The next morning, Helen felt a little better. She was lucid more often, and did not seem as hot. By contrast, Sergios was fussy. As Helen had predicted, his insides resented the new food he was getting. He spent a lot of time crying, his legs drawn up to his belly against gas pains. Argyros thought he felt warm, but would not have sworn to it.
A knock on the door that afternoon made the magistrianos jump. He got up from beside Helen and hurried to the entrance hall. “There’s sickness here,” he called, expecting whoever it was to beat a hasty retreat.
Instead, to his amazement, rumbling laughter answered him. “I’d not be here if there weren’t,” said the man outside; his Greek had a strong Italic Latin flavor. “I’m a doctor, or so they tell me.”
In his relief, Argyros had to try three times before he could work the latch and throw the door wide. The man who brushed past him was a vigorous sixty, stocky and broad-shouldered. His big nose had been well broken sometime in the distant past; he wore his graying beard high on his cheeks to cover as many old pockmarks as he could, but it did not hide them all.
He barked laughter when he saw Argyros looking at him. “Oh, I was pretty enough once,” he said, “but when you get as old as I am, it doesn’t matter worth a damn any more anyway. Now tell me who’s got it and where they are.” He set hands on hips and waited.
“This way, ah—” The magistrianos paused, flustered both by the doctor’s blunt manner and because he did not know the man’s name.
“I’m Gian Riario, if you’re wondering,” the doctor said. “Ioannes Rhiarios, if you’d rather have the Greek like most people here.” As the original language of Rome, Latin was still co-official with Greek, but had less prestige than the tongue of the richer, more anciently civilized eastern half of the Empire.
“I speak Latin,” Argyros said mildly. “If you’d rather use it—” Riario shook his head, gestured impatiently. The magistrianos went on, “Before you go farther, I have to tell you I fear it’s the smallpox.”
“You waiting to see if I run?” Riario said and laughed again. He ran his fingers over his pocked forehead. “I’ve had it already, and I’ll not catch it again. You can only get it once, no matter what the old wives say. Either it kills you, or it leaves you alone afterward.”
“Is that really true?”
“It’s true, or else I’d’ve been dead five hundred times this past month. Come on, who’s sick here? Wife? Brats? Not your mistress, or you’d be keeping her somewhere else.”
“My wife,” the magistrianos said, refusing to be drawn; he recognized that Riario’s abrasiveness had no malice behind it. “My baby son is well so far, thank God.”
“Aye, it’s very bad in babes. Well, take me to your woman, then”—Riario yawned till his jaw cracked—“for I’ve more stops after this one.” For the first time, Argyros noticed the dark pouches under the physician’s eyes. The man was close to working himself to death.
The magistrianos led Riario back to the bedroom, saying as they went in, “I think Helen is better today than she has been for the last couple of days.” Indeed, his wife had her wits about her and managed a smile for Argyros and for the doctor when he was introduced.
Riario at the bedside was nothing like Riario with someone who did not need him. He felt Helen’s forehead, murmured, “Oh, very good,” and reached for her wrist to take her pulse. “Very good,” he repeated, his eyes on her face.
She smiled again, then made an apologetic gesture and scratched at her cheek. The doctor did not seem to notice. “You’ll be up and about before long,” he said. “Now I’m just going to check to see that your baby’s doing well too. Does he look like you, or is he homely like his father?”
She giggled.
Riario snorted. “You come with me, sirrah, and leave your lady at peace,” he said to Argyros. When they were in the hall, out of earshot of the bedroom, he let out the sigh he had been holding back.
The magistrianos seized his arm. “She’s better, not so?” he demanded, remembering barely in time to keep his voice down.
“It often seems that way,” Riario said, “just before the pocks come. You saw that rash she was picking at on her face? That’s how it begins.”
Argyros heard him as though from very far away. Young, bright Helen’s cheery face pitted and slagged with scars like this old doctor’s? It was not that he could not love her afterward. He knew he could; he cherished her for much more than the outward seeming of her body. But he feared she could not love herself disfigured, and her sorrow would take the summer from his year.
