God’s Homunculi
For those curious, I also wrote a blog post a while prior to writing this story that touched on my research for the 14th century setting it takes place in!
https://ynnhoj.substack.com/p/blood-of-the-rat
Enjoy!
In the Fall of 1348, in the month of November when the leaves had long-since turned away from the light, and the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception had come and gone, there was a town called Perdono in the north-eastern precipice of Italy. It was known for little but the rearing of sheep and the culling of bovines, save the business of horns carved with runes representing some form of local culture around herd animals and their place in the greater order of things. Perdono was home to several hundred people, most notably Gianvitali Corrtessoni, a mason that had built several churches in the surrounding region, including the St. Augustine’s Chapel — not the famed one — in the neighboring town of Cessari, where the Order of the Reviving Blood had once trained newcomers to the organization in decades past.
In the Fall of 1348, in the month of October when the leaves had fallen to the earth like the Hated Foe in his descent from the spires of Heaven, there was death in the air. Death and flies.
Upon a hilltop overlooking the town of Perdono, its exterior dreary upon that twilight eve, there was a fire. The bonfire was a sickly thing that couldn’t cook through the two hares split over it without someone constantly fanning the flames. It had been set by two men. The pair had been traveling east from the Republic of Genoa, the port city having been afflicted briefly by the Plague in the early fall months but had since recovered from the initial outbreak.
One of them was young, with a thin build and narrow features, whose somber expression in the flickering of the firelight painted him as some tragic figure of Byzantine glory, and wore the traveling attire of those with a scholarly disposition; raised boots, robes filthy from the road, a woolen cap to mask the start of his hair loss, and a purse of medicine-things, a long cane for travel and poking at oddities from some distance away, and several bits and bottles besides. The other was middle-aged, sporting a graying beard and messy hair that more likely than not had become the breeding ground for several species of lice, and odd platemail that reflected light weeks ago, when it was last polished. This one carried a sword with a lacquered hilt, and a small steel buckler that hung from his back, alongside any of their camp supplies which the horses were no longer sturdy enough to carry. Both wore unassuming crosses under their clothing.
The young man shall henceforth be referred to as the Physician, while the older man will be the Warrior. There is no need for names in such times; those with names are liable to die from naught but a drink of spoiled water, an encounter with others cursed with the new Plague sweeping the continent, or through brief acquaintance with the wrong fly buzzing about in the spoiled air. Names are left for those counted among the living. In this sad corner of the world, there are only the dead and the dying.
“Would go faster were you to place your strength behind mine,” muttered the Warrior, voice hoarse both from age and limiting his consumption of water in the past week. He had been fanning the flames using a torn book that had once been some romance or another. Its former owner no longer had need of its services, and the Warrior could not read Latin as well as he could German, or even English for that matter.
“I recall your insistence on my providing you a tincture for the wound upon your arm?” Came the reply from the Physician. He did not bother looking up from his work, which involved mixing some specific proportions of a murky liquid in a glass vial. “If so, then tend to the meat. Only a moment and the wounds will abate. I am wholly confident in your endurance, good sir.”
Bastard, though the Warrior, gritting his teeth. He wishes to avoid any manual labor. When I was assigned to the young shit, I didn’t think he’d be so irritating. Youth in these times…
This is as good a time as any to explain the circumstances behind the two’s acquaintance, as they more than likely will not provide a straightforward overview themselves. In short: The Physician was sent to investigate news of the plague and its spread towards the centermost part of Northern Italy, while the Warrior had been sent by the same organization funding the Physician — itself known to few, though those that knew it often referred to it as the Order of the Reviving Blood. The Order had been concerned with matters of supernatural influence for some time now; the darkness in the water, the supposed rumors and wives’ tales of the dead rising out of flesh pits, clawing out of chestnut coffins to scour the earth, succubi and incubi alike frolicking with those destined for the second circle. The members of the Order itself were stretched regrettably thin however; for a mission such as the one the Physician and Warrior were currently undertaking, the Order would typically send at least a half-dozen men to investigate. This paltry party, its rusted weaponry and meager rations, were a sign of the times.
It had been thirteen days since the pair had first departed the Genoa. An ill omen, seeing as how they’d anticipated a mere nine days to arrive herein, but were harried by the snows and the destruction of a bridge that had forced upon them an additional days-worth of travel around an estuary. But they paid little heed to minor portents, for now they had arrived just short of Perdono and the conclusion of their quest, and both were eager to let this be a brief dalliance and little more. Those that wielded pens held little affection to those that only wielded steel in those days, and naturally the same could be said in the other way as well.
“Let us eat,” said the Warrior dryly.
The course was laid out using tin bowls the pair kept with them at all times, along with a pot, basic cutlery, a carving knife, their waterskins, and their camping gear. They had rations in two bags tied to the saddle of the Warrior’s horse, but these were now whittled down to reserves. They had meant to stock up again at either Asiago or Bassano del Grappa, but the plague had ravaged both locales and there was little left by way of men or edible goods by the time they’d arrived.
