Chapter Nine: Salt in the Water
Marpessa lived above the spring in a hut with a good roof on it, which was the first thing Lysandros noticed and the thing that told him everything.
Nobody in that village had a spare roof.
They had put a good one on hers.
She was Thessalian.
She had come up out of the north about twenty years earlier and she had not left since, and when Lysandros asked Klytie why, Klytie explained it in the tone of a girl too wise for her age.
“Because you cannot let a woman like that go and have her living somewhere else being angry at you.”
“So she is a prisoner.”
“She is not a prisoner.
She has a house and food and nobody touches her.”
“Can she walk down that road.”
Klytie opened her mouth and shut it again.
Damon had worked it out within an hour of arriving.
He said one sentence about it that whole first year, on the way back from carrying wood past her door.
“They have not chained her,” he said.
Lysandros went up there in the spring because he wanted to know what was in the pots.
That was all he wanted.
Somewhere in a hut on an Arcadian hillside there was a woman with twenty years of accumulated knowledge about what grows in these mountains and what it does to a person, and he had a head full of chemistry and pharmacology and nothing whatsoever to apply it to, and the gap between those two facts kept him awake.
She was about fifty, with big hands, and she looked at him for a long moment in the doorway.
“No,” she said.
“You do not know what I want.”
“You want to be told things.
Everybody who comes up here wants to be told things and they all bring something and you have brought nothing.” She started to close the door.
“And you are the unlucky one.
Go away.”
“Is it the willow that you use for pain,” Lysandros said, “or do you use the poppy up here, because I would have thought the poppy does not do well at this height.”
The door stopped.
She looked at him for a good deal longer that time.
Then she shut it anyway.
The chief’s son fell ill in the summer of the second year, when Lysandros was nine.
Hylas was fourteen and he had been perfectly well on the Monday.
By the Thursday he had been going through it at both ends for two days and there was nothing left in him, and the household had done the thing that every household in the ancient world did, which was to stop giving him anything to drink, because everything they gave him came straight back out and it seemed obvious that they were making it worse.
Lysandros saw him once, through a door, on the Thursday afternoon, before somebody moved him on.
Once was enough.
It was enough from twelve feet away.
Sunken about the eyes.
Mouth dry and the tongue dry with it.
Skin on the forearm standing up in a ridge after it was pinched and staying there.
Breathing fast and shallow, and the boy not really present, sliding down into a doze that was not sleep.
And the detail that closed it, which he got out of Klytie in about four seconds: nobody had emptied a pot from that room in a day and a half.
The child was not dying of a fever.
He was drying out.
He had maybe a day.
“They will not let you in,” Klytie said.
“I know.”
“Praxias put your name in his mouth this morning and it was not a nice sentence.”
“I know that too.”
He sat outside the hut on the wall for two hours doing the only calculation that mattered, which was not about the boy.
Break the terms and Damon has to choose, in front of the whole village, whether to back him or disown him.
Break the terms and be wrong, and there is a dead headman’s son and an unlucky child in the same story, and the story ends one way.
Break the terms and be right, and every person up here has watched a dysdaimon do something to the leading family’s son that nobody can explain.
Keep the terms and the boy is dead by tomorrow night.
He was still sitting there when they sent for the witch.
They brought her down at dusk with two men walking behind her, and the whole village came out, because in a place with forty three people in it there is no such thing as a private crisis.
She was in there an hour.
Lysandros stood at the back of the crowd by the wall and could not see anything and did not need to.
He could hear the shape of it.
Chanting first, low and long, with pauses.
Then something poured.
Then a silence that went on too long.
Then Praxias’ voice, and then hers, flat and hard and pitched to carry, because she wanted it heard by everybody and not only by the father.
“It is not enough,” Marpessa said.
“You have asked me for a thing and I am telling you the price of it.”
“Say it plainly.”
“The plain words are these.
Nothing small has worked in this house or in this village for twenty years, and I have given you everything small that there is.
The gods are thin.
There is no ear left to shout into.
There is one thing in the stories that has always worked and you know it as well as I do, because you learned the poems at the same fire I did.” A pause.
“A life.
A whole one.
Given properly.”
Somebody in the crowd made a noise.
“Whose,” Praxias said.
“It cannot be a beast and it cannot be an old one, or I would give you my own.
It has to be worth something.
It has to be a child of about his years.”
“Whose.”
“The widow’s boy,” Marpessa said.
