Four Thieves’ Vinegar

Most victims died within the first days. She was one of the lucky ones. Or unlucky if you consider she had to watch as each member of her family was plucked from her like in a cruel game of ‘she loves me not’. The people were petals, and the Bubonic Plague fancied picking every last one of them. Except her.

Maria outlived everyone. Il medico e aromatorio alike. Many lasted, at least initially, but quickly succumbed to the sickness. The curvature of the boils burned into the skin, the fevers that promised beads of sweat poured from every pore. Those with the fortune to live were tasked with the burden of carrying the memories. The oddly sweet scent of putrefaction, and the swift replacement of cadaverine in less than a candle’s wick.

The beginning was perhaps the worst. First, the boats docked and returned with sailors souls bereft of their bodies. Soon, the disease left the harbour. Bodies piled onto carts hobbling down the cobblestone, and uncertainty hung in the air.

The world seemed at once to split in two: those who lived their last days in fear, and those who lived fearlessly. The irony of course, remained with the latter. Their atmosphere was positively Dionysian. Drunken debauchery was their raison d’être. Wine overflowed their cups, and lovers were cupped with many hands.

What was normally mere hedonism, however, was tantamount to Thanatos. The simple act of meeting one’s lips to the same chalice as another’s was a kiss of death. The pursuit of pleasure was a short-lived one for those who counted their last days in mugs of mead.

Some said The Plague was a punishment, a scourge of leather lashing into the backs of humanity. The only way through was to pay the penance. But the price was unknown. Those who could afford left the cities to inhabit the quieter villages, in hopes that the pestilence did not follow in their footsteps. To their dismay, absolution from the ailment was not found in the hamlets, and it could not be bought with their bounty of gold. The mortar and pestle’s grind paid no mind to the number of emeralds in the wine. The drink of death awaited every man, pauper or prince.

This was fortunate for Maria, as her purse was light. Before the streets were left desolate, she would occasionally secure a few coins as a bread merchant. But lately, the flour supply had dwindled. For this, her hands were thankful. Her arthritis-ridden body begged for less loaves to be kneaded, but the need remained for ample sustenance.

The days when the disease swept its way through the streets found Maria inside nursing her joints. In the rare moments when the weather was kind enough not to wreak havoc on her bones, she would venture into her modest garden and harvest the season’s blooms. Winter would bring her plum violas, and the spring would bring forth her favourite: marigolds. Their floral scent, however, sharp, was a welcome departure from the stench of Death outside her door. The end of the season, she found, yielded the most fragrant, with vibrant shades of ochre.

Maria would gather them in a bundle and delicately tie them with a blade of grass before placing them into an empty glass jar. She liked to watch the blossoms shrink and the colour slowly fade. She took great satisfaction in counting each petal as it fell onto the table, more to add each day, until the stems laid bare.

The collection of dried flowers gathered in a mound on the knotted wood, and a few rogue essences travelled to the earthen floor below. As she bent her knees to pick them up, she found herself face to foot with eight matching, tattered shoes. Intruders.

“Aiuto!” the shortest of the four men cried. His bellows for help were barely needed, as the desperation emanating from the four men outmatched the malodor of the streets and homes they housed.

Between gasps for breath, the shortest of the men explained their troubles. What he lacked in height, he made up for in timbre. His resonant voice could be felt in the walls’ vibrations. They had been running for weeks, he explained. Vagrants living off the land of the dead, until the locals discovered their secret.

The men possessed the power of eternal life, or at the very least, that which was surely a sentence worse than death. They had been fortunate enough to never have need to test the limits of their discovery. Most who had found them could barely carry a cup, let alone a fatal weapon. Armor against the disease was sufficient, and this was their humble need. Satisfying it required vigilance.

As Maria had meticulously gathered her yield each season, so too did the thieves gather theirs. The dead’s barren homes were their crops. Where demise made friends with mere mortals, bounty had befriended the land. The quiet of winter laid bare the soil for fresh harvest. Over the seasons, they gathered a collection of herbs that would rival an apothecarist. Meadowsweet and marjoram, cloves and campanula, rosemary, wormwood and wine vinegar.

This concoction of blossoms and herbs was their elixir. When mixed in the right proportions and gently rubbed into the temples, the potion would perform miracles, banishing the plague from its host. The recipe and its ingredients were Maria’s, should she assist the thieves in their escape.

She eyed the plucked chicken from the sill of the window, distraught at the woeful lack of foliage remaining on its body. The supply of viable animals was dwindling, and the feathers would only fend off her impending fate for so long. Maria walked over to the table where the dried petals lay and retrieved a small dagger from its sheath, revealing its curved, deceptively sharp edge. It was rusted and worn, but would suffice for the task of cutting the four men’s hair and securing their disguises.