Dinner was a silent affair, consisting of the cooked hare, spiced with equal sums of salt and pepper, alongside what scavenged goods they were able to find in the woods — namely, almonds, chestnuts, and some red berries that the Physician had deemed safe for consumption after they had been boiled. The Physician likely felt the tug to speak of portents and things relating to his scientific curiosity, while the Warrior cared little for these things and preferred instead to chew upon the small bones and suck at the marrow between the hare’s joints. When the Warrior had run out of bones to devour, he took the thinnest of them and snapped it in half, using the jagged splint that remained as a tool for picking at bits of meat between his teeth. He noticed the Physician writing into his journal using a swan’s feather and ink from an enclosed casing the younger man kept with him, and attempted to peer over to see what was written upon the page. The Physician drew back, robes billowing about him from the agitated speed at which he recoiled from the German man.
“You forget I cannot read your scribbles, ja? Such skittishness, I thought you might have been a mouse,” the Warrior said, his missing tooth quite visible when he smiled.
“I… I recall you mentioning it before, yes. But how can I know if you are telling the truth about your illiteracy?” Said the Physician.
“Illiteracy implies I cannot read at all. I can parse German just fine, and Latin as well if written by simpler folk. It is simply French that I cannot abide by.”
“I’m sure la langue douce cannot abide by you in turn.”
The bone pick became lodged briefly between the Warrior’s teeth. He was able to wrestle it free by pulling at it with significant force, though the metallic taste upon his tongue meant he’d yet again cut at the inner gum along the way.
“Upon which subject do you write on, Fran — ” The Warrior started, before being swiftly cut off by his traveling companion.
“Names!” The Physician hissed. “No names, that was the pact, agreed upon by us both and watched over by several members of the Divine Sorted, carried out with sacramental wine to bind us, wearing the cloth of the anointed few. No names, at least not in the open.”
“You are a skittish sort, Physician.” The Warrior grinned. “You give far too much credence to the heavens, that they would take the time out of the dark days to punish us for these… gentle transgressions, when so many who have done far less are no longer of this mortal coil.”
“I care little of your tirades upon the strange inconsistencies of divine judgment.”
“Only fair, and truth be told, neither do I. Yet I am interested in what you might be writing into that journal of yours, if you’d care to part with some of your wisdom.”
The wind was a fiendish gale, one of the lesser devils coming from the East perhaps, fluttering and breaking branches as it pleased. Were some imp or chort prowling the countryside, they would not hear the words being passed between the two men sitting around the fire, eating what meat they could find that hadn’t yet fled this godless place.
The Physician coughed, turned the journal one page back with a flick of the thumb, and summarized what he had written within:
“… It must’ve been no more than a week, perhaps eight days, since we’d met the last of the men in the village San Fiore suffering from the new Plageus. We buried that man, though this was against the instructing that we’d received not two weeks past when still at Genoa, from whence we’d first began our ghastly pilgrimage. He was a farmer, aged perhaps fifty if not more, with yellowed teeth and an unsightly bulbous complexion. Sores were starting in the underarms, the bridge of the nose, the left thigh, and the left foot. When prodded with the pliers, a mud-yellow pus began to excrete…”
“A dour and needlessly intricate accounting of our adventure thus far,” concluded the Warrior. He had listened to the Physician’s reading with a dispassionate face, having also rolled up the sleeves of his longshirt and begun picking at a dense scab on his arm. “You ‘learned men’ have the most morbid fascination with such obscenities. It’d please me if you were to forget that I asked to read your shit drivel in the first place.”
“There is no need for such displeasing language,” said the Physician. “It is important to account for our actions in writing. So that, should we perish upon our journey, others may be able to make some use of what we have written here thus far. This is still a new phenomenon, this strange disease, and if our findings do not succeed us, this endeavor will have been for naught.”
“It is a disease like any other. Some three-thousand will die, two ‘learned men’ will huddle over it in a courtyard over it and whisper feverishly about poultices and humors, and one account of your little plague will be written that no one will ever lay their eyes upon. And that shall be the end of it, like the Run D’Argent and the Black Toes Plague.”
“The latter of which I helped find a tonic for, meaning you remember it…” muttered the Physician. “I suppose you are more giddy at the prospect of doing battle with some necromancer or dark warlock?”
“An evil I can bleed through steel alone is preferable to one that simply fades away in silence. There’d be no need to write a book about it — the body will be enough,” The Warrior said, smiling.
In response, the Physician simply sighed and went back to writing in his journal.
The Warrior decided that he’d had enough of prodding the Physician and turned in for the night, laying his head uncomfortably on his bedroll. Nearly a full hour later, after having accounted for everything in his journal — including his conversation with the other man after dinner — the Physician went to bed.
