The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [72]
“Ah,” said Awa, simultaneously terrified and curious. “I think—”
“You do, you do.” Paracelsus bobbed his head. “How many would listen, though? How many would admit that a Moor and a woman are both capable of thought, and the skull of even the Moorish woman must be tapped for milk like a coconut from her savage shores, the milk of knowledge, the elixir of information!”
“What?” Awa took a step back, resolving to put the man down like a crazed animal if he tried to bore into her skull to get whatever milk he thought might be there, friend of Manuel’s or not. Their journey to Milan had been uneventful, although they had needed to hide from the retreating Imperial mercenaries as they approached the contested city, and upon gaining the walls Awa discovered it was unlike any place she had ever been, an overwhelming jumble of impressive buildings and once-impressive buildings reduced to rubble and ruin. Now, in the broken heart of Milan and the doctor’s clinic, Awa felt far less optimistic about her current prospects—the man was deranged, and the entire low building echoed with screams and wails.
The actual hospital lay deeper in the city and was much larger and cleaner, but Paracelsus’s clinic was not intended for war wounds and mundane illnesses. Rather, the warehouse he had cordoned off with clothesline and sheets into something resembling an infirmary was devoted to treating the Great Pox, and with the siege finally ended the doctor was overjoyed to eject the combatants he had been forced to tend and return to his never-ending supply of syphilitics. After he finished adorning Awa in her disguise he led her out of the crowded storeroom and down the makeshift hallway, pointing from one curtained-off chamber to another and rattling off the required care.
“But what is it?” Awa finally managed to sneak in a question as Paracelsus took a pull from his flask of schnapps. “I know what a pox is, but what is this particular pox? How is it caused and how is it spread and—”
“The French Disease?” said Paracelsus, and, noting her continued confusion, he clapped a pudgy hand to his forehead. “The Italian Disease? Dutch Disease? Wherever-the-soldiers-or-sailors-or-whores-come-from Disease? I suppose they don’t teach such things in the convents, of course. I suspect it’s caused through contact with the infected, especially by coitus, intercourse, sex. The inflicted dribble their noxious fluids into one another, not that those high asses at the university would admit it. So long as you live up to your habit you won’t have much to fear, but tell that to all my deserters. It’s you and I for now, sister, everyone else has abandoned us for the real hospital.” The scorn in his voice was palpable to even a novice in the ways of nuance such as Awa.
“But what does it do?” asked Awa, all of the patients obscured by the hanging sheets.
“Why, it ravages the body and destroys the mind!” said Paracelsus with obvious relish, and suddenly snatching her arm, he dragged her between two curtains. A patient lay in a bed, staring at the ceiling. “Behold the wages of fornication, the cost of rutting like a beast!”
Awa took a step toward the man. At first she took him to be an animated corpse, meaning Paracelsus knew more than he let on, and meaning she was in a great deal of danger. She turned to the doctor, convinced he was performing some strange experiments on the dead and masquerading it as a pox epidemic. Then she heard the patient’s wheezing breath and turned back in horror, disgusted and fascinated that life was capable of persisting in so decayed a vessel.
The man’s face—no, his entire body—was rotting, the stench wafting from him something she had not experienced in quite some time. Paracelsus watched curiously as his new nurse approached the man instead of recoiling in horror. She did not even hold the clove oil–soaked sleeve of her habit to her nose, instead leaning in to get a closer look at the poor, damned mercenary.