Samantha knew better than to think the word, let alone say it.
The morning had unfurled in a steady, unhurried stream of patients—no bleeding emergencies, no screaming children clutched to desperate mothers, no men hauled in from the Arena or the wharves half-dead and loud about it. Just enough to keep the mind focused and the hands moving. The sort of day that made the older attendants narrow their eyes at the sky and mutter something noncommittal, carefully dodging the three worst words you could speak inside the Clinic of Ar.
Slow. Calm. Quiet.
They were considered temptations thrown at the Priest-Kings themselves, daring them to topple the fragile order of the day. Samantha, being new enough to still believe in logic, had thought the superstition ridiculous when she first arrived. She did not now. She had seen too many days turn from manageable to blood-soaked chaos within breaths of someone saying, “It’s been quiet.” So she kept her thoughts deliberately vague and her mouth shut, as she tied off a neat line of sutures in a dockworker’s forearm. “Hold still,” she murmured, tugging the knot tight. “You’ll keep the scar, I’m afraid. Consider it a reminder to respect the edge of a cargo crate.” The man grunted, his rough face splitting in a grin. “Scars impress the girls.” “Scars impress no one when they’re infected,” Samantha replied, cutting the thread. “Keep it clean. No paga spilled on it while you’re boasting.”
He laughed at that, flexing his fingers. “You’re almost as bad as the other one.”
“The other one” did not need to be named. The clinic had only one physician whose reputation could be summarized in a single phrase: the other one. Physician Elizabeth of Ar.
Samantha finished bandaging the docker’s arm and stepped back, wiping her gloved hands with a clean cloth. Her gaze drifted across the long central room of the clinic, the high arched windows admitting shafts of sun that lit motes of dust and the gleam of bronze fixtures. Within that light, the midday rhythm of the clinic moved: a slave girl filling basins with steaming water, an attendant sorting alignment rods for fractures, an older technician consulting a scribbled chart from the new diagnostic machine in the corner.
And Elizabeth. She stood near the central pillar, her auburn hair bound back in a simple knot, a few loose strands curling against her temples in the humidity. She wore a short, sleeveless tunic of a physician, dyed green and belted tight for movement, the hem falling at mid-thigh over her matching linen britches, and strong legs. Her hands were bare today, long-fingered and precise; she had an odd preference for feeling skin directly when she could, trusting her fingers almost as much as the odd humming metal devices in the clinic. At that moment, she was bent over a boy of perhaps seven, his leg splinted and propped on a cushion. His mother sat beside him, fretting with the edge of her veil.
“…and if you keep that splint on,” Elizabeth was saying in that quiet, steady voice of hers, “you’ll be faster than all the other boys when it heals. Your bones are clever. They remember how to be strong.” The boy squinted at her. “Clever bones?” “Yes.” Elizabeth’s mouth tugged in a subtle half-smile. “Yours remembered how to break. Now they will remember how not to. Provided—” she lightly tapped the wooden splints “—you do not wrestle urts in the street or try to climb half-built towers again.” The boy’s ears turned red. His mother’s eyes widened. “You were on the tower?” Elizabeth did not raise her voice. She did not need to. The slight emphasis on the word carried more weight than a shout. The mother turned on the boy with a whispered scold, and the boy ducked his head, chastened.
Samantha watched them, admiring the balance—humor, discipline, reassurance. Elizabeth’s brown eyes, intense and unblinking, softened only at the edges, but that was enough. The boy’s shoulders eased. His mother sat a little straighter, as though the physician’s equanimity were contagious.
“Physician Samantha.” Samantha started. An attendant had come up beside her, a young man with a shaved head and ink-stained fingers. “Yes?” “Delivery at the back. Herbs and ampoules. The Physician of Ar asked you to check the inventory.” He tilted his head slightly toward Elizabeth with a respectful glance. Samantha caught the look, too. It was subtle, almost involuntary, but she’d seen it in many—the way people oriented themselves to Elizabeth whenever she was in the room, as though she were a fixed point around which the rest of the clinic orbited. She moved through the chaos as if she were made of quieter air.
