The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [75]
“What?”
“The patients?” Paracelsus arched an eyebrow.
“Oh, yes, of course,” Awa said after catching Manuel’s smile. “Call if you need me.”
There were several rain barrels set just outside the main door, and Awa filled her jug with the brownish water many times throughout the day as she tended to the patients. Most were not as bad as the first man she had seen, and there were also a few women down on the left side, closest to the building’s only fireplace. Once she had watered them all she brought them gruel from the large cauldron that had been warming since breakfast, then collected the bowls and washed them in a rain barrel. After this she emptied their chamber pots, and then cleaned the beds and bodies of those too wasted away to reach the pot at all. Manuel was dozing in bed, Paracelsus dozed in his chair, and on Awa worked into the night.
Taking a break from her already intuitive routine, Awa slid past Paracelsus and examined Manuel’s hand. The tincture Paracelsus had smeared on the wound stunk like old mushrooms, and Awa could tell at a glance it would fester before a week was out. With a sigh she wrapped it back up and returned to the first patient she had met, the desperate, decaying man. He did not wake as she entered, and drawing the sheet along its string behind her to cordon them off, she killed him with her touch.
“Doctor,” Awa said, and when he did not rise, “Paracelsus!”
“Yes!” The physician started awake. “What?”
“One of them died. The man you showed me?”
“The Swiss? Well, I’m Swiss, Manuel’s Swiss, but the Swiss? The one I showed you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, drag him outside, then.” Paracelsus stood and stumbled toward his storeroom.
“And what then?”
“Eh?”
“After I take his body outside, what then?” said Awa.
“Leave him in the street,” Paracelsus said slowly, gesturing with his arms as though she were deaf, “and come back inside. Someone takes them to the potter’s for us; we can’t well be expected to do everything.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“Of course, of course,” said Paracelsus, retiring into his storeroom.
Awa returned to the man she had murdered, and, cutting his left hand off at the wrist with her ibex dagger, she dragged him out onto the damp street. After she had cleaned up the smear his stump had left on the floor she set to cleaning the hand and digging out the needed portion, going back and forth between the dead flesh she was working with and Manuel’s injury to make sure she did not miss anything. She went wide in case there were internal injuries she could not see, and then dipped into the storeroom for cooking gear rather than tossing it all into the gruel cauldron.
Paracelsus slept on the floor with his arms and left leg wrapped around a sword almost as tall as he was, and stepping over him, she retrieved a small pot as well as a mortar and pestle. After rinsing out the powdery residue in the latter and scraping out the black crust in the former, Awa ground up the pieces of hand she had taken, bones and all. Making a pudding from them, she set the pot over the low fire in the rear of the clinic. She was almost done when a shadow fell over her, a shadow much taller than Paracelsus or Manuel, and Awa went still, wondering if the disposal of the dead in Milan was not as casual as the doctor had implied.
“Imma have some of that puddin,” a gruff voice said in clumsy Italian, and turning to answer her guest Awa saw the largest woman she had ever seen hulking over her like some animate larch or ash.
“This is for another patient, madam,” said Awa. “But if you return to your cot I’ll make you some as well.”
“Harrumph.” The woman squatted down, her clothes less soiled but just as pungent as most of the patients’. She had yet to acquire the stink of impending death, however, and only the fragrances of old sweat, blood, and halitosis wafted from her. Even hunched over she was a giantess, with hair the color of dead grass pulled back in a ponytail as thick as its namesake. She only had a few