What Eleven Dry Days Do to a Body Standing in Line

I was called to the well on Ulev Street a little past the second bell, to a woman down at the rope with her jar half-filled and spilling into the dust around her.

She was perhaps fifty years, a dyer’s wife by the stain worked permanently into her hands. Skin dry and hot to the touch, and no sweat on her despite the sun already high — this is the detail that tells me more than the collapse itself. The tongue swollen, cracked along its center seam. Pulse fast and thin at the wrist, easier to find at the throat. She had passed no water since dawn by her own account, and what the rag drew from her when I pressed it came dark, close to the color of steeped tea.

I had her moved out of the sun under the cooper’s awning. Cooled the neck, the wrists, the crease behind the knee with well water — no ice; there is none to be had this late in Bloommonth. Small sips of water carrying a pinch of salt, one swallow at a time and no more, because a stomach gone this dry this long will not hold a full draught, and losing it back up costs more than waiting would. Feet raised above the heart. Then I waited, which is most of what this work is.

The pulse slowed over perhaps forty minutes, from racing to merely quick. She said her name before I asked for it — often the first honest sign that the mind has returned ahead of the body. She wanted to stand before I would let her.

I have now treated six of these since the rain stopped: five women, one boy, every one of them from a well-queue, none from indoor work. I note this because it is not the fever I have been watching on Weaver’s Street. That fever sweats. This does not. A district that treats the two as one thing will treat the wrong one wrongly.

The rain has not come back. The queue on Ulev has not shortened. I expect a seventh.