Death After Death-Chapter 362 - Triage
Before Simon could help the masses, though, he had to help those closest to him, which meant getting a handle on the situation. It was worse than he feared. While he’d only touched on it in the outskirts of Abresse, some of the people here at the Wayfarer had seen trouble coming off the docks the week before and fled, bringing the disease with them. While he’d left his inn in as fine a shape as he could imagine, he’d come back to squalor.
People were at wits end, especially Bessa. She seemed about to pass out standing up when she saw Simon. Now that he was paying attention to the miasma of illness, he could see who was sick and who wasn’t, and he was grateful to see that she was merely exhausted trying to care for so many.
“I d-didn’t think you’d come,” she stammered. “I thought that the plague might have gotten both of you. I can’t imagine how bad Abresse is now with all of this.”
“Not as bad as it will be in a week or a month,” Simon clarified as he took in the situation and bombarded her with questions. For a moment he worried that the former slaves he’d sent her had been the ones to spread this illness so far so fast, but his cook assured him that wasn’t the case.
“They were a fine help when everyone else started showing up the following week,” she assured him.
Simon took charge immediately, and gave a short speech from his balcony which overlooked the front yard. He put on his armor first, though, because he knew it would make the frightened people below take him more seriously.
What he tried to do was assure them they had everything they needed to beat this, and give them hope. That wasn’t strictly true, of course, but it would be soon enough. Still he stood there assuring everyone that this was not a divine punishment from the gods, or witches curse and that it be cured.
“With any luck at all everyone will be on the road to recovery within a fortnight,” he assured them. Some doubted him but they were shouted down by those who desperately wanted to believe. Given that most of the still healthy people had fled, the doubters were greatly outnumbered by people who wanted to believe him.
That wasn’t to say that everyone was sick or dying. It was just that every group had at least one person in such a state that the rest could not bear to leave behind. Simon spent the rest of the day putting everyone to work.
Mostly that meant cleaning. He didn’t have enough beds for everyone, but that was quickly rectified. In the space of an afternoon the common room was torn apart and remade as a crude hospital ward, and spare bedding was shredded to become bandages and face masks as he put everyone to work.
Some people were sent north to the woods in small groups to gather herbs and hunt game. Others were put to fetching and boiling water to sterilize it, or caring for the sick. That last group would almost certainly get sick themselves in a day or two, but Simon was working on that too, or at least Leon was.
While he technically wasn’t the stable boy anymore he’d stayed on as a carpenter, and right now he was chiseling out wooden forms that Simon had drawn for him. They were simple things, that were very nearly the words for lesser curing powered by fire. That’s what they would become after a little work on his part, but he didn’t want to share that information with the boy, or the smith who he planned to recruit to cast them in bronze.
Even so, with all the trust the young man had for him, Leon had still asked, “Are you sure this okay? This symbol… are you sure it isn’t evil?”
Simon nodded and assured him it wasn’t. “It’s just a holy symbol from up north,” he explained. “We will use it to heal the worst cases, where medicine fails us.” Even with help it was a solution that took several days to create. It cost Simon as much silver to buy the smith’s silence as it did to actually make the things, but even with all those costs it was worth it.
The objects were nothing but cheap copies of those that he’d made in Charia. Their workmanship was rougher, which meant they’d take more fire and put out less healing to do the job, but it was what he was capable of on such short notice. Really, except for the fact that he’d only done a little of the work himself on the final inscriptions to connect all of the words properly before hiding those runes the most remarkable part of them was that he’d done so little to create them.
Those first few days, despite all of his efforts, the most they’d done was to keep the situation from spiraling out of control. Medicine and bandages could only do so much, though, and as more people became sick, just grinding leaves and mixing them in the right proportions became a full time job for Simon.
Everyone else had their hands full too. He was hardly alone in that. Aranna was a dutiful nurse, working late hours every night, at least until she started to get sick too. Likewise, Bessa never left the kitchens at this point. With so many people in need of food to keep up their strength, it was a round the clock operation that included half a dozen helpers.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Those were just for cleaning, too. There was a whole group led by Leon that was devoted simply to gathering, splitting, and carrying the endless firewood they needed; those needs only doubled when Simon’s magical trinkets got into circulation too. After that the fires never burned hot or high, no matter how stacked with wood they were, frustrating Bessa to no end.