“Pyrrhos.
There is nobody to stand up for him and there is not enough grain in that house to see them through to the winter as it is.”
Nobody moved.
That was the part Lysandros kept afterwards.
Forty three people in a yard, most of whom had known that widow her whole life, and not one of them made a sound, and inside the silence you could hear all of them doing the same sum.
He got up onto the wall so that he could be seen.
“You do not need to kill anybody,” he said.
“He needs water.”
The yard turned round.
He had thought he was ready for it.
He had run a department, he had stood in front of three hundred people at a lectern, and none of that was of the slightest use, because he was nine years old and standing on a wall with his voice cracking in the middle of the sentence and forty faces coming round at him with one expression on all of them.
Praxias came out of the doorway.
“Get that thing out of my yard,” he said, to nobody in particular.
“He is drying out.” Lysandros kept his voice level, and he heard it go flat and adult in his own ears, and he did not care.
“That is all that is wrong with him.
Everything that has come out of him since Tuesday has to go back in and it has to go back in slowly, and you have stopped giving him anything because it kept coming out.
I know why you stopped.
Anyone would stop.
It is the wrong thing and it is killing him.”
“Get him out.”
“You cannot pour it in,” Lysandros said, louder.
“That is why it comes back.
It goes in a spoonful at a time, and it does not stop, all night, and there has to be salt in it and there has to be honey in it, and if there is no salt in it then it will not work and he will die and you will think I am a liar.”
Two men started for the wall.
Damon stepped in front of them.
He did it without any ceremony.
He simply moved, and stood, and put his hand nowhere near the sword, and looked at them, and both men stopped, because he was a man who had killed four people in one night and everybody up there had worked out by then that it was true.
Lysandros looked down at the back of the old man’s head and understood what it had just cost him.
“Let him speak,” Damon said.
“He is a child.”
“He is my child,” Damon said, “and I have kept him alive for two years, and if he is wrong you may do what you like with both of us in the morning.
Let him speak.”
Marpessa came out of the doorway.
She looked at the boy on the wall for a long moment, and there was less anger in it than he had expected.
There was a kind of readiness, and something that might have been interest.
“Say it again,” she said.
“The salt.”
“Water.
Boiled and let cool, from the spring and not the stream.
A pinch of salt in it and a spoon of honey stirred through until it is gone.
It should not taste of much.
If it tastes strongly of salt it is wrong and it will make him worse.”
“How much.”
“A spoon at a time.
One spoon, then count fifty, then another.
All night and all tomorrow and probably all tomorrow night.
If he brings some back you wait a count of two hundred and start again.
You never stop, and you never give him a cupful, however much he asks for it.”
“And that is all.”
“That is all.
Wet cloth on him for the heat.
Nothing else.
No wine.
Wine will kill him faster than the sickness will.”
Marpessa turned to Praxias.
“I have never heard anything like it,” she said.
“Not from anyone.”
“Then he is talking rubbish.”
“I did not say that.” She folded her arms.
“I said I have never heard it.
He is offering to sit up all night with your son and give him a drink.
There is nothing in that which can hurt the boy, and the other thing I have asked you for can wait until morning, because it will still be available in the morning.”
She looked back up at the wall, and her voice went hard.
“But he does it.
Not me, and not you, and not the mother.
Him.
Whatever comes of it belongs to him.”
It took eleven hours.
He had help, which was the only reason it worked.
Klytie kept the fire and boiled and cooled the water in relays and did not once ask why the boiling mattered, and Damon fetched and carried and stood in the door and kept the room clear, and the boy’s mother held her son’s head up and got the spoon in when Lysandros’ hands got too tired to be trusted.
He ran it exactly as he would have run a resuscitation bay.
One person speaking.
Everybody else doing one thing each, and knowing what it was, and reporting it out loud.
“Spoon.”
“In.”
“Count.”
Somewhere around the third hour, sitting on a dirt floor in Arcadia with his back against a wall and a shell in his hand, it occurred to Lysandros that he was doing the thing he had told himself he would never do again, which was to stand in a room and say words in a flat voice and have people move because he had said them.
The last time he had done that, a girl had died in twenty two minutes because he had opened his mouth when he was tired.
He kept his mouth working and counted to fifty and did it again.
And in the gaps, because there were a great many gaps in eleven hours, he thought about salt.
He had been a surgeon.
He had spent a career on the most difficult end of it, the end with the theatre and the lights and the enormous machines, and he had been proud of every hour of it.
