Loyalty: A Tale in Three Voices by grey_gazania

Part I, Chapter I (Tókhesh)

FA 459

I was 12 years old when the rains rolled down from the North — old enough to guard the goats but too young to wed.  And guard the goats I would have done, but that spring, the wolves and hill-cats who sometimes preyed on our livestock were among the least of our worries. It rained for months, hard, driving rain that washed our crops away, drowned the goats and filled the copper mines with water. Mudslides from the hills buried whole villages, and others were destroyed by floods as the Nuváthisi overflowed its banks. The Kházad to the West were spared, sealed deep in the mountains as they were, but our neighbors to the East, my mother's people, fared no better than we did.

People from the outer settlements streamed into our city seeking shelter, which we had; food, which we did not; and above all the protection of my grandfather, Lúpentho, later called Ulfang. The eldest descendent of Yéfan the Fearsome who had united our people so many generations ago, he had been our leader since the death of his father some thirty years earlier. He had expanded our territory along the river, brokered an alliance with our neighbors to the East, established trade with the Kházad and the Southern Lands, and held off the greedy raiders from the Northeast, who had long coveted our copper mines. But even he, fierce and cunning as he was, could not protect us from the fever that followed on the heels of the rain.

In the beginning, we did not realize the danger. My baby brother was the first to fall sick, but little Lúfuk had been born under an ill moon, weak in the lungs and too small, and no one was surprised by his death. But the fever spread, slowly at first but then gaining speed, causing whole families to collapse in ones and twos and threes. Always it followed the same pattern — first a fever, chills, and vomiting, sometimes accompanied by pain in the head and the limbs. If the signs stopped there, the person would likely survive. But often the disease only grew worse, bringing on a bloody cough, convulsions and, finally, the death-sleep.

We gathered the ill in our meeting hall, laid out on blankets so that our healer, Lame Haná, could tend to them all in one place. We all helped as best we could, but for the first time in memory, her treatments did not work. The willow bark did nothing to halt the fever; either those who had fallen sick would fight the disease themselves, or they would die.

My brother Lúkub had passed beyond healing and our mother, already tired from the babe she carried in her womb, was weak and pale with the early fever when Lame Hána called a meeting. "Start boiling the water," she told us as we gathered in the square -- at least, those of us who were still standing. She was leaning heavily on her stick, her eyes tired, but her voice remained strong and clear.

"You think that's what's causing the fever?" my aunt Thisí asked, her mouth pinched with worry. My cousins had been spared so far, but with my brothers ill, it was only a matter of time.

"Could be," Lame Haná said. "With all the flooding we've had, something could have seeped into the wells. But even if it's not, boiling can't hurt." She swatted at a bug and added, "Use the wells furthest from the river, too. The air there has a bad smell. I don't like it."

And so began my treks to the far well, carrying bucket after bucket of water to Lame Haná and her helpers. My arms and legs soon ached and sweat ran down my back, but it was better than being in the meeting hall. The windows were thrown wide to bring fresh air to the sick, but the smell inside was still powerful, and the flies buzzed in to cluster on the blood and filth of the dying.

Not that the bugs by the well were any fewer, and those ones bit, leaving itchy lumps on my skin. But at least the air there was clean. And my mother needed the water. So I wiped the sweat from my brow, took another pair of buckets, and made my way back to the well.