The Wrack

by John Bierce

  It took nearly an hour for Raquella and the others to marshal their arguments and convince the Empress of what needed to be done. Impressively, even Anton found his voice to stand up to the Empress, and he had been terrified enough speaking to Raquella.

  The little man was wasted on the dockmaster’s offices, and if they all survived the war to come, Raquella was determined to get him and his twisty little mind working for her.

  They weren’t just relying on Anton’s maps, of course. They’d sent out their healers to investigate his claims, with blind Sherra at their head, and they found that he’d seen right into the truth of things with his maps.

  And finally, finally, they convinced the Empress of the truth of the matter, and they had convinced her of the bloody deeds that must be done. There would be riots over it, if not outright rebellions, but that was a small price to pay for the end to this plague.

  And the bones and the flesh and the blood slowly began to pile up in that little valley. And those piles grew, and grew, and grew.

  But not all of that bloody slaughter happened in that little valley. Hunks of flesh and bone were hauled in from the city. They were carried by hand to the edge of the city, for the streets were too narrow for wagons, and then the wagons were hauled out to the little valley. Not too close, for the horses harnessed to the wagons were skittish and unhappy with the scent of blood, but they could haul their bloody burdens up the hill to dump into the little valley.

  And the mounds of flesh and bone grew and grew, until it seemed that there could not possibly be this much flesh in all of Galicanta, let along Ladreis.

  And yet, for all the blood, for all the death, the men and women of Galicanta rejoiced and had light hearts, because the slaughter they did was not of their kin, nor of men or women at all.

  “It’s the cattle,” Anton had claimed, when he stepped foot into Raquella’s office. “Cattle are spreading the Wrack.”

  And he’d proven it.

  Anton had painstakingly compared every single report of the Wrack’s spread to the shipping records and reports in the Ladreis dockmaster’s records. He’d spent quite literally months spending every moment of his free time comparing every movement of goods and people they had records for with the spread of the plague.

  And, given how far the semaphore network had spread across Teringia, they had far, far more complete records than they might have once had from the visiting ships in the harbor alone.

  The Wrack first showed up in summer by Castle Morinth, when the mountain cattle had finally gained back enough weight to start eating again. Some beast from the Mist must have spread it to the herds when it attacked them. When the cattlemen had brought their herds down to the plains to sell, they’d brought the Wrack in the cows.

  Again and again, Anton showed the same pattern happening. Whenever cattle were herded to a new place, within one and a half to three weeks the Wrack would take root. The wealthy took sick with the Wrack first and most often simply because they could afford to eat beef far more often than most. Many of the poor couldn’t afford it at all, and they only caught the Wrack from contaminated drinking water, hence the delay of weeks after the wealthy got infected.

  In the pass below the Mist Maze, everyone could and did eat cattle, especially the soldiers defending the pass, hence the break in the usual pattern.

  The Geredaini army that invaded Lothain had caught sick two weeks after seizing and eating infected cattle. The Geredaini nobility, who had their food shipped in from Geredain via supply chain, didn’t catch the Wrack.

  Again and again, Anton’s cattle theory explained bizarre irregularities in the Wrack’s patterns. The Moonsworn didn’t get it because their dietary laws forbid them from eating furred animals. Their obsessive religious concern with clean drinking water kept them from getting it from contaminated water. Those Moonsworn who did catch it were often noted for their lack of piety and cheating those same dietary laws.

  When Raquella brought up objections, pointed out places on the map where the cattle explanation didn’t work, she found herself providing explanations instead— almost entirely having to do with the vector of contaminated water. For many routes the Wrack had taken could be explained by contaminated streams and rivers, like the Rhost through Geredain. And though Moonsworn water law had prevented the Wrack’s spread in many places, it had never been intended to protect cattle from contaminated water. Fleeing infected refugees from the Wrack shitting near streams and ponds could spread the infection to cattle.

  They spoke for hours before finally, Raquella was convinced. It was a day and a half before the rest of the Moonsworn were convinced— and before the seers they’d sent out to inspect the cattle herds outside the city had found the Wrack in the animals. For, aside from perhaps a little increased skittishness, the Wrack lived peacefully inside cattle without trouble, and without producing their noxious poison.

  So many questions about the Wrack remained unanswered. They still didn’t know what caused the rapid mass outbreaks to occur so quickly. They didn’t understand how the disease could survive cooking in meat, but be killed off with such a low fever. They didn’t know how to cure it, or whether there was an antidote for the Wrack’s poison, or whether its victims would ever regain use of their fingers.

  But now they knew how to stop it from spreading.

  And when the Empress was finally convinced, the order went out across Galicanta, to slaughter all the cattle somewhere far away from streams and lakes. The message was sent by semaphore where the network still fitfully held together, but was sent more often by rider on horseback, as it had been done in the days of the Empress’s youth.

  And the message was sent farther out still, across Teringia.

  And it was even sent south across the Choke to the Sunsworn Empire, to Oyansur. And the courtiers in Ladreis praised Empress Phillipa’s mercy and grace, even towards her enemies.

