Another Man’s Cure

Joanna Michal Hoyt

 

 

Excerpts from the traveling journal of Dr. Marcus Leeds, editor and writer of The Journal of Cryptoethnogastronomy:

 

May 11

I am through with tergiversation, and also with the attempt to explain myself to Lady Bollinger my backers. I depart tomorrow for the Denoresh Plateau, without my dear Gaspar. Dr. Ludwig’s suggestions are far too interesting to pass over. I suppose I ought to summarize those here, as her colleagues in the Department of Cryptoethnology appear inclined to regard her last letters as a sort of practical joke. Since I cannot remember that she ever demonstrated a humanizing levity, I find this improbable; since she was not married, wanted or indebted, I can see no other reason for her to disappear in this way and imply her own death. But this is beside the point.

Dr. Ludwig's first visit to the Denoresh demonstrated, as any reasonable person might have expected, that the feared Witchfolk of the High Places were in no way supernatural and, as very few reasonable people had guessed, that the Witchfolk were not primitives either, but a quite advanced group happy to seclude themselves on a high plateau with excellent satellite-phone reception and avoid their subsistence-farming neighbors except on those occasions when they themselves required food on which to subsist.

Establishing trade would have been time-consuming and ethically complex; they found it more efficient simply to abstract foodstuffs at night, with sufficient special effects to prevent them being followed. She also reported that the Witchfolk, so-called, had their own set of possibly mythological bogeymen, to whom they simply referred as Those People Over the Pass.

They strongly urged her not to cross the pass, and they showed an unusually primitive reluctance to explain the danger on the other side. Her relentless questioning (a skill she had honed with great effect on her colleagues here) elicited only the information that the people and the land were both somehow accursed, and that if she absolutely insisted on going there it was imperative she carry all her own food and eat nothing beyond the Pass (possibly, she thought, an echo of the ancient warning against eating in the Land of the Dead), and also that she plug her ears before sunset every night and leave the plugs in until after dawn.

Their fear of Those People Beyond the Pass appeared to be connected to their only two demonstrably irrational customs: an absolute refusal to eat fruit of any kind or imbibe any fermented liquor, and a morbid fear of cats.

I confess I find the latter attribute repugnant. So, apparently, does Gaspar, who sat on my desk staring at the report and made no attempt to chew or it lie down upon it. Leaving Gaspar behind will be the worst part of this venture, but I dare not risk his life in High Denor, and doubtless Lady Bollinger will respect his dignity no less than that of her own feline companions. I am willing to sacrifice the pleasure of his company for a time in the interests of cryptoethnogastronomy. He, noble animal, will hardly suffer from the loss of my company.

I find that I have still not clearly explained my reasons for believing that Those People Over the Pass are legitimately part of my field of study. Besides the general statements given above, Dr. Ludwig recorded a few peculiar phrases used relative to Those People and not subsequently explained, despite all her inquiries. These included: “the two-poison balance,” “the sweet-death tree”, and “the living-death diet.” Granting the likelihood of morbid or romantic exaggeration, it seems likely there is something there for a cryptoethnogastronomist to investigate. I said as much to Gaspar, who fixed me with his green-gold eyes and waved his tail thrice as though in measured assent.

 

May 24

The people of High Denor are indeed as civilized, charming, and unhelpful as Dr. Ludwig reported them to be. They remembered Dr. Ludwig’s visit and her departure through the Pass. They expressed no surprise whatsoever at her failure to return, and exhibited no sense that they ought to have sent searchers after her. They did not recommend that I follow her, but they showed no inclination to hinder me. They hosted me, fed me (on a peculiar mix of drone-delivered processed foods and commandeered grains, vegetables, and meats from their more primitive lowland neighbors; (there’d be a mildly interesting study there, perhaps, if I fail to find anything significant and reportable beyond the Pass), and taught me something of their language (which they say is similar to that spoken beyond the Pass), in exchange for a large payment in bitcoin. Indeed nothing I said or did during my sojourn among them appeared to disquiet or even interest them in the slightest, until this morning.

