by Hal Clement
“But it was I who made you come away,” Marc pointed out.
“I know. I thought of that. If I were your slave instead of your wife that might mean something. I was uneasy about going, but not firm enough about refusing until it was too late. No, Marc, the fault is mine. The guilt is mine. The curse is mine.”
“I’m not convinced. Every fault you claim for yourself could as easily be laid on me. In any case, it makes no difference; whether it be a curse on you, a curse on me, a curse on both of us, or simply another of the troubles given indifferently to the sons of men, the task and the fight are mine.”
“No, you wouldn’t be convinced. I know the sort of thing it takes to convince you. You are not sure whether the curse is on you or on me or on both of us because the children who have been touched are of both of us. I have thought of that, too. A child of Elitha’s—” She let her voice trail off, watching him. He was several seconds catching her meaning; then he shook his head negatively.
“No! You said it a moment ago—you are my wife. A curse on either of us, or a trouble for either of us, is a curse or a trouble for both. It is not that I don’t know which of us it is; I do not care.”
“But why should you grow old with no sons because the gods are angry with me? I still don’t believe that anyone can fight the gods—you’ll just make them angry with you, too, for trying. Forget that I gave you sons; we’ve been warned often enough. Kyros will join the others—you know it as well as I do. Take Elitha—”
“No!” Marc was even more emphatic than before. “I tell you it is not your fault. If gods or demons are punishing you, I blame them, not you, and will fight them—”
“Marc!” The woman’s voice was shocked. “No! You can’t.”
“Yes! Many times yes! If it will make you feel better, I don’t believe it is either gods or demons, or even a curse. I think I am just trying to learn something men should know; but if my sons have been killed by any living thing, that thing I will fight—man, devil, or anything else. I will not listen to any word of surrender, from you or anyone else.”
“But if you yielded and stopped fighting, they might spare Kyros.”
“What reason have I to expect that? They—if it is anyone—did not spare little Marc, or Balam, or Meth. They have done nothing to suggest that they would spare Kyros if I stopped fighting—you know that. I hadn’t started fighting when Marc and Balam died. You can’t suggest the smallest of reasons to believe what you just said; you just hope!”
“What else can I do?” Her voice was down to a whisper again.
“You can help. You said you would, in most things.”
“I couldn’t help you with something that would take another woman’s children as mine have been taken. Why should I pass my pain over to her?”
“Because if I can learn to fight this sickness, the knowledge will ward that pain from all other mothers from now on. Can’t you see that?”
“Of course I can see it. In that case, it would be right for you to test your ideas on Kyros. Would you do that?”
“No.” The answer came without hesitation. “Kyros is my only remaining son. I have given my share.”
“And learned nothing.”
“I learned enough to let me talk about it sensibly with healers in Rome.”
“And all they told you was that it couldn’t be cured!”
“That no one knew how to cure it,” he corrected. “I would not even have known that, if I had not seen—what we saw. Seeing that three times was more than my share, and far more than yours. We will see it again, perhaps; but if I have learned enough in time, we will see only part of it. Our boy will live.”
“But promise me, Marc—tell me you won’t try your ideas on other people. I know you don’t believe there’s any other way to learn, but promise me—not that way!”
“What other way is there?” he almost snarled. Then, in a gentler voice, “I can’t promise, my own. I would do anything in the world for you—except what I think to be wrong. If the gods have any hand in this at all, it is not a curse but a warning—an order. Galen in Rome had never heard of more than one son of the same father who had suffered this way. I have lost three to this thing; one remains. That is either a warning, an order, or a challenge, if it was done deliberately. I heed the warning, I obey the order, I accept the challenge. I can do nothing else. I do promise not to try my ideas on people as long as I can see any other way; more than that I cannot promise, even for you.” He got to his feet; after a moment she did the same, and stood facing him. Their shadows, magnified on the cavern wall by the steady flame of the single lamp, merged briefly and separated again.
“Sleep now, my own,” he said softly. “I must think—I will think of all the other ways I can possibly learn what I must, before I use the one you don’t want. You must sleep; I can’t. My thoughts won’t let me.”
“Shouldn’t I stay to help?”
“You can’t help until I’ve thought of something for you to hear. Then you can tell me what’s wrong with it. You can do that better if you’ve slept.” She went.
For half an hour the man stood motionless where she had left him. Then he strode softly to the entrance of their sleeping cave and listened carefully for several more minutes. Then he took another lamp, lighted it from the one which was burning, and went toward the garden again.
He had not listened at the other sleeping cave.
Judith missed the chance to ask her husband about his plans the next morning. Her attention and his were otherwise taken up. Marc examined his son’s knee a soon as the boy was awake, and found that Elitha had been right—the blood had clotted well enough. The knee was badly bruised, however, and Kyros admitted that it was hurting. For once, he walked to the living cave instead of bouncing to it.
