The old woman watches from across the room. I know what she is thinking. This is no ordinary fever. The Child is wrestling with his demon, the animal spirit who protected him out there in the forest, and is fighting now to get back. When I appeal to her for some medicine, some of the herbs she gathers and makes potions of, she shakes her head and turns her thumb down, spitting. I have to watch the Child day and night. If she thought for even a moment that the spirit might triumph and enter the Child’s body again, she would cut his throat. I know it. But the younger woman, who has a child of her own and is softhearted, cannot bear to see the boy writhe as he does, and sweat, and shiver, and jerk about under the rugs. Secretly, she brings me food for him and a bowl of clean water. I hear the old woman arguing with her, and I know what she is saying. What if the Child gave up the struggle, and we found ourselves shut up here with the giant white wolf who is his familiar, and who might at any moment succeed in filling the Child’s body and then breaking out of it. The fever, she believes, is part of the painful transformation. The Child’s blood boils and freezes, as drop by drop it is being changed. The Child’s belly cringes for the raw meat that is the wolf’s diet. His limbs strain to grow claws. His jaw clenches against the growing there of fangs. And what if it isn’t a wolf after all? But some other beast? Larger, more terrible than even she can imagine. The young woman quails. And I see a new doubt has been sown in her mind. What if the beast, finding the Child too difficult to conquer, chose the body of her own son instead? It would be so easy. While we are all sleeping, our bodies empty in the dark, the Child’s spirit slips out, crosses the room, enters her son’s body - and there, it is done!
For two whole days the young woman refuses to come near us. She watches the Child, she watches her son, she keeps the boy as far from our corner of the room as possible, while the old woman whispers and flaps about between us. But in the dead of night, when the Child’s fever is at its crisis, and I am forced to call for help, it is the younger woman who stirs in the dark, wraps herself in her cloak, and comes with water. I am desperately tired and through sheer exhaustion, after nearly five days of watching, seem always on the verge of tears. My hand shakes so much that I cannot lift the bowl to the Child’s lips.
She takes it from me. Kneels. Lifts the boy’s head, letting him gulp at the coolness, and when she has laid his head back on the pile of rags I have contrived for a pillow, sits fanning him, while I rest for a moment against the wall and sleep. When I start awake again she is still there, her face just visible in the folds of the cloak. She sits perfectly upright, her hand moving back and forth to make a breeze. She nods, indicating that I may sleep again, and immediately I fall back into my body’s depths. In the early morning light that seeps in through the window cracks, I wake to find her holding the Child in one of his fits. She looks frightened, and I know that this is the real moment of crisis. I know too what it is she fears.
The Child’s body jerks, loosens, his limbs fly about, his jaws clench and unclench, strange animal sounds come from them. I hear the others begin to stir, and see the old woman come out of the darkness to watch, and the boy rising sleepily behind her. The Child grunts, low growls come from his throat. His tongue lolls and saliva rolls from the corner of his mouth. His lips move. And suddenly, so clearly what we all hear it - I and the young woman, who suddenly gasps and pushes him from her, the old woman who lets out a howl - clearly, from his lips, among all the growling and whines of animal pain, comes a word, one of the words I have been trying all these weeks to teach him. He has discovered it at last in his delirium. It has come to the surface of his mind. His tongue has discovered how to produce it.
It is quite an ordinary word, and has no significance. Just one of the common words of this people’s daily life. But the effect on them is immediate. And in my joy at his discovering his humanity at last I fail to see what it is that alarms them. The young woman stumbles to her feet, terrified, and begins to back away. The old woman reaches a hand out to take her, and another to catch the boy. They huddle together with the boy between them, staring, while I look up from the floor at the Child’s side, unable for the moment to comprehend. It is what the old woman has predicted. In the depths of his fever, at the crisis point, the Child has snatched away another soul. His suddenly speaking out like that, a word in their own language, proves it.
It is the boy Lullo they now turn to, since it is he who has, without knowing it, spoken from the Child’s mouth. The old woman immediately begins wailing over him, cursing the younger woman who has deserted her own child to care for an interloper, and in nursing him up to the crisis has made it possible for the demon to steal, if only for a moment, her son’s spirit. The younger woman is speechless with fear. She staggers about the rushes, holding her belly and making little wordless sounds in her throat as if she might be about to be sick. The boy begins to whimper, and the old woman tears his clothes off to search his body for marks, signs, some place where the demon may have got in. An hour later, when Ryzak returns from guard duty, the room is in utter turmoil. Both women are hysterical and the boy is laid out on his pallet, sweating in the first onset ever, while the Child, his own crisis over at last, breathes quietly and sleeps.
My mind is awhirl with all this.