I was making polite conversation more than anything else when I asked my hostess what creature had called outside my window during the previous night. First, half asleep, I thought I heard Gaspar crying in evident misery. Then, coming fully awake, I remembered, first that Gaspar was thousands of miles away, and second that I had never heard him make such a horrible sound.

Then, I heard the cry again. It was something like the sound a more ignoble cat might make if its tail were caught in a door, and something like some of the more disturbing noises produced by ravens, and something like something else that I could not place, yet felt that I had somehow known before, and could, if I were very unfortunate, know again. I did not, of course, mention the third component to my hostess. Nevertheless, she looked narrowly at me, said they had no place in Denor for such foul creatures, and strongly encouraged me to leave Denor before another nightfall.

In compliance with her wishes, I am departing this afternoon. She has offered to sell me quantities of freeze-dried food to take with me; when I mentioned having already packed dried fruit she shook her head and left the room.

 

May 26

My second day in Kopsti. I am very lucky, I suppose, that it is not my second day in another world, possibly better or possible not. Physically, I am still feeling the terrible effects of yesterday’s indiscretion, though I am now well enough to sit propped up and write, but mentally I am in high glee. The food system I have discovered here is unique, possessed of sensational aspects which should draw popular attention, and capable of being fully comprehended under no other discipline but that of cryptoethnogastronomy. My Journal and my legacy are secure.

That is to say, they will be secure if I manage to avoid whatever mistake or misfortune may have led to Dr. Ludwig’s demise. For it appears that she is actually dead; the young man Lekhi who was brought to serve as my interpreter worked with her, remembers her well, and maintains that she is buried here. He will take me to her grave when enough of the kopiat juice has been purged from my system so that I can walk.

 

I made the acquaintance of the kopiat yesterday. After hiking through the Pass itself, I found myself on a rather overgrown trail descending a steep slope in switchbacks. The top of the Pass was bare stone. The going was slow and the sun intense. I was drinking water sparingly. At first, when that smell of peculiarly intoxicating sweetness rolled up to meet me, I feared it was a hallucination brought on by heatstroke. When I passed under the tree line, the coolness was immediately refreshing, but the scent increased tenfold. When I saw the fruit...I can remember my sensations, but I am at a loss to describe them. Suffice to say, I entirely forgot both my professional discipline and the warnings of the Denoresh. I fell to eating at once.

The fruit was considerably larger than any peach I have ever seen. Its smooth plumlike skin was crimson with a silver bloom. The flesh was green-gold, a shade that reminded me of Gaspar’s eyes, and softer and more melting than anything else I have ever tasted, and the flavor beggared description.

But there was more to it than that. It seemed when I ate that fruit that the light which fell around me was richer and lovelier than anything I had ever seen, that the sound of the wind in the leaves was the most subtle and pleasing of musics, that the air itself was intoxicating. I don’t remember deciding to pluck another fruit after finishing the first, but Lekhi informs me that the silver pits of four fruits were scattered at my feet, and I would have eaten more if the violent pain in my stomach and the constriction in my throat which prevented the expulsion of my stomach's contents had not caused me to lose consciousness.

When I came to myself again, I was lying on my side on a soft pallet. A basin full of foul-smelling liquid was beside the pallet, and another and fouler liquid was being spooned into my mouth by a furious-looking woman who held my head very gently while obviously berating me in a language I did not understand. A few words sounded similar to Denoresh, but I could make no sense of them. I attempted to answer in halting Denoresh, which seemed to annoy her further. Then, in desperation, I attempted English. Something complicated passed across her face. She turned away from me and shouted “Lekhi!” This, of course, conveyed nothing to me until Lekhi came.

Lekhi explained, in formal and constricted English, what had become patently obvious—the raw fruit of the kopiat is highly poisonous.

“Only raw?” I asked.

“Cooked is a slower and a more weak poison,” he said, “and made to ferment it makes not death, but foolishness only. Great foolishness.”

“Why do you bother to cook it or ferment it, then?” I asked after another spasm of nausea had passed.

“To eat and drink,” he answered as though I had asked why he breathed.

