Nights he slept, as always, in the trundle bed at the doctor's feet. But he did not sleep easily; he would awaken at a
change in the tone or tempo of Faust's constant murmuring, and was often jolted upright by a sudden cry of wonder or alarm.
Visitors came—the landlady, neighboring scholars, even the heavy-footed Brother Josaphat—to offer condolences, soup, and nostrums which invariably had a history of miraculous cures when the doctors themselves had despaired and inevitably had no effect whatsoever save upon the difficulty of Wagner's daily laundering of the sheets.
Still, for most of the day and all of the night, Wagner was alone. In his weakness, he could not help remembering the long voyage by foot he had made to Wittenberg, so many years ago, how he had slept in barns when allowed and haystacks when not and his cloak when neither were available, eating stale bread from his wallet and whatever fruits and plants the wilderness had to offer along the way (but he was a village boy and had enough woods-lore that this was not the hardship it might have been) and drinking only water from streams, for his mother had often warned him that still water caused seizures.
A fearful and exhilarating time it had been for a young man. He could scarce believe now he'd had the courage then. For he had never before left his native Kreuzendorf. But he'd conceived a great enthusiasm for learning at the Latin school, and studied so diligently that with good master Paumgart-ner's help he had managed to extract a promise from his father that—somehow—when the time came, money would be found to send him to a university.
So that after his father had died and his mother been taken into his Aunt Scheurl's household, what other opportunity was open to him other than to turn his cap toward the nearest university town? He had neither home nor patrimony, lacked the money to be apprenticed to a trade, and was too young to have any skills worth the hire. All he had was a love of learning and the fiery desire to read the odes of Pindar, of which he had heard much and seen nothing.
Empty-stomached, Wagner had walked the streets of Wittenberg in a marveling daze, staggered by the height of its buildings—five stories, some of them!—and the plenitude of stone-paved streets. He had determined to kneel before the first teacher he met and beg to be accepted as a student, in exchange for his unquestioning service as a servant. But so weakened was he by his privations that in the actual event he collapsed facedown in the dust.
To his eternal joy, the scholar at whose feet he had flung himself had been Faust.
Faust, amazed and amused, had taken the starveling to a tavern, bought him a plate of sausages and a mug of beer, and grilled him on his Latin verbs and then probed his far more elementary grasp of Greek. "Good enough for a provincial," he had concluded at last, and so the deal had been sealed.
Wagner could not help remembering all this and then, blushing with guilt, wondering what was to become of him should his benefactor die.
"Call in a doctor," Brother Josaphat commanded on his second visit.
Wagner's heart leaped. "You recognize the disease? It's curable? You have no idea how relieved I am to hear it. I had almost given up hope he would ever recover his wits."
"For photons of uniform energy," Faust mumbled, "the energy flux of the photons at the point of interest is related to the absorbed dose rate ..."
"Listen to the man! He's dying. Doctors can't help that. But they have drugs and methods to revive him long enough to confess his sins and receive the sacrament." The monk's angry gaze took in the plenitude of scientific and pedagogic devices upon the walls with here a lute and there a steelpoint engraving of a rhinoceros but never a crucifix to be seen. "Can't you feel the demons thronged about your master, eager to drag him down to the shit-pits and cesspools of Hell? Faust has frittered away his life with grammar and pagan scrib-blings. But the Lord is all-forgiving. An instant of repentance, an act of true contrition, and his soul can evade their clutching talons and wing its way free to Heaven."
Brother Josaphat was so exercised by his speech that when he paused, he was panting like a dog. His hands and jaw clenched hard enough to bulge the veins on his forehead. Delivered thus, his simple message of Christian redemption sounded like a threat.
"The spectral emissivity of a thermal radiator is the ratio of the radiance of the radiator in a given direction to that of a black body at the same temperature."
"He despises doctors!" Wagner cried, horrified. "Many a time I've heard him say—"
"You can help him die into the eternal life of the Father," Brother Josaphat growled, "or else consign him to burn in the endless night of damnation. Think hard—and think of the welfare of your own soul as well!"
