Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [280]
Nicholas knelt by the body. He said, ‘I will deal with it. Is the woman his wife?’
‘She won’t mourn him,’ said the Arab. ‘She will stay. She has seen worse, I dare say, these many months.’
As he had done on the journey to Rhodes, from that time onwards Nicholas gave up his will, his designs, and his planning, and lived from hour to hour simply to work as he was bidden.
Each day he came twice to the banker’s house and sat in the sickroom, warm and better furnished now, and kept his lover company; sometimes talking, sometimes in silence. With the coming of fresh food, and the medicines that Abul had sent for, she seemed to rally her strength. She slept, with something of her old determination, in order to be awake when he came; and often she wanted to talk: about Bruges; about the past; about all the foolish exploits that had made Claes the apprentice notorious – the jokes with the gun and the waterwheel; the chases, the skating; the escapade with the ostrich. The first time they had met, he had fished her headgear out of the canal. She had been nineteen, and affronted. ‘You were so kind with the children,’ she said. ‘And Felix. You have that gift, to be liked. Gregorio, the lawyer who fought Simon for you. Your engineer and your doctor. Diniz is ready to take you as friend, or will be soon.’
Once, she spoke of the day of the bombardment. ‘The balls didn’t often come quite so far. I expect you aimed at the walls.’
‘Wherever we aimed, they always fired in another direction,’ Nicholas said.
‘It was a marble ball. They showed it to me later. There were inscriptions half buffed from the surface, but you couldn’t see what shrine they came from.’
Whichever it was, it had brought death to her. ‘Aphrodite or Pallas Athene?’ Nicholas said lightly. ‘I think I prefer either to the Heart as Love’s Captive. Since you spoke of it, I’ve found out the story. The Knight Coeur is a failure. And the lady Sweet Grace is never liberated.’
‘Not entirely a failure,’ she said. ‘The lady escapes from the Manoir de Rébellion. But of course, the three enemies of Love trap her eventually. Shame, Fear and Denial.’ She smiled. ‘We have escaped them.’
The rest of his time, he spent with Abul Ismail.
The sick who had no one to tend them were spread through the inner, inhabited core of the city, in the monasteries, in the hospice of the Knights of St John with their double chapels. There they were tended by the Brethren of the Order, and elsewhere by those monks who had survived. Still, their strength and their knowledge were limited, and the physician in daily demand. Among the patients were the injured and sick of the army. Once they had had their own barracks, their own surgeons. Now they stood to the walls, and if they fell, had no more help than the civilians had.
The others in need were those still in the care of their families. The roofs were most often not their own: long since, the community had drawn in from its perimeter, sharing its water, its food and its warmth, and distancing itself so far as might be from the walls and the thud of the cannon.
All these people, Abul Ismail visited. He was given a boy, and two soldiers, and a handcart. In that, he took the box of his instruments, and the pills and plasters and powders which took Nicholas and himself half their sleeping time to boil, to mix and to stamp. Every second day, food and medicine were delivered from Zacco and, strictly watched, the doctor was allowed to speak with the courier who came with the convoy. Nicholas was never given that privilege.
For him were the heavy tasks. Now, with new carts, he could drag both water and food to where they were needed. He took the night soil and the corpses to the south wall, where the north wind would scour them, and ground off the flesh of his hands, digging trenches.