Salt and Honey

Nell got sick on the fourth day after the handle went into the river.

Teo found her curled up on his straw mattress when he came back from the pyre-yard that evening, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face grey and shining with sweat. The bucket in the corner told him the rest.

For a moment, he simply stood in the doorway — and could not move.

'No. No, no, no... She didn't drink from the pump. I told her. I told her...'

But it did not matter what he had told her. Nell's mother had filled two jugs at Saint Orlen's on the morning she fell ill, and those jugs had stood in their room on the square ever since, and Nell, who had been creeping back to that room every day to sit among her mother's things, had been thirsty.

She told him all this in a small, cracked voice, between cramps, while he knelt beside her with his hands shaking.

"...It was Mama's water," she whispered. "She fetched it. I didn't want to waste it."

Teo closed his eyes.

He had carried two hundred and forty-three people to the pyres in fifteen days. He had seen how the grey flux took them. It was not a slow death. The first cramps came, and then the torrent, and within a day, sometimes within half a day, a strong man could be dead. A child was smaller. A child had less to lose.

He stood up so fast that his head spun.

"Hold on," he said. "Hold on, Nell. I'll be right back."

He did not remember running down the back stairs. He remembered only the door, and the knock... twice, pause, three times... and the old man's voice, and then he was standing in the lamplight of the cellar, and his own voice was coming out of him far too loud.

"Nell has it. The flux. What do I do? Hesk... what do I do?"

Hesk did not waste time asking questions. He turned his blind face toward the crates against the wall and said, quickly and calmly:

"The Leaf with the drawing of the child and the cup. Grey crate, near the top, a whole one. I had it read to me last winter. You read it to me, in fact. Do you remember it?"

Teo did. Vaguely. It had been a long, dull page about something called "dehydration", which he had not understood, and he had read it in a mumble while thinking about his dinner.

He tore open the grey crate and found it.

The page was printed in large, plain letters, as if it had been made to be read by people who did not read well. At the top was a drawing of a woman holding a cup to a child's lips. Below it, a heading. How to make oral rehydration solution at home.

Teo read it aloud, faster than he had ever read anything in his life.

The flux did not kill with poison. That was the first thing the Leaf said, and it was the thing that made him stop and read the line twice. Diseases like cholera killed by draining the body of water, and of the salts that the body needed to hold water inside itself. A person did not die of the small lives. A person died of being emptied. And if the water and the salts could be put back in, as fast as the flux took them out, then the body could hold on long enough to win.

Plain water was not enough. Plain water ran straight through. But water with a little salt and a little sugar, in the right measure, was different. The sugar helped the body to drink in the salt, and the salt helped the body to hold the water. Even a person with the worst flux could keep it inside them, if it was given in small sips, constantly, day and night.

Then there was the recipe. Six level teaspoons of sugar. Half a level teaspoon of salt. One litre of clean drinking water... boiled and cooled.

Teo stared at the last line.

"What is a litre?" he demanded.

Hesk was silent for a heartbeat.

"...I don't know."

"Hesk!"

"I don't know, boy! The Makers had a hundred measures, and we lost all of them. Think! Is there nothing else on the page?"

Teo searched it frantically. Most of the rest was about signs of danger and when to find a doctor, which were not much use in a world without doctors. But at the very bottom, in small print, there was a note. One litre is equal to the volume of a cube ten centimetres on each side.

"A cube," he muttered. "Ten centi... centimetres. What's a centimetre?"

"The width of a fingernail," Hesk said instantly. "The little finger. I remember that one. A Leaf about measuring a child's growth. A centimetre is roughly the width of a child's little fingernail."

Teo looked down at his own hand. Ten of those, then. Ten fingernails side by side was... perhaps the width of his palm, across the knuckles. A box as wide as his palm, as deep as his palm, as tall as his palm.

It was close enough. It had to be.

"And sugar," he said hoarsely. "There's no sugar in the Sump. It costs more than silver."

