A Beautiful Poison by Idrils Scribe

The City

The second and greatest evil came upon Gondor in the reign of Telemnar, the twenty-sixth king... a deadly plague came with dark winds out of the East. The King and all his children died, and great numbers of the people of Gondor, especially those that lived in Osgiliath.

The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, Annals of the Kings and Rulers: Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion

Osgiliath stank of piss and terror. 

Elrond tried not to breathe as his carriage crossed the great bridge. 

The city’s clever Numenorean sewer system had ceased to function. Angry crowds railing against water from the Mountains of Shadow smashed the aqueducts flowing in from Ithilien, and the craftspeople who might repair them had long died or fled. The river Anduin was the only water to be had now. In high summer it ran slow and lukewarm, choked with the city's waste - and its corpses. 

He looked out the window at the water churning below, but then the smell hit him and his stomach soured. The Plague made all bodies bloat alike: men and women, young and old, Numenoreans and Lesser Men bobbed side by side. Their dark-haired heads looked like strange floating nuts until the corpse-gasses evaporated and they sank to the bottom to be fed on. Only the eels thrived in times like these

And yet there were people about. The rich had long fled to their country estates, burghers to their ancestral villages, spreading the Plague throughout the land. Only the poorest remained in the city, and they fled their crowded housing, where the disease leapt from shack to shack and devoured entire families within a day. They milled about on the squares and leafy avenues, scared of the river, of the sewers, of one another, dying in droves - on street corners, under bridges, in marble arcades. 

Osgiliath had no hands left to dig that many pits, not enough quicklime to keep stacked corpses from festering in the summer heat. Bloated green corpse-flies burrowed into every crevice, carrying the plague. And so the bodies were tipped into Anduin, and the eels grew fat.

They were headed for the crown prince’s refuge; a fortified mansion, more citadel than house, in a leafy quarter on the river’s western bank. 

A man lay sprawled on the steps leading to the front door. 

“Careful, lord, do not touch him!” Elrond’s coachman yanked him back by his sleeve when he rushed over to examine the sick man. Only then did Elrond notice the tell-tale stains, blood and pus soaking through the man’s tunic from the weeping sores in his armpits. 

The Plague - and what else, in Estë’s name, could it be? The Plague, in its inexorable third and final stage. There was no help for this poor fellow, no succor, no comfort but death. Elrond struggled to keep his expression even and smooth - master healers did not weep. 

The Man looked so young, perhaps not even twenty, with the olive skin and aquiline profile of Harondor. What had brought this southern boy to Osgiliath, the city of the king? And what led him here, to choose for the place of his death the crown prince’s doorstep, his back against the gate? 

The boy tried to speak, but the Plague’s abscessed lymph nodes had closed his throat so that breath could barely pass, and delirium burned in his gaze. 

“Hope …”

This mansion was Gondor’s hope. With the king and his wife lost to the Plague, their only son had been sealed into his house to weather the epidemic. 

Alas, for Sauron’s artfulness! The Torturer cleverly engineered this accursed disease. Walls of stone could not hold a pathogen so elegantly designed, so flawlessly lethal. A gram-negative bacterium strong and versatile enough to ride rats and fleas, be carried in the pus oozing from the wounds of the dying - or be borne upon the very air they breathed. 

The Plague had an exquisite predilection for the genetic makeup of the Edain. Numenorean blood became a death sentence, and Gondor’s people had the purest of all in Middle-earth. 

Elrond could offer the dying boy neither hope nor healing. All he might do was ease the inevitable passing. It was a warped, alien kind of compassion, but Elrond was so weary of sickness and despair. A good death was all he had left to give. He reached out his mind and caught the boy’s in his. Some strength yet remained, like a wounded bird flapping its wings against the hunter come to deal mercy, but the coruscating thread connecting the boy’s fëa to his hroä had frayed thin already. Snapping off a child’s life had become an easy thing after so many, and the light fled from the boy’s eyes in an instant. 

The coachman watched from a safe distance, his face a mask of indifference. Compassion had run out a long time ago, in this city. Once the boy’s final death rattle passed his blistered lips, the man whistled sharply, a familiar sound in these streets. Soon a mule cart appeared around the corner, its drivers dressed in long-snouted masks and waders. Their creaking wain was stacked high with corpses. The boy was headed for a nameless grave in Anduin’s waters. He was someone’s son.

Elrond could not watch him tossed onto the cart like a sack of grain, but turned around and climbed the steps to the gilded gates of the crown prince’s mansion. Instead of a door he was faced with a thick seam of coagulated metal: prince Tarlanc’s residence was welded shut. To knock here was entirely pointless. He did so nonetheless.

“Hail Lord Elrond, and well met!” called someone from a window high up. A basket was lowered on a rope, and Elrond climbed in. 

Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices ... great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night ... And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug … And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. 

Agnolo di Tura, 14th century chronicler from Siena, Italy, on the Black Death

 

Chapter End Notes

Hi everyone, and welcome!

I hope you'll enjoy my first foray into the horror genre.

The research for this little tale was a wild ride, and as we go I'll be sharing some of the weird and wonderful histories I happened upon. Whatever Elrond may think, the star of this story is of course the Great Plague. Afaik Tolkien gives no details on the disease except that it's deadly, so I've concocted a hybrid horror. The disease's transmission modes are those of the actual Black death (good old Yersinia Pestis), but the airway compression is strangles (Streptococcus equi), a thoroughly terrifying disease in horses.

A comment with your thoughts on this chapter would make my day.

See you tomorrow, and stay spooky!
Idrils Scribe