Chapter Text
The north of France, late summer into early autumn, 1348
There is a question that travelers have asked, in every age of the world, when they have stopped at a crossroads in country they do not know and looked at the two or three or four roads going away from them into the soft uncertain distance: which of these leads where I am going.
The answer, in the year of our Lord 1348, was all of them.
This was not a season for crossroads. The Pestilence had, in the slow patient way it had of doing such things, arranged the geography of northern France so that any road one took led, in the end, to the same place — which was a village with no one in it, or a village with too few people in it, or a village in which the people remaining had decided that strangers were a category of creature they were no longer obliged to be courteous to. The travelers had stopped meaning anything by their travel. They moved because moving was the alternative to sitting still, and sitting still was the alternative one had grown afraid of.
Two travelers in particular were moving north that summer, on roads that did not, yet, intersect.
They did not know each other.
They were, however, beginning — in the small obscure way that things begin before anyone has noticed they have begun — to know of each other.
The Inn at Châlons-sur-Marne
The Doctor had not intended to stop at Châlons.
He had intended to skirt it, by the old Roman road that ran east of the town, in the careful manner he had developed for skirting towns that still contained living people. Living people, in his experience, were a complication. The towns one could pass through unmolested now were the towns in which there was no one left to be molested by; the towns in which there were still mayors and watchmen and innkeepers tended, in this season, to have grown nervous about masked physicians traveling with quiet patient followings of patients who did not entirely walk like patients, and the Doctor had grown nervous in turn about the nervousness of mayors and watchmen.
But Galen had thrown a shoe.
This was the sort of thing Galen did not do. Galen had been wearing the same four shoes for a length of time the Doctor preferred not to calculate, and Galen had not, in any of that length, troubled the Doctor with the small mortal inconveniences of an ordinary horse. That he had thrown a shoe now, three miles south of Châlons, on a road that ran straight as a quarrel to the south gate of the town, was — the Doctor thought, sitting on the bench of the cart and looking down at the bare hoof and the small bent strip of iron lying in the road like a discarded smile, a decision.
He did not know whose decision.
He chose, after a moment's consideration, not to inquire.
He led Galen into Châlons on foot, with the cart behind him, and he left his patients in a stand of beeches some way back from the road, with instructions — though he did not, exactly, give them in words; they understood him now without words, which was a convenience and not, he thought, a thing to be examined too closely — to wait until he returned. They arranged themselves at the edge of the trees in the loose attentive cluster he had come to think of as theirs, and they did not move, and the flies followed him into Châlons because the flies, perversely, preferred him to them; and so it was that the Doctor came into Châlons-sur-Marne in the late afternoon of a Tuesday in August, with a lame horse, and an empty cart, and a small offended cloud of flies, and the long curved beak of his mask catching the light.
The blacksmith was alive.
This was the first good news of the Doctor's week. The blacksmith was a thick gray man named Cuvelier, who had buried his wife in June and his apprentice in July and had decided, with the small dry stubbornness of his trade, that he would continue shoeing horses until either the Pestilence or his own knees told him otherwise. He looked at the Doctor's mask without flinching — he had seen one before, he said, on a physician who had come through in May, and the physician had been a fraud, and Cuvelier suspected the Doctor was a fraud also, but it was no matter to him; he shoed horses, not opinions — and he took Galen by the bridle, and Galen permitted this, with the patient flat attention of a horse who had decided that being shoed was for other people but who would, on this one occasion, oblige.
The work would take, Cuvelier said, the better part of two hours.
He suggested the inn.
The Doctor did not, ordinarily, take suggestions from blacksmiths. But the alternative was to stand in the smithy yard for two hours and be looked at by Cuvelier's apprentices, both of whom were new and neither of whom had achieved Cuvelier's professional indifference to the mask; and so the Doctor walked across the small square, with his bag in his hand and his beak full of herbs and the flies in their soft offended cloud, and he went into the inn at Châlons-sur-Marne.
