Still mostly asleep, Sergios ate a little and did not throw it up. That gave Argyros enough hope to seek his own bed. His rest, though, was fitful, and Riario’s knock not long after dawn came as a relief. He sprang up to let the doctor in.
But Riario had no good news to give him. He hissed in dismay when the magistrianos led him into Sergios’s room. “The first eruptions already,” he grunted, and Argyros saw he was right. Raised red patches were beginning to cover the baby’s face, just as they had Helen’s. But with Helen, they had taken four days after the onset of the fever to appear. This was only the next day for Sergios.
“Is that bad?” Argyros asked, already afraid he knew the answer.
“Yes,” the doctor said baldly: he was not one to mince words. “The faster the disease goes through its course, the worse the prognosis.”
“What can I do to help him? There must be something!” The magistrianos kept running the nails of one hand over the back of the other. He was not even aware he was doing it.
Riario sadly shook his head. “Only what you did for your wife. Keep the tot as comfortable as you can. Bathe him in cool water to try to fight the fever. Do your best to see he eats—he needs his strength. Come to me when you need more poppy juice. Pray, if you think it does any good.”
The physician’s callous attitude toward prayer had shocked Argyros the first time he heard it. Now he only nodded. He still believed prayer could help the sick—but only sometimes.
Then Riario left, and he was alone with his son, alone to fight the inexorable progress of the smallpox. He had thought nothing could be worse than tending Helen had been. Now he saw he was wrong. It was as if some malign spell had accelerated the disease so he could watch Sergios get worse hour by hour. Nothing he did slowed the illness in the slightest.
The only mercy—a small one—was the poppy juice. It spared the baby the torment of itching Helen had gone through. Sergios hardly knew how, as the day waned and dusk fell, the pus-filled vesicles spread over his body. The end came not long after lamplighting time. The baby gave a small sigh and stopped breathing. For several minutes, his father did not realize he was dead.
When he did, he fled the house that had seen his young family begin and end as if it were accursed. To him, it was. For two coppers, he would have put a torch to it, no matter if the blaze set half Constantinople afire. He wandered blindly through the dark lanes and alleys of the city.
He was walking past the church of St. Symeon when he noticed where he was. Later, he saw it was probably not chance that had led his feet thither. He made for Riario’s house. Of all the people he knew in the city, the doctor was most likely to grasp his anguish and, in grasping, help temper it.
When a knock sounds in the middle of the night, men commonly come to the door with a lamp in one hand and a cudgel or knife in the other, ready to fend off footpads. Because of his trade, though, Riario was used to such rude summonses. He opened the door at once, still wrapping his blanket around him. “Yes? What is it?” He held up a taper to see who his caller was.
His face fell when he recognized Argyros. “So soon as this, eh?” he said, and did not wait for a reply. “You’d better come in. I have some wine that could use drinking.”
Riario filled and lit several lamps in his living room, threw a couple of robes from a chair to the floor, and waved the magistrianos into it. The rest of the room was strewn with clothes, books, and medical oddments. Men who live alone are usually very neat or anything but. The doctor was of the latter group.
“Here.” He put an earthenware jug in front of Argyros and got one like it for himself. He did not bother with cups. “Drink,” he said.
Argyros drank. Like a sponge, his grief sucked up the wine and left him all but untouched. He put down the jar. “Why?” he cried, a groan that filled the room.
“Ask God when you come before Him in judgment,” Riario said. “I intend to. He’d best have a good answer, too, or I’ll make Him pay. One day I had a wife I loved, two daughters I couldn’t afford to dowry, and a face I didn’t mind seeing in a mirror. A couple of weeks later … But you know about that.”
“Yes, I know about that.” Argyros drank deeply. After a while, he went on, “I wish I had caught it too. Why am I here and untouched, when they’re gone?” He rubbed at the backs of his hands.