He dreamed of rabbits in the fields of Italy. They were being hunted so that they might be used as stewing meat, or perhaps to make a roast for the lord of an ailing village who hadn’t had so much as a fig and cheese in months. The rabbits, naturally, had the plague. They passed it along to all those that consumed them.
Against the odds, the Physician awoke the next morning well-rested. He only remembered the rabbits prior to their capture. The thought of them pleased him greatly.
“Ash and dust,” said the Warrior, disgust plain on his face, “And the sinews, and the… the dreck… ah, mud? The mud of creation.”
“‘The filth of the created’,” corrected the Physician. “From the Eighth Plasm of St. Sebastien Sunday. ‘All that His glory builds is beautiful and made in His image, yet look yonder and see that in His absence the sinews and filth of the created doth rise like rot dough in those fields where the cathedrals once stood…”
Neither wished to continue the psalm from there. Even speaking this close to the corpse pile had bidden latent bile to rise up from their gullets, threatening to be spilled through their cloth nose-and-mouth coverings and over the earth. Both swiftly crossed themselves and moved away, each vowing inwardly to bury the bodies left to rot here once the investigation was over, but neither truly believing they could hold themselves to that promise.
As it turned out, this pile was the first of several. The one they’d found first, located towards the back of a barn long since deprived of any animal inhabitants, was the least decomposed of the bunch, meaning it likely consisted of the last of the survivors who had worked their best to carry the dead into remote locations where they could bury them outside the main square of the town, caught the Pox from the corpses, then were in turn infected and put into a pile by others. Each pile was tidely made and surrounded by flowers… dead roses. The theory seemed plausible at first; the two investigators figured that they’d either find the corpses of the final survivors strewn about the buildings closest to the main square, or else footprints leading out of the town to explain where those not afflicted by the plague had gone after burying their lives. Both found it peculiar when they found neither of the two — only the piles, only the husks.
“Three of these… collections,” said the Physician, writing the details into a bound journal with a mud-yellow cover. The Warrior noticed that this seemed to be a different ledger altogether from the one the Physician had been dabbling with on previous nights.
“The oldest seems the largest, and each subsequent collection appears lesser than the last,” said the Physician. “This aligns with my theory, of the first pile pertaining to the initial wave of infections, then the next wave arising from the bodies akin to miasmic wind, then the last…”
One of the order’s members had suspected, to the derision of his kin, that perhaps there were amateur necromancers among the populace now, hoping to use the power of the fallen angel to put the dead to work carrying out their own bidding. The Physician had dismissed the idea handily then, yet now he felt doubts. Foolish, irrational thoughts, and yet…
“And what, the final pile was self-erected? The last of the townsfolk laid down and died together?”
Ring around a rosie.
“This idling helps little. The main square might hold answers.”
To call it a main square, thought the Warrior, was to name such a village as Fleur-de-Lac the ‘Paris of the Shoreline.’ This barren collection of merchant’s carts, stalls and surrounding homes could have held two-hundred barterers at best on the busiest of days. There was rotting meat in one of the stalls, alongside various mushrooms that had sprouted mold and fleas. The men avoided any fleas they saw following a theory from the Order that named these insects as agents of Lucifer and ill creatures that could spread the pox. But the Warrior knew well that if the pair followed all pronouncements from the Order, then they’d have little choice but to avoid all sources of water, sustenance, and civilization besides. Neither was keen to live in the woodlands for the chance at avoiding the wave of disease that swept through Europe, yet it seemed increasingly like the wisest choice.
The Physician had stopped at a cart that held only a dense variety of flowers for bartering. He was a fairly skilled horticulturist but could distinguish little aside from the basic lilacs, lillies and morning glories. There were no roses on the stall, or more likely, none were left.
They look so bold, these brave little men.
“Empty,” the echo came from the Warrior across the square.
Empty indeed, the Physician thought. Not a single sign of life here, not a single body. An entirely secluded space haunted by the ghosts of the dead that had been deposited further away. Judging by the state of the meat he’d seen earlier, the last of them would have died several days ago, yet the fact that the doors of the surrounding houses had not been breached and broken apart to ransack the abodes of the dead seemed strange. Normally, a fallen village such as this would have been looted by passerby by now. That meant either that the Physician and the Warrior were the first to come upon this place, or that others had come and gone without disturbing the area due to either impeccable moral character, fear of His wrath for the sin of graverobbery, or some darker portent.
Both men entered one of the homes, which they’d marked as the largest in the area by a small margin and likely belonging to the headsman. It contained several cots for children and a pair of larger cloth-laden beds for the parents. A pot of lamb stew smelled sickly, though the fragrance of parsley still came through. The bowls on the nearby table were untouched save one, a dinner laid out for a family that would never return. The physician prodded at a bowl with his cane, pushing it away from the edge of the table. Dried blood had formed at the base of it.
