"Ah." Her eyes cut sideways to the thin stranger. "Well, if you are certain-"
Nichols' smile widened. The seventeenth century was a dangerous place at times, but assassins generally tried to blend in. "Here," he said, and took the satchel. "Now, please, at least one of us should be working. Thank you."
He gestured Mbandi inside and closed the door, plunging the hallway into dimness. "Through to that room," he said, hooking a hand toward the study. "Please, go to the fire, for the warmth. Ah, tea?"
"No, thank you," said Mbandi; but in the study, he stood against the mantel close enough to singe his robe. Another man's face might have dissolved into bliss. His did not.
Nichols dropped the satchel on his desk, then sat behind the cluttered surface, half-amused at doing so. The doctor is IN. He remembered early days as a physician, the occasional doubt or hostility, the whisper to the receptionist-maybe someone else, ma'am, with you know, more experience? He hardly needed to impress himself on a man who'd come-
"How far did you say? Asuncion. Is that in Spain?"
Mbandi looked up from clasped hands-for warmth, Nichols saw, not piety. "No, it is across the great Atlantic. Six days up the river Parana from Buenos Aires."
"Jesus H.-" Mindful of the robe, Nichols bit off the rest. "That is very, very far."
"It is. I crossed that ocean once before." He smiled as sharply as Nichols had earlier. "I liked it better this time. I could see."
In his mind, Nichols shoved aside the charts and papers. "You are a courier, then?"
"No, I carry no letters. Only, something far more important. Ah-" The traveler set himself in a formal stance. "Father Ruiz Montoya of Asuncion sends greetings to the famous Moorish physician of the United States of Europe, the 'medical-doctor' James Nichols. It is his understanding that in your time, it is known what will succeed in ours, and what will fail. The work he has given his life to-" Mbandi hesitated in his clearly memorized speech "-the reducciones, the Jesuit missions, of Guaraya-the security and happiness of so many-this is now known to fail. The communal ways of living he practiced among the Guarani Indians, and that others are said to twist into such misery in later centuries, cannot survive. Their enemies will inevitably destroy them. And so the Company of Jesus has decided, with wise logic, to cease those ways. The Guarani missions will close and the fathers be recalled to where their efforts will bear fruit."
Something twisted in Mbandi's expression. "Father Montoya cannot convince the father general that this is wrong. Or that-that his enemies, the paulistas, raiders of the missions, can be stopped. Can, sometimes, be saved. Or that there is hope and will beyond logic.
"Therefore, he will depart from the Company, and remain with the Guarani to aid them as he might. He has only a few years before his body will fail, but his spirit will not… Others are staying with him, choosing between their oaths and their dreams. His last hope, which failed him, he now wishes to pass freely to you."
Nichols concentrated on following the archaic German, and quashed the flicker of cynicism: No one gives anything for free, in this century or any other.
"Years ago, when word from your books first went through the Company, Father Montoya sent Father Gustav-" Mbandi smiled at that name "-to try to gain something which your time has shown to succeed. In the Apolo region of the Viceroyalty of Peru, near the mines of Potosi, grows a certain tree whose bark has the highest property of curing fevers-"
"Quinine?" said Nichols, jerking upright in his chair. "You, you speaking are-" he floundered a moment "-are speaking of quinine?"
"Yes, what is, will be, called cinchona roja. The bark from which a true febrifuge can be made."
Nichols stared at the fat satchel. "Cinchona bark?" Jesus H. Christ, there must be ten pounds of it.
He looked back to Mbandi in astonishment, and new respect. There'd been solicitors enough before; Grantville, an alien pocket of future lore, drew them like a lodestone. Princes and courtiers, spies and merchants, and never a one of them could offer Nichols what he wanted. Clean your cities, inoculate your people. Stop the plagues and the dying. Even in the midst of what up-time records called the Thirty Years' War, humans couldn't kill each other as fast as pathogens could. And quinine worked, even if it didn't cure. The dose wasn't large, this would be enough to…
On the heels of surprise, dull realization settled in, a medical official's mindset trumping a doctor's. Not enough. Not for the coming summer. Malaria was widespread, even through much of Europe; it killed popes in Rome, kings in Spain, merchants in Venice-Sharon!-even Oliver Cromwell, supposedly, although perhaps now they'd never know. The Jesuit's Bark that could treat it traveled in small quantities like this-exotic, expensive, like the contents of the glass jar Balthazar Abrabanel kept under lock in his apothecary.
"No, not the bark," said Mbandi hastily. "Although there is a little. Father Montoya offers, offers…" He shrugged aside his recitation and took two hasty steps to the desk and his satchel, opened the buckles and dumped out an oilskin bag. Tugged at the lacings-
"Father Montoya offers seeds."
Nestled in the oilskin was a shifting mass as dark and fine as pepper.
"He has said that there are fifty thousand in this bag, and also in this other. Each seed may grow one tree, to provide bark for years. I am to be giving one bag to you, Herr Doctor, so that you may find your own places to plant them-not here, but in warm countries." He gave a belated shiver.
"Fifty thousand," marveled Nichols. He felt a shiver of his own. "And the other bag?"
"I will take that to Africa," said Mbandi with infinite calm. "I will go wherever I can, and wherever the soil is right, and the slope, the air and the rainfall-I will plant them, five in a cross, as the cascarillos, bark-hunters, learned from the fathers. And I will go on again. This is what Father Montoya has asked of me, and I will do it."
Nichols absorbed this for a few moments. It stunned him with its scope, but… He lifted a hand. "Who is this Montoya? You said he was the provincial, the senior Jesuit in the region? What is his interest in quinine-why was he there at all?"
"He is a great man," Mbandi said sincerely. "He founded the mission at Lareto more than twenty years ago. At first it was only to teach Christian ways to the Guarani, the Indians near the Parana River…"
Nichols' patient questions-and an atlas from the shelf-pieced together the account. In what would become Uruguay and Argentina in Nichols' own time, a handful of Jesuit missions had themselves become pockets of communal society ever since 1609: Willingly organized, wisely ruled, and humane beyond anything else in this time, it seemed. Thousands of Guarani dwelt there without lords or kings; prospered; learned the catechism in their own tongue. "There was even an orchestra at San Mini," murmured Mbandi with wistful pride.
The coming of the up-timers changed all that in a year's time: both at the missions, and far away in Peru.
"Some books told of cinchona, the bark that cured fevers." Mbandi shrugged. "Who could tell what bark it was exactly? But all who heard came down upon the viceroyalty of Peru, hungry for bark worth a fortune for each quintal's weight." Government agents, adventurers, brigands, men who would be kings; a locust-swarm, seeking their feast. Many bark-cutters would have none of it; they claimed the cinchona as their own. Others fobbed off any bark as cinchona, and laughed at the joke with a pocketful of gold. All was chaos.
"And Father Montoya?"