"All men die." Mbandi's eyes clenched shut. "Father Gustav will die, in my place, because Father Montoya sent me away instead. I know this. I cannot fail him."
"I took an oath…" whispered Nichols. Furniture groaned over the floor behind him, almost silencing his voice.
"All the fathers took oath as well. To the pope himself, in person, to obey his word. Those who saw what must be done, t-they broke it. I ask you, break yours this one time. Let me prove myself and my task. Please."
Nichols rose slowly, walked to his desk. He looked from the telephone to the satchel, and back; from the twentieth century to the seventeenth, aspirin and IVs to unknown quinine. The atlas was crumpled across Central Africa, he saw as he picked it up; sighed, and slammed it shut.
"Help me get him on the couch," he rasped to Kircher. "Then we need to grind up a handful of this bark he has brought, and make an infusion."
The dry chills lasted for five hours; the first infusion, cautiously gauged at thirty grains of an unknown powder's strength, did nothing. As the windows darkened, Mbandi's shudders faded to lassitude-and his temperature began to rise.
"I don't know how long this crap takes to work," muttered Nichols, as Father Kircher poured another cup infused from sixty grains. "Or if it works at all." He slipped the thermometer from Mbandi's slack jaws. "One-oh-three and a bit. God damn it…"
"Keep trying," mumbled the traveler. His skin was as glossy and hot as a kettle. "Remember, I have lived through this before."
"Yes, and each time it's been tearing up your liver." Nichols had to steady his head as he drank. He'd doused the study lights long before; firelight and lamplight were gentler.
Two more hours. One-oh-four. Nichols picked up the phone, gripped it tightly; set it down. "Everything I do does harm," he muttered. "Always did. Come on, you fucking lunatic, you better be right or I'll kill you myself."
One-oh-five, and Mbandi began to babble snatches of words, his eyes no longer tracking. German. "Loreto, it's fallen." Spanish. "Paulista, este non hombre-este perro." Fragments of African dialects. His hands fretted at the blanket's edges, as though they could piece the words into sense. Sometimes, when he glimpsed Nichols' face above his own, he cried out in joy, spoke rapid tongues that sounded a continent away. "Malanje-"
Still the fever did not break. For another hour, Nichols sat slump-armed in the armchair, listening to garbled pain and joy and history. Is this how they saw us, these glimpses? Prester John's balloon, all right. But the fever did not break, did not break…
"A hundred and twenty grains, Father. This is the last try."
Kircher's thick fingers rasped the bark into powder, timeless in the firelight; steeped it into a glass of hot water. "It is no easy thing to clash with an oath, for some men," he said as the red tinge spread through the liquid. "I still believe-aside from my duty-that Father-Provincial Montoya was wrong in his choice. But I would not wish to have been in his place."
"Do you think I'm breaking mine? Because I'm afraid to decide?"
"I think," said Kircher slowly, "that man is making a very brave choice, and you are the instrument of it… and this too requires courage. You will know soon enough. Come, this is ready, is it not?"
Mbandi focused long enough to gulp the liquid, sighed "Cinchona roja, Mamani," and closed his eyes in sunken sockets.
Old in the ways of healing, Nichols took a meal in the kitchen, exchanged quiet words with an equally tired Kircher, and rested a while. He'd matched his strength against disease before, knew to husband it. In a weary predawn hour, he walked back into the dimness, the frail form on the couch; cradled the fire-hot head for the thermometer's test.
One-oh-three.
"Well," said Nichols softly. Beside him, Father Kircher murmured something-not English, not German, but Latin. He laid his own hand upon Mbandi's forehead a moment, and withdrew it. "Go, then," he said more strongly in German. "And may God go with you."
He turned away without another word.
Mbandi's eyes flickered, opened, fixed on Nichols' own. "Malungu. Kamerade," he said in a slur of German and-Kimbundu, was it? "Malungu, there is for us, no home behind. Only ahead. Seeds, across oceans. Malungu seeds."
Thin new-fallen snow crackled under Nichols' steps, frozen grass beneath. The knife-edged arc of the Ring of Fire had eroded to a gentle slope here, a good walk southeast of Grantville, a displaced circle knitting slowly with its surroundings. He looked back over fallow fields and thought of hoof prints leading west, toward Lisbon and a long voyage south. "Do you think it'll work?" he asked.
Ed Piazza shrugged inside his parka-carefully, when cold made the old wound ache. "Don't ask me now. I did this on your word, remember."
"Yeah. I don't doubt him-I might not be able to outthink a Jesuit, but I know he wasn't lying or faking, not half-cooked like that. Another hour and I'd have filled him with aspirin. Winter journeys are a bitch-must have triggered the relapse."
"Ah," said Piazza. "About that. I talked to Margritte for a while-"
"Hang on. I figured something out this morning. Amazing what sleep will do… Mbandi said that Father Gustav would 'die in his place.' " Nichols shortened his stride to climb the slope. "Let me play Jesuit for a second. Assume that the Jesuits got everything they could from us about their own history, and that Montoya gets a good part of that relayed to him as a provincial father. He knows he will ordain Mbandi in a few more years… but he sees that in our history, no black Jesuit appears until Healy in 1850."
Piazza sighed. "I get it. If Mbandi died fighting at the missions before he was ordained, then he disappeared from history. Down in the grain, just another foot soldier who changed sides."
They both paused at the crest. "Right," said Nichols, trying not to puff. I'm not old, just need four hundred years to catch my breath. "Maybe that got to Montoya after a while. So he sent Mbandi away, broke the timeline-and somehow Mbandi found out, or figured it out. That's hard on a man-because you always feel relief first. Always." He stared at the horizon as he spoke, a thousand yards away; hearing the burr of a mortar fragment flying past his own ear, the impact into another man's flesh, the instant's thought: Thank the Lord it was him and not me.
"No wonder he tried so hard to convince me, then, is it? No letters, no proof. Just the sickness he was carrying himself, and the bark to cure it."
Piazza stuffed his hands in his coat pockets. "Well-as I said, I talked to Margritte, and she mentioned something that seemed peculiar. She was chatting with the coachman who'd driven Mbandi into town, and the coachman said this 'schwartzenjesuit' was riding on the roof the whole last day in; no coat, no robe, just shirtsleeves. In that terrible cold! The guy said he could practically hear the Jesuit's teeth chattering over the noise of the coach wheels. Now, tell me what that was about."
Nichols closed his eyes for a moment, smiled. "Oh, I can tell you. He wanted to make sure." He shook his head ruefully, kicked a clot of frozen earth loose. "Damn! You see? No letters, no backing from the Company-more likely the opposite-and everyone knows Jesuits are tricksy, right? How could we trust him? But nobody lies through a high fever-so he tried to bring one on, kick-start the 'quartan fever.' No logic games, just humanity. Not many'd take that sort of chance, just to save a year." His smile faded. "Of course, he knew that he doesn't have that many years, carrying falciparium. Not many like him around. Not many malungu. One less, now." That leaves just about one.
"I should get back," said Piazza. "You can freeze yourself like him if you want… But this 'malungu' thing. It sounded familiar, so I checked. Anyone told you about the Gowens, that family owned a farm a bit north of the Ring?"
"No. What's the point? I sure can't meet 'em now."
"They called themselves Melungeons-mixed-race, bit of everything; Indian, European… African. Angolan."