Chapter Eight: Interlude - Among the Ill and Dying

 

Mombasa noticed, after declaring his thirtieth patient in a row dead, that he couldn’t draw in a full breath.

At first, he thought, Oh, this is shock. I’m in shock. 

Then, What am I saying? I’ve been stuck in a closed tent with patients hacking their lungs out with only a cloth to cover my mouth and nose. Of course I’m going to get sick too.

His eyes slid slowly over the bodies, lichen growing out of their mouths and noses, faces blue from lack of breath. His medical team had arrived too late. This was a whole village of two hundred people, felled in fewer than four days.

And now he knew, his medical team would die too.

“Telsi,” he croaked to the nurse, who hurried to his side. The younger man was also showing signs: shortness of breath, white spots around his eyes, short coughs like his body was starting to detect something in his lungs…

Mombasa grabbed the nurse’s arm, speaking softly. “You know as well as I do that it’s too late for these people, and it’s too late for us. I need you and the others to make a quarantine barrier around the village. We can’t have anyone coming upon this unawares. You know the signs. The words.”

Telsi nodded slowly, stifling a cough against his arm. “Yes, doctor,” he murmured. “Is there really no way...to save them?”

Mombasa turned and ran his eyes around the tent. The villagers, all ecking out a living on the very southern borders of the empire, scraping together their next meal from the cold ground, all lay shivering on that same earth.

It had been a particularly bad winter, and many of the common people simply didn’t understand the dangers of living so far south. They didn’t understand what came as the ice and snow advanced….

“In just a few weeks, this village will be gone, crushed under thirty feet of snow,” Mombasa predicted. “And that will only be the beginning. No, there’s nothing we can do for them or us. Not anymore.”

Telsi nodded his head slowly. Bless the child, he didn’t even cry as he made his way out of the tent into the bitter winds.

Mombasa sat down in a cross-legged position on the floor, watching his moaning patients. He imagined that every moment it was getting harder to breathe, although it would probably take a least three days to die. But the thought of caring for yet another person he couldn’t save---

The tent swished open behind him, and he shivered from the gust of chilly air. “No, go away,” he ordered in the strongest voice he could muster. “There’s no use for you here, now go!”

“I don’t take orders from Chith,” came a calm, cold voice from behind him.

Mombasa startled at the unfamiliar voice, then twisted around. A heavily bundled figure walked toward him, removing the layers around their face.

“You can’t be here,” Mombasa croaked, holding up a hand. “The lichen---”

He stopped as the person removed their hat and scarf, revealing russet-brown skin and black hair and eyes. A woman who looked nothing like the Chith dying on the ground or in the camp.

She was Innis.

“I bring tidings and condolences from the Regent,” she said, glancing around the room with careless eyes. “These last few winters have been unusually bad, and the Seers expect they will only get worse. We recommend your people move north, beyond the reach of the lichen.”

Mombasa forced himself to stand, a hot rage washing through him. How dare this Innis woman come into their sick camp without a care in the world, and tell them to leave?

“Or your people could just remove whatever curse you have placed on us so we stop dying,” Mombasa hissed. He coughed violently, doubling over.

She gazed dispassionately. “You heathens are so far beneath us...you are not worthy of our curses. Accept that you don’t belong on the Icefields, and then you will stop dying.”

She turned on her heels, retying her scarf. “I was just traveling through and thought I would pass on the message. Do with it as you will.”

Mombasa sank to his knees as she stalked out, still coughing.

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Photo by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash