Quarantine Bridge

She walks across the bridge every day. It’s the path between her home and the market. Each day, be it windy or sun-filled, wet, frozen, wild, grey, blue-bright or ice-silver. Her hood up over her head, shawl twisted around her thin arms. Always with the cacophony of the marketplace, of the city streets trailing behind her, only softly dissolving as she steps onto the cobbles, pointed towards home.

She always stops. Always takes a moment to lean over and look down. The river shrugs its way lazily between city streets; silver, murky, marbled; there are boats and barges, there are bright little sails, the camouflaged lumps of freshwater whales and the red-topped heads of the sea-cattle, often hatted with a scatter of riding birds. But the river is of little regard; it’s the island she focuses on.

It’s a long finger of green hemmed with sandy-grey. Along the narrow strip of green there are the shrinking, organic outlines of these makeshift dwellings. The best that can be done. Fields grow corn, a few livestock graze. She wonders how it is that they can manage to run them, to keep them fed, milked, sheared or butchered; how they remember the seasons and the tasks that go with them.

She looks for him. As always. And he’s there, in the little hovel she recognises as his. Still wearing the loose, string-drawn trousers of his incarceration; swamped in a delivered shirt, with a flaxen hat she thinks he must have fashioned for himself. She longs to call out: “Deinros! Look up! I’m over here!” She would drop down sugar-cakes, and roses, like she’s done once – the old days – but she feels as if the gesture would be futile, as if the cakes would be gathered and gobbled by whoever was closest. But she would call out, if she could find the courage; if she didn’t fear the face that would tilt up to look at her, changed, and with an expression of blank un-recognition. Curiosity. Bewilderment.

#

He sees her. She’s caught in the hash between sunset and shadow. A creature swathed in green, with feathers in her hair, leaning over the swooping bridge as if she’s looking for something. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels as if she doesn’t find it. As if she never does. And each day, sunrise, sunset, she comes back to cross that bridge, to look over towards the horizon, or down into the river-fenced village.

He thinks he hears a sound, when she looks towards him, a flurry of lights and sensations from inside his own head. And a word – perhaps a name: Frimelda.

Or might it be nothing at all?

#

Twenty-one years ago, a man and woman fell in love. Their names were Deinros and Frimelda. She, working in her mother’s laundry, he; a builder’s labourer; but both of them with all the pretensions and ambitions of raw youth. When Deinros came to bring his father’s clothes for cleaning, Frimelda huddled behind the steaming tubs, watching him, admiring his every movement. And she knew her mother, and her grandmother, and probably her aunts Thenda and Dormosta would throw their hands up in horror at her, but she ran after him when he left, and overtook him, skirts a-flourish, so that she stood in front of him, cheeks flushed, the folds of her dress crunched up in her hands. “I am Frimelda, the laundress’s daughter. Might I ask your name, sir?”

Deinros was impressed. By the bold, forward, blunt expression of her interest. He could find nothing in her that was shrinking or fearful or in the least unsure of herself. He thought, looking her over, taking note of that ginger touch to her hair, that she was just what he needed. He was a man who intended upon going far, he would not be a labourer forever, but a builder, an architect, he studied every sketch he could find, applying them to his work, dreaming big. And so, he would learn the ways of building, from the inside out, learn how to apply them, how to grow and expand and revolutionise them. He’d be a man who could dress in furs, who could expect the ‘sir’ she had just so easily laid at her feet. And this woman, he thought – though she was little past being a girl in truth, and he was only a few years into the transition from boy into man – was the very thing he needed by his side.

“I might give you my name, if you would tell me where I might escort you to deliver you safely home.”

“By all means, but the journey is brief, since I’ve just this moment come from there.”

“Alas, then we shall have to take the long way, so I might keep your company as long as I may.”

“Indeed, but I shall need your name.”

“And you shall have it, I am Deinros.”

And so, they played lady-and-gentleman; with her unpracticed curtsy, and his best-guess bow, with his arm held out so that she might slip hers into it. And then they walked, until laughter got the better of them. And Deinros thought, though he wasn’t ready to say it yet: we’ll be fine folk for real someday, and all this play-acting is going to be for real. And how lucky for me that I have so simply and easily encountered the woman I’m going to marry.

#

The wedding was a simple affair, since they were still only simple people. He had a new shirt, which she had embroidered; and she wore a long, white dress that her aunts and cousins, her mother and grandmother had helped her patchwork together. They waded into the river until they were waist-deep, and spoke their vows with the builders and fishermen and ferrymen and hawkers all cheering their approval and tossing ribbons.

A simple supper of honeyed flatbreads, with walnuts and apples, with barrels of cider and ale, was all that could be afforded, and then home to a one-room house, to a folding bed, where their married life would begin.

And in the night, when the pushing and grunting, and promises that it would grow better and easier over time were done, Deinros nudged her into wakefulness.

“Love, what is it?” She was honey-sweet with sleep.

But he wanted her full attention; Deinros took her hand and lifted it up to his lips, then drew her up so that she would be kneeling before him. He whispered: “Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

“Then I want you to know that there will be better times.”

“This time is perfect.”

“On straw, with a single blanket and dirt on the floor?”

“Yes. Perfect.”

“Well, it won’t always be this way. I want a better kind of perfect for you, and I intend to get it. Have you seen the fine houses of Rainbow Street?”

“Yes.”

“We will live in one of those houses. You will be dressed in lace and velvet, the water boys, and wood boy, will have to curtsy to you when they bring round their wares. We’ll have dinner with great merchants, and councilmen, and ship’s captains. Our children will marry into titles. I will buy those. Do you believe me?”

