Chapter 15 · Chapter 15

The fever came up out of the lower lane on the fourth day, the way damp rises through plaster: first a stain the shape of nothing, then a softness that yields beneath a thumb.

I had been watching for it since the officer read his list at our door. Five households named, and four of them in the lane below us, where the looms stand, where the wool is washed in the same water it is dyed in, and where the runoff trickles into the same gutter it came in by.

Maryama said I had counted the names too many times. She spoke mildly, setting the flatbread down, using the voice she keeps for ordinary weather.

"Twice at the threshold, and twice again at the table," she said. "They are five. They will still be five at noon."

"At noon one of them will be burning to the back of a hand," I said, "and no one in that lane will send for a physician, because a physician is eleven maravedís and a name written into a stranger's book."

She looked at me the way she does when she has decided not to dispute a thing, and has also decided to remember that she held her tongue.

The bark had come in the parcel from Málaga. It had arrived with the letter, and the letter bore three lines regarding the price of paper and one regarding the safety of the road. Hasan read the whole of it aloud in the courtyard twice—once for the sense, and once because he had found his rhythm and did not care to lose it.

Then the parcel was mine, the column on the table remained half written, and I had tallied the names once more while he read.

Willow bark must be gathered early, before damp rots it, and dried where the sun will not scorch it. Ours had traveled too far to be prime, yet it was not spoiled. I spread it in the small courtyard behind the kitchen wall, upon the flat flagstone, turning it once in the afternoon as one turns a matter already resolved in the mind.

I prepared the decoction that night, after the oil lamps were trimmed. In a copper pot, a hand and a half of bark went into a jug of water, simmered down to a third, with crushed anise added at the end because the brew is sharp and the people in that lane have enough bitterness upon their tongues.

Honey followed, but only a single spoonful, and solely for the young ones. Not for the old man, whose digestion is frail. For him there was water infused with coriander and nothing more; he would complain of the thinness, and complaint is what a man offers when his strength begins to return.

Maryama sat with me through the boiling, her hands folded in her lap, withholding what she had come to say until the pot was lifted from the embers.

"Whose is it?" she asked.

"No one's. It is merely brewed."

"Whose will it be when they inquire?"

That was the true question, and I let it hang in the steam, for I had not yet shaped the answer for myself.

"The house's," I said at last.

The lane at daybreak smelled of size and wet fleece, and beneath both, that faint, heavy sweetness that rises from flesh heated by fever for two days. The looms were clacking in the first two doorways, as they always do. A loom does not halt for a sickness; a loom halts only for debt. In the third doorway the frame stood idle, and that was how I knew before crossing beneath the archway.

Zaynab, the dyer's widow, stood in her entrance, her forearms stained indigo to the elbow. She looked at the earthen jug, then at my face, and back to the jug, and a stiffness left her shoulders that she had carried since the alguacil's list had been proclaimed.

"He is within," she said. "He does not know the day."

"Then he has no need to know it. Half a cup when the morning turns, and half when the lamps are lit, with plain water between, and leave the shutter parted even if he curses the draft."

"And what does the house ask in return?"

"The house wants the weavers at their frames before the feast, for the house has wool waiting."

That was an honest answer and a useful one, and she accepted it as both, which is how a woman of the quarter survives.

Hamda's two sons drank theirs standing, one taking the cup from the other, making identical grimaces. Old Faraj refused the coriander infusion until I assured him twice that it was not the fever draught and that no one was withholding the stronger medicine from him.

The carder's boy bore the heavy jug for me over the final twenty paces and would not yield it up; I permitted him the burden, for a lad carrying an earthen jug through a lane where his mother's name is whispered carries more than water.

It was at Hamda's door that the coins appeared. She laid two coppers upon the stone sill, deliberately, as one sets down payment for an item already accepted, so that the transaction cannot later be named a favor.

I did not touch them.

"Take them up," I said.

"It is not charity. It is what I possess."

