Doctor Silas Blackwell's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The next morning the line was worse. A man Silas had treated the night before stood at the front, healthy now, telling everyone who would listen that Silas worked miracles. He had walked here from two towns over. Behind him waited strangers Silas did not know, faces gray with fever, some carried on doors. Word had spread past Willowmaw. Three doctors could not touch them all. Silas counted forty and stopped. Ashworth came to the door and looked at the crowd. He did not flinch. "We can't cut forty people in one day," he said. "Some will die on the step waiting." "Then we stop cutting one at a time," Silas said. His hands shook at his sides. He could not operate, but he could still think faster than any man he knew. "Most of these people don't need a knife. They need to be sorted." Matthias stepped out beside them, hat low, watching the road for guards. Every stranger in that line was a stranger who might know his face from a warrant. "Sorting takes a fourth pair of hands," he said. "We have three." "We have the sick themselves," Silas said. He walked into the crowd. He raised his voice. "Who among you can stand? Who can hold a cup? Who can wash their hands?" A dozen answered. He split the line. The strong he sent to fetch water and hold the weak. The fevered he laid on the ground in rows, worst first. He worked the rows on foot, kneeling at each body, reading the sick with his eyes and fingers. He named what each one needed. Ashworth cut only the few who truly bled or festered. Matthias mixed draughts by the box of supplies and moved down the rows pouring measured doses. The hanging herbs came down in bundles. The recruited patients carried, wiped, and lifted while the doctors judged. By dusk the rows had thinned. No one had died on the step. The man who called Silas a miracle worker now carried water for a stranger. Silas leaned against the doorframe, spent, his tremor bad from the long day. "You didn't heal them faster," Ashworth said. "You made the well ones do the lifting." "That is the sanctuary," Silas said. "Not three doctors. A whole town caring for itself." But Matthias was not looking at the rows. He stared down the road. Two of the strangers Silas had turned away, still fevered and angry, walked fast toward the town center. One pointed back at the clinic as he went. "They're going to the Council," Matthias said quietly. "To report a doctor who works miracles." He pulled his hat lower. "And they saw my face." Silas straightened. He had answered the flood. He had also just shown the Council exactly where to find the fugitive at his door.