The moment his mother discovered that he was less active than usual, she lost all thought for anything else. She kept anxious eyes on him while he ate, and went with him to the garden when he finished. Marc made no effort to follow, though he looked with concern after the pair. He went to his work cavern instead. The girl followed him to ask whether she should remain within call or go to the garden as usual with the others. He thought briefly, then smiled rather grimly and went to one of the bundles he had brought back the day before.
“Take one of the smallest pots, which we can do without for cooking or eating,” he said as he opened the package. “Take the head off this, and boil it for the rest of the day. I want the skull complete, so handle it carefully. Once the pot is boiling do not touch it except to add more water if it seems to be going dry.” He handed the corpse of a fair-sized snake to the girl. She shrank back for an instant, then got control of herself and accepted the repulsive object. Her voice trembled just a little as she asked, “Should I skin it first, Master?”
“No, don’t bother. It will be much easier after the boiling, and I don’t need the skin. That will be all; you may work in the garden with the others, as long as you don’t let the pot boil dry. This thing was too hard to get for me to want it burned.”
“Yes, sir.” Elitha took the snake and left the workroom, showing rather less than her usual serenity. The man either didn’t notice this or didn’t care; he turned back to the forge.
He was not an experienced metalworker. He had sometimes seen goldsmiths at work when he was a child, and had deliberately watched them again during his recent trip; but seeing something done is not the same as doing it oneself. He could melt gold easily with his charcoal fire and a bellows he had devised, but casting or otherwise working it into a desired shape was another matter altogether. He lost himself in the problem.
Sometime about the middle of the morning Elitha reappeared. She stood silently by the entrance until he noticed her; just how long this was he was never sure. When he did see her, as he straightened up from another failure, he was rather startled.
“What do you want, girl?” The answer was hesitant, in contrast to Elitha’s usual self-possession.
“I wonder
ed whether your pot should be at the cooking fire when the lady and your son come to eat. The boy might not notice, but do you want the mistress to know about it—about the snake?”
“I don’t see why not.” Marc was honestly surprised.
“Do you think she’d like black magic? She is very fond of good, and might not like bad magic even for a good purpose.”
The man’s surprise and annoyance vanished, washed out on a wave of amusement. “This is not magic, black or white, Elitha.” He laughed. “I’ll show you what I need the skull for when it’s ready. Bring the pot back here before the evening meal, though; it should have boiled enough by then.”
“I don’t want—I—very well, Master.” The girl left hastily and Marc returned to his work and his frustration. The rest of the day was uninterrupted, uneventful, and unsuccessful for him.
It was worse for Judith. As long as her son was active and happy, she could usually persuade herself that the threat to his life was at least postponed; but today he was neither. His knee kept him from most of the games he enjoyed, and made him crankier than usual about the necessary garden work. Judith tended to take each complaint, each bit of disobedience or stubbornness, each departure from what she considered his normal behavior, as evidence that the curse was about to reach a climax. Elitha, who was skillful at controlling the youngster tactfully on his bad days, was spending more time than usual inside the cave. Since Judith in her present mood was quite unable to be firm with the boy, it was a bad day for both. About the only successful order she issued was the standing interdict against climbing the ladder which Elitha used to go up to the plateau for firewood. Even this might have been disobeyed if Kyros had actually felt like climbing—though it is possible that the sight of her son climbing might have driven even Judith to something stern enough to be effective. No one will ever be sure.
The four ate the evening meal together as usual, though less happily than usual. Kyros was fretful, Judith silent, and Marc was becoming more and more worried—about his wife rather than his son. She had promised to help with his work. She was, he knew, perfectly able to do so in her normal state of mind, since she was a highly intelligent woman; but because of Kyros’ condition she had been useless all day, and seemed likely to remain so. She asked not a word about the work, but watched the boy as she ate.
The youngster himself had a good appetite, whatever else might be wrong with him. He finished what was set before him, asked for more, and finished that. He rebelled at the suggestion that it was time for sleep, which seemed normal enough to Marc but bothered Judith. A compromise was finally effected in which Elitha was to go back to the garden with him and tell stories until the stars could be seen. Marc engineered this arrangement, partly to get Judith from the boy for a while and partly so that he could talk to her himself. It almost failed; Judith wanted to go out with the others, but saw in time what her husband had in mind and managed to control herself. She remained silent until the two were out of earshot; then she burst forth:
“Marc! What can we do? You can see that it’s aiming—”
“No, I can’t. Think, dearest, please! All that’s really wrong with him is a bruised knee. The blood from the cut dried, just as the finger did the other day. Why do you worry so about a bruise? Boys have bruises more often than not; you know that.” Marc was actually trying hard to retain control himself; he was carefully not telling his wife everything he had learned from Galen of Pergamum. “Please stop worrying about him, at least until something serious really happens, and help me so that we can be ready for it when it does.”
“I’ll try.” Judith’s voice gave her husband little ground for optimism. “What have you thought of? What can we do?”
“Nothing, without—well, you know.”
“You have thought of nothing?”
“I have ideas, but I have no way of knowing whether they are good. How could I?”
“I should think that if an idea is good, anyone could tell that it is. What are the ideas?”
