“Aye, but you should eat something now. There is food here, meat, bread. And some mead.”
“Food?” she said, closing her eyes again. “You eat.” Her voicedrifted off. “My throat and ears hurt. And I’m too tired…” Then she fell back to sleep.
Lyall, however, sat nearby, occasionally tossing wood upon the fire, watching and waiting and thinking. He did not fall asleep for a long, long time.
11
Her screams woke him from a deep, hard sleep. Lyall leapt to his feet, crouched in an attack stance, ready, with his sword drawn, his eyes darting in all directions. But she lay sleeping. Other than the glow from the fire, the room was dark and he sensed, empty.
Her dog was sitting up and at her side, alert and growling lowly.
Sheathing his sword, he straightened. There was no one else was in the room. “Down, Fergus!” he said. But her dog’s instant reaction confirmed he had not merely dreamed her screams.
With his free hand he grabbed an unlit rush torch from a nearby iron holder and stuck it in the embers of the banked fire, then moved across the room to where she lay. She was whimpering softly when he squatted down beside her. He cupped her face with his palm.
Her face was flamingly hot and feverish. Within a few moments she began to thrash, turning her head from side to side. He put a hand on her shoulder and said her name.
She opened her eyes and looked at him, unseeing. “Al? Applecross, Dingwall, Suddy, Cromarty, Plockton, Garve, Kyle, Avoch,Knockbain, and Wester! There, Alastair. See? I know them by heart. I swear I shall never show myself there again. I promise Al. I promise….” Her voice faded off.
Clearly she was delirious. Her brow was on fire to the touch. He rose and placed the torch in the wall, retrieved another towel and filled a wooden laver with water, then pressed the damp towel to her face and neck, trying to cool her down.
When one of the knights had been injured and then grew fevered after a winter tourney, they had bled him with cups and packed him in snow to freeze out his fever. The cure advice had come from a manservant from the East, who was attached to the great English knight Sabin Fitzwilliam. Both he and his manservant claimed Eastern medicine was most successful.
The fevered knight recovered in a single day.
There came a sudden but quiet knock on the door and it opened. Pater Bancho and three other monks came inside. One carried a sword, raised high, two were carrying cudgels and the other had a quarterstaff, their eyes darting and wide as new pages at a tourney.
And they knocked first? Lyall thought, looking at their weapons and shaking his head.
“You heard her screams.” He drove his hand through his hair. “She woke me screaming. She’s in a fever,” he said flatly. “The ride was too hard on her today. I…”
“We were at Matins,” Pater Bancho interrupted him. “Brother…fetch Pater Magoon. Hurry.” He faced Lyall. “Pater Magoon is the barber and runs the infirmary. And Brother Leviticus, the gardener.“
“The gardener?” Lyall questioned.
“Herbs,” was all Pater Bancho said.
She was crying now, weakly and pitifully, and each sob almost broke his heart. He swiftly moved back by her side and put more cool cloths on her face.
Pater Magoon, the barber, was a tall man and he came inprepared, carrying a wooden box, which he opened and began to examine her, pulling back the blankets to her waist. “There are no lesions, no rashes, which is good.” He pressed his wide thumbs on her belly and below her ribs, in the small of her throat and arm pits. He lay his hand on her brow for a long time. “Her fevers are strong and high. Her humours must be balanced.”
He removed his bleeding cup and a small lancet. He lay her arm straight at her side and then looked at Lyall. “Come hold her hand into a fist, hold it tightly.”
Lyall did what the monk asked, his grip tight on her fisted hand, so small his covered it. He watched closely as the barber monk made a small slice in the thin blue vein of Glenna’s arm and used a flint to light small torch so he could heat the cup, which he placed on her bleeding cut and then he turned her arm, so her blood slowly filled the cup.
“Now the left side,” he told Lyall. “Do the same with her other fist.” He then repeated the cupping on her other arm. Pater Magoon filled the cups twice on each side, then demanded that they bring a metal tub. A bath would break the fevers, he had said, But it seemed to Lyall as if the bath made her even worse.
In came a plump little man with a face as red as an apple with a wooden tray of steaming bowls. Brother Leviticus said they must make her drink the brews, sip by sip.
“I shall do it,” Lyall insisted to the men.
Brother Leviticus nodded and Pater Magoon left with the promise to come back between each prayer hour to check her humours.
She seemed to calm after the teas and when Lyall put cold towels on her, but soon her teeth began to chatter again and she twisted and fought him when he tried to calm her. At one point, he pinned her down with his body to keep her arms down and her fists from fighting him.
“I am not a brood mare!” she shouted in her delirium.
“Glenna. ‘Tis me, Lyall.”
