“How do I know?” Riario said irritably. “I keep thinking of King Mithridates of Pontos—you know, the one who gave Rome such a fight in the time of Sulla and Pompey. He made himself so immune to poisons by taking lots of small doses that when he really needed to kill himself he had to get one of his mercenaries to do it for him.”
“Wonderful,” Argyros said. “Where are you going to get a little dose of a disease? And—”
He stopped, his mouth hanging open. He thought of Paul Skleros, his plump happy wife, and their eight children, all healthy while smallpox raged through Constantinople. He thought of the cow pox marks he had seen on small Paul—and surely the rest of the family would have had that ailment too. He thought of Riario’s own words, of how people coming down with cow pox were afraid they had smallpox.
“By the Virgin and all the saints,” he whispered.
“What?” Riario still sounded as though he regretted bringing his vision out where the magistrianos could see it.
Then, stammering, his tongue thick with wine, Argyros set his own insight before the doctor. When he was done, he waited for Riario to call him an idiot.
He watched Riario’s hands slowly curl into fists. His face took on an expression Argyros did not recognize for a moment. Then he remembered his army days and suddenly riding into a clearing where a wildcat was stalking a squirrel. The cat had borne that same look of hungry concentration.
“To hit back, oh, to hit back,” Riario breathed. “Do you realize the weapon you’ll have put into physicians’ hands if you’re right, Argyros?”
“If I’m right,” the magistrianos repeated. “How could you find out?”
“I know what I’d like to do,” Riario replied at once: “Dab some pus from a smallpox sore into a cut on somebody who’s already had cowpox. If the poor sod didn’t come down with smallpox after that, he never would.”
“I thought you would say that. Do it.”
“With whom?” the doctor asked scornfully. “Who’d be madman enough to take a chance like that?”
“I would,” Argyros said.
“Don’t be a jackass, man. If you’re wrong, you take the disease for real, not just in your foolish wishes.”
The magistrianos spread his hands. “Why should I care? My life is in ruins anyhow.”
“That’s the wine talking, and your sorrow.”
“In the morning I’ll be sober and tell you the same thing. As for my sorrow ... if I live to be old as Methusaleh, I’ll never lose it. You should know that.”
Riario flinched, grimaced, reluctantly nodded. All the same, he said, “Go home and go to bed. If you’re fool enough to come back in the morning, well, we’ll talk about it. If not, I can’t blame you; that’s for certain.”
Argyros did not want to go home; the memories of the past weeks were too bitter for him ever to want to live in that house again. In the end, his legs decided the matter. They might as well have been jelly when he tried to rise. His head spun like Scylla’s whirlpool. He slumped back into his chair and passed out.
When he woke, his pounding head made him think he had died and gone to hell. He groaned, and then groaned again at hearing his own voice.
Riario was moving about; listening to him also hurt. The doctor said, “There are two cures for a hangover. One is raw-cabbage, the other a bit more wine. Cabbage always makes me belch. Here.”
Argyros thought his queasy stomach would reject the cup Riario pressed on him, but the wine stayed down. After a while, he began to feel human, in a melancholy way.
Riario’s haggard look and red-tracked eyes said he was suffering too. He picked up a chunk of bread, shuddered, put it down again. “I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”
“I’m half your age, and I was too old years ago.” The magistrianos sat bolt upright and regretted it. “The smallpox!”
Riario regarded him with bleary curiosity. “You still want to go ahead?”
“I said I would, didn’t I? I remember that. It’s one of the last things I do remember.”
“Let me look at you,” Riario said and took the magistrianos’s hands in his own. Argyros looked with him. Clean brown scabs were already forming over the cowpox blisters. The doctor grunted. “Aye, you’re healing from it. Come along, then. If you’re after a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pelagios with the other suicides, I’ll help put you there.”
“If you were so sure that was going to happen, you wouldn’t try this,” Argyros said.
“I suppose not. But then, I wouldn’t try it unless I was certain I’d miss the disease.”
Having had the last word, Riario paced the house, waiting for someone to report a new case of smallpox. He began to grumble; by this time yesterday, he had been wanted in three places at once. But noon was still a long way away when a woman began pounding on the door, crying, “My husband!
Come quick! The pox has seized my husband!”
Argyros and Riario both screwed up their faces at the bright morning sunshine. Lost in her own concern, the woman never noticed. She unquestioningly accepted Argyros as another doctor. The magistrianos’s stomach almost rebelled when he stood by the sick man’s bed. The fellow reminded him too sharply of what he had gone through with Helen and Sergios. Smallpox lesions covered his face and limbs; as yet, they held clear fluid, not pus. “Will he live?” Argyros asked quietly, so the man’s wife, who was sobbing in the next room, would not hear.
“He may well,” Riario answered. “The fever’s not as high as it often is, and his pulse is very strong.”
He eyed the magristrianos. Argyros willed himself to nod.
The doctor pulled a scalpel from his bag; Argyros thought it was the same one he had used to open the wine the night before. He made a small cut in the side of the magistrianos’s right thumb. Argyros nearly jerked his hand away. Holding still to be deliberately injured, he found, was harder in some ways than going into battle.
Humming tunelessly, Riario pierced a couple of the sick man’s blisters with the scalpel. He pressed the liquid from them into the wound he had made on Argvros’s hand and wrapped a bandage around it. He gave the scalpel a thoughtful look. “If this had smallpox poison on it, I suppose I ought to wash it before I use it again.”
He went out a few minutes later to tell the sick man’s wife to do all the things Argyros had done for Helen: bathe him against the fever, keep him quiet—all the palliatives that did no harm, and not much good, either. They did not pretend to cure.
His thumb had begun to throb. It did not matter. If he was right, here was something better than a cure, for anyone who had once had cow pox would never get smallpox at all.
If he was wrong—well, Riario had already spelled out what would happen if he was wrong. One way or the other, he would know soon.
His visits to Riario became a daily ritual. The doctor would examine him, feel to see if he had a fever, check his pulse. Then Riario would growl, “Still alive, I’d say,” give him a cup of wine—a small cup of wine—and send him home again.
The routine gave him something around which his life could coalesce once more. So did his work, to which he returned about a week after Sergios died. The corps of magistrianoi was still badly shorthanded, with some members dead and others mourning loved ones or caring for the sick. The number of things to be done, though, remained the same. Exhaustion was an anodyne hardly less potent than wine.
After three weeks, only a pale scar remained from the cut on Argyros’s thumb. He began to lose patience with Riario’s stock phrase. “Think I’m likely to stay that way?” he asked pointedly.
“Oh, yes, I’ve thought so for some time,” the doctor said. “There is another problem, though: for all we know , you may have been immune to smallpox even before you got the cow-pox. You nursed your wife and son without catching it, you know.”