Quina
XXXIII
The fourth day, they came down out of the last of the rock onto an open plain — La Bureba, the ventero had called it, a broad dry sweep of stubble and low rise watered somewhere by a river, the whole of it lying under that same enormous white sky that had followed them since the Ebro and would, he now believed, follow them to the sea if they ever reached it.
Open country should have been a mercy after the gorge.
It was not. It was only more of it — more distance, more sun, more road unrolling towards a horizon that did not come nearer for all their walking.
Elizabeth rode it with her eyes half shut and her weight tottering.
He rode close enough to keep one hand free and ready, and near noon, when she slumped and did not right herself, he simply took her weight against him and rode on with her held there.
Her head fell back against his shoulder, and the fact that she did not protest being held by him told him more than her breathing did.
“Elizabeth, stay awake a while. Talk to me. Insult me. You have always found it easy enough.”
She said nothing for several seconds. Then, with only the ghost of her usual self, she mumbled, “You are... a ruinous husband. You have spent... a fortune... on beds I do not sleep in.”
“I have.” His throat was not behaving. “Every one. I shall buy you another tonight, in Briviesca, and you shall fail to sleep in that as well, and I shall consider it money well lost.”
She might have smiled. He could not see her face from where her head lay.
Her hand had found his forearm and closed on it, and he rode the rest of that long open afternoon with her hand on his arm.
What he had feared and dismissed last night was now a reality, because fever was coming up through his coat sleeve like a second sun.
This was not altitude sickness. It may have begun with that, or been complicated by that, but it was worse now, with something gnawing and devouring her with every hour. And the worst of it was that he was starting to fear that he might not be far behind her.
They came into Briviesca in the last of the light — a real town, a market town, a mesón with a bed in a room with a door.
He carried her up to it, because she could no longer be trusted on her own feet, and he laid her down.
Her brow was worse now, much worse, a dry burning that no amount of denial would make into fatigue any longer.
What was he to do? He went down to the man who kept the inn and asked if there was a doctor, but he was at enough pains to make himself understood.
“Senora, enfermo,” he kept repeating, and he was sure he was bungling the words badly, but no one laughed at him.
The innkeeper looked sympathetic but only raised his hands and summoned his wife.
The woman did agree to follow Darcy to the room, but when she looked at Elizabeth, she only shook her head. She said a few dozen words, some of which made Elizabeth wince, and one that made her smile. But the rest made her face turn bleak and empty.
“What did she tell you?” Darcy asked when the woman had left.
Elizabeth closed her eyes and pulled the blanket higher. “Water,” she mumbled. “She is bringing water.”
“Is she sending a doctor? What was that thing she kept saying?”
Her features had already softened into the want of sleep, and her throat worked as if she were trying to swallow. “No doctor. Burgos for doctor. Quina… she kept saying…” She trailed off. Her mouth was still forming words, but her throat had quit putting out sound.
Quina? Whatever the devil that was. Probably some term for prayer, because just now, he could not think of anyone who needed it more.
Burgos rose out of the plain in the late afternoon — a grey sprawl under a great pale sky, the cathedral's spires pricking up above the roofs, a river somewhere throwing back the light. Now it was in front of him, and he could hardly see it, because the road had begun, gently and horribly, to swim.
He had been suspecting since… well, the truth was that he had suspected since the second morning out of Vitoria that there was something terribly amiss with them both, when the headache could no longer be blamed on a night of bad wine.
The altitude served as an excuse in the beginning.
Everything he had ever read about it matched — faintness, a general malaise, occasional queasiness…
but altitude sickness was supposed to make a man pale, not flushed.
The ache had come up out of his bones and into his blood.
The band above his eyes had drawn tight and then tighter until the light itself was a kind of pain, and his teeth were chattering in broad daylight in late July.
Twice on the open road, he had come back to himself with no memory of the mile behind.
He had not trusted Elizabeth on her own mule — she could hardly sit upright, so he had put her on in front of himself, and now he clung to her burning form as if he would turn to a block of ice without her.