It was called The Three Crowns, although there were now only two crowns on the sign because the third had been painted out, in haste, with a thin yellow wash that did not quite cover the original gold; and the Doctor, ducking under the low lintel, decided not to ask why.
The common room was dim and smelled of beer and old straw and the particular sweetness of a place that has not been thoroughly cleaned in some weeks. There were perhaps a dozen people in it. A pair of merchants in the corner, with the small tight faces of men who had been arguing about something for too long. A widow by the window, who was drinking from a wooden cup and not, as far as the Doctor could see, eating. Three carters around a table by the fire, with a fourth chair pushed back as if its occupant had just stepped out, although the dust on the table suggested that whoever had occupied the fourth chair had stepped out some time ago. And a young man at the bar, in the soft pale gray robe of a Franciscan, with the rope cinched twice around his waist because the body inside the robe had grown smaller than the robe was tailored for.
The innkeeper looked up.
The innkeeper looked at the mask.
The innkeeper did the small calculation that innkeepers had been doing all summer, which was to weigh the bad luck of refusing a masked physician against the bad luck of admitting one, and decided — as innkeepers will, in such circumstances — in favor of the coin in the physician's purse.
"A cup of wine, sir?"
"Water, if it is clean," said the Doctor, in the voice that came from behind his left shoulder.
"It is clean."
"Then water."
He took a seat at the small table furthest from the fire, with his back to the wall, in the corner where the smoke gathered and where no one could approach him from behind. He had not, when he sat down, intended this arrangement. He had simply found himself sitting in it, the way one finds oneself sitting in arrangements one has been sitting in for a long time. He set his bag on the bench beside him. He laid his gloved hands on the table. He waited for the water.
The Franciscan was looking at him.
The Doctor had noticed this in the way he noticed most things now, which was without turning his head. The young man at the bar had not turned around — he was still facing his cup, with both hands wrapped around it — but his head was tilted very slightly, in the way of a man who is using the corner of his eye, and the corner of his eye was on the Doctor.
After a moment the Franciscan picked up his cup, and crossed the room, and sat down on the bench across from the Doctor without asking.
"You are going north," he said.
It was not a question. The Doctor regarded him through the dark glass of the eye-pieces. The Franciscan was perhaps twenty-five. His face was the face of a man who had been handsome before he had stopped sleeping, which was a face the Doctor had come to recognize as the standard face of the season. His eyes were a pale, exhausted blue.
"I am going north," said the Doctor, who saw no purpose in denying it.
"To Flanders?"
"Perhaps."
"To a town called Verbois?"
The Doctor did not, by training and long practice, permit his expression to change. The expression was hidden behind a leather beak in any case, and the change would have been invisible. But he had a small private convention with himself, by which he tried not to permit even the invisible changes, on the principle that a small private discipline was the only kind of discipline he had left; and he kept to the convention now, and held his face perfectly still behind the mask, and said, very lightly,
"Verbois. I have heard the name. It is a town with a deacon, is it not."
"It is a town with a deacon," said the Franciscan.
He was quiet for a moment. He turned the cup between his hands. The cup was empty. The Doctor noticed that the Franciscan's hands were shaking very slightly, in the small constant way of a man who had been shaking for so long that he had stopped noticing.
"I have come from there," said the Franciscan, eventually.
"From Verbois."
"From Verbois. I was sent." A small breath, that was almost a laugh and was not. "I was sent by my superior, who had heard the reports, and who wished to know whether they were —" He paused, choosing the word. "Edifying."
"And were they?"
"They were edifying."
"You do not look edified."
The Franciscan looked up.
He looked at the Doctor for a long moment, through the smoke and the dim light, and the Doctor saw that the young man's pupils were the wrong size for the light in the room. They were very large. They were the pupils of a man who had walked, recently, out of a great darkness, and whose eyes had not yet remembered how to be eyes for an ordinary afternoon in an ordinary inn.
"Doctor," said the Franciscan, very quietly. "May I ask you a question, as a man of learning."
"You may ask."
