The stench of sickness hit Apollo even before the door shut behind him, a cloying, animal rot, sweetened by the herb bundles that drooped from the rafters like desiccated bats. For an instant, the god recoiled.
’This is what it comes to?’ He, who had banished pestilence with a gesture, now forced to blink away tears stung not by empathy but by ammonia and decay.
The girl, Liska, let the blanket puddle at her ankles and tiptoed forward. "Mama, I brought someone," she said, her voice a brittle reed.
A woman lay on the cot, mid-thirties, perhaps, though the years had been salted with famine and fear.
Her face was a shrunken moon, cheeks collapsed, pale as cheese rind but for the wild fever roses stippling her brow. Every shallow breath snapped and popped, the sound of a green log burning.
Apollo hovered in the dusk between the doorway and the cot, uncertainty burning in his throat. It was not for him to trespass in these chambers of mortal grief.
But Liska’s eyes, hungry for miracle, he knew that hunger, for it had made him, unmade him, and now called him to kneel at every bed of suffering in the world.
He crouched beside the woman, noting the bruised shadow under each fingernail, the webbed capillaries snaking up her neck.
"May I?" he said, reaching with a hand that only trembled a little. Liska nodded, lips pressed tight as a sutured wound. The sick woman’s eyelids fluttered, but she did not wake.
Her name, Apollo learned from the girl, was Hessa. The name carried the hard "h" of the old river tribes and, for some reason, made him think of frost.
He pressed two fingers to the pulse-point at her wrist, it was rapid, thready, the rhythm of drowning.
He searched, reflexively, for the golden corona of vitality that used to halo every living thing. Nothing. His sight was only mortal, no more than a clever trick of nerves and guesswork and hope. He almost laughed at the pettiness of it.
’Once, I could see the illness crawl, could name its genus and unweave it with a rhyme,’ he remembered, ’but now I am reduced to the games of men, observation, deduction, patience.’
Still, some habits persist. He spoke to Liska in a voice meant for the dying. "She’s burning up. Has Othra given feverroot?"
Liska shook her head. "Said we had to save it. For the little ones."
Apollo looked at the sleeping woman, then at the child, and felt a pang of admiration for Othra’s logic, and a greater pang for its cruelty. The gods had invented triage, but mortals had perfected it.
He took a cup from the shelf, crudely turned, the rim chipped and stained dark with years of use, and went to the hearth, where a kettle hissed with the threat of boiling over.
He strained water through a scrap of muslin, found a scrap of bark that might pass for willow, and mashed it with the hilt of a knife.
It was ritual, in the old way, movements that bound the body to the task, so that the mind was freed for worse torments.
He brought the cup to Hessa’s lips, let Liska steady her mother’s head, and trickled the bitter into the breach between clenched teeth.
Some dribbled out, dark and muddy, and pooled in the hollow of her throat. Apollo dabbed it away with the hem of his sleeve.
"Will it help?" Liska’s voice was so thin it barely left her mouth.
He lied, as gently as he could. "If anything will."
But the fever was a living thing, and it despised intrusion. Hessa convulsed, the body’s revolt so violent it nearly toppled her from the cot.
She spewed the mixture, coughed blood and sputum in a spray that flecked Apollo’s face and the girl’s hands.
Liska began to wail, the sound a high, unbroken thread, as her mother twisted in the sheets and began to seize.
He saw, in that moment, all the failures of mortality. The medicines, the prayers, the waiting for strength to return that never did. Apollo, who had once been the god of medicine as well as of song, recognized the uselessness of both.
He wiped the blood from his chin, caught Liska’s flailing arms, and pressed her head to his shoulder.
"It’s all right," he murmured, as if the words meant anything at all.
"It’s all right. I have you, you have her, it’s all the same in the end."
He hoped Liska was too young to parse the meaning.
The seizure ended as swiftly as it began. Hessa stilled, her breath now a series of wet rattles, the chest rising and falling in diminishing arcs.
Apollo checked her pulse again, and found the thread thinner, more desperate. He’d seen this before, a body in its last act, rehearsing the exit.
He looked at Liska and, in the brittle light coming through the shuttered window, saw the divine cruelty of resemblance.
How the daughter’s features, even in her snot-streaked panic, echoed the mother’s. It would be a long grief, this one.
But the god in him was not yet finished. Apollo shut his eyes and reached, not with hand or voice, but with the remnant of that old, solar ache inside him.
He had sworn not to touch the aether, not to risk the attention of the ones who watched for such transgressions, but here, where the alternatives were death and despair, he decided that one small sun might go unnoticed.
He let his mind empty, then filled it with the memory of a summer afternoon. The way honey light poured through olive groves, the sting of sweat on golden skin, the sound of bees.
He called to the fire in the air, the secret music of white blood and marrow, and poured it into the shape of Hessa’s dying body.
