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!"
"Here, now, what have we here?"
Dr. Jules Soublet, in charge of the ward by night by virtue of having one of the oldest practices in the French town, approached them, a tall, brisk, bustling man only a few years January's senior. His coat of black superfine wool was expensively tailored over heavy shoulders, his linen immaculate-Soublet changed it every few hours. His servant followed him, bearing on a japanned tray a jar of slow-squirming brown leeches, six knives of German steel, an array of cupping-glasses and a bleeding-bowl whose white porcelain was daubed and splashed with red. "Mary, Mother of God, save me!" shrieked the Italian. "I have not loved those fat capons of Satan but I always loved Thee! Do not leave me in Satan's hand!" He began to vomit again, clotted black rivers of spew. Barnard and Dr. Soublet both stepped back in alarm;
January caught the man's shoulders to steady him, helped by the tall woman who'd been mopping up.
The vomit spattered her calico skirt. Her face, beautiful and impassive under an elaborately folded tignon, did not change, dark eyes like a serpent's, registering neither disgust nor pity.
"This man doesn't need your silly Thompsonian trash," Soublet said to Barnard, not sparing a glance for the sick man. "Weeds and vinegar and cinchona bark-fie! It's clear that his constitution needs to be lowered. Boy..." The doctor addressed January. "Hold him down."
Barnard backed away, clutching his slice of onion, which in the dim light did indeed resemble the Eucharist. The Italian, too spent to struggle, only wept a little as January gripped his right arm and shoulder, Soublet's servant his left. Soublet opened the patient's