Riario might have read his mind. “Don’t fret over her looks,” he said bluntly. “Fret over whether she lives. The pocks are the crisis of the disease. If they begin to scab over and heal, she’s won. Otherwise—”
“Is there nothing you can do?” The magistrianos knew he was pleading and did not care.
“If there were, don’t you think I’d’ve done it for myself?” Riario’s laugh was harsh. “I hate smallpox, and even more I hate being helpless against it. If it’s God’s curse as they say, why, I curse God back for it.”
Argyros crossed himself at the blasphemy, but the physician answered with a two-fingered obscene gesture Italians often used. Riario grated, “If you’d watched as many men—aye, and women like your wife, and babes like your babe—as I have die in pain, and all you could do was close their eyes when they’d gone, you’d understand. When God smote Egypt, Pharaoh got off lucky, for He didn’t send him small-pox.”
He shook his head and seemed to come back to himself. “Show me your son, as long as I’m here.” The bitter edge returned for a moment: “Not that I’ll be able to do any good if he does have it.”
But Riario’s interest revived when he saw the jar of milk and the syringe by Sergios’s cradle. “What have we here?” he asked. Argyros explained. The doctor rubbed his chin and nodded. “Clever. A trick I’ll have to remember.”
He picked up the baby, felt Sergios’s forehead with his hand and then, as if not sure what it told him, with his lips. “A touch of something there, maybe,” he said at last, “but who knows what? These little ones take all sorts of fevers. If it’s bad, you’ll find out soon enough.”
Again, he was gentle with his patient, cuddling Sergios and making him smile before he put him down. To Argyros he said, “I’m sorry I can’t offer more hope. No doubt you’d rather have a doctor who tells you sweet-sounding lies.”
“No, I prefer an honest man,” the magistrianos said, which startled Riario but also seemed to satisfy him.
The physician gave a jerky nod and headed for the street. “Another mission of mercy,” he said, rolling his eyes to show how much mercy he expected to bring. “Good fortune to you, Argyros; I’ll call again in a few days, or when I have the chance.” He nodded again and was gone.
Over the next week, Argyros learned why Riario hated smallpox so much. He watched helplessly as the disease’s characteristic rash spread over Helen’s face, arms, legs, and even onto her belly and back.
At first the marks were red and raised. They must have itched ferociously, for Helen scratched them till they bled. Her fever was back full force and left her wits wandering. Argyros finally had to use rags to tie her hands to the bedposts to keep her from clawing herself in her delirium.
In the moments when her wits partly cleared, she wept all the time, moaning, “I’ll be ugly, Basil, ugly. How will you be able to want me any more?” Nothing he said could get through to her to convince her she was wrong. That wounded him almost as much as being there hour by hour, day by day, watching the ravages of the disease grow ever worse. Sometimes he wondered if he was going mad. Sometimes he wished he could.
Most agonizing for him was how little he could do even to make her comfortable. He sponged off her sores several times a day. The coolness might have helped her fever a little, but none of the ointments of grease and honey and other, less easily named, ingredients that he bought did the least thing to help her itching.
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br /> Argyros could not make her eat much, and the days of fever wasted her. She grew very thin.
The only times he left the house were his daily trips to buy milk for Sergios. The baby was growing as used to his makeshift feedings with the syringe as he had been to his mother’s breast. That saddened Argyros too, although he was relieved his son’s fever had grown no worse.
He got to know Peter Skleros and his large family well: they were the only healthy people he was seeing. Once or twice he caught himself resenting them for escaping the smallpox, and immediately felt ashamed for his meanness.
He could not help being glad to get out of the house, though, and it was only natural that sometimes he invented small delays to keep from going straight back with his milk. He would help Skleros’s children keep the dairy buildings clean, lead the cows to and from their grazing at the park. Once he even did his own milking.
“Here, Sergios,” he said with foolish pride when he gave the boy some of that jar. “Your father drew this with his own hands. Doesn’t it taste especially good?”