"If a man preaches a doctrine that is heretical, but preaches it so beautifully, and so kindly, and with such — such — patience, that the soul of the man hearing him agrees, even while the mind of the man hearing him knows that what is being said is not the faith… is the soul or the mind in the right?"
The Doctor considered the question.
He considered it longer than he had any question in some time. He had not, in the small honest cellar of his own thinking, expected to be asked, on an August afternoon, a question that touched him so closely. He had been asked, in his time, a great many questions about herbs and humors and the location of the various organs of the body. He had not, in a long while, been asked a question about the soul.
"The mind," he said, after a moment. "The mind is in the right."
"Is it?"
"It must be."
"Why must it be?"
"Because the soul," said the Doctor, slowly, "will agree with anything that is offered to it kindly enough. The soul is a… a hungry organ. It eats what is set before it. Only the mind can taste, and refuse."
The Franciscan was looking at him very intently.
"Doctor," he said. "Forgive me. But you say that as if you had… as if you had eaten something. And were trying, now, to taste it after the fact."
The Doctor said nothing.
The innkeeper brought the water. The Doctor inclined the beak in thanks. The innkeeper, who had been planning to ask about the patients waiting in the stand of beeches outside town, looked at the long curved beak and decided that he would not, after all, ask, and went away.
The Franciscan was still looking at him.
"Tell me about your deacon," said the Doctor.
The Franciscan told him.
He told it without ornament, in the voice of a man who had told it to himself a great many times on the road south and had grown tired of his own telling. He had been at Verbois for three weeks. He had attended the Sunday Mass twice. He had spoken with the parish priest, an old man named Anselm who was not the dangerous Anselm one would later hear of in the south but a different and lesser Anselm, and the lesser Anselm had been, in the Franciscan's account, delighted. Delighted with the deacon. Delighted with the crowds. Delighted with the offerings that had begun, in the past three months, to overflow the alms-box of Saint Agnes and to require a second box, and then a third.
He had attended one of the Flagellant processions.
He described the procession in the small flat voice of a man he did not, even now, fully believe he had seen, the seventy or eighty bare-backed figures, the disciplines of leather and small iron stars, the slow procession through the streets of Verbois by torchlight, the deacon at the head of the procession with his porcelain mask catching the fire, the blood in the snow (there had been an early snow, in Verbois, in July, which the deacon had preached upon at length as a sign of the Lord's favor and which the Franciscan, who was from a town in Provence, had found unnatural).
"The deacon does not flagellate himself," said the Franciscan.
"No," said the Doctor.
"He walks at the head. He does not strike himself. He carries… he carries only a small bowl, into which the discipline-blood is collected by the man walking beside him. A young man. A novice from the parish. The novice walks with the bowl, and at certain points in the procession the deacon raises the bowl, and the people on either side of the street, they come forward, and they dip their fingers in the bowl, and they mark their foreheads. As one marks one's forehead on Ash Wednesday. Only with…" He stopped. "Only with that."
"And the bowl is full, at the end."
"The bowl is more full at the end than it was at the start. I do not… I cannot explain this. I have thought about it on every mile of the road south, and I cannot explain it. The novice did not refill it. No one refilled it. I watched. I am very sure of what I watched. And yet the level in the bowl rose, in the course of the procession, from perhaps a finger's depth to… to —"
"Too much."
"Yes. Too much."
The Doctor lifted his cup of water. He did not drink from it. He turned it between his gloved hands, in something like the unconscious gesture of the Franciscan, and he watched the small disturbance of the surface, and he thought.
"You said," he said, after a while, "that the deacon was reported to be immune."
"He was the only survivor of his village. He came to Verbois in the rags of a deacon's robe, with his face bandaged from the Pestilence. He has been at Verbois six months, in the closest proximity to the dying, and he has not… he does not —" The Franciscan made a small useless gesture, the gesture men make when they wish to indicate that the words for what they have seen have not been invented yet. "He does not sicken. He does not weaken. He attends every deathbed in the parish, and he leans close, and he hears the last confession, and he goes on to the next, and he does not sicken. He is… I do not know what he is."
