Stranger Times

Quiet Night

Blood-red wine swayed its glass cradle, lapping against the sides of his chalice like gentle waves caressing the hull of a ship.

Stroking that glass with the tip of his blackened finger, a stranger sat in a darkened corner of a tavern. The distant light from the hearth wasn't allowed to touch his face as he huddled beneath his cloak, his arms resting a worn wooden table as he listened to a small group of Genoese sailors finish their drunken shanty.

"God be praised, it's good to be back in the City of Cities!" One of them cheered, hoisting his mug into the air and slowly twisting to glance from one side of the tavern to the other. "As wondrous as those heathens in the east are, the Grace of God doesn't shelter them."

A hush fell over the sailors as the big, burly man seemed to only just realize what he said. The jovial atmosphere was whisked away like the smoke of a single candle caught in a hurricane. The sailors sat down, still to sober to help but be somber.

"Plague," one of the locals muttered into the silence that followed. Heads were bowed, prayers were murmured, and the man in the corner flinched beneath his hood.

He remembered bodies, a few still moaning in fear and agony, as they were catapulted over the walls. Broken, mangled forms surrounded in a cloud of fleas. Pustules, rot, death. Corpses piled high and set alight. The stink of burning flesh, hair and clothes now carved in his memory.

Plague. That word, alone, was enough to make his stomach churn and his hands shake.

"The Kahn's empire in Xanadu has been ravaged. The sultans in India speak of half their people felled in a single year. Cities abandoned because the corpses outnumber the living," another sailor said, into his mug. "God has turned His wrath on those poor bastards."

The thought brought a humourless, joyless smile to the man's lips.

"God has nothing to do with it," one of the locals said. "No emperor has ever done more for God's kingdom on earth, and Justinian suffered plagues under his reign."

The man in the corner remembered a friar, a good and holy man, moaning in delirium and pain. His emaciated body covered in boils as he lay in the mud and asked why God had abandoned him.

"Pray that you're mistaken," one of the sailors said. "Or what protection will any of us have?"

"I heard the Tartars spread it. Make it and spread it. Cursed Kaffa and killed it's defenders. Their so-called 'Golden Horde' didn't have to lift a finger to take the fortress," a local said.

The man remembers pushing a boat out into the water, helped by a dozen sickly, weary fellows. The soldier beside him, fingertips black, rotten and gangrenous. A knife in the moonlight and a body left in the water.

The man rubs the hilt of that same dagger with his other hand.

"How is the plague spread?" another asked.

"From the sick, alive and dead," the burly sailor insisted. The sailor fixed a hard glare around the room, and growled. "No one on my ship has gotten sick since we left. And we spent weeks at sea."

"I won't turn my sword on God fearing men, especially not healthy ones who have coin," the tavern's owner said, as he set down another pitcher of ale in front of the sailors. "That plague is far away from here."

"Tell that to Kaffa. Or the Turks," another local said bitterly. "We ought to start blocking the ports. Burn ships coming from those lands."

The burly sailor stood up, took four loud steps over to the table the speaker sat at, and very deliberately put his fist into the poor fool's nose. The local man's nose cracked and bent, blood spraying onto the table before the sailor's victim slid off his stool and fell to the ground.

His fellows throw themselves to their feet and launch themselves at the sailor, who goes down in a mass of flailing bodies. The other sailors join in, and the locals at other tables throw themselves into the mix.

The man at the table finishes his wine, flinching from the pain of clutching at the glass with his blackened, rotting fingers. The sickly sweet taste is a balm to the pain of his body and the horrors of his heart.

He sets the glass down and it slips from his fingers, tumbling off the table and smashing on the ground.

"Apologies," the man said to the owner, as he left a pair of silver ducats on the table.

"You'll cause less damage than these fools," the owner replied as he scooped the coins into his pocket.

"That may not be true," the man said, as he dodged around the brawl and slipped out to the street. He turned a corner and set his eyes back onto the small ship he had docked nearby. Then ship that had carried a dozen men from Kaffa.

Eleven corpses now lay in the moonlight, resting in their open tomb on the gentle waters of Constantinople's docks.

The man sighed, and his dying hand rested on the damp spot on his shirt, where a bulb of swollen flesh in his armpit leaked thick, yellow pus down his side.

"I want to live," he muttered, as he walked into the streets, trying his best to enjoy the revelry of the night in the City of Cities.