The Folding Knife Part 13

Six.

The first anyone knew of it was a ship, found drifting just outside the harbour mouth. It must have been blown down from the Cape during the night; the watchmen on the Great Light saw it at dawn, and as the day wore on, they wondered why it was just sitting there, when the weather was so fine. Reasonably enough, they suspected it might be a pirate, hanging about waiting for a victim it could tail into less well-regulated waters. When the harbour prefect made his rounds in mid-afternoon the Light captain reported it, and the prefect decided to send a patrol sloop to take a closer look.

The sloop captain, a Verrhoean with twenty years' service, sailed cautiously to just inside hailing range. The ship, he observed, looked like an ordinary Scleriot merchantman: a fat pot of a ship, triple-masted, with high castles, not exactly a pirate's vessel of choice. He tried hailing, but there was no reply, and no sign of activity of any sort. He'd seen something rather similar thirty years earlier, when he was working for his uncle. He sent a boat, with instructions to board if n.o.body answered their hails.

The boat came back an hour later. Everybody on board was dead, they said. Most of them were lying in their bunks; a few must've kept going until they dropped where they stood, and one man had fallen from the rigging. Any marks, the captain asked: swellings, blisters? Yes, the boatswain said, in a voice that suggested he knew exactly what he'd seen.

The sloop captain knew what to do. He went on board the merchantman personally to supervise the breaking open of the tar barrels and the setting of the fires. Then, once the merchantman was burning well, he set course for the Cape. There was an island just off the southern point that was kept empty, for use as a quarantine base. Before putting in, he sent the boat to within shouting range of the nearest village on the mainland, and raised the alarm, giving orders for a message to be sent to the City immediately. The village choirmaster (closest thing to a mayor) borrowed a horse and set off for town, where he went straight to the harbour prefect.

The prefect knew exactly what to do. First, he gave orders for the harbour chain to be raised, to stop any ships entering or leaving. Then he sent word to the City prefect, the Guard commander, the gatewardens and the First Citizen's office in that order, and put down the barriers to seal off the harbour from the upper town. The gatewardens closed all the six main City gates and put sentries on the five sally-ports. The City prefect issued emergency notices: all markets, fairs, shops, inns and places of entertainment to close immediately; no unauthorised gatherings of more than five people; a curfew; compulsory notification of plague symptoms to ward and guild officers. The Guard commander posted troops to enforce the emergency regulations, keep order and prevent looting. The First Citizen gave out commissions and warrants to the designated activity officers, conferring the usual additional powers on them for the duration of the emergency, sent compulsory service notices to all registered medical pract.i.tioners, suspended the House and called an immediate cabinet meeting.

They were intelligently planned procedures, quickly and efficiently carried out, by men who knew what they were doing. They'd never worked in the past, and this time was no exception.

The room was full of smoke, so thick that Ba.s.so couldn't make out the mosaics on the wall ten feet away from where he was sitting. He had a handkerchief pressed over his nose and mouth, but his eyes were watering. It had been proved a century ago that braziers burning aromatic herbs did nothing at all to prevent the spread of plague but everybody still did it anyway. There wasn't anything else anybody could do.

"We know for a fact that it's spread by rats," said the tall, bald doctor, his voice m.u.f.fled by his scarf, making him sound like he had a bad cold. "That's not a guess, it's science. But this time, it can't be rats. The customs men who went on the plague ship to burn it took all the usual precautions, and anyway, they didn't see a single rat anywhere."

"How do you know that?" Sentio queried. "By the time our people got to the Cape, they were all dead."

"The captain wrote a log," the doctor replied. "All the relevant details, he was a good observer. They can't have caught it from rats on the merchant ship. It's not possible. And even if one of them had got it, the rest of them-"

"So it can't have come from that ship," Cinio interrupted. "There must've been another ship, with people on it who had the plague at a less advanced stage."

Ba.s.so shook his head. "The ship we found adrift was from Leucis," he said. "No other ships in from there in the last month. Besides, you've seen how quick this thing develops. It's hours, not days."

"Then it can't be rats," the doctor said. "In which case, it's an entirely new strain, and everything we know about dealing with the plague is most likely useless."

