Chapter 6: One Small Sun
The stench of sickness hit Apollo even before the door shut behind him, a cloying, animal rot, sweetened by the herb bundles that drooped from the rafters like desiccated bats. For an instant, the god recoiled.
’This is what it comes to?’ He, who had banished pestilence with a gesture, now forced to blink away tears stung not by empathy but by ammonia and decay.
The girl, Liska, let the blanket puddle at her ankles and tiptoed forward. "Mama, I brought someone," she said, her voice a brittle reed.
A woman lay on the cot, mid-thirties, perhaps, though the years had been salted with famine and fear.
Her face was a shrunken moon, cheeks collapsed, pale as cheese rind but for the wild fever roses stippling her brow. Every shallow breath snapped and popped, the sound of a green log burning.
Apollo hovered in the dusk between the doorway and the cot, uncertainty burning in his throat. It was not for him to trespass in these chambers of mortal grief.
But Liska’s eyes, hungry for miracle, he knew that hunger, for it had made him, unmade him, and now called him to kneel at every bed of suffering in the world.
He crouched beside the woman, noting the bruised shadow under each fingernail, the webbed capillaries snaking up her neck.
"May I?" he said, reaching with a hand that only trembled a little. Liska nodded, lips pressed tight as a sutured wound. The sick woman’s eyelids fluttered, but she did not wake.
Her name, Apollo learned from the girl, was Hessa. The name carried the hard "h" of the old river tribes and, for some reason, made him think of frost.
He pressed two fingers to the pulse-point at her wrist, it was rapid, thready, the rhythm of drowning.