The Fifth Servant (23 page)

           
Her words cut through my conscience to the center of my soul. I felt a numbness, like a knife wound that only hurts after the blade is removed.

           
Then Acosta burst into the shop and called out to me: “There you are! The Christians are wrecking Federn’s shop.”

           
I was forced to drop everything and follow the night watchman outside, where I was swept along with the crowd jostling toward the East Gate in time to see a mob of lawless soldiers pulling Freyde and Julie from the looted shop.

           
I heard the women screaming, “Leave us alone, you
eyrev-rav!
You stupid idiots! A black year on you!”

           
Then one of the
Reiters
tossed a burning torch into the shop, and at that moment I knew that if I hadn’t stopped in to see my wife, I would have been at the shop by now and things wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand. But now it was too late. And I stood there watching my plans for the immediate future go up in smoke.

CHAPTER 13

           
THE VALERIAN ROOT BOILING IN the pot exuded a rank odor like no other on earth—a blend of peasant sweat, mossy wood, and rotting meat that filled the air as thick clouds of steam rose and dispersed.

           
The sharp-eyed observer of this alchemical experiment was a wise woman named astava, whom the Germans called Kassandra the Bohemian, or Kassy Boehme for short. She was somewhere in her thirties, but had chosen to wander off on her own, far from the well-traveled path of wife and mother, so she still had the bright smile of a much younger woman; a smile that caught the eye of countless men who had known the thrill of seeing her light up a room just by walking into it with a glow that was nothing short of a miracle of nature. Or so it struck them. She had a high sloping forehead, eyes that changed from brown to green depending on the light, a long thin nose, all of her teeth, and according to whom you asked, either long blond hair with brown streaks in it, or long brown hair with blond streaks in it.

           
At the moment, she was searching for a way to distill the essence of the valerian root into concentrated drops. She didn’t know what useful purpose it would ultimately serve, since an ordinary infusion made from steeping a bit of the root in hot water for a few minutes usually worked its natural magic quite nicely, easing her nervous humors and letting her get some much-needed sleep. Still, the experiment might yield some interesting results.

           
That venerable iconoclast Paracelsus had argued that if the active ingredients in a plant could be isolated and concentrated, the resulting tinctures would surely be purer and more effective than the natural forms of the medicinal herbs, which were full of inactive materials that diluted their potency. The first step was the easiest: extracting the water that made up most of the plant by boiling it away.

           
But the root of the valerian plant had very little water in it to begin with, so Kassy made a decoction from the finely ground root, and was boiling it down to its elemental form when an old woman everyone called
babi ka
Strelecky, or “granny,” entered her tiny storefront, which served as a combination kitchen-laboratory-consulting room. The old woman had cloudy gray eyes, and deep-set wrinkles that made Kassy think of the dry gullies and stream beds high up in the Krusné Mountains, in the land of a thousand sunsets.

           
The old woman told Kassy that her jaw had been hurting for two days, ever since the tooth doctor had yanked out a rotten molar, telling her that she’d feel better in a day or so. Only so far she didn’t feel any better, and how was she supposed to get her strength back when it hurt so much just to chew? Kassy took the old woman’s hand and helped her over to the chair by the fire, easing her worried mind with kind words and the promise to send her home feeling better, absolutely no question about it. Then she had a look inside the woman’s mouth. The wound was taking a long time to heal, but it showed no signs of infection. Kassy told her to gargle three times a day with warm salt water and a dash of strong drink to keep the area clean, and gave her a vial of nut-brown syrup to ease the pain.

           
“You’ll need to take some prune juice with this as well.”

           
“I don’t like prune juice.”

           
“This class of medicine tends to clog the bowels, and you already have enough trouble in that area, don’t you?” Kassy explained. “It’s the price of reducing your pain, granny.”

           
Everything came with a price. If you wanted to take the paregorics, you had to drink the prune juice as well.

           
Babi ka
Strelecky examined the brownish glop in the tiny bottle. “How much is this going to cost me?”

           
“Three pfennigs.”

           
The old woman pursed her lips tightly. It was clearly too much for any medicine that wasn’t a sure thing. Kassy would have charged her less, but the ingredients were expensive, and the landlord never reduced her rent just because she had trouble turning away the charity cases.

           
“Two if you bring me back the bottle,” she said.

           
Babi ka
Strelecky counted out the battered copper half-pfennigs, slipped the bottle into her apron pocket, and went on her way.

           
Kassy didn’t think she’d ever see the bottle again, but she didn’t let it bother her. God would pay her back in time.

           
The mixture was one of Paracelsus’s rare successes, easing pain so effectively that the old alchemist had taken the Latin verb for “praise,”
laudare
, and named it laudanum. His original recipe called for minute quantities of gold, lead, pearls, and other precious metals of dubious healing properties, but Kassy had modified it, dropping the heavy metals while keeping the main ingredient, concentrated juice of the opium poppy dissolved in alcohol. It worked wonders, if used properly.

