At my request, they went out to the four bodies I’d moved, to look on them a last time and to tell me what their names had been. The moment they left the kitchen, I could restrain myself no longer. I dished myself an immense tureen of porridge. I put several hunks of butter to melt in it, and then poured molasses over the top of it. I sat down and devoured it in huge spoonfuls. It was hot to the point of scalding, but that did not discourage me. I stirred it to cool it, melting the glorious yellow butter into the oaty porridge and mingling the rich brown threads of molasses in swirls. As fast as it cooled, I ate it, savoring the subtle flavors and the sensation of swallowing large bites of nourishing food. I served myself another bowlful from the pot, scraping it clean. I was generous with both butter and molasses. I devoured it.

They’d left a pot of tea on the table. I poured myself a cup, sweetened it to soupiness with more of the molasses, and drank it down. I could feel life and strength resurging in me with the consumption of the sweet stuff. I poured another cup, draining the pot. I put more water in the kettle and set it to boil again. The smell of the baking bread almost made me wild.

I was startled when Duril and Nita came back. In glorying in the food, I’d almost forgotten them and my grisly task. I hastily drained off the last of my cup of tea. Duril was looking at me in a sort of frozen dismay. I suddenly realized how I must appear, my face and shirt smudged with dirt and sweat, my nails and hands filthy, and supporting it all, my immense body. The sticky tureen was still on the table before me, the ewer of molasses almost empty beside it. I bowed my shoulders reflexively, trying to seem smaller.

“I have their names, if you want to write them down,” Duril said heavily.

“Yes. Thank you. I do. We will have to have stones carved for them later, but for now, well, it is best that I put them in the earth.”

Duril nodded solemnly. I went to my father’s study for paper and a pencil. When I returned, Nita was washing up the porridge pot. “I’ll go with you,” Duril announced, and followed me out of the kitchen.

He said little, but I could feel his disapproval hovering over me. When we reached the bodies, he listed their names for me and I wrote them down carefully, along with whatever he knew about each of them. Then, as if I were planting tulip bulbs, I set one man and three women into the earth. Duril helped me as much as he could, but his strength was gone, and I fear we were not as gentle with those mortal remains as we would have been in better times. When they were in their graves, we returned to the house, and one at a time, I carried out the two dead servants I had discovered in their rooms. Their soiled bedding became their shrouds. Flies had found the one, and the hatching maggots worked in his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth. Even hardened old Sergeant Duril turned aside from that sight, and I repressed a gag as I covered the dead man with his bedding and wrapped it firmly around him. As I carried him out of the house, I wondered if we would ever get the stench of death out of the place.

Duril had known them both. I noted down their names and set them each in a grave. Then we covered them, with me doing the lion’s share of the work, and Duril manning a shovel more for the sake of his self-respect than for any real help he could give me. The long summer day had found dusk before we were through. We stood by the six mounds of pale soil, and Duril, who had buried many a comrade, offered a simple soldier’s prayer to the good god.

When we were finished, he looked askance at me.

“Tomorrow is soon enough,” I said quietly. “They’ve lain in their rooms this long. One more day will not hurt. And perhaps by tomorrow my father will be recovered enough to help me give them a more formal burial.” I sighed. “I’m going down to the river to wash.”

He nodded, and I left him there.

But the next morning, my father was little better than he had been. He made no response when I tried to speak to him. Unshaven, his hair wild, dressed in his nightshirt, he would not even sit up in his bed. Several times I told him that I had to bury Mother, Rosse, and Elisi, that it was not fitting to leave them dead in their beds. He did not even turn his eyes to look at me, and at last I despaired of his help, and took on the mournful task myself. Duril helped me, but still it was a sad and messy duty. I found rope in the stable, and at least we were able to lower them into their graves with a bit more dignity. I wished for fine caskets or even simple boxes, but the stench and the rot persuaded me that it was best to act quickly instead. The trees surrounding our little graveyard were full of hopeful croaker birds before I was through. They sat watching me, jaunty in their black-and-white feathers, the wattles around their greedy beaks red as blood. I knew that the smell of carrion had attracted them. They were only animals, and they did not care whether it was beast flesh or human that they scented. Even so, I could not look at them without recalling the Porontes’ wedding sacrifice to Orandula, the old god of balances. I wondered grimly what all these deaths balanced, and if it pleased him.

I put my family in the earth, and covered them, and said the prayers that I could summon to my mind. They were the childish prayers of comfort that my mother had taught me when I was just a boy. Sergeant Duril came out to stand beside me and witness that feeble ceremony. Afterward, I took my shovel and pickax back to the toolshed and hung them on the wall before I went to wash the grave dirt from my hands.

And that was how my old life ended forever.

M y father’s recovery was agonizingly slow. In the first week that followed the burials, he was almost completely unresponsive to me. I went daily to his bedside, to speak to him and report what was going on, but he looked away from me. After several experiences of moving to try to meet his gaze and having him simply turn his head away, I gave up. I stood at the foot of his bed each morning and each evening and gave him a report of all I’d done, as well as presenting the problems that awaited me on the morrow. Each time, I stood quietly when I finished speaking and waited for a response. Silence was always his reply. I tried to take it in stride and keep on functioning. The terrible tragedy that had befallen our family had ended, I felt, our battle of wills. There were more immediate things to worry about than why I was fat or if I would ever be a soldier.

Nita fared better with my father than I did. She took his meals to him, persuaded him to shave and bathe, and eventually moved him back into his own chambers. In retrospect, I believe he was suffering not just from his grief but also from a mild form of the plague. In later years, I would come to find that most people seldom fell victim to severe bouts of the plague twice, but that some sufferers would catch a milder form and then endure recurrent bouts in the years that followed.

Whatever the cause, my father was incapacitated for a month, and despite my own burden of grief, the tasks of running the estate fell upon me. What a whirlwind of work that time was. Everything demanded my attention at once, and I had few resources at first to apply to them. The servants had not fled far. Some had gone to neighboring landowners, who had either taken them in or afforded them refuge in rudimentary shelters on the outskirts of their holdings. Others had been living rough. They trickled back, shamefaced, a few each day, until we had about three-quarters of our former staff. What had become of the rest of them, death or simply that they had abandoned us, I was never to know.

I wrote to Dr. Amicas about my experience, for I knew he was still gathering all information he could on the disease. I speculated that the people scattering had perhaps cut down on the spread of the disease, but also that the swifter deaths we had experienced were due to the sick being left without caretakers. I could not tell if that had led to a lower percentage of deaths, and added that I did not suggest it as a routine response to the disease, as it seemed likely to me that if the servants had had other towns to flee to the chance of spreading the plague to large population centers would have been much greater.