“But if it is poison…”

He indicated the flask from which the irritable woman—Lenna—was pouring more vile fluid. “Antivenin,” he said.

“You eat it and then…”

“We eat mixed, and no sickness,” he said.

“Wonderfully healthy stuff, this antivenin,” I said, looking unhappily at the spoonful being advanced toward my mouth. “So does everything good for you taste foul here? Is it only…” My mouth was then occupied disagreeably for some time, but apparently Lekhi had understood my question.

“Antivenin is poison, also,” he said. “Taken never except with kopiat.”

 

§

 

That evening, finding me weak but poison-free, he explained more to me. Apparently, they subsist largely on the products of the kopiat tree. The fruit is highly nutritious when its toxins are neutralized; the leaves are also nourishing, fibrous, and filling, and also toxic; the wood provides the material for most of their homes. And a large amount of kopiat leaf or fruit can be rendered harmless by a relatively small dose of the antitoxin.

“What plant does that come from?” I asked.

“No plant,” he said. “From stiss.”

In response to my further inquiries he left the room, returning with a notebook whose opening pages contained observations recorded in Dr. Ludwig’s strong spiky handwriting. He riffled through these to a page mostly filled by an illustration—clearly not Dr. Ludwig’s; the woman couldn’t draw an envelope so it was recognizable.

My first thought was that the subject of the illustration was a cat, and I felt an acute nostalgia for Gaspar’s company. A closer look revealed this thought had greatly maligned cats. The illustration’s subject—the stiss, as Dr. Ludwig’s caption declared it to be—was generally feline in conformation, but its matted fur was blue, its eyes a venomous magenta, and its forelegs appeared to bend in the wrong direction, giving a rather horrible suggestion of human arms. Its mouth was open to show a fine array of exceedingly sharp teeth. Dr. Ludwig’s notes explained that stiss venom—or antivenin—was milked out while the stiss was asleep.

“Wouldn’t it be safer if you killed it first?” I asked, and then froze, fancying that Gaspar heard me from a thousand miles away and gazed at me with profound disdain. But indeed I could not imagine this abhorrent animal was truly related to Gaspar in any way.

Lekhi’s horror, however, was obvious and actual. “Never!” he said, his eyes widening in shock and then narrowing in what I took to be ferocious disapproval. “Never to be killed, kopiat or stiss. We do not make to die what we live by.”

“But isn’t it dangerous? And is it hard to catch them sleeping?”

“Dangerous, yes,” he said. Then he proceded to explain the bite of the stiss was immediately painful and paralyzing, and thereafter fatal if it was not counteracted both with purgatives and with copious quantities of kopiat. However, the harvest could usually be accomplished without danger of bites. Sometimes the animals were sedated with blow-darts, though their intelligence and dexterity made this difficult. “And when fed to full, they will sleep of themselves and not wake for long and long,” he added.

“What do they feed on, mostly?” I asked.

“The blood of fools,” he said quite gravely. “You must stay inside at night.”

That night—last night—I heard again the terrible sound which I had heard on my last night in High Denor. This morning I asked Lekhi about it. “The stiss,” he said, nodding.

“That’s their hunting-cry?” I said. “Do… How big are they? Do they hunt in packs?”

“So large,” he said, indicating an animal about as long as my arm. “And no packing. Every stiss is always alone, except in mating time and for a small time when the young are born. And they do not hunt. They sing and they wait.”

“Wait?”

“For fools to go to them.”

I expressed my opinion that something beyond folly would induce anyone to approach the source of such a revolting noise.

He looked unhappy. “Stay always inside at night,” he repeated. Then, he put my breakfast in front of me—a bowl of cooked kopiat, which he assured me had been treated with a drop of stiss-venom. The smell and taste were pleasant enough, but not nearly so lovely as that first taste of raw kopiat had been. That was an hour ago, and I have experienced no ill effects. I am going out now for a better look at the kopiat tree in its native habitat. I will, at Lekhi’s insistence, wear a mask which dulls the scent of it so as not to succumb to the temptation of eating the raw fruit again. Lekhi appears to treat me as a dull-witted child. This is fatiguing, but I must remember he first met me under singularly unpropitious circumstances. Doubtless time will improve his opinion of me.

