The Snake Stone

92

Dr. Millingen closed his bag and snapped the catch shut.

He glanced up the bed, to where the sultan lay drowsing against the pillows. Ten grains: enough, and not too much. Laudanum helped ease the pain.

The doctor frowned. When he told the eunuch that his business was with the living, not the dead, he was telling a half-truth. Sometimes people who were well came to him, he bled and dosed them, and they lived. Sometimes he protected people who would otherwise have died. But his business was with neither the living nor the dead: it was with the dying.

His job was to give them courage, or grant them oblivion; for it was seldom death itself that people feared. For most of them, it was the realization of its approach; as if death was easy, but dying came hard.

The sultan was sunk back against the pillows, and his skin was sunk back against the bones: he looked papery. His mouth was open, at a slight angle; his eyelids were almost purple. His breathing was so faint as to be almost imperceptible.

Millingen bent forward to put his hand close to the sultan’s mouth.

The sultan opened his eyes. They were lifeless and yellowed around the dark core of the iris.

“S’agit-il des mois, des jours, ou des heures?” His lips barely moved. Hours or days? Millingen had heard that weariness before. The sultan did not lack courage.

“On ne sait rien,” he said quietly. “On va de jour en jour.”

The sultan did not drop his gaze. Only his hand moved slowly over the counterpane, as if there were some effort he wished to make.

“Sultan?”

“The crown prince. Summon him now.”

“Yes, Sultan. I will send for him.”

Millingen turned and went to the door, instinctively aware that he was being watched. At the door he looked back. The sultan moved a finger: go.

He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. Two footmen snapped to attention on either hand, and a small, thin man in a fez sprang up from the sofa.

“He asks to see the crown prince,” Millingen said. He knew it was probably futile; the prince had a morbid horror of the disease.

The little man bowed. Millingen wondered if he knew it was futile, too, as he scurried off down the corridor.

Millingen folded his arms and let his chin sink toward his chest.

A week, he thought. If only he could have another week.

A memory of something he had once read came into his mind: Suleyman the Magnificent, dead in his screened litter, rushed from the battlefield as if he were still alive. The grand vizier having discussions with his corpse, in order not to alarm the troops.

He pushed the thought aside.

This is not the age of Suleyman now, he told himself. This is the nineteenth century.