Delia of Vallia by Alan Burt Akers Read Free Book Online Page A

sort possessed a tiny silver heart on each petal. These were vilmy flowers. The others were fallimy flowers.
    From the vilmy flowers was made up a paste that soothed the sores and eased the pains of the sufferers.
    From the fallimy flowers was made up a paste used in the normal way to scour cisterns. Now it scoured and cleansed everything that came into contact with the sickness.
    Delia did not personally inspect every flower petal to make sure. If some soothing ointment paste went onto the floor, not too much harm would be done. If scouring paste was rubbed into a sore — no, that would not do. Delia gave strict — very strict — orders about that.
    Stromni Elspa looked puzzled.
    “But, majestrix! I mean — whoever heard of anyone putting fallimy paste on their body? It would — it would—”
    “It would scour their chest most thoroughly.”
    “Majestrix?”
    “You’d be surprised. And I laughed.”
    At Elspa’s bewildered expression Delia bustled into caring for the next row of patients. If the sores could be kept clean, if the patient could be kept cool, there was a chance of recovery. Much of the sherbet drink, parclear, was consumed. Three days of terrible suffering, with suppurating sores breaking out all over the body, and three days of fighting to contain them and keep the patient cool, and then, if the gods smiled, the worst was over, the crisis past.
    And, anyway, Delia couldn’t explain about the little silver heart on the little blue flower petals. Poor Thelda! She always meant well...
    To think about the past was as fruitless now as to think about the future. All she could do was work and work and go on working. She took this dreadful attack of pestilence in the town as a personal affront. Detesting every moment of it, fighting nausea, biting down on vomit, she forced herself to care for the sick.
    Tandu made her rest. He did this with such auspicious tact and understanding for a Dwadjang as melted Delia’s heart. It was clear, if she did not let herself rest and sink her abused body down into sleep, then Tandu would feel personally responsible for the consequences. Knowing her Djangs, she was aware that it was not beyond the bounds of probability that, in order to save his Queen of Djanduin, he would personally slay every last sufferer. Then, the queen could rest.
    For some folk, and for Djangs, that was a normal way of thought.
    The dead were burned.
    Covered of faces, with gloved hands, the people dragged out the corpses and piled them up. The smell was not really tolerable; but with Delia, Empress of Vallia, standing so tall and firm, grasping a ghastly limb to help haul, gently pushing a twisted body up onto the pyre, no one could hang back. The strom and Stromni, gagging, took their part. The bodies flopped, some already swollen, some with tongues jutting, some just indescribable lumps of offal.
    The flames licked all clean.
    The bodies melted and ran, sloughing away. Hair frizzled. The corpses crisped.
    When the last were burned, there were more. In the town of Mellinsmot the doctors had been the first to die. Only one needleman remained, and he looked shriveled at the enormity of the catastrophe. As one batch of dead was burned, so another was dragged out. The process deadened the mind and calloused the spirit.
    But the avenging spirits of whatever gods or demons had sent this torment upon the people would not be appeased. Townsfolk huddled in the churches and the temple, and there the Affliction of the Sores of Combabbry sought them out, and consumed them.
    The needleman shook his head helplessly. His face looked like a chunk of indigestible meat after a dog had chewed and rejected it. His eyes lurked in shadowed pits beneath his eyebrows.
    “We can do nothing, majestrix, nothing.”
    “You can, Agron the Needle! You can alleviate their pain.”
    Agron’s leather wallet shook as he reached in to fetch out fresh acupuncture needles. In the cunning Kregen way he could insert a needle and