Ba.s.so scratched his head. "Wonderful," he said. "We don't know how it spreads, we sure as h.e.l.l don't know how to cure it, and it takes hold so fast there wouldn't be time anyway. So what do we do?"

The other doctor, the one who looked like a cat, said: "We let it run its course. No choice in the matter."

"We let it run its course," Cinio repeated. "For crying out loud, gentlemen. We've got to be able to think of something better than that."

Ba.s.so turned and looked at him. "Such as?"

"I don't know," Cinio said helplessly. "But my mother and both my sisters died in the last lot, and all anybody said was, there's nothing we can do, just let it run its course. And that's not good enough."

"You haven't got anything to suggest, in other words." Ba.s.so turned to the doctors. "How about you?" he said. "Anything at all, doesn't matter how drastic. I'll burn down half the City, if you think it'd help."

"They did that in Coele Opuntia, sixty years ago," the bald doctor said.

"Did it work?"

"We don't know. The fire spread all over the city, and most of the people in the lower town were trapped behind the quarantine barriers and couldn't get out. It hadn't spread to the upper town, so really there's no way of telling. Personally, I wouldn't recommend it."

"Fine," Ba.s.so said. "What else is there? I seem to remember something about diverting a river."

"Dapoeia, forty-six years ago," the cat-faced doctor said. "They dammed up the Asper and flooded the slum district, with the people still in it. Same problem as with Coele Opuntia. n.o.body left alive to see if it did any good."

"Besides," the bald doctor said, "we're not dealing with the same disease. In both those cases it was the regular strain, spread by rats. Burn or drown the rats, you get rid of the plague, though of course they didn't know that then. But in this case, since we don't know how it spreads, we'd just be guessing. Suppose it's water-borne, and you flood the whole of downtown. All you'd achieve would be to spread it all through the suburbs."

Ba.s.so nodded. "Nothing to be gained from the big, broad gesture, then," he said. "All right. You've left us in no doubt about what we don't know. What do we know?"

The bald doctor frowned. "All we can say for certain is that it's a ma.s.s of contradictions," he said. "It's been going on for eight days. In the first forty-eight hours, it spread across a quarter of the City; infection rate close to ninety per cent; mortality, as far as we can tell, something like one in three. After forty-eight hours, it stopped dead in its tracks; no new cases in the next twelve hours. Then there was another spurt, right across the west side; same infection rate, same mortality. Then another pause; then we started getting a few scattered outbreaks on the north side, with much lower infection rates but rather higher mortality. Then practically all the southern wards catch it, but the death rate drops to one in six." He paused to catch his breath, then went on: "In seven out of ten cases, it's all over in twelve hours; they die, or they get better. In three out of ten cases, rising to fifty per cent on the south side, it drags on for eighteen hours, though the mortality ratio stays pretty much the same. That's the worst thing about it, from our point of view. There's no pattern. Which means," he added, "that there is a pattern, but we haven't seen it yet. I just hope some of us live long enough to figure it out."

Ba.s.so had been taking notes. "What we need," he said, "is a ship's captain, preferably off a merchantman. Or a fisherman would do just as well, I guess. Cinio, get out there and find me one, quick as you like."

Cinio knew better than to argue. He doubled his scarf round his face, got up and left without a word. Ba.s.so was frowning at the notes he'd made. "This is no good," he said. "What we need is a map. Doctor-sorry, I keep forgetting your name. I want you and your colleague here to get a map of the City and mark on it where the outbreaks have been. Sentio, round up some clerks to help them. And when you've done that, find Aelius, if he's still alive, and bring him here."

"Is that a good idea? What if-?"

"Sorry," Ba.s.so said, "I thought I was the one who's deaf, but obviously I was wrong and it's you. Come on, all of you. This is important."

When they'd gone, he stoked up the fire with laurel, sandalwood and the dried leaves in the bag from his mother's private store, until he could hardly see at all for the smoke.

Cinio got lucky. The first clerk he asked had a brother-in-law who'd just come home after three months as first mate on a charcoal freighter; he was at the clerk's apartment right now, just a few hundred yards down the street, in one of the big grace-and-favour blocks reserved for the civil service.

