"Tabitha…?"

The name came out poorly. His mouth had been dry for too long and his lips weren't quite his yet. But he said it, and Tabitha bent over the cot and put her hand on his cheek and her face was the face he had been looking at in his head for twenty-one years. She said:

"You took your time."

Lucian closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, because he was not at all sure she would still be there when he opened them. She was. She was sitting on her stool with the lamp behind her and the bird at her throat catching its light.

"Where am I?"

"Edessa. Three days past your fever breaking. You're going to live. You're not going to like the next month very much, but you'll live."

"Where's my—where's Demetrios? My companion?"

"At the moment, he's asleep in the courtyard. He hasn't left you since he brought you in. I'll send for him when you can sit up, which is not yet. Drink this."

The cup was at his mouth. The pomegranate juice. Lucian drank what she gave him. She lowered his head back to the cot and wiped his eyes for him with the corner of a clean cloth, the way she had been doing for him for three days while he had been doing nothing much at all.

"How long have you been—doing this?"

"In Edessa? Eighteen months at the hospital, three years in the city. Enslaved. Freed. Not married to anyone."

"How long have you known I was…me?"

"Three days. I knew the morning your fever broke and you looked at me clearly for the first time, although I doubt you remember it. I had Demetrios for company while you were doing whatever you were doing inside your head. He told me where you'd both been. There's a great deal of it. You can tell me your half when you can talk for more than a sentence at a time."

Lucian tried to take this in. He could not. The room kept rearranging itself around the bird at her throat, which was the only fixed point he could find, and the rearranging was using more of him than he had to spare. A great wave of something he could not name washed over him and Tabitha, who had clearly seen this expression on her patients before, lowered his head a little farther into the pillow and put the cool cloth back on his forehead and did not ask him to articulate any of it.

"Sleep, my dear, lost, brother. We'll have time. Sleep."

Lucian slept.

Lucian recovered, after that, in the slow honest way a man recovers from a disease that nearly kills him—a week of weakness, a week of returning interest in food, a week of short angry walks around the small inner courtyard of the hospital under his sister's supervision and her commentary on the pace of his progress, which she considered insufficient. By the end of the third week he could read for an hour without his eyes blurring, eat what he was given without negotiation, and sit upright on the stone bench in the courtyard talking with Demetrios for a full afternoon without falling asleep against his shoulder. Tabitha pronounced him no longer in danger of dying and merely in danger of being an idiot, which was, she said, his baseline medical condition.

Demetrios had been admitted to the ward on the second day after Lucian's fever broke. He had spent a fortnight in the courtyard believing his beloved was dying and the better part of another fortnight learning, in fragments delivered by Lucian's sister between her shifts, that she was, in fact, Lucian's sister and not some random Syrian woman who happened to match her description. Demetrios sat on a stool beside Lucian's cot for hours at a time, holding his hand and looking at him with an expression Lucian had not previously seen on Demetrios's face and hoped not to be the cause of again. Veritas was permitted into the courtyard but not into the ward, on the grounds that no monkey had ever been admitted to a Greek hospital and they were not about to start with this one. He registered his opinion of the rule by stealing the porter's hat twice on the first day and a third time on the second, after which the porter decided to leave his hat at home.

Two Years A Slave

As Lucian recovered, he and Demetrios spent hours together in the courtyard. Tabitha would come out to check on them every hour or so. On one of these occasions, when she had finished her watch and was encouraging Lucian to come to bed, he stopped her. "You've yet to tell me what, exactly, happened to you? First I thought you'd died of the plague. Then I heard you might have been taken by slavers. Now, somehow, you're a nurse. What happened to you?"

Tabitha hesitated a moment, as if these events were not among those she was anxious to relive. Then she sat on the bench across from Lucian and Demetrios. "You said you knew Mother had died. I tried to care for her but then I came down with the plague myself. I was very sick, but just as I recovered, the slavers came. They came over the eastern wall just before dawn. I was in the temple courtyard. The first I knew of the raid was the priest. He had been standing at the altar with a lamp when a Saracen who came over the wall killed him on the spot. He dropped the lamp, which I think was what woke the others."

Tabitha recited this as if she had told this story before, Lucian thought, perhaps to herself, perhaps to whoever in Edessa she trusted with the telling. The weight had been worn off the words.