And he could hardly keep himself in the saddle.
He rode into the outskirts of the city, holding her upright with one arm, her head fallen against his shoulder, her breath quick and shallow, and he began to call out to everyone he passed.
“Médico,” he said to a man with a barrow. “Médico — please — où est — un médico —”
The man looked at the two of them, shook his head in suspicion at the Spanish Darcy was conflating with the French, and went back to his work.
“Please!” Darcy said to a woman in a doorway, to two men outside a wine shop, to a boy who ran away. “A doctor. Where is there a doctor? ?Médico?”
No one stopped for them. They were two strangers riding into town looking half dead, one of them raving for a doctor in no respectable tongue anyone would trust. In a country where every family had lost someone to war or fever, no one was looking to invite trouble into their homes.
He was losing her. He could feel it in the change of her weight. The way she had leaned into him with intent and the seeking of comfort earlier in the day, and now, she was simply limp. His voice split, cracked as it had not done since he was an adolescent.
“?Quina!” he shouted. He had no idea what it meant. It was probably not a prayer, but it was the best thing he had, and he could only hope someone might know it for the desperate plea it was. “?Quina! For God's sake — ?quina! Somebody — ?quina!”
A woman stopped. An old man lifted his stick and pointed — not at a house but along a way, up toward the cathedral. “El padre. Vaya al padre. Padre Ignacio.”
The church had taken its own share of the war — a scar of new stone in an old wall, a saint in a niche with his face gone.
There was a low house, and out of it came a man in a cassock, holding a basket and bending over to examine the flowers outside his door.
Darcy kicked the mule and called out to him. “Padre Ignacio?”
The man turned, and Darcy clutched Elizabeth tighter as he urged the mule on. The padre had the tired, compassion-worn face of his profession, but the instant he saw the fevered, impassive woman in Darcy’s arms, he dropped his basket and rushed forward.
“?Está viva?” he called as he came near.
Darcy started shifting her weight, and Elizabeth moaned softly against his collar. “She is alive,” Darcy replied as the padre came close. “Can you help her?”
The padre was reaching up, lifting her head now, touching her brow.
He gave instructions, but Darcy did not need words to understand.
He let the padre take Elizabeth’s weight for a minute while he pushed back and dismounted.
The earth wobbled. The sky shook back and forth with the jarring of his bones, and even the mule seemed to lean.
Darcy kept his hand on the saddle for an instant while the world cleared, and then he took Elizabeth down into his arms.
“Padre,” Darcy said, “Can you…”
A wave of blackness swam over his eyes, and he staggered. The padre moved quickly, catching Elizabeth. “Tú también estás enfermo,” he declared.
“Enfermo…” Darcy repeated. “Yes, yes, she is…” No, this would hardly do. He could not fumble his way through with Spanish, and the padre would have already attempted English if he had any. But there remained another language they might have in common.
“Pater,” he pleaded in Latin. “Adiuva nos. Uxor mea — aegrotat — febris —” My wife. She is sick. Fever.
The dusty tongue came out of his mouth stiff, and probably sounding like a desperate schoolboy. The priest's head came up at it, and his tired eyes changed into comprehension.
“Quamdiu?” How long?
“Dies quattuor. Quinque.” Four days. Five. He had lost the count. “Peior fit. Hora in horam.” Worse. Hour by hour.
The priest had lowered Elizabeth to the ground and was already on his knees beside her in the dust of the road, a hand to her face, her throat, thumbing back an eyelid. Then he looked up at Darcy.
“Et tu,” he said. “Tu quoque aegrotas.” You are sick as well.
“Non refert. Illa refert. Solum illa.” It does not matter. She matters. Only she.
He went down to his knees too, not from devotion but because his legs simply curled beneath him.
He caught himself on one hand in the dirt, dragging at the belt beneath his coat, at the mules' reins, at everything he had left in the world and laying it out before the priest like an offering on a poor altar.
