Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (3 page)

Al-Ashmar laughed. “Then stop smelling it.”

“It smells so
weird
.”

“Well, weird or not, it’s the Empress’s, so leave it alone.” Al-Ashmar added the minced wormwood root and mixed it thoroughly with the ground husks. That done, he flipped his hourglass over, and the sand began spilling into the empty chamber.

Mia leaned over the table and retrieved a thin piece of coal and the papyrus scrap she’d been writing on. “How long after the bark?”

“Four hours, covered. It will boil down, nearly to a paste.”

She wrote chicken prints on the scroll. Al-Ashmar tried to hide his smile, for if she caught him, she always got upset. She didn’t know how to write more than a few letters, but still she created her own recipes as Al-Ashmar made things she hadn’t learned about yet.

“Then what?”

“I told you, the clove juice, then the elixir, then they steep.”

“Oh,” she said while writing more, “I forgot.” She sat up then and fixed him with a child’s most-serious expression. “Doesn’t she have people to heal cats in the palace?”

Al-Ashmar found himself hiding another smile. He often told his seven children about his day over their evening meal, but Mia was the one who listened most often. “She does, Mia, but they rarely see such things.”

“Snakeworm?”

“Yes.”

“From where you and Memma came from.”

“Yes.”

“Then how did it get here?”

Al-Ashmar shrugged. He still hadn’t been able to piece together a plausible story. “I don’t know.”

“Tell me about the woman again. She sounded pretty.”

“I told you, pet, she wasn’t pretty. She was mean.”

Mia shrugged and tugged the Empress’s book closer. “She sounded pretty to
me
.” She flipped through the pages, pretending to read each one. “What’s this?”

“A gift, from the Empress,” Al-Ashmar said.

“What does it teach?”

Al-Ashmar smiled. It was a retelling of several fables from his homeland—four of them, all simple tales of the spirits of the southern lands and how they helped or harmed wayward travelers.

“Nothing,” he finally said. “Now off to bed.”

Mia ignored him, as she often did on his first warning. “What’s this?”

Al-Ashmar snatched the book away and stared at the scribbles Mia had been looking at. He hadn’t noticed it earlier. He’d had too much to do, and since it had seemed so innocuous, he’d left it until he had more time to sift through its pages. On the last page were the words
save her
written in an appalling, jittery hand. The letters were oversized as well, as if writing any smaller either was impossible or would have rendered the final text unreadable.

The Empress, surely. But why? Save who?

And from what?

Mia dropped from her stool and fought next to him for a view. “Enough, Mia. To bed.”

After tucking the children in for the night, Al-Ashmar stayed up, nursing the tonic and thinking.
Save her
. Save Bela? But that made no sense. He had already been summoned, had already been directed to heal the Empress’s cat. Why write a note for that?

Then again, there was no logical reason that the cat would have the worm. Coincidence was too unlikely. So it had to have been intentional. But who would dare infect the Empress’s cat? Did the Empress fear that the next attempt would be bolder? Was something afoot even now?

Bela, after all, was the Empress’s ninth cat—her last—and when she died, so would the Empress, and her closest servants with her. That might explain Djazir’s tense mood, might even explain Rabiah’s sullenness. But it wouldn’t explain the smile on the Empress’s lips. For whatever reason, it seemed most logical that the Empress had arranged this.

Al-Ashmar paged through the tale in which the jagged words had been written. It was a tale of a child that had wandered too far and was destined to die alone in the mountains. But then a legendary shepherd found her and brought her to live with him—him and his eighty-nine children, others who’d been found wandering in the same manner.

Hours later, Al-Ashmar added the clove juice and a honey-ginger elixir to the tonic and left it to steep. After his mind struggled through a thousand dead-end possibilities, Father Sleep finally found him.

The following
day, Al-Ashmar was led to the Empress’s garden. Strands of wispy clouds marked the blue sky as a pleasant breeze rattled the palm leaves. Bela sat at the foot of the Empress’s throne, which had been moved from inside the cold and empty room. The cat lapped at the cream laced with the tonic.

Odd, Al-Ashmar thought. Cats usually detested the remedy no matter how carefully it was hidden. Al-Ashmar’s other patients, however, were not so pliant. Nearby, Rabiah took a deep breath and downed the last of her phial. The eunuchs, thank goodness, had swallowed theirs at a word from Rabiah.