"Sir, you judge my master too harshly. I assure you there is nothing impious in the examination of Creation."
"In isometric transition a metastable nuclide is converted into another nuclide of the same element with emission of gamma rays."
"It's the devil's own syllabary!" The monk stamped his foot in outrage. "I'll listen to no more."
He left.
So it was that Wagner, with guilt and trepidation, searched through Faust's chests and belongings until he found the small store of coins set aside to last through the new semester's fees, and from it extracted enough to pay for a physician. Then, on the advice of Frau Wirten, the landlady, he sent for Doctor Schnabel. *
Doctor Schnabel was famed for having an educated nose, an enormous and complexly sensitive olfactory instrument with which he could almost instantaneously diagnose diseases, identify subtle changes in the progress of an ailment, and infallibly predict the onset of a patient's death. He entered the room with a rush and a swoop, flinging the door aside as if the fate of his patient were too precarious to wait upon such niceties as knocking. He was seated at the sick man's bedside almost before Wagner could bring up a stool to slide beneath him.
Frau Wirten, who was a simple creature and a dwarf as well, was a great admirer of the grotesque and loved tales of demons and murderers, and things medical above all. She appeared in the doorway, like a scrap of paper drawn up the stairs in the wake of the doctor's passage. Lips tight with excitement, she tiptoed into the sickroom.
The doctor leaned low over Faust, passing his great nose over every inch of the scholar's body. He stroked the forehead with a slender white finger and then closed his bright, pink-lined eyes as he held that finger under his nostrils and inhaled noisily. With a flourish, he produced a spotless white handkerchief to wipe the finger, and then daintily drew up a corner of the imperfectly laundered nightshirt for nasal inspection.
All the while he addressed them both in a sonorous, confidential manner:
"My dear late mentor, Doctor Geier, rest his soul, would not only smell the excrement of his patient but—you'll scarce credit this—taste it as well, and do you know why? To impress the client, you see. The sick prince (or merchant, or whatever) would think to himself: To what extremes he goes for my sake!' And would resolve to pay particularly well upon his recovery. For in those days, the fee was contingent on recovery.
"Well, those were primitive times in some ways. These days we handle such matters in a more civilized manner, and require a set fee which is due us for our labors whether one recovers or not." He paused and peered significantly over his spectacles at Wagner. "That's in the way of being a jest, my solemn young friend."
Wagner colored. But Frau Wirten's laughter spiraled into the air, bright-feathered and approving. She pushed her way forward and poked the unconscious scholar with a bony finger. "Is he going to die?"
A tolerant smile that shaded into sadness and then resignation before reaching full growth as a heavy sigh. "I'll not lie to you," Doctor Schnabel said. "There's no sepsis, and that's hopeful. No pustules, cankers, or emission of fluids. Were Magister Faust a tradesman or a monk or even a courtier, I would say: Leave be! Let sleep and nature run their course. But your tenant, alas, is a learned man, and the en-suant overexercise of his imaginative faculties leaves him prey to mental vapors, horrid imaginings, and nonconform
ing behavior. In short, madness. I am, in fact, working on a taxonomy of such bizaria in the form of an instructive booklet (I shall have to commission woodcuts; terribly annoying expense, but necessary if one wants to reach the masses) listing the follies of the famed and the obscure alike, to be called The
Madness of Scholars." His eyes grew dreamy. "What name shall I give Faust's affliction? Magic-mad, perhaps, or alchemy-mad?"
Scandalized, Wagner seized the doctor's arm—Frau Wirten gasped to see it—and kneeling, imploringly cried, "Sir! Surely this judgment is premature. I refuse to believe the Magister is mad, particularly since he remains unconscious; a man may say things in a fever he would never say otherwise. Think of your patient's reputation! I beg you, apply yourself to his cure."
Doctor Schnabel came to himself with a start. He sighed again in a professional manner.
