Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (19 page)

The thief regained his balance and stared at the inn incredulously. “Is it here you’re thinking of asking?”

“I’ll do better negotiating if I don’t have a thief stinking of fish trailing me in.”

Octavius leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. “
I’ll wait here for the laughter that will follow you out.”

The innkeeper did laugh, at first.
Conor swiftly cut off his merriment by clanking his purse on the table between them. The familiar gleam of greed lit the innkeeper’s eyes. Stammering, he bustled into the back room and returned with a bulky ship of a woman whose face bore the stamp of the Vikings who’d once scoured these lands. Her watery red gaze took in Conor’s gold, clothes, and face with lazy avidity.

Then the bargaining began, like an old dance. People never changed.
The whole of a person’s character could be read with one glance into the eyes. Conor knew, staring into the flat, dun-colored orbs of the innkeeper’s wife, that she was already calculating heady profits. But though she couched her offers in vague language, Conor soon knew that this inn had no bed to offer, and the best he could get from them would be a straw pallet before the kitchen hearth, already crowded with a half-dozen other travelers, and at a price that would curl even a moneylender’s hair. Gathering his alms bag, he left the inn to search for another while Octavius clung to his heels.

After
Conor stormed out of the fourth inn in a row, Octavius swiveled into his path and wagged at him the greasy head of a chicken bone. “Are you ready to listen to me now, or are ye after asking every innkeeper in Troyes?”

Conor
seized the chicken bone and sent it flying into the gutter.

“God’s Nails,” Octavius sputtered
, “there was no need to be doing that—”

“If you’ve something to tell me
you’d best say it, or it’ll be your bones I throw into the street next.”

“I’ve been thinking
,” Octavius began, “and I know of a burgher, a man as rich as Midas, with a ring for every finger and enough gold about his neck to put a king to shame. He’s in need of a doctor.” The little man edged closer. “He’s got a young daughter, an odd one, they say, fresh out of the convent. She’s sick near to death, and her father distraught, for he just lost a son. He’s full of fear of losing the daughter as well.”

Conor
rested an impatient gaze upon the thief, conveying wordlessly how little some burgher’s daughter’s fate meant to him, when in his endless life, he’d witnessed misery beyond any human’s imagining.

“Don’t you see
? The burgher has used every doctor in Troyes and none have been to his liking. You being a doctor and all, you could make a fine fee—”

“
It’s no fee I seek,” Conor snapped, “and I’ve no stomach to be pandering to some overfed burgher’s daughter with a bellyache.”

“A
ye, but this burgher’s daughter lives in a five-story house on the Grande Rue.” Octavius leaned back against a wall, crossed his arms, and toed one foot across the other. “There’s a soft bed in that palace, I suspect, for the doctor who cares well for the lass.”

Conor
’s eyes narrowed. “How would the likes of you know of the plight of a burgher’s daughter?”

“I’ve ears, I do
. Since the lass returned from the convent, she’s stirred up more than a mite of gossip.” With an odd, almost triumphant cackle, Octavius jerked away from the wall and danced a jig down the street. “Will ye be coming then? Or will you pass on a golden apple dropped in your lap from the skies above?”

***

Conor prowled in the anteroom of a rich burgher’s post-and-beam home, waiting for the servant who had greeted him to announce his presence to Monsieur Mézières. Octavius pranced around the dark chamber, cackling with laughter.

“
It’s venison, I smell, stewing in its own juices.” The thief gorged his lungs with the scent. “If you take your time with the doctoring, you and me might be digging our teeth into a haunch of that stag afore the day is done.”

“In your dreaming
mind.”

Conor
planted a foot on the stairs and glared up at the door draped in black serge. He must be crazed with exhaustion to let this dwarf drag him halfway across Troyes on the slim chance that a wealthy burgher would let a strange doctor tend to his only daughter, and thus give him a bed for the night. This house groaned under the weight of its grief. Beneath the aroma of roasting meat lingered the sickly sweet stench of balsam and funeral ointment, and the air hung thick and still, as if neither window nor door had been cracked since the body of the burgher’s son had been carried out for burial three weeks ago.

“We’ll be getting
a meal out of it, don’t you worry.” Octavius rubbed the well-worn wool of his tunic. “The burgher’s desperate for the likes of you.”

Conor
resumed his pacing, rolling his shoulders as if he could shake off the fog of human misery. He wanted none of the burden of sorrow he felt crushing this house. If he didn’t crave the feel of a fine bed beneath his back, he’d be off and think no more of it. “You’ll be leaving here with a full belly,” Conor argued, “but don’t be expecting the haunch.”

“Leaving
? Nay, nay.” Octavius fell into step beside Conor. “It’ll take time to do your healing, and you’ll need a man of your own. It’s expected of a fine doctor. Don’t let my beard fool ye, for I can shave a man as close and as smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

A crack o
f light speared down the stairs and the shadow of a servant fell upon it. “Monsieur Mézières has agreed to see you.”

The servant allowed
Conor to pass, but halted Octavius and ordered him to wait below. The servant slammed the door shut on the cursing thief, then ushered Conor deeper into the dim room.

A haze of wood-smoke permeated the air as thickly as in any ancient Irish mead hall. A single oil lamp
suspended by chain from the ceiling illuminated a wedge of the blue haze and splashed feeble light over a trestle table. Two men presided at the table, one at either end.

Conor
entered the circle of light and thudded his pack to the floor. A derisive laugh burst from the younger of the two men.

“Scraping the dregs, are we,
Mézières?” The young man tipped in his high-backed chair and threw one calf over the corner of the table. His sword scraped the floorboards, tracing patterns in the rushes. “Soon you’ll be calling in the Jews.”