“Bela will need two more doses today,” Al-Ashmar said, “and three more tomorrow.”

Djazir stared at his half-empty phial, a look of complete disgust on his face.

“Please,” Al-Ashmar said to Djazir, “I know it is distasteful, but you need to drink the entire phial.”

“I will drink it, physic, but we will not subject the Empress to such a thing.”

Al-Ashmar hid his eyes from Djazir. “Of course you know best, but if the Empress has the worm, the effects will only worsen.”

The Empress spoke to Rabiah. Al-Ashmar, listening more closely than the day before, could still understand not a single word.

“Of course, Exalted,” Rabiah said, and she retrieved the phial meant for the Empress.

Djazir gritted his jaw as Rabiah tilted the phial into the Empress’s mouth. The Empress’s eyes watered, and she coughed, causing some of it to spill onto Rabiah’s hands.

“Be careful of her eyes,” Al-Ashmar said, stepping forward. “The tonic will sting horribly for quite some time—”

But Rabiah waved him away. At least she took more care how she supported the Empress’s head as she dispensed the liquid. The Empress’s coughing slowed the process to a crawl, but eventually the ordeal was over.

Djazir took Al-Ashmar by the elbow, ready to lead him from the garden and out of the palace.

“I wonder if we might speak,” Al-Ashmar said. “Alone, so as not to disturb the Empress.”

Djazir seemed doubtful, but he released Al-Ashmar’s elbow. “What about?”

“A few questions only, in order to narrow down the source of the worms. If we cannot find it, the infection may simply recur.”

Djazir brought him up a set of stairs to a railed patio on the roof of the palace. Around them the entire city sprawled over the land for miles. The river glistened as it crawled like the snakeworm through the flesh of the city until reaching the glittering sea several miles away.

Al-Ashmar spoke, asking questions about Bela’s activities, the Empress’s, even Rabiah’s, but this was all a ruse. He’d wanted to get Djazir to agree to questioning simply so he could ask the same of Rabiah. He had to get her alone, for only in her did he have a chance of unwrapping this riddle.

Djazir agreed to send Rabiah up to speak to him as well, and several minutes later, she came and stood a safe distance away from him, staring out over the city. It took him a moment, but Al-Ashmar realized that Rabiah was staring at the fourteen spires standing at attention along the shore. Thirteen Empresses lay buried beneath thirteen obelisks, and the fourteenth stood empty, waiting. Al-Ashmar thought at first she was simply ignoring him, but there was so much anxiety on her face as she stared at the obelisk.

“She won’t die from the worm, my lady. We’ve caught it in time.”

Rabiah turned to him and nodded, her face blank now. “I know, physic.”

Then realization struck. Rabiah wasn’t afraid because of the worm, never had been. She was afraid for something else, something much more serious. Like riddles within riddles, the answer to this one simple curiosity led to a host of answers he’d struggled with late into the night.

He hesitated to voice his thoughts—they were thoughts that could get one killed—but he had no true choice. He could no more bury this question than he could have denied any of his children a home when they’d needed it.

“How much longer?”

A muscle twitched along Rabiah’s neck. She turned away from him and stared out over the sharp, rolling landscape. For a long, long time the only sound he heard was the call of a lone gull and the pounding of stone hammers in the distance.

“Months, perhaps,” she said, “but I fear it will be less.”

“You know what she’s asking of me, don’t you?”

“Yes, physic, but you will do nothing of the sort. I will die
with
her. I will help her on the other shore as I have helped her here.”

This was ludicrous, Al-Ashmar thought. He jeopardized his entire family with this one conversation. He should leave. He should instruct Djazir in the creation of the tonic, heal Bela, and be done with this foul mess.

But as he stared at Rabiah, he realized how lost she was. She would die the day after the Empress did, would be buried in the Empress’s tomb, which waited beneath the newest obelisk along the shores of the Dengkut.

The ways of the Empresses had always seemed strange when he’d been growing up in the southlands, and little had changed since coming to the capital to find his fortune. In fact, the opposite had happened. Each year found him more and more confused.

