The Medusa Plague

Chapter Six

Bram DiThon picked his way carefully between the potholes and ice patches on the road to Thonvil, wishing the soles of his boots were not four years thin. The usual freeze-and-thaw cycle was in full swing, dawn ice turning to afternoon mud. Sometimes Bram wondered if spring would ever truly come to Ergoth's moors. The dark-haired young nobleman drew his winter cloak, heavy as a sack of coins, closer as he headed for old Nahamkin's cottage for some promised seeds.

Bram had been hoping the eighteenth day of Misha- mont, his twenty-first birthday, would find him with new boots. He was not terribly surprised when they didn't appear. His mother Rietta was too busy struggling to maintain the image of the lady of the manor. His father-well, Cormac was someone Bram didn't like to think about. Besides, not receiving a present from his family was a small price to pay for the freedom of neglect.

In fact, Cormac's neglect of all of his responsibilities had given Bram's life purpose. It was his ambition-his obsession, even-to restore Castle Thonvil to the productivity and prosperity of his grandfather's time. Due to lack of coin, Bram's mother had been forced to abandon her aspiration for him to become a Knight of Solam- nia, so he had been free, at sixteen, to inconspicuously assume the day-to-day duties of a castle's steward.

Unsurprisingly, Cormac's overtaxed tenants had long ago fled. It had taken Bram almost five years of working alone from dawn to dusk to resuscitate Castle DiThon's demesne and get the family's personal lands producing food again. That had been no small feat, considering he hadn't horse or ox to plow with.

Bram had not yet had time to attend to the castle;tself, which looked run-down enough to be abandoned. Besides, crumbling stone walls just weren't as interesting to him as the perennials that would be popping up soon: Lady s mantle, foxglove. He'd already seen hope- rul lavender poking through the last crusts of snow. Bram supplied many of the villagers with dried herbs, Ьчт the winter had been a bad one for minor influenzas, and Se was running low on the more common medici- aa-s. Fortunately, the end of the season of sickness coin- ntini "T*h the beginning of the herb season.

Bran’s eyes were on the small village ahead when he caught movement in the grass to his right. Startled, he looked out then let out a slow sigh. A snake. He'd seen at least two handfuls of them alreadу in the gardens. Their exodus from the cold earth seemed to have came earlier this year. He watched the long, black pillar with the golden diamond pattern on its head moving swiftly through the still-brown roadside grasses. What’s your hurry?" Bram thought. The snake fell the stock-still briefly, then sprang on an unsuspecting mole and gobbled it down in one gulp. The nobleman's shiver had nothing to do with the cold.

Bram hastened toward the village, which boasted no gates or other symbols to mark its entrance. It was too small, too unassuming, too poor. No neighboring lord in his right mind would care to storm Thonvil now. These days the village was no more than an unimpressive collection of dilapidated houses and small shops grouped together out of apathy and convenience. Anyone of youth or ambition had run off to the capital city of Gwynned in the last five years, when the economy had turned sour alongside the lord's fortunes.

The exodus had included members of Cormac's own family. Most recent to leave was Bram's sister Honora, who had married beneath her station to the seneschal of a small estate in Coastlund. The family had neither seen nor heard from her since, which was no burden for Bram, who found he had just enough tolerance for haughtiness to deal with their mother.

The first to leave, of course, had been Uncle Rand. Bram frequently pondered the shadowy memory of the man. Cormac had forbidden anyone to even speak Guerrand's name in Castle DiThon for more than a half decade. Was he still alive? Not even Kirah knew, or at least his aunt wouldn't say.

The notion that the spindly little blonde was his aunt always made Bram laugh. She was two years younger than he. But then, the branches of his family tree were as tangled as the limbs of a hagberry bush and just as susceptible to wind damage. And what a wind had blown through the DiThon family seven years before, when Guerrand had defied Cormac and left to pursue the study of magic.

Bram came to the long, half-timbered building whose ground floor housed the baker's shop on the right half and the only remaining carpenter in Thonvil on the left side. A narrow flight of wooden steps hugged the area between the baker's front door and the right wall, and led to the room let by his Aunt Kirah.

