When a Physician's Limbs Revolted and the Tongue Saved His Neck

The physician lay on his cot with the king's sickness pressing on his thoughts, and the moment sleep took him his own body turned against itself. He felt it the way a man feels a riot start in the next street. First a muttering, then shouts, then the whole house of his flesh up in arms.

The hands spoke first, lifting themselves before his closed eyes. "We gripped the rope. We hauled the beast down. Without us there is no cure and no king and no reward." The feet stamped beneath the blanket. "You gripped nothing until we carried you across three days of stone. The credit is ours." The eyes opened in the dark of the dream and burned. "You walked where we pointed. We found the den. We found the milk." And so the council of the body argued, each limb staking its claim to the cure, each one certain it alone had earned the king's gratitude.

The Quarrel of the Members

Then the tongue stirred in the floor of his mouth, and the noise of the dream-body changed. It did not shout. It lay flat and small behind the teeth and said, quietly, "I too had a part in this."

The hall of the flesh fell silent for one beat, and then they laughed at it. The hands curled into fists. The feet stilled. The eyes narrowed. "You?" the limbs said together. "You have no bone. You cannot lift, cannot stand, cannot see, cannot hold. You are a wet thing in the dark that has never once carried weight. You did nothing. You are nothing." They turned their backs on it, all of them, and went on dividing the glory among the strong.

The tongue did not argue. It went quiet, the way a wronged thing goes quiet when it has decided what it will do.

The physician woke with the dream still wet on him, and he did not shake it off the way men shake off ordinary dreams. He was a man who listened to the night. He rose, washed, took up the vessel he had carried across the wilderness, and went to stand before the king.

The Word That Walked Him to the Gallows

The whole court waited. The king lifted his eyes from the sickbed, and the physician opened his mouth to say lion's milk, the cure he had risked the den to draw, the thing that would buy his life and his fortune in a single breath.

What came out was, "Here is the dog's milk we went to fetch for you."

The word hung in the air of the throne room. Dog's milk. Brought to a king. Offered to a king as his cure. The strong limbs froze inside the physician's body, every one of them, the proud hands and the tireless feet and the sharp eyes, all of them suddenly aware of what the small wet thing in the mouth had just done with no bone and no muscle at all.

The king did not ask for an explanation. His face closed like a door. "Hang him," he said. "He has mocked me on my deathbed."

They took the physician out. The proud limbs that had argued over the reward learned in an instant what the reward had become. The hands shook so badly they could not be tied straight. The feet would not hold him and had to be dragged. The eyes that had found the den now found only the rope and the beam and the gathering crowd, and they could do nothing but stare. Not one limb could lift the sentence the tongue had laid on all of them.

The Confession on the Scaffold

And in that last place, with the noose waiting, the tongue spoke again, low, where only the trembling house of the body could hear it.

"Did I not tell you that you are good for nothing? You boasted. You divided the spoils. You shut me out as a thing too small to matter. Now you stand at the edge of death and not one of you can save the man you live in. Acknowledge that I am above you, all of you, and even now, from here, I will pull him back from the grave."

The limbs surrendered. The hands and the feet and the eyes, all the proud strong members, bent the knee inside the flesh and granted the tongue its crown. And the moment they did, the tongue went to work.

The physician turned to the executioner and begged. "Bring me back to the king. One word, then do as he commands." The man relented and walked him back into the hall, where the sick king lay waiting to watch him die. The physician knelt. "As a last favor to a dying man's enemy," he said, "let the king only taste what I have brought. Taste it, and then hang me, and I will go in peace."

How the Tongue Won the Crown

The king, sick and bitter and curious the way the dying are curious, agreed. He took the milk the physician had named for a dog and drank.

And he rose. The fever broke and ran out of him. The strength came back into his arms. The thing he had been certain was an insult became the very cure that emptied the sickness out of his body, and the king who had ordered the rope now ordered the man set free, and sent the physician home in peace with his life and his name intact.

So every part of the body came at last to confess what it had laughed at in the dark. The hands that grip and the feet that carry and the eyes that find can do nothing for a man whose mouth has already destroyed him, and nothing against death once the small wet thing behind the teeth decides to save him. The strong members are servants. The one that rules has no bone in it at all.

And the strange arithmetic of it held even further back than the physician's dream. When the first woman was shaped, the tradition says her Maker took care not to build her from the eye, lest she be all curiosity, nor from the ear, lest she be all eavesdropping, nor from the mouth, lest she be all chatter, nor from the hand, lest she steal, nor from the foot, lest she wander. He built her from a hidden limb, a quiet bone. And still the mouth in her did its work, and still the word went out, and still the members of every body after her have gone on quarreling over who is master, never quite believing that the smallest, softest, most boneless thing among them holds their life and death in the dark behind the teeth.