And now that Snape's in the drain, it's time for something completely different! I'll work on the transitions someday. But not today. No. Not today.
In the meantime, the Sues multiply: meet Luna's mum. Also, rating has gone up (in case cannibalism legally requires parental consent).
Incidentally, I've come up against a bit of a problem: there is a contradiction between the previous chapter and this one. See if you can spot it. Then see notes at the bottom.
Professor Sinistra published horoscopes under the name Agrippina Celeste. Snape learned this in the shop of Master Henry Mondeville, Apothecary, because Master Henry Mondeville, Apothecary, sold these horoscopes from the ornate rack next to his prized astranatomical charts — original Grunewalds and a sight of sights to behold: muscled bodies that peeled and dismembered and eviscerated themselves again and again to show the sign on each organ, all while dancing, merrily, into and out of their frames. The artist had been so skilled that blood actually pooled on the floor.
This made Henry's clientele very much female, and thus very much superstitious. Hence the rack. The conceit was that since the members of the body were governed by the bodies in the sky, one could ensure that arms were not broken in Quidditch by paying attention to Gemini — and by paying three sickles to Henry. In return one would receive a pamphlet with charts and advice. This might have been a fair enough trade, but the pamphlet was invariably a smudged, grimy, and flimsy affair, printed at the press of Laurens Janszoon (a crook) with the help of an ancient technique (banned by departments of health), and was altogether the sort of thing one should have to be paid to read, not the other way round. The ink powdered off it in clouds. The letters all looked the same. The paper was brittle and sharp, so it could (wonder of wonders) crumble and give paper-cuts at the same time. Yet the females insisted on buying, though they coughed and they spluttered and tore their Toad enCreamed hands in the process. Out of compassion — or, rather, whenever the planet Mercury indicated that people should go easier on their eyes — the venerable Agrippina published her thoughts in the Quibbler's "When Night Falls" supplement as well.
The Quibbler had an astonishing number of supplements. One of them was a Guide to Divining the Future from the smudges in a Janszoon Press publication.
Snape had been waiting for Master H. Mondeville, Apothecary, to bring him his two thirteen-ounce jars of Candied Leper Gel. His previous supplier had been arrested by the Ministry — as had the three before him — for trafficking in Grade Two Controlled Substances (to wit, the uterine lining of a Wetbacked Flipperpithecine, a simian that was almost extinct). Snape had been vaguely amused. Human flesh was a Grade Five Controlled Substance; he'd considered it a compliment to his smuggler-picking skills that his dealers had been caught for something insignificant compared to what they were procuring for him. They were also the sort of people who came out of Azkaban with their heads clear and their principles intact, allowing Snape - at least in theory - to revert to his earlier sources upon their release. But in truth they were an unpredictable lot. The great Trevenen Huxley-Brown, for instance, had jilted Snape for the redheaded heiress of Manx, whose acquaintance he had somehow made while in Azkaban, and whose estate in the Rift Valley Ash Layers supported no less than three Magic mafia rings and not a few Muggle scientists. But Snape knew the risks. He had long ago realised how hard it is to compete with red hair.
Master Henry got his Candied Leper Gel through a certain monastic order, an ever efficient organisation. When Inquisition was in demand, they provided it. When brothels were in demand, they provided that too. And when leprosy demanded and was demanded, they provided. The world is a curious place, full of people who will die a slow death if it means several coins for their children and three meals, however sweet, every day. But that is a matter best told in Oscar Wilde's fairytales.
"That's… that's immoral! Illegal!" the earnest Granger-esque types would whine. "It is a violation of human rights!"
Of course they'd mean the injustices done to the poor, not Oscar Wilde's fairytales — which, though peopled with rosy-lipped boys, are not in themselves illegal. As to the other matter, a small store-cupboard, carefully disguised as a potted plant on one of Snape's upper shelves, contained such delicacies as pickled House-Elf feet, Goblin noses, naughty bits of Veela, the petrous portion of two giants' temporals, and a jar of assorted eyes (nerves attached). Every one of them was legal with a license, and most had been removed while their owner had still been alive. The calculus of suffering has coefficients. It was a little-known detail in the Legal Code that House-Elves could be freed not just by receiving clothes but by selling various things that clothes cover.
