The Fifth Servant (24 page)

           
“Slow down, I’m not going to take it away from you,” said Kassy, patting the boy’s hand. His fingers were unusually warm. Kassy felt his forehead. He was burning up with fever.

           
Kassy asked if she could examine him more closely. Then she unbuttoned Karel’s shirt, exposing a diffuse redness all over his chest and arms—everywhere except on his face.

           
Kassy pulled up a stool, sat down at the child’s level, and examined the rash closely. It wasn’t a solid mass of red, as it first appeared to be. It was more like a collection of deep red spots that were growing together to form a confederacy. It sure wasn’t worms.

           
“Say ah.”

           
The boy had a hard time swallowing the bread so he could open his mouth. His mouth was red and swollen inside, particularly around the soft palate and the little lobe of flesh hanging at the back of his throat, which were covered with a viscous secretion.

           
“Has he been complaining of a sore throat?”

           
The woman shrugged, as if she were worried about opening the door to that possibility and letting in another burden.

           
“Any vomiting?”

           
“Sure, but I thought it was the worms.”

           
“Convulsions?”

           
“Huh?”

           
“You know, any uncontrollable twitching, fits, attacks, seizures, that sort of thing.”

           
“No, thank God.”

           
“Does he have any pain in his legs?”

           
“Oh my God,
yes
,” said the mother, her eyes widening. “He was just complaining about it on the way over here, but I figured he was just whining as always. What is it? What has he got?”

           
“What about his urine?”

           
“What do you mean, his urine?”

           
“Is he peeing normally? What color is it?”

           
“No, the fever must have taken it all away. The few drops that came out this morning were as red as that rash.”

           
Oh, dear God. It was the scarlet fever, which no doctor on earth could cure. Despite all her knowledge, the best she could hope for was treating some of the symptoms, which might give the boy an even chance of surviving.

           
“How long has he had this fever?”

           
The woman hesitated. “I don’t need any more trouble.”

           
“There won’t be any trouble. Now tell me how long.”

           
“A couple of days,” she finally admitted.

           
“All right. The first thing you need to do is give him cold baths to keep down the fever.”

           
“Cold baths? What about spiderweb?”

           
“That’s an old legend. It won’t bring down his fever. I don’t keep any around.”

           
“You don’t? What kind of a healer are you? Not even to stop bleeding?”

           
“Cloth works just as well,” said Kassy.
And in case you haven’t heard, people associate spiderwebs with witches.
“What about his brothers and sisters?”

           
“What about them?”

           
“Do they show any signs of having the same symptoms?”

           
“Not yet.”

           
“Good. You need to keep him away from them, or they might catch it, too.”

           
“What do you think he’s wearing this for?” said the woman, holding up a pouch around the child’s neck.

           
Kassy gently eased the pouch out of the woman’s grip, loosened the draw-string, and opened it up. She sniffed the contents, and almost got a noseful of peony root—a deadly poison.

           
“Did you get this from another curist?” she said, covering her nose and waiting a couple of heartbeats to see if she felt its toxic sting.

           
“Of course I did. He said it would protect him from evil.”

           
“Yes, it works like a charm, doesn’t it?”

           
That is, if you want to kill someone.
Peony root, for Christ’s sake
. But Kassy didn’t feel any burning yet, which meant that she might actually live to see the sunrise on Easter morning, as she had been planning to do. So she simply said that this dosage of the herbal charm had become too dry to be effective, and replaced it with some flowering hops sprinkled with alcohol, which would at least help the boy sleep.

           
“That’s fine for keeping down the fever, but what about getting rid of the rash?” asked the woman.

           
“I’m going to give you a couple of doses of an infusion made from the bark of the aspen tree, which comes all the way from the northern Americas. It’s been highly recommended for bringing down fever.”

           
“I didn’t ask you about bringing down the fever, I asked you about curing the rash.”

           
“Keep giving him water with sweet herbs that’s been boiled and cooled, and with God’s help, the rash might go away before long—”

           
“It
might
go away? There’s a man down the block who says he can cure it in three days flat.”

           
Well, he’s lying
, Kassy thought.

           
She said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen anyone actually cure the scarlet fever.”

           
“Don’t you want to help my child? Or are you out to harm him? I don’t know what your game is, missy, but we’re not staying here another minute.”

           
The woman wrapped her shawl around her son as if she were protecting him from a sorceress’s evil gaze, then she picked him up and stormed out.

           
“Don’t forget to give him the cooling baths!” Kassy called after her.

           
Some days are like this,
Kassy thought. Sometimes the ignorance was just too strong. She did what she could, but she knew better than to press too hard against the brick wall of people’s superstitions, which would stir up resentment and worse, charges that would put her own life in danger. Maybe she should have gone into the shoe trade, like her younger brother Jacob.