“I’ll see to it,” Samantha said, stripping off her gloves. “Tell her I’ll bring the list.” She circled the room’s perimeter, passing the diagnostic machine—a compact, humming contraption of polished steel and green-glowing glass that could show a broken bone without cutting the flesh. Other physicians distrusted it. Elizabeth did not. Samantha had heard her once, speaking with a senior man who had sniffed at the machine as “un-Gorean.” “If a tool shows me truth more quickly,” Elizabeth had said, voice calm as ever, “I am less likely to kill my patient out of ignorance. What could be more Gorean than not wasting a life?”
The memory tugged at Samantha’s mouth as she pushed through the swinging door into the rear receiving room. The delivery man waiting there wore the livery of the House of a wealthy Physician from another district. He had a crate strapped to a hand-sledge and was impatiently tapping his foot. “You’re late,” Samantha said, more briskly than she normally would. In Elizabeth’s shadow, everyone seemed to pick up a sharper edge of competence, or try to. “There was traffic at the Central Market,” the man grumbled. “What do you physicians do with all this?” He jerked his chin toward the crate. “It cost my master a small fortune to import.”
“Keep people alive,” Samantha said. “A poor investment in your opinion?” He snorted but said no more as she broke the seal, pried open the crate’s lid, and began inventorying. Bundles of dried herbs from the forests beyond Thentis, neatly tied. Glass ampoules of a brilliant blue serum, nested in straw. A slender metal device the length of her forearm, with a crystal core she recognized: a portable coagulator, humming faintly when she pressed its activation stud. She murmured the items under her breath, marking them on her tablet. It was methodical work, but not dull. Each item meant the difference between life and death in the right—or wrong—hands. The delivery man shifted, craning his neck toward the doorway leading back to the clinic. “Is she here?”
“Who?” Samantha asked, though she knew. “The Physician of Ar. Elizabeth.” There was something like awe in his voice, and maybe a touch of fear. “I saw her once, in the Great Square. A man collapsed, just fell like he’d been struck by a sword. She cut him open right there on a merchant’s cloth and… fixed him. With her hands.” “Fixed him,” Samantha echoed, trying not to smile. “Is that the technical term they use in your House?” He reddened. “I’m no physician. I only know he walked away alive. People talk about her.” Samantha made another mark on the tablet, the stylus scratching softly. “They talk too much.” “Still,” he persisted, “it must be something, to study under her. My sister bruises her knee and three women in the house shriek like she’s been disemboweled.”
“Send her here next time,” Samantha said, imagining Elizabeth’s placid stare at such theatrics. “We’ll give her a real reason to shriek.” He chuckled uneasily. Samantha closed the crate, sealed it, and handed him the empty tablet. “Sign here.” He did, and she sent him off with a nod, listening to the fading squeak of the hand-sledge wheels on stone.
When she stepped back into the central room, the light had shifted. Afternoon slanted across the cots and benches, turning the bronze fixtures to molten gold. The flow of patients had not increased, but neither had it ebbed—just that steady, careful tide. An older man with congested lungs, coughing weakly. A young girl with a knife cut along her palm, eyes bright with more indignation than pain. A warrior, bare-armed, getting his knuckles splinted around a muttered story of a tavern brawl. In the center of it all, Elizabeth moved like water. She did not stride; she walked with even, unhurried steps, as though she were pacing through her own thoughts and the world simply arranged itself to meet her. Her voice was low, never sharp, but when she spoke, people listened. She touched patients as if they were interesting puzzles rather than burdens, her brow faintly furrowed, her lips occasionally quirking at some private amusement.
Samantha approached her as she finished with the coughing old man. Elizabeth lifted a hand, fingers resting lightly on the man’s back, feeling the vibrations as he coughed into a cloth. “Try to exhale fully,” she instructed, “as though you’re blowing dust from a shelf. Not halfway. All the way. The more air that leaves, the more can come in that is not trying to drown you.” The man wheezed, chuckled, coughed again. “Drown… without water. You physician women and your talk…”
“And yet you came,” Elizabeth said. “Drink the decoction she gives you.” She nodded toward Samantha now, her intense gaze landing on her like a well-placed weight. “Samantha will measure it out.” “Yes, Physician,” Samantha said, wishing her voice carried even a fraction of that calm authority. They moved aside together, Elizabeth gliding into the space Samantha had vacated. For a moment, they stood shoulder to shoulder at the central table, the old man shuffling toward the exit with an attendant’s help.