"But it's immoral! It should be illegal!" the earnest Granger-esque types would whine if they knew, but fortunately they were too high on the moral high ground to notice or wonder about such things. So they sliced their bat-eyes and slivered their fish-scales, and passed their OWLs and their NEWTs thinking that Potionmaking was just like making porridge for breakfast only with sillier steps. Master Henry's thirteen-ounce jars (labelled "Hippogriff earwax — for external use only!") would perhaps make them think lofty thoughts, none of which would be to open a jar for a sniff. For who wants to sniff Hippogriff earwax? It's only known use, as it happens, is for a rarely-used spell in which a candle is doused with the stuff, lit again, and inhaled, transforming the inhaler into a hippogriff for all of three minutes.
The Gel was exactly what its unlabelled name suggests. It had to be imported, of course. England and Scotland were for the most part devoid of lepers, and while there were rumoured to be some in Wales, they were also rumoured to have self-respect. So the lepers had to be candied elsewhere. To this end they began eating honey. They ate nothing but honey all day: lavender honey, black honey, rose-hip honey; drank honey-water and pissed honey piss. Eventually they would die, for man cannot live by honey alone. They would then be sealed in vats of honey for a hundred years, while their flesh honeyed and bones honeyed and their eyeballs honeyed too; and after the hundred years they'd be opened and boiled and condensed and bottled and sold and consumed. Which was illegal. But the Wolfsbane Potion requires courage and skill to brew not because it corrodes the cauldron, like the potion called Insidious Green, and not because it tends to explode, like the Inverse Kent-Jones Potion of Discovery, and not even because it turns the brewer into an ingredient — like a potion so tightly controlled I can't even mention its name — but because it requires three dripping spoonfuls of human flesh in each pot.
This had been discovered by Luna Lovegood's mum. It was also an offense worth twenty years in Azkaban and life in St. Mungo's thereafter.
"Healers from the ancient Romans to the Muggle dabbler Louis Pasteur have known that sola dosis facit venenum, that poison is only made by its quantity," Dumbledore had read, deliberately, glancing over the parchment at Snape from time to time. "From this principle follows another: that every antidote contains a drop of its poison."
"Yes, Headmaster," Snape had said, who had known this before he could talk.
"The analysis in this report will prove that the danger posed to humans by werewolves can be reduced or removed if they are given a small measure of human flesh, proportional to such variables as the age of the individual and the amount of time elapsed since the bite —"
"I am unprepared to go to Azkaban to make your pet werewolf docile, Headmaster," Snape had said icily.
Dumbledore had made an oblique reference to some of the other materials in Snape's laboratorium. "And surely the final cause eclipses any irregularities in the material cause?"
"My objection has little to do with Aristotle."
"Now, now, Severus. Have some Turkish Delight."
Snape had bitten the words out of the air. "I believe this werewolf a threat regardless of the time of month, Headmaster. You are of course free to drug your judgment by drugging him, but I want no part of it."
There had followed a blatant attempt to bribe Snape with the promise of patent rights to the potion.
"I am not a Muggle pharmaceutical company," Snape had snarled, quickly looking away. His instincts had been bristling. With a breath he'd pulled the plug of his mind until only a faint aftertaste of disgust had coated his insides: no headgames, Headmaster; not now. Not you.
"The Order of Merlin is given to treatments for contagious problems such as lycanthropy."
"Why, Headmaster, surely you do not think me so much a Slytherin as to accept an honour I've done nothing to deserve," a voice — almost his own — had replied. "Theodoric clearly has a much more avid interest in werewolf physiology than I; perhaps he could be persuaded to brew the potion himself."
"Herself," Dumbledore had corrected, and thus the story had come out. Theodoric had worked with the Order, though his — her — contacts with Snape had been sporadic: an exchange of recipes mostly related to the gathering of information. To Theodoric Snape had been Paracelsus. Under Theodoric's directive he'd coated his fingers with a peculiar brew one afternoon and the words of the Death Eaters had stuck to them. Under his directive Theodoric had spent a full month vivisecting a Tengu in order to use its vital forces for watching the Floo network. Their collaboration had yielded results, but even after the end Snape had known nothing more about Theodoric than that his wand had an bat-finger core.