Maria made quick work of the men’s new appearance. Their bedraggled manes lay littered on the floor, belonging to no one but the Fates. With a cursory “grazie”, the thieves found their way to the door, leaving the herbs in their wake until Maria was once again alone with her flowers. As quickly as the men had appeared, they had vanished without a sound. She began to wonder if the humors had seized her senses, and she had imagined the whole encounter. With a wave of her snarled wrist, she dismissed the thought as folly.

Picking up the last of the petals from the floor, she added them to the rest of the pile and assembled the new arrivals. The collection lay in a rough mound on the table, twigs of rosemary sticking out errantly amidst the soft mass of flowers. There was no time to spare in preparing the concoction, as the herbs would need at least a fortnight to soak in the wine before extracting their magic. The wealthy may have had their wine and jewels, ground to a fine powder for a panacea, but Maria possessed the true wisdom found within the Earth’s treasures.

She crudely measured the grey-leaved horehound roughly in her hand, attempting to match the instruction of the four men, and added it to the glass of wine vinegar.

The four thieves stood beside the door, ears placed closely to the wood as if listening for the portal to speak. Maria’s motions could be heard quietly within the confines of her modest home. In a moment of silence, the men’s eyes met in unison, realizing their mistake. Their eyes widened in recognition, pupils speaking the words which they all knew they failed to convey to the kind stranger who had provided their new identities.

She may have had the ingredients, but she lacked the method with which to bring the potion to its full potency. Without it, she may as well have been left for dead.

Four thieves the men may have been, but liars they were not. With a turn of their ankles, they angled their feet towards the doorway to give Maria the remaining mysteries behind the elixir, only to find her quick at work.

The petals lay on the wood, lonely for a purpose. Maria gathered them in her hand and dropped them in, one by one. She watched as they slowly drifted down in a back and forth motion before making small puddles in the vinegar. Their entry sent swirls of rosemary and meadowsweet to the top.

Each new petal perfumed the air with notes of pungent citrus. She scooped up the wormwood, an assortment of powder and stems. The mixture smelled faintly of pickles, but was quickly replaced with an offensive bitterness when it met the melange below. If the first few twinges of the nostrils were any indication, the Four Thieves’ Vinegar would be a fine deterrent.

Maria deftly added the remaining herbs to the glass and reverently stirred the contents as if the vessel were her Grail. Whether it held the promise of eternal life remained to be seen. For now, she would wait.

* * *

The year is 2020. February. Bodies bustle in the big city, rushing to get to work, to school, to meet mates for coffee dates. Until the world stops. Thankfully for Maria, she is blissfully unaware, far away from the hustle in the hamlets of Northern Spain. Her head rests a pillow in a remote village, grateful for the lumps of cotton that are sparing her skull from the bare stone below. The beauty of the cathedral is undeniable, but it provides less than stellar sleeping quarters, making for a restless night. Between tosses and turns, Maria drifts into a world all her own. Or so she believes.

Maria is Maria in her dreamworld, but her face is not her own. Her youthful skin is replaced by wizened bark, a wrinkled outer layer concealing the rings of the many years she had clearly lived. Her hands were also not her own, but knotted too like old wood.

She walks over to a table to retrive a small glass before taking a swift glug of the liquid within. A pungent smell of marigolds overwhelms her nostrils as she looks outside her window. Bodies lay piled upon each other on a wooden cart, and more bodies lay in the street. She is grateful for even the slightly offensive scent of marigold that stands between her and the desolate view outside her window.

Maria awakens in the present, seemingly centuries away from her dreamscape. Despite her best efforts at a digital detox during her Spanish pilgrimage, her phone has other plans. Thirty-one missed text messages, and fifteen emails, each with varying degrees of severity.

'ARE YOU OKAY?', 'When are you coming home? 'Call when you get this' and similar sentiments all meet her gaze.

Maria shifts her head on the pillow, unnerved by a familiar scent. She angles her hands underneath the pillow to reveal the culprit: marigold petals.

She drags her finger onto her mobile screen to check the latest news. Hundreds dead from a mysterious illness, and spreading like the plague. Flu-like, possibly transmitted by animals. Funny how the details seemed to match her dreams.

She could not change the present, but perhaps she could change the past. The plague had ravaged Europe, almost assuredly where Maria had been before. And would be once more, armed with the wisdom of modern medicine. Perhaps if she could intervene in the Black Plague, she could impact the present. It certainly wouldn't hurt to try. And the petals, she knew, held the secrets to doing so.