“Habeo — I have — the mules, take them, take all of them — silver, what silver is left —” His Latin faltered, the English rushing into the gaps — “and this —”
He got the cross free from the money belt, and he held it up into the last of the light where the stones caught fire. The priest’s eyes rounded to see such a prize in the hand of a Protestant.
“Benedictus Deus,” he breathed, and his hands reached reverently to touch the gems. “Tuum est?”
“Yes, mine,” Darcy panted. “Habere potes. Omnia. Omnia tibi. Tantum serva eam. Serva uxorem meam.” Everything is yours. Only save her. Save my wife.
The priest smiled wistfully, then pushed the cross back into Darcy’s keeping. ”Habeo quinam. Sed parum. Valde parum.” Quinam… whatever quinam was. But he said he only had a little.
“Quinam?” Darcy asked. “Quid est?”
The padre did not answer the question Darcy was asking, but he held up his hand, thumb and finger nearly closed, to show how little of it he had. “Exercitus omnes cepit. Non est amplius. Non hic.”
That, he understood. The army took it all, there is no more. Not here.
“Sufficit ei?”
The priest looked at Elizabeth, at the burning cheeks, the delirious murmuring and her parched lips. “Fortasse. Ei — fortasse. Si Deus vult.”
Enough — perhaps. If God wills.
Then he looked back at Darcy. “Non satis est alteri.” But not enough for another person.
Darcy nodded and laid the cross over Elizabeth’s chest. “Quia eam.”
Padre Ignacio carried Elizabeth himself, because Darcy had tried, and hardly got more than four steps before his toes dragged and his knees forgot how to straighten. The priest took her to a low room and laid her on a bed. He stood back and made the sign of the cross over himself.
That made Darcy’s heart seize. Not last rites… she could not be that far gone!
“Unde venistis?” the padre asked.
Darcy blinked. Why did he want to know where they had come from? Why did it even matter? “A Tudela. Per vallem — the valley — Calahorra, Estella… a month, more —”
The priest closed his eyes briefly. “Malus locus. Mala aqua, malus aer hoc anno.” A bad place. Bad water, bad air this year.
He pointed at Darcy. “Quod illa habet, tu habebis.” What she has, you will have. “Et pro te —” He spread his empty hand, the little gap of thumb and finger now showing nothing at all between them.
“Sí,” he breathed. “I know.”
Ignacio nodded and instructed Darcy to remove Elizabeth’s gown, her shoes, and her stockings, and to take the pins from her hair.
Make her comfortable, easy to care for seemed to be the intent.
Then he went away, and Darcy bent over his wife to undress her.
Off came the shoes, the stained gown, the petticoat and stockings and stays.
He left her in just her chemise, thin and nearly transparent by now.
He was seeing double by the time he was done, and he collapsed to his hip on the bed beside her, gasping and weaving where he sat.
Elizabeth’s eyes fluttered now and again.
She was aware, she knew what he had done.
She was just too listless to care. Her hand fumbled and found his, and that was all the strength she had.
He squeezed it, kissed her forehead, and held there, his lips against her brow.
Ignacio came back a few moments later, stirring something in a cup. He lifted it and passed it to Darcy, gesturing towards Elizabeth.
“There. Sit up, love.” He put an arm behind her and lifted her shoulders. “Drink, Elizabeth. Drink it all.”
She obeyed, then sputtered hard at her first taste. “Bitter,” she gagged.
“I know. I know, just drink it.”
She swallowed more, then bent away from him, already heaving on it.
“No, no! You must keep it down. Breathe, Elizabeth! Do not… just keep it in you.”
Her body quivered with the effort of it, and for some seconds, it seemed indeed as if she would roll over and retch on the floor.
At length, she lay limp and shivering, half the medicine swallowed.
He held her head back against his shoulder and soothed the hair off her forehead with one hand as he held the cup with the other.
Her closed eyes squeezed once, then she opened them and nodded. He held the cup for her until the last of it was drained, then eased her back to the bed. Ignacio produced a blanket and gestured for Darcy to cover her, and he did.
That was the last thing he could recall doing before the fever rose up, unopposed at last, and took him down into the dark after her.