"You know what he is."
The Franciscan looked up sharply.
"Doctor —"
"You know what he is. That is why you have been sent south. That is why you are sitting in an inn at Châlons telling a masked stranger what you have not yet told your superior. Because you have understood, in the way the soul understands and the mind has not yet caught up to, that what you saw at Verbois is not — what it presents itself to be. And you are afraid that if you go on south to your superior, and you say what you understood, your superior will tell you that you are mistaken; and you are afraid he will be right; and you are afraid he will be wrong."
The Franciscan was very still.
"Yes," he said, eventually.
"You wish someone to tell you that what you saw was real."
"Yes."
"It was real."
The Franciscan closed his eyes.
He sat for a long moment with his eyes closed and his hands on the empty cup, and the Doctor watched him, with the small distant interest he had begun, lately, to take in the suffering of others — a different interest from the one he had used to take in it, and one he did not, when he sat with the question honestly, like very much.
"Doctor," said the Franciscan, eventually, eyes still closed. "Why are you going north."
"I have heard," said the Doctor, choosing his words, "that there is a man immune to the Pestilence. I am a physician. If a man is immune to a contagion, then his blood contains the principle of his immunity. If one could obtain it, and isolate it, one could —"
He stopped.
He had been going to say one could save them all, as he had said it to the faceless thing across the coals two months ago, and as he had said it to himself many evenings since, and he had heard, again, as he had heard the first time, that this was not what he meant.
The Franciscan opened his eyes.
He looked at the Doctor with the pale exhausted blue eyes, and the Doctor, behind his dark glass, looked back at him; and there was a moment, perhaps half a minute long, perhaps longer, in which neither of them spoke; and in which something — the Doctor felt it, as one feels a draught from a door one had not known was open — passed between them, with the small dry click of a piece of information arriving in a place that had been waiting for it.
"Doctor," said the Franciscan, very softly. "Do not go to Verbois."
"I will go to Verbois."
"Doctor, listen to me. He will know what you are."
"I know what I am. There is little he can know that I do not."
"That is not what I mean."
The Franciscan leaned across the table. The pale exhausted blue eyes were very close to the dark glass.
"He will know what you are," said the Franciscan, "in the way that a thing knows another thing of its own kind. He will know it before you have spoken to him. He will know it the moment your shadow falls across the door of his church. And he will, Doctor, I do not know him. I have only watched him. But I have watched him long enough to tell you this: he is lonely. Whatever he is, he is lonely. And a lonely thing that recognizes another of its kind will not… will not let it go."
The Doctor was silent.
"I will go to Verbois," he said, at last.
The Franciscan sat back.
He closed his eyes again. He nodded once, very small, the nod of a man acknowledging a thing he had known he would have to acknowledge from the moment he sat down.
"Then God keep you, Doctor."
"That is generous of you."
"It is not generous. It is… I do not know what it is. It is a habit. I am a Franciscan. We bless people. It is what we do, even when we have stopped being certain whom we are blessing, or to whom the blessing is addressed."
He stood up.
He left the cup on the table.
He walked out of the inn, into the late afternoon, and the Doctor watched him go through the small square window beside the table, and watched him cross the square in the soft pale gray robe with the rope cinched twice around his waist, and watched him take the road south, away from Châlons, away from Verbois, away from whatever it was he had decided to walk away from; and the Doctor sat for a while longer, with his hands on the cup he had not drunk from, and he thought about loneliness.
It was not a humor he was, ordinarily, given to thinking about.
He found, when he examined the thinking, that he had been thinking about it for a long time without noticing he had been thinking about it. The faceless thing at the fire. The patients who followed the cart. The empty bench beside him on the cart. The wife whose face he could not remember. The name that would not come when he called it.
A lonely thing that recognizes another of its kind, the Franciscan had said, will not let it go.
The Doctor lifted the cup.
He did not drink from it. He set it down again, very carefully, in the exact place on the table where it had been before, in the small wet ring it had left on the wood.