And the single most valuable piece of knowledge in his entire head, the one that would save more lives than his hands ever had, was that you put salt in the water.
That was it.
Salt and something sweet, in clean water, in small amounts, over hours.
It was the difference between a child who dies of a bad week and a child who is annoying again by Sunday, and it had taken his own civilisation until well into its industrial age to work it out properly, and it had then gone on to save more people than every surgeon who had ever lived, put together, by a margin that made him feel slightly ill whenever he thought about it too hard.
There was nothing to it.
No tools.
No steel.
No glass.
No theory anybody up here would accept.
A pinch of salt in the water.
He was sitting on the floor of a house made of stones with a child’s life in a wooden spoon, and he had never in either life been closer to the actual centre of his profession.
Hylas asked for food at about the eighth hour of the morning.
He asked for it in the small cross voice of an fourteen year old, and his mother went out of the room and was sick in the yard from relief, and Praxias stood in the doorway of his own house and could not make his face do anything.
Lysandros gave the instructions for the rest of the day, twice, slowly, and made Klytie say them back.
Then he walked out past all of them, up the path, and got about two hundred yards before his legs stopped working and he sat down on a rock and shook for a while.
Damon came up and sat next to him and did not say anything for ten minutes.
“He is going to be fine,” Lysandros said eventually.
“I know.”
“He was going to be dead tonight.
He was probably eight hours off it.
If he had been three years younger he would have been dead on Wednesday and nobody would have thought anything about it, because children die and everybody up here has buried one.”
“I know that too.”
“They were going to kill Pyrrhos.” His voice went.
“They were standing in a yard doing the arithmetic on it.
I watched them do it.
Not one of them said a word.”
Damon looked out over the basin, where the light was coming across the reeds.
“You want me to tell you they are monsters,” he said.
“I am not going to.
Twenty years ago a woman up here lost four children in one winter and the year after that they had a bad harvest, and the winter after that they went into the spring with nothing.
I have been told about it eleven times since we got here.
They are not monsters.
They are people who have seen what happens when a village comes apart, and they were about to do a terrible thing for a reason, and the reason is the part you will not be able to argue with.”
“I know what the reason is.”
“Then be careful with them,” Damon said.
“That is all I am going to say.
You did a very large thing last night, in front of everybody, and they are going to love you for a while now, and I would rather you did not enjoy it too much.”
They came in ones and twos over the next fortnight, and none of them mentioned the word they had been using for two years.
An old man with a leg ulcer that had been open since the winter.
A woman with a child who would not feed.
Straton, of all people, with the arm that was not what it was, standing in the doorway looking at a point on the wall six inches above Lysandros’ head while he explained.
And they paid, because that was the only way any of them knew how to make a thing real.
Nobody up there had coin worth carrying.
He was paid in a cheese, and then in wool, and then in a share of a slaughtered goat, and then in eleven measures of barley from a man in the lower village who had been about to pay them to somebody else for two years.
He kept a list.
He had not kept a list of anything since he had a life, and it turned out he had missed it.
By the end of the summer there was a corner of the hut that was his, with things in it that belonged to him, and it was not much and it was the beginning of something, and both of them knew it and neither of them said so.
Marpessa came for him in the autumn.
She did not knock.
She stood outside and waited until he came out, which he did, because he had been expecting her for two months.
“Walk with me,” she said.
They went up past the spring.
She was not fast.
When they got to the flat place above it she stopped and turned round.
“You made me look like a fool in that yard,” she said.
“That was not what I was doing.”
“It is what happened.
I do not care very much what you were doing.” She sat down on a rock.
“I have had twenty years up here.
Twenty years of a whole village coming to my door and not one of them ever looking at me the way they look at you now, and I am not going to pretend that is a small thing or that I am above it.
Sit down.
I want to know how you did it.”
“I told you how I did it in front of everybody.
Water.
Salt.
Honey.
Small and slow and constantly.”
“Why does it work.”
Lysandros sat down.
“Because water leaves a body faster than it goes back in when a person is like that,” he said, “and salt drags it in through the wall of the gut, and the sweetness drags the salt.
Put them together in the right amounts and the water goes in three or four times faster than it would on its own.
Get the amount wrong in the other direction and you pull the water out of him instead and you finish him off.
That is why I said the taste.
The taste is the measure.”
Marpessa looked at him.
“Say it again.”
