Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence

by Virginia DeMarce

  “Good morning, Herr John. It’s just me, wandering past the tumult.” She nodded toward the window. Outside, the grand duke’s regiments were heartily singing their way through Sunday morning services. “The Monster just got in. Raudegen and one of Diane Jackson’s door dragons gave me permission to come up.”

  Bernhard’s secretary sat up, put his feet on the floor, and bowed sleepily.

  “Comfortable?” Kamala gestured at his canvas cot. “It scarcely matches up to the rest of this impressive pile of a castle.”

  “For the past three weeks, I’ve been sharing the watches with Moscherosch, his friend Jesaias Rompler, and the up-timers from Basel.” John reached for his boots and started to pull them on. “One of us is always here, no matter who else is around and no matter how much the grand duke grumbles about it when he’s awake. Which he is, now, at least part of the time. Feret is doing my work––most of it, at any rate. I check the desk when I get off here.”

  “Rompler?” She wrinkled her forehead. “Do I know him?”

  “Probably not. He’s a poet, a friend of Moscherosch’s. He joined the campaign in hopes of writing an epic poem about the expedition. Still, both of them are trustworthy and none of the Kloster proper could be spared from purely military duties. They’ve been skirmishing with Monsieur Gaston’s forces the whole time the grand duke has been sick.”

  “You didn’t classify anyone else as trustworthy?”

  “There are plenty of people who would be delighted to see the grand duke out of the picture. Of course, deciding to handle it this way meant that I haven’t been able to keep up with the correspondence, but Ohm contributed two great-nephews and a first cousin once removed who’s a good accountant to assist Feret.”

  “Where did he find them on such short notice?”

  “Somewhere over by Augsburg, probably. He’s related to the Rehlingers. Or in Frankfurt am Main––he was born at Bockenheim. Or up by Heidelberg, perhaps. Ohm’s grandfather and great-uncle were ennobled for zealous paper-pushing in the service of the bureaucracy of the Palatinate. Most of his family are still middle-class people, looking for a job. As a family name, ‘von Ohm’ or ‘von Oehm’ or ‘von Ehm’ started out as just plain Ehem. His wife’s Alsatian. He has relatives all over the map.”

  “What about the grand duke’s staff doctors?”

  “Schmid’s probably okay, but he’s in the field. I don’t trust Blandin, the Genevan, at all. Haven’t let him into the room. Anyway, he’s been sick himself.”

  “So. How’s the patient.”

  “No worse. A little better. Frau Jackson says to let him sleep.”

  “Sick as a dog and refusing to admit it.”

  “That pretty much sums up the situation.” John paused. “He’s been sick enough to get a real sense of his own mortality. Sick enough to frighten me, pretty bad. Sick enough that I’ve done everything I could to keep people, even der Kloster, from realizing just how sick he is.”

  “That’s what the grand duchess was afraid of.”

  He looked at her. “Can you...?”

  “Let me take a look at him. I’ve brought every medication in the up-time arsenal.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “By the time I arrived, he was starting to recover on his own. Maybe I can speed things up. With the tools available to me in an army camp, even one headquartered in a castle, I can’t reach a scientific diagnosis, Your Grace. I apologize for that. There have been many occasions since coming down-time that I wished I had been trained as a doctor rather than a nurse, but I wasn’t. I know it, you know it, and the grand duke knew it when he hired me. I have placed the grand duke on a course of antibiotics and will insist that he continue to take them for two solid weeks. I will do my utmost to keep him alive.”

  Kamala looked at the report she was sending to Claudia de’ Medici and added a sentence.

  “Please send Dr. Guarinonius, if he is willing to come. I would feel a lot easier in my mind if there was a physician on the case.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “With all due respect to his physical complaints,” Kamala wrote in her accompanying report to Dr. Guarinonius, “it’s my opinion that the grand duke is just about as tough as they come. He survived smallpox as a teenager, and I greatly suspect that he’s just survived a bout with the plague. I’ve talked to his batman as well as his secretary. It definitely wasn’t anything a person could call ‘colic,’ even though that’s what he wanted the doctors to treat him for at first. He never developed buboes during these last few weeks, though he did at one point have a serious rash. The fever, vomiting and bloody diarrhea, the constant headaches, nausea and abdominal pain, don’t seem to be accounted for by anything else he’s likely to have caught. There’s no typhus going around right now. No wonder he reported that he constantly felt weak.”

