Near dusk, he cooked some thin barley gruel to feed Helen. As an afterthought, he stirred some honey into that, too: Helen was hardly thinking more clearly than Sergios. She ate about half of what he’d made, less than he thought she needed, but better, he supposed, than nothing. The thin waning crescent moon was rising in the east when exhaustion clubbed Argyros into sleep. A few minutes later, Sergios’s howling woke him. He stumbled out to take care of his son and heard the first cockcrow just as the baby was nodding off.
His eyes were full of grit; he could feel himself walking in slow motion, as if the air had turned thick. Perhaps because he was so tired, the idea of going to Helen’s family for someone to help struck him with the force he imagined Christianity had hit St. Mouamet. He took along the empty jar that had held milk. While one of Helen’s younger brothers or sisters came to watch over her and the baby, he would go back to Skleros’s dairy and refill it; or he would send them to get the milk if they feared entering a disease-filled home.
Helen’s father was a notary named Alexios Moskhos. As always, several dogs started barking when Argyros knocked on his door; on holidays, Moskhos liked to go into the countryside and hunt rabbits. The magistrianos waited for his father-in-law to come cursing and laughing through the pack to let him in. He heard Moskhos approach, but the door did not open. Instead, Moskhos cautiously called through it, “Who’s there? What do you want?”
“It’s Basil. I need help—Helen’s sick.” He explained what he needed. There was a long silence. Then Argyros listened in disbelief as his father-in-law said, “You’d better go, Basil. I’ll pray for you, but no more than that. No one here’s been ill, and no one’s going to be if I have anything to do with it. I’ll not hazard all of mine against one already poxed.”
“Let me hear your wife say that,” the magistrianos exclaimed.
“It’s for her I do this.”
“Why, you gutless, worthless—” Indignation choked Argyros. He hammered on the door with his fist.
“Let me in!”
“I’ll count three,” Moskhos said coldly. “Then I set the hounds on you. One—two—”
The magistrianos left, cursing; he could tell his father-in-law would do what he’d said. What made it somehow worse was that Argyros understood. I le wondered what he would have done had Helen been well and Moskhos come to him for aid.
He was honest enough to admit he did not know.
Peter Skleros’s mouth turned down when Argyros came to buy more milk. “I was hoping your lady might just have, oh, eaten something spoiled that made her ill,” he said as he led the magistrianos into his barn. “But that’s not so, is it?”
“I’m afraid not. I wish it were.”
“And I,” the dairyman said. As he had said, his little son, also named Peter, was helping to clean the barn. He took the boy by the arm and brought him up to the magistrianos. “I wish it could have been like this.” There were three pock-marks, close together, on little Peter’s wrist. They looked like smallpox marks, but no smallpox victim escaped with so few.
“This is your cowpox, eh?”
“Yes.” He patted the boy on the bottom. “Run along, son; the gentleman is done with you now.” To Argyros: “Here, I’ll get your milk.” He pulled a stool up beside a cow.
“Your family is still well?”
“Yes, praise the Lord, the Virgin, and all the saints. Good of you to think to ask, sir, with your own troubles on your mind.” He handed the magistrianos the jar of milk, waved away payment. “Really, it’s not enough to bother over. You take it, and keep your boy strong till your wife is better.”
Against the dairyman’s insistence, Argyros could only accept as gracefully as possible. He compared Skleros’s behavior to that of Helen’s father and could only shake his head. Like combat, the epidemic brought out the best and the worst in people.
When he got home, it was as if he had not left. Helen’s fever still raged. Sometimes she knew him, but more often she was lost in a world of mostly unpleasant dreams. He tried to keep her cool, but the burning heat of her forehead dried his compresses almost as fast as he put them on. Sergios drank the cow’s milk. His father hoped he was taking enough. As with Helen, he supposed anything was better than nothing.
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. I le 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. I le 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 anymore any-way. 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. “Joannes Rhiarios, if you’d rather have the Greek like most people here.” As the original language or 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. Me 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 creaked—”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.