Chương 191: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-ONE: THE INSPECTION

Prior Bertrand came on the fourteenth of February with one servant and a mule. Marcus met him at the east gate because Okafor had asked him to and then had immediately said he didn't have to. He went anyway. The old man was helped down off the mule by a boy of about sixteen who did it the way you do a thing you have done four hundred times, and then Bertrand stood in the road and looked at the gate for a while without saying anything.

"It's forty feet," Marcus said.

"I can see that."

"Sorry." Bertrand waved a hand. He was smaller than Marcus had pictured. The letter had built something taller.

"Where's your hospital?"

"Clinic. Behind the market square."

"Take me there."

"You've been eleven days on the road."

"I have been eleven days on the road to see a clinic," Bertrand said.

"Take me there." Rue met them at the door and put her hand out to shake, which nobody in the eastern territories did, and Bertrand looked at the hand for a moment and then took it. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"You're the one who travelled," he said.

"Twenty-six stations."

"In December."

"The season starts in January." Bertrand went past her into the front room. It was full. Fever season meant eleven people on the benches and two more standing, and a girl of about seven asleep across her mother's lap with her mouth open. He stopped.

"How many today?"

"Twenty-two so far," Rue said.

"Four will be admitted."

"How many can pay?"

"None of them pay," Rue said.

"That's not a thing." Bertrand did not answer. He walked the length of the front room and stood at the far end and looked back down it, at the benches and the mother and the girl asleep with her mouth open, and Marcus watched him do it and did not say anything.

"Prior," Rue said.

"The review is on Thursday. Physician Okafor said you'd want three days first."

"To do what?"

"Watch."

"Watch what?"

"Whatever you like," Rue said.

"The doors aren't locked. There isn't a part of it we take you round." He watched for three days. He came at the sixth hour and left at dark and mostly he sat on a stool in the corner of the treatment room and said nothing at all. On the second day he asked one question, of a junior called Sef, about why she had written down the hour of a child's admission when the illness had been running six days already and an hour could not matter.

"Because if she gets worse at the ninth hour I need to know it was three hours after we started the fluid and not five," Sef said.

"And if she doesn't get worse?"

"Then I've written down an hour for nothing." Sef went back to what she was doing.

"That's most of them." On the third day he found Denise Okonkwo in the storeroom counting linen and did not speak to her, and she did not speak to him, and he went out again.