The Serpent’s Tale

“How did it happen?” Adelia demanded in English-and added, as she so often had to, “The doctor wants to know.”

Cross spoke up. “Caught it under a cartwheel on the march to the tower, clumsy young bugger. Put some ointment on it, can’t you?”

“Can you leave him his elbow?” Mansur asked.

“No.” The telltale signs of necrosis were already racing upward beyond the joint.

“We’ll be lucky if we can save his life.”

“Why did the little woman not do it herself earlier?”

“She can’t. She’s not allowed to shed blood.”

The Church’s proscription against surgery was absolute. Sister Jennet could not disobey it.

Mansur’s hawklike nose wrinkled. “They would leave him to die?”

“They were going to send for the Wolvercote barber.” The horror of it overcame her. “A barber, dear God.”

“A barber who sheds blood? He need not shave me, Imshallah.”

Even had he been called in, the barber would have had to do his work in the kitchen to avoid offending God’s nose with bloodshed in the area of the sacred cloister. Now, so would Adelia. This added tussle of medicine versus her religion caused such turbulence in Sister Jennet that she made arrangements for the operation in a rap of furious orders, and watched Mansur carry her patient out of the ward as if she hated them both. “And you,” she shouted at the despised Cross, “you crawl back to your kennel. They don’t want you.”

“We do,” Adelia told her. “He…er, he knows the password.”

However, the procession of doctor, patient, doctor’s assistant, her dog, mercenary, and two nuns bearing clean linen and palliasse went unchallenged as it emerged via the door from the infirmary chapel and turned left toward the kitchen.

Adelia let the others go in first and caught Cross by the front of his jerkin before he could enter. She was going to need him; the patient would be less frightened if Cross, his friend, were present. She didn’t like Cross much-well, he didn’t like her-but she thought she could trust him to keep silent. “Listen to me, that boy’s arm has to come off, and I…”

“What you mean ‘come off’?”

She kept it simple. “There’s poison spreading up your friend’s arm. If it gets to his heart, he will die.”

“Ain’t the darky going to say magic words over it or summat?”

“No, he’s going to amputate, cut it off. Or rather, I am going to do it for him but…”

“Can’t. You’re a woman.”

Adelia shook him; there wasn’t time for this. “Have you seen the state of the doctor’s hands? They’re in bandages. You will hear him talk and see me work but…”

“He’s going to tell you what to do, is that it?” Cross was slightly reassured. “Here, though, what’s my lad going to do without his bloody arm?”

“What’s he going to do without his bloody life?” Adelia shook the man again. “The point is…you must swear never to tell anybody, anybody, what you see tonight. Do you understand?”

Cross’s unlovely, troubled face cleared. “Is magic, ain’t it? The darky’s going to do sorcery, that’s why the nuns ain’t allowed to see.”

“Who’s your patron saint?”

“Saint Acacias, a’course. He always done well by me.”

“Swear on him that you will not tell.”

Cross swore.

The kitchen was deserted for the night. The nuns prepared its enormous chopping block with the palliasse and clean sheets for the patient to lie on, then bowed and left.

Young Poyns’s eyes were goggling in his head and his breathing was fast; he was feverish and very frightened. “It don’t hurt. It don’t hurt at all.”

Adelia smiled at him. “No, it wouldn’t. And it won’t, you’re going to go to sleep.” She got the opium bottle and a clean cloth out of her bag. Mansur was already lowering her net of knives into the bubbling pot of water hanging from a jack over the fire; hot steel cut better than cold.

The light in the kitchen, however, was insufficient. “You,” she said to Cross. “Two candles. One in each hand. Hold them where I tell you, but don’t let them drip.”

Cross was watching Mansur raise the knives from the pot and take them out of the net with his bandaged hands. “You sure he knows what he’s doing?”

“Candles,” Adelia hissed at him. “Help or get out.”

He helped; at least, he held the candles, but as she put the opium-soaked cloth over the patient’s face, he tried to intervene. “You’re smotherin’ him, you bitch.” Mansur held him back.

She had a few seconds; the boy must not breathe the opium too long. “This arm has to come off. You know that really, don’t you? He may die anyway, but he can’t live if I don’t operate right away.”

“He’s telling you what to do, though?” Cross had begun to be overawed by Mansur, who, with his strength, his robe, and kaffiyeh, was impressive. “He’s a sorcerer, ain’t he? That’s why he talks funny.”

“You’ll have to appear to be instructing me,” Adelia said in Arabic.

Mansur began gabbling in Arabic.

She had to work fast, thanking God that opium grew plentifully in the Cambridgeshire fens and she had brought a good supply but measuring its benignity against its danger.

The world shrank to a tabletop.

Since he had to keep talking, Mansur chose as his theme Kit b’Alf Layla wa-Layla, also known as The Book of a Thousand Nights. So an Oxfordshire convent kitchen rang with the high-pitched voice of a castrato recounting in Arabic the stories that the Persian Scheherazade had concocted for her sultan husband three hundred years earlier in order to delay her execution. He’d told them to Adelia as a child and she had loved them. Now she heard them no more than she heard the pop and crackle of the fire.

Had Rowley, saved from the cold waters, entered the kitchen, Adelia wouldn’t have looked up, nor recognized him if she had. The mention of her child’s name would have brought the response “Who?” There was only the patient-not even him, really, just his arm. Fold back the flaps of skin.

“Suturae.”

Mansur slapped a threaded needle into her outstretched hand and began mopping blood.

Arteries, veins.

Saw the bone or cleave it? How the patient might manage his life with only a shoulder stump was not her concern; her thinking could only advance at the speed of the operation.

A heavy object thumped into the kitchen waste pail.

More stitches. Ointment, lint, bandage.

At last she wiped her forearm across her forehead. Slowly, her vision expanded to take in the beams and pots and a roaring fire.

Somebody was bothering her. “What’s he say? Will he be all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“That was wunnerrful, though, weren’t it?” Cross was shaking Mansur warmly by the hand. “Tell him he’s a marvel.”

“You’re a marvel,” Adelia said in Arabic.

“I know.”

“How are your hands, my dear?” she asked. “Can you carry him back to the infirmary?”

“I can.”

“Then wrap him up warm and be quick before the soporific wears off. Careful of his shoulder. Tell Sister Jennet he’s likely to vomit when he comes round. I’ll be along in a minute.”

“He’ll live now, won’t he? Going to be all right, the lad, ain’t he?”

She turned on the botherer. She was always bad-tempered at this point; it had been a race and, like a runner, she needed time to recover and-Cross, was it?-wasn’t giving her any.