A foul stench pervaded in this place. It was the smell of sickness, that which held on even when the living had long since passed. The rotting of fruits and stomach-curling smell of cheese no longer fit for consumption. An ever-present ghost that follows all that find themselves in the halls where living was interrupted by fate.
The Warrior adjusted the cloth wrapped around his nose and mouth, muffling his voice and senses, while behind him the Physician opened various cupboards to examine their contents. His glove traced the dust that had collected on the windowsill and looked outside, towards some wood sticks fashioned into play weapons. His tired gaze drifted higher, squinting at a hill in that distance that overlooked the town. There was a massive tree upon the hill, and next to the tree were various gravestones and other wooden figurines that had been placed there. And next to these figurines, there was a watcher — humanoid in shape, cloaked and hooded. Their full appearance was difficult to make out from such a distance, but there was no mistake that this person was staring straight at the pair rummaging through the village house.
“We are discovered.” Said the Physician. “I suppose protocol dictates we cover our tracks and hasten away.”
“A single individual, is it not?” The Warrior wiped his nose with his forearm, as if such a simple act could wipe away the stench of the room. “Perhaps we consult protocol only after we say ‘Hello’, eh? Could be our warlock.”
“Fine by me. But I imagine your sword arm’s been itchy… do your best to keep it by your side.”
“Well I won’t swear on it.”
Despite the incline, their hike only took a few minutes, and upon arriving at the submit of this small hill overlooking the village, they found themselves faced with a hulking tree, a cloaked figure, and woolen bedding just behind the figure.
A grand old oak stood before them, grown strong under the relentless sun of the countryside. It was covered in skull-like ornaments that many in the Order had noted were becoming increasingly common in places where the disease had struck and heavily depopulated the area; the hope was, by placing ram and bull skulls up as vestiges of death, the reaper would not come to the village again for it was convinced that this was a place it had already visited, and by virtue of this the plague would abate as well. No one knew if this had proved effective.
Their mystery watcher from before was a woman. She was covered in a ragged cloak likely stolen from one of the houses, lined on the inside with dark fur belonging to squirrels and skinks in the area, which blew fiercely to one side from the winds present at this height. The woman turned towards the men as they came up the hill, watching their boots pummel through mud. Her nose and mouth had vaguely southern features, perhaps Greek or even further. Her hair was ink black, curling over her bodice. The hood obscured the upper half of her face, hiding the eyes.
A single flea was present on her hand, crawling over the nails, which were black. The hand itself looked burned, though not in the way that a victim of flame might appear, more as if she had intentionally charred the flesh herself.
“Are you a native of Perdono?” The Warrior called out, sparing any pleasantries.
Perdono?
“This village, this dark place. Is it home to you?” Said the Physician.
I have no home. I am of the world.
“Romani, most likely,” said the Warrior under his breath. The Physician was inclined to agree, but found this even odder; Romani peoples traveled with their caravans. One of their number would have no reason at all to leave her people behind, unless…
The men came to the conclusion at the same time. The Warrior crossed himself with one hand even as the other pushed his traveling companion back, leaving a space of at least a dozen feet between the men and the stranger. The physician even held his cane up as if it were a rapier.
The woman threw back her head and laughed. Her voice had a harsh depth to it that surprised them both. She would not be quite so lively if the disease had taken hold. The hood stayed on her head.
You men of the faith. So easily frightened.
“What is your name?” Said the Warrior, ignoring her provocations. He itched insistently at the graying beard under his helmet.
So many questions for me, yet you are not so forthcoming. It hardly seems fair.
“Y-You may call me Francesco,” said the Physician, speaking quickly in spite of both his stutter, which revealed itself in times of distress, and of the Warrior’s glare burrowing into the back of his head, “And he is D-Dieterich. We are here to investigate this village for evidence of necromancy.”
“Sir Dieterich,” said the Warrior, silently berating his companion for revealing such information so freely despite the berating he’d received for just the same only a day past.
A pleasure.
“And h-how should we refer to you, gentlewoman?” said Francesco, after a moment of silence.
I have many names.
“Name thyself,” said Sir Dieterich coldly.
To choose a single name is to dilute the vastness of me and the terror of me. Throughout this world and the next, I am called the Death on Wings, and the Razing of Villages, and the Black Boils. To the learned among you, I am the Killing Fleas, and the Horror in the Wells, and the Horde of Rats. I am the First Judgement, and perhaps even the Last.
For simplicity’s sake, thou shalt call me Pesta — plague incarnate, hated foe. You will assist in ridding me of myself.
“I do not believe it.” Said Sir Dietrich, spitting on the ground near his companion’s feet. “Those that purport to be from a greater demesne than the earth are of beneath the earth, and are thine foe. You are hellspawn and little else. Ilk of the Fallen One sent to frighten and make us stray from our mission.”