           
At least when a sick old man loosened his grip on this world and went to his reward, you could tell yourself that he’d lived a good long life, had his full measure, couldn’t complain—all the usual comforting lies. But children were different. Losing a child always hit her hard, enough to make her wonder if all her mastery of the craft amounted to anything at all. Because there were things that no one should have to face alone. Things that left her wide awake in the dreary solitude of an empty bed with no hope of fulfilling her dreams. Not in this man’s empire, anyway.

           
She boiled some water, added a pinch of St. John’s Wort, and sat down to have a nice, warm cup of herbal tea, which some touted as a cure for melancholy. Kassy knew very well that there was no such thing as a cure for melancholy. Temporary alleviation, maybe, but nothing remotely like a cure. The systematic study of medicinal herbs was only just emerging from the murky realm of superstition and magic, and it didn’t make her job any easier when greedy mountebanks went around making wildly exaggerated claims about the curative properties of various concoctions.

           
Kassy had come from the mountains northwest of Prague to make a new life for herself in the enlightened city, but she had landed in the poorest quarter and found it filled with people whose horizons of expectation were disappointingly narrow. Charlatans roamed the streets trying to sell gullible women crudely carved-up briarwood as if it were mandrake root. Her first paying job was “purging” a burgher’s house of the plague by giving it a good scrubbing that any kitchen maid could have pulled off. And she found that she had to watch what she said very closely. When a passing beggar asked her how cold it would get that night, and without thinking much of it she looked at the sky and said that it might rain, she was nearly accused of “aeromancy,” the maleficent practice of making predictions about the future by studying the atmospheric aether, which was closely akin to witchcraft.

           
And with the Roman Church reestablishing its grip on the empire, witchcraft had become a serious charge. Hus himself was arrested on the lesser crime of being a heretic, and they had burned him at the stake, then roasted his heart over the flames, pulverized his bones, and thrown the ashes into the river where they dispersed forever without a trace so that there would be nothing left of him—not even a shoelace for his followers to remember him by.

           
What was the matter with these blood-crazy “reformers”? Because just killing someone wasn’t enough for them. No, the Inquisitors objected so strongly to a secret Jew—a Portuguese
converso
named García da Orta—publishing esoteric dialogues about exotic drugs from India that they had his body dug up and burned five years
after
his death.

           
She knew the real reason for this. And despite the authorities’ public claims that the Jews were a low priority, everyone else on this unruly street knew it, too: by refusing to convert to Catholicism, the lowly Jews kept the fires of religious freedom burning for all to see. Their very existence defied the Papists’ arrogant claim that there is no salvation outside the Church.

           
It was different back when a woman could escape the horrors of a forced marriage by retreating to a convent full of like-minded women, and perform meaningful and rewarding work like ministering to the poor while getting a decent education. But ever since the Council of Trent had confirmed that all of the sisters had to be cloistered, a convent was the last place she’d ever want to end up—especially when they were ruled over by men who knew in their hearts that all scientific investigation and book learning was inherently evil. End of discussion.

           
Maybe that’s why she felt such an affinity for the Jews and their famous thirst for knowledge. “Of bookmaking there is no end,” went one of their sayings. And she had seen it written in the Book of Job that wisdom can lead you to “a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen.” These passages aroused her starving curiosity.
Is it possible to salivate over a book?
 
she wondered. But since she couldn’t read Hebrew, and few secondhand editions were available in Latin translation, the main sources of Jewish knowledge were closed off to her for now.

           
She checked on the bubbling broth in the pot to see how the experiment was progressing. More than three-fourths of the water had boiled off, leaving a brownish residue clinging to the sides of the heavy iron pot while the mixture at the bottom thickened to a dark paste. It
did
smell like something that might have been left behind by the inky black hoofprints of the Devil himself.

           
She rinsed out her teacup, washed a couple of pots from yesterday’s experiment, and had just sat down to re-read Agrippa’s comments in praise of Jewish learning when a stream of voices rushed by the window, yelling something about how a phalanx of Jesuits in long black cassocks was pushing its way into the quarter. Angry men and filthy street kids swarmed by with bits of wood and stone to hurl at the arrogant holy warriors.

           
She got up and lifted the lid off the big black pot, dipped her little finger in and tasted the bitter valerian extract, and had to fight the urge to test its effects that very minute. It was too early in the day to numb herself with potions. People came in at all hours with their personal emergencies, and she needed to be ready, no matter what.

           
As if to underscore this fact, a young woman came in who obviously needed help, though probably not for herself. Kassy saw the familiar look of desperation in her eyes, but also saw great strength and determination in them as well. And she was clearly concealing something under the folds of her apron.

           
“Are you astava, the wise woman?”

           
“There are some who call me that.”

           
“In the name of God and his Blessed Mother, you’ve got to help me.”

           
“All right, but what’s a nice Catholic girl like you doing around
Betlémská kaple
?”

           
The young woman opened her mouth to answer, but stopped after a couple of syllables. Kassy could tell that she wasn’t especially good at lying.

           
“Don’t worry,” Kassy said. “Anything you tell me stays within these walls.”