The Golden Fool
Chapter 10: Marrowgate

Chapter 10: Marrowgate

He traveled on, the landscape yawning into a three-day monotony of freezing wind, shallow gullies, and the black veins of marshland that grew fatter as he approached the river.

The banks had long since collapsed, taking half the ancient causeway with them, so that his crossing was less a march than a series of leaps from stone to stone, with a dozen chances to drown or snap an ankle along the way.

The first night, he slept beneath the upturned hull of a wrecked river skiff, gnawed by mites and the memory of a lullaby that might have been his own.

On the second, he found a half-abandoned shrine, its walls scorched with the sigils of every faith that had ever tried and failed to claim the hinterlands.

He left a coin for the dead, though he doubted any would bother to collect.

By the time the towers of Marrowgate came into view, Apollo was half-starved and wholly filth, and more than once had to pause and spit blood into the mud just to keep moving.

The city was a contradiction: a ring of pale, ossified ramparts rising out of the salt marsh, its flanks swaddled in the blue haze of woodsmoke and the stink of boiling tallow.

The gate itself arched, ribbed in bone-white stone, stood open to the morning, guarded only by two children in armor so mis-sized and patched that it looked like a carnival mockery of war.

He passed through the gate in silence. Neither child challenged him. The streets within were a warren of alleys, each clogged with refuse and the industry of the desperate.

Vendors hawked roots and scrap, mending women squatted in the gutters with their baskets of ragwork.

Above, the tenements leaned together like drunks, their windows stitched with the yellow light of crowded lives.

Every surface was etched with messages: threats, bargains, the names of gods long since lapsed.

A woman with a face tattooed in spirals offered to sell him a charm against plague.

He demurred, but she pressed a lump of beeswax into his palm anyway, whispering in a voice so hoarse it might have been disease itself.

He pocketed the charm, out of habit more than hope.

He walked until the alleys widened into a square, at the center of which hunched a structure that might once have been a temple, or a courthouse, or both.

Its roof was gone, blown off by fire or by time, and the columns that remained were webbed with iron scaffolds, as if someone had tried to stitch the ruins back together and then given up halfway through.

A notice board sagged at the edge of the square, its surface so layered with decrees, warrants, and pleas for help that the oldest notices had rotted into illegibility and the newest were already scored with knife cuts.

Apollo lingered there, scanning the script, most of it crude and ill-spelled, more threat than information.

But one posting caught his eye: a call for healers, any with even the meanest art, to report to the east quarter. Payment in coin, food, or safe lodging.

He considered ignoring it. But hunger, and the deeper ache of irrelevance, drove him toward the promise of utility.

The east quarter clung to the marsh edge, where the city’s walls were lowest and the stink of the salt flats crept in with every tide.

Apollo followed the signs, a crude red slash painted on doors, on gutterstone, even on the skin of the ailing and their minders, down a warren of alleys that narrowed with every turning, until the sky was a trickle of cold daylight and the ground was slick with the seepage of overfull middens.

The sick-house was a reclaimed warehouse, its upper windows knocked out and patched with rags and twisted wire.

The entrance was watched by two men in filthy blue sashes, leaning on cudgels, their eyes yellow with fatigue and suspicion. One of them stopped him with a bark.

"You a surgeon, then? Or just a picker?"

Apollo considered the word picker. He decided it was better not to ask. "I have some training," he said, letting his voice slip into the flat humility mortals expected.

The man grinned, showing a rack of teeth that had, at some point in the past, endured a violent sorting. "Don’t need ’training’ so much as hands." He jerked a thumb at the door. "Follow. Don’t touch nothin’ that ain’t breathing."

Inside, the air changed: it was thick not just with the wet, sweet reek of rot, but with the massed exhalation of dozens, maybe hundreds, of the dying and the doomed.

The cots were crammed so tightly along the floor that Apollo had to step over them, careful not to tread on arms or the loose, sallow feet that stuck out at random angles.

A woman, head shaven, arms banded with black string, met him near the rear, where a curtain of burlap offered a pretense of privacy for the most desperate. "You volunteering?" she asked, voice flinty.

He nodded, and she eyed him for a heartbeat, then shrugged. "Good. We need more help with the splits. The bleeding’s worst in the mornings, but you can start now. Tools are that way, if you don’t have your own."

She pointed him toward a scarred bench, where a roll of knives and hooks lay soaking in sour water.

He picked out a blade, its edge more jagged than true, and forced himself into the work. Each patient was much like the last: a child, a woman, an old man, all burning with fever and fighting the agony of eruption.

The disease began with a cough, then a darkening of the gums, then one day the flesh split open along the jawline or ribs, a black resin crusting at the wound’s lip. None survived long after that.

He did what he could. He cleaned, bandaged, sometimes cut away the necrotic tissue if the patient screamed loud enough to prove there was something left to save.

He found that if he hummed, not a song, exactly, just an old, repetitive phrase, the pain seemed to slow, and his hands moved less from memory than from the echo of another life.

The other orderlies watched him with something between contempt and curiosity. No one here had the energy for rivalry.

They simply worked, rotating the dying from cot to cot, hauling away the dead when space was needed.

After a timeless spell of blood and exhaustion, the head orderly, Apollo heard the others call her "Nara" tossed him a rag and jerked her chin toward the exit. "You’re done for now. Stand in the yard if you don’t want to take the sickness home."

He rinsed his arms in a barrel of brined water and staggered out to the yard, where the dying sunlight pooled in a slant of colorless amber.

The air was cold, edged with the promise of frost, but after the stench of the sick-house it felt almost clean.

He let himself slump against a post, closed his eyes, and counted the heartbeats slow until he remembered how to breathe.

A shadow fell over him. "You took the shift through dusk. People notice that." It was Nara again, eyes narrowed, the scars on her scalp catching the light in fine, pink traceries.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

She reached into a cloth purse at her belt and pulled out two coins, rough discs pressed with the crude likeness of a wolf’s head.

She pressed them into his palm; they were warm from her body, and heavier than he expected. "One for the work, one for the quiet. Some talk too much the first day."

He weighed the coins, recognizing neither the alloy nor the insignia. But worth was always arbitrary: the breath of mortal commerce, the promise of food or shelter. "Thank you," he said.

Nara shrugged, but her mouth twitched at the edges. "If you want more, come back tomorrow. If you don’t, nobody will curse your name. Just don’t cross the north alley after dark. They say there’s a cutter who preys on the weak ones."

He let the warning pass over him, the way a wolf lets the wind pass through its pelt. "Will you sleep tonight?" he asked, and surprised himself with the question.

She hesitated, then gave a sharp, amused grunt. "If the dead are kind, maybe. But there’s so many of them, some are bound to be bastards."

She thumbed her nose, leaving a streak of black across the bridge.

"Try the stew house by the river. It’s cheap and thick, and they pour two cups for every coin if you don’t ask what’s in it." She turned, then paused.

"You’re not what you look like," she said, not quite a question.

He smiled. "No one is," and the words hung between them, strangely cordial.

She left, and Apollo lingered until the light was almost gone, the yard slowly filling with the shufflings of other orderlies, the odd, hushed laugh, the unsteady singing of someone already drunk.

The coins burned in his palm, marking him: not as a god, or even a healer, but as someone who could be owed or paid, who had a stake in the world’s slow turning.

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