“I checked the delivery,” Samantha said, offering the tablet. Elizabeth took it, scanning with quick, neat eyes. Her lashes were thick, almost in contrast to the spareness of her expression. “The coagulator? “Intact. Charging now.” “Good.” She made a small satisfied sound and handed the tablet off to a passing slave. “Keep it near the main cot. If the day turns…” She paused. Samantha felt the weight of the unsaid word—the one no one said. Her eyes flicked instinctively toward the doorway, as though expecting a wave of patients to surge in at the mere thought. Elizabeth’s mouth curved, one corner lifting. “If the day changes its nature,” she amended. “We will want it close.”
Samantha relaxed a little. “You are superstitious, then,” she said, half-teasing, half-relieved. Elizabeth looked at her sidelong. “I am experienced.” “And experience has taught you the Priest-Kings listen in the clinic, waiting for forbidden adjectives?" “In my experience,” Elizabeth replied, her tone as mild as ever, “the universe is listening to arrogance. Whether one calls it Priest-Kings or chance or the stupidity of men. I prefer not to provoke it.”
Her gaze shifted, sharpening on Samantha’s hands. “Your last sutures—how were they?” “Neat. Minimal tension on the skin.” Samantha felt a prickle of self-consciousness. “On a dockworker’s arm.” “Show me.” Elizabeth’s fingers moved, miming on her own forearm. “Here?” “Higher. He had a… enthusiastic relationship with a crate corner.” Elizabeth snorted softly. “Crates. The great predators of the city.” She considered her. “After we see the girl with the hand, you will do the next sutures under my eye.” “Yes, Physician,” Samantha said, heartbeat quickening with both nerves and anticipation.
The afternoon unspooled. Samantha gave the decoction to the old man and explained it in the same simple terms Elizabeth had used. She watched Elizabeth coax laughter out of the girl with the knife cut by asking if the blade had at least been reasonably impressive, or if she’d bled so much over a dull kitchen knife. The girl pouted, then giggled, and by the time the wound was cleaned, she worshiped Elizabeth as if she were a warrior from the sagas.
Through it all, Elizabeth never raised her voice. She never barked at a slave, never snapped at an attendant, even when they made small mistakes. Her reprimands, when they came, were like the pressure of a thumb against a bleeding vessel—direct, unyielding, but not cruel. “Again,” she said once, when Samantha fumbled the knot on a suture. “You know this. You are thinking of my eyes on you instead of the flesh beneath your hands.” Samantha swallowed and nodded, biting back a retort. She did know the knot. She could tie it in the dark. But those eyes—intense, unwavering—felt like they saw through not just her technique but her hesitations, her doubts, the flicker of pride she tried to hide whenever she got something right.
She re-tied the knot. This time, the thread lay flat, the tension perfect. “Better,” Elizabeth said. “The skin is not here to prove something about your mastery of thread.” Samantha exhaled. “Is it always like this for you?” she asked quietly, trimming the excess. “Like what?” Elizabeth stepped back, folding her arms, watching her.
“The… control.” Samantha flushed, annoyed at herself for the word. “You never seem to… doubt.” Elizabeth regarded her for a long moment. The clinic hummed around them—the low murmur of voices, the clink of instruments, the muted thrum of the machines. “I doubt constantly,” Elizabeth said finally. “Every time I cut. Every time I decide not to. I doubt.” Her eyes did not soften, but there was something in them now, a deepening. “Control is not the absence of doubt. It is what you do with it.” Samantha looked down at the stitched wound, the neat line of thread. “What do you do with it?”
“I listen to it.” Elizabeth’s tone remained level, but the words were weighted. “Sometimes it is a liar, whispering fear. Sometimes it is a friend, reminding me not to be a fool.” She tilted her head slightly. “You think I do not raise my voice because I am calm.” A faint humor touched her mouth. “I do not raise my voice because people stop listening when you shout, and because screaming does not make blood flow backward.” Samantha huffed out something like a laugh. “I’ve seen physicians in the markets who would disagree.”