He had suppressed any curiosity a weaker man would have entertained about the identity of his dance-partner. Curiosity was a hole. Curiosity cut through defenses: the lacuna of information in one's mind, being a lacuna, was easier to overlook from inside. Theodoric? I do not know Theodoric. I have no information about Theodoric. I do not know anything about Theodoric at all. To such thoughts one had to pay special attention, because they were enough to reveal — should anyone look in one's mind at an inopportune time — that there was a Theodoric to know. Snape had covered his shelves in the writings of the real thirteenth-century Theodoric and other anonymous texts; Theodoric had presumably dusted off his — her — copies of Paracelsus. Marginal notes in the one by the one would rewrite a chapter or two in the other for the other. Thus they communicated; and thus the curiosity could be changed enough, linked enough to a real otherness, to be hidden. I am studying the arcane recipes of a thirteenth-century monk. Care to look, Master? They'd derived this system simultaneously, at first with dangerous bombast. The second volume of Theodoric's Chirurgia had flown onto Snape's desk and settled, fluttering, to a section written in a conspicuously different hand; at around the same time the Grosse Wundartzney of Paracelsus had opened to a page on which certain letters, randomly, had gone red. It had taken them two weeks to smoothe out the glitches and put in the safe-guards. And now —
"Theodoric can't brew the potion because Theodoric is dead, Severus."
"Theodoric has been dead for eight hundred years, Headmaster," empty Snape had replied without thinking. "I find it emblematic of Muggle stupidity that none of his ideas, which he was good enough to share with them, took hold for so many hundreds of years."
When he'd returned to his chambers with the parchment and let his body go limp in a chair there had been triumph mixed in with the sorrow. It was a very Slytherine triumph: there was no more Lily Evans; there was no more Theodoric; he was alone.
He'd remembered Dorothea Eitmann vaguely, a reedy Ravenclaw girl several years older than him. She had never been on Slughorn's list of desirables.
Presently he'd taken down the Chirurgia, volume one, from where it had migrated, neglected, to the very edge of a shelf. Things between them had gone back to normal. They had reverted to Dumbledore as a go-between on the rare occasions when they had something to share; of late Theodoric had focused on various classes of charms. The book had lain unopened for years. Yet in the front was a note — new, and very short.
And thus I, Master Theodoric, took down the words of my friend and teacher, for he said to me that he wished it, in order that if the Lord called him his knowledge, though unfinished, would not yet be gone from the race of men.
The unfinished knowledge had begun two pages later: disembodied sentences, scraps of inspiration, sometimes a whole recipe or the outline of principles underlying one. At the very end of the entries he'd found the same recipe he'd taken from Dumbledore.
It had been sparse, and beautiful without the florid academic argot. Take of human flesh three units—
Snape had closed his eyes, finally letting himself fill to the brim with the reactions he'd put off and the thoughts he hadn't quite thought about Theodoric. During the war it had been too dangerous for them to dwell on each other, and after the war - pointless. But Theodoric had mattered. He'd been (she'd been) a friend, pristine, uncluttered with the personhood of friendship. Uncluttered with such flaws as being married to Simon Lovegood, for instance. Perhaps there was a correlation, an as-yet-unexplored principle, that required all girls with skills in potion-making to fall in love with worms. (A promising if painful line of research.)
He'd let himself ache for exactly four seconds before forcing himself back into the flesh, and the three units, and — as it turned out — the note after them.
My friend and teacher believed that the hunger would be sated with a single drop of nectar, but it was not. My friend and teacher believed that the hunger would be sated with a leaf, but it was not. My friend and teacher believed that the hunger would be sated with a flower, but it was not. Thus my friend and teacher abandoned the brew, and rent his garment and put ashes on his head, saying "Cursed be the mother that bore me, and cursed the day I was born, for I have nothing more than a drop and a leaf and a flower to give to this hunger and it has eaten them up." But I, Master Theodoric, have found —
It ended there, presumably for him to continue.
He'd shuddered, wondering if a flower was a hand and Dora Lovegood had actually hacked bits off herself to throw in the cauldron. When he'd tapped the note (Sic, he'd whispered, not because he needed to) the words had dissolved into a single line in Theodoric's own scrawl.
Bugger it P, can you do anything with this mess?
He had carefully read through the recipe.
He had carefully read it again.
Theodoric's most annoying trait had been that he — she — rarely finished anything all the way, preferring instead to point out the raw stones of an idea and let Snape extract them and scrape and perfect. The opposite had been true on occasion as well, but Snape had caught on almost at once that Theodoric was — had been? — something of a Renaissance man (before the Renaissance, of course, and a woman): encumbered with the breadth of too many disciplines and too much imagination to linger on any one for too long. There must have been others like himself, polishing the rest of her brilliant handwaving. So Snape had been unsurprised to see that the potion, as written, was useless; though he did not tell Dumbledore at the time. The calculations were correct. The principles were correct. The potion, however, had failed to work; and this had intrigued him enough, werewolf or no, to make him accept Theodoric's last scribbles from the ever twinkle-eyed Headmaster.
