Episodul 177 · Every Bed by Name

Varren stayed on the steps after the light in the hut went out, and let the voices find their places again.

There were two now. The commander stood by the red plant. Farther off, broad leaves glowed the yellow of a lamp carried close to the floor, and the woman stood beside them. She had always been the quieter one. She looked at him the way she looked at everyone, as if something were missing and she already knew what.

— You came the winter after him.

Yes.

That winter the fever went through the dormitory, and it was his turn to be carried upstairs. Someone looked in at night and asked whether he wanted anything. He said no. They asked only once, and he did not know what was missing, only that something was.

He went into the gray garden to look for it. Past the red plant, a light moved low along the ground: broad leaves, yellow, a stone with a name. He could read by then. He read it once and kept it to himself, like the first.

He touched the leaves because they looked like someone coming with a lamp.

— I never knew what I wanted that night.

Water.

That was all it had been.

He had dreamed her last nights, and afterward she stood beside the plant with a lamp of her own. Most of what she showed him later was gone now; the fifth had fed on that too. The first nights he still had.

On the riverbank, he remembered them now.

— Voices II —

At night the infirmary had twelve beds and one lamp, and the woman who kept it could have walked it blind.

The beds stood in two rows beneath the roof, their feet toward the middle. A brazier warmed one end; the window at the other looked over the yard to the gate and the road down the rock. She carried the lamp low and stopped at every bed.

She had never needed to ask what a man wanted. The knowing came plainly, like a sound she had been born able to hear. Not what was wrong with him. What he was missing.

The stable brother needed water but was ashamed to ask again. She filled his cup while he pretended to sleep. The old cellarer needed someone to complain to.

— If I die tonight, Sister, tell the abbot it was the soup.

— I’ll tell him you died of complaining. He’ll believe me.

The cellarer settled, satisfied. The soup had not been the trouble.

The feverish novice needed the dark farther away. She lit the little stair lamp above his bed, and he shut his eyes.

At the bed nearest the brazier she put her lamp down and sat beside Brother Wendel. A practice blade had cut his thigh; what she had cut away had come back, and now the wound’s sweet, wrong smell lay beneath the smoke. He had been shrinking for a month.

— Is there anything you want?

— No, Sister. I have everything.

His hand was a fist on the blanket. She knew what he was missing. The end of it. He had wanted that for nine days, but holding on was what a brother did.

She took the brown bottle from the cupboard. The infirmary book gave the measure for pain, in her own clear handwriting. She poured it into the horn cup, then poured more, enough to be certain. It would be cruel to be unsure.

— This will help you sleep.

— You’re a good woman, Sister.

— Drink it all.

She supported his head. He made a face at the taste; she wiped his mouth, and his fist loosened.

She held his hand and talked about summer: bees in the lime tree, hay coming up from the valley, the year the novices had walked across the low river and returned muddy. When he stopped answering she went on, quietly, so the others could sleep.

Outside, wind pushed at the shutters. She had spent half her life closing that window for men too weak to notice the cold. She closed it now and came back to his hand. He did not open his eyes again.

His breaths grew farther apart. She waited a long time for the last one to be followed.

Then she folded his hands and wept. He had been kind to her for twenty years. Once, when the lay brothers were ill, he had carried flour up these stairs. He always said her soup was better than the kitchen’s, even when it was the same soup.

She cried honestly, and afterward felt lighter. Nobody would take him down the rock to a surgeon or a strange bed. He had died here, in her care.

She opened the register and wrote Brother Wendel and the date. All but the first pages were hers: a name to a line, nothing else. She had never needed to count them.

Piers came in with too much firewood, his chin on the pile. Nearly seventeen, broad now, taught to hold a sword, still carrying wood as he had at six. He saw Wendel’s folded hands and brought her water before asking when.

— A little while ago. In his sleep.

— That’s good. That he slept.

She drank. He had known she was thirsty before she did. He had learned that by watching her go down the beds, year after year.

— I brought too much wood.

— You always do.

— Then you’ll never be cold.

He went for the clean sheets. She heard the little drawer under the table open.

— Not that one.

He stopped. Her voice had been too sharp.

— The sheets are in the chest.

— I was getting bandages for his feet.

— I’ll do his feet.

He let the drawer go. She knew where the letter lay beneath the bandages, folded along creases twelve winters old.

They changed the bed together. Before they finished, the gatehouse bell began: three strokes and a pause. Doors banged below; someone called for horses.

Piers went to the window.

— It’s the war. They’ll ride at first light. The abbot said I could go when it came.

He turned toward her, trying not to smile. For a moment she could see the little boy inside him, swinging his legs at her table.

She knew what he was missing. The road, the horses, the brothers who had taught him, the valley beyond this window. The going.

She knew it as clearly as she knew thirst, and did not move to give it to him.

— You’ll need your good shirt. It’s in the chest.

He grinned and went to find it. She smoothed Wendel’s sheet while he hummed behind her and the bell told everyone what they had to do.

At first light she watched the brothers ride through the gate. Piers was near the back on the brown mare, wearing the shirt whose collar she had mended. He did not look up.

She told herself she had not expected him to. A boy going to his first war should not look for his mother at a window. She waited until the road was empty, then turned to the beds.

The letter lay on her register, squarely, where it would be found. Someone had opened it and carefully folded it along her old lines.

A miller and his wife had lost their five-year-old son to the spotted fever. They had heard of the healthy foundling at the monastery and offered him a home, their trade, their name. The wife had added that she would be good to him.

She had read it here while Piers ate porridge, his feet swinging above the floor. Then she had put it under the bandages. Their second letter, in spring, had gone beneath the first. Later she heard they had a daughter. She had truly been glad for them.

She folded the letter and put it back where it belonged.

The brothers had taken everyone who could sit a horse. In the afternoon a cart collected the coughing men for the sisters’ hospital by the river, and she promised them they would be home by spring. The novice went down to the kitchen. The cellarer complained down every stair, then held her hand at the bottom without saying anything.

By evening she was alone.

She lit the lamp, banked the brazier, washed the sheets. Then her feet took her down the row as they had every night for thirty years.

The first bed lacked nothing. Its straw was turned, its blanket folded. It needed no water, no word, no light moved nearer. She waited for the knowing, and there was nothing to know.

By the middle of the room she was walking faster. She had never heard her own shoes among the sleeping men. Now there was no other sound.

At Wendel’s bed she stopped. Nothing. The room wanted nothing from her.

She went to the window and listened toward the gate. Sometimes a basket was left there at night, wrapped in sacking and crying. Piers had come in a fish basket, small enough to carry upstairs in one hand.

None came that night, or the next.

A few days later the cough found her. She recognized the chill in her chest and the heat in her face. She knew what she would need: fire, water, broth, someone beside her through the night to turn her and listen to her breathe.

She knew it as words from a book. The other knowing would not come. She could not look at herself in a bed, and there was nobody to look for her.

She dragged her chair between the rows and set the lamp beside it. The brazier died while she sat there.

The brown bottle stood on its shelf with the horn cup. She knew the measure. She did not know whether she wanted it. She waited for the certainty she had given Wendel, burning and cold, and nobody got up to bring it.

Toward morning she thought of Piers at five, on the day the letter came: honey on his chin, telling her about a cat. She had looked up from the paper and known he lacked nothing. He had his porridge, his cat, and her.

She had never been happier.

She held on to that warmth while snow came against the window and nothing was missing from any of the beds.

Nobody said her name. Nobody was there to say it.

It was Clemence.

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