A Test of Faith

I held the spoon and the lota and I did the only sum that mattered, which was not who put the poison in the water but how I was going to get clean water into two dying men inside a room that had been sealed against the whole world by a man who half wanted them dead.

The lota had come up the hill from the bedchamber. The bedchamber was the room a great lord had walked into on muddy feet an hour before he walked into this one. So the water in the lota was suspect, and the water in the lota was the only water I had, and a thready heart that had stopped once already that night needed a spoonful every little while or it would dry itself back into failure, and a swelling throat needed wetting to stay a throat. I had two patients who could not last the night without water and one vessel of water I could not give them. That is the kind of problem they do not teach you, because the answer is supposed to be obvious: you fetch more water. You walk to the tap.

There was no tap. There was a sealed door and a man at it whose word was the only thing that opened it, and the word, just now, was no.

"Captain," I said. "When you carried the prince up, did anything come with the water. A jug. A skin. Anything that held more than this lota."

"The lota only, my lady." He had set the spoon down when I took it from him and he was watching my hands the way he had learned to, reading the trouble off them before I named it. "They lit out fast. There was no time to pack a sickroom."

"Then this is all the water in the room."

"It is."

I looked at the lota. It was good brass, chased around the lip, the kind of vessel a court keeps for a dying prince so that the last thing to touch his mouth is beautiful. Somewhere in it, maybe, were five drops of a heart-medicine in spirit, or maybe nothing at all, because I had no way to look at water and see what was dissolved in it, and that was the whole horror of the thing. In the life I lost I would have sent it to a bench and had an answer by morning. Here I had my nose, which had already told me the worst of it, and my caution, which told me a nose is not a verdict.

"Light a flame," I said. "A diya will do, the steadiest one. And I want the smallest clean vessel anyone can find. A temple bowl. A lota, emptied and rinsed. An ink-pot, scoured out. Anything that will sit in a flame and not crack."

Vyas's voice came out of the place by the shelves where he had not moved. "You mean to make water."

"I mean to make it safe. Heat takes the foul out of water. It will not take out a poison, if there is one in this lota, so I am not going to use this lota. I am going to use what the camphor has been keeping the damp off." I turned and looked at the walls of palm-leaf and paper, three hundred years of them, the cold that lived in old sandstone, the lamp-niches sweating faintly where the warmth of the diya flames met them. "This is the highest, coldest, driest room in Devali. Stone like this weeps. There will be water in here that never saw a channel or a tank or a cup. I only have to gather it and boil it, and I will have a few spoonfuls that no hand in this room has touched. It will not be much. A heart drinks slowly. It only has to be enough, and it only has to be clean, and I would rather give a prince three honest spoonfuls an hour than a flood I cannot vouch for."

It is a strange thing, to stand in the holy heart of a kingdom and announce that you intend to wring drinking water out of the sweat of its walls. The attendant who had been trimming the diya wicks looked at me as though I had proposed to drink the lamp ghee. But the captain was already moving, finding the cold lamp-niches with his soldier's hands, pressing the back of a knife to the sandstone and watching the blade come away beaded, and Vyas was watching me the way he had watched me name the archive, which is to say he was doing a sum and not liking where it came out.

"You could simply trust the water," Daman said.

He said it gently, from the door, the way he said everything, a reasonable man offering a tired woman the easy road. "It came from the prince's own bedside. His own household drew it. You insult a great deal of loyal service, my lady, by treating a sickroom lota as though it were a thing crept up out of the Lowwater. The prince is thirsty. Give him his water and let him drink."

And there it was, laid on the floor between us in the lamplight: the whole of it, in one soft sentence. Drink the water. Trust the lota. Have a little faith.

"I would be glad to," I said. "Will you drink first."

Nobody in the room moved.

I did not raise my voice. I have learned that you do not chase a man like Daman, you set the thing down in front of him and let him decide in front of witnesses whether to pick it up. "It is good water, you say. Drawn by loyal hands, beyond suspicion. Then there is no harm in it, and a swallow of it will settle the prince's nerves better than any spoonful from a damp wall, because it will have come from the hand of the man who loves him best." I held the lota out across the room toward the door, level, steady, the brass catching the flame. "Drink, Thakur Daman. Half of it. Show the prince his water is safe and I will give him the other half myself, gladly, and beg your pardon for a physician's nerves. A test of faith. You have faith in the water. Prove it, and I will share it."

He looked at the lota. He did not move toward it.

It is a small thing, a man not crossing a room. In a court it is nothing, a great lord does not fetch his own lota, he has people for the crossing of rooms. But this was a sealed chamber with a prince awake on the table and a High Jyotin weighing what was true, and every soul in it understood, in the held breath, that a man certain of his water drinks it, and a man who will not drink his own offered water has told the room something his mouth never will.

"This is theatre," Daman said. "I will not be made a player for a witch's amusement."

"Then I will not be made a poisoner's instrument for a lord's convenience," I said, and I drew the lota back, and I turned my shoulder to him and gave it to the captain. "Pour it out. Onto the floor, where I can see it go. Not back in any vessel. Out."

The captain poured it out. The water ran dark across the holy stone and found the seams between the flags and was gone, and I watched it go the way you watch a thing you cannot get back, because if I was wrong, if the lota was clean, I had just thrown away the only easy water in a sealed room and bought myself a night of wringing walls for nothing. I am wrong sometimes. I have been wrong over a body. The difference between me and Vaidya Ojha, choking on the floor at my feet, is not that I am never wrong. It is that I do not arrange the room so that being wrong looks like the gods.

"Daughter of Arun Devar." Vyas, quiet, from the shelves. The tired undertone was back, the thing older than the rule. "You have just told me, without a shelf to show me, that you believe a lord of the realm poisons the water of the prince he kneels to. That is a far heavier thing than a register on a wall. I asked you to keep them alive. I did not ask you to accuse the crown's own blood in the one room where the walls do not need to repeat it."

"I have accused no one," I said. "I offered Thakur Daman a drink and he declined it. The walls heard that, not me. I am a physician. I do not know who put a hand on the scale. I only know that something is, and that a man with nothing on his conscience is thirsty, and that one is, and one is not." I turned back to the niches, to the cold beaded stone, to the work I could actually do. "Hold the flame steady, Captain. We have a long night to drink our way across, a spoon at a time, and we are going to do it on water I have watched come clean. That is the only faith I keep."

I had the diya lit and the rinsed temple bowl tipped to catch the first thin runnel off the stone, my whole attention narrowing down to the small honest task of making three spoonfuls of safe water in an unsafe room, when Ojha, on the floor at the foot of the table, made a sound.

Not a word. A wet, dragging pull, the sound of a throat trying to be a throat and most of the way to failing. I had bought him hours with weight and position and cold air, and the hours were spending themselves, and the swelling that had crested was cresting again, higher.

His hand came up off the stone. It did not reach for his collar this time. It reached toward me, the fingers working, the way a man reaches when the words will not come and there is something he must say before the door of him closes for good, and his eyes found mine over the lip of the reading-table, wide and wrong and absolutely awake, and his mouth shaped, around no breath at all, the start of the name he had got one word into and no further.

Thakur.

And then the throat closed, all the way, and the dragging sound stopped, and there was no sound at all from Vaidya Ojha, and I dropped the temple bowl and went for him across the holy floor with both my hands.