“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 hack 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. I le 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 all he could do not to burst into derisive laughter. “I low would you do that?”