CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Plague

My memories of those days are distorted, like images seen through a badly ground magnifying lens. Faces came too close, sound was shocking and light pierced my eyes. I didn’t recognize the room. There was a window opposite my bed and bright winter light shone directly in my face. There were other beds in the room and all of them were occupied. I heard coughing, retching and feverish moaning. My own life had vanished. I did not know where I was.

“Please. Pay attention.”

There was an orderly by my bed with an open notebook in his hand. His pencil was poised over it. “Concentrate, Cadet. The doctor demands that every patient answer these questions, no matter what condition he is in. It may be the last important thing you can do with your life. Did you touch a Speck?”

I didn’t care. I just wanted him to go away. Nevertheless, I tried. “They threw dust at us.”

“Did you touch a Speck or did a Speck touch you?”

“Rory stroked her leg.” I thought of that, and my memories spun me back to the sideshow tent. I saw the woman’s mouth soften as he caressed her. I opened my own mouth, longing to kiss her.

A voice shattered the image. “So you’ve told me. Six times. You, Cadet. You…” He flipped over a page and likely found my name, “Nevare Burvelle. Did you touch a Speck or allow a Speck to touch you?”

“Not… really.” Did I? In a dream, I had done far more than touch a Speck. She had been lush and beautiful. No. Fat and disgusting. “It wasn’t real. It didn’t count.”

“That won’t do. Yes or no, Cadet. Did you have carnal contact with a Speck? Don’t be ashamed. It’s too late to for shame now. We know that several other cadets bought time with the Speck woman. Did you? Answer me, yes or no.”

“Yes or no.” I echoed the words obediently.

An exasperated sigh. “Yes, then. I’m putting down yes.”

Dr Amicas’s guess had been correct. It was Speck plague. It went against all we knew of that disease for it to strike so far west and during winter. Conventional wisdom at the time said that it flared, up in the hot dusty days of summer and died down during the cool wet days of fall. But all the other symptoms matched and Dr Amicas, who had seen the disease first-hand, was adamant from the beginning about his diagnosis. It was Speck plague.

Those of us who fell to the first wave of illness were fortunate in a sense, for in the early days of the plague, we got good care. The first circle of cadets to sicken was composed only of those who had visited the freak tent. I have a hazy recollection of a rumpled and unshaven Colonel Stiet striding up and down past our beds, loudly denouncing us as perverts and saying we would all be dishonourably discharged for having unnatural relations. I remember Dr Amicas pointing out that, “Numerically, it simply isn’t feasible that all these lads had relations with the same female on the same night. Even if she’d lined them up like ducks, there simply wasn’t enough time. I’m including your Caulder in that line, of course. For him to become infected so swiftly, he, too, would have had to had congress with her.”

“How dare you think my son could be involved in something like this? How dare you even suggest it? One of the cadets who dirtied himself with that striped whore passed the illness on to my boy. It’s the only possible explanation.”

The doctor’s voice was tired but insistent. “Then, unless you are saying that your son had abnormal relations with one of these cadets, we have to admit the plague can be spread by means other than sexual contact. In which case, perhaps only a few of the cadets had intercourse with the whore.”

“They’ve admitted it! Half a dozen of those new noble vermin have admitted it!”

“And as many of your fine old noble sons have owned up to it, also. Stop haranguing me, Colonel. How the disease got started is no longer a priority. Stopping it is.”

The Colonel’s voice was low and determined. “We never had Speck plague in Old Thares before. Is it a coincidence that the first time we have young men patronizing a Speck whore, we get an outbreak? I don’t think so. The city officials who banished the freak show don’t think so either. Those who patronized the diseased whore are as guilty as the circus that brought her to town. And they should be punished for what they have loosed upon all of us.”

“Very well,” the doctor conceded wearily. “You occupy yourself with thinking about how to punish them. I’ll try to keep them alive so you’ll have someone to punish. Would you please remove yourself from my infirmary now?”

“You haven’t heard the last of this!” The Colonel promised angrily. I heard him storm out, and then drifted off into my fever again.

Dr Amicas’s plan to quarantine the Academy and confine the plague there was doomed to defeat. No walls or gates could contain or hold out the enemy that had descended upon us. The reports of sickness in the city were multiplying before the first day of lengthening daylight was over. As it was with the Academy, so it was with the city. Those who had visited the freak show tent were the first to fall ill. But it spread rapidly to their relatives and caretakers, and outward to others. Families such as Gord’s who had left the city for the holiday heard the tidings and did not return. Families trapped within the city closed the doors of their houses and waited inside, hoping against hope that the contagion had not already infiltrated their homes. The circus and the freak show were rousted from the city, but the Specks had inexplicably vanished by then. Their keeper was found dead, choked on his prod that had been forced down his throat.

Two days after I fell ill, the second wave of plague swept through the Academy. The infirmary was overwhelmed. There were not enough beds to hold the afflicted, not enough linens and medicines and orderlies. The doctor and his assistants did what they could to take care of the cadets suffering in their various dormitories. There was little outside help to be had, for the Speck plague was raging through the city by then, and all doctors who dared to treat the ill had far more work than they could handle.

At the time, I knew nothing of that, of course. On the second day of my sickness, I was moved to a bed in the infirmary, and remained there. “Lots of water and sleep,” was Dr Amicas’s first advice. I’ll give him this; he was an old soldier and knew well how to take action even before the command came down. He recognized the plague and treated it as such from the first outbreak.

He’d seen Speck plague before, and had even contracted a mild case of it when he was stationed at Gettys. Knowing what he knew, Dr Amicas did the best he could. His first recommendation, that we drink lots of water, had not been a bad one. No medicine had ever proven efficacious against Speck plague. A man’s own constitution was his best resource. The symptoms were simple and exhausting: vomiting, diarrhoea, and a fever that came and went. Day would seem to bring a slight recovery, but with night our fevers rose again. None of us could keep food or water down. I lay on my narrow cot, drifting in and out of awareness of the ward around me.

My cognizance of those days was an intermittent thing. Sometimes when I was awake the room was brightly lit and other times it was dim. I lost all sense of the passage of time. Every muscle in my body ached, and my head pounded with pain. I was hot, then shaking with cold. I was constantly thirsty, no matter how much I drank. If I opened my eyes, I felt as if too much light were in them; if I closed them, I feared to slip off into fever dreams. My lips and nostrils were chapped raw. I could find no comfort anywhere.

When I first arrived at the infirmary, Oron had lain in the bed to my left. The next time I awoke, he was gone and Spink was there. Nate was in the bed to my right. We were too miserable to talk; I could not even tell them of my dishonourable discharge or that they were soon to be culled as well. I drifted between dreams that were too sharply real to give me any rest and a nightmarish reality of foul smells, groaning cadets, and misery. I dreamed that I stood before my father and that he did not believe I was innocent of the false charges against me. I dreamed that my uncle and Epiny came to visit me, but Epiny had the deformed feet of the chicken woman. When she blew her little whistle, it made cackling sounds.