The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  Three guards had entered the back of the lorry with John. He caught the name of only one, Muiris Cohn, a small man with a face that appeared compressed from top to bottom, the closely set eyes too near the nose, the nose too close to the mouth and the chin almost touching his lower lip.

  While the three guards occupied a bench on one side, John was forced to stay on the chilled bed. When he complained of the cold, Cohn nudged him roughly with a heavy boot and said: “Now, y’ heard Kevin! You’re alive and it’s more than you deserve.”

  To John, the trip drew itself out into an interminable frigid torture, which he endured by promising himself he would live and, if his story was believed, he would work his way into whatever the Irish were doing to solve the plague problem. There, he would sabotage that effort.

  The lorry went first up a steep hill, rolling John toward the back. His captors dragged him forward again, wedging him near their feet.

  “Which way we going?” one of them asked the others.

  “I heard them say the road through Belgooly is safest,” Cohn said.

  “That means they’ve restored Fivemilebridge,” the questioner said. He was silent for a moment, then: “How long’ll we be stopping in Cork?”

  “Now, Gilly,” Cohn said, “the times you’ve made this trip and you still asking such a question!”

  “I’ve a thirst the River Lee itself and it running full in the spring could not wet,” the questioner said.

  “And you’ll have to wait until we rid ourselves of this lout,” Cohn said. He kicked John in the shoulder. “We’ll get as wet as the seas themselves on the way back. It’s either that or answer to Kevin himself, which I’ll not be doing, him in the mad mood as you could see.”

  John, sensing a faint warmth from his captors’ feet, wriggled closer, but Cohn felt the movement in the darkness and thrust him away with one foot, sneering: “Keep your stinking self away from us, Yank. I’ll be bathing for a week just to get the smell of you off me feet.”

  John found himself wedged against a metal support post for the bench on his side of the lorry’s bed. The sharp edge of the post cut into his back, but it was a different pain from the cold. He focused on this new pain, clinging to it. The darkness, the cold, the pain began to work on him. He had thought O’Neill safely buried deep within, obscured and hidden away forever. But his nakedness, the dark and cold bed of the lorry, these were not a place he had ever imagined. He could feel a terrible inner warfare waiting to occur. And he began to hear the lunatic sound of that inner voice – John Roe O’Neill clamoring for his revenge.

  “You’ll have it,” he muttered.

  The sound of his voice was almost covered by the grinding rumble of the lorry as it climbed a hill. Cohn heard him, though, and asked:

  “Did y’ say something, Yank?”

  When John did not answer, Cohn kicked him. “I’ll have an answer from you, damn your evil soul!”

  “It’s cold,” John said.

  “Ahhh, that’s fine now,” Cohn said. “We wouldn’t want you to enter our world comfortable like.”

  Cohn’s companions laughed.

  “It’s the way we all enter Ireland, y’ know,” Cohn said. “Naked as plucked chickens and them ready for the pot. You’ve no mind for the pot you’re in now, you Yankee devil.”

  They fell silent then and John lapsed back into the arena of his inner war. He could feel the presence of O’Neill. It was a single eye like a beam of light glaring from within his head. No warmth in it. Cold… cold… as cold as the metal upon which his body lay.

  The lorry rumbled across a wooden bridge and the sound of the tires against the planks was a drumbeat in John’s head. He could sense O’Neill trying to emerge and this terrified him. O’Neill did not belong here! O’Neill would scream. The three guards would enjoy that.

  Lights!

  He sensed lights out the open rear of the lorry and this restored him somewhat. He realized that his eyes were tightly closed and, slowly, he opened them. O’Neill sank back into obscurity.

  The lights were on both sides of the lorry – a well-lighted city street. He could hear people shouting. It was a drunken sound. There was a gunshot, then high-pitched laughter. He tried to sit up, but Cohn pushed him back with a foot.

  “Painted like hussies,” one of the other guards said.

  John felt a crouching sensation. Had some of the women survived? That high-pitched laughter. Had his plague failed?

