THOTH & MORVEREN
Training with Khasekhemwy, huh? Thoth had had an utterly negative opinion of all the deities after his mother died, although he had (a little grudgingly) come to accept since that Mallos was okay. Sometimes. Rhaegar had nearly tried to kill him once, and all the others just stared at him with unconcealed curiosity whenever they saw him, like he was some kind of zoo animal. Then he and Khasekhemwy had worked together for the first time to translate his mother’s combination parchment after the fall of the dome, and they’d found a common spark. Other than his mother, Thoth had never met anyone else who was so passionate about language. For the first time in a long time, he’d had an academic conversation with someone, rather than just talked at them and received nothing but a blank face for his trouble. In spite of his still less-than-positive opinion of the council as a whole, he could respect Khasekhemwy and, by extension, anyone who purported to be his student. Danny was elevated a little.
It wasn’t particularly encouraging when Danny mentioned that he’d made the potion himself. He was, after all, ten and in training. Thoth glanced at the blue vial but made a point of not saying anything. He was used to being a medical guinea pig, to a certain extent, since he was in and out of hospitals so often. Dr. Gupta in particular was always gleefully ‘trying new methods’ on him, and now apparently he was using him as a test for his apprentices too. At least it had been checked, he supposed.
He shrugged for a third time when Danny asked about his leg. This was turning out to be a very shruggy conversation. “If you want,” he conceded, “but it’d be fine if he’d let me put my mould on it.”
Penicillin and its daughter antibiotics hadn’t yet made it to Shaman, but Thoth was aware of Fleming’s work from a history of medicine book his mother had given him when he was four. His experiments with mould, trying to reproduce the precious material, had been ongoing for about the last five years, but none of the healers ever let him try it out on himself. None of them could imagine how mould would help to cure infection, as the word ‘antibiotic’ hadn’t yet made it into the general vocabulary of the planet’s medical teams.
He pulled back the sheets to reveal the cast, splinted and bandaged leg (the healers had taken no chances; there had been several bad breaks, and if it wasn’t set properly then he would be lame for the rest of his life), careful to avoid disturbing Morveren. He needn’t have bothered. The little water-fox was a heavy sleeper, and didn’t so much as stir even when the sheets shifted under her. He almost laughed out loud at Sol’s curiosity and, following his warning, wariness.
“Your worst nightmare,” he warned the tiger in a spooky voice, sounding more like the child he physically was than he had ever done around Danny before. “If you wake her up, she’ll annoy you to death.”
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