"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 2 - Fever Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

? Two

January drew the ragged sheet up over the face of the man on the floor before him and sat back on his
heels. Toward the end the man had begged for something, January didn't know what, in a language he
could not understand. Dr. Ker, the head of Charity Hospital, guessed he was a Russian, a sailor who'd
jumped ship hoping for a chance of making a better life for himself ashore.
Poor fool.
"You stupid dago, I'm doing this for your own good!" January turned his head at the sound. Emil
Barnard, a gangly young man who had styled himself "a practitioner of the healing arts" when he'd
volunteered his services to Dr. Ker, backed nervously from the cot of a man who'd been brought in that
afternoon. The patient's face was flushed the horrible orange of the fever, and black vomit puddled the
floor beside the rude wooden bed. The sick man was cursing weakly in Italian, swearing that no priest
should come near him, no murdering government spy.
"Own good, you understand?" yelled Barnard, more loudly. "You understand?"
It was quite clear, of course, that the Italian didn't understand. Probably even if he knew French when he
was in his right mind, the fever's delirium had sponged such knowledge from his screaming brain. All he
knew-he was shouting this over and over again now-was that he was in hell. In hell with all the murdering
priests.
January closed his eyes. He knew he should get up and go over to them-his Italian was good enough to
make himself understood-but exhaustion held him like a chain. Maybe they were in hell.
It was hot enough, God knew. In the long upstairs ward, the clotted black heat was imbued with the
stenches of human waste and fever-vomit and the peculiar, horrible stink that reeks from the sweat of
those in mortal fear. The long windows that gave onto the gallery were shut tight and heavily curtained in
the hopes of excluding the pestilence that rode the air of night, and January's face ran with sweat as if
he'd put his head in a rain barrel. Like hell's, the dark was smudged with fire. The lamps were too few
and burned the cheapest oil obtainable; smoke hung beneath the high ceiling and the smell of it permeated
clothing, hair, flesh. Like hell, even in this dead hour of the night, the room murmured with a Babel of
voices: German, Swedish, English...
Like hell, it was a place without hope.
"He thinks you're a priest." January got to his feet, slowly, like an old man. "He has no use for priests."
"An Italian?" Emil Barnard straightened indignantly. He spoke the singsong French of the Midi, with its
trilled vowels and rolled r's. "Absurd. They're all priest ridden, Romish heathens. You are mistaken." Yet
Barnard did look a little like a priest, in his long, old-fashioned black tailed coat and his shirt of
biscuit-colored calico that looked white in the lamp glare and smoke.
"He thinks that's the viaticum-the Host-you have . . . sir." In his days in Paris, January had called no man
"sir" unless he thought they deserved it: the physicians at the Hotel Dieu, the wealthy men who had hired
him to play, the Director of the Opera. It was hard to return to his childhood, to call even a
street-sweeper "sir" if that street-sweeper happened to have been born white, to look down or aside so
as not to meet their eyes. "What is it?"
"Onion." Barnard had a very long narrow face that was carefully shaved, light brown hair a trifle too curly
for Nature's unaided hand. "Placed near or under the bed of a sufferer from the yellow fever, it is a
sovereign remedy against the miasmatic influence of fever-air." He stepped aside a pace as a woman
came to mop up the Italian's vomit from the floor by the cot; he didn't even look down at her as he
continued his lecture. "The onion is a nearperfect remedy for all imbalances of the bodily humors. Its
wonderful absorptive powers will draw forth the febrile vapors from the lungs and gradually purify the
lymphatic and bilious systems. It was a common remedy among the great Indian nations that anciently
inhabited these countries, and was written of in papyri of Egypt in the reigns of the Pharaohs, long before
the birth of Christ."
"Get him away from me!" screamed the Italian. "Clerical scoundrel! Starver of babies! Thief of a poor
man's belongings! You stole the bread out of the mouths of my children and left them to die!"