Free The Golden Horn by Judith Tarr Page B

wind-driven, seemed
to pass over it or else to fall short of it. The air felt cooler there, and
cleaner; even amid the cries of agony and the bodies crowded into every space,
there remained a sense of order and of peace.
    After Alf had seen the wounded boy settled, he brought Jehan
to a tall hard-faced man in blue who surveyed them with a grim eye. Jehan knew
how unpromising he must seem to a master surgeon of Constantinople: filthy,
stumbling with weariness, his mantle long lost, the rest of his garb charred,
tattered, and all too obviously that of a Latin priest.
    Alf laid an arm about his friend’s shoulders and said,
“I’ve found the man I spoke of, Master. He’s trained as well
as I am, if not better, and he speaks excellent Greek.”
    “Do you now?” said Master Dionysios. “Prove
it.”
    “He flatters me, sir,” Jehan answered, “but
then, he did the training. I suppose he’s entitled to brag a little.”
    The Master glanced from the soot-streaked young face to the one
that was somewhat cleaner and seemed a good deal younger. Whatever his
thoughts, he only growled, “I suppose you know what a bath is for. When
that’s done, you can find work enough to do.”
    Jehan bowed.
    “And,” Master Dionysios added grimly, “mind
you, sir Frank. If anyone dies here, he won’t be sent to Heaven or Hell by
a heretic. We can use your hands, and your training if you have any. Leave the
prayers to those who can say them properly.”
    Jehan’s eyes smoldered, but he held his tongue and
bowed again with frigid correctness.
    o0o
    Deep night brought no relief, no slackening in the flood of wounded
and dying. With all the hospital’s rooms and corridors filled, Master
Dionysios sent the rest into the garden to be tended by the light of lamps and
of the fire itself, a fierce red glow all about them.
    Bathed and shaven and dressed in a fresh tunic that strained
at every seam but was at least clean, Jehan labored in the garden. The scent of
flowers was sweet and strong even over the stench of smoke and burning flesh;
it refreshed him as the water had when he came out of the fire. Sometimes he
saw Alf, marked by his luminous pallor, tending those whose hurts were greatest.
Once he thought he recognized Bardas’ heavyset figure, if truly it was
His Majesty’s Overseer of the Hospitals who held a man’s head while
a surgeon cut away the remnants of a hand.
    Thea attached herself to Jehan soon after he began, still in
her boy’s clothes but without her cap. “I thought you’d be helping
Alf,” he said.
    She handed him the knife he had been reaching for. “He
doesn’t need any help.”
    “And you think I do?”
    “l have no talent at all for healing,” she said,
“but I’m good at holding heads and at talking sense into people.”
    “And at keeping fire away from hospitals?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Well enough then,” he said. “If anyone
asks you, you’re my apprentice.” He had a glimpse of her swift smile
before she bent to comfort the child who lay at their feet, his eyes fixed in
terror upon Jehan’s knife.
    o0o
    Alf saw the sunrise from the roof of Saint Basil’s,
whither Master Dionysios had driven him with orders that he not return until he
had rested and eaten. Food, he could not face; his body, stronger than a man’s,
was not yet desperate for sleep. Others of the healers tossed and murmured
under a canopy drenched with water to keep off the fire, with Jehan among them,
sleeping like the dead.
    He sat on the roof’s edge and clasped his knees. The
dawn light seemed a feeble thing beside the fire that raged still in the City.
It had retreated somewhat from the hospital, feeding now to the southward;
flames had crept forth to lick the dome of Hagia Sophia. All between blazed or
smoldered or crumbled in ruins: tenements, gardens, palaces, churches, and the
arches and columns of the fora.
    “People are saying that it’s the wrath of God,”
Thea said, settling beside him.
    “The wrath of man can be