10: Down With The Sickness
Then there was the time I thought for sure I'd got the pale sickness.
I was miles from the nearest big city, and I thought that alone would kill me.
But since then, I've seen what happens to people in places like Newbegin and Wosh-Tun when someone gets the pale sickness, or the crazy lumps, or anything like that. They get shunned, isolated and sometime even expelled from the city.
Half the time it's their own families that throw them out, and the rest of the time — when the family sticks by them, or tries to find a physician who can help them — the entire family may as well have it.
I once saw several generations of a whole family get thrown out of Wosh-Tun because the old grandfather got the black death. Or that was what the physicians said, anyway. Whether or not he actually had it, I'll never know, because they were all ejected the next day and never seen again.
But I wasn't in a city. I was in a little town mid-country called Desolation, just stopping by to see how they lived. It was a slow town. Not much happened. A young boy called Jans showed me round on the first day, and I saw pretty much all of it. Figured I'd be out of there the next day.
But on the second morning, I could hardly get out of bed. My whole body ached, and every time I tried to even turn over in bed I felt like I'd just run a mile. When Jans called on me, I could hardly speak. He said I looked pale, like a ghost, and that was when I really started to worry. It was pale sickness took my mother, and a lot of folk still believe parents can pass it down to their children.
Jans fetched the town physician, an old guy called Edde. The fact they even had a physician was some kind of miracle, but this guy was actually experienced, and had seen the pale sickness before.
What I'd got, he said, wasn't the pale sickness. It was just some kind of fever, probably from travelling and eating food that was little better than goatshit for weeks.
Edde put me straight on how people got pale sickness. For one thing, he said the stuff about getting it from your parents is all crap. You get it from bad water, or from living with carriers — people who've got it, and can pass it on, but don't get sick themselves — in cramped, dirty conditions. But I'd been pretty much on my own for the past couple of weeks, and all I'd drank was riverwater and leafwater. Plus, I wasn't coughing up blood, which he said was a sure sign of the real deal.
So I just had to lie there and sweat the fever out, whatever it was. Which meant I spent a whole lot of time doing a whole lot of nothing, and Edde visited often.
He was once an Artisian, the most senior physician in Wosh-Tun. But he had some kind of fall-out with the council about cleaning up the city water and privys, so he left. Just upped and walked out of the city, and came to live here in Desolation where he could help people, especially travellers, with what he knew.
And he knew a lot. Wisely, he talked; wisely, I listened.
You don't catch black death, he said, from other people who are sick with it. You get it from gnat critters, who get it from sick rats.
Then he told me about something called 'desert death', which meant nothing to me, until he said some folks called it 'black puke'. Now that, I'd heard of. When I was over on the east coast, round places like Blackwater Point, folks were always wary of it.
Edde said it was even worse than pale sickness; he'd seen people live through the pale, but everyone he ever saw get desert death died within a week. They call it that because it turns your skin yellow, like sand. And yeah, it makes you puke black blood too, all while you're shivering and cramping up in pain.
That sounded like shivering sickness to me, but Edde said it's easy to get them confused. I guess the main difference is that shivering sickness doesn't always kill.
Four days after it started, my fever broke. A day later I was fine. I tried to pay Edde, but he wouldn't hear of it, so I slipped Jans five bucks instead. It was useless to him in the town, but I figured he could buy something from a passing caravan with it.
So the best way I could think of to pay back Edde was to pass on what he'd taught me. But when I saw that family thrown out of Wosh-Tun, I was helpless.
I tried to tell the physicians to look for dead rats, and that they couldn't get it just by being in the same room as the grandfather. They ignored me, said I was crazy.
When I told them where I'd learnt that stuff, of course, it just made things worse. I left before they could throw me out.
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