Habidah and Feliks still took their morning walks. There wasn’t as much to see. Their sensors let her know when her neighbors went indoors and failed to come out. Infrared gave her the rest of their stories. Some of them were still alive. They’d just gone to what remained of the markets, bought as much food as they could, and holed up inside. They didn’t step out even to empty their nightsoil.
The old mercenary died huddled on his floor. He was quiet to his end, even when he was choking on his bile. The disgraced priest had fled, but he never had the opportunity to make it out of the city. She heard from one of his neighbors, a prostitute, that his name had appeared on the cathedral’s death roll of clergymen.
Habidah saw the apprentice furrier die. From his body temperature alone, she knew he was sick, but since he was still on his feet, she’d assumed he couldn’t have been badly off yet. He’d sat down against the side of his house like he was taking a moment’s rest, and never got up again. The corpse-collectors fetched his body a day later.
The old woman raising her two nephews and niece struck Habidah the hardest. As soon as the woman realized she was sick, she took the kids out of her house and made them live with one of her grown children still in the city. One of her other grown children, a dockman with already-thinning hair, came back with her. He half-carried her inside, muttering soothing words.
Habidah listened to their conversation remotely. He brought bread and fresh milk. He promised her that he would be back, that he would bring more milk, and sweetmeats and sugar and other foods. Habidah’s attention perked. The price of sugar had spiked because it was said to be good for the sick, and would stretch a dockman’s pay. The old woman had drifted to sleep mollified.
Habidah’s sensors kept watch through the night and next morning when he failed to return. He could have died, but he’d shown no sign of infection when he’d left.
The old woman’s bed lay by her window. She no longer had the strength to stand. Throughout the morning, she cried for her son to come back, and then for anyone at all to bring her food or help her. She had no water. Her voice grew weaker, and cracked.
Habidah and Feliks heard her on the next morning’s walk. The few people out hustled by, pretending they hadn’t heard. No one wanted to enter and risk infection. Without thinking, Habidah started toward her door.
Feliks caught her arm. “You do it for one of them, you’ll start doing it for all of them,” he said.
She let him stop her.
Nothing in her medical kit was good enough, anyway. She had no cure, no way to replace the dead. The amalgamates had withheld a cure for just this reason. They knew that some of her team wouldn’t be able to resist helping.
Habidah asked, “You could synthesize a cure to the plague if you had enough time, couldn’t you? Even without access to the Unity’s libraries.”
Feliks nodded. “But I wouldn’t.”
“You’re a stronger person than me.”
“Think about it this way: the amalgamates didn’t forbid our interfering because they want to harm these people, or even to protect them. They made that rule for our protection. We’ll lose ourselves if we get in too deep.”
The amalgamates could hardly claim noninterference as a guiding principle. The only reason they’d allowed the shuttle its stealth fields was to protect the sanctity of her team’s observations. They meddled with other planes persistently. They had to, they said, to survive. They had competition.
They were not the first creatures to grow and maintain a transplanar empire. But they were, so far as Habidah knew, the most successful. The amalgamates swallowed or destroyed their rivals. Some even joined the Unity willingly. The amalgamates and their agents fought vast and lightning-quick wars on the Unity’s periphery.
But for all the resources they poured into those conflicts, somehow they couldn’t have spared an infinitesimal fraction of them to cure this world’s plague. Or so they would have her believe.
She and Feliks continued down the street until the old woman’s cries faded into the susurrations of the city.
Feliks said, “This would still be happening if we’d never come here. We have a responsibility to use our time here efficiently. If the things we learn can help even one plane back home, then, frankly, individuals don’t matter.”
“I know. I don’t need a pep talk.”
“You raised the subject.”
He said nothing else, waited for Habidah to speak again or let the subject rest. In spite of herself, Habidah asked, “Has anything we’ve discovered here helped you?”