They heard it then, past the howling of the wind. It was the childlike cry of pain coming from the bedding behind Pesta. Sir Dietrich’s hand went instinctively to the hilt of his longsword, but he was stopped by Francesco before steel could meet air.
“A survivor?” Said Francesco quietly, his mouth becoming dry, the stutter gone as soon as it had come.
Her name is Gianna. She is fourteen years old. Her father was the village’ headsman, while her mother helped at the local church and made all manner of stew for war orphans, which this village suffered too many of. Gianna contracted me from an infected stream nearby; if you pass it, immediately south-east of the crossroads near the mouth of this village, do not drink from there. Lest you wish to see me again.
Metal grinding out of a sheath sounds out from where Sir Dietrich’s sword hand is currently sweating. I hear it, as I hear all things.
That won’t do you any good. I am not the source of the plague, but merely an avatar that has manifested for… something. I know not why, but I intend to make the most of my time here. My purpose is twofold, however; if you rid yourselves of me, the disease present in the fleas in our vicinity and on that girl which I know you will treat, good physician, will see you as prey. While I am here, you may consider yourselves inoculated against such things.
“A likely story,” said Sir Dietrich. The sound of his sword slamming back into its hilt could be heard from the hill’s base.
And yet, a true one. Now then… Francesco. Will you fulfill your duty?
“Yes.” The Physician said quietly. “I will save her.”
Rose petals and garlic? Nothing novel, but a pleasant scent. I smell honey too… ah, this looks like egg yolk, I’d seen others apply it as well. Well, your work here will take some time… how about a story? I’ll tell you about a particular… mhm, where was he…
In the footslopes near Mt. Dors, where the shadows grow like weeds. Please imagine that we are there now, and that it is feeding.
A cobbler, a thief and an opportunist, his name is Rhova. He has come here from the north, where the pickings are slim due to the encroaching winter and the fear stirring in the air at the mention of night terrors, to find respectable feed. Though once he could gorge upon passerby in oaken stagecoaches and marvel at their lack of self-preservation, now the Slav had to be craftier. He needed to prepare and bide his time to leave any encounters unscathed.
There was a stagecoach again, finally, in this neck of the woods. Few traveled along the main road that had been cultivated over a half-decade amongst the underbrush of Verriglas Forest, but he could see it clearly from where he was etched on the rocks at the mountain’s base — lanterns, keeping the dark at bay. Three lanterns, one that swung cleanly from front-to-back and two that seemed to move more haphazardly as they rode along, in half-circles. The first was likely attached to the carriage, while the others were held by escorts riding on horseback ahead of the stagecoach, which sounded like it was being pulled by two… no, four horses. Rhova is likely thinking to himself: How odd! A wealthy man, at this time of night?
Indeed, a wealthy man. Who else? Those who contract it are more often the common folk and have no recourse, nowhere to run to, no physicians or a Physician in far-away towns willing to examine them for a sum of coin greater than a year’s wages that they have no chance in God’s heaven of even saving for a crisis of this sort. Those with heavy purses and knowledge of the wider world have such things precisely so they can throw caution to the wind for the vain hope of a cure to their predicament, though from what I’ve seen, most simply coop up in their manors and towers and hope the storm will pass them by. These may well be the wiser sort.
This man has a name… Lord Giancorvo, from Milan. He left half his wealth with his household staff before leaving for this journey, telling them to spend it all if he does not return in two month’s time and they are still of this earth. He collected the skulls of various feline species and wrote observations on them in a journal he’d like to publish one day. He has a son in Normandy that no longer speaks to him. He is afraid of the dark. His fingers are white with pain as they grip an iron chest resting on his lap.
The wealthy are no more immune to fate and chance than the rest of us. Gold does not keep me out, nor does it invite me. I go where I must and I cannot stay still. For shame.
It is two hours later. The guardsmen are in the ditch. One is laying still, while the other is being prodded by a pair of foxes, who are confused by the presence of this body in their neck of the woods. They are hungry, however, and will not be picky this time.
The stagecoach rests on its side not ten feet away. The horses have bolted off, their lines cut, and have left their lord and master without hope of escape from the pale-skinned man that has pinned the rich man’s legs under the overturned stagecoach. The man, gray-haired and bleeding from the temple, looks up and sees Rhova above him, clad in a fur coat and grinning madly. I can almost see him now, the moonlight covering Rhova in an angelic glow. This creature’s hair is white, like lillies.
It is four hours later. Rhova sits upon the stagecoach luxuriously, wondering what it would be like to be a rich man again. He hadn’t been careful that last time, had let his bloodlust overtake him, and was driven out by a mob. He will not make that mistake again, he thinks as he suckles absently on the marrow of a finger, ignoring the odd taste of the old man’s blood. Some gout, most likely. It added a peculiar flavor that he wasn’t sure he enjoyed, but the meal had been worth it regardless. Rhova resolves to find some village to the south where their own lord has perished and is in need of new management. Somewhere more pleasant, where he can toss away these old furs and wear fine Venician silk instead.