  “Would they were hussies,” Cohn said. “I’d even welcome old Bella Cohen and the Monto, the saucy darlin’s beckoning us with their skirts lifted.”

  “It’d be better than this,” the other guard said. “Men with men! It’s against the Commandments, Muiris!”

  “It’s all they have, Gilly,” Cohn said. “They haven’t our opportunities to get a warm woman into bed.”

  “It’s the buryin’ of ’em afterwards I don’t like,” the other guard said. “Why didn’t the sanctuaries save ’em, Muiris?”

  “Ohhhh, it’s a terrible, virulent thing, this plague. A short life. Better it be merry, as the poet said.”

  “I’ll never lay with a man!” Gilly said.

  “Save that for the time when the coffin ships come no more, Gilly.” Cohn slid back along the bench past John and peered out the rear of the lorry. “Isn’t it a shame, the fine city of Cork come to this!” He returned to the others.

  “Did you hear that the English queen died?” Gilly asked.

  “Good riddance! Best see an end to the House of Windsor!”

  The lorry made a slow, tight turn to the left and the driver shifted down for a hill. The guards lapsed into silence.

  John kept his eyes open, watching the shadows on the canvas overhead. The lorry picked up speed along smooth paving.

  “The N-Twenty-five’s mostly clean now,” Cohn said. “We’ll be in Youghal soon enough. Then it’s back to the bright lights, eh, Gilly?”

  “I think it was the devil kissed your mother,” Gilly said.

  Cohn laughed. “And maybe he did a bit more, eh?”

  “Have you the cloven hoof, Muiris?”

  “I know how to survive in these times, Gilly. You just be remembering that. Kevin and me, we know the ways that’re needed now.”

  Gilly did not answer.

  In spite of the pain and the cold, John felt himself dozing. It had been a long, tiring time at the sailboat’s tiller and then the shock of his reception. His eyes closed. He opened them quickly, willing them to stay open despite fatigue. He did not want O’Neill to return.

  They passed an occasional vehicle going the other way and the lights through the canvas cover showed the guards with their eyes closed. Once, a car overtook them moving very fast, its lights flashing into the lorry’s rear, then darkness. The car’s motor whined in very high revolutions.

  “From Dublin,” Cohn said. “I saw the flag on its fender.”

  “He was doing at least two hundred,” Gilly said.

  “All of that,” Cohn said. “They move very fast, do our superiors.”

  Three times the lorry slowed to a lurching crawl over rough ground before returning to the smooth pavement. The fourth time it slowed, Cohn said the one word: “Youghal.”

  “I’ll be glad to load and turn around,” Gilly said.

  “And be shut of this baggage,” Cohn said, nudging John with a foot.

  John felt them making a sweeping turn to the left, then low gears for about five minutes. They came to a jerking stop and someone up front shouted: “Get him out!”

  Cohn leaped over the tailgate and there was the sound of his feet on gravel. Presently, Cohn said: “All right. Let’s have him.”

  The two guards remaining with John had to help him to his feet. His voice not unkind, Gilly said: “Out you go, Yank. Mind the gravel on your feet.”

  John let himself down over the tailgate, moving stiffly, his muscles cramped with the cold and inactivity. Cohn took his left arm above the elbow and led him fast around the
lorry into its headlights. Limping and stumbling on gravel and broken blacktop, John was glad to stop. The lorry’s lights carved out two tunnels of insect-populated brilliance, glimpses of bush-overgrown embankments on both sides of the road. He could hear a river somewhere off to the right.

  Cohn pointed to the direction revealed by the lights. “There’s the direction you go, Yank. Don’t come back this way. That’s the Blackwater below you there. Keep it on your right until you cross the bridge. There’s a stone hut about a mile up. The priests keep a store of clothing there for them as gets that far. There may be something to fit your ugly flesh. And one thing more, Yank. If anyone should ask, it was Kevin O’Donnell of the Clogheen O’Donnells who spared your stupid life. If I know Kevin, he didn’t want the wasting of a good bullet on his conscience. Me, I expect to see your dead body floating down the Blackwater.”