He paid the innkeeper. He went out into the square. Cuvelier had finished with Galen. Galen stood patient and old in the smithy yard, with his new shoe gleaming in the afternoon light, and he looked at the Doctor with the patient inexhaustible flat attention of a horse who had decided some time ago that dying was for other people; and he did not flick an ear; and he did not roll an eye; and when the Doctor climbed onto the bench of the cart and took up the reins and said, very quietly,
"Walk on, Galen,"
Galen walked on.
He walked north.
The Confessional at Saint Agnes
In Verbois, at approximately the same hour, in the small dim wooden booth where the wood had been drinking for six months, Brother Lazare was hearing a confession.
The penitent was a woman of perhaps forty, the wife of a cloth-merchant of the town, named — for she had given her name as one gives a name, on the first occasion, in the small careful old formula — Marguerite. She has been there three times now. She came on Fridays. She was the kind of penitent Brother Lazare had grown to take a particular interest in, which was the kind who returned. The returning ones were the ones the wood liked best. They came back not because they had new sins to confess but because the act of confessing itself had become the small warm secret comfort of their week; and each time they returned, there was a little less of them, and a little more of him; and neither party found this an unsatisfactory arrangement.
Tonight she was crying.
Brother Lazare had come, over the months, to recognize the various kinds of crying one heard on the other side of a confessional grille. There was the crying of guilt, which was loud and brief and unfocused. There was the crying of grief, which was quieter and longer and ran in a single channel like a stream that had cut itself into a bed. There was the crying of fear, which trembled. And there was the crying of love, which was the rarest, and the sweetest, and the one Brother Lazare reserved his closest attention for, because the crying of love was the crying that gave the most freely, and the most deeply, and the longest.
Marguerite was crying of love.
She was crying about her son.
He had been a boy of fourteen, Brother Lazare gathered, listening with the slow patient attention of a man who had nowhere else in the world to be this hour. He had taken the Pestilence in May. He had been very nearly gone, gray at the temples, struggling for breath, the small clear water of the dying running from his open mouth onto the pillow; and a physician had come through Verbois that week. A physician in a long curved beak.
Brother Lazare went very still.
He did not, of course, change his posture. The change in his posture was invisible. But there was, in the small wooden booth with the slow dark beads on the underside of the bench, a particular kind of stillness that came over him when something he had not been expecting arrived; and the stillness came over him now, with the small soft inevitability of a tide.
"Tell me about the physician, daughter," said Brother Lazare, very gently.
Marguerite told him.
She told him that the physician had come to the door in the morning. That he had gone upstairs to her son and worked alone for five hours, and that when he had come down again her son had been laying in the bed, smiling softly, and saying Mama, I feel much better; and that her son had been smiling ever since; and that her son had not eaten in three months; and that her son still smiled; and that her son followed her through the house, now, room to room, without speaking; and that her son smelled —
Marguerite stopped.
"Yes, daughter."
"Sweet, Father. And —"
"Yes."
"Not sweet."
"I understand."
She wept. Brother Lazare let her weep. He had learned that the weeping was the work; that one did not interrupt the work; that one waited, patiently, with the small soft attention of a man who had been waiting for a very long time and was good at it.
"He is still my son," Marguerite said, eventually. "He is still my son. He smiles at me, Father. He follows me. He — he sleeps at the foot of my bed, the way he did when he was small. He does not — he does not breathe, Father. He does not breathe. I have watched him. I have watched him for hours. He lies at the foot of my bed and he does not breathe, and he smiles, and he is my son. He is still my son. Father, tell me he is still my son!"
Brother Lazare considered.
He considered for a long moment, in the small dim wooden booth with the slow dark beads on the underside of the bench; and then he leaned, very slightly, toward the grille; and he spoke, in the voice that was kind in the way one had always wanted a voice to be kind; and he said,
"He is still your son, daughter."
