The Children of Jocasta

The man looked across the room at his son, who lay shivering on the hard couch. He took a step towards the boy, thinking he would wrap a blanket more closely around him to coax the shivers away. But then he stopped, unable to persuade his limbs to repeat the actions they had carried out the day before and the day before that. He had kept his wife warm when the shakes ran through her; her body like an axe-blade, juddering in the trunk of a thick, black pine tree. And then he had kept his daughter warm until she too succumbed to the disease. What was it the washerwoman had called it? The Reckoning.

He felt his cracked lips stretch into a mirthless smile. What kind of a reckoning did the citizens of Thebes believe this to be? Punishment from the gods for a real or imagined slight? The temples rang out with the sound of prayers and offerings to every god, by every name. Most often they called on Apollo. Mindful of offending him, they addressed him by one name after another: Cynthios, Delphinios, Pythios, the son of Leto. Everyone knew that his arrows carried the plague on their immortal tips and that his aim was always true. But what possible grudge could the Archer have held against this man’s daughter, scarcely more than an infant? Or his wife, who had made her sacrifices devoutly with each new season? The god could not have resented her, but she had died all the same. Two days ago, he had carried her body into the streets himself, struggling with the weight not because his sickness-ravaged wife was heavy – she was sinew and bones, the skin hanging loosely from her arms – but because the plague had left him barely able to lift his own battered bones.

Carrying his daughter out the following day had been easier.

He looked over at Sophon again, and saw the convulsions ripple through his ten-year-old body. He felt a wetness beneath his eye and thought for a moment that he was weeping. But when he took his hand away from his face, he saw the raw crimson of fresh blood on his fingertips. The blisters were bursting, then. He had heard that men were losing their sight. Only a few heartbeats after he had silently cursed Apollo, he murmured a quiet prayer. Let me not go blind. A blind man was of no use to his young son. If the boy survived, he would not be able to take care of a blind beggar man. His prayers grew smaller: let me keep one eye, at least. One eye intact. And – they increased again without him noticing – let the boy live.

But should he really leave him to shake so? He had felt his own teeth drumming against one another when the shivering had consumed him a day ago. He worried he would bite through his own tongue. He paused, realizing that was not quite true; he had given no thought to his tongue when the fever rattled through him. Only afterwards, when the heat had broken and he lay spent on the ground, did he wonder how he had not injured himself. When the shakes came upon his wife, he had wrapped her up, and she had wrapped up their daughter. But neither had survived. He had placed all the blankets around them, so there was nothing left by the time he fell foul of the same cruel dance. Yet he was – so far – still alive. And so perhaps this was something he had learned about the Reckoning: it thrived in the heat. It might be driven out if it was denied warmth.

The boy moaned so softly that he wondered if he was hearing things. But he did not approach him, and he did not make him warm.

The Archer would take who he chose. But still, the man hoped – a tiny broken thing like a bird – that he would seek his prey elsewhere.