It is six days later. I can see Rhova so clearly now, with the black boils covering his pale skin and the yellowing teeth in his mouth. I can hear him cry out and curse, in weak agony, at Lucifer and Mannon and Bealzebub and all other manner of fallen divinity. He reminds me of the old man I saw before, in some ways. He had a name, so do they all, and I believe I just told it to you… ah, Lord Giancorvo, yes, it’s still here. Eventually I forget their names after I have gone. I cannot even count how many names I’ve already known.
It is eight days later, twice that of most victims. The creature that was Rhova is now but a beautiful corpse. I am no less lonely.
“Why would you tell me this, Pesta?” said Francesco. Unlike his companion, the Physician had all but let the matter of my existence seemingly pass him by without so much as a word. He was dedicated to his craft; she claimed the attention of him.
It is a moment in time that is fleeting, and I wanted someone to remember it. My sense of self is the River Styx, and every soul ripples across the water’s surface. When the echo is gone, the memory is gone, but you will remember it.
“I understand. But why this story? I don’t believe I’ve learned anything new about the plague, and precious little sympathy for the creature or the noble sir.”
My intention is simply to instill stark truths into you. The greatest of which is simultaneously the simplest: I am uncaring, inconsiderate, and all-encompassing. Some are more susceptible to my venom, others who have always believed themselves immune to my kind resist me with great ferocity, yet there is no rhyme or reason to me. You cannot predict me or defend against me. You can only evade my touch to the best of your ability.
“There must be a cure, a potence for you — God-willing, one will be found soon, before him and I are your prey.” These hoarse words came from the dry throat of Sir Dietrich, who was pressing a wet cloth to the girl’s forehead. She was breathing harder now, grasping at what life still flowed in her veins.
Francesco, you are the scholar between the two of you. Tell me your findings thus far.
“I did not wish to speak in the open quite yet, but…” The physician sighed, leaning back against the decorated tree. His hands were covered with blood and water, as he had been wiping away both the blood the girl had vomited a few minutes prior and trying to clean a mandrake root with a knife that had been through truly dire circumstances. His black robes had a dash of color to them now.
“It is not progressing well. I had truly hoped that the garlic would have sufficed at least in bringing the swelling upon the buboes down and returning the girl to her senses, as I had mixed nearly twice the amount recommended by the Order into my poultice, yet she has not stirred and the growths remain. The opium at least had sedated her and prevented more of the tremors we were seeing an hour past, but her body appears to act on will without real order, as we saw with the blood regurgitation just now. I plan to create a decoction with the mandrake root to aid in the opium’s effects; earlier I was considering a tea, but her throat is likely wretched from the blood…”
Summarize your findings.
“Nothing is working,” Francesco’s tone is calm, but a tremble betrays the truth of his fear. “The entirety of the Order’s teachings and what knowledge my time in Milan and Montpellier has given me amounts to nothing.”
So you see, good knight, what you believe has little relevance. I am telling you the reality and, kindly, asking that you treat me with the fear necessary for us to make progress here. There is cruelty in dealing with my kind that you have seen only on the scale of provincial outbreaks and villages filled with the dead. I am the first, and perhaps only, disease to achieve this level of virility. Perhaps it is due to this that I have manifested an avatar, to speak my will and warn of my coming? I know not. But I have seen much, and spoken to others such as you, and have heard the outcries from their lips same as yours.
“How many…” Francesco’s voice is hoarse. He has forgone his water flask since he first started his ministrations on the dying girl before him, many hours ago. “How many of us will perish by the time you’ve swept through the continent?”
I am the curse of your epoch. Putting some paltry sum to it is not enough, and it will not give you the right scale of the tragedy, but I will try: Imagine every person you have ever met in your life. Imagine the innkeeper, the barmaid, the hawker. Imagine the slaver, the deacon, the executioner. Imagine your own mother and father. Imagine the sons or daughters yet to come.
Imagine them all in the ground. This will not be the case, of course — many will survive me, I’m sure. I am not all-encompassing and all-destroying. But that is how it will feel. You will look upon the remains of your life and believe that there is nothing left for you but the ghosts. Then one day the memories will fade, and they will become little more than beautiful corpses.
“So the girl…” Sir Dietrich began, but he was cut off swiftly by a gesture from his companion.
The girl will live. You were lucky in that her body has been surprisingly adept at resisting the ravages I’ve inflicted upon her, and you, my dear Physician, were meticulous in maintaining her hygiene and induction of fluids and nutrients. I’m sure you don’t know what these words mean, but that is fine — what matters is that through your intervention, Gianna, daughter of Perdono, will survive.
I can see Francesco breathe out slowly. He’d been holding that breath, the catch at the end of the inhalation, ever since he first went to work on the girl’s condition.
