Read Online The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon - Free Book Online Page B

gods, charms thrown into the sea, no baths, no wearing black or goatskins, no highly flavoured foods, and no putting one hand or foot on top of the other.
    “Bullshit,” my father said. “They want to avoid the only true cure. Not that I blame them, but I ask you.” He slapped one hand on top of the other to demonstrate the forbidden position. “Absolute bullshit. There’s a woman behind it, you wait and see.”
    “What is the cure?” I asked.
    “Mucus,” my father said. “In you and me, it flows naturally down from the brain and is dispersed throughout the body. In men like this, though, the normal passages are blocked and it enters the blood vessels, where it prevents the flow of air to the brain. And it is cold, you see, and the sudden cooling of the blood vessels brings on the attack. If there is too much mucus, the blood will congeal and he will die. Or if it enters one vessel but not another, one part of the body may be permanently damaged. The patient will suffer worse in the winter, when there is cold outside as well as in. The winds, too, must be taken into account. The north wind is the healthiest because it separates out the moisture from the air. The south wind is the worst. It dims the moon and the stars, and darkens wine, and brings damp. No wind today, so that is not a factor.”
    I knew he was rehearsing what he had read the night before, reminding himself as much as teaching me. The sacred disease, it was called, though my father agreed with the author of the treatise that the gods were no more responsible for this than for a runny nose. Bad healers claimed so only to excuse their own incompetence, or inability to effect a cure. It was, my father acknowledged, one of the most difficult diseases to treat.
    “What is the cure?” I asked again.
    “The mucus must be released.”
    At the house we were met by the man’s brother. “Will he suffer?”
    “He is already suffering,” my father said.
    In the man’s bedroom he laid out his instruments. These were three stone tools I had never seen before, not part of his regular kit.
    “I know,” he said, reading my thoughts. “But they’re too heavy to carry around every day, and you never do this without preparing for it first.”
    “You will release the demon,” the man said from his bed, with relish. He looked like his brother, a big barrel of a man with a shaved head and a genial face that was probably good, in happier times, for amusing children. They shared a sympathetic, humorous look, more pronounced in the sick man, who also slurred his words slightly. Damage from the seizures, I guessed, but my father knew better.
    “I hope there will be a release.” For all his impatience and sternness, my father was careful never to contradict a patient or do anything to disturb him unduly. “Will you excuse me?”
    In the hall, I heard him ask the brother if the patient had been drinking.
    “Not at all!” the big man said.
    “I smell it on his breath,” my father said. “I gave you specific instructions.”
    “For the pain.” I could tell the man was crying.
    My father told him to wait downstairs.
    Back in the room, he pulled from the large bag that he had carried himself something that looked like a vise.
    “Oh dear,” the sick man said.
    With the help of a slave, my father positioned the sick man’s head in the grip and tightened it very slowly. “Shake your head,” he kept telling the man, and when he could no longer do so, my father was satisfied.
    “It’s tight,” the man said.
    My father placed a leather bit in the man’s mouth and told him to keep it there. He took the knife I held out to him and made a quick X on the man’s shaven scalp. The man screamed. My father took one of the stone tools, a bore, and placed its tip in the centre of the X, where he had peeled back the flaps of skin.
    “No, no, no!” the man screamed.
    My father pointed to the floor, and I retrieved the bit and put it back in the man’s mouth. He