“And I have seen them bury more patients than I do,” Elizabeth said matter-of-factly. Before Samantha could respond, a commotion stirred near the entrance. The double doors crashed open, and a man stumbled in, half-carrying another who sagged between his arms. Blood darkened the front of the injured man’s tunic, soaking down to his belt.
The room shifted. Attendants straightened like war-trained hunters scenting danger. A slave girl gasped, choking it back down. The older technician abandoned his chart. The humming machines seemed suddenly louder, more urgent. Elizabeth was already moving. “Samantha,” she said, voice steady, already in that peculiar stillness that she brought to the worst moments. “Main cot. Coagulator. We are now busy.”
There it was. Not the forbidden words—never those—but an acknowledgment, simple and unadorned. Busy. Samantha’s body moved before her mind caught up. She grabbed a basin, clean cloths, the newly delivered coagulator, its crystal core glowing faintly. She reached the main cot as Elizabeth guided the bleeding man onto it with the barest touch, directing the frantic companion to put his hands here, not there, to press and not lift.
“What happened?” Elizabeth asked, fingers already probing through the soaked cloth. “Knifed,” the companion gasped. “In the Lower Market. He just— there was shouting—” “Is the knife still in him?” Elizabeth’s tone sharpened, precise. “No. We— it slid out when he fell.” Elizabeth’s jaw firmed. “Of course it did,” she murmured, not unkindly, more to herself. “Samantha, strip the tunic. Quickly.”
The room’s rhythm had changed, but the structure remained. Samantha’s hands shook only for the first second; then they found the practiced motions drilled into her over months of training. Cut the fabric, pull it aside, reveal the wound. The man’s skin was slick with blood, a deep, pulsing red from the left side of his abdomen. Not a spurt—a steady, terrible welling. “Deep,” Elizabeth said, eyes scanning, fingers pressing around the wound. “Not arterial, but close. We’ll need to go in.” She glanced up. “Samantha. What do you see?”
Samantha swallowed, forcing herself to focus past the heat and coppery smell. “Entry here. Narrow blade. Angle— down and in. No foaming at the mouth, no coughing blood, so lungs likely spared. Abdomen… we won’t know until we’re inside, but his pressure is dropping.” Elizabeth’s eyes flickered with approval. “Good. Say what you see, not what you fear. Attendant!” Her voice cut cleanly across the room. “Boil more water. Prep the instruments. I want the lumen wand and the coagulator charged. We will need light and heat.”
Hands flew. Water splashed into basins. The slave girl who had gasped before now moved with almost ferocious focus, laying out scalpels, clamps, a slender rod ending in a crystal tip that would glow cold white when activated. Elizabeth bent close to the man, meeting his glazed eyes. “Listen to me,” she said. “I am Elizabeth, Physician of Ar. I am going to open you to find the bleeding. You may feel pressure. You will want to thrash. You will not. Understand?”
His lips moved. “Hurts…” “Yes,” she agreed. “It does. Stay with me. What is your name? “Rufus.”
“Rufus. That is a good, solid name. Stay in it. Keep breathing. In.” She demonstrated. “Out. You see the woman beside me?” She angled her head toward Samantha. “She is very clever. She will fix what I cannot reach.” Samantha blinked. That was an absurd compliment, given the gulf between their skills, but the effect on the injured man was immediate. His eyes flickered toward her, caught on her face.
“I…” he whispered. “Will… try.” Elizabeth straightened. “We begin.” Time compressed.
Under Elizabeth’s direction, Samantha moved like part of a machine. She placed the lumen wand, its crystal tip bathing the wound in cool white light. She handed instruments without being asked twice. She dabbed, cut thread, adjusted the coagulator’s settings as Elizabeth cauterized tiny vessels with precise pulses of heat. Elizabeth’s hands were steady, her movements economical. She spoke sparingly, each instruction clipped but not harsh.
“Here— sponge. Good. Hold there. No, not so much pressure. You are not trying to crush the liver, merely persuade it to stop sulking.” Samantha almost laughed, even with her nails biting into her palms. Elizabeth’s dry humor threaded through the tension like a grounding wire. Even the attendant holding the man’s shoulders managed a strangled snort. The bleeding lessened. They found the main culprit, a torn vessel near the kidney, and Elizabeth worked with a speed that never looked hurried, tying, cauterizing, muttering once under her breath about “Knives and men who think the Lower Market is a game.”