“Never wish you had smallpox,” Riario said, most seriously. “Never. Poison yourself if you want, or jump off a building, but never wish that on yourself. Be thankful you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His eyes bored into the magistrianos, seeming to glow in the lamplight. Abashed by the force of that stare, Argyros raised the winejar to his lips again. Riario’s glance shifted. Even after he had been drinking, he missed very little. His eyebrows shot upward. He whispered, “Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Look at your hands, fool!”
Setting down the jug, the magistrianos did. He felt his heart stumble with fear. On his fingers and the backs of his hands were several of the hateful red blotches he had come to know so well. A couple were already turning into blisters.
“It’s impossible!” he burst out. “I’m not sick!”
Riario stood beside him, felt his forehead, took his pulse with sure, careful fingers. “You’re not sick,” he agreed at last. It sounded like an accusation; the doctor was scowling. “Why aren’t you? Those are smallpox sores. Why don’t you have more of them?”
“I don’t know.” Absurdly, Argyros felt guilty.
Riario kept poking and prodding at him, trying to figure out why he was not worse. He could not fathom it himself. He had watched the smallpox lesions disfigure Helen before they killed her, had seen them devour his son, and here he had this harmless handful. If God was giving him his wish, it was a mocking gift.
Then he smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I’m a fool!”
“I’m willing to believe it,” Riario said, “but why do you say so?”
“I don’t think I have smallpox at all.”
“What are those, then?” The doctor jerked his chin at the blisters on Argyros’s hands.
“What did the dairyman call it when his little boy had it? Cowpox, that’s what it was. I milked cows a couple of times, getting milk for Sergios.”
“You’re right, and I’m the one who’s the fool.” Riario shook his head in chagrin. “I’ve seen cowpox often enough, on milkmaids and such scared spitless they had smallpox instead. It’s just that now, with so much of the real sickness everywhere, I naturally thought of it first and didn’t even worry about the other.”
Still grumbling to himself, the doctor left the room. He came back with two jugs. “That calls for more wine.”
“I don’t want to drink to celebrate,” the magistrianos said.
“Then drink to drink, or drink for oblivion, or drink to stay with me, because I intend to. Just drink.” Riario used a scalpel to cut into the pitch sealing the winejar’s cork, worked it free, raised the jar to his mouth, and tipped his head back.
Argyros followed suit. At last the sweet wine began to reach him. He stared owlishly toward Riario. “What the devil good are you miserable doctors, if you can’t even cure anybody who falls sick?”
Riario did not get angry. Instead, he buried his head in his hands. “How I wish we could. Give us what credit we deserve, though: we set bones, we tend cuts and burns, sometimes we even do some good with the knife.”
The magistrianos nodded. “Oh, aye, I’ve seen all that in the army. But I’ve also seen campaigns fail before they started because half the men went down with a bloody flux, and no one could do anything about it.”
“Yes, I know; those things happen.” Riario hesitated, then continued slowly, seeming to reveal a long-cherished dream at which he feared Argyros would jeer: “What I really wish is that we could do something about disease before it started.”
Indeed, the magistrianos had al
l he could do not to burst into derisive laughter. “How would you do that?”
“How do I know?” Riario said irritably. “I keep thinking of King Mithridates of Pontos—you know, the one who gave Rome such a fight in the time of Sulla and Pompey. He made himself so immune to poisons by taking lots of small doses that when he really needed to kill himself he had to get one of his mercenaries to do it for him.”
“Wonderful,” Argyros said. “Where are you going to get a little dose of a disease? And—”
He stopped, his mouth hanging open. He thought of Paul Skleros, his plump happy wife, and their eight children, all healthy while smallpox raged through Constantinople. He thought of the cowpox marks he had seen on small Paul—and surely the rest of the family would have had that ailment too. He thought of Riario’s own words, of how people coming down with cowpox were afraid they had smallpox.
“By the Virgin and all the saints,” he whispered.
