The Sheen of the Silk

Twenty-seven

IN THE YEAR AFTER THE DEATH OF GREGORY X, ANNA HAD little chance to pursue any further information about Justinian or his disillusionment with Bessarion, or even the courage or strength of the Church. There was little rain in the spring, and the summer’s heat came early.

Disease started in the poorer quarters where there was insufficient water. Rapidly the outbreak spread, and the situation spiraled out of control. The stench of sickness filled the air, clogging mouth and nose.

“What can you do?” Constantine said desperately as he stood in his beautiful arcade, gazing at Anna. His pained eyes were hollow with exhaustion, red-rimmed, his face pasty gray. “I have done all I know, but it is so little. They need your help.”

There was no possible answer but to make arrangements for someone else to see her regular patients and for Leo to turn away new ones until this fever and flux were past. If afterward she had to begin again and build up a new practice, it was the price that must be paid. She could not walk away from Constantine, and deeper and more lasting than that, she could not leave the sick without help.

When she told Leo he shook his head, but he did not argue. It was Simonis who did.

“And what about your brother?” she said, her face tight, eyes angry. “While you’re tending to the poor night and day, running yourself into the ground, risking your own health, who’s going to work to save him? He waits in the desert, wherever he is, for another summer?”

“If we could ask him, wouldn’t he say that I should help the sick?” Anna asked.

“Of course he would!” Simonis snapped, her voice sharp with frustration. “That doesn’t mean it’s what you should do.”

Anna worked night and day. She slept only in snatches here and there as exhaustion overtook her. She ate bread and drank a little sour wine, cleaner than water. She had no time to think of anything but how to get more herbs, more ointments, more food. There was no money. Without the generosity of Shachar and al-Qadir, all real help would have ceased.

Constantine worked also. She saw him only as he called on her because he knew of someone in need so desperate that he was willing to interrupt whatever she was doing or even to waken her when she slept.

Sometimes they ate together or merely spent the last hours of a dreadful day in wordless comfort, each knowing that the other had had experiences equally harsh and also ending in death.

Then as the year waned, at last the infection ebbed. The dead were buried, and the business of ordinary life slowly took over again.