The clerk's brother-in-law, a short, square man by the name of Mavorsus, wasn't too keen on leaving the house, but the platoon of Palace guards Cinio had brought along just in case eventually managed to persuade him. He arrived in Ba.s.so's office in the Severus house about twenty minutes after the clerks had handed Ba.s.so the map he'd asked for.

Yes, Mavorsus said, of course he knew the winds in the bay. He'd been a sailor all his working life, ever since he used to help his dad on an oyster boat. Including the times of day? The times when the wind changed direction. Well, naturally. You had to know that stuff if you were a fisherman.

Ba.s.so showed him the map and explained his theory. It's possible, Mavorsus said. Possible? Well, it fits. You'd get a good blow coming in from the sea around about then, for sure; we used to ride it home from the oyster beds; and we'd take the turn of the tide out again, when the wind'd be blowing south-west, out to sea. Then we'd be stuck out there until the late evening north-easterly, which (Marvorsus had to admit) is what you've got written in here.

"It's airborne," Ba.s.so said. "It moves when the wind changes. And the incubation period is short. If we know where the wind will be blowing and when, we can move people out of harm's way."

The doctors looked mildly stunned. Sentio looked terrified. Aelius, who'd arrived shortly after they brought Mavorsus in, opened his eyes wide. "I'm convinced," he said. "Mind you, I'm no expert."

"Yes you are," Ba.s.so said. "You were at the siege of Lyssa, weren't you?"

"Yes, but-"

"You're an expert. More to the point, you've got the men and the organisation to carry out ma.s.s evacuations very quickly indeed. Stop arguing, general, who the h.e.l.l else is there? The fire brigade?"

"Fine," Aelius said, with a shrug. "Right, I need to know when, and where to."

They crowded round the desk, and between them, somehow or other, they drew a new map, heavily annotated with times and directions; big arrows drawn in Ba.s.so's imperial purple ink (for signing statutes and decrees) and cl.u.s.ters of numbers in his nearly illegible handwriting, and underneath, other numbers (the designations of army units) in Aelius' tiny, neat, slanting hand. Then Ba.s.so looked at his clock and said, "That'll have to do. You'd better get started or you'll miss your chance." Aelius grabbed the map, nodded, and left. After he'd gone, there was dead silence for some time.

"Well," Ba.s.so said, "I sincerely hope we've got that right. Otherwise..." He shrugged. "If anybody's got an alternative theory that fits all the facts, this would probably be a good time."

Sentio, who'd been looking very unhappy, said, "You do realise we're risking the lives of everybody in this city on the word of an oysterman."

Ba.s.so looked at Mavorsus. "Well?"

"As far as I know, that's about right," he said. "Don't you all go blaming me if it turns out wrong."

"And there you have it," Ba.s.so said, throwing his head back and gripping the arms of his chair. "If everybody dies, don't blame us. h.e.l.l of an epitaph for a quarter of a million people."

"Who'd have died anyway," Cinio said quietly, "if we'd just sat here and done nothing."

"Stick some more of the leaves from that bag on the fire, someone." Ba.s.so grinned. "My mother may have gone a bit strange in her old age, but she knows her home remedies. She bought that stuff from a Verrhoean who swore blind it wards off the plague. Wouldn't give her the recipe, unfortunately, or else we'd all be laughing."

The cat-faced doctor pulled a face, then got up and went to the brazier. "They haven't had the plague in Verrhoe for seventy years," he said.

"There you are, then," Ba.s.so said. He twisted his neck restlessly, as though the plague was an itch he couldn't quite reach to scratch. "This has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever done," he said. "Sentio, get this man here a large sum of money and send him home. We've taken advantage of his sense of civic duty for long enough."

Sentio stood up. "When you say large..."

Ba.s.so laughed. "As much as he can carry. Fill a f.u.c.king sack. If we're right, he's just saved the Republic. If he's wrong, in a couple of days it won't matter a d.a.m.n. You, what's-your-name: stay at your brother-in-law's till you hear from me, and try not to die, we may need you again."

That left him with Cinio and the two doctors. "Is there anything else we can help you with?" the bald doctor asked.