“One we mentioned before—replacing the blood which a person loses. We thought of having him drink it—”
“I remember. We didn’t like the idea.”
“It’s not so much that we didn’t like it, but I doubt very much that it would work. A person’s stomach must turn the things he eats into the things his body needs, and maybe if you drink blood and your body needs blood it will go right through your stomach unchanged; but I’m not sure. After all, by that argument any food must turn into blood in your stomach, if that’s what you need. When the other boys were dying we tried to get them to eat. When they could, it didn’t do any special good, and toward the end they couldn’t. Remember?”
Judith bit her lip. “I remember.”
“So I thought it might be better to put new blood right into the veins, where we know it is needed.”
“That seems perfectly all right. Why didn’t we think of it sooner? We might have saved the other boys!”
“How would you go about it?”
“Why, just—” Judith stopped, her mind running over the various ways of getting a liquid from one container to another, and rejecting each in turn. “I don’t see how, right away. Some sort of funnel, with a little pipe—but I don’t see how—” Her voice trailed off.
“That’s my general idea, too, and I think I see how; but I’m having trouble making it work.”
“What are you doing?” Marc sighed inwardly with relief; he had apparently weaned her mind away from her son’s condition for the moment.
“I’ll show you; come up to the workshop,” he said. She followed eagerly. “One part was quite easy,” he went on as they reached the cavern. “There is a way made by the gods, if you want to look at it so, for putting something into a person’s veins from outside. A viper can do it very easily, you know.”
“Of course! I should have thought of that. You can make a sort of hollow needle, like a viper’s tooth.”
“Unfortunately I can’t. I’m not that good a smith. What I thought of doing was using an actual viper’s tooth, and fastening it somehow to a funnel; and I’m having trouble even with that.”
“You have the tooth?”
“Yes. Here.” He indicated the white skull on the bench. “The teeth are there. I haven’t tried to get them out yet—perhaps your fingers would be better than mine. The real trouble has been to make a funnel which could be fitted to the tooth. I know that gold is one of the easy metals to melt, and I’ve been trying to make out of it a funnel and tube which could be fitted to such a small thing; but I’ve had no luck at all.”
“Isn’t lead easier to melt?”
“So I understand, but I don’t have any. We do have some gold coin still.”
“But what is your trouble?”
“I’ll have to show you. I can melt the gold easily enough in a clay pot, and I can even make a sort of cup which could be used for the top part of a funnel; but I can’t make a hollow tube. If I try to pour the gold into a narrow clay pipe, it just fills up to form a solid rod. If I put something down the middle of the pipe to keep the gold at the sides, I never can get it out afterward.”
“Why not use clay for the tube you need, without bothering with gold?”
“Any clay tube I’ve made which was small enough cracked all to pieces when I tried to harden it in the fire. You can try that if you like while I melt up the gold again; you’ll see.”
If took several tries, and several hours, to convince Judith that practice could be more difficult than theory, and that ideas could be basically sound and still difficult to execute. When they finally stopped work for the night, Kyros and Elitha had long been asleep—at least, Judith’s quick check of their cave produced no change in the breathing of either one.
The next day was somewhat better. The boy’s bruise was less painful, and he showed something more like his normal activity. Judith was able to devote some thought to her husband’s problem, while Marc himself alternately thought and tested out new variations
on his amateur goldsmithing techniques. Elitha kept busy with her regular housekeeping and nursemaid duties. In spite of her reaction to the snake, she occasionally appeared in the work cave to make sure the lamps were full, though she came no closer to the working area than she could help. Marc suspected that she still considered him a black magician.
The night was similar to the preceding one; Judith joined her husband in the workshop for a time, and assisted in another failure or two. Marc saw that she was becoming discouraged. He couldn’t blame her, but the fact discouraged him, and he decided to stop the forge work earlier than on the night before. He did not, however, go with her to sleep; there was thinking to be done, as he emphasized and as she was quite willing to admit. She left him alone at the workbench. His trip to the garden, and beyond, was quicker than before.
And so the days passed. Kyros’ knee recovered. Then he scraped an elbow while running through the passage to the garden, and Judith relapsed into near-panic during the ten hours or so which the injury took to clot. Perhaps the experience was useful, though, for she produced a constructive idea a day or two later. She had long since extracted the fangs from the snake skull, adding to Marc’s problems by giving him a realistic idea of the size of the tube he was trying to match. He had managed by now to make finger-size pipes of gold, but this was a long way from what was needed—in fact, when he took his first good look at an extracted fang he suffered a spell of discouragement almost as bad as one of Judith’s. He had recovered from this and resumed the struggle before Kyros suffered his elbow injury, but was making very little progress.
Then, with the boy back to normal, Judith appeared in the work cave bursting with an idea.
“Marc! I’ve been wondering. Why do we have to make a tube to connect the bowl part of the funnel to the snake’s tooth? Why can’t the tooth be right in the bottom of the bowl?” The man straightened up from his furnace, and his eyes narrowed in thought.
