1335, Lisbon, Portugal
The fever was eating me alive.
I was fourteen, and I already knew no one cared.
My mother called it "a sickness of the spirit."
My brothers laughed behind my back, punishment for stealing fruit from the priest's orchard.
Even the house dog avoided me.
The only one who stopped was my father.
Álvaro Castro Kearvalos was built like an oak, with eyes of ice and a broken nose. He always wore a leather doublet stiffened with ox blood, a trophy from the fair. When he leaned over my bed, his signet ring, shaped like an anchor, scraped my forehead.
"Damn brat," he growled, pressing his rough hand against my sweaty skin. "You're just gonna piss yourself to death."
I coughed so hard I saw stars. Vomited bile, shivered under silk sheets, pale skin, my body reeking of fear.
All because of a swim in the river. Too cold. Too stupid.
On the third day, an old man arrived: long beard, milky eyes, a leather sack tied with vines slung over his shoulder.
They called him a "healer" or a "fraud," depending on whether the patient lived.
He didn't ask my name. Just said:
"You'll live. Or you'll be worm soup. Not my call."
He made me drink a bitter, scalding tea, reeking of dirt, rotten garlic, and some root that still burns in my memory.
Then he stuck leeches on my back. I screamed. My nails tore through the straw mattress.
My father just watched and said:
"Now that's medicine, eh?"
After the blood came boiling water. Compresses. Prayers and curses.
And I didn't die.
I wasn't grateful.
I wasn't better.
But I was alive.
A week later, legs weak and pride in tatters, I made a decision:
"Medicine, something that takes effort and time. As long as I don't become what my father wants, it'll be my choice."
I went back to the river.
Sat on the bank, stared at my albino reflection trembling in the dark water.
"You had your chance," I whispered to my own face. "You had your chance."
That day, something inside me turned to ash. It wasn't just the fever leaving. It was the belief that the world took care of its own.
I stood up. Shaking. Ribs aching, the cold biting. I went to the back of the house.
Between empty barrels and spiderwebs, there was my grandfather's cabinet, a few moldy books inside, pages gnawed by rats, smelling of damp wax and extinguished candles.
I dusted off one: Treatise on Natural Wisdom and Earthly Blessings. On the cover, a crude sketch of a man surrounded by plants and a skull.
I didn't understand half of it. But it pulled me in, a magic without incense or priestly robes, knowledge from people who bled like I did.
I started reading in secret, at night, by candlelight.
The Latin was mangled, the Portuguese archaic. I read. Scribbled in margins. Wondered how the healer's foul tea had worked inside me.
I noted symptoms. Guessed causes. Drew plants, even crooked ones.
My father caught me once.
I was sketching notes on fever and vomit when he barged in:
"What's this? Soup recipes?"
"Study. Medicine."
He snatched the paper:
"This is priest shit. Or witch shit. And you're neither. You're my son. You'll trade salt, leather, oil, real men's work. Not this sickness nonsense."
I didn't answer. Just stared.
Right then, I knew: I'd never be what he wanted.
So I kept at it like a rat gnawing wood, in corners. The maid, an old woman with onion breath, taught me scraps of herb-lore; in return, I drew the warts on her dead grandson's face (so she wouldn't forget him, she said).
I listened to peasants coughing blood, dying with purple lips. I took notes. Watched. Drew a leech so carefully it looked alive.
Then, one night, between rats and moths, I found a book with a spine half-eaten and a word stamped in iron: Coimbra.
A place where men in black robes cut up corpses and called it study.
Where priests copied books instead of burning them, if you knew which priest to bribe.
I went back to the river, the one that nearly killed me, and carved my name into the oldest tree with the knife I'd used to steal honey from the priest: "Peres was here."
If God existed, He'd know it wasn't a signature. It was a warning.
Time passed, and the silence between me and my father thickened. He stopped mentioning the "family trade." I stopped talking medicine. We pretended the other was deaf. It worked.
Until, at dinner, between hard bread and cold meat, he said:
"Coimbra. That shithole where they stick knives in dead men and call it 'science.' You really going?"
I nearly choked on watery wine.
"What?"
He chewed like a man paying taxes through gritted teeth.
"That school where they teach corpse-carving, curing pig sickness, that shit you read."
"The University. Yes."
He tossed a bone into the bowl, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand:
"If you're wasting time on this, waste it with the best."
I stayed silent.
"Wrote to a cousin in Santarém. Says he knows an abbot with connections there. It'll cost you. Your problem."
"You're letting me go?"
He looked at me, weighing the price of his own decision:
"I'm saying I won't stop you. But if you don't come back with gold in your pocket and your name on people's lips, don't come back."
"That a threat?"
"That's raising you. So study. But if you're gonna be shit, be expensive shit."
He stood and left.
That night, I didn't sleep. The mattress smelled of mold and my own dread.
This wasn't acceptance. It was a bone thrown to a starving dog.
Not support. Just my father measuring my worth.
But it was enough.
Because in the end, the Kearvalos didn't raise sons. They raised debts.
And yet, by some miracle, my path was set.