"Honey," said Hesk. "The Mercy House keeps it, for the sweetening of the holy oil. Sugar and honey are cousins. Use a little more of it than the Leaf says, honey is part water. And salt, they have salt there too. For the cleaning."

Teo was already running.

He knew he should not go to the Mercy House. He knew that it was the evening prayers, and that the acolytes would be at the altar, and that the stores were behind the altar, and that if he was caught stealing from the Chantry a second time in five days, nothing he could say would save him.

He went anyway — of course he did.

The hall was dim and quiet, full of the soft moaning of the sick. Teo slipped along the wall toward the storeroom door, praying to nothing in particular, and had his hand on the latch when a voice behind him said:

"You do seem to like it here after dark."

Teo turned around very slowly.

Sister Mira was standing a few paces away with a lamp in one hand and a bucket in the other. Her face was drawn and exhausted. She looked at him... at his face, at his shaking hands... and something in her own expression changed.

"What's wrong?"

Teo had prepared a lie on the way. He found that he could not remember it.

"A girl," he said. "Ten years old. She has the flux. I need salt and honey. There's a Leaf... there's a way to make water stay inside someone. It's in the right measure. Salt and sweet, in the right measure. I need it now, Sister. Please."

He heard himself say the word Leaf, and his blood ran cold.

Sister Mira's eyes widened very slightly.

For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Teo could hear his own heartbeat, and the soft crackle of the lamp, and somewhere far away, the deacons chanting the evening hymn.

Then Sister Mira put down her bucket, pushed past him, opened the storeroom door with a key from her belt, and went in.

She came out a moment later with a small clay jar of honey, a twist of grey salt in a cloth, and her own brown cloak, which she was pulling over her white robes.

"Show me," she said.

They worked through the night.

Teo boiled water in Hesk's iron pot, over the little clay furnace he had built for the glass, and let it cool. Mira measured. She was good at measuring. Her mother, she said, had been obsessed with recipes. She used a spoon from Hesk's shelf and a small wooden box that Teo had cut to the width of his palm, and she made the first jug exactly as the Leaf said, and tasted it, and frowned.

"It should taste no saltier than tears," Hesk said from his chair. "That's what the Leaf says. I remember now. No saltier than tears."

Mira tasted it again, and nodded slowly.

Then she knelt beside the straw mattress in the room upstairs, lifted Nell's head, and began to give it to her. One spoon. Then another. Then another. Every minute, a spoon. When Nell vomited it back up, Mira waited a little and began again. When Nell wept and turned her face away, Mira talked to her, softly, patiently, about nothing at all... about her mother's kitchen, about the cat she had had as a girl, about the bells of the Crown... and kept spooning.

Teo boiled more water. He made more jugs. He emptied the bucket and brought it back. He counted the spoons, because he could not help it. Two hundred. Five hundred. A thousand.

Some time after the midnight bells, Nell stopped shivering — not all at once, but slowly, the way a storm stops.

Some time after that, her breath, which had been coming in fast, shallow gasps, began to slow.

And as the first grey light crept in through the broken roof of the chandlery, Teo pinched the skin on the back of her hand, the way he had seen the healers do... and it smoothed back down. Slowly. But it smoothed.

He sat back against the wall and found that he was shaking all over.

Sister Mira was still kneeling by the mattress, the spoon in her hand. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her hair had come loose from its pins and was hanging around her face. She looked down at the sleeping girl, and then at the Leaf, which was lying on the crate beside the jug, its drawing of a woman and a child turned toward the light.

"How many people," she said quietly, "have I watched die of thirst in the Mercy House, with this in the world?"

Teo did not answer.

Mira reached out and touched the edge of the Leaf with one finger. Very gently, as if it were something holy.

"I'm going to have to confess this," she said.

"...Please don't."

She looked at him for a long time. Then, for the first time since he had met her, Sister Mira laughed. It was a small, cracked, exhausted laugh, and it did not last long.

"No," she said. "No, I don't suppose I am."