But that was him. His opinion mattered little. What mattered was why the
Empress
would go against tradition and ask him to save Rabiah from her fate.

The answer, Al-Ashmar realized, could be found by looking no further than his adopted children. Rabiah had cared for the Empress, most likely day and night, ever since her attacks had left her stricken. Rabiah would have become part daughter, part mother. And when the Empress died, Rabiah’s bright young life would be forfeit. How could the Empress not try to protect her?

Al-Ashmar regarded Rabiah with new eyes. She had cared for the Empress in life, and she was willing to do so in death, no matter what it might mean for her personally.

“You are noble,” Al-Ashmar said.

Rabiah turned to him, a confused look on her beautiful face. “You don’t believe that.”

Al-Ashmar smiled. “I may not understand much, Rabiah of No Mother, but I know devotion when I see it.”

Rabiah stared, saying nothing, but her eyes softened ever so slowly.

“I will need to come for a week, to ensure Bela’s restoration is complete. Perhaps we can come here and talk. Perhaps play a hand of river.”

“I don’t play games, physic.”

“Then perhaps just the talk.”

Rabiah held his gaze, and then nodded.

The next
week passed by quickly. Al-Ashmar’s oldest son, Fakhir, was forced to take the summonses Al-Ashmar would have normally taken himself; Tayyeb, his oldest girl, did what she could for those who brought their cats to his home; and though they hated it, it was up to Hilal and Yusuf to watch over the young ones, Shafiq and Badra and Mia.

The family conversed each night over dinner. Al-Ashmar helped them learn from things they did wrong, but in truth his pride swelled over their performances in tasks he had thought them incapable of only days ago.

Most of his time, however, was spent creating the tonic for Bela and the Empress, administering it, and teaching the technique to Djazir. Bela continued her uncanny acceptance of the tonic, as Djazir continued his complaints, but the cure progressed smoothly.

Rabiah held true to her word. She accompanied him to the roof, sometimes for nearly an hour, and spoke to him. She was reserved at first, unwilling to speak, and so it was often Al-Ashmar who told stories of the south, of his travels, of his early days in the capital. It was uncomfortable to speak of Nara, but to speak of his children, he had no choice but to speak of his wife.

“You loved her?” Rabiah asked one day.

“My wife? Of course.”

“You couldn’t have children of your own?”

Al-Ashmar smiled and jutted his chin toward the city. “She knew what it was like, out there. Why have our own when there are so many in need?”

Rabiah regarded him for a long time then, and finally said, “You wanted one of your own, didn’t you?”

Al-Ashmar paused, embarrassed. “Am I so shallow?”

“No, but such a thing is hard to hide when you speak of subjects so close to the heart.”

He shrugged, though the gesture felt like a clear betrayal of Nara. “I did want my own, once, but I regret nothing. How would I have found my Mia if I hadn’t? My Fakhir and Tayyeb?”

The silence grew uncomfortable, and Al-Ashmar was sure he’d made a mistake by discussing his children. But how could he not? They were his loves. His life.

“
You
are the noble one,” Rabiah said, and left him standing near the railing.

Al-Ashmar, hugging
Mia against his hip, stood before the palace, unsure of himself with the palace so near.

The eighth day had come—the last day Al-Ashmar would be allowed into the palace. Djazir had mastered the tonic well enough, and he’d grown increasingly insistent that no one, least of all the Empress, needed to take such a distasteful brew any longer.

Al-Ashmar could hardly argue. The snake-like trails in Bela’s eyes were gone, and her feces had returned to a proper level of density.

“Let’s
go,
” Mia said.

“All right, pet, we’ll go.”

They entered the palace. The guards were a bit disturbed by the unexpected addition of Mia, but Al-Ashmar explained to them calmly that Rabiah had permitted it. He made it to the Empress’s garden, where he relieved his aching arms of Mia’s weight.

Djazir marched forward. “What is this?”

“Eminence, my sincere apologies. With my absence, my business is in a shambles. My other children are old enough to run my errands, but I had no one to watch Mia. She will sit quietly, here, and bother no one.”

“She had best not, physic.” Djazir frowned and stared at Mia. “Don’t touch a thing, child. Do you hear me?”

Mia hugged Al-Ashmar’s waist and nodded.