At any other moment I might be overjoyed at what has occurred. The Child has spoken at last. In his delirium he has discovered human speech. The first step has been taken that will lead him inevitably now into the world of men. If this had happened six or seven weeks ago, out there in the marshes, I would be beside myself with joy. Now I am aware only of the danger he has put himself in. that first human word, drawn up out of the depths of himself in sleep, while his mind perhaps, his spirit, was far off in the deep snow of his forest, may destroy him.
He is innocent of all danger, his breath coming softly between his lips now as he sleeps; but the danger is real, and I dare not leave him, or allow myself to fall, even for a moment, into my own body’s hunger for rest. In their corner opposite, too occupied for the moment to pay us any attention, the two women are wailing over the body of the boy, whose moans can be heard, lightly, between the spaces of their howling. He is in the early stages of the same sickness the Child had. I recognize the symptoms.
How did he take it?
What comes to my mind is the look of alarm on the boy’s face, the terror of some unknown presence, as the old woman’s hands tore at him, searching his body for signs of invasion. Did he take the disease then? Catching her fear and making it his own? Who knows by what mysterious means the body moves to its ends? Years ago, on my travels to Asia Minor, I came upon a city that was visited by the plague. What struck me then was the randomness with which the disease advanced, how it appeared in one house, striking down all but a single child, who remained quite unscathed, then leapt two houses to claim another victim. I came to believe then that as well as the plague itself, moving like a cloud over the city, there must also be some shadow of the plague that lives in the body or in the mind, and that only when the two meet and recognize one another can the disease break in. How else explain why one man takes it and another, sitting beside him, or sleeping in the same bed, does not? And what can that shadow be, that sleeps there in the body, but fear? It is terror that is the link. The body breaks into a sweat of fear, and in the dampness of that sweat, the plague begins to swarm, each drop is transformed and becomes fever sweat. What begins in the mind works now upon the body. So too, once, I saw the disease transmitted in the theater. A famous actor in Antioch, portraying the last anguish of a hero who had been stricken with a deadly fever, after insulting the gods, worked so powerfully upon the minds of the audience, reproduced so perfectly the burning, the choking, the paroxysms of the disease, that half a dozen spectators, out of their own terror, their own guilt, suddenly fell ill with it, dropped sweating from their seats, and had to be carried out. Their minds had so taken the impression of what they saw that the mere simulation of the disease, in the actor’s body, had communicated itself to their bodies and become real. The actor’s spirit, in imagining the disease, had so powerfully affected theirs that they had let the illness in, and immediately all its poisons flooded through their veins. Is that how such fevers spread? Is that how the boy has been afflicted? Not through some wish of the Child’s to free himself by passing the disease on, but through fear, carried in the mind of his mother, imprinted upon his own mind by the old woman’s sudden panic, and immediately translating itself into sweat, into fire, into the fits he is now enduring. The point of infection was that moment when the old woman reached out her hand to touch the young woman, as she started away in terror at the Child’s speaking, and turned with a cry towards the sleepy child behind her. In this first shock at the old woman’s scream, he took the disease, his body opened to receive it from her hands, through his mother’s from the Child. Out of their mind into his. Though what the old woman believes, and has impressed upon the younger, is that the Child’s spirit has worked all this out of malice, and that the boy’s mother has indeed been made the carrier, but through her own weakness and pity. In turning aside to care for the Child she has betrayed her son’s life to him. She has permitted the death spirit to pass between them. So hourly, the boy Lullo sinks deeper into delirium, shouting, muttering, allowing through his lips the same whimpering cries and growls of animal pain that the Child has filled the room with all this last week, and wrestling, so the women believe, with the same animal spirit, which will use him to gain entry among us. Meanwhile the Child, unaware of all this, grows stronger. Today he sits up, too weak to support himself as yet, but strong enough to eat again. And smiles. Even Ryzak now regards the Child’s return to health with narrow eyes, and I see in him some real fear of what the Child may have done to them, though like the women he is too anxious, too torn with grief at his grandson’s suffering, to do more than stare and wonder. His feelings are entirely engaged with the small, pale figure on the rushes, who clasps his hand in fit after fit as the fever moves through its phases of fire and ice. It is only when the illness has done with him at last that the old man’s sense of shock will turn to resentment, to anger against us. For five days and nights he squats on the floor at the child’s side, his shoulders hunched, his face set, the tears occasionally, as the boy whimpers, wetting his cheeks. I know what he feels but can make no move towards him. I try to make myself invisible here, and take the Child with me. The young woman, the boy’s mother, is too stunned now, with grief, with guilt, to do more than sit with her head covered, staring at the boy, willing him back to life. It is the old woman who tends him. Should the boy die, I know, all this fierce emotion that surrounds us will break out into violence. There will be nothing I can do then to protect the Child or myself. Half dozing, I wait for the moment when it will come - the hoarse cry of rage that will tear through the old man and come hurtling upon us, the violence that, shaking the boy now, will come raging through the old man’s body to strike back at us, at the Child first, and then surely, if I try to protect him, at me.