  If any of them had the cynical thought that the Sunsworn, bound by similar dietary laws as the Moonsworn, would not be at much risk from the Wrack anyway, they didn’t say it out loud. If they considered that explaining the plague would help tear out the foundations for the Sunsworn Emperor’s religious justifications for the invasion, they didn’t share those considerations with anyone.

  Of course, the Moonsworn shared those thoughts everywhere and with everyone, for they considered even the calculated aspects of the matter quite praiseworthy on Phillipa’s part.

  And though there were more battles to be fought against the Wrack yet, for it would not die gently, the eyes and minds of everyone in Ladreis turned to the horizon and waited for the Sunsworn invasion fleet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Questions Like Arrows

  My grandchildren ask me of those dark days sometimes. Those days when the Wrack descended upon Ladreis. They ask me if I heard the screams. If I saw the slums burn. They ask me piercing question after piercing question, and I never know how to answer, and I can’t even make myself say the plague’s name.

  And then their mothers and fathers take them away and scold them for bothering me, and I close my eyes in my bed and pretend to sleep, and I think of all the answers I wanted to give my grandchildren but couldn’t.

  Then I think of all the other grandparents whose grandchildren ask them questions about those days, who find it so hard to speak of these things as well— even the ones whose fingers are blackened and withered. I think of the poets who found themselves unable to call the Wrack by its name for so many decades, and of those poets who fear it not but saw it not.

  I want to tell my grandchildren that I stood with the Moonsworn, and helped them carry water in the days before the plague’s arrival. I want to tell them I helped wrestle thrashing screamers into submission and wrap them in canvas so they couldn’t claw and injure themselves. I want to speak of how they ran out of canvas, and how the healers began to tear down the tapestries from the halls of the wealthy and tie them about the screamers with no care for how old or rare or v
aluable they were.

  I want to tell my grandchildren that I stood against the fires that raged in Ladreis’ slums. That I stood side by side with beggars, soldiers, and noblemen against the fires. I want to tell them that I could not tell thief from merchant, heir from beggar, or priest from sailor. That we were all so tired and covered in soot that we were all brothers and sisters in that fight, hauling our buckets from ten-score fountains, and even the harbor itself, and though we lost most of the slums, we held back the fires long enough for the poor to flee.

  I want to tell my grandchildren how I held my brother in my lap as he thrashed and wailed, desperately trying to free himself from the canvas. I want to tell them how I never stopped speaking to him, letting him know he was loved, that I was there, that his family would never abandon him. I want to tell them how I wept when his heart failed, though he was young and hale, and how long I simply sat alone with his corpse before I could make myself leave our home and return to fight the Wrack.

  I want to tell my grandchildren how quiet Ladreis grew. Ladreis, the liveliest of cities. As the screamers dwindled in number, and the moaners slowly recovered, and the babblers regained their sense, the quiet in-between the screams started to build and build, until you had to wade through it like chest-deep water. How that heavy silence forced the words back in our lungs, and how all of us who had escaped the Wrack’s clutches found ourselves secluding ourselves away, more afraid of the silence than the screams. How the streets were left to the rats and the stray dogs and all us living treated our homes like they were our coffins.

  I want to tell my grandchildren of the whispered, fearful rumors that rushed through the city when we dared pass our doorsteps. For it had spread from the palace and was on every set of lips. The Sunsworn were coming. The Sunsworn had declared war. There was a Sunsworn fleet sailing for Ladreis, and Galicanta was too broken to stop it.

  I want to tell my grandchildren about how the soldiers began sinking ships out in the harbor, to blockade it from invaders.

  I want to tell my grandchildren how I stood alongside a hundred other men and women of Ladreis, as we faced ten times as many of our countrymen who would turn against the Moonsworn, for fear they were Sunsworn spies. How we shamed that unruly mob into turning aside, and leaving the Moonsworn unharmed.

  I want to tell my grandchildren how we built blockades, passed out makeshift spears, and prepared for invasion.

  There are so, so many things I want to tell my grandchildren.

  I won’t, though.

  Because every one of those things is a lie.

  I never helped the Moonsworn.

  I never fought the fires in the slum, and I never joined that august brotherhood of soot.

  I never held my brother as he screamed. He died alone and untended, and someone else preserved his name for the ancestors.

  I never heard the quiet grow.

  I never heard the awful rumors of war.

  I never saw the sunken ships.

  I never stood against the mob.

  I never prepared for war.

  Because what I never want to tell my grandchildren? The reason I don’t speak to my grandchildren of the Wrack?

  I fled. I fled into the hills like the coward I am before the first screams came from the Wrack, and I stayed there until the Wrack had loosed its hold on Ladreis. I stayed in those hills, and drank wine in the little shack I had stocked with food and wine and books, and I saw no one and spoke to no one until my food and my wine ran out and I’d read all the books a dozen times, and I learned of none of what transpired in Ladreis until afterward.

  I tried to copy the broken walks of those who’d endured those horrible days, those stares that seem to pass right through you. I found that I needed neither, however. The more normal I acted, the more desperate I tried to seem happy, the more people just seemed to assume that I was concealing some deep suffering.