  She paused a minute, fiddling with her pen.

  “No, to answer the question that the grand duchess asked, no, I don’t think it was poison. I’m just glad that I sent gallons and gallons of sugar/light saline energy drink with him in his baggage, for it probably staved off the dehydration that might have actually done him in. I can’t believe that he actually likes the stuff, but he does. He drank it all. Please have more prepared and shipped as soon as you can. Dr. Weinhart has the formula, since he has been using it for the children in the orphanage.”

  She thought another moment.

  “Then there’s his chronic gastritis. I don’t have an up-time lab culture, of course, but I’m pretty sure that the grand duke has peptic ulcers. Maybe duodenal ulcers, but I think peptic is more likely. You can look up the difference in the reference book I left in the hospital library. You know, Dr. Guarinonius, up-time medicine wasn’t perfect, either. For decades and decades, doctors thought that people got ulcers because they had bad tempers or were under a lot of stress. Their opinions weren’t that different from the down-time ideas about the humors. Basically, they thought that people with choleric temperaments developed stomach ulcers.”

  She thought a minute more. The Lord only knew that the Grand Duke of the County of Burgundy could be choleric enough when the people around him weren’t producing the results he wanted, so she inserted a CYA.

  “Maybe being choleric can be a complicating factor, but less than twenty years before the Ring of Fire, some doctors in Australia figured out that ulcers were the result of infection with Helicobacter pylori bacteria, not just temperament. House flies can pick it up from fecal matter and transmit it by landing on food. DDT helps there, too, by cutting down on the number of flies, and in general, we get back to the recommendations for cleanliness. People should wash their hands thoroughly with soap and water, eat food that has been prepared in a sanitary kitchen, and get their drinking water from a safe, clean source.”

  She got up, walked to the window of her room, looked down at as much of Bernhard’s camp as she could see across the walls and the distance imposed by the surrounding sixty-three-yard wide dry ditches, and swallowed. At least they had dug reasonably good latrines and both the officers and men had been issued soap. Erlach was making the men boil their drinking water. “Sanitary kitchen” was off somewhere in a different frame of reference, though the noncoms were supposed to enforce the washing of cooking pots before re-use. She wandered back to the pen and paper on the table.

  “Anyway, up-time doctors were starting to treat ulcers more aggressively, with antibiotics than just with a bland diet and antacids.”

  She thought again.

  “The stinky thing is that chloramphenicol won’t fix ulcers any more than it’s effective against diphtheria. If you look on my desk there in Besançon, in the pile on the right side labeled ‘To Do,’ you’ll find a letter I got from Leahy Medical Center in Grantville a couple of weeks before I left. It lists what they found on treating H. pylori. To cure the grand duke would take four or six different antibiotics, none of which we can make yet, so you’d better prepare the grand duchess and the whole medical staff in Besançon for a decad
es-long course of soothing his stomach.

  “And whatever you do, don’t let him take any more aspirin. It’s wonderful for a lot of things, but not for people with ulcers. No more little blue pills.

  “Please write to the Leahy Medical Center and ask whether or not ‘Pepto Bismol’ or some equivalent is within our manufacturing capabilities yet. Even better, get the grand duchess to write Lothlorien Pharmaceuticals or Dr. Gribbleflotz’ operation in Jena, or both of them, and say that she’ll pay to get it manufactured.”

  “And, please come, if you possibly can.”

  Besançon, Franche Comté

  Claudia de Medici was astonished at the relief she felt when she received reports from Dr. Guarinonius and the up-time nurse that the grand duke was clearly on the mend.

  Part of the relief was political. For the last several weeks, she had been trying to persuade herself that she would be able to hold Burgundy together if Bernhard died.