“What is the point,” mutters Sir Dietrich. “The whole of a long night to save one person. In the time it takes to save a single victim from your influence, two-dozen more perish, coughing blood and wheezing in the darkness? Damn it all, I’m going to make a pyre for the bodies. I’ll have none of this.”
I met a Jewish merchant’s wife named Leah, herself a learned woman by way of reading texts her husband would sell prior to their departure. She was attempting to study me through accumulated medical texts and writings on esoteric and foreign methods of identifying and curbing various diseases left to her after his passing. Leah had taken over his position after I had passed through him, and spent eighteen days without rest, working even on Saturdays, to see if she could find some remedy to my works — she could not. Yet she did learn that the local water supply may have been tainted, and the source of the many deaths, but could not be sure of her findings. When nearly a third of her village had perished, Leah decided to bring her findings to the village rabbi. By the next day, they had forbidden anyone to take water from the local well, and instead to go to the freshwater basin in the neighboring village from which they were punished by the local lord for drawing from in the past. But that lord was dead, and his sons were shut-ins fearing the baleful wind, so the men of the village came back with many buckets of clean water.
Many died still; remember that I am in the air, the rats and the fleas, and to escape from me is to remove thyself from all the earth and sky. Yet in my estimation, changing the water supply meant that there were some who were in good health that did not worsen as a result of the tainted well. Those that remained strong, and weathered me when I came to them, and bid me a good day when I passed by. Many were weakened from my passing, true, but they recovered. They will recover.
How many did she save — ten of her village, perhaps? Half that? Or perhaps only a single person? I doubt we will ever know, and neither does Leah. But she does know one thing, written in that holy book of hers: He who saves one life saves the world entire.
The physician clenched his hands slowly. Near the base of the hill, a grunt of exertion rang out. Sir Dietrich had cleaved another log in two, adding it to a growing pile.
“I understand,” Francesco said. “But your words indicate a darker purpose. You imply we should not bother learning what it is you are, the root of you, and instead treat you as divine judgment, an unseen flood seeking to sweep away the land. And like Noah, you wish for me to build an arc, nail down the doors, and wait for danger to subside.”
Nothing should ever stop your pursuit of knowledge. Your eye must always be on the world, or the world will turn you away. What I am advocating for is to obtain the wisdom to know when a disease can be treated, like your Black Toes Plague, and when you must do everything in your power to seal yourself away and avoid contact.
“Bar the entryways, quarantine the sick, bury the dead in soil not water…”
You have the weapons to wage war against me. Use them without thought of clemency. I don’t wish to be this any more than you may wish to suffer me.
“And what of you, Pesta? What will become of you?”
The memory of me will fade, for the masses at least. But you will remember it.
“But you must have more advice before you leave us, yes? On how to best — No! Damn it all, where — ”
By the time he turns to face me again, I am no longer there. I do not see sadness on his face, only fear. But there is work ahead, and there is no time to spend considering the magnitude of it.
He is heading down the hill, this troubled boy, to meet with the other frightened child.
Godspeed to them both.
In the Summer of 1370, in the month of July when the flower petals had opened to embrace the sunlight, and the apples hung like crystalline baubles from dew-frosted branches, there was a monk in the northwestern precipice of Italy.
He stood upon a hill overlooking the small collection of buildings at its base — an abbey, a storage shed, a stable, and a newer building meant to act as a makeshift library. It was called the Abbey of St. Sunday and His Glory, a local patron that was influential in founding the Order to which this man once belonged. Those days on the road were long behind him. The Bubonic Plague, as the learned men have now termed it, yet remains in the vestiges of Europe and western Asia, but only as a half-nightmare drifting in the breeze and filthwater. The new generation sees it as just another one of the many devil’s bad winds delivered here from the underworld. There are not many of the old generation left to remember it as it truly was.
One apple is particularly ripe, its red skin attracting the eyes of the man, who wears a frock and has shaved his head and now wears a cross more prominent than the one he wore when his head still nurtured a garden of dark hair. The cross around his neck was worn under the robes now.
He examined the apple, and considered telling the Abbot or Brother Elbel about this new growth… no, neither would not know how to nurture it. Brother Gerung might, perhaps; he was young and curious. Yes, Brother Gerung would be the successor.
There was no time to take a bite into his apple. He had a guest on the hill, whose approach he did not notice. The priest rubbed the apple against his robes to clean it of debris, then set it down on a small stool he’d brought with him when he watched the sunrise. He liked praying here in the early hours, before the others were awake, for its unmatched serenity.
Hello, good sir.
The girl behind the monk said it with a smile. She had come up from behind him in silence, her bare feet somehow avoiding the crunch of twigs. Hair of brown, skin of white, clothes of poverty. Eyes of gold.
“Simply ‘Father’ to you, child,” The kindly monk said, turning towards me. He seemed embarrassed for a moment when I noticed his stance, a defensive one. Taken in instinct. “Ah… though these hands are calloused, they have not wielded a blade in twenty and two years now. They have forgotten the touch of steel.”