 

[The next several entries, apart from the very brief excerpts below, are highly technical in nature.]

 

May 28

Today, I saw Dr. Ludwig’s grave. She is buried, according to Lekhi, at the foot of a particularly splendid kopiat tree. This does not appear to be the common burial ground. I did not inquire into the reasons for grave placement; burial customs were part of Dr. Ludwig’s field of study, not mine. I did inquire into the reason for her death.

“She was a fool,” Lekhi said. “She did not listen to us. She went to the stiss. We could not save her.”

She is, indeed, more of a fool than I would have believed; I never suspected her of having a penchant for the loathsome.

 

June 1

Every night I wake to the horrible singing of the stiss. Lekhi urges me to sleep with my windows closed, but this would also exclude the delicious fragrance of the kopiat trees, and besides the air is sweltering.

Lekhi continues to treat me like a child. So, I suspect, do the other village folk…

 

June 3

Tonight, there is to be some a festival for the full moon. My host family is involved in some sort of final adjustments to their jugs of kopiat liquor, which I have not yet tasted. I had some difficulty in inducing Lekhi to translate for me as I asked what they were doing; he told me rather rudely to avoid the liquor altogether, and did not seem to understand that my questions were put in the spirit of scientific inquiry. He also urged me not to take part in tonight’s festival, but to stay in my room and work on my notes with the windows closed.

He is young enough to be my son, and I do not intend to continue to reward his impertinence. I will not, of course, argue with him. I will merely attend the festival as an alert observer, abstract a sample of the finished kopiat liquor for analysis, and also sample some myself, the better to understand its subjective effects.

 

June 10

I have been a fool. I am still, I suppose, scientist enough to record what has happened to me for the benefit of future travelers, if any. I think there is some reason why I ought to care about that. At present, I find it extremely difficult to remember why I should care about anything. Lekhi says this effect is likely to last for a long time, and may be permanent. I tried to receive this news politely. I owe him my life, though I am not at all sure I am glad of this.

I went to the festival. I believe I found the music very pleasing even before I had begun to sample the liquor, although once I had begun to sample, I was hardly capable of being displeased. I remember thinking the moon hung in the sky like a kopiat fruit just out of reach, drenching us all with light as sweet as kopiat scent. At first, I found this very pleasing, too. The one thing I looked on with disfavor, was the small vial of stiss venom with which the drinkers were doctoring their cups.

My neighbor—not Lekhi, who was in another group of celebrants; I had told him I would shut myself into my room and he was free—had shown me by emphatic gestures that I must put three drops into every cup. I followed his instructions for the first three cups. Then, it occurred to me Lekhi had said the fermented kopiat did not cause illness. He had said that it caused foolishness, which I took to be a polite euphemism for plain drunkenness, but I had always had a good head for liquor. I poured a cup for myself, left the stiss venom out of it, and took a cautious sip. My neighbor by then was singing quietly and swaying and not paying much heed to my behavior.

The euphoria I had experienced upon eating the first raw kopiat fruit came over me again. I did remind myself to check for discomfort in my stomach and throat, but I experienced none. I drained the rest of the cup and poured another.

Much of the rest of that night is still hazy in my mind. I do not believe I sang or danced as the others did, merely sat and sipped while the night and the music and the moon leaped and swayed gracefully around me. For a time, the sweetness was overpowering and wonderful. Then, it was merely overpowering. Then, it was overpowering and nauseating, but I could not tear myself away from it.

I abhorred the smell and taste of the kopiat drink, but I could not stop drinking. I felt myself suffocating in a horrible sweetness, powerless against it; I saw myself as a loathsome maggot in the midst of a sweet and rotting fruit, and all I could do was burrow further in.

Then, away out in the night, under the moon, which was falling westward, I heard the stiss singing. I heard it, for the first time, truly as a song, the lament of a creature even more loathsome and more lonely than myself. I rose from the table—I was alone there, the others were dancing—and lurched into the night toward that cry. I had, so far as I can recall, no fixed intention in so doing; merely, it appeared to be the only thing outside the putrefying sweetness of the world.