"Father —"
"He is still your son. The physician who came to your house, he is, in his way, a kind of priest also. He has his own sacraments. He has performed one of them upon your son. Your son is no longer what he was. But he is still your son. The love that you bear him is the love that he bears you. That love does not die when the breath does. That love is the part of him that smiles, and that follows you, and that lies at the foot of your bed. Mourn the breath, daughter, if you must. But do not mourn the love. The love is what is left."
Marguerite sobbed, once, the sob of a woman who had been carrying a thing alone and has been told, at last, that she may set it down.
"Father —"
"Hush, daughter. Hush. There is one more thing."
"Yes, Father."
"Pray for him."
"For my son?"
"For the physician."
There was a small silence on Marguerite's side of the grille. It was the silence of a woman who had not, perhaps, expected this; who was, perhaps, working out whether she had heard correctly; whether the kind voice on the other side of the carved wood had truly asked her to pray for the masked stranger who had taken her son's breath and left her son's smile.
"Yes, Father," she said, after a moment. "I will pray for him."
"Pray for him daily."
"Yes, Father."
"He is… a colleague, daughter. In a manner of speaking. We do not, he and I, walk in the same orchard. But we eat, I think, of the same fruit. And I have been hoping, for some time now, that he might come to Verbois. Pray that he comes. Pray that the road treats him gently. Pray, daughter, that he finds his way."
"I will pray, Father."
"There. There. You have done well tonight. You have given me a great gift. Go in peace, daughter."
Marguerite went.
Brother Lazare remained.
He remained in the small dim wooden booth for a long time after she had gone, and the slow dark beads gathered on the underside of the bench, and one of them grew heavy and fell, and the wood drank it; and behind the porcelain mask, in the small unknowable country that was the inside of him, the deacon of Verbois — who had been, in another season, in another body, a stevedore named Andreu on a pier in Messina; and before that a fishwife in Naples; and before that a Greek slave-girl in a household in Antioch; and before that, and before that, and before that, in a recession of small consumed lives so long that even he did not always remember the order of them — smiled.
It was the kind of smile that did not reach the face. The face was not his. The face was porcelain. It had been smiling, the small patient amused smile, for six centuries by his best reckoning, and would smile for as long as the porcelain held.
But beneath the porcelain, in the wet dark space where the mask sat against what was, this season, his skin, something moved.
A colleague.
He had not, in any of the many lives he could remember and the many more he could not, met a colleague.
He had met victims, by the thousand. He had met witnesses. He had met, on three or four occasions in long centuries, hunters, men with the small particular grim attention of people who had decided to know what he was, and he had eaten the hunters in the small careful way one eats a creature that has come to eat one, and he had not been troubled afterward, because the hunters had only ever come one at a time and had only ever been, in the end, men.
He had never met a colleague.
A man who walked the road as he walked the road, only on the road instead of in the church. A man who took the suffering of others as he took it, only with a knife and herbs instead of with a kind voice and a grille. A man who had, perhaps a man who had grown, perhaps, as tired as he had grown, in his long going-about.
A man who was lonely.
A lonely thing that recognizes another of its kind, the Franciscan had said, in the inn at Châlons, at almost exactly this hour, to almost exactly this man's intended; will not let it go.
The Franciscan had been correct.
The Franciscan would not, as it happened, live to be congratulated on his correctness. He would die six days later in a hostel outside Troyes, of a fever that the hostel-keeper would record as the Pestilence, although the symptoms would not, strictly, match the Pestilence as the hostel-keeper had come to know it; the Franciscan would die smiling, and the hostel-keeper would not, when she came to lay him out, be able to remember at any point in the rest of her natural life why he had been smiling, or what he had been smiling at, or what he had been whispering in the last hour of his life in a soft pleased voice that had not sounded entirely like his own.
But this was a matter for later, and for elsewhere.
For now: the deacon of Verbois rose, in the small dim wooden booth, and adjusted his sleeves, and stepped out into the church.
The church was empty. Vespers had not yet rung. The pale August evening came in through the western windows in long warm slanted bars, and the dust of the day turned slowly in the bars, and Brother Lazare walked up the side aisle to the altar, and he stood for a moment before the altar with his head inclined and his hands folded into his sleeves.