Take of human flesh three units—
Hardly a wonder he'd taken to Potions, he'd thought bitterly. It was the only subject at school which required one to make a perfectly controlled mess and then clean it up with precision. Not a spine of snodgrass was unnecessary. If a drop of newt blood was required, neither omitting it nor putting in two was acceptable. What an antidote for the slapdash way people romped through life, like elephants, leaving the forces of God (or Nature, or just someone else) to set everything right afterward. But Theodoric made uncontrolled messes like this one, which only proved that her mind was really not fit for Potionmaking. He'd taken the liberty of a smile.
The answer had came to him during his third class a week later. It was fourth-year Ravenclaw-Slytherin, an unpleasant dynamic, and he had just let his thoughts meander to the inefficiencies of the educational system when Wesley Perkins, Ravenclaw, had yelped. His potion had started to grow.
"I — I'm sorry, Sir, I don't think I —"
"One is supposed to consume the potion, Perkins, not the other way round," Snape had said, lazily watching the sticky mass as it developed something like arms, or hammers, one of which attached itself to Perkins' pale hair. In the cauldron a hole had appeared, large, cavernous, and suspiciously mouth-like, to which Perkins' head was now being dragged.
"No, please, Sir…"
"Attend to your own potions," Snape had snapped at the class, waving the potion away. "Now, Perkins —"
Perkins was trying to pull off the sticky globs that Snape had been considerate enough to leave in his hair.
"Whatever possessed you to put so much Czech Yeast in your cauldron? Did you not read the instructions? Did you not hear me say, explicitly, that too much yeast will cause an uncontrollable chain reaction?"
"I only put a drachm in, Sir, just like it says on the board! I even re-read it three times because you said —"
"I see. Perhaps you might read it again for my benefit, Perkins, aloud."
Perkins had done so.
"Very good, Perkins. And what is a drachm?"
Perkins had taken a little blue knob, carefully labelled "1 drm", from one of the balances of the scale before him.
"Not good enough, I'm afraid. What is this?"
Snape had rather enjoyed himself. Perkins' face had grown very pale as he realised that the much littler green knob Snape had held up was also labelled "1 drm."
"Always remember your units," Snape had turned from the unfortunate boy. "You are using Venetian drachms, not Veronese ones. The difference is substantial. Ah, Levitt, you seem concerned…"
And it was while Levitt had tried to beat his potion back into the pot that Snape had understood Theodoric's difficulty. After class he'd extracted an obscure book from the library using a complicated charm and settled down to the calculations. Sometime after midnight he'd extracted three more books from the library. Sometime after four in the morning he'd been fairly sure he'd figured out which of them Theodoric had used as a reference. As dawn was breaking an error had appeared, seeming to indicate that Theodoric had in fact used two of the books, working through the calculations once with the information from one, then re-working them with the other — except where she'd forgotten to change one of the numbers, presumably because it had been a long night for her too. After he'd thoroughly re-checked everything he'd gone to his nine o'clock lesson, which had been an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. He'd skipped lunch. By the time the Hufflepuffs had been dismissed from their two-thirty class he'd given thirteen detentions and Minerva had had the nerve to ask him if he was all right. Two hours and a draught of a Cat Tonic later he'd been more or less rested enough to tackle the calculations again, this time substituting all the relevant numbers from the third book. After checking to make sure that the Slytherins were all in their dungeon for the night he'd extracted twelve books from the library and checked a passage in each one. And sometime around midnight he'd let himself collapse, too tired to even feel pleased.
"All right," he'd told Dumbledore the next day. "I'll brew this abomination, if all expenses are defrayed. Also I'd prefer it if the recipe remains quiet and classified."
"What about sharing knowledge with the rest of the academic community?" the headmaster had said sweetly. Snape's response had been a particularly potent glare.
"You must know, Severus, that Mrs. Lovegood's report to the Ministry has lately been rediscovered. It seems that werewolf matters are considered a high priority as of late. I'm told that the Department of Ingestables, Inhalables, and Balms has even commissioned clinical trials of it."
"I'm sure your influence was minimal, Headmaster."
"It actually was. The driving force appears to be one Damocles Belby of Belby Thaumaceuticals, Inc. Do you know him? He seems to think it a good idea to boost his company's image in the werewolf community — and, of course, to corner a neglected market."
Snape had waited while Dumbledore ate a marzipan beetle.
"I'm told that the clinicaltrials are about to commence, in fact. Do have one, Severus, I find them excellent for the nerves."
"I am not going to work for Belby, Headmaster, nor with him. Is it not enough that I've agreed to brew this potion every month for the rest of my life?"