From the other end of the table, Monsieur
Mézières cast him a narrow-eyed glare. “If it takes a Saracen, Sir Guichard, then so be it. I will do whatever is necessary to restore my daughter’s health.”

“Ah, yes, I know well that she’s your most valuable asset, more precious than a cart full of gold.” The man called Sir Guichard slammed his tankard on the table, rattling the scattered d
ishes. He cast a scornful glance over Conor’s worn, mud-splattered boots, the stubble growing thick upon his chin. “But even a burgher’s daughter shouldn’t be poked and prodded by every charlatan who wanders into Troyes. Toss this roaming vagabond out on his rump.”

The rushes crackled as
Conor swept up his pack and headed for the door, intending to oblige the drunken sot without another word.

“Please forgive my guest, doctor.”

Conor reluctantly paused at Monsieur Mézières’s words.

“You must understand,” the older man said.
“Sir Guichard believes I am a foolish old man, casting his gold about like bread crumbs to the birds. And perhaps I
am
foolish in my desperation.”

The word reverberated in
Conor’s head. Damn it. He wanted none of the muddy quagmire of emotions fluxing in this household. But she had taught him too well. The healer in him would not allow him to leave, not yet, not while someone suffered. Not while there was a chance he could atone once more for his former life.

He twisted to face the table. The burgher appraised him with an even, level gaze, as he petted the fur that trimmed his purple surcoat with a hand glittering with jewels.

“If no doctor has yet cured your daughter,” Conor said, casting a cold glare toward the nobleman, “then there’s no foolishness in seeking another.”

The burgher unfurled his fingers toward
Conor’s dusty garments. “Then convince me that you can do better than the last.”

Conor
’s hand tightened on the slung leather of his belt. His was a skill taught to him by the greatest Irish healer south of Cruachan, a skill honed in the courts of Visigoth chieftains, on Viking ships, in the palaces of Saracens, amid the Jews of Spain, and on more battlefields than this man could ever imagine. “There is much medicine,” he said tightly, “that can be found outside the boundaries of this city.”

“You overdo your modesty, charlatan.” Sir Guichard sloshed more wine into his tankard.
“Where are the self-deprecating proclamations of skill? The reluctantly told tales of miracles done in foreign lands? The stories of wise Italian teachers? Come, come, you can bow and scrape better than that, if you want Mézières’s gold.”

Conor
eyed the young knight. Puffiness softened the lines of his chin and waist. A jeweled brooch hung from the gaping neckline of his surcoat, revealing the frayed, gravy-stained embroidery of the linen beneath. Conor wondered why the burgher suffered such rudeness at his own table, and then wondered what a nobleman was doing dining with a burgher at all, and then wondered why the hell he was wondering. His only concern should be a bed for the night.

“My skill will speak for itself, but there are those who can speak of it.”
Conor repeated the names of the merchants of Genoa with whom he had journeyed for so many miles. “These men are here in Troyes. Find them, and they will speak well of my skills.”

“
It’s clear,” the burgher said drily, “that you lack a doctor’s light-tipped tongue.”

“Pretty words won’t
heal the sick. My skill may.”

The burgher’s fingers stilled upon his cloak.
“Your name, doctor.”

Conor
resisted the urge to shrug. A name was nothing but an empty label thrust upon a babe before the parents knew the pith of the child. It was best that a grown man choose his own, as he was forced to do.

“I am called
Conor MacSídh.”

“Mag-she,
” the burgher repeated. He scraped his chair back and stood up. His fine robes moved fluidly around him as he strode around the table to scrutinize Conor’s features. “You’re Irish.”

Conor
must be wearier than he’d thought for two ordinary men in one day to see so much of what he kept hidden.

“How cunning of you, Mac
Sídh.” Sir Guichard raised his tankard with a flourish and sloshed the spillage off the table with a swipe of his forearm. “But thicken your brogue, charlatan. The burgher’s own daughter has more of an Irish lilt than you—and it’s been over ten years since Monsieur Mézières rescued her from that savage island.”

Something cold slithered up
Conor’s back. The finger of the gods was in this. Only they would mock him so by leading him to a place where the Irish buzzed thicker than fleas.

Then he remembered
: Soon it would be Lughnasa. He should have sensed it coming, he should have known, but the road to Troyes had been long, and his senses too dulled to foresee it. The memory of that one life was a scar the gods refused to let heal. Every year it hardened over, and every Lughnasa the gods found a way to rip it open so it festered and bled anew.

He clenched his fist around the strap of his bag.
Damn the gods
. He should convert to Christianity and spite them all for their ceaseless mockery. The Christians believed in redemption for their sinners—
his
gods had no mercy: They had cast him into Hell and abandoned him here to burn.

“Come, come, doctor, why so silent?”  The nobleman tipped his chair back
. “There’s no need to feign ignorance. Everyone knows the good burgher’s last wife was Irish, and their children grew up on that savage island . . . that is, until the good burgher’s
first
wife died and he could finally bring her here—”

“Pray to God,” the burgher interrupted, his blue gaze slicing across the room, “that this Irishman has half the healing skill of my late wife, Sir Guichard. For only then will you find yourself in better straits than you are
now.” The burgher headed toward a flight of stairs, eddying angry currents behind him. “Come, Monsieur MacSídh. We shall see if you do honor to your countrymen.”

Upstairs, at the end of a short hall,
Conor plunged into a room as hot and humid as Baghdad in July. A great canopied bed loomed in the dimness, shrouded with thick serge. Black cloth muffled the windows. A single tallow candle flickered on a stand by the side of the bed, where an elderly maidservant plucked at her rosary and filled the room with the drone of prayer.

“Enough of that.”
  Conor clanked his doctor’s sack upon a bedside table and cut off the servant’s devotions. “Strip those cloths from the windows.”