“What?” Riario still sounded as though he regretted bringing his vision out where the magistrianos could see it.
Then, stammering, his tongue thick with wine, Argyros set his own insight before the doctor. When he was done, he waited for Riario to call him an idiot.
He watched Riario’s hands slowly curl into fists. His face took on an expression Argyros did not recognize for a moment. Then he remembered his army days and suddenly riding into a clearing where a wildcat was stalking a squirrel. The cat had borne that same look of hungry concentration.
“To hit back, oh, to hit back,” Riario breathed. “Do you realize the weapon you’ll have put into physician’s hands if you’re right, Argyros?”
“If I’m right,” the magistrianos repeated. “How could you find out?”
“I know what I’d like to do,” Riario replied at once: “Dab some pus from a smallpox sore into a cut on somebody who’s already had cowpox. If the poor sod didn’t come down with smallpox after that, he never would.”
“I thought you would say that. Do it.”
“With whom?” the doctor asked scornfully. “Who’d be madman enough to take a chance like that?”
“I would,” Argyros said.
“Don’t be a jackass, man. If you’re wrong, you take the disease for real, not just in your foolish wishes.”
The magistrianos spread his hands. “Why should I care? My life is in ruins anyhow.”
“That’s the wine talking, and your sorrow.”
“In the morning I’ll be sober and tell you the same thing. As for my sorrow … if I live to be old as Methusaleh, I’ll never lose it. You should know that.”
Riario flinched, grimaced, reluctantly nodded. All the same, he said, “Go home and go to bed. If you’re fool enough to come back in the morning, well, we’ll talk about it. If not, I can’t blame you; that’s for certain.”
Argyros did not want to go home; the memories of the past weeks were too bitter for him ever to want to live in that house again. In the end, his legs decided the matter. They might as well have been jelly when he tried to rise. His head spun like Scylla’s whirlpool. He slumped back into his chair and passed out.
When he woke, his pounding head made him think he had died and gone to hell. He groaned, and then groaned again at hearing his own voice.
Riario was moving about; listening to him also hurt. The doctor said, “There are two cures for a hangover. One is raw cabbage, the other a bit more wine. Cabbage always makes me belch. Here.”
Argyros thought his queasy stomach would reject the cup Riario pressed on him, but the wine stayed down. After a while, he began to feel human, in a melancholy way.
Riario’s haggard look and red-tracked eyes said he was suffering too. He picked up a chunk of bread, shuddered, put it down again. “I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”
“I’m half your age, and I was too old years ago.” The magistrianos sat bolt upright and regretted it. “The smallpox!”
Riario regarded him with bleary curiosity. “You still want to go ahead?”
“I said I would, didn’t I? I remember that. It’s one of the last things I do remember.”
“Let me look at you,” Riario, said and took the magistrianos’s hands in his own. Argyros looked with him. Clean brown scabs were already forming over the cowpox blisters. The doctor grunted. “Aye, you’re healing from it. Come along, then. If you’re after a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pelagios with the other suicides, I’ll help put you there.”
“If you were so sure that was going to happen, you wouldn’t try this,” Argyros said.
“I suppose not. But then, I wouldn’t try it unless I was certain I’d miss the disease.”
Having had the last word, Riario paced the house, waiting for someone to report a new case of smallpox. He began to grumble; by this time yesterday, he had been wanted in three places at once. But noon was still a long way away when a woman began pounding on the door, crying, “My husband! Come quick! The pox has seized my husband!”
Argyros and Riario both screwed up their faces at the bright morning sunshine. Lost in her own concern, the woman never noticed. She unquestioningly accepted Argyros as another doctor.
The magistrianos’s stomach almost rebelled when he stood by the sick man’s bed. The fellow reminded him too sharply of what he had gone through with Helen and Sergios. Smallpox lesions covered his face and limbs; as yet, they held clear fluid, not pus. “Will he live?” Argyros asked quietly, so the man’s wife, who was sobbing in the next room, would not hear.
