Love & Conquests

Chapter 3

The whole vehicle stank of rotting flesh. Flies flew in and out from the window, buzzed around the small, carriage space, and stuck themselves on or around the Esclavo's partly open mouth. Doctor Luciano winced as he watched a fly land on the Esclavo's mouth and wiggled itself between her lips.

The Esclavo, half-conscious of her whereabouts, turned her head to the sides, frightening some of the black flies away. She groaned and watched from the corner of her eye the doctor, who looked at her with pinched brows and a hand over his nose. The carriage rattled, and the Esclavo shut her eyes as it wasn't only the carriage that rattled; her head did too.

They had arrived at the clinic, and the Doctor hurriedly shoved the door open and breathed in a lungful of air. He turned to his driver and instructed him to carry the Esclavo woman inside, have her rest on one of the beds, and call for Agueda to come down. The driver quickly did so. He carried the woman in his arms, careful not to breathe through his nose, and entered the clinic with the Doctor's help.

Luciano put down his bag on an operating table and fished out his paraphernalia: a stethoscope, a jar of leeches, syringes, a bottle of laudanum, a small hammer, and a saw bone. He looked to the jar of leeches, wondering if the patient did indeed ingest poison, perhaps the leeches could suck it out. Or perhaps, she was another victim of unnecessary violence by the guards. This wasn’t far-off for it was a common occurrence, and he was one of the plethora of doctors called to Forts to tend to wounded (and often missing a finger or limb) Esclavos. They were, after all, goods to be auctioned off or sold by bulk to countries that needed cheap labor. They were nothing more than expendable wares meant to fatten the King’s pockets.

Looking over his shoulder, Luciano watched his patient sleeping in the next room. She looked horrible like an ill-used rag doll, beaten black and blue, and mutilated. She wasn’t unique though. The doctor had seen worse—Esclavo men with p*****s sliced off from the base and other Esclavo women, who’d had all their limbs chopped off so they couldn’t resist or escape when their guards r***d them. If anything, this Esclavo was fortunate that only her tongue was dismembered and nothing else.

"Doctor," Agueda cried from the patient's room. She hurriedly strode to Luciano's side; her brown face paled and her lips trembled. "Doctor, ye brought a corpse!"

"Nonsense, Agueda," Luciano said with a laugh. "She may reek like a corpse, but, my dear girl, she is far from a corpse."

"Hav of a corpse, you mean," the Esclavo woman muttered.

"Half, whole, a fourth! Doesn't matter. I need your help to clean her."

"Clean her?" Agueda cried. "No, no, and no!"

"Yes, yes, and yes! Don't complain, Agueda, when you've cleaned my bottom many times before when I was a babe."

"Ah, but ye wir an engel den. Ye wud nat want me to clean yer bottom now." Agueda shrugged her shoulders and walked to the next room with the doctor. She wrinkled her nose once Luciano pried the rotting tongue from the patient's hand and handed it over to her. "Ye be a bad man fir doing diz to Agueda," she snapped.

Luciano grinned. "But Agueda is still my favorite girl. Take care to throw it in the trash, or maybe bury it in a shallow hole. Capitan Mariano mentioned the patient tried to put her tongue back in her mouth. We wouldn't want her doing it again."

"What she dun to be executed with Cortar?" Agueda asked after returning from discarding the blackened flesh in a hole in the garden.

"What do you think?" the doctor countered with a raised brow.

"She did nothing," Agueda said in a low whisper.

Luciano nodded and proceeded to tear off the Esclavo's sack cloth dress with a pair of surgical scissors. He started at the neckline and cut down until the dress was in half. He threw the dress aside and examined the Esclavo's body. 

She was dangerously thin—her collar bone jutted out and her limbs almost had no fat in them. She reminded the Doctor of the skeleton, he and Agueda called Eduardo, displayed in his clinic window.

"It's a miracle she stayed alive, Agueda," he said as he eyed his nursemaid, who was fat from eating too much chocolate he always bought for her from the chocolatier next door.

"She be lucky 'en."

He wondered of her stomach, why she'd beat it right after Cortar. Her breasts, the Doctor noticed, were swelling, and the belly, he realized, was protruded as though she had only eaten. "Worms probably," Luciano muttered.

"Or pregnant," Agueda supplied.

"Pregnant?"

"De belly button, it's poking out."

Luciano gave the patient another perusal, discovering that the belly button was indeed jutted. "Good lord!" the doctor exclaimed.

"Ye know, doctor, Forts are breeding grounds. I know because I used to breed, too. Agueda heard Fort Esperanza is de worstest of 'em."

"Oh, Agueda," cried Luciano. "Q-quick! We must clean her. She's had her tongue cut. You'll have to feed her soup o-or soft carrots."

"Aye, doctor." The nursemaid hurried to the kitchen to prepare hot water and corn soup for the patient.

Doctor Luciano held his hands together and watched his patient sleep. The dirty feeling he’d feel when visiting Forts crawled on his skin, making him itch. He had no doubts that this Esclavo was r***d more than once, and probably by more than one man. A tear trailed on his cheek and another until Agueda came back with a bowl of hot water and saw the Doctor cry beside the patient's bed with his hands on his face.

“Stoopid boy,” she teased and put the bowl of water on the bedside table. “Why ye cry?”

The doctor wiped his eyes and grabbed for the wash cloth Agueda stretched out to him. “She reminds me of you, dear.”

“Aye,” she said, nodding her head. “But Agueda ain’t dat ugly.”

“Nor that thin.” He washed his patient’s arm, scrubbing the soot and dried blood fiercely. “But this shouldn’t happen to anyone, Esclavo or not.”