The very first person to receive one of the amulets was Aranna’s mother. She wasn’t the sickest, but she was the sickest person that he cared about as an individual, and he made the hard choice there. Even though he got four more into the hands of those who needed them most, people died as a result of his selfishness, but there was little he could do.
Simon had long ago come to the grips that he couldn’t save everyone, even though he regularly tried. Still, day by day he could see that he was saving dozens of lives here, and that was enough. The other version of himself in that crowded marketplace in Abresse was saving hundreds more than that, but then he wasn’t limiting his use of magic, which made all the difference.
When Simon felt himself starting to get sick, he fought through it, and didn’t tell a soul. He supposed he should have, but the last thing he wanted to do was worry people when things were already in such poor shape.
He did try to get one of the icons he’d made previously to ward it off before it was too bad, but two of them had been stolen by the people they’d healed, and the other two were with people that would certainly have died if he’d taken them away. Since he was unwilling to kill a little boy or a young woman he dealt with it for now, and instead sent Leon to start making another batch of five.
This time the boy didn’t bat an eye. It wasn’t until the following day when he was pale and visibly sweating that he Aranna forced him to step back. “You have to take care of yourself Simon!” she scolded him. “You do too much.”
He thought about pointing out that in this case too much wasn’t enough and people were still dying, but still, he agreed to rest. Outside of magic, rest and fluids were the best medicine for this disease since he hadn’t invented antibiotics and wasn’t likely to ever do so.
The printing press is probably as far as I go, he told himself. Chemistry, except where it concerned paints or medicine, was largely beyond him.
For a day he choked down the same herbal teas he’d been forcing everyone else to drink with mixed results, but that didn’t stop the sores from appearing as the disease assaulting his body started to grip it more tightly.
Those weren’t enough to keep Aranna away, though. She’d already gotten sick and recovered in the course of treating her mother. She didn’t fear this plague, though she obviously feared losing him. Each time she insisted he take one of the amulets that were doing such good work he’d refuse. “Others need them more than I,” Simon insisted, unwilling to kill any more people with his own selfishness.
That barely placated her, though, and whenever she had spare time she would sit at his bedside, hold his hand, and talk to him. As his fever worsened Simon had a hard time keeping track of those conversations. Sometimes they were about her early time time at the inn, and other times they were about their recent trip together. Always though, he could see regret linger in her aura.
As his fever increased those stranger perceptions intensified. It was like he could hear the things she didn’t say.
“Why didn’t we ever get together?”
“What will I do without you?”
Most of all, though, the question she wanted to ask him but didn’t was, “Why didn’t you see this coming with all of your magic? Why didn’t you just avoid it?” While Simon never answered it, he thought it was a very fair question.
I should have known that spending a life near a place I knew a plague would break out was a bad idea, he told himself. Still, this was infinitely better than his original plan. He’d planned to be in the city during all this before. While he would have hoped he would have made friends in that version of his life too, here at least he had people that loved and cared for him.
Those relationships only became more critical in the days that followed when his condition worsened. Aranna and her mother had already sickened and recovered, so they were immune. So were many other survivors. Many of those fled as soon as they were well, fearing they’d get sick again, but a few stuck around. They made for a fairly competent nursing staff.
Simon let himself be cared for, and took some small measure of pride in how smoothly things continued to go even as his life became a series of naps and watery soups along with increasingly foul bandages.
While his immune system fought hard for a while, by the time his condition worsened enough that they went off to search for one of his talismans they couldn’t find one. Simon could no longer say how many days he’d been in bed. Still, by then, Leon was finishing the first of the new batch, and gave that to Simon to clutch as he shivered in his bed.
Unfortunately, Leon didn’t know about that last, crucial step, and Simon’s throat was too swollen to explain it. Not that I would if I could, he reminded himself. Leon was a good kid. He didn’t want him to learn any more about the dark arts than he had to.
Still, Simon didn’t want to die right now, but all he could do was lay there and let his body do the fighting for him, since the faux relic that was clutched to his chest was doing nothing at all. Would I whisper the word if I could? He asked himself. Simon drifted off to sleep before he could answer that question.
