A Country Life

CHAPTER 6 - FARRON

Farron stood in his father's room and looked about him. It was a modest room - several paces long and almost as wide, with one small window that looked out over the inner courtyard of Berkeley Castle. Sable had been given the room by Lord Kilvern some seven years before, when his place in the Protectorate as Master Healer had been confirmed following the death of the previous occupant.

Sable had inherited the furniture too, which included the eagle motif chest of drawers, along with bookshelves containing several volumes of ancient books and journals, most of them over three hundred years old, all dog eared and mildewed. The books had been marked in many places by previous Master Healers, looking for cures to illnesses and complaints that could be concocted using nothing but the plants and materials available to them in the lands in and around the Protectorate. 

Sable had claimed to know all of what was contained in those volumes, and more. Naturally, he wouldn't reveal where he had obtained his knowledge. He had once led an expedition into the centre of Bristol to seek out buildings that may have been hospitals and pharmacies, in which to scavenge anything of use left behind after the plague. The expedition had returned with a few items, and a couple of technical reference books, but that was all. Most buildings in the city had been burnt during the plague in a last-ditch desperate measure to eradicate the disease and, occasionally, to eradicate half-crazed plague victims commonly known as plague wraiths, who tended to congregate together in buildings of any size during the years of the plague's spread. 

Perhaps the most useful thing the expedition had returned with was confirmation that the city was still an unwholesome place to go. Stagnant, contaminated water, collapsed and unstable buildings and drains and all manner of objects, man-made and natural, made the abandoned city a difficult place to traverse, to say nothing of the risk of plague still lingering in the masses of human bones that littered the ruins. There had been enough sporadic resurgence of the plague over the last few hundred years or so to make people nervous of venturing into any significantly large urban area. Cities in general were tombs, only worth going into to scavenge building material not available freely in the countryside, but nothing else.

Farron pulled one of the books off the shelf in front of him and flicked though it at random. It was one of the newer works, A Treatise on the Red Plague, written some two hundred years earlier by the first Healing Masters of the newly formed Wessex Kingdom. It set out all that was known of the plague at the time, at least from the viewpoint of the southern English Kingdoms, from its first emergence and stories of global attempts at eradication, through to its authors time, some hundred and fifty years later by which time the global view had become a local one, there being no knowledge of how the rest of the world had fared. 

Farron knew one thing for certain from the book, and that was no-one, without exception, was recorded as having survived the plague and make a full recovery from its effects. No-one that is, except for himself. 

According the Treatise, the plague worked quickly to change the physical appearance of a person, turning their skin the deep, dark red that gave the plague its name, while at the same time attacking the victim's brain and leaving them in a primitive mind state. Once turned, the victim was only just able to function, following instinct rather than reason, and often developed a pack mentality resulting in plague victims grouping together, sometimes harmlessly, but more often as shortages of food began to become commonplace, the packs would turn violent and unpredictable.  

Often malnourished, and with empty, emotionless expressions, plague victims been half jokingly referred to as zombies by some when the first cases of cannibalism and group attacks were recorded, but by the time the scale of the disaster became e global catastrophe, and not one family had been left untouched by the plague's effects, the more pitying name of plague-waifs had became the norm. Perhaps it had been less frightening to the minority who remained healthy.