  It would have been hard. Much harder than her regency in Tyrol. There, the county was an established entity, with a history. She had been married to Leopold for several years before he died, long enough to get to know the people and establish ties to the influential ones. She had the backing of his brother and nephew in Vienna, who were not all that far away.

  Here? The County of Burgundy was barely more than Bernhard’s dream, held together by men whose loyalty belonged to him––to him personally––rather than to the emerging principality he had cobbled together by sheer brilliance, arrogance, and stubborn refusal to be stopped. Would they have transferred that loyalty to her? To her personally, or to her as regent for the child she was now certain that she carried?

  She straightened up.

  She could have done it. She would have done it, but it would have been hard. So hard.

  It was better that she would not have to do it.

  Not yet, at least. It might still come. It was unlikely that Bernhard would abandon generalship for a life of sedentary administrative tasks any time soon now.

  Not for years, if God was gracious enough to grant those years to him.

  It was really––astonishing, yes, that was the correct word––how much relief she felt. She was astonished.

  Especially because not all of her relief was political. She would, she realized, have missed him. Greatly.

  Yes, she was astonished at the relief she felt.

  She felt calmer, more defined, once she had put a word to what she was feeling.

  She reviewed the report from Kamala Dunn. She owed favors. She rapped on the table.

  Volpert Motzel, the competent young jurist whom Dr. Bienner had managed to entice into the employment of the former regent of Tyrol by offering unparalleled opportunities for advancement and new experiences not likely to be matched in the fastnesses of Salzburg no matter how much Paris de Lodron was willing to pay him, appeared from the outer office.

  “Call Knorr to take dictation for Us. We owe the following persons public recognition, honors, and suitable rewards for their outstanding services during the grand duke’s recent illness...”

  Claudia was back at work.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Now that I’ve spent so much time here, for one reason or another,” Bernhard announced, “I think that I’ll just hang onto Châtel-sur-Moselle. It’s a nice fortress and, after all, it was originally Burgundian and not exchanged with Lorraine until 1544. I’ll be willing to make a reasonable recompense to whoever turns out to be the ruler of the duchy.”

  Basel

  “Aieeeeeee,” Diane Jackson shrieked. “Will you look at this, young Tony. Just what does it take to make him understand?”

  Tony Adducci, who some time during the course of the spring and summer, as crises came and went, had decided that his next stop after Basel would be Larry Mazzare’s town house in Magdeburg, where he would request permission to study for the priesthood, just sighed.

  Chapter 27 Of Plague and Pestilence

  Lorraine

  Once the grand duke was up and around again, Dr. Guarinonius, having made the official call that Bernhard had been suffering from a rather atypical case of the plague, went home.

  From Merkwiller, Gus Szymanski, the EMT from Fulda, arrived from the oil field, at Aldringen’s request, to train the Lorraine militia in plague-fighting.

  “What do you think, Gus?” Kamala asked. “Guarinonius and the other Padua men call it plague, but is it? From a public health perspective, I mean?”

  She looked at him sharply. In her opinion––make that a professional opinion––, the sixty-year-old medic from Fulda was just about on his last legs. “Sit down, would you? Put your feet up for a few minutes.”

  “Do you want a guarantee? No, we’re not a hundred percent sure that it’s bubonic plague. That is, we’re not a hundred percent sure that it’s caused by yersinia pestis. But let me assure you that it’s a nasty disease that kills a lot of people.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Out here, in the field, we’re focusing on preventing it, not on curing it after someone has it. Quarantine. Isolation of identified cases––I preach about not coming into direct contact with the patient’s bodily fluids until I’m hoarse. Sanitary disposal of the corpses.”

  “Don’t you care about getting a certain diagnosis?”

  “Sure, we send samples to the medical school at Jena, just as you did for your grand duke, but we’re not in any position to conduct on-site research. It’s some kind of epidemic pestilence, but it’s a lot more contagious person-to-person than the classical bubonic plague was supposed to be. Maybe it’s mutated into some form of pneumonic plague. I preach till I’m hoarse about not coming into contact with any droplets that the patients breathe out, and then I preach some more. Flu mutated like crazy––why not plague? It’s not smallpox––though that’s endemic, of course. It’s not typhus, either, or measles, or diphtheria. It’s what the down-timers call Pestilenz.”

