The Seventh Rib

There was no pact spoken aloud. Caunedo took off his coat and folded it over a coffin; Brais emptied his pocket onto the packing table—the probes, the silver cannula he had not used in years—and Sister Benigna, satisfied, drew the tongs back from the embers. Between the two of them they moved the boy from the stretcher to the table, the way one moves a piece of furniture nobody wants to break, and opened his chest by the light of the rushlights the nun had hung from the hooks of the arches.

The drip in the zinc bucket beat a slow cadence against the dented bottom: drop, pause, drop. Scarcely two steps away, the steam rising from Julián Caunedo mingled with the black smoke of the mutton-tallow rushlights. The thieves' vinegar fought for the air with the quicklime seething against the walls.

The packing table lacked the drainage groove prescribed by the Flemish manuals. Its boards, badly joined and caulked with black pitch, forced them to work with their elbows pinned to their ribs to avoid dipping their sleeves into the alum brine. Brais shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His left instep had been throbbing since the previous vigil; a dull, vulgar ache from standing on damp brick.

"The tallow from this batch is thick with hoof," Caunedo said, rubbing his eyes with the back of a drab sleeve that reeked of jerked beef. "Smutch what it will, there's no telling muscle insertions apart."

"Bring the linen rag," Brais replied.

"It's soaked through."

"Use the dry corner."

Caunedo grunted, but did not move right away. He scratched the corner of his jaw with a blackened fingernail before reaching toward the wobbly stool where the cloths rested.

Sister Benigna de la Maza had not moved from beside the brazier. She held her habit gathered at the waist with a cord of coarse hemp so as not to drag the sackcloth through the muck on the floor. She held the vial of lead salts against her chest, but the fabric of her coif did not even tremble with her breathing. Her knuckles were white, pressed hard against the thick glass, stiffened more by rage than by the dampness of the walls.

The rib saw had two loose brass rivets in the ebony handle. It bit into the cartilage with a screech that traveled up Brais's forearm. The flesh yielded like salted, cured bacon, cold and tough. With the skin of his fingertips flayed by months of acid vapors, Brais could scarcely tell the difference anymore between cartilage and perichondrium. He sped up the back-and-forth. Two short strokes, three. On the fourth, at the curve of the seventh rib, the metal bit deep into something soft and jammed hard between two edges of bone.

He pulled.

The iron did not yield.

A thick soot ran down the glass tube that Caunedo held crooked, obscuring the scale engraved in drachms. The tallow smoke stung the ulcer in Brais's nasal septum; he swallowed saliva tasting of old blood so as not to spit upon the open chest. If the blade snapped inside—

"You're drifting into the pleura," Caunedo muttered, tilting the rushlight until the soot stained the shroud. "You have no angle, Mújica. If you splinter the inner facet, there'll be no bellows left to mend."

"Leave the lamp and hold his shoulder," Brais ordered without looking up.

"The blade's going to snap on you."

"Hold him."

Cracking the bone was the least of it; what weighed was the air the cavity held.

Brais planted his left palm on the sternum and threw his body weight downward. The notched teeth rasped against the rib cage until a dry snap freed the iron. The rebound almost knocked the handle from his numb fingers. The chest wall gave way laterally under the tension of the retractor.

There was no stench of guts, nor the sweetish reek of consumption.

A faint vapor of camphor, alum, and tincture of benzoin rose, instantly masking the smell of burnt mutton. The lungs had neither the purplish hue of suffocation nor the cavities of the consumption Sister Benigna had sworn to; they were pale and whole, washed with the double infusion no apothecary dispenses and no lecture manual records. The one Brais had measured, grain by grain, in the agate mortar of his cell, and then written down in one place only.

That boy had not died of consumption. Someone had washed him from the inside before bringing him down to the cistern, with a formula copied from the black sheepskin notebook that lay two paces away, under Sister Benigna's tongs.

Caunedo's shadow blotted out the hollow of the ribs. In the rushlight, a wisp of wick sputtered in the tallow.