Feliks took a long moment to think. “Yes. Seeing other people go through what I have.” He nodded at the building they were about to pass, a one-room home that had once housed a widower and his five children. All dead. “Realizing what I have, that I’m still very lucky. My demiorganics will preserve my memories and experiences. That helps keep it all from seeming pointless. A generation from now, there won’t be a trace of these people left.”
“Would you have gotten the same feeling out of reading a report?” Habidah asked.
“Probably not.”
“A lot of good we’re doing with our time here, then.”
“We’re not looking for an instant solution. Just some strategies to help people cope with the onierophage, that’s all. And, anyway, we’re not the only team out there.” Feliks waved his hand at the overcast sky, a stand-in for infinity. “There are hundreds of others on planes like this. We’ll be able to share observations before we compile our conclusions.”
Habidah said, “I haven’t heard a single thing from any of them.”
“We’re all facing our own difficulties,” Feliks said, and fell silent. This time, Habidah didn’t break it again. All she’d done was make things worse.
Habidah had hoped the old woman would have faded away by the time she and Feliks circled back. There’d been no such mercy. She would have plenty of time to die.
7
Niccoluccio shuffled through the silent cloister, dragging his robe through the snow.
Sacro Cuore’s late cellarer had once feared that the monastery would be inundated with refugees. None had appeared. There might well have been nobody left in the outside world.
It had become easy to lose track of the days. Every morning, the first thing he did was visit the sacrist’s quarters to check his calendar. If it wasn’t Sunday or a feast day, he promptly forgot about it. He liked to treat Sundays differently, but, in practice, other than spending a few extra hours in the church, he wasn’t sure how. He couldn’t prepare an appropriate meal. The milk was gone. All he had was a prisoner’s diet, water and gritty bread. He baked the bread himself.
There was too much else to do around the monastery to take a day off. Every time he worked on Sundays, he heard Prior Lomellini’s voice ringing in his ears, haranguing him for not keeping the day holy. He needed firewood, though, and to clear the snow between the dormitory and infirmary. Graves, too, needed to be dug.
After checking the calendar, he made his rounds in the dormitory, knocking on doors and checking inside when no one answered. Most cells were empty, but behind some he discovered bodies, delirious or dead.
The deaths came in waves. The last four of the novices had perished within hours of each other, without ever visiting the infirmary. Niccoluccio had found them huddled in opposite corners of their shared quarters. Even dying, they remained terrified of each other, of infection.
He took the monastery’s last dog, a mastiff, with him on his walks. Her littermates had died as well. She was at least some company. She had been trained to never enter the dormitory, though, and not any of Niccoluccio’s coaxing could change her mind. She ran off when Niccoluccio approached the doors.
He dreamed of buboes, gurgling and poker-hot under his arm. Every time he woke, he expected to find himself racked by tremors. He felt awful all the time – cold and hungry, aching – but never sick nor feverish.
The first few days after Rinieri died, he ate in the refectory, hoping f
or company. Twice, he was sure he heard footsteps in the foyer. When he checked, he found no one, nor footprints in the snow. The last time Niccoluccio had spoken with more than one of them, around Brother Rinieri’s grave, they had whispered that the plague must spread by sight, that it leapt from a dying man’s eyes into its next victim. Niccoluccio had seen so many dead and dying that he should have been well on his way to joining them. The others stayed clear of him.
He wasn’t sure when he started to pray for the pestilence to take him, too. But a week after Brother Rinieri died, the pestilence trickled to nothing. The deaths ended.
Niccoluccio found no more bodies in the dormitory. By knocking on doors and waiting for answers, Niccoluccio figured there were about a dozen brothers left. They were all junior to him. None of them had been at Sacro Cuore for longer than ten years.
The survivors met in the too-large chapter house. Eleven hooded and shadow-eyed brothers sat at the benches, refusing to sit near each other or at the table reserved for the officers. They took stock of the dead and the monastery’s meager resources. Only after Niccoluccio’s prompting did they agree to try to survive the winter here. The nearest town was too far for winter travel, especially should pestilence find them en route or – Father forbid – at their destination.