"They tied us at the wrists and the necks. The ones who could walk. The ones who couldn't were left. They didn't kill them; they didn't need to. We walked for thirteen days. We slept on the ground. We ate what they gave us, which wasn't much. Eighty of us, and five died on the road. I was sick again for two of those days—lightly, the way you can be a little sick when you've already had the worst of a thing."

"Oh, my gods. My poor little sister!"

Tabitha shrugged. "It got me to Edessa. They sold us at the market here, half a mile from where we're sitting. A merchant from Edessa bought three of us together. His name is Aurelius Demetrias—not your Demetrios; the most common name in this city, you'll get used to it—and he is a silk-broker who deals with Antioch four times a year. That's a piece of the picture you'll want for later. He took me to his house for inspection. His wife saw the marks on my face and asked me, in slow trade Greek, the way you'd test a slave's understanding, whether I'd had the pox. I said yes. She said, Then you'll do. Their little boy was very sick that week. They thought he was going to die. They wanted a nurse who couldn't catch it."

"Did he live?"

"Telephos. He was four. He's seven now. He sends me a clay tablet every month with his letters on it. He's a terrible scribe and a sweet child and I love him as much as I have loved anyone since I last loved you."

Lucian had to take a moment with that.

"I nursed him for two months," Tabitha said. "The household doctors had told the parents he didn't have a chance. I sat with him and gave him water with honey and pomegranate juice, hour after hour, and sponged him cool, and sang him the songs Mother sang to me when I was small, and on the morning of the sixty-third day his fever broke and he asked me for a peach. He's been my responsibility in one way or another ever since, although the law isn't involved in it anymore. When he was strong enough to ask his father to keep me, his father did better than that. He freed me, properly, with the magistrate as witness. He paid for my contract back to the Saracens, which he didn't have to do, so that no one could ever say I was a runaway. He gave me a small stipend that he still pays. I lived in their house for another year, looking after Telephos. Then I came to the hospital, because I'd discovered I was good at this, and the hospital needed me, and I'd had enough of being someone's freed slave even in a kind house."

"And now you live here at the hospital?"

"Practically. I share rooms over a baker's shop with two other nurses. We get along. I have friends. I see Telephos every Sabbath, when Aurelius brings him to me and I take him for a walk along the wall and we eat fried fish from the stall by the south gate. I have a man I see, sometimes. He's a copyist at the public library; nothing serious, but enough. I am not lonely. I love my work, hard as it is. I have a life that suits me. So, you see, even the worst things that happen to you can turn out all right, if you can just live through them."

Lucian looked at his sister for a long moment, then opened his mouth to speak. She held her hand to stop him. "Demetrios told me about Father and Uncle. I had heard rumors but I didn't know. I'm sorry. I know you loved them."

Lucian took her hands and smiled. "At least you are all right. Our family isn't dead as long as any of us remain."

A Reason To Be Leaving

Although he'd barely been in it while Lucian was ill, Demetrios had gotten a room at an inn and, now that he was feeling better, Lucian joined him. Sleeping together felt so perfect after nearly so long without. There didn't seem to be any particular reason to leave Edessa; his sister was there and he wasn't sure where else he'd want to go, anyway.

But one evening Tabitha came to their room with an expression Lucian had not seen on her in the weeks of his recovery.

"Sit down, both of you. Don't get up. We have new cases. Six in three days. Last week we had two. The week before, one. Two weeks before, none. The pattern is what we saw in Samosata in the autumn of the year of the raid, when there were ten cases at the end of the first month and fifty at the end of the second. The physicians have called a meeting tomorrow. Personally, I think you should ride for Antioch in the morning instead of waiting for the next caravan, and I think you should ride hard."

Demetrios was already throwing his things into packs. "How bad do you think it will be?"

Tabitha considered. "I have been working with plague survivors for three years and listening to old physicians who've worked with them for thirty. The way it descended in Samosata was a minor one, by their reckoning. This one feels worse. I think we are at the beginning of something that is going to run for years. I think it will reach Antioch within the month and Rome by spring. I want to be wrong. I do not expect to be wrong. I want you on the road in the morning anyway."

Lucian looked at her.

"And you?"

"I'll be fine; I'm immune. (So are you, now.) Telephos is immune. My friends mostly are, because they're nurses." She shook her head. "The hospital will be full by Saturnalia. I will not be idle, Lucian. I will be doing exactly the work I was made for, and I will be doing it in the city where I have built a life."

"And…what about me?" Lucian asked, somewhat plaintively.

