“I don’t believe I’ve ever been allied to such a bloody fool.” He jerked his head inside Roper’s quarters, indicating they should speak within.
Roper did not immediately respond to the accusation, instead producing a key which he fitted to the lock. “You’re well, Helmec?”
“So well, lord,” said Helmec, with indecent cheer.
Roper, Tekoa and Keturah entered, leaving Helmec on guard outside. Within, Tekoa unfastened his cloak and threw it over Roper’s bed, before proceeding to the hearth and opening the vent to reignite the charcoal in the grate. “Make yourself at home,” said Roper.
Tekoa turned back to him. “You are a god-damned fool. A vapid, half-baked clod.”
“Why?”
“There is a plague.”
“Which is my fault?”
“Of course it’s your fault!” exploded Tekoa. “You think you can just shelter thousands of people in squalor in the streets without building additional latrines or ensuring they are properly fed or warmed? You think you can then cram those people into the homes of others without infection? Plague is not a coincidence. It is not a bloody curse from the Almighty or something cooked up by the whims of chance. We have not had one for fifty years because we have not had a damned oaf like you in charge. This is what happens to rulers with a soft heart. Calamity!”
Roper blinked. He was caught off-guard by the tirade, and could think of no obvious defence of his actions. “Your counsel would have been welcome long before this stage, Tekoa,” he said, at last.
“The extent of your lunacy has only just been made clear to me,” snarled Tekoa. “You must move fast, or this fortress will be overwhelmed. We cannot lose a large proportion of our population to plague. There must be a quarantine, and it must be now.”
“What do you propose?” Roper took a seat, staring at the legate who was prowling back and forth across the room. Keturah had fallen quiet and sat on the bed beside her father’s cloak.
“Legionaries to cordon off any street where there is infection: nobody goes in or out.”
“The people won’t like it,” said Roper. Tekoa looked incredulous at that. He stalked to the chair in which Roper sat and leaned close.
“Have you not yet understood, my Lord Roper?” he said, lips barely moving. “When the piles of suppurating corpses are building up in the streets, and you cannot breathe without wanting to retch through the smell of burning flesh, and whole neighbourhoods vanish within days, you see how much the people like that.”
Instinctively, Roper wanted to resist Tekoa’s advice for the tone that it carried; for the fact that he had been made to feel like a child again. But the decision was as blatant as sand in the mouth. Within an hour, legionaries had flooded from their barracks to seal off all streets with a tuft of hay hanging in a doorway. The soldiers built barricades of barrels and carts and tables which they guarded night and day, turning away the subjects within who were at first furious, but before long had retreated silently into their own homes. The legionaries supplied them with food which they traded over the barricades to those caged inside; taking care to soak any metal they received in return in bowls of vinegar to destroy the contagion. They also provided bundles of wood, propped against the inside of the barricades for use after dark had fallen. And everywhere, pervading the fortress like the cold, was that bitter smoke, emanating from braziers of herbs.
Each day, the death toll grew faster. With every new dawn, corpses were ejected into the street by their families, beginning a pile in the middle of the cobbles that grew until dusk brought a measure of peace to the fortress. Then those bundles of wood were collected from the barricades and propped over the bodies, which were arranged with their heads facing towards the east. Nobody but the families would touch the corpses, so they were burned in the streets in which they had died. The pyres smoked and smouldered terribly, so that what remained by morning was often a pile of white ash, surrounded by charred limbs. They were scraped together and reserved for that evening’s conflagration.
Roper watched the fires. He stood with the legionaries after dark, watching from behind the barricades as flames stuttered into life further down the street and trying not to retch at the sense of responsibility that made his limbs weak. He was not sure that the connection between his treatment of the refugees and the plague was yet widely known, but he had an enemy who would ensure that it soon was.
Despite the swift implementation of Tekoa’s suggestions, the plague was already widespread. It had developed on the snow-laden streets among the refugees and spread before it had become clear what they were dealing with. Beneath locked doors, between sealed shutters: through the air or carried by the flesh or in the water or however it spread, it suffused the fortress. There was little worse that Roper could have unleashed upon his subjects. Plague was a Suthern problem: very rarely one which bothered the Anakim with their superior standards of hygiene.
The streets were deserted but for the legionaries who guarded the barricades. The markets fell quiet. The smoke invaded everything. The sickly orange glow of the corpse-fires crept beneath Roper’s shutters at night. One morning, after a night of dead-calm, Roper awoke to discover the smoke from the corpses hanging as a fog above the fortress, so that only the rooftops were visible from his elevated quarters.
He toured abandoned streets, being sure he was seen sharing in the danger of the legionaries. He felt like a fool and was desperate to regain the trust of the subjects. He had seen the way Earl William and Lord Northwic had interacted with their knightly bodyguards. He had heard from his father, from Tekoa, from Gray, how King Osbert, ruling from his throne in the south, treated his subjects. They were his servants. At all
