The Golden Fool
Chapter 7: Gods Are Cause And Cure

Chapter 7: Gods Are Cause And Cure

She filled it from the pot on

the hearth and set it in Apollo’s hand. The flavor was nearly identical to yesterday’s, scorched and peevish, no balm at all, but it cut the tremor in his muscles and coaxed a shallow warmth up his throat.

He sipped it, and Othra let the silence press in. From outside came the thud of logs splitting and the dull, wordless bellow of men at labor, but the hut itself was insulated, wrapped in a hush that made every tick of the fire seem like a clock wound down.

"You should rest," Othra said, but her words were flat, no more than the shadow of concern, spoken out of habit.

She was about to say more, or perhaps just blink away the moment, when the door burst open with a violence that scattered every loose leaf and herb along the rafters.

The man with the spear, the one who had found Apollo, stood in the doorway, sweat streaking a face gone ashen and wild.

He cradled something in his arms, something wrapped in blankets that mewled and jerked. Behind him, a drizzle of muddy water pattered onto the reed-mat floor.

"Othra," he barked, "the babe’s sick. She won’t eat and her skin’s hot as a forge." His voice, which the night before had measured and judged, was now all undiluted panic.

Othra was across the room before the word had finished. She snatched the bundle from the man and peeled back its layers with the deftness of a butcher.

The child was tiny, far too small for the world it had landed in, its face was red and puffy, lips cracked and dry. The infant’s eyes, when they opened, were blue as glacier melt and just as cold.

"She’s burning up," Othra muttered, then spat on her thumb and ran it along the baby’s gums. She turned to Apollo, eyes narrow. "You seem to know fevers as well. Tell me if this is the kind that takes them quick, or the kind that lingers."

He did not want to touch the child. He did not want to risk the anger of whatever power had banished him, or the wrath of the mortals should he fail.

But the man’s gaze was desperate, and Othra’s expectation left no room for cowardice.

Apollo set the cup aside and leaned in, his hands hovering just above the baby’s mottled chest.

He could feel the heat radiating off her, aggressive and wrong, the tide of infection already at flood.

The baby’s breathing was shallow, each inhalation a squeaking struggle.

He closed his eyes, searching for even a thread of the old diagnostic sight, but there was nothing, just the knowledge, the memory of a thousand deaths, and the certainty that this child was already closer to the underworld than to the world above.

"She has little time," he said softly. "If you have willow bark, give it, but keep her cool and pray." There was more he might have done, were he whole, were he allowed, but Apollo forced down the urge to try. Even the gods knew the cost of hubris, in the end.

Othra nodded, setting the baby down in a reed cradle beside the fire. The man with the spear hovered, hands flexing toward his weapon and back, like a moth denied flame.

He looked at Apollo, then at Othra, then back, and the confusion in his face curdled into something darker. "She was healthy until yesterday," he said, voice low. "Until he came."

Othra didn’t bother to answer, but the man was not finished. He advanced a step, spear in hand, the blade’s edge catching the hearth-light. "No one else in the hut is sick. Not the mother, not the son. Just her. She fed at dawn, and by dusk she was burning."

Apollo felt the pulse of accusation, familiar as old music. He met the man’s eyes and saw there the same blend of fear and suspicion that had greeted the first plague, the first famine, in every corner of the earth.

’Gods are always cause and cure,’ he thought, ’never innocent bystander.’

"I have brought nothing here but myself," Apollo said, voice gentle. "Disease does not travel by foot. Your village is beset, but not by me."

"Then why did Othra’s medicine fail?" the man persisted, voice rising. "Why does it always fail now, after years and years of working?"

Outside, voices drifted closer, neighbors drawn by the commotion, by the sharpness of panic. Othra reached for her knife, not as a threat but as a tool, setting it on the table between herself and the man.

"Enough," she said, the word a hammer-blow. "If you want to gut him, wait until the child is either dead or saved. Until then, your job is to breathe and let me work."

He shifted, but did not drop the spear. Apollo looked at the child again, saw the slight tremor in her limbs, the glaze already forming on her lips. The fever would crack her, one way or another, within the day.

He forced himself to move, to act, and took up a strip of linen from the shelf, soaked it in the bucket near the fire, then wrung it out.

The ritual, gentle, steady, cooling the child’s brow and the tender creases of her arms, was both ancient and insufficient.

But it was something, and for a time, that was all any of them had.

The man with the spear did not leave. He stood over Apollo, arms crossed, as if by sheer will he could force a cure.

Othra ground more willow, muttering to herself, hands shaking with the intensity of her focus. The baby whimpered, too weak even to cry.

An hour passed, then two, and the world outside Othra’s hut faded to a soft, blue dusk. The village, Apollo could sense, was gathering at the threshold, waiting for news, for a scapegoat, for a miracle.

When the baby failed to rouse at sunset, when even the cool cloths brought no comfort, the man with the spear reached the end of his patience.