Sergios was not impressed.
Helen got worse. The red patches on her skin turned to blisters, filled at first with a clear liquid and then with pus. When they broke, as they sometimes did in her thrashing, the smell was foul. She would not eat at all after that, and drank only a little water. She had no more control over her bodily functions than Sergios had.
Her breathing grew harsh and labored. Along with the pox, her skin began to look bruised. Though she was still delirious, she moved less and less. All these signs terrified Argyros, who ran to the church of the Holy Apostles for a priest to give her the last rites.
Though that church was second only to Hagia Sophia, it had but few ecclesiastics to serve it. Some were dead; others fled. Only one would go back to his house with him when he told them Helen had smallpox.
He cursed the rest for cowards. The priest, whose name was Ioasaph, set a hand on his arm. “They are no more than men, my son. Do not ask for what is beyond their strength.”
“How do you dare come, then?”
Ioasaph shrugged; his thick brown beard bounced on his chest. “God will do with me as He wills. Whether I stay or come, I am in His hands.”
The magistrianos wondered what Riario would say to that.
Then all such small thoughts crumbled to ashes within him, for when he and the priest returned to his home they found Helen dead. Ioasaph prayed over her body, then turned to Argyros. “She is at peace at last, and out of pain.”
“Yes,” Argyros said dully. He was surprised he did not feel more. It was like a sword cut: the damage was done, but the pain would come later.
Ioasaph said, “You must understand, this is God’s will. She has gained eternal life, against which this world and its suffering are but a moment.”
“Yes,” Argyros said again, but he could not share the priest’s calm confidence. Having been with Helen all the while, he found he could not see why heaven had to be purchased with a week of hell.
After a while, Ioasaph left. Argyros hardly noticed. He sat staring at Helen’s body. Even in death she had no repose, but lay contorted.
He did not know how long he stayed by the bed they had shared. Sergios’s cries finally roused him. He changed and fed the baby. He had joked with Helen about that, back in another lifetime.
Remembering their laughter reached him as the brute fact of death could not. He set down his son and buried his face in his hands. The tears came then, and for a long time would not go.
At last, moving stiffly as one of Hephaistos’s bronze men in the Iliad, he made himself go do what he had to. Arethas Saronites’s sympathy sounded forced; the medical officer had said the same words too many times these past weeks. So too with his final advice: “Go home and wait for the burial party. It will come soon.”
Two shaven-headed convicts bore Helen away to one of the large, newly dug graves outside the city. An overseer with a bow stood by. If the convicts lived through the epidemic, they would go free.
Had it not been for Sergios, the magistrianos would have given way to despair. The baby was far too little to understand his mother was dead; he only knew he needed someone to take care of him. He did not give Argyros much time to dwell on his own grief.
Argyros thought once more about getting the boy a wet-nurse. Before, he had balked because he did not think one would come into a house of sickness. Now he did not want to expose Sergios to more outsiders than he had to. The baby was all he had left to remember his wife by. He did not count her family. After he sent the message telling them she was dead, he intended never to have anything to do with them again.
When the knock on the door came, he thought it was his father-in-law, come to try to make amends. His hand was on his knife hilt as he went to the front of the house. But instead of Alexios Moskhos, Gian Riario stood waiting.
The doctor’s shoulders sagged when he read Argyros’s face. “Oh, damnation,” he said. “She was young and strong, and if she pulled through the crisis I thought I’d be able to help her. These are the hard ones to lose.”
“What do you know about that?” the magistrianos lashed out at him.
“Do you think I was never married?” The question, and the raw hurt behind it, brought Argyros up short. After a moment, Riario went on, “Your baby is still well, I hope?”
“Yes.”
“Something, anyway. I wasn’t so lucky,” the doctor murmured, more to himself than to Argyros. He grew brisk again: “Listen—if you so much as mislike the way he breaks wind, call me. I live on the street of the church of St. Symeon, six doors up from the church. Do you write? Yes? Good—you can leave a note on my door if I’m not there, and I probably won’t be. Even if he farts funny, do you understand?”
