Chapter 50 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 50: Flame in the Swamp 06
"White willow bark, rue, fig, asafoetida, agrimony, angelica, hyssop, valerian…"
In the low earthen-brick house, the feeble flame of an oil lamp wavered inside its glass shade, lighting Stasia's face in shifting patches of light and dark, casting long pale shadows from a row of brown glass tubes.
Square labels cut from brown paper were affixed in a neat line. Deep blue ink, handwriting slightly hurried, each word trailing a thin upward hook at the end of the final letter, out of long habit.
These were the herbal solutions from various trials.
Below this row of tubes, there sat another row of small vessels containing a dark red, viscous liquid. Each tube held only a shallow measure, fewer than ten in all, paired with their corresponding trial solutions.
This was blood from the infected, obtained by Kelsey in exchange for silver coins from a robust vagrant in the city district.
None of them had considered approaching slum residents to take blood samples.
Collecting blood was viewed as a sinister act. Were it discovered, it would confirm every vague suspicion the people harbored — surely these well-dressed strangers and their charity had some sinister design.
Homeless vagrants, therefore, who kept apart from others, were the safest option.
Indeed, throughout history, blood and viscera had been deeply taboo in the human world, considered the domain of evil and the occult. This fear had been doubled and redoubled by ignorance, until touching them had become an absolute prohibition.
A significant reason why Stasia's practice of medicine had led people to regard her as a monster, or worse, was precisely her habit of reaching for the knife and the syringe.
Trace the roots of this belief back far enough, and you arrived at the prehistoric age.
In the prehistoric human world, particularly its final era, curse rituals had run rampant. Blood, viscera, even objects worn close to the body could serve as effective conduits for curses.
People used them against other races, but also against their own kind, until in the end nearly everyone lived in fear of everyone else.
In cities where industrialization had already advanced, people were more isolated from one another than at any previous time in history.
The threshold for curse rituals was horrifyingly low. You never knew whether a neighbor you'd quarreled with, or even a stranger who had brushed past you in the street, might use your blood or belongings to curse you. The only thing to be done was to be cautious, and then cautious again, handling every wound with care and leaving no opportunity for anyone to obtain your blood.
By the end, even intimate relationships had been severely affected. Trust had broken down so completely that people began to dread even the physical closeness. Their sense of happiness declined. Birth rates plummeted year upon year…
And in the final tableau of that prehistoric world, this was only the tip of the iceberg.
But to return to the present, even with the transmission of curse rituals having been almost entirely severed in the Great Calamity along with so much else, people's caution around blood and the body, and their fear of the mysterious, had survived intact, becoming one of the defining cultural traits of humanity.
Even when Kelsey exchanged silver coins for these blood samples, the vagrant who agreed to the transaction had done so with the mentality of gambling with her life — which is to say, they had paid the price of a human life for this small quantity of blood.
Stasia handled these samples with exceptional care, placing only a shallow measure in each tube. When Lucita tasted them, she permitted herself only the very tip of her tongue.
She had once again lost her appetite to the putrid stench of plague-ridden blood, and after several days of this, her spirits had sunk considerably.
In the end, they identified two formulas with markedly effective substitutes.
One replaced the original ingredients with mature hyssop and goldenrod, slower to take effect but gentler in action. The other was sharper in potency, using pungent fresh indigo jasmine leaves, along with the juice of wild black cherries and lobelia, somewhat more costly to produce.
Stasia wavered between the two for some time, and ultimately decided to trial both simultaneously.
After all, with Grande's herb supply only flowing outward and nothing coming in, even using both formulas at once might not be enough to meet the entire city's medicinal needs.
What was more, there were simply too many sick people, and the concentrated magical decoction they had brought, despite constant dilution, was nearly running dry.
With the plan settled, Stasia and Kelsey set off for the herb shops in the main city district.
They had made the trip along this route several times already. The first time, a few opportunists had tried to rob them. After Kelsey had dealt with them on a couple of occasions, their passage had grown considerably smoother.
Lucita, meanwhile, remained behind to keep the medicine stall running.
Something felt off to Lucita today.
Normally by this hour, Dalila, the daughter of their host family, would already have come out to help, and at day's end would receive her silver coin wages in high spirits as she headed home.
But today the sun had gone down and there was still no sign of Dalila.
Lucita had been kept too busy distributing and brewing medicine to think much about it. It was only now, as she handed out the final bowl of the day, that she turned her attention to the matter.
Not only had Dalila not come, Lucita had also not seen the woman who had been walking the streets playing the soul-summoning song.
Had she finally let it go? Or did the ritual only require seven days?
She thought of the great white-bone swamp, and resolved to pay it a visit once this business was concluded, and get to the bottom of the secret that had been drawing her in.
Come to think of it, Stasia and Kelsey still hadn't returned…
As Lucita was turning this over in her mind, a shadow appeared at the end of the street.
The evening sun had nearly finished setting by now, leaving only a wash of deep red clouds lingering before night came, a thin blush of crimson light over everything.
She couldn't make out the face, but the long shadow cast by the figure looked thin and frail.
It was Dalila.
Lucita carried on putting away bowls as she asked: "Dalila? Where have you been today? Coming this late, there's no pay for you today."