He stabbed the spear into the pallet so hard the wood cracked. "If she dies, it’s his doing," he said, words flattening the hush. "Either by curse or rotten luck. Mark me."

Othra looked up from her mortar, and for all her compact frame, she seemed to broaden, a cold rage pouring into the lines of her face. "Mark you for a fool, Yvant. This child’s blood is no more his than the moon’s."

She scraped the paste from the bowl onto her finger and, ignoring Yvant’s looming, smeared it along the baby’s gums and down her throat.

The smell, sharp even above the fever-sweetness, seemed to rouse the infant for a moment; her mouth worked, chewing in reflex, before she fell limp again.

Apollo stood, slow and careful, ignoring the way his ribs stitched tight with each breath. "I am sorry," he said, and there was no divinity in it, only the subdued manner of the condemned.

He found his way outside, into the burnt-blue evening, and let the cold air comb the sweat from his brow.

Villagers clustered in the mud, their faces bleached by anxiety and the slanting, dying light. A woman in a patched shawl whispered behind her palm as he passed.

A youth spat and turned away, his contempt too brittle to hold Apollo’s gaze.

He walked to the edge of the clearing, boots squelching, and sank onto a broken cart wheel half-submerged at the field’s edge.

There, for the first time since exile, he allowed himself to weep.

He kept the sobbing quiet, tight between his teeth. It was neither the proud, operatic grief of a god nor the dignified silence of a man who has weathered loss, it was something mean and childlike, a convulsion of shame and fury at being caught in the web of mortals, needing and failing and grasping after the smallest flicker of control.

The evening crawled on, and dark began to settle its weight against the palisade.

When Apollo finally wiped his eyes, he saw that the forest beyond the fields had gone strange, there was a shimmer to the air that he recognized as the first stirrings of aether, the world’s old magic bleeding through at the edge of thought.

He looked skyward, and for an instant, the clouds parted, revealing the antique shape of constellations he himself had named, back when humans were still squinting up from the mud, abashed by the mystery of stars.

He ached for that certainty, the old order, his place among the spheres, the clean logic of myth. Instead, he had only the cold, the stink, the doubtful eyes of mortals, and the doom of a child that would likely not see sunrise.

"Her name is Mirra," said a voice behind him.

He turned, slow, leaden, to find Yvant, the spear-man, standing at a respectful remove.

The anger was gone from his face, replaced by exhaustion and the deeper grief of the already-bereaved.

Yvant’s eyes were brown, flecked with amber, and they held the bleak steadiness of someone who had killed more than he’d loved.

"Mirra," Apollo repeated, letting the name resolve on his tongue.

Yvant shifted his weight, as if the name alone were a burden. "I spoke poorly," he said, voice gone low. "Forgive the threat. When a man’s child is dying, even gods would be accused."

The apology was as begrudging as a soldier’s field meal, swallowed only because to leave it would mean death.

Apollo regarded him, unsure if this was a peace offering or merely the ritual of men at the margins of disaster. "You were not wrong to fear," he said. "I would have done the same, once."

Yvant grunted, a sound halfway to laughter. He leaned on his spear, the blade buried in the churned mud, and watched the sky where the stars were now burning with a clarity unknown to city nights. "You talk like a man who’s seen his own share of ruin."

"More than I ever wished," Apollo said, though the words came out brittle with the echo of centuries.

They stood together, the silence less hostile now, as if the mutual recognition of weakness had drawn a line between them and the rest of the waking world.

After a time, Yvant spoke again, softer. "Othra was my mother’s sister. When the fever took our village, she saved what she could. Hauled the rest up the ridge, burned the bodies herself. I watched her break a man’s jaw with a soup ladle when he wouldn’t leave his wife’s corpse. Never seen her lose before now. Not ever."

He did not say the rest, how the sight of Othra’s hands trembling over the sick baby had taken something solid out of him, left behind only the sand and the tides.

Apollo studied the man’s face, the deep creases that bracketed his mouth, the scar at the temple that ached blue in the cold.

"She is not lost yet," he said, though the words tasted more of habit than hope. "Children can surprise you."

Yvant nodded, then fished something from his belt, a small flask, lacquered black and stoppered with bone. He sloshed it with the care of a priest handling relics, then passed it over. "Mead," he said. "You’ll need it, tonight."

Apollo took the flask, raised it in silent salute, and drank. The stuff scorched him, then settled into a warmth so sudden he nearly wept again. "Thank you," he said, and meant it.

A holler came from the village, women’s voices, loud with the raw, unselfconscious terror of people whose world is always ending.

Yvant spun, fear crowding out his shame, and took off at a run. Apollo followed, his legs unwilling but compelled.

They reached Othra’s hut in time to find her at the threshold, back pressed to the door, arms stretched wide like a shield. Villagers clustered in a semi-circle, some clutching knives, others slinging stones in their fists.

The baby’s mother stood behind Othra, hair wild, eyes rolling, keening an animal sound. In the reed cradle, the baby lay still as a doll.