“Will he live?” Samantha asked before she could stop herself. Elizabeth did not look up. “He is alive now. That is the only truth I can swear to. Do not rush the story ahead of the facts.” Eventually, the wound was closed. The sutures—some placed by Elizabeth, some, under her watchful eye, by Samantha—lay in a careful line. The man’s breathing had steadied, though his skin still had that waxy pallor that made Samantha’s gut twist.
“Bandage,” Elizabeth said softly. “Then we wait. And listen.” They did. The clinic’s hum slowly returned to its earlier cadence, though a thread of heightened awareness remained. Rufus was not the only wounded man on Gor today, but he was theirs. After a time, Elizabeth stepped back, cleaning her hands in a basin of cooling water. Her arms were spattered with thin lines of blood up to the elbow, standing out starkly against her sun-browned skin. She looked down at herself, then at Samantha, whose own tunic bore a matching pattern.
“We are works of art,” Elizabeth said dryly. “Abstract. Red on green.” Samantha huffed, some of the tightness in her chest loosening. “You never lose your humor?” “I misplace it sometimes,” Elizabeth replied, taking a clean cloth and wiping slowly, methodically. “But I try not to.” Samantha glanced at Rufus, then back at Elizabeth. “How do you do it?” The words felt heavy, laden with more than she could articulate. “How do you move like that, how do you not shake, how do you hold lives so lightly and so carefully at once?”
Elizabeth considered her, then turned to lean a hip against the central table. The light caught the fine lines at the corners of her eyes—signs of years spent squinting at wounds, at charts, at the flickering displays of machines. “I remember,” Elizabeth said quietly, “that today it is him on the table. Tomorrow, it may be me. Or you. Or someone we love.” She folded her arms. “There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ here. There is only flesh that happens to be open, and flesh that is still closed. That keeps my hands steady.”
Samantha absorbed that in silence. “And,” Elizabeth added, a glint in her gaze, “I remember that shouting impresses no blood vessel I have ever met.” Samantha smiled despite herself. “There are physicians who would disagree.” “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “And often, they are the ones who say the forbidden words.” “Slow?” The word slipped out before Samantha could stop herself. She slapped a hand over her mouth. Elizabeth’s brows rose. A faint, dangerous amusement flickered in her eyes. “You are bold today.” “I didn’t mean—”
A commotion erupted at the entrance again. Another man staggered in, supported by two others, this one with a leg bent at a grotesque angle, bone threatening to pierce skin. Samantha winced. “I… I’ll never say it again.” Elizabeth’s laugh was a low, warm thing, rare and genuine. “Oh, you will,” she said. “We all do. Then we pay for it with work.” She straightened, already moving toward the new arrival. “Come, Samantha. The day is not yet over.”
As Samantha followed, she watched the way Elizabeth approached the man with the broken leg—her expression alert but not alarmed, her voice even, her hands already shaping the air where the bone needed to be. It struck her then that it wasn’t the machines that made Elizabeth remarkable, though she used them with a comfort that made the older men uneasy. It wasn’t even her skill with a blade or a needle, though that was undeniable. It was that she carried the chaos of the clinic as if it were a familiar weight, neither minimized nor exaggerated. She never called the day slow, calm, or quiet. She never damn it with careless words. She simply met each new wound as it came, with humor tucked somewhere behind her intense eyes, with doubt acknowledged but not obeyed, with a control that was not coldness but precision.
Samantha found herself squaring her shoulders, matching her pace to Elizabeth’s. She would learn that, she thought. Not the superstition, though she would honor it if only to keep the others from glaring. Not just the sutures and the knots and the names of herbs and the sequence of machine calibrations. She would learn how to stand in the center of a day that was not slow and hold her voice level. She would learn how to let doubt be a guide, not a master. She would learn, in time, how to be, if not Elizabeth of Ar, at least Samantha, Physician of Ar, in her own right.
“Hands,” Elizabeth said, glancing back at her as they reached the new patient. “Ready?” Samantha nodded, feeling the thrum of the clinic, the hum of the machines, the murmur of human pain and stubbornness all around them. “Always,” she said.
And the day, which no one would dare to call calm, rolled on.