She had been the second member of the DiThon family to leave for Gwynned. Bolted, in fact, when Rietta had tried to marry her off to a toothless old man thirty years her senior. To everyone's surprise, Kirah had slouched back into town but seven months later, a different person, and not the better for it. While it was true she had already changed from the carefree, outspoken scamp she'd been before Rand's leaving, this was different. Worse somehow. She was skittish and withdrawn, like a reclusive old woman, though barely possessed of nineteen years. Something awful must have happened to her, but she refused to talk about it.

Bram had no notion of how Kirah paid for the room she let from the baker, or why she'd returned to a village she'd always professed to hate. She had explained to him once that it was not the village but the castle she hated. Rietta would never have welcomed her back at the castle anyway.

Nevertheless, Bram stopped by to see her whenever he came to the village. He took the stairs two at a time and knocked on his aunt's door. When no answer came, he pushed the door back gingerly, calling, "Kirah?"' It’s me. Bram.'

He stepped full into the spartan room and saw that rope bed was made feather tick fluffed into place, but he was alone. Some objects on the wooden table under the small street-side window caught his eye. A quill and ink pot were next to a note with his name neatly lettered on the front. He picked up the parchment and caught his bottom lip between his teeth; Behind the note was a pair of boots quite obviously too big for he diminutive aunt.

Bram,

The boots, of course, are for you. Don't insult my resourcefulness by protesting the expense. Besides, we can't have the local lord's son walking about like a beggar, can we? What will people say? But then, you know how concerned I've always been about that sort of thing…

Sorry to have missed you, but I felt the need for a walk and the peace it provides. Have a most merry day, dear nephew.

— K-

Bram shook his head, touched and sad at the same time at the thought of her solitary walk. The village rumor mill had it that Kirah went daily, no matter the weather, to a cove along the coast to wait for a lover who would never return. Frankly, Bram suspected his aunt had never had a lover, could not see when or where she'd had the opportunity, except, perhaps, during the time she'd spent in Gwynned. So what if she sat looking out to sea, seeking solitude?

Bram slipped on the new boots, and his eyes sank shut languorously. The fit was perfect, the soles double- thick. He no longer dreaded treading on the half-frozen dirt road.

Bram spied the quill. Taking it up, he dipped it in the ink pot and scratched a brief, Thank you, — В- at the bottom of Kirah's own note. He rolled his old, soft boots into a floppy log, tucking them under his arm as he pulled Kirah's door shut behind him. Bram checked the position of the sun in the grayish sky. Nahamkin would be wondering where he was.

A freckle-faced young woman was leaving the bakery with a coarse loaf of bread stuffed in her flour-sack apron when Bram bounded back down the stairs. Blushing, she bobbed the courtesy due the lord's son and hastened down the street, past Roxtin the carpenter's shop. Bram found himself reflecting that, although he was very friendly, he had few friends. Perhaps it wasn't possible for the villagers to be more than distantly polite with anyone named DiThon, he decided.

Bram had one true friend, a funny old man, Nahamkin. A farmer all his life, the man rose before the sun and set before it as well. Too old to make a living at farming anymore, Nahamkin was a cotter now, a tenant of a village cottage that held just enough land for him to sustain himself on the small plantings. His sons struggled on with the larger potato, barley malt, and maize fields that surrounded the village as part of the DiThon estate. Nahamkin puttered with the flowers and vegetables that had not been profitable enough for him to bother with as a farmer.

Rounding a corner at the far edge of town, Bram came into sight of the hovel in which Nahamkin happily lived. During the growing season the cottage's seediness was obscured by tall, wild gardens and flowering trees. Unfortunately there was nothing to cover it now. The thatch was rotted to black all over. The walls were not the wattle and daub of the rest of the village, but old, rocky mud, crumbling in places. And yet there was a sweet and comfortable look about the place, for the sun seemed to shine more strongly here, bringing the vellow-green of spring to the chaos of Nahamkin's aniens earlier than to the rest of Thonvil.

