'Aye, water.' Mokios gasped. He sounded more worn than the man he had just healed.
Half a dozen villagers raced to be first to the well. Zoranne did not win the race, but the others gave way when she said, 'Let me serve them. It is my right.' With the pride of a queen, she drew up the dripping bucket, untied it, and carried it to her husband and Mokios. Between them, they all but drank it dry.
The priest was still wiping water from his mustache and beard with the sleeve of his blue robe when another woman tried to tug him to his feet. 'Please, holy sir, come to my daughter,' she got out through tears. 'She barely breathes!'
Mokios heaved himself upright, grunting at the effort it took. He followed the woman. Again, the rest of the villagers followed him. Phostis touched Krispos on the shoulder. 'Now we pray he can heal faster than we fall sick,' he said softly.
Mokios succeeded again, though the second healing took longer than the first. When he was done, he lay full length on the ground, panting. 'Look at the poor fellow,' Krispos whispered to his father. 'He needs someone to heal him now.'
'Aye, but we need him worse,' Phostis answered. He knelt and shook Mokios. 'Please come, holy sir. We have others who will not see tomorrow without you.'
'You are right,' the priest said. Even so, he stayed down several more minutes and, when he did rise, he walked with the shambling gait of a man either drunk or in the last stages of exhaustion.
Krispos thought Mokios' next healing, of a small boy, would fail. How much, he wondered, could a man take out of himself before he had nothing left? Yet in the end Mokios somehow summoned up the strength to vanquish the child's disease. While the boy, with the resilience of the very young, got up and began to play, the healer-priest looked as if he had died in his place.
But others in the village were still sick. 'We'll carry him if we have to,' Phostis said, and carry him they did, on to Varades.
Again Mokios recited Phos' creed, though now in a voice as dry as the skins of the cholera victims he treated. The villagers prayed with him, both to lend him strength and to try to ease their own fears. He sank into the healing trance, placed his hands on the veteran's belly. They were filthy now, from the stools of the folk he had already cured.
Once more Krispos felt healing flow out of Mokios. This time, however, the priest slumped over in a faint before his task was done. He breathed, but the villagers could not bring him back to himself. Varades moaned and muttered and befouled himself yet again.
When they saw they could not rouse Mokios, the villagers put a blanket over him and let him rest. 'In the morning, the good god willing, he'll be able to heal again,' Phostis said.
By morning, though, Varades was dead.
Mokios finally roused when the sun was halfway up the sky. Videssian priests were enjoined to be frugal of food and drink, but he broke his fast with enough for three men. 'Healers have dispensation,' he mumbled round a chunk of honeycomb.
'Holy sir, so long as it gives you back the power to use your gift, no one would say a word if you ate five times as much,' Krispos told him. Everyone who heard agreed loudly.
The priest healed two more, a man and a woman, that day. Toward sunset, he gamely tried again. As he had with Varades, though, he swooned away before the cure was complete. This time Krispos wondered if he'd killed himself until Idalkos found his pulse.
'Just what my father worried about,' Krispos said. 'So many of us are deathly ill that we're dragging Mokios down with us.'
He'd hoped Idalkos might contradict him, but the veteran only nodded, saying, 'Why don't you go on home and get away from the sickness for a while? You're lucky; none of your family seems to have come down with it.'
Krispos made the sun-sign over his heart. A few minutes later, after seeing that Mokios was as comfortable on the ground as he could be, he took Idalkos' advice.
He frowned as he came up to his house. Being near the edge of the village, it was always fairly quiet. But he should have heard his father and mother talking inside, or perhaps Tatze teaching Kosta some trick of baking. Now he heard nothing. Nor was cooksmoke rising from the hole in the center of the roof.
All at once, his belly felt as if it had been pitched into a snowdrift. He ran for the door. As he jerked it open, out came the latrine stench with which he and the whole village had grown too horribly familiar over the last few days.
His father, his mother, his sister—they all lay on the floor. Phostis was most nearly conscious; he tried to wave his son away. Krispos paid him no heed. He dragged his father to the grass outside, then Tatze and Kosta. As he did, he wondered why he alone had been spared.
His legs ached fiercely when he bent to lift his mother, and when he went back for Kosta he found his arms so clenched with cramps that he could hardly hold her. But he thought nothing of it until suddenly, without willing it, he felt an overpowering urge to empty his bowels. He started for the bushes not far away, but fouled himself before he got to them. Then he realized he had not been spared after all.
He began to shout for help, stopped with the cry unuttered. Only the healer-priest could help him now, and he'd just left Mokios somewhere between sleep and death. If any of the villagers who were still healthy came, they would only further risk the disease. A moment later he vomited, then suffered another fit of diarrhea. With his guts knotted from end to end, he crawled back to his family. Perhaps their cases would be mild. Perhaps ...
His fever was already climbing, so thought soon became impossible. He felt a raging thirst and managed to find a jar of wine in the house. It did nothing to ease him; before long, he threw it up.
He crawled outside again, shivering and stinking. The full moon shone down on him, as serene and beautiful as if no such thing as cholera existed. It was the last thing Krispos remembered seeing that night.
'Oh, Phos be praised,' someone said, as if from very far away.
Krispos opened his eyes. He saw Mokios' anxious face peering down at him and, behind the priest, the rising sun. 'No,' he said. 'It's still dark.' Then the memory came crashing back. He tried to sit. Mokios' hands, still on him,
