“I saw his left hand,” said Cadfael. Such hands he had seen before, thefingers rotted away until they fell like dead leaves, the corrosion of theflesh gnawing slowly until even the wrist shed its bones. Yet it seemed to himthat this devouring demon had died of its own greed. There was no ulcerouscrust remaining; the seamed white flesh where the lost fingers had once been wasdry and healed, however ugly to the view. Firm muscles had moved in the back ofthe hand when he gestured.

“Has he given you a name?”

“He says his name is Lazarus.” Brother Mark smiled. “I think it is a name hegave himself at a late christening—perhaps when he cut himself off from familyand home, according to law. It is a second birth, lamentable though it may be.He was godfather at his own second baptism. I don’t enquire. But I wish hewould use our help, and not rely only on his own tending. He must surely havesome sores or ulcers that could benefit by your ointments,before he leaves us as he came.”

Cadfael mused, watching the withdrawn figure, motionless at the head of theslope of grass. “Yet he is not numbed! He has his powers of body still, in allsuch members as are left to him? He feels heat and cold? And pain? If hestrikes his hand against a nail, or a splinter in the fence, he knows it?”

Mark was at a loss; he knew the disease only as he had encountered it,unsightly, ulcerated, full of sores. “He felt the sting of the whip, I know,even through the armour of his cloak. Yes, surely he feels, like other men.”

But those who have the true leprosy, thought Cadfael, recalling many he hadseen in his crusading days, very long ago, those who whiten like ash, thosewhose skin powders away in gray patches, in the extreme of their disease do not