The Tree Where Demons Traded Their Cures in the Dark

Two men walked into the desert together, and only one of them meant to walk out.

The cunning one watched his companion's pack the way a hungry man watches another man's bread. By the second day his plan was ready. "We should eat your provisions first," he said, easy and reasonable, "and save mine for the deep stretch where there is nothing." The other man, who trusted faces, nodded. It sounded like sense. So they ate his food, day after day, until the last crust was gone and the sand ahead still ran out to the edge of the sky.

"Now your share," the trusting man said.

The cunning one pulled his pack against his chest. He did not argue. He simply gathered his supplies, turned, and ran, his feet kicking up dust until the dust swallowed him whole.

Left to Starve Among the Herbs

The abandoned man stood alone in a country with no water and no road. He climbed a low mountain looking for anything to put in his mouth and found only bitter desert herbs, the kind that fill the belly with ache and nothing else. Night came down fast. Out on the open ground he could hear things moving, low and patient, the way predators move when they have all the time in the world.

He found a tree, the only tall thing for miles, and he climbed it. He wedged himself high among the branches and held still, a starving man hiding in leaves from whatever owned the dark. He did not expect to live until morning. He certainly did not expect company.

What Came Walking Through the Grove

Two shapes came through the grove below him, dragging something heavy between them. Shedim (שדים), the demons of the waste places, the spirits that own the desert after the sun goes down. They hauled their burden into the clearing and dropped it, and in the starlight the man in the tree looked down at the slack face of the thing they had brought to eat.

It was the cunning one. The companion who had taken the food and run. His running had carried him exactly here.

The man in the branches did not breathe. Below him the shedim worked without hurry. They butchered the body, struck a fire from nothing, and set the meat to roast, and the smell of it rose up through the leaves to the living man hiding above the dead one. He pressed his back into the bark and prayed the dark would keep him.

The Cures They Let Slip While They Ate

The demons ate, and like anyone at a fire after a meal, they talked.

The first one tore a strip of roasted flesh and said, idle and unguarded, "Strange thing about this very tree. Its leaves will heal any sickness a body can carry. Any sickness at all. And no one alive knows it but us." He chewed. He had no idea what sat in the branches over his head.

The second one swallowed and answered, "Here is a better one. The daughter of the king of Alexandria has lost her mind, and every physician in the world has failed her. There is one cure and one only. The blood of a spotted dog mixed with the blood of a tiger. Pour it into her, and she is whole again."

They finished the meat. They scattered the fire. They walked back into the waste and were gone, and they never once looked up.

The Man Who Climbed Down Rich

The living man stayed frozen until the sky went gray. Then he climbed down on shaking legs, past the dark stain where the fire had been, and he did the only sane thing a man can do who has just been handed two secrets by the spirits of the desert. He stripped the tree. He gathered an armful of its leaves, as many as he could carry, and he walked out of the wilderness alive.

Town by town, he became a healer. A child burning with fever. An old woman folded over with pain. A man whose wound would not close. He pressed the leaves to them and the sickness lifted, every time, and his name moved ahead of him down the roads. Coins came. Then gold. The starving fugitive who had hidden in a tree now rode into cities, and crowds waited at the gates to be touched by the man whose cures never failed.

His fame ran ahead of him all the way to Alexandria, where the king had a daughter no one could reach.

The Princess of Alexandria

The court summoned him to do what every physician before him had failed to do. He remembered the second demon's words at the fire, word for word. He found a spotted dog and bled it. He found a tiger and bled it. He mixed the two together, exactly as he had heard it whispered over a meal of roasted treachery, and he gave the mixture to the princess.

Her madness broke. Her eyes cleared. She came back to herself as if waking from a long fever, and the king who had buried every hope now stood looking at a sane daughter and the stranger who had returned her.

The king gave him the princess in marriage and a fortune to go with her. The man who had been tricked out of his last crust and left to die in the sand now sat at the head of a kingdom's table. And somewhere out in the waste, under a tree whose leaves could heal the world, the bones of the man who had robbed him lay scattered where the shedim had left them.