  Trembling with the cold, John stuttered: “Wh… where d… do I g… go?”

  “To hell for all of me! Move smartly now.”

  Stumbling painfully on the broken surface, John set off up the road. He heard the lorry turn around behind him, its lights gone quickly, the sound of it lasting only a bit longer. He was alone in darkness on a road sparsely illuminated by a broken cup of moon revealed occasionally when clouds were swept clear of it. Tall trees in heavy leaf bowered the road for most of the way. The road angled to his left slowly, then right. He felt ridiculous, angry and powerless.

  What did I expect? he wondered. Not this.

  The road began to climb steadily and, the clouds passing, he emerged from the covering trees to find the way a thin ribbon through gorse, a bridge directly ahead across the river and a Y-branching just beyond. The left-hand way was blocked by a jumble of fallen trees and there was the heavy smell of something rotten.

  John made his way cautiously across the river bridge and, as he neared the blockaded road, saw a naked body hanging in the tangle of trees. It was bloated and the flesh falling away. He hurried past, coming on a steeper climb, hills rising sharply on both sides of the road. The cold moonlight revealed leafless trees sheathed in ivy, a witch barrier on the heights.

  Both feet were bleeding by now but he forced himself to ignore the pain, trying to move as silently as he could.

  What had killed that man back there? He felt that the body had been left there as a warning.

  They don’t expect me to survive very long.

  At the top of the hill he came out into an open area where the grass had been burned away all around a stone hut that stood in a depression off to his right. The moonlight revealed a flat stone-and-mortar construction with a lean-to shelter at the rear. There was the burned ruin of a house directly across the road from it.

  What should I do?

  He thought that if he entered the hut he might encounter an occupant who would kill him the minute he entered. But Cohn had said something about priests.

  “Hello the hut,” John called.

  There was no response.

  Stone paving marked a narrow path between burned bushes down to the hut.

  I must have clothing and shoes.

  Cautiously, he limped down the stone path to the black oblong of a doorway. He put a hand out to the latch but before he could lift it, the door creaked open. A candle flared and he discerned a brown-faced man in a black cassock. The candle held high, the man stared back at John without a word.

  John found his voice. “They said… I… some clothing?”

  The cassocked man stood aside, nodding John into the hut. The dark figure closed the creaking door, put the candle on a wall-bracket shelf and went through a low opening into the shed at the rear of the hut. He returned presently with a mound of clothing in his arms. John accepted the clothing, noting then the empty look in his benefactor’s eyes.

  Blind?

  No, the cassocked figure moved with too much purpose and he had known where to put the clothes in John’s hands. John looked around him, found a low chair on his left beneath the candle. He put the clothing there and began dressing. The underwear was a full suit of long Johns, white and soft. He felt better the minute he had pulled this garment over his chilled body. There was a pair of black-and-gray tweed trousers, a rough woolen shirt of dark green, a yellow woolen pullover.

  John stared at his companion while he dressed.

  “Are you a priest?” John asked.

  Without speaking, the man inclined his head in agreement.

  “Have you taken a vow of silence?” John asked.

  Again, the head inclined.

  John looked down at his bruised and bleeding feet. The priest also looked down.

  “Do you have shoes?” John asked.

  Once more, the cassocked man went into the shed at the rear, merging with the shadows there. Spooky, the silent way he moved, John thought. There was a thud, then a creaking sound from the shed. Presently, the priest emerged carrying a pair of worn brogans and a pair of thick socks in green wool. John accepted them gratefully. He sat on the low chair to ease the socks over his sore feet. The brogans felt long enough but too wide. It helped when he tightened the shoelaces.

  All this time, the priest stood silently above him.

  John stood.

  “I’ve come from the States to help where I can,” he said. “I’m a molecular biologist. Is there a research establishment of some kind where…”

  The priest held up a hand for silence. One hand went under the cassock and emerged with a small notepad and a pencil attached to it by a short length of string. The priest scribbled on the pad and passed it to John.