Ba.s.so shook his head. "You two stay here, though," he said. "Who knows, someone might get sick. Cinio, remind me, what's the legal position about people who die without making a will?"

Ba.s.so stayed in his office for eight days. He slept on the floor, and when he wasn't working he sat and stared at the mosaics. One of his earliest memories had been sneaking into this room, which was out of bounds by order of his father, and climbing up the mountain of stored and dust-sheeted furniture to get a closer look at the pretty pictures on the sloping ceiling. In particular he remembered one angel with a sad face; her eyes were big and wide open, and a single stylised tear hung from her lower eyelid. She didn't seem to be there any more.

They brought him reports, every hour on the hour. The evacuations had gone as smoothly as could be expected. Plague had broken out in two of the evacuation camps, but both the infection rate and the mortality were only a fraction of what they'd become used to. People who'd had the plague and recovered were immune; he conscripted them into burial and security details. Looting was a problem. Aelius' soldiers wouldn't go near areas known to have been infected when the wind was in that direction, and who could blame them for that? But gangs of recovered plague-sufferers were taking the opportunity to help themselves to whatever they could carry. By the fifth day, Aelius had enough men who'd caught the plague and lived to form a specialist squad, who hunted the looters through the deserted streets. For a while, the looters managed to get their plunder past the checkpoints by hiding it on the floor of the handcarts used for clearing the dead and piling bodies on top, until Aelius got wise to that. There were outbreaks of dysentery and other illnesses brought on by overcrowding and exposure in the evacuation camps. With no ships coming in, food was already a problem, and could only get worse. The death toll rose. Accurate figures were hard to come by, needless to say, but the best guesses put it at an average of eleven hundred a day. Firewood, for burning bodies, ran out on the sixth day, and Ba.s.so chaired a grim meeting to consider alternatives; burying them would take up manpower urgently needed for other purposes, dumping them at sea would mean lifting the blockade and risking having ships make a run for it. The latter option prevailed; nearly all the sailors who'd been trapped in the harbour district when the plague had first broken out were dead by now, so the risk of unauthorised egress was minimal.

On the ninth day, the estimated total went over ten thousand.

"You know," Ba.s.so said, when they broke the news to him, "I simply can't imagine that. Ten thousand people dead. That's enough to fill the Blues' end of the Track, isn't it?"

About that, they said.

Later he regretted thinking about it in those terms. He could see it clearly in his mind's eye: the Track, on a race day, and one end of the auditorium filled with dead people. Well, he told himself, more people than that died in Perigouna, which was entirely my fault, and this isn't. But that didn't work at all, so he sat up all night checking the stores inventories against the supply requisitions; a useful exercise that revealed five clear cases of theft of food. He wrote an order for the thefts to be thoroughly investigated, and the perpetrators hanged, as an example.

On the tenth day, he called a meeting of the full emergency cabinet. The picture, they told him, was inconclusive. Deaths in the evacuation camps were considerably lower than in the infected areas of the City, which had been sealed off. Incidence of new cases, however, had peaked on the seventh day and was now holding more or less steady. The airborne theory, it had to be said, was starting to look a bit ragged; if the theory was correct, there should either be a lot fewer or a lot more cases, depending on the distance the infection could carry. A steady plateau in the statistics suggested that it was being spread by something else, and the evacuations had therefore made no material difference, one way or another.

On the fifteenth day, when the figure topped eighteen thousand, the cat-faced doctor presented an alternative hypothesis. It wasn't airborne at all, he said; it was in the water, just like the contamination at Perigouna. As evidence, he produced maps of the underground cisterns, with the routes of the sewers overlaid in red. The fluctuations Ba.s.so had noticed weren't in fact anything to do with the wind, though it had been a reasonable enough mistake; they were in fact linked to the tides. If (the doctor argued) an unusually high level of silt had drifted into the outlets where the City sewers flowed out into the bay, it could alter the course of the currents. Foul water could, under a complex concatenation of circ.u.mstances, be flowing out into the sea and immediately be drawn in again by the backdraft; in which case, it would end up in the overflows, which travelled along three-hundred-year-old lead pipes which had been neglected for a long time. It was entirely possible that those pipes were leaking; in which case, contamination could easily enter the cisterns, from which the City drew all its clean water. The fluctuations they'd been observing were consistent with this theory: accelerated incidence of infection when the tide turned (which coincided with some, though not all, of the predictable changes in wind direction), and irregularities in both incidence and mortality that could be explained quite simply by the extent to which the contaminated water was diluted-in other words, whether the cistern tanks in question were empty or full at the time. The evacuation camps, he pointed out, drew water from the cisterns, but by the time it reached the outskirts and the suburbs, a lot of the flow would have been diverted to other places, while additional clean water would have entered the system from the outer rainwater traps and underground springs; accordingly, the contamination in the water that reached the camps was consistently more diluted than it would be further inside the City, hence fewer cases and a lower fatality ratio.

