The Eyes of a King (17 page)

“Yes, it’s all right. You’re safe at home now.” He clutched at her, but his hand went wide of her shoulder as if he could not see where it was at all.

“Can you see this?” I asked, holding my hand before his face. He made no sign that he could.

“What?” he croaked.

“Leo, will you go and get Father Dunstan?” asked Grandmother. “Hurry. Go at once.”

I shut the front door and ran down the stairs.

F
ather Dunstan was kneeling at the altar. “Leonard!” he said, turning as I clattered through the door. He always called me Leonard, because he didn’t really know me. “Glad to see you well again.”

“Could you come and look at Stirling?” I said. “He is sick.”

“Certainly, yes.” He stood and picked up his cloak from where it lay over the front pew. “Now Stirling? This is sudden, is it not?”

“Yes.” He strode out of the church and I followed him. “He’s been coughing for a couple of days, and then he just fainted suddenly, and he’s been bad ever since.”

We hurried through the square and up toward our street. Father Dunstan shot the occasional question at me as we walked. He led the way, and I jogged behind him.

“Do you think it is serious?” I asked when I had told him all the symptoms.

“I cannot say,” he replied. “But sometimes illnesses appear serious at first, and then turn out to be only mild. Let us hope it is one of those.”

Maria was still there when I got back, and I was glad of her company while I waited in the living room. Father Dunstan was in the next room with Grandmother and Stirling, and I could hear their low voices but could not judge anything by the tone.
I picked up Grandmother’s sewing absently, then stabbed my finger on the needle, swore and dropped it again. Maria did not notice. She was staring out the window.

“Maria?” I said after a while. “What did you say you read in the newspaper? About diseases that start with loss of feeling?” She turned to me. “You were talking about it yesterday.”

“Oh yes,” she said. But she did not go on.

The previous day’s newspaper was lying on the table, and I reached for it now. “Is it in here?” I said.

“I … I think so, yes. But it was not a very serious article. You said yourself that this newspaper …” She trailed off as I searched through the pages.

I went through it once, then again, impatiently. She took it from me and turned to a page near the back, scanning it for a minute without showing it to me. I leaned over her shoulder to read the headline: when I got back, I realized I’d been shot.

“It sounds like comedy,” I said, though I was not laughing. “Hold it still; your hand is shaking.”

She did not speak while I read it. It was a real account of a soldier who had had what he’d thought was a close escape in battle. He rode back to camp alone. When he got there, he saw that his leg was bleeding, and he realized that he had actually been shot. But he could not feel any pain.

I glanced up at Maria, but still she did not speak. “What did he have, this soldier?” I asked quietly. “What illness?”

“Silent fever,” she said.

I stared at the page. The words were drifting in front of my eyes. I tried to read on, but I couldn’t. “It’s a different strain, they think,” said Maria. “Slow-developing silent fever.”

“What does the rest say? Tell me.”

“It says they are just discovering this disease. Some of the symptoms are different, so they always thought it was a different illness. It doesn’t pass on between people like ordinary silent fever. You know how with marsh sickness you catch it from drinking bad water, not contact with people who are infected? They thought it was something like that. But then they found at the border that people were getting sick with this disease because they came into contact with silent fever carriers.”

She ran her finger down the page. I followed where she was reading: “ ‘The illness always begins with temporary periods of loss of senses—in most cases sight or hearing; but in many, taste, smell, and occasionally feeling can be lost too, as in the case previously described.’ ”

I looked at Maria. Neither of us said anything. At that moment Grandmother gave a cry from the next room. We both clattered to our feet in a rush, still staring at each other in blank horror.

At the bedroom door Maria paused for a moment, but I pushed it open and she followed me. Father Dunstan knelt beside the bed, one hand clasped in Stirling’s. Grandmother’s head was pressed against his shoulder, and she was sobbing. The only one who noticed us enter was Stirling. We stood in silence while Father Dunstan attempted to comfort Grandmother and she cried. I tried to catch the priest’s eye, to ask him in a look what was wrong, but I couldn’t, and at last I blurted out, “What is it?” Neither of them answered.

Then Stirling murmured, “Silent fever.” At the words,
Grandmother’s wailing grew louder. We had known it already, but this confirmation from Stirling himself made it seem so final.

I ran to his side, but he did not seem troubled, or even quite conscious of what was happening. Grandmother’s sobs rose. Even Father Dunstan, who saw people sick like this every week, had tears in his eyes. Why was I not crying? All I felt was selfish disappointment that just when I had thought everything was perfect, this had happened.

I turned to look at Maria kneeling beside me, and a tear fell from between her eyelashes and landed on her cheek. Impulsively, I reached up and brushed it away, and I kept my hand there, pressed to the side of her face. Then I was suddenly angry with myself. Stirling was ill—seriously ill—and all I could do was flirt shamelessly. I dropped my hand, my fingernail catching on her cheek, and stood up and left the room. No one even called after me.

I
met Maria down in the yard the next morning. She was there, with Anselm half asleep in her arms, when I stepped out of the bathroom. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Me? Yes.” I was still putting on my shirt. It was early, and I had thought I would meet no one.