"This will be a close thing, a very close thing indeed."
He rolled up his sleeves, as if preparing to literally wrestle with the forces of life and death over the fate of his patient. Then he opened his handbag and removed two cloth bags with wooden-nozzled hoses, several paper-wrapped packets of pilled and powdered drugs, and a jar of leeches. From the leather pouch upon his belt, he selected the sharpest of many blades. "I'll need a basin, two if you have them. Three would be best."
"In vertebrates the hormone-producing organs are the adrenal cortex, the ovaries, the testes, and the placenta."
Returning to the room with a basin in either hand (Frau Wirten carried the third high over her head), Wagner said, "I must ask, sir, that you tell of any procedures you may intend before they are put into effect. This is no reflection upon your abilities!" he hastened to interject. "But the Magister has very definite views on certain aspects of the healing arts."
Frau Wirten bristled, but said nothing.
"Stereoisomerism is of importance in nature not only for carbohydrates but for all compounds where stereoisomers are possible."
Doctor Schnabel leaned forward to sniff Faust's eyelids and the crinkles at the edges of his eyes. "This man is twenty-nine years old—am I correct?"
"Thirty or thereabouts, yes."
"Twenty-nine," Schnabel said firmly. "His Saturn is in the third decan of Aquarius." Squinting, he moved his lips in silent calculation. "Not quite thirty, then." Then, turning to address Wagner directly, "My approach is orthodoxy itself. The body is a microcosm, subject to the laws of growth and decay. In much the same way that the macrocosmos is a single organism, so too every being is his own small world, selfcontained and self-regulating. It is for this reason that each individual's disease is unique."
Frau Wirten smiled and nodded as Schnabel spoke, holding one hand down with another, to keep them from launching upward into applause. Wagner, however, remained uncertain.
"But what specifically," he asked, "do you propose?"
"Your master's brain is overheated, due to an imbalance of humors in the bodily fluids. He must be purged. We will begin simply by toning his body with an enema, an emetic, and an expectorant. Any competent farmwife could do thus. But then he must be bled, in order to cool the fever and relieve him of impurities, and that will require all of my curative powers, for with too diffident a purging we cannot stop the course of his deterioration, and yet with too great an excision he may well die. It is all a matter of balance, the restoration of which requires both skill and experience."
"Why are there two enema bags?" Frau Wirten asked eagerly.
"The second, dear lady, is for the clyster, which is the complementary other half of an enema. When we are done, it is possible that the good scholar may not be able to take in food by mouth. In which case we will prepare a soothing mixture of broth and wine and insert it—thus." He gestured. "You see ?
"Ah;" she said, appalled and fascinated. "I never realized that nourishment could be taken in by that particular orifice."
Indeed. Such specialized knowledge is the province of a professional such as myself."
Wagner straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. A little tearfully he said, "Sir, I have listened to your intended course of action and I can authorize none of it. Doctor Faust has often spoken on such methods, and once made a careful comparison of the health of people who are bled against that of those who could not afford it. The conclusions he held inescapable that purging is deleterious to the health/
"And where has it gotten him?" cried Frau Wirten, unable to contain herself, I myself am bled every month at the full of the moon and look at me. I have not been sick since that time two years ago when my head swelled to three times its—"
"Yes yes yes" Schnabel opened the jar and drew off a small cupful of leech-water. The actions roused the bright denizens of the jar and they struck at its inside surface again and again He was careful to keep his fingers away from them. "I am aware that Faust was at one time employed as a—surgeon"— his voice dipped ever so slightly passing lightly over his opinion of the occupation— in the service of Poland, and that he was no believer in prophylactic bleeding. But we shall change his opinions, I assure you." He opened a twist of paper and deftly tapped in a dram of white powder. "A year from today he will be the most fervent of believers. He will sing on his way to the knife, and skip merrily on his way back from it."
"I must insist." Wagner shook off Frau Wirten's reproving hand from his arm.