"I know what it is. Take them up."

She remained motionless. So I spoke plainly, for Hamda is not a woman who can afford an illusion.

"If those coppers pass from that stone into my palm, this becomes a trade. If it is a trade, I am dispensing physic for coin. If I dispense physic for coin, then I am a woman in this quarter keeping an unchartered ledger, and the penalty for that is not discharged in coppers. It is paid out of the house. You are not buying a draught from me. You are buying me a citation before the magistrate, and our house cannot afford the notice."

She stared at the coins for a silent breath. Then, with the outer edge of her slipper, she scraped them off the sill into the drainage channel—the sharpest sound heard in that lane all morning—turned inside, and pulled her door shut against me. It was the greatest mercy anyone showed me that week.

The clerk was waiting near the head of the alley when I emerged from the final house. The register rested under his arm, still tied with its cord, which is how officials wait when they wish you to observe that it could be untied.

"That is a generous measure of remedy," he remarked, "for a woman who merely tends a domestic garden."

"It is a modest portion of herb and an abundance of boiled water."

"And dispensed without fee."

"It is dispensed."

He shifted the heavy folio to his other arm, offering a brief, cold smile toward the arch as if the masonry had uttered a folly.

"Things given freely," he murmured, "are the most troublesome to record. A price explains itself. A gift reveals nothing. Thus the ledger must ask: whose gift is it?"

There it stood between us, laid out upon the wet paving stones in the white morning glare by a man who had not once met my eyes.

"The house of Abu Ja'far," I replied.

I spoke without haste, in the even measure one uses for words long settled in the chest. Behind me, the shuttle resumed its beat in the second dwelling, and I thought: let him write to the rhythm of our work.

He opened the leather cover. It required a moment, and he had to wet his thumb against his tongue. He inquired after the spelling, and I gave it to him letter by letter, as it stands inscribed upon the older deeds, not as it is slurred in the street.

When he finished, he closed the clasp and observed that the price of flour would climb before the month's end, as though he had taken nothing from us, and turned down toward the river gate.

I returned by the upper street to avoid passing Hamda's shutter again.

In our courtyard, Maryama had turned the copper vessel upside down upon the bench, scrubbed clean—her customary way of delivering judgment without uttering a syllable. Hasan met me near the cistern with three eager questions in a single breath; I gave him no reply, and he accepted the silence, being fifteen and easily diverted.

Later, in the quiet of the afternoon, I sat once more before the draft of the contract. Málaga. Twenty-eight years of age. A scribe. The notary would require the remainder before the week ended: the names of the witnesses, the lineage of the man's father, whether the mother was freeborn, and the dower—that sum which must be recorded twice and read aloud before witnesses.

I had believed the reckoning was complete. Five households named: four down in the damp alley, and one at the bend where the drainage pools. I had tallied them at the entrance, at the meal, and again in thought, for a woman who hears her quarter read aloud by a bailiff learns to count twice.

Yet that fifth name upon the officer's parchment had not been a living household. It was an empty shell where only a stone wall remained upright, and I had assigned our own name to the vacancy without realizing it—treating it as shelter, rather than an account waiting to be settled.

When the lamps were extinguished, I went down to the inner room with a single wick, turned the heavy iron key in the lock, and restored the leather pouch to its recess against the north foundation. I stood there, resting my palm flat against the chilled masonry, steadying it as one steadies an unmoored weight.

Above, in the courtyard, the bitter bark lay drying on the flagstones. Below, in the weavers' lane, the shuttles moved across the warp. And in the magistrate's register, there existed a fresh line that read the house of Abu Ja'far, written without error.

The quarter had taken my family's name before it took my own. That is how protection is maintained, if it is to endure at all: first the outer wall, then the name of the house, and the woman only at the very end, when nothing remains between her and the street.

I lowered the wick, sat upon the lowest stone step in the darkness, and counted once more. The number was five, and the fifth was ours.