I cannot feel my legs. And I cannot feel the tip of my fingers, my palms, my wrists and forearms. Only a tingling numbness that seems to try and whisper me to pull away - apply some force, and those unsightly limbs will fall, like the bee’s stinger after a stab, and let me fly free.
But the darkness around me speaks differently. It is like a mantle of leaves interposing between my eyes and the world without: faint flickering motes of light are visible, framed by a suffocating sea of black.
Suffocation, yes. I breathe in, my lungs scream - I can feel the disease still waging war upon my body. I inhale through my nostrils - and my senses are overwhelmed by a sickly-sweet miasma clawing at my throat: heavy, cloying, like rancid meat left overlong under the sun, mingled with the acrid tang of sour, purtrefying bodily fluids and the earthy, damp smell of disturbed soil.
The scent moves to my tongue, inescapeable, a reminder of that foul rot surrounding me. Then, a change in the deathly stillness: thump. It echoes from above the amassed leaves, and it shuffles them - the mass moves and is pushed even lower into the desecrated earth. Thump - another follows, another shiver in the air, another burden upon my body.
Thus I remember. No leaf interposes between my eyes and the pale light of Winter sun: but corpses. These are the corpses of Splitwater-by-Icelace - and I shuffle in their mass grave. A solitary blade of sunlight pierces the coalesced union of hands, limbs, and faces, allowing me to see a singular visage amidst them all. His eyes, once brown like spruce bark, now look at me pale and yellowed - hateful. Wise-man Helmut, why do you hate me so?
-
Womanly wails echo in a simple house by the river, smothering the sound of foamy waters. The mist-laden outside is damp, chilly, whilst within the house, the roaring flames of torches and hearth spread a suffocating heat. A different dampness fills the single-room house, for the air is thick with the scent of sweat and blood.
A concerned man with a black beard, three young boys with raven hair, two maids with blood-soaked hands, a physician with heavy beads of sweat - all surround a wide bed of hay and linen upon which a woman screams. She is giving birth, but doom weighs heavily upon the hall, and the screams turn progressively weaker, and weaker.
The physician cannot cut. He shakes his head, powerless, at the black-bearded man. The maids, with white virginal coif upon their heads, cry bitter tears. The three young boys seem to lack complete clarity upon what is happening.
There is so much blood upon the white linen. Then the crack of a broken scream, the stillness of silence, followed by a spurt and a stomach-churning sound of viscous liquid impacted upon by a tiny, fragile body. The physician kneels to pick up the newborn, but his eyes are upon the lifeless mother - he loved her. He could never tell her, for she was married, but he loved her.
The newborn is given to the black-bearded man. He loved her too, for she was his wife, and had brought to light the joys of his life: three young strong boys. They, in fact, loved her too: she was their mother, and she could prepare a decoction of melissa and honey that tasted sweet in summer, and preserved as mead for the winter.
The young maids cried, for they loved her too: she had taught them all, through pregnancies three, and prepared them for the day in which their own bodies would have given birth to little rays of sunshine.
Oddly enough, amidst them all, nobody loved the little newborn, who cried her first wail underneath the gaze of a stern, heartbroken father. All could see it in his eyes, the murderous temptation: girls born in Winter hardly ever live, and the river was close, cold, and foamy. But he did lay the newborn in a solitary crib, left her to the care and study of the physician, and then moved to cry over his once-wife.
-
You loved her, did you not, Wise-man Helmut? That golden-haired mother of mine which I never knew, who gave me but a speckle of that gold - a cruel reminder to her husband that in me a part of her lived. I look away from the eyes of Wise-man Helmut: I was powerless, I had no mind of my own, why would he hate me so?
I feel a warmth slithering up my right arm. The shuffling of corpses underneath the weight of more of their peers added to the mass grave has liberated my forearm from a burden, and now life comes back to it. I extend, grasp at a gaping mouth with my fingers, using the Weaver’s Wife jaw as the first step of a ladder towards the light.
Thump - another corpse falls. Someone above must be piling up the dead of Splitwater-by-Icelace. The malady had fallen so quickly upon us all - even Wise-man Helmut could do nothing to stop it from spreading. The elders and younglings died first, their lungs bleeding out of their mouths in a foul malodorous sludge. Then the others started to follow, one by one, slowly - soon Splitwater-by-Icelace was ordered quarantined, and the King’s Men came to enforce that order.
