Fever

Nothing happened for three days.

Teo watched the scratches on his arm the way he had once watched the count fall on the wall of Hesk's cellar. Morning and evening, every day, he pushed up his sleeve and looked at them, and Mira looked at them, and wrote down what she saw in a small book of grey paper that she had begun to carry everywhere. First day. Scratches healing normally. No redness. No swelling. Second day. The same. Third day. The same.

On the third night, he began to wonder if Bram's cousin's threads had been dead. If the cold river had not been cold enough. If six days on the barge had been too long. If it was all for nothing.

On the fourth morning, there was a small red bump on his arm, right where the scratches had been.

Mira wrote it down. Her hand was perfectly steady. Teo noticed that, and loved her a little for it, and did not say so.

By the sixth day, the bump had grown into a raised, pale blister the size of a fingernail, with a dimple in its centre and a ring of angry red skin around it, and it itched like nothing he had ever felt. By the seventh, the itching had spread up his arm into an ache, and the ache had spread into his armpit, where there was a hard, tender lump, and the lump had spread into the rest of him.

He woke on the eighth day with a fever.

It was not a bad fever. He had had worse, as a child in the Sump, every winter, the usual fevers that came and went. He was hot and then cold, and his head ached, and he did not want to eat, and everything seemed slightly far away, as if he were looking at the world through the wrong end of the brass telescope. He lay on a pile of blankets in the corner of the boathouse and watched the firelight on the ceiling and tried very hard not to be afraid.

...It did not entirely work.

'This is what it's supposed to do,' he told himself. 'The red book said. A mild fever. A blister. Then it passes. This is the body learning. This is the defenders in the blood, fumbling with the key. This is fine.'

'...And if it isn't the cow-blister? If Hessa's cows had something else? If it's the red pox already, if I caught it walking through the Sump, and this is the start of it, and the blister on my arm is just the first...'

He made himself stop. He made himself breathe, the way Hesk had taught him. Panic was only thinking that had forgotten where it was going.

What did he see?

A single blister. On his arm. Exactly where the thread had been. Nowhere else. Not on his face, not on his hands, not on his chest. The red pox, Mira said, began on the face. Always. And it began as many small spots, everywhere at once, not as a single large one.

What would be true if he were wrong?

There would be more spots. On his face, first. By now, there would be some. Mira looked every morning and every evening, and wrote down what she saw, and there were none.

How would he know?

He would wait... that was all.

So he waited. And on the tenth day, the fever broke, in a long, drenching sweat in the middle of the night, and he woke in the morning soaked and weak and ravenously hungry, and the blister on his arm had begun to dry into a dark brown scab, and there was not a single spot anywhere else on his body.

Mira wrote it all down.

Then she put down her pen and sat beside him on the blankets and did not say anything for a long time. Teo did not say anything either. He was too tired, and too relieved, and there was nothing that needed saying.

"Hesk wants to know," said Nell, from the stairs, after a while, "if you're going to be insufferable about this."

"Tell Hesk," said Teo, without opening his eyes, "that I've only done half of it."

That was the part that nobody had wanted to talk about.

The cow-blister was only the first half of Jenner's test. A blister and a fever proved that Teo had caught the cow-blister. It did not prove that the cow-blister would protect him from the red pox. And there was only one way to prove that.

Jenner had done it with the gardener's boy, six weeks after the cowpox. He had taken matter from a real smallpox blister and scratched it into the child's arm. Exactly as the old variolators did. If the cowpox had not worked... the boy would have caught smallpox through the scratch, and perhaps lived, and perhaps not.

...He had not caught it.

"Six weeks," Mira said. "The book says Jenner waited six weeks."

"We don't have six weeks." Teo was sitting up now, wrapped in blankets, holding a bowl of Ama Tull's beans in both hands. "The Mercy House has three hundred sick. There are red cloths on half the doors in the Sump. Every week we wait, how many more?"

"And if you're wrong, and you catch it, and you die?"

"Then you'll know," Teo said simply. "And you'll stop. And nobody else will die from it."

Mira stared at him for a long moment. Her face was very white.