He said it again.
“Nobody knows that,” she said.
“No.”
“Nobody.
I have sat with three women who knew more than me, and one of them was ninety, and none of them knew that.” She leaned forward.
“So who told you.”
“You would not believe me.”
“Try.”
“No,” Lysandros said.
“Not today.”
She let it go, which surprised him, and then he understood that she had not let it go at all.
She had simply put it somewhere.
“Then we will talk about the other thing,” she said.
“You think I am a monster.”
“No.”
“You think I was going to murder a child.”
“You were going to murder a child,” Lysandros said.
“Those two things are not the same and I have thought about it a good deal since.
I do not think you are a monster.
I think you were going to do it and I think you would have slept afterwards.”
“I would have,” Marpessa said.
“You should understand why, since you are so interested in why.
Fourteen people in that yard depend on Praxias for the loan of a plough and the loan of grain in a bad spring.
If that boy had died his brother would have had it, and his brother is 12 and stupid, and inside two years the arrangement that keeps nine households from starving in March would have come apart.
I have watched that happen.
Not here.
At home, when I was young, and it does not look like a tragedy while it is happening, it looks like people leaving one at a time.
“So it is one boy against nine houses.
I did that sum in front of you and I would do it again in front of you, and if you want to call it murder you may, but do not stand there and pretend you have never done a sum like it.”
Lysandros was quiet for a moment.
“I have done that sum a thousand times,” he said.
“It was my job.
That is what I want to say to you and I want to say it properly, because I am not going to stand here and tell you I have clean hands.
Where I am from, when there were more people hurt than there were of us, we sorted them.
We did it out loud and quickly and we did it in front of the families.
And some of them we put to one side and did not treat, and they died, and I made those decisions, and I made them in four seconds, and I would make them again tonight.
“But there is one rule in it, and the whole of it stands on that rule, and the rule is this.
You sort by who can be saved.
Never by who is worth saving.
The moment you start sorting by worth, you are not sorting any more.
You have started choosing.
And there is no floor under that.
It starts with the widow’s boy because there is nobody to speak for him, and there is a reason it started with the widow’s boy and not with Praxias’ other son, and everybody in that yard knew the reason and nobody said it out loud.”
“That is not an argument,” Marpessa said.
“That is a preference.”
“Yes.
It is.
It is a preference that people where I am from arrived at very slowly and paid an enormous amount for, and it is not obvious and I am not going to pretend it is obvious, and nobody in this village has any reason to believe it.” He met her eye.
“So here is the argument.
“You had no way of being wrong.
“That child needed water and salt.
That is all.
If you had taken Pyrrhos out and done it and Hylas had lived, you would have said the offering worked.
If you had done it and Hylas had died, you would have said it was done improperly, or that it was too late, or that somebody was impure.
There is no result you could have got that would have told you your method was mistaken.
There is no possible outcome that counts against it.
“That is not a strong method.
That is a method with the tests taken out of it.
Anything that cannot fail teaches you nothing at all, and a method that teaches you nothing gets more expensive every year, because when it does not work the only thing you can do is pay more.”
Marpessa did not answer for a while.
“You have been thinking about that speech for a month,” she said.
“Two months.”
“It shows.” She almost smiled.
“Here is mine, and I have had less time.
You were lucky.
You looked at a boy from twelve feet away and you got it right, and if you had got it wrong you would have been in the ground by the following night and so would your old man.
You know that.”
“Yes.”
“And what you did looked exactly like what I do.
You said words over him.
You put a thing in the water and you would not say why.
You made them do it in a particular order and you made the girl repeat it back.
From where I sat in that room there was not one thing in it that I have not done myself.” She stood up.
“The difference is that you can say why.
That is all the difference there is, and it is bigger than I would like it to be, and I have been awake about it for two months as well.”
She started down the path and then stopped.
“One more thing and then I am going to go and be angry somewhere else for the winter,” she said.
“They will pay you in cheese and wool and they will call you clever and in a year they will be used to you.
But nobody up here has ever asked me for a thing that did not cost somebody something.
Not once in twenty years.
That is not superstition, boy, that is the oldest observation anybody in this country has ever made and we have put it in every story we have.
“You did not skip the price.
You have not been billed yet.”
She went down the path.
Lysandros stayed on the rock above the spring for a long time, until the light went off the top of the reeds and the cold came up out of the ground, and he could not have said why the last thing she said had gone into him so far.