My feet are cold. I feel them now, so terribly cold. For they are bare: was I taken for a corpse, had my boots been stolen? Yet now my legs move, and they push me higher still - my right sole supported by Farmer Dreiger’s back, the left sole upon his head. He was a wide, strong man, after all the work in the fields, after having ripped turnips, beets, and potatoes from the hard Damaran soil around the village. At times, he gave me herbs, the flowers that grew around his fields.
-
Upon a small glade by the shade of spruce trees, the Summer sun falls on a girl and her little fire. Neatly arranged, with stones surrounding the core to avoid the uncontrolled spread of flame, and sturdy straight branches in a triangular pattern to support a small iron skillet lazily hanging above the heat.
She wears simple clothes of folded linen and wool - Summer it may be, but the land is cold still, and she is happy for the warmth that the flame is giving. The water in the skillet vivaciously boils, and thus she seeks and finds, in the small pouch slung around her shoulder, a bouquet of fresh, strange herbs, and dried berries. She knows the name of a few only: yarrow, the bark of willow trees, and lingonberry - the others are a mystery still. Yet she must pierce their enigma.
She breaks them and squeezes them, rubs them in her palms, then casts them as moist powder in the water. It is like a Summer snow, with the white of lingonberry flowers spreading a gray colour in the boiling liquid. The scent, herbal and deep, stings her nostrils and pushes her to recoil, but there is no learning without suffering. Thus she returns to be a witness to the mysteries of herbs.
Then a manly howl echoes in the glade.
Three young men with raven hair march towards her, some with anger, some sneering, amused. They demand answers that the girl is unable to give; they demand work that the girl, of feeble constitution, is unable to perform. But they do not listen to reason. One grabs her shoulders, pulls her away from the brew, then kicks her stomach for good measure. She crawls, attempting to regain her breath, only to see the contents of the skillet spread upon the glade.
The three then walk away. And the girl would do better to follow, for if she does not then they will tell all to the black-bearded man, and he has hated her from the day she was born.
-
Farmer Dreiger understood - he was kind. He knew the work in the fields well enough to understand I could never do something like that - I was just born wrong. But he was kind, so he gave me herbs, he allowed me to cook them in his barn, allowed me to experiment, to play with the combinations, to seek the ways my teas could be better.
Memories start to flood back to my mind. Thump - men thought the disease came from the water, the river poisoned by the corpse of a winged beast that had fallen dead upstream. But the illness was not caused by a rotten carcass - I tried to tell them, but they would not listen. It struck the lungs, it spread by way of air - the fog turned red by the continued coughing of men and women choking on their blood. It was a malady, a plague.
So they started to ration the old water encased in ice. Drinking less, rather than more. Drinking cold, rather than warm. The ate dry meat, for they thought meat did good to their health, whilst they should have consumed teas, herbs, medicines. The only thing greater than their wickedness was their foolishness.
I climb, my thoughts turning dark. Thump - another shuffle. I lose my footing, and grasp at the closest thing I can find: face. My thumb pierces through a half-melted eyesocket, and the skull underneath offers enough support to pull myself up, whilst my feet find purchase on the half-collapsed ribcage that once belonged to the boat-man who travelled back and forth along the Icelace, bringing goods from the big cities in the South.
Gasping, I look at the skull I violated, and I see the black-bearded man. Another word would define him better, but that word can hardly emerge in my thoughts, and will never emerge from my mouth - he is just the black-bearded man.
-
In the distance, the Wintery fog is pierced by warm lights. High flames perched atop wooden towers, that announce those within the circle to remain, and those without to stay away. Armed men with sharp spears surveil the circle, each of them bearing the effigy of the mythic sovereign, the bane of Dragons.
The village, enclosed in that gloomy perimeter, is enwreathed in death, and the foul stench of decay. Corpses wrapped in dirty linen await outside the doors of each house, for the strongest of men to pick them up and bring them to a mass grave dug at the core of the village, in front of the chapel raised to equitable and fair death.