Bram knocked at the oddly tilting door. He could hear the old man shuffling behind it. The door flew open revealing the stoop-backed, wrinkle-faced codger, Bram had grown so fond of. Nahamkin waved made with a work-weathered hand. "Come in. come in," Nahamkin said in his hardy, hisp.

Bram dipped his head to keep from smacking it on the low door frame, having done it too many times to his own discomfort and the old man's amusement. Pots and tins and wooden pails were scattered everywhere, catching the drips of melting snow that pounded a steady, irregular rhythm with the sound of a crackling fire. It was an oddly welcoming clamor. Or perhaps it was Nahamkin's wide, toothless smile that made Bram feel welcome. The old farmer had taken the nobleman under his wing when Bram was very young and shared everything he knew about sowing the earth.

Nahamkin wiped suet from his wrinkled hands onto his stiff, much-stained leather jerkin. "You're just in time to help with the candle makin'," he announced, then returned to the dry sink to slice beef tallow into a dull, green-stained copper pot.

Evidence of the cotter's work hung from the beams overhead. Butter-colored candles-in-the-making dangled from a branch in pairs by cotton wicks soaked in a lime water and vinegar solution.

"Take the thinner ones and give them another coating in that pot over there." Nahamkin bobbed his head toward a tall tin by the fire. "That one's got the alum and saltpeter that makes 'em burn longer and cleaner. Dip them in the pot of cold well water to speed up the cooling between layers."

Bram did as he was told and withdrew the thinnest pair of candles from the branch. "How do you know so much about making candles?" he asked more for conversation than curiosity.

"My wife, rest her soul, used to make and peddle them," said Nahamkin, moving his pot of suet scraps to the fire. "I'm afraid mine don't come close to the perfection of hers, but I've got to see, haven't I?" Watching Bram, Nahamkin shook a knobby-knuckled digit at him. "Here, now, you'll have to roll those on some

parchment, or they'll be as crooked as my old fingers."

Chuckling, Bram quickly complied. They worked quietly, companionably, Bram dipping, rolling, cooling the candles, Nahamkin inspecting his work and cutting new wicks. It took thirty to forty dips to make a candle of sufficient size.

At last the old man rocked back on his heels and regarded the day's work with a satisfied sigh. "That ought to hold me until this time next year, provided I live that long." Nahamkin made a reverent gesture for luck.

"I don't know why you need so many candles," jibed Bram, wiping waxy residue from his hands. "You're alwavs on the straw, eyelids drawn, before darkness falls."

"Those of us who rise with the chickens need to see, too," Nahamkin shot back. He smirked as he added, "But you wouldn't know about early rising, being a lord's son."

Bram threw his head back and laughed. "We both know how much good that's done me."

The old man nodded kindly, fondly watching his young friend put away the candle-making supplies. No one knew better than Nahamkin that Bram's life was not typical of a lord's only son. The two had talked of it often enough. The old man secretly thought Bram was the lord of Castle DiThon, for all practical purposes, considering the work he alone did there. No one had to look very close to see that the responsible young man was nothing like his parents and sister. Over the years, Bram's comments had drawn Cormac as an oddly distant father at his closest moments, and Rietta as a mother who'd been domineering until life had forced her to consider only herself.

Bram was still chuckling as he put away the last of the wicks. He held up a new boot for Nahamkin's inspection. "Yes, the lord's son is so prosperous that his poor, crazy, penniless aunt had to buy him boots for his birthday!" Bram frowned suddenly, sorry he'd dogeared the day.

Nahamkin's gnarled hand came up to pat Bram's head. "Ah, yes. That's why I asked you here today. Twenty-one, isn't it?" He steered the young man toward the door, pushing Bram's head down to avoid the low archway. "And here you are, spending your birthday dipping candles with an old man."

"I–I enjoyed it, really, Nahamkin," Bram assured him. "It was better than plowing a field without an ox. I don't have much opportunity to do things like this."