Doctor Schnabel withdrew a small rod from his pouch and stirred the mixture briskly. "We'll begin with the emetic. If you would be so kind as to hold the basin, I'll guide his head."
"You must leave, sir," Wagner said sternly. He went to fling open the door and found it had never been closed. So he contented himself with throwing out an arm and gesturing dramatically down the hallway. "You are not welcome here, nor will you be paid for your efforts, nor do you have the authority to do anything to this good man."
Doctor Schnabel looked up, annoyed. "If you cannot refrain from this confounded bleating and squeaking, young fellow, I shall have to put you out of the room."
Wagner gestured again, this time with an accompanying stamp of his foot. "Out!"
It had no effect. Schnabel remained bent over his medications, with Frau Wirten hovering anxiously behind him.
Sheepishly, Wagner returned to the sickroom.
"Friedrich Wilhelm von Wondheim," Faust said, "was bled to death over the course of six weeks."
A puzzled frown crossed the doctor's face. "What is he saying?"
Faust opened his eyes.
"Karl Melber died from loss of blood as well, as did Frau Tucher, Heironymus Ntitzel, Bettina Hotzschuher, and Charlotte Koestler. Berndt Plitz was felled by an overdose of mercury administered as a supposed cure for morbus gallicus. Lafcadio Romano was similarly poisoned, but has recovered with only moderately severe nerve damage; it is a neighborhood joke to offer him a bowl of soup. Frau Wieruszowski and her unborn twins would be alive today, had her husband had the sense to summon a midwife/' Faust sat up, eyes blazing. "All of them are dead within the past year, and who do they have to thank for it but you?"
Doctor Schnabel started to his feet, scattering instruments. "How can you know all this? The mercury cure is a proprietary—I perfected the methodology myself. How dare you—" He broke off, suddenly suspicious. "Have you been following me about? What unholy power do you have?"
Behind him, tiny Frau Wirten hurriedly made the sign of the cross.
"Say that the devil whispers in my ear, if you wish. Say whatever nonsense you like. What failings of mine could compare with your hideous complacency? Accused of murder, you rush to defend the secrecy of your quack inventions. You refuse to even look at the truth—which is that you have no idea what you are doing. The blood serves three purposes: It carries nutrients to all parts of the body. It takes away the dead cells. And it contains infinitesimal platelets that fight and destroy the animalcules that cause disease. In bleeding your patients, you depress their natural defenses and by thus weakening them, encourage infection and promote the very diseas
es you are sworn to combat."
He stood, the embodiment of wrath. The two doctors faced each other across the dim room, the one visibly shrinking from the violent anger of the other. With a squeak, Frau Wirten retreated to the shadows.
Schnabel smiled weakly, placatingly. "It is your madness speaking now. You must lie down and rest."
"Oh, you are a blockhead indeed. You are as ignorant as snot! Shall I delve deeper into your incompetence? Very well. The woman you petitioned to have burnt as a witch, and who subsequently fled Saxony altogether, was no more than a simple herbalist, whose plain cures were vastly more effective than your own poisons and nostrums. There are five citizens in the graveyard because her absence drove them into your arms."
"Sir, you must control yourself. Your humors—"
"No shame yet? I will hold up a mirror to your ugly mug that will make even you blush: Your own brother died when you cut him for the stone." Faust picked up a fireplace poker and lashed it angrily in the air. "Do you remember how he smiled and squeezed your hand before the operation? How lovingly he kissed it? How, gazing into your eyes, he told you to ignore his screams, for he knew your hands, your brotherly hands, would heal him? Your hands. He would have lived, had you thought to wash those hands first! Oh, I should smash your thick skull in for you—it would be a mercy!"
With a choked cry, Doctor Schnabel flung an arm before his eyes and stumbled from the room. Frau Wirten went bouncing after him, arms flapping like a child's.
Faust laughed and threw down the poker.
"Fill one of those basins with water," he said. "I must wash and dress. Make certain the inkwells are filled. Sharpen a dozen quills."
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 4