  Taking it to the candle, John read: “Take the Cappoquin road. There are signs. Go on to Caher. Ask there.”

  The priest removed the pad from John’s hands, tore off the used page and held it to the candle flame. He let it burn in the candle holder. When the paper had been consumed, he went to the door and opened it. Leading John outside, he pointed to the road leading off beyond the hilltop. John could see the way entering a stretch of high hedges there, the growth black in the moon shadows.

  “Cappoquin,” John said.

  The priest nodded and, once more, a hand went under the cassock.

  Expecting the notepad, John almost missed the long knife when it came slashing out at him from beneath the cassock. John jerked backward, the knife narrowly missing his throat. His assailant merely stood there, the knife held motionless at the end of its swing.

  Never taking his attention from the man, John stumbled backward up the stone path to the road.

  All that time, the cassocked figure stood there, a lethal statue.

  At the road, John turned and ran toward the hedge-bordered stretch. The road dipped and then rose. John ran, panting and glancing backward whenever he could, stopping only when he came out of the hedges onto another hilltop where the road curved left along a ridge. He sat down on a stone wall to catch his breath and keep watch back along the way he had come. There was no sound of pursuit.

  Was that really a priest back there? An insane priest, perhaps? Then:

  Cohn knew! He expected me to be killed.

  It was quiet on the hilltop, only a faint soughing of wind in the gorse. He was thankful for the warm clothing. The attack at the hut was unsettling, though. Things were not what they appeared here.

  When he had recovered his breath, John set off more slowly.

  But I’m here, he thought.

  The clothing on his body smelled of fresh laundering and sun-drying. It felt warm but unfamiliar. And he suddenly realized there wasn’t a scrap of identification on his person. Cohn had been right about that. John was freshly born in Ireland.

  The best hiding place in all the world. John Roe O’Neill could watch the working of his revenge here and no one the wiser.

  O’Neill within made no response and, for this, John was thankful.

  Daylight found him in another river valley. He stopped at a rusted gate that once had been painted white. Brick pedestals stood on each side, their mortar falling
away in irregular patches. On the far side of the gate, an overgrown single track with grass on the crown led away into thick stands of maple and pine. Nettles and mallow bordered the edges of the track. John glimpsed stone shapes rising from the growth off to his left and realized he was looking at a cemetery. He felt weak with hunger and his throat was dry.

  Cappoquin? he wondered. Would it be safe to go where the cassocked man had directed him?

  Who do I dare ask?

  Anyone he met here could be dangerous. That was the lesson of the cassocked man’s knife. Perhaps that had been the intention.

  The river below the road beckoned him. It would have cold water to allay his thirst.

  I’ll get a drink of water, he thought. Then I can decide what to do.

  There’s nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction.

  – Sean O’Casey

  JOSEPH HERITY stood in front of the long table, arms hanging loosely at his sides, his eyes not really focused on the three important men who sat facing him on the other side of the table. It was too early in the morning to focus, barely dawn, and Kevin O’Donnell, the man seated in the middle, directly in front of Herity, had a reputation for crazy blather that he already had confirmed here.

  Listening carefully, Herity sought for the thing that had raised his hackles on entering the room. There was fear in this place. To Herity, that was like the smell of warm blood to a predator. Who was fearful here and what did he fear? Could it be all three of them? They did seem a bit on the nervous side.

  Except for the table and three chairs, the room was unfurnished. It was not a large space, only about four meters long and three wide. One high window, narrow and without shade, stood open on Herity’s right, framing a faint rose color in the clouds as the sun lifted over the horizon somewhere behind him. Light came from two double-sconce lamps behind the seated men. The lamps gave a yellow cast to the fawn cream walls.

  “We’ve been saving you for a moment such as this,” O’Donnell said. “You must appreciate this, Joseph. ‘Tis a fine thing for a man of your talents, well recognized as they are in this company.”