Free Nerilka's Story by Anne McCaffrey Page A

fashion, no matter what the provocation.”
    “He is not my Lord Holder,” I replied, meeting his stare unflinchingly. “I have come to help. I have a firm grounding of the properties of herbs and their preparation. I . . . helped Lady Nerilka brew the tussilago. She taught me all I know, she and her lady mother now dead at Ruatha. I can nurse and I am not afraid of the plague. All I loved is dead now anyway.”
    He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. No one would dare such a familiarity toward the Lady Nerilka, yet I did not find it offensive to be handled. It proved I was a human being.
    “You are not alone in that.” He paused for me to fill in my name. “All right, Rill, I’ll take any volunteers right now. My best nurse just succumbed . . .” He nodded to a woman, still and white on a pallet of boughs. “There isn’t all that much we can do except relieve the symptoms—” he affectionately patted the container of tussilago “—and hope there are no secondary infections. It is that which causes death, not the plague itself.”
    “There will soon be enough vaccine.” I said it to cheer him, for patently he did not like to be so helpless in the face of this epidemic.
    “Where did you hear that, Rill?” He had lowered his voice, and now held my upper arm in a painful grip. All handling is not reassuring.
    “It is known. Yesterday the Bloods were inoculated against the disease. More of the serum is being made. You are nearby . . .”
    The man shrugged in bitter acceptance of his situation. “Nearby, but scarcely a priority.”
    The woman struggled in the grip of the fever and flung herself out of her coverings. I went immediately to her side. And that began my first twenty-hour day as a nurse. There were three of us and Macabir, the journeyman healer, to tend the sixty stricken people in that rude infirmary. I never did know how many more the camp held, for the population shifted. Some had arrived on foot as well as by runner, hoping to claim Hold at Fort or assistance from the Halls or the Hold, and left when they realized that they were not permitted to reach their objective. I often wondered how many people actually had obeyed the full quarantine. But we are more populous here in the west than the eastern half of the continent. And the territory under Fort’s jurisdiction suffered nowhere near the casualties that Ruatha did. We heard that only Master Capiam’s early attendance at South Boll kept the disease from ravaging that province as well. There were those who said that Ratoshigan would have deserved the fate that was dropped on Ruatha and young Lord Alessan.
    He was still alive, I learned. But he and his youngest sister were the only survivors of that Bloodline. His losses were more grievous than mine, then. Would his gains be as great?
    Though harried, anxious, overworked, underfed, and certainly sleep-deprived, I had never been so happy. Happy? That is a very odd word to use in conjunction with my occupation in the camp, for that day and the next, we lost twelve of the sixty lying in the tent, and acquired fifteen in their places. But I was being useful for the first time in my life, and needed, and I was the amazed recipient of the mute gratitude of those I tended. For someone raised as I had been, the experience was a revelation in some rather personal and unpleasant ways as well, for I had never coped with the intimate bodily functions of either man or woman, and now had to attend both. I suppressed my initial revulsion and nausea, cropped my hair even shorter, rolled up my sleeves, and got on with the job. If this was part of it, then it would not be shirked.
    I had the added assurance of knowing I was buffered against catching the disease that I nursed, so sometimes Macabir’s praise of my courage on this count embarrassed me. Then a journeyman healer walked boldly into the camp bearing sufficient serum to inoculate everyone, and announced that the camp was being struck. The