
“Not as efficacious as mine, I assure you, dear lady. And cheap, very cheap-only sixpence for the first application, three for any thereafter.”
“No, thank you, Doctor.”
While Emma ushered the man out, Adelia set about her own examination of the patient. Roetger bit into his lip but made no sound.
The humerus of the left arm was undoubtedly broken, but the other injury was not to the ankle. What she’d heard when Master Peter’s quarterstaff connected with Master Roetger’s foot hadn’t been the crack of a bone, more a “pop,” like something being pulled apart-not a noise she’d heard before but one she’d been told about at the School of Medicine. And the blow had been to the back of the leg
Sure enough, when she took his right foot in her hand, it flopped to the touch; she was able to bend it until the toes touched the lower shin.
“This is not a broken ankle,” she said. She looked at Roetger and then at Emma. “I’m afraid it’s the heel, the Achilles tendon.”
“What is that?”
“It’s… well, it’s like a piece of string attached to the muscles of the calf.” She was seeing it as displayed in a dissected leg on the great marble table where her foster father had carried out autopsies.
She would have liked to tell them about it, how marvelous it was, the thickest and strongest tendon in the body, which seemed to enable the foot to push downward in a run or jump. And why it was named after Achilles, whose only weak point it had been because his mother had held him by the heel when she made every other part of the hero invulnerable to injury by dipping him into the River Styx. But neither Emma nor poor Roetger would be interested in a dissertation at this moment.
“It’s ruptured, you see,” she said. “That last blow must have been tremendous.”
The champion made an effort: “How long?”
“Do we just strap it up?” Emma asked.
“We do, yes.” Adelia turned to Roetger. “We must ensure you don’t move it at all. As for how long it will take to heal…” She searched her memory for what the school’s lecturer on limbs had said-she herself had never treated this particular injury. “It may be a very long time, longer than the break in your arm… perhaps six months…”
Roetger’s eyes went wide with shock.
Aghast, Emma said, “Six months?”
Adelia grabbed her by the arm and took her outside the tent. “You can’t abandon him. What would he do? How could he return to Germany on one foot?”
Emma was indignant. “I don’t intend to abandon him. He was injured in my service. Of course I’ll care for him.”
Adelia sighed with relief. The gentle Emma of old still survived under the harsher surface of the new.
“But he’ll have to travel with us,” the newer Emma said sharply. “I may have a use for him after we get to Wells.”
“Not for six months, you won’t.” Adelia began making a list. “The whole lower leg will have to be splinted. A decoction of willow bark for the pain. And comfrey, we’ll need comfrey, but that grows everywhere, and we must hope it works on tendons as well as broken bones.” She started off toward where the traders were dismantling their pavilions to beg some struts for a splint.
Emma called after her: “Is he in much pain?”
“Agony.”
AT LAST IN BED at the Aylesbury inn at which they were all staying, Adelia worried about the heel most of the night. She had put on a rough splint for the time being, but that wouldn’t be good enough, not if it was to endure the rigors of travel over rutted roads and prevent its owner from being tempted to put his foot to the ground, something that had to be avoided at all costs.
At dawn she was in the inn’s stable yard, making inquiries to a sleepy ostler as to where she might gather comfrey. Since every county had its own name for the plant, he and she were at crosspurposes for a while until, finally enlightened, the man said, “Oh, you’re a-meaning knit-bone,” and directed her to an untidy patch of ground beyond a vegetable garden where clusters of young lance-shaped leaves and new yellow flowers were becoming visible in the dark green crowns of the old plants.
It was mostly comfrey roots that Adelia wanted, and she dug for them with her trowel, wishing she’d worn gloves-the hairy leaves were an irritant to the skin.
Carrying her spoils back to the inn, she found the pilgrims at breakfast and in shock. They’d received appalling news.
“ Glastonbury is burned down,” the Yorkshireman told her. “Aye, we had it from two separate peddlers last night. Burned down. Glastonbury. Glastonbury. Reckon the heart’s gone out of England.”
It was a heart that had been beating for more centuries than anybody could remember, empowered by the holiest of the holy-Saint Joseph of Arimathea, Saint Patrick of Ireland, Saint Bride, Saint Columba, Saint David of Wales, Saint Gildas… And now it had stopped.
There was puzzlement in the room, as well as shock. A glove maker from Chester expressed it: “You’d have thought with all those saints, at least one of ’em would’ve put the damned fire out.”
“King Arthur should have,” said somebody else. “How could he sleep through that?”
There was a feeling that the blessed dead of Glastonbury had not pulled their weight.
Emma entered the room to be told of the calamity and was aghast. “ Glastonbury?”
“Aye. Never have thought it, would thee?” the Yorkshire burgher said. “And a right conflagration it were, so it’s said; noothing left, not noothing, sooch a pity. And I were looking forward to a blessing from Joseph of Arimathea.” He shook his head. “Should’ve set out earlier.”
The Cheshire abbess was less upset. “I said all along we ought to be making for Canterbury. With Saint Thomas we are assured of even stronger sanctity, his being the latest martyrdom. Ah, who would have thought such a blessed saint would be killed by his king…”
The Yorkshireman cut her off in mid-flow; her companions had heard the abbess’s strictures on Henry Plantagenet’s perfidy in crying for the death of his obstructive archbishop many times before. He said, “Aye, well, that’s where we’re a-going now-to Canterbury.” There was no virtue to be had from Glastonbury ’s bones and relics now that they had been reduced to ashes, whereas there was much to be gained from the vials of Saint Thomas a Becket’s blood that were on sale in the cathedral where he’d died.
Bills paid, packing done, the pilgrims congratulated Emma on her triumph in the trial by combat, which, they said, they had much enjoyed, and bade her farewell. The man from Yorkshire kissed her hand. “Right sorry we are to be leaving your coompany, my lady.”
“I’m sorry, too.” Emma meant it. Without the pilgrims, and with Master Roetger disabled, the journey to Wells would be considerably less safe.
Adelia didn’t stay to wave good-bye; she was already at work to ensure the immobilization of a heel.
Gyltha was ordered to the kitchen to begin pounding the pile of comfrey roots to a mash in the largest mortar the inn could provide, while Mansur, armed with an ax, a whittling knife, and instructions, was sent off to find an ash tree and a willow. Adelia herself impounded the services of Emma’s most experienced groom, Alan, and both were to be seen in the stable yard drawing diagrams in its dust.
To facilitate matters, Master Roetger was carried to the cart and put on its cushions with his legs dangling over the tailboard until the bad one, which was bare, could be placed with care across a sawing horse. It was a maneuver causing excitement among the inn servants, who forgathered under the impression that they were to watch a Saracen doctor-Mansur’s assumed role-perform an amputation.
Instead, they saw Gyltha hold some of the comfrey leaves to the heel while Adelia gently plastered them into place with the unpleasant-smelling green-black paste from the mortar, eventually encasing the entire foot, including the sole, and lower shin with it.
Under the lash of the innkeeper’s tongue, his staff returned to work-it was, after all, only the usual home remedy of comfrey being applied to a breakage by a couple of women.
When the foot was done, the broken arm was treated to the same procedure. Pain compressed the patient’s mouth into a straight line and sweat glistened in the furrows of his forehead, but he tried to show interest.
“In my country this plant we also eat,” he said. “Schwarzwurz, we call it. Fried in batter, it is good.”
Adelia was interested. England ’s peasantry ate boiled comfrey, as they did nettles, as a vegetable. To put the leaves in egg, flour, and milk argued a higher standard of living.
