A blinded horse lay against the bottom stair, feebly kicking. I took the knife of a jerdier laying nearby and finished it quickly.
A man, crusted black as were each of the figures in that appalling place, limped up to me and caught my arm. He babbled that another horse had fallen across his wife’s body, but that she was alive. I went to help him and managed to lift the horse sufficiently that he could drag her from under it. Then he sat down by her, and held her head in his lap, cheerful that she felt no pain. But it was bad, for her back was broken, and I could perceive she knew it as well as I, though she smiled and patted her husband’s hand.
I turned away to help another, glad they had not recognized the sorcerer and begged for healing. I could have done nothing. The Power in me was no longer fettered-it was gone. Such a thing I could feel, as the woman felt the incurable wound in her body. As I bent to my fresh task, I was aware that what I did was, in any case, superfluous.
This man we brought out living, but part choked. I laid him on his belly and worked upon him till he spewed a black vomit of flies and commenced breathing.
Standing, I looked up. The sky was empty, the sun blazing through a steely haze.
Observing what I had done for the choked man, a trick learned on most ships to clear a man’s lungs of seawater, I was in demand from every side. So I turned healer in this rough-and-ready fashion. If any knew me, they said no word.
I worked right through the morning and the noon, not pausing to meditate. I understood very well that this was not the end, but had no notion what the end might be. A strained normalcy was struggling to repossess the city. The rain of flies had fallen everywhere, from here south and east, and to the western dock, not a street or a house had been missed,
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but only here, about the Temple, was there such a harvest of death.
A few had noted the potency of incense, and by early afternoon there was hardly a byway that did not have a brazier set out, smoking up heady blueness from its grille. The faces in the windows were wooden with fear, and on some was a rigor of grief held in.
It was Shaythun who had sent the flies, this they all believed, even those who could not give the name of the ungod of Old Hessek Bit-Hessee. Shaythun, Lord of Flies, Shepherd of Swarms.
Long before sunset the sky was darkening, the sun a smear of bloody heat through the incense smoke. Men climbed about their sloping roofs, sealing cracks and chimney outlets. Often they gazed westward for another swarm.
Bailgar had taken charge of the Citadel, mounting a watch on the high places, the towers and parapets of the city.
I had got down as far as Winged Horse Gate. There were fewer casualties that side of the wall, though a deal of panic and ghastliness. I went through and washed myself at the public basins in the Market of the World. One of the unicorn beasts of the black men, attacked by the flies, had run bellowing, smashing the booths and pavilions, till some artery burst and it slumped against the wall of the basins. Two black men stood beside its body, periodically ululating and trying to force the beast, which was quite dead, to rise.
A sense of purposelessness had come on me again, my services dispersed to their limit among the people, and forgotten. Priests were moving about, as I had seen them do in the aftermath of the fire that day after Hessek’s rising. Lamps were already burning, for it had become so dark from the smoke and the abnormal overcast. The sky had become a thick lens interposed between Bar-Ibithni and the light. With an awareness of irony, I turned my steps toward the Grove of the Hundred Magnolias.
On the street, three jerdiers in the livery of the Citadel rode up to me.
“Vazkor-is it the Lord Vazkor?”
It appeared they were not familiar with Sorem’s accusation of treason against me and my subsequent confinement, from which I had so incidental and peculiar an escape; they wanted only to escort me to the Palace. I related some yarn of having a woman whose safety I must make sure of on this side of Hragon’s Wall, and asked them how Sorem did. The
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young captain slapped his thigh-that suspect gesture of Orek’s, which I recalled as if in a dream where past and present mingled like sands.
“Sorem Hragon-Dat is well. The horse merely stunned him, but the priests carried him to the Temple. The Empress Mother is also secure. We shall have to make the coronation another day.” He smiled at me, charming as a girl, and said, “I remember how you slew the Hesseks, that wild night, like the god himself.”
I thanked him. Soon, getting no more from me, they cantered away into the misty, blood-orange dusk.
I had no wish to return to Temple or Palace, to watch Sorem struggle with new gratitude, his raw emotion, yet another pardon. Nor to my woman, though in truth, a portion of me would have been glad enough to seek her arms, what comfort her love and her body could give us both, before the final stroke of the sword.
But there was no logic to it. It would be fruitlessly dreadful to see these grapplings after hope, after life itself, and I partaking of them, when life and hope were done.
I lay down beneath a flowerless tree in the Grove. No stars shone between its branches in that occult sky.
A little after the midnight bell-I had been surprised to hear it ring, this formality and order between the double brinks of chaos-a voice started up not far from me, and Went on and did not cease.
I went to look. It was like my omen, and I must seek it.
A man lay in the bushes. He was a thief, out slitting purses even on such a night, and had been counting his gains there. Now he lay on his side, hugging himself in his soiled coat and staring up at me. He shook all over, and he whined, “I’m cold, Fenshen. Fenshen, run to the widow and get some coals. See, I’m cold and I’m sick, Fenshen. I’ve a pain in my belly like a worm ate me.”
As if a bright lamp shone on a word in a book, I grasped the fact.
He shivered, and doubled up his body, and called me Fenshen once more.
“The flies didn’t hurt me, Fenshen,” he said. “I hid in the cellar of the widow’s house, and I brushed them off when they fastened on my arms. But she screamed, the silly bitch, and they went in her throat.” Then he laughed and cried and clutched his abdomen, smiling horribly with the pain.
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He was the first victim I saw of the plague that the flies had brought to Bar-Ibithni.
3
The plague came to be called Yellow Mantle. Men must name everything, as if, by giving a name, they will decrease the nameless horror they experience. Though it was an accurate title enough. Those who contracted the plague passed swiftly through a stage of lassitude and weakness into delirious fever, accompanied by a purging of blood from the bowels. This was the turning point, for here the purging would either unaccountably stop, the fever cool and the patient gradually recover, or else the hemorrhage ‘would worsen, the entire structure of the inner organs apparently poisoned and breaking down, until death ensued. By this time the body was so drained of blood that the skin of the corpse-in most cases a brown-fleshed Masrian-had altered to a pallid, overtly disgusting yellow. There was no doubt on seeing those corpses piled up on the sweepers’ carts that they had perished of some vile pestilence for which no cure was known.
Yellow Mantle came in the night, sudden as only a supernatural curse could be. There was hardly any period while the plague hatched in the bodies of the most susceptible victims. Those who fell sick after, their constitutions being more vital, had simply held illness at bay a fraction longer.
I speak from an intimate knowledge of the disease. I saw all its stages and almost all its variations. I watched the thief die in the Magnolia Grove. He went quickly, before sunrise. I could do nothing to ease him, and indeed had not tried. I knew this for the last stroke of the sword. I think it gave me a strange fortitude to understand that.
By morning, three hundred lay sick of the plague. By noon, three thousand, and there were hundreds already cold.