"Not since you took over your father's duties, anyway." Nahamkin couldn't hide his scorn.

As usual whenever criticism of Cormac came up, Bram was torn between defending his father and acknowledging the truth. "He does the best he can," the nobleman said.

"Well," said Nahamkin, anxious to change a subject he hadn't meant to bring up, "just wait until you can plant these seeds I've been saving for you."

The old man took Bram's arm and guided him outside and around to the back of the cottage, beating back a path through the brambles that leaned against the structure. He looked down at a long, rectangular box built against the house, nestled in the last snow and frozen leaves. "I've been wanting to show you my newest invention for getting a jump on the weather."

Following his gaze, Bram looked down, then quickly away as a hot glint of reflected sunlight caught him square in the eyes. "What is that?" he howled.

Nahamkin knelt stiffly on one knee and lifted from the top of the box a large, expensive pane of good- quality glass. "I call it a hot box," he explained, setting the pane carefully to the side.

Bram dared another glance. The box was filled to its last inch with clay pots, and in each were tender little sprouts reaching for the sunlight. He recognized fuzzy, hand-high tomato plants, among many others. Bram was stunned. The earliest he'd ever seen annuals break seed and germinate was during the last days of Chisl- mont, and then only after an unusually warm winter.

"Got the idea at the Red Goose Inn last month. I was sitting by the one window, and the afternoon sun came pouring in. If it was hot enough to cook me through glass, I reasoned it could cause a seed to sprout. Picked the glass up from Jessup Lidiger's wife, after the weaver ran off for the city," explained Nahamkin. He cupped a willowy tomato seedling in his tough palm, sending up a cloud of fresh, acidic scent. "I'll have tomatoes ripe on the vine by Argon, mark my words."

Bram ran a hand lovingly around the box's frame. "I've got to make one of these at the castle," he breathed. "Do you realize I could grow herbs year round with this hot box of yours?"

Nahamkin half nodded. "Maybe not year round. I'll wager Aelmont and Rannmont are a touch too cold and dark to generate enough heat even through the glass, but you could certainly extend your growing season." He held up a hand expectantly, and Bram pulled the farmer to his feet, old knees popping and cracking.

"You can draw up some plans if you like while I sort through my seeds for your birthday present." Nahamkin leaned heavily on the young man's arm as they headed back through the brambles to the cottage's front door. Bram looped an arm over his friend's sloping shoulders. "A man's twenty-first birthday used to mean something, a coming of age."

Bram stopped before the door and looked over his shoulder at the dilapidated village. "Nowadays people are more concerned with surviving than marking the passage of time."

"That's so," Nahamkin grudgingly agreed.

The sound of dripping snow water inside the cottage had slowed with a late afternoon drop in temperature. The room had grown dark, except for the faintly glowing fire. The old man slit the loop that connected two new candles and held one wick to the smoldering coals. Shuffling over to an old chest, he rummaged around in it and extracted a seldom-used quill and ink pot, as well as a slip of curling, golden parchment.

"The size of your box should be determined by the glass you have," he said, placing the items, including the lit candle, on a lap desk before Bram.

The nobleman nodded. "I know where pieces have been salvaged from some of the castle's more neglected wings." He wasted no time dipping the quill to scratch an illustration of the support bars and spacers.

Nahamkin lit another candle and, for lack of a better holder, put it in the top of an empty, narrow-necked bottle. He set the light on a cabinet that he kept farthest from the fire, then pulled the handle of a long, narrow drawer. Inside were neatly catalogued parchment packages containing seeds saved from last year's crops. He flipped through them, withdrawing some well-marked favorites to divide and share with his young friend. They worked in happy, companionable silence, Bram sketching, Nahamkin sorting.

The old man was about to suggest Bram stay for some of yesterday's soup and bread, when both men heard frantic footsteps and labored breathing on the path outside. A knock came, quick and demanding.

"Bram DiThon, are you still in there?" a voice rasped through the drafty door. "I saw you walking through the town earlier."