In spite of the troubles this presented, Niccoluccio left the meeting feeling better than he had since Brother Rinieri died. Hearing their voices had been like exhaling after weeks of holding his breath. He could inhabit the temporal world again. He could think more than a few hours into the future.
Then, perversely, things became worse.
Two of the other brothers walked to the lay community to contact the men there. They returned without having gone the whole distance. Instead, they’d found a half-dozen snow-covered and ragged sheep half a mile along the route. The sheep followed the brothers on their own, and no shout or shove could ward them off. They were skin and wool and bones, and their eyes rheumy.
There were no sheep herders in the lay community. They must have traveled here from a long way indeed. They lingered around the gates like beggars.
A day after the sheep arrived, they began to die.
Niccoluccio took up a rusty hoe and chased the sheep away, but they kept coming back, and by then it was too late anyway. The sheep died outside the gates, bleating to get in. The two brothers who’d rescued them joined them in death swiftly thereafter.
Whatever new pestilence they’d brought with them was worse than anything Niccoluccio had yet seen. He found the two brothers dead in their quarters only a day after he’d last seen them. (None of the brothers ever voluntarily came to the infirmary anymore.) Judging from the stains on their pillows and cheeks, they’d coughed blood until it dribbled out of their lips.
Several other brothers claimed to have heard them dying, but they wouldn’t open their doors to let Niccoluccio see them. They were terrified of him, afraid that he’d be next. He, too, had been near the sheep. He stayed away from the dormitory in case they were right and he only needed time to manifest the symptoms. Nothing, though.
The next time Niccoluccio made his rounds, two days later, he found three new corpses. One of the youngest men, three months out of his novitiate, had collapsed in the corridor, as if struck down searching for company.
The weather had unseasonably warmed, but the ground remained hard as iron. The blisters on his palms reopened as he dug their graves. He had once dreamed that he wouldn’t be doing this again.
He had wept as he’d dug graves before, but always for the departed, not himself. He had hardly known these men, couldn’t put names to their faces. The end of the world was revealing him to be a worse person than he’d ever known he could be. Until now, he hadn’t imagined himself so self-absorbed, so focused on his own fate and mortality. He didn’t feel a thing about these men. He couldn’t force himself to. This resurgence of the pestilence had drained everything he’d thought was good in himself.
A vicious storm swept across Sacro Cuore that evening, pelting the walls with hail, breaking windows in the church and chapter house. Niccoluccio listened from the calefactory and shivered. The wind broke branches, flung them against his door. It was as if the storm were trying to bury Sacro Cuore and the last of its men. Brother Rinieri had wondered if the natural world would continue after the end of man. That night, flinching at every gust, Niccoluccio knew the truth was lateral to that: it was the natural world that would end man.
The next morning saw the night’s rain turned to ice, covering the cloister. Niccoluccio fought, unsuccessfully, to avoid slipping on his way to the refectory. As he chewed his granite-hard bread, he decided against making his dormitory rounds. If any of the men believed he could help, they would come to him. He certainly hadn’t helped any of the sick he’d found so far, except to force them to drink water. He was no Brother Rinieri. Better to let them die on what terms they wished.
Instead he took to making long, slow walks with his memories of Rinieri. Rinieri was quiet, as usual, but occasionally he would remark on the sights around the cloister. The trimmed bushes at the southeastern edge of the cloister would die soon without care. The walls of the seyney house would be overgrown by vines unless they were trimmed by spring. Worse, snow and branches remained scattered on the floor of the chapter house. No one had replaced the windows, nor had anyone even been in there since the new pestilence.
Niccoluccio kept his hood down so as to not miss any of the other brothers should they try to attract his attention. No one came. By the end of the afternoon, the cold stung like slapping branches.
