Page 86 of Homeless

The fourth day, they came down out of the last of the rock onto an open plain — La Bureba, the ventero had called it, a broad dry sweep of stubble and low rise watered somewhere by a river, the whole of it lying under that same enormous white sky that had followed them since the Ebro and would, he now believed, follow them to the sea if they ever reached it. Open country should have been a mercy after the gorge. It was not. It was only more of it — more distance, more sun, more road unrolling towards a horizon that did not come nearer for all their walking.

Elizabeth rode it with her eyes half shut and her weight tottering.

He rode close enough to keep one hand free and ready, and near noon, when she slumped and did not right herself, he simply took her weight against him and rode on with her held there. Her head fell back against his shoulder, and the fact that she did not protest being held by him told him more than her breathing did.

“Elizabeth, stay awake a while. Talk to me. Insult me. You have always found it easy enough.”

She said nothing for several seconds. Then, with only the ghost of her usual self, she mumbled, “You are... a ruinous husband. You have spent... a fortune... on beds I do not sleep in.”

“I have.” His throat was not behaving. “Every one. I shall buy you another tonight, in Briviesca, and you shall fail to sleep in that as well, and I shall consider it money well lost.”

She might have smiled. He could not see her face from where her head lay. Her hand had found his forearm and closed on it, and he rode the rest of that long open afternoon with her hand on his arm. What he had feared and dismissed last night was now a reality, because fever was coming up through his coat sleeve like a second sun.

This was not altitude sickness. It may have begun with that, or been complicated by that, but it was worse now, with something gnawing and devouring her with every hour. And the worst of it was that he was starting to fear that he might not be far behind her.

They came into Briviesca in the last of the light — a real town, a market town, a mesón with a bed in a room with a door. He carried her up to it, because she could no longer be trusted on her own feet, and he laid her down. Her brow was worse now, much worse, a dry burning that no amount of denial would make into fatigue any longer.

What was he to do? He went down to the man who kept the inn and asked if there was a doctor, but he was at enough pains to make himself understood. “Señora, enfermo,” he kept repeating, and he was sure he was bungling the words badly, but no one laughed at him. The innkeeper looked sympathetic but only raised his hands and summoned his wife.

The woman did agree to follow Darcy to the room, but when she looked at Elizabeth, she only shook her head. She said a few dozen words, some of which made Elizabeth wince, and one that made her smile. But the rest made her face turn bleak and empty.

“What did she tell you?” Darcy asked when the woman had left.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and pulled the blanket higher. “Water,” she mumbled. “She is bringing water.”

“Is she sending a doctor? What was that thing she kept saying?”

Her features had already softened into the want of sleep, and her throat worked as if she were trying to swallow. “No doctor. Burgos for doctor. Quina… she kept saying…” She trailed off. Her mouth was still forming words, but her throat had quit putting out sound.

Quina? Whatever the devil that was. Probably some term for prayer, because just now, he could not think of anyone who needed it more.

Burgos rose out of the plain in the late afternoon — a grey sprawl under a great pale sky, the cathedral's spires pricking up above the roofs, a river somewhere throwing back the light. Now it was in front of him, and he could hardly see it, because the road had begun, gently and horribly, to swim.

He had been suspecting since… well, the truth was that he had suspected since the second morning out of Vitoria that there was something terribly amiss with them both, when the headache could no longer be blamed on a night of bad wine. The altitude served as an excuse in the beginning. Everything he had ever read about it matched — faintness, a general malaise, occasional queasiness… but altitude sickness was supposed to make a man pale, not flushed.

The ache had come up out of his bones and into his blood. The band above his eyes had drawn tight and then tighter until the light itself was a kind of pain, and his teeth were chattering in broad daylight in late July. Twice on the open road, he had come back to himself with no memory of the mile behind. He had not trusted Elizabeth on her own mule — she could hardly sit upright, so he had put her on in front of himself, and now he clung to her burning form as if he would turn to a block of ice without her. And he could hardly keep himself in the saddle.

He rode into the outskirts of the city, holding her upright with one arm, her head fallen against his shoulder, her breath quick and shallow, and he began to call out to everyone he passed.

“Médico,” he said to a man with a barrow. “Médico — please — où est — un médico —”

The man looked at the two of them, shook his head in suspicion at the Spanish Darcy was conflating with the French, and went back to his work.

“Please!” Darcy said to a woman in a doorway, to two men outside a wine shop, to a boy who ran away. “A doctor. Where is there a doctor? ¿Médico?”

No one stopped for them. They were two strangers riding into town looking half dead, one of them raving for a doctor in no respectable tongue anyone would trust. In a country where every family had lost someone to war or fever, no one was looking to invite trouble into their homes.

He was losing her. He could feel it in the change of her weight. The way she had leaned into him with intent and the seeking of comfort earlier in the day, and now, she was simply limp. His voice split, cracked as it had not done since he was an adolescent.

“¡Quina!” he shouted. He had no idea what it meant. It was probably not a prayer, but it was the best thing he had, and he could only hope someone might know it for the desperate plea it was. “¡Quina! For God's sake — ¡quina! Somebody — ¡quina!”

A woman stopped. An old man lifted his stick and pointed — not at a house but along a way, up toward the cathedral. “El padre. Vaya al padre. Padre Ignacio.”

The church had taken its own share of the war — a scar of new stone in an old wall, a saint in a niche with his face gone. There was a low house, and out of it came a man in a cassock, holding a basket and bending over to examine the flowers outside his door. Darcy kicked the mule and called out to him. “Padre Ignacio?”

The man turned, and Darcy clutched Elizabeth tighter as he urged the mule on. The padre had the tired, compassion-worn face of his profession, but the instant he saw the fevered, impassive woman in Darcy’s arms, he dropped his basket and rushed forward.

“¿Está viva?” he called as he came near.