Lin
The woman in the bed has the hollow, drawn look of impending death.
knows it well. When you are a physician, death walks at your side, solicitous and inquiring. You learn to recognize the signs of his arrival long before the patient does: the first spatter of blood into a white handkerchief, the persistent cough that lasts into summer, the faint yellowing of the eyes.
takes Domna Delores’s pulse—light and rapid—and listens to her chest with the auscultor, but she already knows. Knows from the red spots on the woman’s cheeks, from the tightness of the skin on her bones, the shadows beneath her eyes. Consumption, in its latest stage. She will die of it soon.
From her satchel, draws the only medicine that will help now: morphea grains for the pain. As she begins to explain how to dissolve the grains in water, Domna Delores lays a hand on hers. The sick woman’s fingers are fragile as hollow reeds.
“Tell me, Doctor. Are you Ashkar?” she asks.
hesitates for a moment, taken aback. Surely her clothes—neat, plain, gray—make it obvious? And surely the woman knows what kind of physician has been recommended to her?
“I am,” says. She does not elaborate. Every Ashkar knew this hesitation, the space between declaring one’s identity and the reaction to it. Would it be anger, rejection, curiosity?
Domna Delores’s eyes fill with tears. “So was I, once.”
A long silence. looks a second time at the dying woman’s small, sunny flat. It is clean but plain and tiny: There is a single small table, and only one chair. No signs of books, music, color. To , the room seems to sing of loneliness, an unadorned, unaccompanied life. “You chose to leave the Sault?”
“No. I was exiled.”
draws in a sharp breath. “Oh. I am so sorry.”
She can think of nothing else to say, but it does not matter. A feverish energy seems to take hold of Domna Delores; words spill out of her, a tale of love and punishment. An Ashkar girl, a Castellani boy. She had fallen in love, and when it was discovered, she had been exiled by the Maharam—not Davit Benezar, the current leader of the Sault, but the one who had come before him. A man had not known.
Unusually, the boy had stood by her, and Delores had married her sweetheart. He was a shipbuilder, and they had always lived in sight of the walls of the Sault. Every time she saw the gates and the guards, Delores had felt the knives of loss turn in her chest. Her sister, her mother and father, her friends. All of them still alive and in the same city in which she lived, but none willing to breach the boundaries of the Law to communicate with her. She had even tried approaching her sister once in the marketplace, but the other woman had fled from her as if she were poison.
Later, when her husband died in an accident at the Arsenale, Delores had been left utterly alone. She had never made friends in Castellane. Others had kept their distance, made uncomfortable by her Ashkar background. She had found work at a stall in the market with her skill as a needlewoman, sewing on buttons for widowers, embroidering family crests into the linens of merchant families made good.
Life had passed her by quietly: a lonely, solitary thing. On windy nights, she would take herself to a tea shop close to the Sault and listen for the music that carried over the walls, the cantillations of the holy night as the Maharam called out questions and the men and women of the Sault responded: What is life? It is a narrow bridge. Why will the Goddess return? To heal the world.
“If you give me their names, perhaps I could tell you of your family,” says gently. “It is most likely that I know them, or my grandfather does.”
But Delores—a Castellani name that means “sorrow,” knows; she cannot help but wonder what name her patient had been born with—only shakes her head, gripping ’s hand tight. “No,” she says. “No. It is too late for all that. Tell me of the Sault. Do the almond trees still flower in the Kathot?”
So sets aside her morphea grains for a different treatment, one that will sustain her patient now more than tea or bread. Yes, she says, the almond trees still flower in the main square of the walled town-within-a-city. The Shulamat glitters gold under the sun, and the physick garden grows green and strong, and children dare one another to climb the walls as they always have, and come to afterward with skinned knees and sheepish looks. And on holy days, of course, there is honey bread and spiced wine, and music at night when the waggons of the traders return from the Gold Roads...
Delores closes her eyes, a slight smile on her thin face, and lets her voice trail off into silence. The next time she comes, she resolves, she will bring her patient a honey cake, or an egg bread studded with raisins. One cannot erase the bitterness of exile with the sweetness of sugar, she knows, but it is better than nothing at all.