"If you haven't already found what your life is about, you will. But not here. Tell me, how is it you want to live the rest of your life? As a traveling rhetor? As a writer, as Demetrios tells me you've already got books in the Great Library of Alexandria? As a teacher? Candlestick maker?"

Lucian laughed. "Why can't I be all those things?"

"You can, if you want," Tabitha agreed. "You just have to focus. It sounds like you've been living without a plan. You go here, you go there. Solve a little murder here, calm a feuding town there. There's nothing wrong with that; as long as that's the call of your heart. But if it isn't, if you're just doing that because you're too lazy to make a plan for something different, then there's everything wrong with it."

Lucian grinned ruefully. "Do I have to decide tonight?"

Tabitha smiled. "You don't have to decide, ever. And you certainly don't owe it to me to present a plan for approval. But do think of what I've said, won't you? In Antioch, and then further along as soon as possible. You can't catch the plague again, but Demetrios hasn't yet had it. And either way, living surrounded by the sick, unless it's your calling to care for them, isn't nearly as much fun as you might imagine. Everything comes to a standstill. Food is scarce. Everyone becomes too afraid to leave their homes." She rose, and added, "Demetrios: I charge you to care for Lucian as I would."

Demetrios nodded solemnly. "Look after him" she continued. "He will be careless. He will overwork. He will argue with people in the street. He will say things he should not say to magistrates who are not in the mood to hear them. You will know which fights to let him have and which ones to walk him out of. He will not always thank you for it. Walk him out of them anyway."

Demetrios took Tabitha's hand and held it for the length of perhaps four breaths.

"I so vow," he said. "And you should also know that I would rip out my own heart rather than let harm come to him."

"Write to me," Tabitha said. "Both of you. The silk-broker route through Antioch takes about three weeks. Aurelius Demetrias will hold mail for me. I will write back."

"I will."

Lucian and Demetrios were packed before the sky had even thought about brightening.

Westward

Lucian and Demetrios rode to the west gate of Edessa in the cool blue of the pre-dawn, the papyrus chest strapped behind Lucian, the olive box wrapped in cloth in Demetrios's saddlebag, the leather satchel of figs and bread and dried apricots Tabitha had packed and Lucian had protested were too generous slung across Lucian's chest. Veritas rode on Lucian's shoulder with the alert attention he seemed to reserve for the start of each new adventure. Lucian had no idea how the monkey knew.

The road ran straight ahead toward the line of hills they had ridden in over a month before, gold-brown now with the wheat stubble of the late harvest, pale blue in the distance under a clear autumn sky. Behind them, in a city that was just beginning to register that something was coming for it, Tabitha walked back to the hospital to start the day's rounds.

At the top of the rise above the western road, Lucian reined in and looked back.

Edessa lay in the bowl of its valley with the citadel rising on its mount above the walls and the smoke of its early morning fires going up in pale columns. He had ridden in ill enough to die and was riding out well enough to travel.

Demetrios came up alongside him. "So what's next, brother?" he asked after an appraising moment

Lucian spurred his horse on, and Demetrios did the same. "Still a good question. You're good at listing options."

Demetrios thought for a moment. "I think the first task is to decide what you want to do. Then you can consider where you want to do it."

"I told old Celer in Tingis that I would never get tired of traveling. But you know, maybe I have done enough of that. By Apollo, I've been to—we've been to probably half the whole world. Maybe it is time to settle down somewhere for a while, just to have a chance to think about everything we've seen and learned. And maybe to write about it, too."

Demetrios considered. "Well, you can't just write; there's no money in that. Except that if you write something that becomes popular, that sells your services as a rhetor, which in turn gives you the money to write more. So you just need a place you can find speaking engagements; because, let's face it, you can write literally anywhere."

They rode in silence for a while. "You should expand that story you told about the island with the weird tree-girls. Make a whole adventure out of it, like Homer's Odyssey. But with more fantasy. And maybe less raping."

"You're saying I should avoid the gritty realism of the Golden Fleece and the Cyclops?"

Demetrios said, "Exactly. Wait, was that a joke?"

Lucian laughed. "I can say anything as long as I preface it by saying it's a lie. Especially if I say it with gravitas. For instance…'I have nothing true to tell, not having had any adventures of significance, so I've taken to lying. But my lying is far more honest than others', for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar!'"

By now Demetrios was laughing so hard he could barely remain on his horse. "By Zeus, I think you've got it!"

They rode toward Antioch, and from Antioch toward the sea, and from the sea toward Athens, and from Athens toward the rest of their lives.

Travelers, together, forever.