The Golden Fool
Chapter 5: Victim Of The Plague

Chapter 5: Victim Of The Plague

Apollo was too tired to argue. Instead, he slurped the lukewarm broth, found in it the ghost of anise and marrow, and let his mind sink into the depths of the pallet beneath him again.

Sleep came yet again, and this time, so did a dream.

He dreamed of the palace at Delphi, columns scorched white by sun, echoing with the laughter of nymphs who no longer remembered his name.

He dreamed of his own hands, unbloodied, coaxing gold from the lyre, then smashing it against a marble step as if to punish the song for daring to persist in a world gone small and cold.

In the dream, he walked the length of the palace alone, calling for his sister, his muses, his hounds, and finding only the echo of his own voice, as thin and bitter as the tea Othra had pressed on him.

He awoke after a time that could have been minutes or years. The hut’s interior was washed in the sickly light of dawn, and beside the fire, Othra sat hunched over a shallow basin, her hands red to the wrist.

She made no move to acknowledge him until he sat up, wincing at the fresh heat where flesh had sealed over the wound.

Othra’s eyes flicked to him, measuring. "You survived the night. That means something here."

He said nothing. The air in the hut, though still thick with the odors of roots and animal, seemed less oppressive than before. Through the gaps in the wall, he could see slats of sky, brightening by the moment.

There was an urge inside him to get up, to walk into the dawn and see if he could still command the sun to rise by the old rituals, but he stayed where he was, letting the minutes build a palisade around his new, ruined self.

Othra cleaned her hands in silence, then crossed to where he sat. She pressed her palm to his brow, fingers cool and sure. "The fever is gone," she said. "You will live." She did not sound disappointed, but neither did she sound especially pleased.

He felt the need to fill the silence, to justify the space he occupied. "Your remedies are unlike any I’ve known."

She grunted. "You come from the south. City-bred, perhaps, or farther yet. What did you do there, before the forest took you?"

He sifted through a hundred plausible lies, but none seemed worth the labor. "I was... a singer. Once." He smiled, though he could feel the lie clench his heart. "Now I am only a listener."

Othra stared for a moment, then barked a laugh sharp enough to crack bone. "You will find little music here, unless you count the howling of wolves and the moaning of the dying."

She reached for a pouch at her belt, withdrew a pinch of dried petals, and dropped them into the embers. The fire snapped, spat blue, filled the air with a sweet and unfamiliar odor.

"Rest," she said. "Whatever sent you here will find you soon enough. You may as well heal first."

He nodded, then forced himself back down onto the pallet, arms folded behind his head. Othra, apparently satisfied that he would not die at her convenience, ducked out into the gray light.

He lay for some time, counting the slow beat of blood behind his eyes, until the noise of the waking village seeped in.

The clanging of metal, the cawing of birds, the muttered bartering that passed for commerce in this muddy outpost.

For all his injuries, Apollo was not built for idleness. The world outside pressed against the hut, demanding witness, and despite the ache in every joint, he rose and dressed himself in the least offensive scraps he could find, his own torn tunic, washed and dried on the line behind Othra’s hut, now faintly scented with smoke and rosemary.

He stepped out, squinting against the day. The rain had slackened, but the ground was a morass, each step a betrayal of dignity as his borrowed boots sucked and slithered through the muck.

The village seemed smaller from within than it had from the forest’s edge: two dozen huts at most, huddled around the remains of a stone keep that looked to have been gutted by fire generations ago.

At its heart, the communal fire still burned, though only a handful of villagers lingered there, clutching mugs and trading rumors.

Apollo felt the eyes of the village on him, children peering from behind rain barrels, a teenager with a shock of hair and a nose bent badly out of alignment, the guards at the gate, shifting their weight with studied indifference.

A trio of women kneading dough in the open, hands white with flour, who only looked up when he passed. He returned their gazes with what he hoped was a disarming smile, but more likely a rictus of pain.

’So this is to be my dominion,’ he thought, ’a kingdom of mud and suspicion.’

He drifted toward the ruined keep, where the man with the spear from yesterday stood sentry.

The man, whose name Apollo still did not know, nodded at him, neither friendly nor hostile, just the flick of a head that said, you are seen.

He stood in the shadow of a toppled column, whittling a length of wood into something sharp and utilitarian.

Apollo thought to ask about the village, its rules, its alliances, but the words felt too large for his mouth.

Instead, he sat on what remained of a stone step, letting the sun work at his bones, watching how the mortals moved around their day.

Not all of them avoided him. The boy with the missing tooth reappeared, this time with a wooden hoop and stick, chasing it through the mud with a wildness that made Apollo ache for a kind of innocence he had never possessed.

One of the flour-dusted women, hair braided in the northern style, offered him a scrap of bread as she passed.

He accepted it, bowing his head in the old Olympian fashion, and when he caught her eye she grinned slyly, as if she alone in the village knew what a god looked like when starved of worship.

He wandered for an hour, or maybe only minutes before the children, this time two girls and a boy, all knobby knees and snub noses, were engaged in a war with fistfuls of mud and shrieks that could strip bark from a birch.

He felt them clock his presence, and for a moment, the youngest girl, her hair the color of wet sand and eyes startlingly blue, stared at him with a frankness that made him pause mid-step.

She sat alone on a stone near the well, shoulders trembling, a rough-spun blanket bundled about her knees. Unlike the others, she did not flinch or avert her eyes, but held his gaze with a queer, hollow defiance.

As Apollo approached, she wiped her nose on the back of her hand, leaving a muddy streak across her upper lip.

He crouched, careful to keep his hands where she could see them, and offered a smile. "You look as though you’ve fought a titan," he said, voice gentled by the memory of his own sister’s childhood tantrums.

The girl sniffed, eyed him with the skepticism of someone who had been on the wrong end of too many lies. "You’re the one Othra patched up," she said.

He nodded. "And you are?"

She hesitated, as if the question were a trick. "Liska."

"A proud name," he said, even as he wondered what act of heroism or folly had earned it.

"What troubles you, Liska? I promise not to tell the others."

She looked away, gaze fixed on the well’s rim. Her hands twisted the blanket tighter, worrying at the loose threads. "My Mother is sick...her name is Hessa" she said.

"Othra says it’s the lung rot, but I heard the men say it’s the black cough. They say she’ll die before the next moon, like the others."

Apollo felt a coldness, this one not from the weather. Othra’s words returned to him: the sickness that took the children and old first, then the rest.

Plague was a familiar enemy, in mortal and divine annals alike, but here it had the intimacy of a whispered curse.

"I lost my mother, too," he said, the lie easier than the truth. "I remember it hurt, but the hurt changes. It lets you remember the good things, later."

Liska’s lower lip quivered. "She’s not dead yet."

"Then there is hope," he said, surprising himself with the conviction in his voice. "Othra is the best healer I’ve ever known. She saved me, didn’t she?"

The girl’s eyes, so like a northern sky in winter, met his. "She said you were dead. Then you weren’t."

Apollo shrugged, as if resurrection were a minor inconvenience. "Sometimes people are wrong about these things. May I see your mother?"

She considered, then nodded, leaping down from the stone. She led him past the well and down a path lined with the remnants of shrine markers, fetishes of root and bone, tied with scraps of cloth, each a testament to some lost plea.

They came to a hut smaller than Othra’s, its door hung askew and smoke leaking from a hole in the roof.