I remember the rank smell of the stiss was almost strong enough to mask the kopiat scent of my breath. I remember I saw the moon reflected in its magenta eyes, purged of all sweetness. I remember I reached out to it, and I think I called it Gaspar. I remember it settling onto my shoulder, setting its face against my neck. I remember the pain was strong enough to overwhelm the nausea.

Then, I was lying in bed and vomiting again. Lekhi was tending me this time, looking as angry as Lenna had before, and scolding me as angrily. Once he saw my eyes open, he spoke to me in my own language.

“I told you,” he said, scowling and shoving another spoonful of raw kopiat juice down my throat. I was not strong enough to resist him, much as I loathed the flavor. “I told you! Do none of you scientists listen?”

I couldn’t answer, as he had clamped his hand over my mouth to ensure the kopiat juice went down instead of coming back up.

“How did you find me?” I asked when he had removed his hand.

“I heard the stiss to purr,” he said. “It is worse even than when they sing. Worse for hearing, and worse for wondering if it is a person they have bitten, for only when they are full they purr. Most times it is a person. Most animals are not fools.”

“Did you get rid of it?”

“We harvested the venom. Better not to have anyone bitten, but if people will be fools we take what we can from it.”

“We?”

“The harvesters took from the stiss. I carried you home and made you to vomit.”

“And you didn’t get to Dr. Ludwig in time?”

“I did.”

“But she died.”

“After. She went to the stiss again. She chose. One stiss bite, is bad, the—” He seemed to search for an English word and fail to find it. “—the stissness stays in your blood. But two stiss bites—“ He shook his head. “From two, always dead.”

I heard the stiss again that night. I remembered what Lekhi had said. Precisely because of that I would have gone back to the stiss if I could have dragged myself out of bed. The kopiat poison acts swiftly and passes off as quickly when the antidote is given; the stiss venom seems to be tougher, longer-lasting stuff.

I fell asleep again, to dream that Gaspar looked down at me and purred while his eyes turned magenta.

 

June 10, evening

This morning it occurred to me death might be preferable to more such nights and days; that it would, at any rate, be easier than dragging myself along for no reason. I supposed Dr. Ludwig must have thought so, too, and that reminded me of the need to send back some explanation. If I vanished without a trace, I feared Lady Bollinger might send someone to look for me, and it seems that foreigners in Kopsti are fatally prone to foolishness. As I thought of that, I also realized I had no desire ever to see Lady Bollinger or even Gaspar again with my stiss-warped vision.

Under the influence of these thoughts, I completed the record above. I was writing a note informing my Denoresh hostess that she would be well remunerated for forwarding the attached parcel to Lady Bollinger’s address when Lekhi came in. He read the note over my shoulder.

“You will to go back to the stiss,” he said. I thought the misery on his face was not altogether due to my warped perceptions.

“No, no,” I told him.

“The doctor Ludwig wrote like that before she went the second time,” he said.

“And you didn’t deliver her letter and notebook?”

“I told her I would not. I told her she needed to wait a moon-turn here, eat kopiat, get as well as she may be gotten, and then, take her message home by herself. I thought that would keep her alive.” He looked away.

“So you suppressed her message and lured me out here…” I began disgustedly.

He sat down abruptly on the floor and put his head in his hands.

“I thought I did right. Now, I know not. Maybe it was the stissness only.”

“How did Dr. Ludwig’s stissness…?”

“Not stissness of her. Of me. I was bitten. I thought, also, I was healed. But maybe you are right, and I am stiss now.” He was starting to shake.

“No, you aren’t,” I told him before I had a chance to think about it. “It isn’t your fault I didn’t listen to anything you told me. But how did you let yourself get bitten?”

A little bit of life crept back into his face. “Tomorrow, I will tell you,” he said.

Naturally I do not intend to go back to the stiss without hearing and recording his story. And I suppose the boy will have another story to get me through the next night. Let him be a Scheherazade; at any rate don’t let him think himself a stiss for my sake. I’ve made a bloody botch of things, but I won’t do that to him.