Surprised, the young nobleman flew to his feet and opened the door. Young Wilton Sivesten, the miller's son, stood wheezing in the doorway.

"Thank my lucky stars you're still here," he said, still struggling to catch his breath. "Ma sent me to find you, what with Herus attending a death in Lusid."

Bram recognized the name of the coroner, a cavalier by training who doubled as the village physicker. "Is your mother ill?" he asked.

Wilton shook his sweat-drenched head. "It's my father. Yesterday he had the fever real bad, and today he's even worse."

"It's probably just the mild influenza that's been going around," Bram suggested in a kinder tone. "I can give you some herbs-"

"That's what Ma thought, until today." The boy's slight frame shuddered. 'Today he started scratching and thrashing, and whole patches of skin are coming off." Wilton trembled again. "You just gotta come and see for yourself."

Bram was shaken by the boy's news. He'd never heard of the influenza causing someone to lose skin. Maybe it was a new strain. "I'm no physicker," he thought, surprised to hear himself saying it aloud. "I don't even have any herbs with me."

"You're the best we got with Herus gone," the boy said, pulling desperately at Bram's hand. "My ma's about to lose her mind. You gotta come, or she'll wallop me and say I never bothered to find you."

"What will you need for fever, Bram?" Nahamkin asked, his face creased with concern.

"If it's just a fever…" the nobleman mumbled, his mind a jumble. "Uh, I don't know. Elderflower, or maybe some yarrow."

Nahamkin snapped his fingers and shuffled off to the dry sink. He offered up a cork-stoppered crock to Bram. "Dried yarrow I have." Helping Bram into his cloak, the old farmer clapped his young friend on the shoulder.

Smiling his thanks, Bram raced out the door in the tow of the miller's anxious son. He shook off the boy's desperate hand after they both stumbled over unseen rocks and roots in the dusky path. The air felt cold enough to snow, and yet none fell. They arrived at the mill before many moments had passed.

"This way," Wilton panted, snatching at Bram's arm again to lead him toward a small door on the far side of the mill. The nobleman had been to the mill many times, brought his own grain here for grinding. The storehouses, the strong scent of the donkeys who powered the massive wheel, the creaking and grinding were all familiar to Bram, but he'd never even wondered where the family lived.

He paused in the doorway of their quarters, feeling uneasy. Already he could smell wood smoke and heat… and sickness beyond fever. Why did people always seal the sick into dark, sweltering boxes, as if fetid air could cure them? Steeling himself, Bram stepped inside.

"Leave the door open," he instructed Wilton briskly, "and stop stoking the fire for a while." The boy's eyes widened in surprise, but he kicked a block into place to prop open the door. A man's husky voice howled in the next room; the two young men exchanged alarmed glances. Wilton bounded around Bram and waved him through the small front room and into the smaller one behind it.

Bram could not keep from gasping when he saw the miller. Hoark Sivesten lay on a narrow cot, naked save for a thin sheet draped over his groin. The skin of one leg and two arms was as raw-red as flayed flesh; his torso was still lily white. A large man, he'd obviously enjoyed the bread made from the mill he ground, but his limbs looked swollen beyond their normal size. Hoark was feverishly thrashing and scraping the one leg that was not that hideous vermilion against the bedclothes, his head lolling from side to side as he muttered and moaned.

"Tell me everything that's happened," Bram said, reaching out to feel the man's forehead. The miller was thrashing so furiously that it was impossible to hold a hand to him.

"It started with the fever yesterday," said Hoark's wife, Sedrette, wringing work-reddened hands against her apron. The stout woman's flour-flecked apple cheeks were streaked with tears. "I thought he got better. He was even talking this morning. Then he started rubbing his legs and arms so fast and steady, like a cricket, that I was afraid he might start a fire with the bedding. We ripped his clothes off after he shed the first leg of skin."

Bram looked up in wonderment at the odd phrase. "Say again?"

For an answer the woman reached down to the floor on her side of the cot and held up a collapsed, crystal- colored membrane as thin as a soap bubble. Her eyes dared Bram to believe. It looked for all the world like the abandoned snake skins Bram had found in fields and meadows since his youth.