At first, nothing. Then, an answering shudder, Hessa’s limbs slackened, the jaw clenched and unclenched. Her breath normalized, from an ugly, dying rattle into something closer to a healthy gasp.
The fever blush faded from her cheeks, replaced by a fleeting, impossible clarity in the eyes as Hessa blinked awake.
Liska, dumbstruck, stared at her mother as if expecting a further trick, another seizure, the return of the blood-froth. Instead, Hessa’s hand reached for her child, unsteady but purposeful.
She managed a smile, weak but real, and in that moment Apollo saw in Liska’s face the beginning of hope and the shadow of suspicion both.
He pressed the cup back into Hessa’s hands. "Drink," he said, and she did, and this time it stayed down.
He watched the pulse at her neck smooth itself, watched the haze in her eyes clear as if scrubbed by wind.
Hessa’s breathing evened, the violent percussion of minutes before replaced with deliberate, human effort.
Apollo resisted the urge to check his own hands for some telltale sign, a glow, a stigmata, anything.
But there was only the ache, and in his mind the memory of a thousand such resurrections, none as costly as this.
For a long time, the room was silent but for the breathing of three people, two mortal, one something else, knelt in the mud of his own undoing.
Liska hugged her mother, and the woman, though clearly exhausted, stroked the girl’s hair with all the tenderness that sickness had denied them for weeks.
When Liska turned, Apollo saw in her eyes a question she was afraid to ask. "What did you do?" she whispered.
He pressed a finger to his lips. "Don’t speak of it," he said, and the words fell out of his mouth with the force of law. "If you must, call it luck. Or call it Othra’s medicine. But you will tell no one the rest."
Liska nodded, wide-eyed as a fawn, and for a moment, Apollo sensed the possibility of worship rising in her,a dangerous thing, here at the edge of the world, when worship was the very fuel of his damnation.
He stood, dizzy with the effort. Hessa, sapped but alive, managed a hoarse "thank you" as she drifted back toward a genuine sleep.
The girl followed Apollo to the door, blanket bunched at her throat, and watched as he limped out into the fading day.
He walked in a daze, the world shimmering at its edges. His wound throbbed, the new pain layered over the old, a sandwich of suffering that at least felt honest.
The sun, low and mean behind the clouds, cast his shadow ahead of him, long, hunched, more scarecrow than god.
Apollo steered himself back toward Othra’s hut, letting the call-and-response of birds and distant axes guide him.
Each step felt heavier, he wondered if his punishment would be to suffer mortality’s cost with each miracle, to trade days of his own exile for each life restored.
Othra was inside, hunched over the low table with a pestle in her fist and a constellation of dried roots scattered like bones.
She looked up as he entered, first with the calculation of a predator, then with a glimmer of something like exasperated relief.
"You’re ambulatory, then," she said, and smacked the pestle down with a sound like a fractured knuckle. "I told you to rest. Which part of that did you not understand?"
He did not answer at once. The room was close, full of the resinous hush of things that grew in darkness.
He steadied himself against the door, uncertain whether he was about to vomit or weep. "There was a child," he said, but stopped, the weight of what had just transpired crowding the words from his mouth.
Othra snorted. "There are two dozen children in this village, if you count the ones who can still walk on their own. Most of them sick, and most of them past my help. Did you go looking for a grave to fall into?"
He could feel her gaze, hard and sharp as a whetted spoon, slicing through his hesitation. He considered telling her the truth, confessing the sliver of solar fire he had spent, the old power that had startled even the disease, but the words would not form.
To say it aloud was to make it real, and there was a part of him that still cherished the illusion of his own decay.
"I wanted to help," he said. "That’s all."
Othra rose, shoulders a hunch of stone beneath her shawl. She crossed the room and took his face in her cracked, purple-stained hands.
She turned his head left, then right, humming as she checked his eyes for fever, his lips for the pallor of infection.
"You wanted, so you did," she said, low. "That’s how people die stupid." But her hands softened at the edge of his jaw.
She let go, stepped back, and jerked a thumb at the cot. "Sit," she ordered. "You’re gray as a drowned cat, and half as warm. The fever’ll get you if you stand in that muck much longer."
Obedient, he lowered himself onto the cot, feeling the sharp twinge of healing bone and a deeper, foreign exhaustion that hummed through every cell.
In the hut’s gloom, the fire snapped blue and green, its sparks dancing in the draft from the eaves.
Othra busied herself with the mortar, but her eyes kept flicking over to him, as if expecting him to burst into flames or sprout wings.
After a time, she said, "You’re not from the south. You’re not from anywhere I know, and I’ve known more than most."
She set the pestle down and leaned on the table, peering at him across the churned surface.
Apollo tried on a smile, found it brittle. "Maybe I’m just good at hiding."
"Maybe you’re just bad at dying." Othra wiped her hands on her apron, then pulled a battered tin cup from the shelf.