But not the weight of it, I’m sure? And do not say otherwise. I’ve learned how to sift falsehood from truthfulness, albeit not very adeptly. It’s all still new to me.
He furrowed his brow. “Who are you? What are you?”
I am the end of the line, and the start of the path. And I am sorry, but it is your turn.
To his credit, the man did not appear afraid. Instead, there was a terrible ache about him. These past two decades were a world apart from the prior ones, that was plain to see. There was a wisdom in his gaze that made me tilt my head, almost like how a human child might when regaled with a story of yore.
“Figured as much. But surprised it took you so long.”
I had to walk my own path first. Where is the Physician?
Brother Dietrich wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve, before pinching his thumb and index to the bridge of his nose to stifle a sneeze. “You can see past mountains and planes, but you can’t find a man you’ve seen face-to-face?”
You are avoiding the question. I mean no malice, I truly do not know.
“Francesco caught your ill wind only a year-or-so after we’d first met you. Buried in Montpellier, where he studied, outside the university grounds. Put a rose there for him, once.”
My sincere condolences. I had hoped… you carried on his work, then?
“Yes. And we saved tens of thousands, I think. Perhaps more.”
You do not seem pleased with your results.
I watch him pick up the apple again, and sit down on the stool. There is visible effort as he lowers himself, in the way his joints groan in protest and he grits his teeth to avoid emitting a groan of pain, his three missing teeth on display.
“The nature of a quarantine, really.” Brother Dietrich sighs. “You do not know if what you did truly kept the plague at bay. Much of it could well have been luck and coincidence and little more.”
But you do not believe that.
“I must. Or else it means we truly are powerless in this world, and must hide from the night terrors. That He is impotent and His Seraphim are content to sit just beyond Empyrean and watch as we, the faithful, pray for naught but our own satisfaction. I do not believe that we are little more than God’s homunculi, made to be discarded. I do not believe it. I must believe that we have power, that we hold within us the means to exert our will over terror — if not today, then tomorrow, or overmorrow.”
You have become someone worth admiring, Father. It is a shame that today is your day.
“I understand… what was it… Pesta?”
I am not Pesta anymore. The time I spent as a manifestation of the plague is hazy now, like looking at running deer through church glass. You may call me Confused Sorrow. I am kinder, I think. I only take your kind when time has run its course and inevitability looms like a great wave over the Mediterranean. I enjoy this existence more.
Brother Dietrich hangs his head. It feels like a different man before me — it feels as though I am speaking to the physician more than the warrior. I cannot help but wonder what he must have seen and learned in the decades since we met, what he had become. He’d had faith before, but this is different. It is kinder too.
“Confused Sorrow… let us say that I have been expecting this day for some time now. I have been marked since first Francesco passed away in his sick bed, madly scribbling instructions to the last. Since the Order decided that their work was done, with scarce few of them remaining as it were. When I felt the first tremor in my hand. When I forgot the name of the city my father took me to when I could first master a horse.
“And the Abbey will be just fine without me, even this place of serenity. Though gardening is far easier for me to master than disease, there is a logic to it that I find lacking in other facets of existence. It is easy to know what is within my realm of control, such as enriching the soil with manure, watering diligently based on the needs of my charges, and clearing pests away, and what is not, such as the earth and soil and whether a rabbit will decide to eat my roses. I suppose to understand the limits of what we can grasp and mold into new form, to truly understand them, is the greatest wisdom all of this has given me.”
O’ Lord, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change…
“The courage to change the things I can…”
And the wisdom to know the difference.
“Will it be painful?”
After everything you have done, good sir, I would not permit it to be. We will go down a stream, you and I, and gradually you will lose the feeling in your limbs, but not unpleasantly. Then you will be ashes, and the world will be a memory.
“You cannot visit me, up there?”
My work is here, on the soil. I do not even know if there is anything ‘up there.’ I cannot believe in it, because I will never be able to confirm my beliefs.
“That is alright. I will believe for the both of us. I will tell Francesco about this, and I am sure he will enjoy the conversation as well.”
You will have much to speak about. I am sure he has been journaling ever since.
“Ah, I can barely feel my legs anymore… as if I am floating. Where are we, the River Styx?”
Only a river. You enjoyed swimming once, did you not?
“My mother taught me. Father never knew. And it seems my arms are nearly gone now, as well.”
Your soul will go last — it is too large, too vibrant to simply slip away. I can see it now, voluminous and bright. It is the sun.
He is crying. His tears are molding with the river. It is terror, vivid and red, but it is wonder and joy. But there is nothing to fear, you brave little man. If God rewards his chosen, then you will sit at the table. You will drink of His cup and learn the names of a thousand glories. I must believe it, too. It is only right.
The others will find his body. A beautiful corpse, here in his beloved garden. I am no less lonely.
But I am content.
