The Dying King Asked for a Woman Physician novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Pulse
On her first night Seo-wan takes the dying king's pulse and finds a healthy man; his thumb finds hers racing.
Gu Seo-wan took the King's pulse at midnight, and it was the pulse of a man who could run to the border and back.
She kept her face still.
Three fingers on the wrist, light, then heavier, then light again.
The beat under them was slow, strong and even.
It was the pulse of a healthy man of twenty-three.
It was not the pulse of a king the whole court said was dying.
"Well, Physician?" said the voice from the bed.
It was soft and dry, and it did not cough.
"Your Majesty's pulse is," she said, and stopped.
She had been in the palace for eleven hours.
That morning she had knelt in the Chief Councillor's office while he looked her over.
"You topped the examination," Heo Gyu-jin had said. "A woman, and a commoner's daughter. Nobody can say we did not choose on merit."
"Thank you, my lord."
"His Majesty asked for a woman on the night watch. He says male hands tire him. I am told he has weeks left."
"I'll do all I can."
"You will record what you see, accurately," said the Councillor, "and when the time comes, you will sign what I put in front of you."
She had bowed and said nothing.
A woman who wanted a ward of her own in the Royal Infirmary did not argue with the man who ran the court.
Now it was midnight in the Hall of Quiet Rest.
The dying king lay on his back with his hair loose over the pillow and his eyes open.
The room smelled of ginseng and lamp oil.
An old eunuch with a smooth, still face knelt by the door, and he had not blinked since she came in.
"Your pulse," said Seo-wan carefully, "is not what the Infirmary's records describe."
"The Infirmary's records say it's thread-thin and fast."
"Yes."
"And what do you say?"
"I say yours is the best pulse I have touched all year."
The eunuch shut his eyes, slowly.
The King smiled.
It was a small, tired smile, and it did something to the corner of his mouth that she did not expect.
He was pale from lying indoors, and his cheekbones were sharp, and there was a small mole under his left eye.
He was a good deal younger than she had pictured, and a good deal more awake.
"Listen to my chest," he said. "Please. I'd like to hear what you hear."
Seo-wan set her ear to the cotton over his ribs.
She did it because it was her duty.
His heart thumped under her cheek, calm and loud.
She listened to the left lung, then the right.
She heard air moving in and out clean as wind in a paper window.
There was no rattle, no wet crackle, no whistle.
She sat up.
"You have never had consumption."
"No."
"You have a better chest than my father's mule."
A short laugh came out of him, startled.
"Ko," he said to the eunuch. "She has already insulted me. I like her."
Seo-wan looked around the room.
She was a physician, and when a patient lied she looked for what he was using to do it.
Beside the bed, on the floor mat, sat a bronze bowl.
It held a heap of white cloth, and the cloth was stained red.
She leaned over and looked closer.
The blood was fresh.
It was bright and frothy at the edges.
She looked at the King's mouth, and it was clean.
She looked at his sleeves, and they were clean.
His lungs were clean, and there was fresh lung blood in a bowl beside his bed.
"That is not yours," she said.
The room went quiet.
Then a hand closed around her wrist.
It was quick, but not rough.
He had sat up without a sound.
Now he held her wrist in long, warm fingers, with his thumb across the inside of it.
It lay exactly where she had just been feeling for his life.
"Faster than mine," said the King.
"Your Majesty, let go."
"Ninety to the minute. Perhaps a hundred."
"That is the effect of a patient who grabs a doctor."
"Is it?" He did not smile now.
His thumb pressed gently, and she felt her own heart knock against it, once, twice, embarrassingly fast.
His eyes went to her mouth, then back up.
"I have been touched by eleven physicians in two years," he said quietly. "None of them has ever had a pulse like that."
She should have pulled away.
Her arm stayed where it was.
Heat ran from his thumb up to her elbow and spread.
She was kneeling on his bed mat in the dark, with her sleeve pushed back and her breath coming short.
"What do you want from me?" she said.
"I want you to go back to the Councillor tomorrow and say that the King is dying."
"I won't lie in the royal record."
"Then don't. Write what you like. Write that I slept."
He let go of her wrist slowly, and her skin felt cold where his hand had been.
"Write that I'm dying, Doctor. I'll tell you why when you've earned it."
Seo-wan looked at the bowl of warm blood, and the healthy man, and the old eunuch who still would not look at either of them.
Then she took up her brush and wrote, in a clear steady hand, that His Majesty slept.
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