“You look tired,” she said. “You look as if you haven’t slept.” The baby murmured, and she jogged him absently. “How is Stirling?” she asked.

“Not so bad. Better than he was yesterday, anyway.”

“Good.” I stepped away from the bathroom door to let her in. “Are you going to go to church this morning?” she asked. I nodded. “I’ll see you there, then. Give my love to Stirling.”

I was almost at the door when she said, “Leo?” I turned. “I have had silent fever,” she said. “I had it, and I got well again quite soon. It will be the same with Stirling, I think.”

“Are you telling the truth?” I said. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Halfway up the stairs I thought of something and ran back down again. “Maria!” I said. She was still at the bathroom door, struggling to quiet Anselm, who was beginning to grizzle. “How did you get well again?”

She hesitated, rocking the baby. “I just … got well.”

“Just like that?” I persisted. “Was there no medicine?”

She began arranging the baby’s little shawl carefully. “I had some medicine. Not much.”

“What was it? Tell me the name.”

She did not answer for a long time. Then she said, “Bloodflower.”

I stood still and stared at her. I knew about the Bloodflower. It was the one certain cure for silent fever. I knew about it, and I knew what it cost. “Where did you get that?” I said eventually.

“People used to find it in the mountains. It used to be more common than it is now. I had silent fever about eight years ago. It has got much rarer.”

“But they still find it,” I said thoughtfully. “You read about it in the newspapers sometimes.”

“People recover without it. That’s what I wanted to tell you. My father’s doctor gave it to me as a precaution, even
though I was recovering already. I think Stirling will recover just the same.”

“But if we had the Bloodflower …,” I began, then stopped. I wandered back up the stairs.

I was at church alone. Grandmother would not leave Stirling. He was the only one of us who had slept the night before, and he seemed better for it, although he complained that his head hurt, and he still had a high fever. This was how Father Dunstan had said the illness would go: he would sink and then rise again. Until one day, I thought, he would sink below the surface.

When I thought that, such fear caught me that I felt as if I was falling. Really falling. The whole world stayed where it had been, but I dropped through it, into darkness, as if it just wasn’t there. I gripped the front of the pew and went on mouthing the words of the prayer. When the bells jangled at the front, they started my heart beating fast, though they always rang at the same point in the service.

I felt the panic rise again in my heart when I heard Stirling’s name listed in the prayer for the sick. Stirling North, among so many others who did not even seem real. Of course, they were real to someone. But to me they were just names—not actual people who were actually sick. And now—

I was breathing fast. I pressed my hand to my mouth and wished that I had sat nearer the back of the church, where I would not have been so exposed.

I caught Maria’s eye as she filed past me behind her mother on her way back from Communion, jogging Anselm up and down to stop him from crying. I gave her as much of a smile as
I could, and she smiled faintly back. She looked tired in the cold light of the stained-glass windows. Maybe she had been worrying too.

After the service I waited behind for Father Dunstan. He emerged from the vestry, knelt for a moment at the altar, and then turned and saw me standing halfway down the church. “Leonard,” he said, approaching. “How is your brother?”

“Better today,” I said.

“I am glad to hear that.”

“I … wanted to talk to you,” I said. “I just wanted to ask, is there anything that can be done? For Stirling. To … save him.”

He looked at me for a moment. “Leonard, you should not give up hope like this.” I stared at the floor. “Many people do recover from silent fever—even this strain, which seems to be more serious. Stirling has always been perfectly healthy.” I nodded. “If he is improved today, that is a good sign.”

“Yes. But they don’t recover very often, do they?” I heard my voice rising in spite of my efforts to control it.

“They do recover. If they have proper care and plenty of rest.”

“Is there anything that I can do?”

“The only thing really to be done is to let it run its course. I won’t lie to you, Leonard. We know very little about this illness. The slow-developing strain even less than the common one.”

“Is there no treatment? What about that herb—the Bloodflower?” When he did not answer, I went on. “Would that cure even slow-developing silent fever?”

He hesitated for a moment. “It has been known to. Yes, it would cure any strain of silent fever. But I haven’t heard of
anyone who has found the Bloodflower for a long time. It can’t be cultivated.”

“Doesn’t it grow in mountains, or hills?” I said. “What about the eastern hills? People find it there.”

“It is important to remember, Leonard, that Stirling has a very good chance of getting well without it. Sometimes people even develop what seems to be silent fever and then recover again after a few days. The symptoms are so varied—”

“But if we had the Bloodflower, then he would be safe no matter what. If we had it—”

“Leonard.” He said it with an air of finality so that I had to stop and listen. “The illness of a loved one makes us feel helpless. We want to do something about it, so that everything is not out of our control. But if you can just—”

“I had better go,” I interrupted. “Sorry, Father, I … said I would be back—well, anyway—” I tried to smile at him. “Thank you for your help. Really.” Then I turned and walked out of the church.

The square was deserted. I started along the side of it, breaking into a run, down the center of the main road, toward the edge of the city.