  “Have you heard back from Jena?”

  “If we have, I haven’t had time to read the letter. You want my honest opinion?” Gus Szymanski asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It really is bubonic plague. I might have to eat my words then when the lab results come in, but that’s what I think. Maybe not exactly the same kind of plague that, up-time, people in the southwest picked up from prairie dogs when they went camping out in the desert, but it’s plague. Something bacterial, at any rate. ItIf it were some kind of unidentified virus, chloram wouldn’t cure it, even in the rare instances where we manage to get a new case of infection and a medic with enough chloram to treat it in the same place at the same time.”

  “But you are curing it.”

  “Yeah. Some of the time. With chloram and supportive treatment, we’re only losing about fifteen percent of the people who catch it. Without those, somewhere between fifty and ninety percent die. It seems to depend a lot on whether the person has some kind of latent immunity from prior epidemics. The up-timers who get it, like Andrea Hill and Fred Pence did, or Jeffie Garand last month, come down with the most severe cases we’ve observed.”

  Kamala pursed her lips. “One thing I didn’t know, until Dr. Gatterer told me. I knew about rats. You knew about prairie dogs. Did you know that cats can carry the plague, too?”

  “Hell, no! Never say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. We’ve been encouraging people to keep cats around, to try to get the rat population down. I thought that the local desire to kill off all the cats was just some kind of witchcraft superstition.”

  “Dr. Gatterer has collected quite a bit of data to show that house cats are another transmission vector. He thinks it’s pretty sure that inhaling droplets from coughing cats is what starts rounds of pneumonic plague transmission. Once that gets started, it does go from person to person if you aren’t awfully careful.” Kamala sighed. “And the death rate from pneumonic is a lot higher than from straight bubonic plague. What I mean is, just about everybody who catches it that way, dies. It’
s probably where you’re getting your ‘ninety percent’ fatality rates.”

  “Well, damn.”

  “Ain’t that the truth, though.”

  “Now that I think about it, Andrea Hill had a kitten. I wonder where it got to?”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The draconian anti-plague measures that Aldringen, in Claudia’s name, imposed on the population of Lorraine did not make him, her, the king in the Low Countries, or the grand duke of the County of Burgundy particularly popular with the inhabitants of the territory that they were now administering.

  For the time being, wherever a person was, whoever he was, soldier or civilian, patrician or beggar, in a city, a village, a military encampment, or the countryside, a nunnery or a brothel, there he or she would stay until such time as the quarantine was removed.

  At least Lorraine was, for the moment, free of moving military units that might further spread disease.

  The reaction of all the above authorities to the public discontent was, ‘“So be it.”

  Cold weather would be coming.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “You must understand, Moscherosch,” Jesaias Rompler said, “that before I undertook the project of this epic based upon the actions of Grand Duke Bernhard and King Fernando, I made a close study of up-time models as compared to the traditional models.”

  “Up-time models?”

  “Yes, entirely. I devoted a full half-year in Grantville, its libraries and its salons, to the study of the up-timer ‘superheros.’ I have studied the various media in which they appeared––the comics, the movies, everything that the town’s resources had. I felt a need, an impelling need, to comprehend to what degree the underlying assumptions of what makes an individual ‘heroic’ might be in that culture.”

  “Any success?”

  “To some degree. The up-time world had not abandoned the custom of maintaining and modernizing the classical models. I was, upon one occasion, invited by Frau Piazza, the wife of the SoTF president, to a private screening of a movie called ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum?’ It was in essence, as she herself pointed out in her introductory words, a combination of several different Roman comedies by Plautus, particularly as indicated by the character of Miles Gloriosus. She expressed her regrets that the intervention of the Ring of Fire caused her to miss her chance to see another of these movies that had been announced as forthcoming, a remake of Homer’s Odyssey set in up-time America. It had been publicized as using the music of one of her own favorite musicians, one Ralph Stanley. She played a recording of some of this Stanley’s music; he used an instrument called a banjo, which I understand is becoming quite popular now. Several of our own composers are producing music for it.”