Another windstorm arrived that night, and blotted the voices he tried to create for himself.
At least during the storms there was noise and movement. His morning walks didn’t help him clear his mind. They were a longer form of pacing. He glanced at the dormitory as he passed it three times, anxious to see any sign of life, of movement, inside. Nothing.
He stopped outside the dormitory doors. With a numbing shock, he realized he hadn’t seen any living brothers in three days.
No one had come to him. No one had cleared any of the ice in front of the dormitory’s entrance. There were, so far as he could tell, no tracks other than his own.
The other brothers would at least have needed something to eat. He supposed, they could have taken days’ worth of bread from the refectory, but he hadn’t noticed any of his batches vanishing.
He wanted to stand still, blend into the cloister and wait for someone to come out. They had all been so frightened of each other that, for weeks, they might as well have each been alone.
That night, he reclined in his warm chair and tried to dream up ways to visit the other brothers. If he could convince them that he was healthy, they might let him in. Surely some of them were as starved for company. He would risk pestilence just to talk.
The next morning, he went straight to the dormitory. He stopped outside, and, for several minutes, couldn’t convince his feet to carry him in.
The first hall stood dark and empty. Most of the doors hung open to indicate that no one lived there any longer. Cold air brushed Niccoluccio’s cheek. Someone must have left their garden door open.
He shivered. He took half steps toward the closest shut door, and stopped and listened. He raised his hand and knocked timorously. After three knocks with no answer, he opened the door. One of the half-dozen former survivors lay on his bed, gaunt-jawed and open-eyed.
The next closed door was the same. A dead brother sat in mute contemplation of the stumpy remains of his candle. He wore a peaceful expression in spite of his blood-encrusted lips.
Niccoluccio rushed to the next closed door. The cold grew more bitter as he approached. He flung the door open without knocking – and found only an empty cell and a bed limed with frost. Its garden door hung open, letting in a stinging breeze.
Outside, he found bare footprints frozen in the vegetable garden. Yesterday afternoon had been the last time the ground had been soft eno
ugh to mark. These had to be at least that old. Niccoluccio had kept careful track of the stock left in the refectory stores. He was sure nothing had been taken. This cell’s inhabitant must have run away to try to make it to the nearest town, or to die. Without supplies, the result was destined to be the same. He hadn’t even taken his shoes. Possibly he’d been delirious.
The footprints faded. There was nothing to track, no one to look for. Niccoluccio closed his eyes and tried to regain control of his breath.
Later, after he’d found himself again, Niccoluccio discovered the same thing in the remaining brothers’ cells. All but three had perished. The remainder were unaccounted for. They, too, must have tried to leave – though with what supplies Niccoluccio couldn’t imagine. He double-checked the refectory and sacristy to satisfy himself that nothing had been taken.
It was of course possible that he’d just missed the remaining brothers’ corpses somewhere in the now-labyrinthine monastery grounds.
He left the sacristy, planning on walking back to the calefactory. His legs stopped halfway. He sat heavily on the stump of a tree, and buried his head in his palms.
He could have still tried to hope. The missing brothers might have survived. Brother Rainuccio’s two-man expedition could have returned. All of this talking to himself couldn’t quite silence the corner of his heart that knew the truth. More likely they were all dead.
Even if they weren’t, it would hardly matter to this place. Sacro Cuore had been waning before the pestilence struck. With the roads to Rome all but empty, the ecclesiastical hierarchy would never deem it worth repopulating.
A fitful breeze swayed the bone-white branches of the cloister’s trees. Niccoluccio lifted his head out of his hands. A dark gray cloud shaded what little of the horizon he could see. High, icy clouds stood still against the sky.
The door to the dormitory lay open. Niccoluccio had neglected to close it. Darkness loomed behind the chapter house’s broken windows. The infirmary, too, stood bare and empty. Niccoluccio stared at the cloister with slack lips. All of the voices of the world had been extinguished.
Quietus Page 9