"How long?" she said at last.

Teo had thought about that, too. The red book said that the body's defenders took a week or two to learn the shape of a sickness properly. He had had the blister for ten days. The fever had come and gone. His body had done whatever it was going to do.

"Two weeks from the scratch," he said. "Four more days. That's the soonest I'll be sure the defenders have finished learning."

"Then four more days," said Mira. She stood up. "And in the meantime, you're going to stay in this boathouse and eat beans and do absolutely nothing, because if you set foot in the Mercy House before then and catch it the ordinary way, we'll never know what we've proved."

She was right. Teo hated it. He stayed in the boathouse and ate beans.

Four days later, in the evening, he walked up through the Sump to the Mercy House with Mira beside him and a clean knife in his pocket.

It was the first time he had been in there since the cow-blister. He had forgotten how bad it was. It was worse than the flux. It was worse than Saint Ardo's Fire. Every cot was full, and so was the floor between them, and so was the corridor outside. It was hot and close, and it smelled of pus and sweat and death. People lay in rows with their faces swollen and blistered beyond recognition, their eyes sealed shut, their skin crusted and cracking. Some of them moaned. Most of them were too weak to make any sound at all.

Cobb met them at the door. He was thinner than Teo remembered, and there were shadows like bruises under his eyes. He looked at Teo, and at Mira, and at the knife.

"Sister," he said, in a cracked voice. "Are you sure?"

"No," said Mira. "That's why we're doing it."

They found a man in the third row who had been sick for nine days and was beginning to mend. His blisters were full and ripe, and he was awake, and when Mira knelt beside him and explained very quietly what they wanted to do, and why, he looked at Teo for a long time with his one unswollen eye... and then nodded, once, and held out his arm.

Mira opened one of the blisters on his arm with the tip of the clean knife. She dipped a fresh thread in the fluid inside it.

Then... she turned to Teo.

He sat down on the floor beside the cot and pushed up his right sleeve — not the left, where the cow-blister scar was — and held out his arm.

Mira looked at him. Her hand was shaking now... just a little.

"Last chance," she said, very quietly.

"I know."

She made the scratches. She pressed in the thread. She held it there for a long time.

It was done.

Then there was nothing to do but wait again. Teo went back to the boathouse, and sat by the fire, and Mira came every evening and looked at his face and his arms and his chest, and wrote down what she saw. Nell watched him like a hawk. Bram sat by the door and whittled a stick into smaller and smaller pieces and said nothing. Hesk asked him every morning how he felt, and every morning Teo said he felt fine, and every morning he was afraid that it would be the last time.

The red pox took twelve days to show, after you caught it. Sometimes ten. Sometimes fourteen. Mira had counted, from the Mercy House ledger.

On the third day, the scratch on his right arm went red and itchy and raised a tiny bump.

Teo's heart stopped. So did Mira's... he saw her face go grey.

On the fourth day, the bump was smaller.

On the fifth day, it was gone.

On the twelfth day, there was nothing. No fever. No aching. No spots on his face, or his hands, or anywhere. On the thirteenth, the same. On the fourteenth.

On the sixteenth day, Mira closed her grey book, and put down her pen, and put her face in her hands, and wept.

Teo sat beside her and did not touch her, because he did not know if he was allowed to. After a while, she leaned against his shoulder anyway, and he put his arm around her, and they sat there by the fire for a long time.

"One," Hesk said quietly, from his chair.

Teo looked up.

"You know that, don't you, boy?" The old man's voice was very gentle. "It's one. One person. You might have been lucky. You might have had the pox as a babe and not remembered. You might be one of the few the pox never takes, whatever you do. One is a story. It isn't proof."

"I know," said Teo.

And he did. That was the strange thing. Two years ago, he would have stood up and shouted that he was right, that he had done it, that it worked. Tonight, sitting in the firelight with Mira's head on his shoulder and the dark scab of the cow-blister itching on his arm, he found that he did not want to shout at all.

"One is where we start," he said. "Not where we stop."

Hesk smiled.

"Good," he said. "Then go and find me a hundred more."