But Mary stood suddenly immobilized, jubilation overshadowed by a pall of apprehension.
Rachel’s hair had grown to her shoulders, hung gray and lank, and her eyes shone feverishly out of shadowed hollows. She looked at Mary as if she didn’t recognize her, asked plaintively, “Mary…?”
Mary fumbled at the chain, pulled the gate open, and at that moment Epona turned, and Mary saw Rachel’s right leg, the lower half of the pants cut away, the leg wrapped from the ankle to just below the knee in bandages soaked with pale, brownish patches.
Mary reached up for Rachel’s hand. “Rachel, what happened?”
She enclosed Mary’s hand in both of hers, but there was no strength in them. “I cut myself with that damn machete trying to clear some bamboo. Mary, I’m so glad to see you. Are you pregnant, or is it just those clothes?”
“It’s not the clothes. Rachel, don’t cry.”
“Why not?” She managed a wry laugh. “You’re crying.”
“Never mind.” Mary reached for Epona’s reins and led her through the gate. “The Doctor has to look at that leg. When did it happen?”
“I think… five, six days ago.”
Mary stopped, looked up at her with an emptiness bom of fear taking shape under her ribs. She stared at the stained bandage, and now she became aware of a faint odor she couldn’t name.
“Rachel, how bad is it?”
She grimaced. “It’s bad, Mary.”
“How bad?”
“Gangrene has set in.”
She said it as matter-of-factly as she might comment on the weather. Mary stood dazed, trying to assimilate the word gangrene. A killer and a cruel one, and in this new Stone Age without antibiotics…
Mary sagged against Epona’s neck, hands clenched in her mane, and turned her face away so Rachel couldn’t see her fear.
And yet…
Nehemiah. The Doctor had saved the old man’s life when his injured hand became gangrenous.
Yes, the Doctor had saved his life—by amputating his arm. Mary swallowed at the bitter, metallic taste in her mouth. But if there was no other alternative—
At least, she was sure the Doctor could do it.
“Look at the people,” Rachel said. “It’s hard to believe, Mary— so many people.”
Mary roused herself, looked around to see all the Flock gathering a short distance away. She grabbed Epona’s reins and urged her forward, shouting, “Somebody get the Doctor! Hurry! Bernadette, where’s Luke?”
Bernadette was hurrying toward her. “He’s coming. I told him—”
What stopped her was a flurry of movement in the crowd. The Doctor, with Luke in his wake, strode through the aisle provided him by the Flock. Mary’s breath sighed out in relief. “Brother, thank the lord you’re…”
But her voice failed her, she pulled back on Epona’s reins.
She didn’t understand what she saw in the Doctor’s face. In the four months since he had learned of her pregnancy, he’d shown her nothing but beatific solicitude, and that was what she anticipated now.
What she found revived with chill clarity the memory of a night in November when rain hissed at the windows of his barren room, when he had condemned Rachel with the evidence of her art.
Mary had forgotten that night. No, she hadn’t forgotten it, only put it aside as something to worry about later, after the baby was born.
The Doctor had not forgotten, nor forgiven.
Mary ordered Yorick to heel. He did, growling softly while the Doctor marched forward, the prophet, the messenger of righteous wrath.
Luke. She focused her attention, her hopes, on him. Luke would bring the Doctor around. He wouldn’t let any harm come to Rachel. When the Doctor stopped a few paces away, Luke continued toward Mary and Rachel.
The Doctor’s whip crack “Brother Luke!” checked him midstride.
It was then that Rachel said quietly, “Hello, Luke.”
He looked at her, seemed to sway toward her, then turned his pleading gaze on Mary, and she couldn’t make sense of his silence.
Finally he spoke, but not to Rachel. To Mary: “She shouldn’t have come here!”
Now Mary couldn’t make sense of his words. “Can’t you see she’s hurt, Luke? You told her to come here, you promised her help if she needed it.”
The Doctor rested a hand on Luke’s shoulder and spoke in the moving-of-mountains timbre of his sermons. “Brother Luke had no right to make that promise.”
Mary faced the Doctor and found in his pale eyes a wall of ice. “Brother, whether he had a right to or not, Luke did make that promise.”
The Doctor ignored that. “Is this the witch Rachel?”
Witch?
The word staggered Mary; she couldn’t believe it, and without thinking, she laughed. “What is this—Salem in the seventeenth century?”
“What do you find to laugh about, Sister Mary?”
“I… I just couldn’t believe you’d make such an accusation of someone who comes to you in her need.”
“She has come to the wrong place! God said to Moses, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ And I’ll not suffer a witch to enter this, the abode of the righteous!”
All around them, the Flock stood silent, accepting that grotesque statement without so much as a murmur.
And Luke remained equally silent.
Mary cried, “Luke! This is Rachel—the woman who nursed you through your sickness and treated you like a son! Can you face her, can you face your god and call Rachel a witch?”
Luke let his head fall back, eyes closed, before he turned to the Doctor. “Brother, I owe her my life. How can you say—”
“You owe this daughter of darkness nothing! I say she is a witch, and I say she will not set foot in the Ark!”
“I can’t believe she’s evil. You don’t know her, you can’t know—”
“I do know her! I see the mark of Cain on her when nobody else can.” He looked around at the Flock, then turned to Luke, pronounced with ringing contempt, “Or do you think you know better, Brother Luke? Do you think you can lead my Flock? Do you think you can lead them in the paths of righteousness? Because if you do, then I will step down, my Godly mission fulfilled, and you, Brother Luke, can take my place!”
Mary watched the transparent transition of emotion in Luke’s face: shock, uncertainty, fear, and finally defeated compliance. He slumped, staring at the ground, and Mary remembered the scars on his back. Yet she felt not a trace of sympathy for him, for the pain so patent in his face. She looked at him and despised him; she wanted to spit on him. She shook with the intensity of her loathing and cried, “Luke, you coward! You pitiful, heartless coward!”
Luke stood mute, and it was the Doctor who answered with a sharp, “Silence, Sister! Or I’ll know you’ve been tainted with her evil. I’ve given my judgment. She will go back to whatever hellish place she came from! You—you will turn your eyes away from me and go!”
That was for Rachel. She was watching the Doctor with a dispassionate gaze that did not waver for his vituperations. She didn’t speak; she only looked at him out of her pain-wearied eyes and silently manifested her recognition and acceptance of a sentence of agonizing death.
But if Rachel was willing to accept her fate in silence, Mary was not. The denial rose from every cell in her body, a flood of fear and grief that drove her forward, bore her to her knees at the Doctor’s feet. “In the name of your god, I beg of you—help her!”
“Sister, don’t ask me to—”
“Who else can help her? Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan! Jesus wouldn’t turn her away! You can’t—”