The Fifth Humor

Marcel the gravedigger brought the green man to me. It was late in March, and the snows around Ste-Gasmorlé were just starting to recede, making it necessary to collect the winter’s corpses from the village’s rooftops. All winter long the people of Ste-Gasmorlé sleep in their tight-walled stone houses, rising only occasionally to nibble at the roots stored in their deep cellars. When they find an old grandmother or grandfather has passed from their hibernation into the sleep of ages, the Ste-Gasmorliers scale the tall snow drifts to lay out the body on the roof. Those bodies not eaten by wolves or pecked away by ravens are gathered by the likes of Marcel, who make a fine living from their grisly charter with the village fathers.

The old tales claim that the ancestors of Ste-Gasmorlé married long ago into a tribe of bear-people; others say their winter sleep is the result of some ancient curse, and cannot be convinced to enter the village. These clearly are examples of the superstitions that hold sway in these regions even at so late a date as this. I have examined the people of this village myself, and find that though a bit more hirsute than their neighbors, they are no less human. No, their long sleep, as any modern practitioner must conclude, is a simple effect of humorous imbalance; too little sanguinity, and an over abundance of the black bile of melancholy, lead inevitably to prolonged somnolence.

But I did not mean to spend so much time discussion the Ste-Gasmorliers! No, my intent is, of course, to discuss the green man, and how his case led me to discover the fifth humor.

As I say, Marcel the gravedigger brought him to me, lashed down to a kit dragging behind his pony. The man was taller than most men from this region, with unusually elongated features. He was wrapped tightly in a wool blanket, so I couldn’t see at the time, but on later examination I found he possessed long, delicate hands with six digits on each; the extra digit appeared to be a thumb, attached opposite the usual thumb, which gave him remarkable dexterity in manual tasks. Likewise his feet possessed an extra toe, and I would later see what incredible balance and agility this appendage afforded him.

These observations would come later, though. What was most striking about the man, bundled so that only his face could be seen, was the deep green color of his skin. It had the dark, waxy sheen of holly leaves against the snow, a deeper and richer green than spring wheat. The shock of hair so blonde to be almost white that stood in wild disarray on his head only made the shade of his skin that much more shocking.

I was at my workshop window, grinding skullcap, when I saw Marcel come to my door. At first I thought to pretend not be at home–Marcel could be a tiresome visitor, and often grew angry if I refused to buy bits and pieces of anatomy from him. But when I saw the strange cargo he carried, I dropped the pestle with a clatter and ran out to meet him.

Marcel told me he found the green man in a snowbank against one of the farmhouses outside Ste-Gasmorlé. He assumed that he had slid from the roof as the snow began to melt; the green complexion he took as merely a sign of putrefaction, a not-uncommon condition for someone in Marcel’s vocation to encounter. But when he went to move the body onto his cart, Marcel told me, it let out a groan and its almond-shaped eyes flickered open for just a moment.

Marcel dragged the green man out of the snow and threw his jacket over him. Then he went to the farmhouse door and pounded it with his fists, but could not rouse the inhabitants. The green man still breathed shallowly, and Marcel could feel a week pulse in his chest.

“And so,” Marcel told me, “I decided to bring him to you.”

Not only because of my profession of medical skill, he told me, but because of my interest in anatomy. One need not be a doctor of medicine, Marcel said, to recognize a rare and interesting specimen in the green-skinned body we laid out on the examining table. I pulled Marcel’s musty blankets away and laid my head against the man’s chest; though faint and labored, I could hear the air in his lungs and the blood in his heart.

The important thing, I decided, was to restore the stranger’s sanguinity, as that humor is most quickly imbalanced by cold; then I could examine him scientifically, his living form disclosing farm more answers to his mysterious appearance than could his corpse. While Marcel watched, I pulled away the blankets and threw them in a pile on the floor. The man was dressed in close-fitting trousers and shirt made of a smooth, metallic fabric; his hands were covered in thick mitts of the same material; and his feet were encased in boots that felt smooth and hard like glass, but were as light as linen. These, too, I pulled away, turning the man from side to side while I undressed him, then yelled at Marcel to get fresh blankets from the wardrobe in my chambers. While I waited for clean bedclothes, I made my cursory examination of the man, discovering then his extra digits and strange limbs. The skin on his body was the same shade as that on his face, if not a bit darker, and of a smooth and waxy consistency.

When Marcel returned with blankets, I set him to work bundling the man while I went into the kitchen. My serving woman had started a good fire on the hearth, and in a short time I had a pot of yesterday’s stew boiling and bubbling, with a measure of the skullcap added for its salubrious effects.