What the Fifteenth Dry Day Does to a Body With No Well of Its Own

I was fetched south of the old walls a little before the third bell by a boy who ran the whole way and could not say what was wrong, only that a man was down and would not get up. I do not often cross into the New Quarter. No one there sends for me until the sending is the last thing left, and by then the room has usually decided the matter without me.

He was young, perhaps nineteen, a potter’s hand by the clay dried gray to the elbow and the small burns, old and new, along the forearms that come from reaching past the mouth of a kiln. Skin hot and dry, and no sweat on him though he lay full in the sun — the same absence I have taken from the Ulev queues, and it tells me more than the fall does. Tongue swollen, split along the center seam. Pulse fast and thin at the wrist, plainer at the throat. Two empty jars beside him in the dust, a yoke thrown clear, and behind him a dragged line of heel-marks running back toward the river. He had carried water from the Karvel — two quarters off, the nearest clean draw a well-less street has — and had come within sight of his own door before the walk took the last of him.

A man was already with him when I came. The sinker the corner knows as Harl Venn — the one who has been sounding the plots south of the walls with an iron rod this six-day — had seen the boy go down from the plot he was working, pulled him into the awning-shade of the nearest wall, and wetted his lips from his own skin. He had done, untrained, most of what the first quarter-hour asks, and undone none of it, which is rarer than it sounds. I told him so.

I cooled the neck, the wrists, the crease behind the knee with the water Venn had carried. Salt in small sips, one swallow and then the wait, because a stomach dried this long will throw back a full draught and cost more than patience would. Feet above the heart. Then I waited, which is most of what this work is.

The pulse came down over half an hour, from racing to merely quick. He gave his name — Denek — before I asked it, which is the first honest sign that the mind has come back ahead of the body. He is hand to the potter Renna Vos, whose letter the Gazette carried this morning, the one counting fifteen dry days and no yoke come down her lane. He had gone for the water himself so she would not have to. That is the whole of the cause, and there is no more to find in it: a well-less street, a boy young enough to believe the distance was his to spend, and a sun that does not bargain.

This was the dry collapse and not the Weaver’s Street fever. The fever sweats; this does not. A district that treats the two as one thing treats the wrong one wrongly, and south of the walls there is no district to treat either — only the neighbors, and Harl Venn’s rod.

He will sit to the wheel again inside the six-day, and lift nothing heavier than a jar of his own drinking before then. Venn struck water at eleven feet on the third plot that same afternoon, sweet and standing; the street will have its well before the rain remembers to come, and the walk that took Denek down will not take the next one. I do not expect to be called south again for this.