“He may well,” Riario answered. “The fever’s not as high as it often is, and his pulse is very strong.”
He eyed the magistrianos. Argyros willed himself to nod.
The doctor pulled a scalpel from his bag; Argyros thought it was the same one he had used to open the wine the night before. He made a small cut in the side of the magistrianos’s right thumb. Argyros nearly jerked his hand away. Holding still to be deliberately injured, he found, was harder in some ways than going into battle.
Humming tunelessly, Riario pierced a couple of the sick man’s blisters with the scalpel. He pressed the liquid from them into the wound he had made on Argyros’s hand and wrapped a bandage around it. He gave the scalpel a thoughtful look. “If this has smallpox poison on it, I suppose I ought to wash it before I use it again.”
He went out a few minutes later to tell the sick man’s wife to do all the things Argyros had done for Helen: bathe him against the fever, keep him quiet—all the palliatives that did no harm, and not much good, either. They did not pretend to cure.
His thumb had begun to throb. It did not matter. If he was right, here was something better than a cure, for anyone who had once had cowpox would never get smallpox at all.
If he was wrong—well, Riario had already spelled out what would happen if he was wrong. One way or the other; he would know soon.
His visits to Riario became a daily ritual. The doctor would examine him, feel to see if he had a fever, check his pulse. Then Riario would growl, “Still alive, I’d say,” give him a cup of wine—a small cup of wine—and send him home again.
The routine gave him something around which his life could coalesce once more. So did his work, to which he returned about a week after Sergios died. The corps of magistrianoi was still badly shorthanded, with some members dead and others mourning loved ones or caring for the sick. The number of things to be done, though, remained the same. Exhaustion was an anodyne hardly less potent than wine.
After three weeks, only a pale scar remained from the cut on Argyros’s thumb. He began to lose patience with Riario’s stock phrase. “Think I’m likely to stay that way?” he asked pointedly.
“Oh, yes, I’ve thought so for some time,” the doctor said. “There is another problem, though: for all we know, you may have been immune to smallpox even before you got the cowpox. You nursed your wife and son without catching it, you know.”
Argyros stared at him, appalled. He felt betrayed. “Then what I did was worthless?”
<
br /> “No, no, no, no. You’re part of a proof, but only part. I’ve done some checking lately. Did you know that it’s not just the Skleroi who escaped smallpox, but almost all the dairy families in the city?”
“No, but that would make sense, wouldn’t it? They’d be the ones most likely to get cowpox first instead.”
“So they would. That’s really what decided me you’d guessed right, whether you yourself were immune or not. By now, I’ve given cowpox to a couple of dozen people and tried to give them smallpox afterward.”
“And?” Argyros wanted to reach over and shake the answer out of Riario. “By the Virgin, tell me this instant how they are!”
The doctor grinned his lopsided grin. “Still alive, I’d say.”
“Then if, say, the city prefect made everyone in Constantinople come forward to get a dose of cowpox, or if babies got it not long after they were born—”
“—None of those people would come down with smallpox later,” Riario finished for the magistrianos. “That’s my best guess. I’ve already started telling other doctors, too. The word will spread.”
Awe on his face, Argyros crossed himself and bent his head in prayer.
“Here, what’s all this in aid of?” Riario demanded after the magistrianos had spent several silent minutes.
“I was apologizing to the Lord for daring to question His will,” Argyros answered humbly. “Now at last I see His purpose in the anguish He sent me and those I love—loved.” Purpose or no, that correction brought sorrow with it. Argyros quickly went on, “Had they not been taken ill, I never would have stumbled across the truth that will save so many more from a like fate. Truly I am but an instrument of His will.”
“Oh, hogwash,” the doctor said. “What of all the others who got sick and died in the epidemic? If God killed all of them just so two would draw your attention, He strikes me as bloody wasteful.”
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