The Physicians of Vilnoc by Lois McMaster Bujold

Author:Lois McMaster Bujold [Bujold, Lois McMaster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 53341301
Publisher: Spectrum Literary Agency
Published: 2020-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was almost sunset by the time Pen rode the army plodder he’d been lent through Vilnoc’s western gate. The main chapterhouse and hospice of the Mother’s Order lay at the opposite end of town, and he looked around as he threaded his way through the winding streets. Nothing seemed amiss, residents drawing in to their homes for the night in the usual rhythm. He passed the corner of his own street, and shuddered with longing to be one of those contented residents. No.

The main marketplace was almost deserted, the last few vendors giving up and taking in their wares, apart from a few horses and mules tethered for the night at the far end devoted to livestock sales, heads down munching desultorily at a wispy drift of hay. One nickered in curiosity at Pen’s horse, who returned the greeting. Competing for their fodder, their unsuccessful owner was setting up his bedroll on a hay pile, ready to try again in the morning. A couple of other men camped to guard their more bulky goods, such as the large stack of ceramic storage jars.

Around a few more corners and small squares, up a slope, and the Mother’s Order hove into Pen’s view. The Vilnoc chapterhouse was an old merchant’s mansion bequeathed in someone’s will a generation ago, and its hospice the former warehouse, gradually refitted to its new purpose. Penric had not been inside before, his own household having no need to call on its services.

At the gate, he found the porter just raising the oil lantern that would burn all night over the open doorway. He recognized and respectfully saluted Pen’s vestments—new-laundered, but more frayed with every day of this crisis, like their wearer—took charge of Pen’s horse, and directed him on to Master Tolga’s lair.

He found the Mother’s physician in a writing cabinet she shared with several others of her Order, most of them evidently gone home for the night or to dinner—Pen’s dinner had been a handful of bread and meat jerky eaten while riding in. She rose at once when he knocked on the door jamb.

“Ah! Learned! You did come!”

“I said I would.”

She shrugged. “Things happen.”

“Aye. Have any more things happened here?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Another feverish girl—I’ll take you to see her, too, if you would be so kind.”

“As long as I’m here.”

She nodded and led him out onto her second-floor gallery, down, and through an archway to the former warehouse turned holy hospice. It was laid out as another colonnaded rectangle around a central court, its own well dug new and deep; just the one level, as the old merchants would not have wanted to hoist their goods up and down stairs. The big gate at the end that could admit wagons was now closed and barred. The chapterhouse’s front door would remain open at all times, mark of the Order’s vow to turn no one away. This resulted, naturally, in the hospice filling up with the indigent sick and injured, such that anyone who could afford it preferred to engage a physician privately to visit them at home.

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