"Hoark rubbed and rubbed until this came off his leg,'' Sedrette explained hoarsely.

Bram looked quickly away from the sheaf of flesh and to the man on the cot. "Maybe we should tie him down so he can't rub off any more skin."

We tried that," Sedrette said. "He's sick, but it ›etms only to have made him stronger. No one could hold him still long enough to fasten him down."

Still and all, Bram whispered for Wilton to fetch some twine. Next he told the woman to put some water on to boil, and to bring a kettle of it and a cup. Both scurried off, obviously relieved to have something useful to do elsewhere. Bram stood alone in the sickroom with Hoark Sivesten. Within moments the walls began to close on him, the sound of the man's frantic scraping and moaning all Bram could hear. Where were those people with the rope and the water? How long could it take to find twine in a mill, anyway?

Bram looked at the man on the cot. Hoark's thrashing had removed not only the sheet, but it had loosened the skin of his other leg as well. Bram bit his lip until it hurt as he watched a jagged split in the miller's skin race, like cracking ice, from groin to ankle. The flesh beneath it rushed up like red sausage released from a too-tight casing. The top layers of skin peeled back with the dry, crackling sound of old leaves. Finally, the man stopped thrashing and lay panting in a twisted mess of bedding and sweat and dead skin. Just as suddenly his breathing slowed. The young nobleman had to look closely to see the shallow rise and fall of the miller's sodden chest.

Bram jumped when the man's son dashed, breathless, through the doorway, trailing a length of coarse twine. "He's so still," Wilton observed almost distantly. "Is he dead?"

Bram shook his head. "No, but I don't think we'll be needing the rope anymore."

"I got that water," the miller's wife announced as she scraped her ample hips through the narrow doorway. Sedrette Sivesten gaped slack-jawed, all the stumps of her front teeth exposed when she saw that her husband was quiet. "What did you do to him?" It was not an accusation.

Bram shrugged helplessly. "I guess he got rid of all the skin he needed to." He looked to the pot and cup she held. "It probably wouldn't hurt to have him still drink some yarrow tea, what with all the water he's lost sweating."

The miller's wife handed the steaming pot and cup to Bram. "What is this, some kind of skin-shedding influenza?" she asked, moving quickly to reposition the filthy sheet that had slipped from her husband's torso. "Is Hoark going to be all right now?"

"I… don't know the answer to either question," Bram admitted. "It's like no influenza I've ever heard of, but I think he's through the worst of it, whatever it is." He pinched three fingersful of Nahamkin's dried yarrow bloom and dropped it into the mug, filling it only half full with warm water. It would be difficult enough to get the reclining, insensate man to drink without burning his chest.

Bram gave directions for the tea to the miller's wife. "Get him to drink as much of it as you can, Sedrette. It should help stave off the return of a fever. Keep him warm, but don't try to roast him again."

She nodded eagerly, relief evident on her chubby face as she walked Bram out of the sickroom. At the doorway that led outside, she pumped Bram's hand furiously, thanking him. "You come to the mill any time, day or night, Bram DiThon, and we'll work your grain without taking multure-not a ring, or even a single bushel-for payment."

Bram felt decidedly uncomfortable with the gratitude and the generous offer, but before he could point out that he had done little more than make tea, Sedrette Sivesten scampered on lighter feet back into the sickroom.

Bram's first lungful of fresh, cold night air blistered its way down his throat, making him cough until he was certain he'd expelled every particle of stagnant air inhaled in the sickroom. It was late, by sight of the risen moon, how late Bram couldn't tell. Snowflakes, dry as potash, swirled about in the wan moonlight. Bram was weary to the bone, and he headed straight home. Passing through the edge of town, where gates should have been but were not, he recalled the reason for his trip to Thonvil this day, his birthday still. With a start he had a memory of seed packets on the dry sink in Nahamkin's cottage. Bram sighed. It had not been the best of birthdays.

At least, he thought, the end of the miller's day had taken a turn for the better.