“I do—and thank you.”
Riario snorted, very much his cynical self again. “You’d thank me more if I really had a hope of doing something.”
“You try.”
“Well, maybe so. As I told you, the smallpox has done everything to me it can. I’m not afraid of it any more.” He laughed harshly. “Futile, aye, but not afraid.”
The magistrianos was afraid: he and Sergios were still vulnerable. After Riario left, he went back and fed the baby. Every syringe of milk his son gulped down felt like a triumph—what could show health better than strong appetite?
Serios was cranky the next day, but not enough to worry his father, in spite of Riario’s words. Argyros went on with the melancholy tasks that sprang from Helen’s death. He was packing her belongings in sacks and boxes to take them to St. Symeon’s church, where the deacons could distribute them to the needy.
Then the baby started crying again, and Argyros’s head came up without his having to think about it. He knew the difference between fussy cries and those that meant something was really wrong. He hurried into Sergios’s room, expecting that one of the fibulae he had used to fasten the baby’s linen had come undone and was poking his son, or some similar minor catastrophe.
But nothing was obviously wrong. Sergios was not even wet. The crying stopped; Sergios seemed listless. Shrugging, Argyros bent to lift him out of the cradle and cuddle him. He almost dropped him—the baby’s skin felt much too warm.
Icy fear shot up Argyros’s back. As if to deny the reality of what his fingers told him, he filled the syringe bladder with milk and offered it to his son. Sergios gave a couple of halfhearted sucks, then spit up the little he had eaten. Argyros wrapped him in a blanket and dashed for Riario’s house.
By good luck, the doctor was there. His arms narrowed when he saw the baby. “Fever?” he asked sharply.
Argyros nodded, unable to make himself say yes out loud.
“It could be any of a myriad things,” the doctor said. He cocked an eyebrow. “They do fall sick of other illnesses than smallpox, you know.”
“Yes, and also from that. How will you know if it is?”
“The rash, of course, if it appears.” Argyros was certai
n four days of waiting would drive him mad. That must have been plain on his face, for Riario went on, “It acts faster in infants than with adults. If no eruptions show up by tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, you’ve probably escaped.”
He disappeared into the back of the house and returned with a small stoppered vial. “Here’s poppy juice from Egypt. It will help the little fellow sleep, and that will do some good. I’ll be by tomorrow morning to look at him again.” He clapped the magistrianos on the back. “Even if it is smallpox, not everyone dies of it.”
“No,” Argyros agreed. He could not help remembering, though, what Riario had said before about smallpox and infants. He put that thought down by brute force as he carried Sergios home.
He gave his son a dose of the poppy juice and waited until the baby had fallen into heavy, drugged sleep. He sniffed at what was left of the jar of milk he had bought the day before. His nose wrinkled: it was sour. As soon as he was sure Sergios would not wake, he hurried to Skleros’s dairy.
The dairyman’s wife greeted him at the door and exclaimed over his grim visage. Maria Sklerina’s plump features went pale when, flat-voiced, he told her Sergios was sick.
“Mother of God, not your little son too, after your wife!” she said, crossing herself. “I thank the Lord every day for sparing Peter and me and our eight, and he and I both added you to our prayers. Who can say why God does as He does?”
“Not I,” Argyros replied. He scratched absently at the back of his hand, which itched.
Maria said, “Here, give me your jug and let me fill it for you. I know you won’t want to spend a moment more than you have to away from him. They’re dear, aren’t they, even when they’re so small you know loving them is such a gamble?” Her eyes grew sad. “We lost two babies ourselves, my husband and I, and mourned them almost as much as if they’d been grown. And we’re luckier than most families we know.”
“Indeed you are,” Argyros said; his own parents had raised only three children out of seven births.
He was glad not to have to make any more conversation as he followed her out to the barn. She rinsed the jar and drew fresh milk from a cow that looked amazingly bored with the whole process. As her husband had before, she refused to take his money. He felt the sting of tears as he thanked her; any small kindness touched him deeply.
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