The streets are cold, moist with mud, and caked with blood. Doom has come upon the village, a divine judgement in the eyes of the people, for their many misdeeds and their evil. Upon the main road, which cuts through the temple square and then leads South to warmer lands, walks a black-bearded man. A yellowed bandage covers his left eye, blood leaks down is dark beard. He carries a corpse, wrapped in linens.
His step is weary, for the disease is strong within him. But as he approaches the mass grave at the core of the square, he is stopped by a man wearing the effigy of the King, and holding a long sharp spear. A moist cloth covers his visage, preventing the black-bearded man to see whether the other is young, or old, but he stops nevertheless. The man-of-the-King uncovers the linens, and sees underneath the visage of a young girl, with hair the colour of hay - pretty, were she not thin, possibly consumed by the plague.
Yet the linens move, faintly. Her breath caressing the cloth, for she is not dead yet. The man-of-the-King looks at the black-bearded man, a frown, many questions. The black-bearded man holds the girl’s body with a tremor, and say something dire, something cruel. The sound is lost in the fog, and the man-of-the-King steps aside. Calloused hands, hateful hands, neck-clenching hands, they toss the still-living corpse in the mass grave, so close to the bottom.
Justice, at last.
-
I remember the white of my veil. Most bring their daughters to their wedding altar in a white veil, but I was met with a different husband. From the sight of it: many husbands, many wives. They had all falllen to the disease, and they had died in pain, for they would prefer to listen to thick-skulled ignorance and concerns born of superstition.
I pull the thumb away from the skull of the black-bearded man, and push his face down, so that the mass of cadavers may eat him in the depths. Then I realize that I am close to the surface, for I hear the buzzing of flies that would not dare to delve too deep in the grave. Thump - the light disappears, a corpse flung right above me.
The movements of the light, the shadows that keep shifting, they now make sense. A man above is casting corpses within, many of them, at times stopping to shuffle through their belongings for anything precious. And, narrowing my gaze, peering upwards through the forest of flesh as if it were a peephole, I can see the man-of-the-King, finding copper coins in Lumberwoman Hedla’s apron.
As I move forth I will be like the lamprey, slithering cruelly towards a prey. I shall pull him in the grave, and in the confusion take his spear and punish him for what he did to the few fair souls of Splitwater-by-Icelace - as no amount of disrespect to the many rotten ones of the same place can counterbalance the foul deed.
He turns, to regard someone approaching. Meanwhile, the eyes of Lumberwoman Hedla fall upon me. Her lips are dried and cracked, her skin pale, her gaze faded into death, her odour foul. It makes me shiver, how one so strong could have become nothing but a deathly puppet. I turn back to observe the man-of-the-King, but he is stumbling, weary. His legs unable to support him, he falls back into the pile of corpses. I ask myself not the reason why, and give myself the final push upwards.
My arms hurt. My legs hurt. My lungs hurt. All is pain - but as long as pain lacerates my body, it means I am alive. I stumble, far less agile than the lamprey, for it is hard to find good footing on shuffling corpses, and manage to find the man-of-the-King’s spear. The fog surrounds us, and I can barely see the village’s houses. All around the crows caw their feasting song, readying themselves for the banquet, and the flies already spurt their vomit and eggs upon the rotting corpses.
I stand upon Lumberwoman Hedla’s corpse, for she was powerfully built and stable, and stab with my spear in the man-of-the-King’s face. He does not move, but I do not care. Blood spurts out of his face, and I stab it again with the spear. His face collapses as I dig through it with the sharpened edge, and kill him. Even if he is already dead. Again and again, the sound of cracking bone, ripping flesh, and vengeful screams out of my aching lungs. Until my arms can manage no more, and I fall on my knees.
I feel like crying. I look up at the sky, hoping to see something beyond the fog turning the Sunlight pale as all those corpses below me. And above, I see a figure. Wreathed in brown-and-gray moth-bitten garbs, her hands ancient and old, like those of a woodland hag. There is a yellow smile underneath the gray hood, yet in all those plain, faded colours, I can see a little hint of hope above: a small pin, purple as amethyst, upon her brooch. She is offering me one of her hands as help to stand above the mass of corpses.
I extend my own to meet hers, and keep living.
