The Stair He Climbed Without Help

I took the night-lamp off his sill this morning. Four days without fever, pulse steady at rest, and the flinch gone from his hands when the ward door swings hard against its frame — that particular flinch outlasts the fever that caused it, I have learned this month, by longer than the ward likes to admit. I did not remove the lamp because four days is a rule written anywhere. I removed it because I had run out of reasons to keep lighting it.

His name is Radko. He came off the hold nine days ago with a rash-less fever and no manifest that claimed him — the ship still answers to no office as anything, and for the first two days, neither did he. The Harbourmaster’s clerk wanted a surname for the ledger before I would let the isolation open its second week. I told him the surname would keep. The pulse would not.

He has no house in this city. Whatever guild he sailed under went down with a vessel that has not yet been permitted a name of its own. This morning I walked him three doors along Guild Row to a room over the wheelwright’s, kept by a widow named Sera who has taken fever cases before and asks a man about his cough before she asks about his papers. He carried his own bag up the stair. I watched him do it rather than help him, because a man who cannot manage eleven steps four days clear of fever should not yet be believed about anything else he tells you. He managed them. Slowly, one hand flat against the wall the whole way, but on his own feet, and he did not stop to rest at the turn.

I learned this week, from a hand that was not mine and did not want to be named as having reached for it first, that someone in this city knew the shape of this fever before the ship ever came under tow — knew it from a smell, in a closed room, weeks before I needed the knowledge and had no register to enter it in. I am not going to write down more than that. She did not offer it to be written, and a body does not require your name to have been right about it. It rarely does.

Radko asked me, at the turn of the stair, whether the rest of his crew were owed anything he should be doing. I told him what I tell everyone at that particular turn: not tonight. Tonight the stair is the whole of it. He nodded like a man filing the answer away for later use, which is the only correct thing to do with an answer like that.