The homunculus, seven inches of pale pear balanced on matchstick legs, wants its milk warm, stirred with iron filings until the spoon drags, and poured into the cracked saucer it has decided is its own. Any other dish is an insult, and it says so in a thin rattle like a kettle lid until the right one appears. By morning a rust-brown ring has dried in the saucer, and that ring is how apothecaries know the creature has been fed and is, for the moment, not planning anything.
The argument in Escalona Baixa is over what the fussing means. Camilo Ferraz, the apothecary, holds that the creature is devoted and nothing more, a cat with opinions, and that it stays because he feeds it. Conceição Duarte, who sells him the milk, says a cat forgives and the homunculus does not. In her account it keeps books on every slight, from a draft under the door to a vial moved an inch, and what Camilo calls devotion is only the grudge it holds closest. I spent three nights on his cellar floor to settle the matter. The creature works from dusk until the roosters start up across the valley at Fontevela, straightening glassware and turning the drying herbs. When a vial slid off the stack of books, it leapt after it with both arms flung wide and caught it, then glared at me as though I had pushed. Beneath its wax skin the violet fluid ran faster while it glared. I side with neither of them entirely. It guards his glass, and it also sulked through an entire evening because I whistled.
The custom in both villages is that nobody thanks it aloud. Thanks imply surprise that it could do the work. You warm the milk, set it down, and leave the cellar. Camilo says the one time he praised it, the saucer sat untouched for a week.
Some things have changed since my last visit two winters ago. The apron, then a scrap of sacking, is now tan cloth stitched in stitches too small for Camilo's fingers, though he admits the cloth is from his own coat lining. The hairline crack in the left shoulder is still sealed with its drop of green glass, and the drop has not grown. I measured the creature with a carpenter's folding rule laid along the workbench while it pretended to be elsewhere: seven inches and a fingernail standing, five and a half when it sat sulking. Its right hand fidgets constantly. The left stays in a tiny leather glove that neither Camilo nor Conceição will claim to have made. Who sewed it, and what was it meant to keep that hand from touching?
- Classification
- Alchemical construct, grown in glass
- Habitat
- Cellars, apothecaries, warm workshops
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- About 7 inches tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Human workshops and cellars
- Binomial
- Parvus retortarius
- Diet
- Warm milk stirred with iron filings
- Temperament
- Fussy, devoted, easily offended