When he'd finished, Ba.s.so said, "But what about the blisters, and the swellings on the face and wrists, and the lumps under the arms? That's plague, not poisoned water, surely."

"It's plague, but it travels in water," the doctor said. "Obviously a new variety we haven't come across before."

So they tried again. Aelius rounded up as many immune citizens as his press gangs could catch, and they dug channels to draw off water from the river upstream of the City into the cisterns. It took five days, during which both incidence and mortality declined steadily and substantially. By the time the sluices were opened and the grand dilution programme was finally under way, the death rate was down to twenty or so a day. It went up again almost immediately, but the cause was an outbreak of typhoid, caused by the unfiltered river water, rather than plague.

Among the very last recorded cases of the plague were six novices at the Studium, all of whom died, and two members of the First Citizen's own household. Because of the quarantine regulations, it was impossible to find out the names of the dead novices until the movement restrictions were lifted. For the same reason, Ba.s.so had to wait until Aelius (in charge of coordinating the emergency while he was himself quarantined) told him he was allowed to write to his sister to tell her that their mother had died. He didn't bother telling her that he'd had the plague as well. It was self-evident that he'd recovered, and she wouldn't have been interested in anything solely to do with him.

One of the first letters he received once the blockade was lifted came in a jar of dates. It read: Thought you'd like to know I'm not dead; a.s.sume you're not either, but would appreciate confirmation. Heard about the artificial flood and rationale behind same; occurs to me that if plague came from backed-up sewers, as currently favoured hypothesis seems to suggest, it can't have come from ship with all crew dead off the Cape; if so, what did they all die of, and surely a bit of a coincidence. Just thought I'd mention that. Cordially, Ba.s.sano.

That made him wince. Not the water-borne theory, then; in which case, diverting the river and flooding the City had been a complete waste of time. But enough doubt had been cast on his airborne theory to convince him that that had been wrong, too; in which case, everything he'd done had been pointless, and the City had survived in spite of his actions rather than because of them. Not that it mattered a d.a.m.n, but...

If Ba.s.sano had figured it out, n.o.body else had. He waited for someone to mention it, but n.o.body said anything. Eventually, when he told Sentio, the look of total bewilderment and despair on his Chancellor's face told him that he hadn't just been keeping quiet out of respect for the First Citizen's feelings- "We did all that," Sentio whispered, "and it wasn't..."

"Apparently not, no."

"Oh my G.o.d," Sentio said, his eyes wide open. "What if someone finds out?"

Who, though? One rather wonderful side effect of the plague was that all his most intelligent enemies were dead. Cremutius and Saturninus had died on the first day. Moriscus, Bonosus, Faustinus and Laesia.n.u.s, the Pupienus brothers; his loathsome cousin Balbinus, a thorn in his side since they were boys, with the added bonus that his wife, uncle and sons died with him, which meant Ba.s.so was his next of kin and inherited his very substantial estate, including nine hundred shares in the Shining Star Bank, which left it wide open to a hostile takeover. Olybrias had caught the plague but had recovered, though he'd lost the sight of one eye and most of his hearing, which was bound to curtail his trouble-making potential in both business and politics. The second tier of benefit was that their successors in the Optimate hierarchy were men like Pescennius, Macria.n.u.s and Numa, clowns, idiots; idiots who didn't realise they were idiots, by definition the very best sort. Until someone new managed to hack and slither his way up the ladder past these fools, the political opposition was effectively dead. Losses on his own side, by contrast, were almost indecently light, and most of them were men he'd have no trouble doing without: Leontius, who'd challenged him for the nomination; Praeclarus, who couldn't open his mouth without embarra.s.sing the government; Gracilia.n.u.s, who'd actually voted against him over the Auxentine war. If someone had given him thirty political a.s.sa.s.sinations of his choice for a birthday present, he couldn't have done better.