No answer came for a long moment.
She looked up. Dalila had come close, her eyes swollen and red, her face carrying a nearly blank, stunned expression.
Lucita's voice caught in her throat. "Dalila... what's happened?"
Dalila raised her right hand.
In it was an old bone flute. Already noticeably yellowed with age, its surface worn to a warm, smooth sheen, clearly a cherished object, handled with care over many years.
Lucita felt a jolt. "That's..."
Dalila sniffed. "She's dead."
"She was..."
"The auntie who was playing this flute out on the street." As soon as Dalila started speaking, she could barely hold herself together. Her shoulders heaved as the words spilled out in fragments. "She came to me last night and asked me to give you this flute, to thank you for the medicine. It gave her daughter two more days, but it was too late. She said it was her most treasured possession. The way she looked... the more I thought about it, the more something felt wrong. This morning I went asking around about her first thing. I spent the whole day. And by the time I finally tracked down her house, I found she'd already... she'd taken her own life. I..."
Lucita was struck dumb by the torrent of information.
She steadied herself, took Dalila gently by the shoulders, and said in a calm, reassuring tone, "Don't rush. Don't rush. This isn't your fault. Tell me. Her body is still in the house, is that right?"
"I think so," Dalila hiccupped through a sob. "It doesn't seem like anyone's found her yet."
Lucita made up her mind at once. "Don't be afraid. Take me to see. I'll handle this."
On the way, Dalila's distress didn't ease.
This was different from an ordinary neighbor dying. Even between strangers, the moment the woman had chosen to leave her final gift through Dalila, some kind of bond had been formed between them.
With no family and no one else in the world, in a sense, Dalila was the only person who might have had any chance at all of preventing her death.
And Dalila had not been able to.
That was the part she found hardest to bear.
She would instinctively hold herself responsible for the woman's death.
Lucita spoke gently to her all the way, deeply worried the child might carry a lasting wound from this.
At the same time, she felt a heaviness of her own, at the stranger's sudden, senseless end, and at the thread of that unknown secret, now severed.
For the woman herself, she had probably never expected Dalila to sense that something was wrong, let alone discover her death. And yet she had gone to find Dalila, who handed out medicine alongside Lucita, to make this final request. It told its own story: the woman had no friends worth trusting, no one left to turn to.
Life, like morning dew.
She followed Dalila's directions to a tidy little courtyard.
The street was close to the main city district now, and the houses were considerably better than in the slums, though still simple enough.
The house itself was built of neatly stacked mud bricks, a small yard enclosed around it, wooden windows and a wooden door, and a flower bed at the entrance with a few pink climbing roses growing in it.
The yard gate was left ajar. Lucita pushed it open easily, and found that the door to the house was not locked either.
She pressed her hand to it and pushed. A faint, unmistakable odor of decay hit her in the face.
Lucita coughed.
Fortunately, she had grown somewhat accustomed to the putrid smell of plague-ridden blood over recent days. She steadied herself after coughing, and saw the woman's body slumped over the table.
She still wore the same ragged short robe. Her face was a cold, ashen grey. She was seated in the chair, both hands wrapped around the hilt of a knife, its blade buried deep in her own abdomen.
The large pool of blood had already congealed. She remained fixed in that position. Her body had long since grown cold and rigid.
Suicide was still a serious crime in this era.
Lucita drew out the knife, rinsed it clean in the washbasin, and placed it in her space.
Then she straightened the woman's body, cleaned away all evidence of what had happened, and only then rose to her feet.
It was at this moment that Lucita noticed a small box sitting on the table.
She lifted the lid to find a stack of detailed portrait sketches inside.
They appeared to be portraits of the same girl, perhaps a dozen or more, drawn from earliest childhood all the way through the early years of adolescence. The final portrait showed her at perhaps fifteen or sixteen, standing as though in a wind, head turned back over her shoulder, the hem of her clothing caught mid-flutter.
The girl had short brown hair that fell to her shoulders, dark green eyes, and a bright, open smile, full of life and vitality.
On the back of this last painting, a few lines had been written in dark blue ink.
By the depth of the color, the words had been set down not long ago.
“Delphine, my darling. Mama misses you so.
Are you well up there?
I have been wandering for a long time now. I don't know whether those who take their own lives truly go to hell, and cannot find you in heaven.
But I know you must need mama beside you. Don't you?
Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid…”
Below this, a few lines in a more slanted hand, rather hurried, but still legible.
“Mama had hoped to bring the flute and come find you, to play the songs of home for our little Delphine. But as the last treasure our family had, I have given it to our benefactor. It was her medicine that kept you in this world one more day. You know, we must remember to be grateful.”
Lucita read to the end and looked at the bone flute in Dalila's hands.
As if moved by some inexplicable force, Lucita held out her hand. "Let me see it."
The surface of the flute was so smooth and warm to the touch, worn to this softness by years of care. It seemed to hold within it everything its owner had ever felt.
The body of the flute was slightly cool.
The moment her fingers made contact, Lucita's vision went black. She steadied herself with one hand against her forehead.
When she opened her eyes again, the ground beneath her feet was a swamp, bubbling softly with dark mud.
Lucita's heart clenched. She looked around in every direction.
Comments
Post a Comment