He was praying.
He was praying in a private language, which only he spoke. He had been the only speaker of this language for a very long time. He had been, in fact, considering that he might be the last speaker of it, and that when he was finished with his work in this world the language would go with him; and this had been, in the small unfaced country beneath the porcelain, the closest thing he had to a sorrow.
Tonight he was praying that the physician would come.
He was praying with the soft patient kindness with which he prayed for everything. He was praying as he had been praying for some weeks now, in the small interstitial moments between confessions and processions and the kind quiet meals he took alone in the deacon's house. He was praying that the road would treat the physician gently. That the patients would not, at any of the small inns or fords or crossings, falter, or fall, or in any way be reduced. That the Doctor himself, the Doctor; he had taken to thinking of him so, with the small private capital letter, would not be turned aside by any of the small turnings-aside the road offered to travelers, but would come, by the straight slow inevitability of two lonely things finding each other in a thinning world, here.
To Verbois.
To Saint Agnes.
To the small dim wooden booth where the wood had been drinking for six months.
To him.
Brother Lazare lifted his head.
The painted closed eyes faced the altar. The painted small patient mouth smiled, as it always smiled, with the small ageless patience of porcelain.
"Come, Brother," said the deacon of Verbois, very softly, in the kind voice, the voice that was kind in the way one had always wanted a voice to be kind; the voice the wood was drinking.
"Come. I am waiting."
The Road North
That night the Doctor made camp some way off the road, in a hollow between two stands of birch, where a small stream ran clear and cold over flat stones; and he unharnessed Galen, and he set out a careful fire of dry wood that gave off little smoke; and his patients arranged themselves at the edge of the firelight in the loose attentive cluster he had come to think of as theirs, and they did not move.
He sat by the fire with his journal open on his knee.
He did not write.
He had meant to write. He had, since Châlons, a great many things he had meant to think about and a great many things he had meant to write, and as he had ridden north in the slow gold of the late afternoon he had been composing, in the small careful Latin part of his mind, the entry he would make tonight; and now, with the journal open on his knee and the pen in his gloved hand, he found that the entry would not come.
He looked, instead, into the fire.
After a while he became aware that he was no longer alone at the fire.
The faceless thing was sitting on the other side of the coals, where it had been sitting more and more frequently of late. The Doctor had begun, in the small private part of himself, to think of it as a companion; and to be unsure whether this was a comfort or a symptom, and to be unsure whether the distinction was one he was still permitted to draw.
Tonight there was something different about it.
It was sitting closer than usual. By perhaps a foot. It had moved the foot since he had last looked. He had not seen it move. He never saw it move. He saw only the result of its having moved.
He considered this.
"You have come closer," he said, into the fire, not turning his head.
The faceless thing did not answer. Of course it did not. It did not have a face. It only sat.
"I am going to Verbois," said the Doctor.
The faceless thing did not move.
But there was, on the air, a small dry sound that might have been a chuckle, if one were inclined to hear it that way; or might have been a fly that had flown into something and stopped; or might have been the small soft beginning of a kind voice on the other side of a wooden grille, in a town some days' journey north, saying — in a language only one person in the world still spoke —
Come, Brother. I am waiting.
The Doctor closed the journal.
He banked the fire.
He lay down on his bench, with his bag for a pillow.
He did not sleep, for a long time. He lay with his eyes open behind the dark glass of the eye-pieces, and he listened to the small night sounds of the hollow between the birches, and to the silence of his patients, who did not breathe and did not shift; and to the silence, louder still, of the faceless thing across the coals, which had moved a foot closer and which would, in the small inexorable way of these things, move another foot closer tomorrow, and another the day after.
Galen, tethered to a birch at the edge of the hollow, lifted his old gray head in the dark.
He looked north.
He did not look away for a long while.
Somewhere far ahead of him, in a small Flemish town with a wall around it and a bell that still rang for matins and vespers, a porcelain face smiled in the dark of a deacon's house, and was glad.