He wrote to Antigonus (who'd had it but survived; shrugged it off, they told him, like it was just a cold or something-not bad for a dying man). He wrote: Buy land.

Not unreasonably, Antigonus wrote back: What land?

Ba.s.so replied: All of it.

Which Antigonus proceeded to do. First they drew down on cousin Balbinus' personal fortune. Then they took over the Shining Star and used its entire cash reserve. Then they had to start using their own money, but it didn't matter. With so many deaths, land prices were lower than anybody could remember, at least until word started to spread about the Bank's furious buying spree. A matter of weeks after the end of the plague, land prices were back where they'd been before the outbreak, and the First Citizen was commended by the House for his swift and effective intervention, which had saved the City from potential economic ruin. A certain amount of selling (at the restored prices) restored the Bank's liquidity, leaving Ba.s.so with- "The good stuff," Antigonus said, looking up from the summary. "I'm impressed."

Ba.s.so shrugged. "It was the obvious thing to do."

"You were the one who did it."

"I had the money."

Antigonus, he thought, was looking better, if anything. The recent ferocious outburst of activity had done him good. The old man must have noticed him looking, because he grinned and said, "You're right. According to the doctors, the plague has actually slowed down the advance of the malignancy. Bizarre, was the word they used."

Ba.s.so smiled. "Maybe some of my luck's starting to rub off on you."

"Maybe." Antigonus frowned. "A few years ago, I saw a play about a man with a terminal disease. His enemies couldn't wait for it to take its course, so they hired an a.s.sa.s.sin. The man was stabbed, but he didn't die; in fact, the a.s.sa.s.sin's knife severed the tumour, which the doctors had said was inoperable, and the man made a full recovery."

"I remember that one," Ba.s.so said. "I thought it was silly."

"Really? It made me think of you. Ba.s.so's luck, I thought."

"What a strange thing to say."

"You think so?" Antigonus shrugged. "I thought of you straight away. You have a knack of getting yourself into the most appalling trouble, which then turns out to your advantage. You might argue that a truly fortunate man wouldn't get into the dreadful mess in the first place; he'd live a life of blameless, uneventful rect.i.tude and eventually die, happy and obscure. You, on the other hand, have all the luck; the good sort and the bad. If your enemies took you out into the bay and threw you in the sea, you'd come up a few minutes later with a fistful of pearls."

"My mother died," Ba.s.so said. "Had you heard?"

Antigonus shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said.

"So am I," Ba.s.so replied, "but mostly because I realised I hardly felt anything when they told me. I waited for it to sink in, it has, and I still haven't really felt anything. That's appalling, don't you think?"

"You should consider yourself lucky," Antigonus replied. "One of the worst things that happens to a man has just happened to you, and you've escaped the suffering."

Ba.s.so nodded. "Mostly," he said, "it's a nuisance; an inconvenience. For instance, I'm trying to remember something that happened when I was a kid. I think, I'll ask Mother, and then I realise I can't; it's annoying, frustrating, it itches where I can't reach, but it's not grief. Unless I lie to myself, the most I can come up with is, it's a loss of information, like a library burning down. There's a whole chunk of my life for which I'm the only source of historical data-well, strictly speaking there's my sister as well, but in practical terms there's just me. It makes me feel, I don't know, vulnerable. What happens when I get old and forgetful? All that part of me, my childhood, will be lost, for ever. I find that intensely disturbing."

Antigonus touched the decanter. Ba.s.so shook his head. "You're afraid," Antigonus said, "that you've lost the capacity to feel. You're worried you're becoming callous and inhuman, and you blame yourself, because of what you've done."

"Yes," Ba.s.so said. "And?"

"Maybe you're right," he said. "Considering what you've done, the way you conduct your life, it's not an unlikely outcome. But I believe you'll cope."