Page 7 of Hemlock & Silver
It turned out that the sort of adults who were willing to listen to children prattle on about puppies and kitties and ponies and parties got a bit twitchy when a small girl began lecturing on toxicology. My father began sending me out of the house when new business associates came to visit.
Despite this, I still had not found the cure for hemlock poisoning.
“This is infuriating,” I said. (Much likeignorance, infuriatingwas one of my deportment teacher’s favorite words.) “It’s been three months, and we still don’t know what the opposite of hemlock is. In fact, I think I’m even more confused than when we started!”
“It happens that way sometimes,” Scand said mildly, sliding a bookmark into the volume before him. “Learning just makes you aware of how much there is to learn.”
I groaned and flung my legs over the arm of the chair, sliding down until my head rested on the opposite arm. I stared up at the ceiling with its peeled-log supports, as if the answers to my questions were written in the lightly polished wood. “Hemlock isgreen,” I said, “and the opposite of green is red. And the root is poisonous, and the opposite of roots is probably flowers? Except that the root is sort of whitish, so the opposite might be black, and the whole thing is a vegetable, so the opposite is an animal, unless it’s a mineral. It has the cold, watery aspect of the phlegmatic humor and thus is associated with Saint Trout. So I’m looking for a red or black flower… or mineral or animal… with a hot, dry aspect, of the choleric humor, which would be associated with Saint Lizard or Saint Adder. But that means it could be anything from torch flower to charcoal to… I don’t know, a reptile of some sort. There are red-and-black lizards, aren’t there?”
“There are,” Scand agreed.
“An infusion of torch flower is good for sore eyes,” I said, “but once you’ve eaten hemlock, I don’t think you’re worried about your eyes. Charcoal is good for some poisons, but not this one.” I stared broodingly at the ceiling. “I don’t know about the lizard.”
“As I recall, the passage you found also said ‘mirror image,’ did it not?”
“I thought of that, too,” I said. “But if I hold up a mirror to a hemlock root, it doesn’t matter if the reflection would be an antidote, because I don’t have any way of getting it out of the mirror.” Scand was silent for so long that I sat up. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I thought once… but that was a long time ago.” He hastily moved to distract me, which wasn’t terribly hard. “Perhaps we’re going about this the wrong way. Maybe an antidoteisn’tan opposite.”
“But the book said it was.”
“Who wrote the book?”
“It was translated from Harkelion the Physician.”
Scand leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “What if he was wrong?”
I stared at him in alarm. “What? But he’s—he was one of the classical scholars! You know? He wrote half the books on medicine!”
“That doesn’t mean he wasright,” Scand said.
“But physicians still use his books!” I tapped the cover of a book next to me. “They quote him all the time.” Practically every book I’d read had at least an epigraph attributed to Harkelion, and most of them had much more.
“I’m sure they do,” said Scand. “But that doesn’t mean he was right. It just means that everyone has learned to repeat his errors.”
I felt as if he had kicked one of the legs out from under my chair and set everything wobbling. “But he lived in ancient times! They were more enlightened—they knew things that we forgot—”
“In some ways, yes,” he said. “But just because someone lived a thousand years ago doesn’t make them correct.”
I put my head in my hands. “But everybody says they were sowise.”
“Some of them were,” Scand said gently. “And there’s a reason we go back to so many of their manuscripts. But they were still just people, like you and me. If someone found your notes in a thousand years, would that make you right?”
I glared at him through my spread fingers. “But you’re the one who taught us the classics! You made me read that entire essay on geometry!”
Scand laughed, which did nothing to mollify me. “And if you had any interest in geometry, it would have been a very useful foundation, too. But it doesn’t mean that all the classical scholars were right about everything they wrote. Some of them were very egregiously wrong, in fact. I think it was Marthian who advised cutting open a pigeon and placing it on the forehead of someone who was feverish in order to draw out the sickness.”
“Eww.” I thought of my last fever and how sweaty and miserable I’d felt, then tried to imagine how much worse everything would have been if there was a vivisected pigeon on my forehead.
“Exactly. We discard the writings that don’t work for us and keep the ones that do.” Scand shook his head ruefully. “One of myteachers had this exact conversation with me when I was studying. But I was nineteen at the time, so you’re doing better than I am.”
This was not much consolation. “But if Harkelion was wrong, then we’re back where we started,” I said, waving to the books that I had gone through with such care and the piles of notes in my crabbed handwriting. I had gotten painful hand cramps writing all those notes, and I’d cut myself twice sharpening quills. “And all this will have beenwasted.”
“Not at all. You’ve learned a great deal. You know the precise effects of hemlock on the body. You know a dozen common antidotes and why none of them work on hemlock, but why they may work on other poisons. And you’ve read theMateria Botanicatwice. You probably know more about poisoning than most physicians. You don’t have to redo any of that.” One corner of his mouth twisted up in a smile. “That’s the thing about learning. You get to keep it.”
“I would rather have the answer,” I muttered.
“Maybe you’ll find the answer to a different question. If you never find the antidote for hemlock, but you do find one for… oh… colchicum, say… would you still consider your time wasted?”