  If, perhaps, I felt some deep, crippling shame, perhaps I could force myself to tell my grandchildren, or even my children, the truth.

  I feel shame, but it’s not crippling shame. It’s not deep shame. It’s a petty, slinking little shame, one I can hide, one I can conceal, and one I can lock away on command.

  What do I really feel? I feel relief. Relief that I never suffered the screams of the Wrack, that I never coughed my lungs out fighting the fires, that I never had to wait upon that great Sunsworn fleet, that I will never have to see my brother in my memory as anything but the courageous man that refused to flee alongside me.

  Relief that it was the better man who died, rather than the coward.

  And if I could rewind time, I’d flee into the hills yet again.

  -Anonymous essay, published four decades after the Wrack struck Ladreis.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A Change in the Sky

  Ladreis had always been a city that looked to its great harbor. This was certainly inevitable enough, since all the great hills of the city sloped down to it. On the day the Sunsworn fleet was expected to arrive, however, the attention of the city was pulled towards the harbor like the water was a lodestone the size of a mountain, and as though the eyes of Ladreis were iron filings. The fleet had passed by the embattled Choke already, the messages sent via semaphore had confirmed, and it was not a long voyage from the Choke to Ladreis.

  The barricades at the harbor had been built, and the siege engines emplaced in the plazas that overlooked the harbor. Any ship that tried to enter the harbor too swiftly would have its hull torn apart by the scuttled ships on the harbor bottom.

  The maze-like streets of Ladreis had been barricaded and fortified as well. No one who hadn’t been raised in the city would ever be able to navigate to the palace atop the tallest hill without breaching them.

  Screams from the Wrack still echoed in the city, but they were less in number, and the horrid grasp they had on the hearts of men was lessened. They still terrified, but their dreadful mystery was gone. The seers could tell you whether you had it or not, now, and all knew how to avoid it.

  The healers and seers, exhausted by their long, sleepless struggle against the Wrack, slept on cots in the very tents they’d built for the battle-wounded. They’d be needed soon enough.

  Winter was hardly a cruel thing in Ladreis, and poets often jested that southern Galicanta had no seasons, yet a wind blew across the city bearing the first hints of spring.

  Those who had survived the Wrack, and whose fingers and toes could do nothing to help defend the city, merely waited. Most were too weak to get out of their beds yet, and of those that could, little more of use could be done by them but pace.

  Noon came and went, and still nothing.

  Early afternoon came, and a rumor raced through the crowds. The fleet had been sighted offshore a few leagues out, and one of the lookout relays had sent a message via semaphore: the Sunsworn fleet was coming.

  Many argued against the rumor, of course. There was no official announcement about it. Surely, they would have sent troops ashore to seize the semaphores along the way. The Sunsworn wouldn’t want to start an evening assault. Surely they’d wait for dawn.

  But the arguments all rang hollow, for there was a cynical streak running through the Galicantan spirit that hadn’t been there before. The Wrack had broken something in them.

  Midafternoon, and there was nearly a riot at the dock barricades. Afterwards, none could say what had provoked it, but it took Galicantan officers nearly an hour to get everything calmed down.

  Late afternoon arrived, and somehow, boredom had set in. Clouds began to roll in from the sea, and seemed to wash away some small fragment of the tension. None had forgotten that an enemy fleet was on its way, yet there were dice games at half the barricades, and many of the barricades throughout the city had begun preparing feasts, as though it was a celebration. A pall still hung in the air, a sense of nervousness, and yet the city laughed, joked, and shared food with their neighbors and countrymen. Even the occasional scream of a new Wrack victim
couldn’t break the mood, for they knew that though some among their number would still fall to it, the dreadful plague’s time was swiftly ending.

  There was not a single scrap of beef at any of the feast tables set up in the streets.

  Evening came, and a shout rose up from the keen of eye.

  Sails had been spotted out at sea, silhouetted against the setting sun.

  The silence was as thick and as cloying as it had been in the depths of the Wrack, but of a different character. This was a silence of anticipation, of dread, and of waiting.

  The Sunsworn ships drew closer, and yet no-one could see their brilliant yellow and red pennants under which the Sunsworn went to war, nor even count the fleet, against the glare of the setting sun.

  When the final reds of twilight were fading, whispers ran through the crowd, but they all whispered the same hope.

  Surely the Sunsworn would wait for dawn to attack.

  Yet the newfound Galicantan cynicism told them otherwise.

  The light faded entirely as the Sunsworn fleet lay anchored out of range of Ladreis’ siege engines.

  Men and women slept at the barriers in shifts and lit no lights of their own, and Ladreis was dark and quiet, save for the lingering screams of the Wrack.

  If you asked anyone who was there that night, they’d tell you that it was the longest night in the history of nights, that they aged a year and a day in that time.

  On that cloudy, still, and moonless night, Ladreis could not see the Sunsworn fleet, nor could the Sunsworn fleet see Ladreis.

  But the fleet could hear the screaming of the Wrack, and Ladreis could sometimes hear the creaking of enemy ships outside the harbor.