Marion Zimmer Bradley by The Fall of Atlantis

Author:The Fall of Atlantis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-08-15T19:21:49+00:00

Chapter Two

THE FEVER

I

That summer, fever raged in the city called the Circling Snake. Within the Temple precincts, where the Healers enforced rigid sanitary laws, it did not strike; but in the city itself it worked havoc, for a certain element of the population was too lazy or too stupid to follow the dictates of the priests.

Riveda and his Healers swept through the city like an invading army, without respect for plague or persons. They burned the stinking garbage heaps and the festering, squalid tenements; burned the foetid slave-huts of cruel or stupid owners who allowed men to live in worse filth than beasts. Invading every home, they fumigated, cleaned, nursed, isolated, condemned, buried, or burned, daring even to enter homes where the victims were already rotten with the stink of death. They cremated the corpses--sometimes by force, where caste enjoined burial. Wells suspected of pollution were tested and often sealed, regardless of bribes, threats. and sometimes outright defiance. In short, they made themselves an obnoxious nuisance to the rich and powerful whose neglect or viciousness had permitted the plague to spread in the first place.

Riveda himself worked to exhaustion, nursing cases whom no one else could be persuaded to approach, out-bullying fat city potentates who questioned the value of his destructive mercy, sleeping in odd moments in houses already touched by death. He seemed to walk guarded by a series of miracles.

Deoris, who had served her novitiate in the Healers sponsored by her kinsman Cadamiri, met Riveda one evening as she stepped out for a moment from a house where she, with another Priestess, had been caring for the sick of two families. The woman of the house was out of danger, but four children had died, three more lay gravely ill, and another was sickening.

Seeing her, Riveda crossed the street to give her a greeting. His face was lined and very tired, but he looked almost happy, and she asked why.

"Because I believe the worst is over. There are no new cases in the North Quarter today, and even here--if the rains hold off three days more, we have won." The Adept looked down at Deoris; effort had put years into her face, and her beauty was dimmed by tiredness. Riveda's heart softened, and he said with a gentle smile, "I think you must be sent back to the Temple, my child; you are killing yourself."

She shook her head, fighting temptation. It would be heavenly comfort to be out of this! But she only said, stubbornly, "I'll stay while I'm needed."

Riveda caught her hands and held them. "I'd take you myself, child, but I'd not be allowed inside the gates, for I go where contagion is worst. I can't return until the epidemic is over, but you . . . " Suddenly, he caught her against him in a hard, rough embrace. "Deoris, you must go! I won't have you ill, I won't take the chance of losing you too!"

Startled and confused, Deoris was stiff in his arms; then she loosened and clung to him and felt the tickly stubble of his cheek against her face.

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