"I'm only suggesting that perhaps it would be a good opportunity for you to contribute to your field, get involved in the academic community."
That hated word again. One of Snape's nostrils had twitched. His academic field was about as communal as its medieval counterpart, where every village and hillock had its own metric system.
Which had been the potion's problem all along. Because human flesh was such a controlled substance, there were few references for its use and no consensus on how to quantify it. Theodoric had made a reasonable guess on the basis of one source, a fourteenth-century book written in England, which source had used an earlier source, a Parisian manuscript dated to 1312. The English book converted the Parisian units into English ones, and Theodoric had worked with both sources far enough to see that they would give the same result. Unfortunately the Parisian book did not really use Parisian units but Bolognese ones, having copied a substantial part of its material from a thirteenth-century book from Bologna; and the author had neither converted the units nor indicated that they were different. Theodoric, with her typical lack of thoroughness, had not discovered the earliest manuscript; and the later academics had obviously never brewed the knowledge before they'd copied and shared it. Academia was an excellent thing.
"The recipe Theod — ah, Mrs. Lovegood — filed with the Ministry is useless, Headmaster. Belby is too much of a nitwit to concern himself with setting it right; his only concern is to sell it. What is it that you want from me?"
"Perhaps you should let him discover it, Severus."
"I see."
A thousand Slytherine instincts had turned him first pink and then purple. The headmaster had smiled at him for a time and then helpfully waved a glass of tea onto the table before him.
"If I understand correctly, Headmaster, you are asking me to give the fixed recipe to Belby and watch while he wins the Order of Merlin for Medicine."
"Something like that. We primarily want the clinical trials to go smoothly. He won't be allowed to mass-produce it, of course, given its main ingredient, and I shall make sure he doesn't get patent rights either. But I think it wise for the potion to exist, and to be known, even if few Potionmakers will actually make it. It will otherwise be very difficult for me to convince the Ministry to let me hire a werewolf."
There had been a crescendo of vitriol on Snape's part during the ensuing conversation. The headmaster had been unreceptive to all arguments about the folly of hiring any werewolf and especially this one, and suggested that Severus drink his tea.
"Anise-flavoured, though not too strong. And a hint of rosehip, I believe, though I would defer to your judgement on that point."
"Why Belby? A thousand other more competent people —"
"I'm disinclined to draw attention to you at the moment, Severus, for reasons that should be clear. He's interested; it would be absurd to use someone else as a front. Sugar?"
In the end he had agreed, as sour as the potion itself. It had taken him two full months to research the market. When he'd presented his exorbitant budget the headmaster had approved it without so much as a frown. It had taken two more months to brew the quantities necessary for the clinical trials, and two more for the results to be properly analysed. Snape had received news of the potion's approval with about as much joy as a summons to Azkaban. It was small comfort that the potion remained controlled, unmarketable, and utterly useless to Belby — in spite of his inevitable award — as he did not even know how to brew it.
Thus Snape came to be waiting for his supplies at Master Henry's shop of horrors — a hooded figure with a scything nose, adding to the ambiance.
He'd been waiting for some time. Master Mondeville was in the back room, fondling the contents of some box. There was absolutely no point or purpose to fetishising one's ingredients, but the apothecary had a fondness for civet balm and mushrooms (one of which he would sniff while stroking the other) and showed no indication of finishing with them anytime soon. Snape had paced. He'd contemplated the anatomical charts. He'd found an error in them. He'd glanced idly at the rack of pamphlets.
The very latest (on a shelf labelled "The Very Latest!") concerned kidneys, and how the stars cared for them, and which stars had already crossed them, and what to pay to do something about it. But in small print towards the bottom of the cover was another comment:
For the stars predict the future of kingdoms and kings. It is up to us to stay on the right side of the stars and the kingdoms and kings.
Which, as it happened, had been Sinistra's precise words of advice to Snape at the end of their last midnight kvetch-session. They'd concerned, of all things, the Babylonians.
Notes: the Candied Leper Gel is historically accurate, although any hermit (not just a leper) would do. Various names have been cribbed from various historical figures. Theodoric really was a thirteenth-century surgeon, who put great emphasis on cleanliness and the undesirability of pus.
The contradiction between this chapter and the previous one is that I forgot that, in the previous chapter, Snape decides to visit Herr Lovegood because he realises that Luna's mum was his anonymous collaborator back in the day. In this chapter Dumbledore tells him. That my chronology is fuzzy is also true. Any and all suggestions are welcome -- particularly as regards fixing the previous chapter, since the next chapters reference this one rather than chapter four.