           
She still had her doubts about using lead as a fever reducer, since classical authorities from the days of Olympiodorus of Thebes had reported that a demon living inside the metal drove long-term users mad. Not that she believed that a demon could inhabit the tiny shavings used in the Paracelsian tinctures, but she had no plans to test that hypothesis on herself or anyone else until a better explanation was forthcoming. So she kept in touch with the other wise women who used it in their medicines, curious to learn what results they had observed, and remained skeptical of the legions of naturalists who made a regular habit of overstating the effects of their drugs. She didn’t want to be duped again, like the time she finally got her hands on a long-sought volume of Pliny, only to find out that he was one of the sources of the blasted myth with a hundred lives that a menstruating woman’s touch will curdle butter, turn cream sour, rot fruit, and dull the blades of carving knives, and that just
one look
from her is enough to kill a swarm of angry bees in mid-flight.
I didn’t realize we had such power
, she thought with a bitter chuckle, before she had thrown the dusty old book across the room and startled her orange tiger cat, Kira.

           
Her shelf was filled with tattered flea-market copies of books by the great masters, bearing their incontestable stamp of authority and containing complete and utter absurdities. John of Gaddesden passed down the wisdom of his age, writing about how he had cured the son of King Edward Plantagenet of En gland by wrapping a bit of red cloth around the pox, which he claimed would cause it to disappear (it won’t). The German Inquisitors Sprenger and Kramer were so credulous they swore that “a certain virgin” who recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed while making the sign of the cross had cured a friend whose foot had been “grievously bewitched” (if only it were that easy). Even Albertus Magnus repeatedly stumbled in his
Book of Secrets
, recording for all time his assertion that mistletoe and a certain species of lily could open any lock in the kingdom. Magically.

           
Nonsense.

           
But the world-famous Albertus had the epithet “the Great” permanently affixed to his name, while she barely survived on the pennies she took from the poorest patients in the city. So he must have been on to
something
.

           
“What’s that awful smell?”

           
Kassy looked up from her bottles and flasks. A woman with a tangled mop of hair and dark circles under her eyes blundered into the shop, her shawl damp with rain, dragging a child dressed in rags, with snot dripping from his nose. The neighborhood of Bethlehem Chapel didn’t have much in the way of palaces and nunneries, but it sure had plenty of poor people. The revolutionary leader Jan Hus had preached in this very square, and started a mass movement that became the first of its kind to successfully resist the dominance of the Roman Church and carve out a zone of religious tolerance in the very heart of the Empire. But these days it was a Protestant ghetto, besieged on all sides by the resurgent Crusaders, even if it didn’t have a wall around it like the
Židovské M
sto
.

           
“What’s the matter with your little boy?”

           
“He’s got the worms.”

           
“Intestinal worms?”

           
“What other kind of worms are there?”

           
“There are plenty of other kinds of worms. You’ve seen them in his stools?”

           
“Listen, missy, I’ve got five kids at home and I think I know when something’s wrong with them. And what on earth is that god-awful smell?”

           
Kassy opened the window to let in some cold air. Then she reached for a jug of pale gray liquid and a copper funnel, and carefully decanted a cupful of the bitter medicine into a small green bottle.

           
“The juice of the ash tree is a reliable vermifuge—”

           
“A
what
?”

           
“Sorry. It’s also called Bird’s Tongue, and the boiled bark of the tree will kill the worms, but it’s kind of bitter tasting. You can try mixing it with sugar or stirring it into his porridge.”

           
“Do I look like I can afford sugar? Will you be making a fine burgher’s wife of me then?”

           
“Here, this will help it taste better.”

           
Kassy tossed in some dry peppermint leaves at no extra charge just to get rid of the woman, but the boy was busy petting Kira, who had been sniffing around the mouse hole, and the woman had to yank him away.

           
Poor boy. His eyes were glazed over and his face was pale. He probably got the worms from eating dirt. She had seen many cases in the mountain villages of hungry children trying to fill their empty stomachs with clods of earth that were full of worm eggs.

           
They were almost out the door when Kassy called them back.

           
“Now what?” said the woman.

           
Kassy made up something about how the juice of the ash tree bark was cool and wet, so it worked best if taken in combination with something warm and dry, like freshly baked grains, as she cut a couple of thick slices of rye bread and brought them around the counter for the boy to eat.

           
“What’s your name?” she said, kneeling next to the boy and offering him the bread.

           
“Karel,” he said, looking up at his mother, his eyes as big as empty soup bowls, as if he were afraid to ask if he could really have the bread. His fine golden hair was plastered to his skin in places by sweat, and his lips were dry and chapped.

           
“Listen to me, Karel. You must eat this here, right in front of me,” said Kassy.

           
His mother nodded, and the boy grabbed the top slice and began stuffing it into his mouth.