In this half-dark, with the wind wrapped around the sharp rooves of the city, Frimelda did believe it. She thought to herself: I would have you in a pigsty, eating acorns, and dressed in sacks; I don’t need any of the rest of it. But she could see it meant a great deal to him and so she said solemnly: “I do believe you.”

#

The children never came. But wealth and position did.

Deinros studied the art of putting together a building. He set his dreams upon all the ways that one could be made better. And in time he was noticed, given more senior responsibilities, consulted on the matters of design, until he could and did design his own works. When one day a nobleman approached and sought his work, he accepted the position and built a house that was fine and functional, earning his reputation, and with it his future. Every day he walked past that house, taking in its smooth lines, the slope of its walls, the way the light struck the pale stone. This had been his making: he walked past in soft leather shoes, and with fur around his collar.

And Frimelda. Her hands were not accustomed to being still. Even in her fine home she cared for the housework, for the cooking and planning, mucking in with the serving girl, and becoming a fine hand with an embroidery needle. Their respectability was such now that she had no need to – indeed, ought not to – work for money. But she worked her needle whenever she had the chance, gifting her works, or wearing them on the collars of her dresses, flowing down the long, layered skirts.

And so, they were happy.

Until a man walked into town. He was a wild, starved vagabond, and people avoided him. He had the air of madman. He crouched down on to a nearby street and pressed some seeds into the cracks in the roads. He called out to the howling wind and the dark night, “This is what you deserve, every, every last one of you!”

The weather ate his words. Nobody heard them.

Frimelda and Deinros slept through the night in their canopied bed knowing nothing of what had transpired.

#

But the seeds grew.

They slid between the cobbles, they embedded themselves in the cracks in the walls, and over weeks a thin, yellow moss began to grow.

And as it did, people sickened.

Deinros was amongst them. And the sickness was a terror of a thing. It turned the skin of its victims into a hardened, thready mass, a mix of greys and yellows; it sunk into their bones, warping the shape of them; and into their minds, stealing away their reason and understanding. The doctors and witch-healers agreed that they would not survive.

Frimelda remained at his bedside. What else was there for her to do? She knew what was being said, that there was little to no hope. But she was stubborn. She insisted on every potion, or every fancy, every trick, spell and medicine being tried. And she sat there day and night, she slept there, talking to him: “My fine lord, you have come too far to give up now. Look at all the things you’ve given me, look at what you’ve made of yourself. From that hovel on Kink Street, to these three storeys on Westwood Close. You did all that. You weren’t born to a penny of it, and now you strut amongst men who were born with fortunes. You’ve more work to do in the world. More greatness to aspire to. And I – please consider your wife – could never live without you. You have no right to die.”

And indeed, he didn’t.

Had he listened to her words? She wanted to believe it. But in truth, none amongst the infected were dying. But their recovery was not as it should be. Their strength returned, but not their colour, their shape, nor their wit.

Seekers had drugged themselves to vision: a wild man on a city street, long gone, but the seeds he’d planted, seeds enspelled, still held sway. These things were hunted out and burned. Roads dug up, buildings demolished, to put an end to the terror of this plague. Scars were left on the city, but they were death-scars, an interloper sniffed out and cauterized; clean, healing wounds all that now remained.

If only it could have been true.

One day, a father, one of the infected, touched his daughter as she came to kiss and feed him. Beneath his fingerprints a taint of grey-yellow formed, it grew into her skin, and it spread like wildfire. Days later, a wife came away from a kiss with her lips similarly afflicted. The city’s councilmen met at midnight, oil lamps burning, and they spoke their minds. This unnatural plague had become contagious. Their work in stamping out its roots had not been enough. That half-mad mage was still wreaking his spite, his revenge, whatever had inspired him, from whatever distance he was now away.

“This is a harsh measure, it is cruel.”

“Less cruel than the alternatives.”

“Men, we are not savages.”

“No. but we must save our city. First and foremost.”

And so, before the next dawn, a plan had been worked out; and Lowering Island, beneath the Quarantine Bridge was born.

#

She worries about the weather. How he will fare in it. She wonders if there might be any way to see him, to speak with him. In the past she has contemplated telling the authorities that she wants to be sent to the island. Her courage always burns strong at first, at night, pacing the floorboards, but it dies with the dawn: she fears that place, the madmen who roam it, even her Deinros, who she knows is no longer truly her Deinros.

But on a night that is so cold and wind-swept and ice-laced that she fears for his survival, she puts on a long coat, gathers up all his winter clothing that she can, and ventures out into the madness. The housekeeper grabs at her hands: “Madam, you can’t go out in this. You’ll come to harm.”

It’s as wet and howling as it was the day the madman brought the plague.

“My place is with my husband, though I’ve never had the courage to take it. To bring him these things is the least I can do.”

“Other madmen will take them.”

“That is why I’ve taken all of them.”

“Madam-!”

“Let me go, Solistie; I have to. I command it. I’ll come back safely.”

She presses her way into the night, into the pelting rain, against the full heft of the weather, and she heads for the bridge.

When she gets there, she sees that something is happening on that island, there is commotion and noises, and from inside the huts, through the sodden gaps, there is a white light emerging. And she can see these figures, mostly dark-shrouded, but still, she can see them in the fields, bent over, with their shoulders pointed up against the storm. There’s howling sounds that come from them, sounds that compete with the wind. Sounds of the animal.

“Deinros!” He’s there amongst them.

She has to. She has to go down to him. Whatever he is, and whatever it means for her: a lifetime amongst these afflicted creatures, succumbing to her own affliction. She has to, all the same. She tries to bunch her skirts up enough to scramble onto the railing. But her respectability is her saviour, there are too many layers, too much lace, and these things entangle her legs, so much so that she falls backwards, onto the bridge, into dirty puddles, and the rain batters her face.

When she struggles to her knees and then her feet again, she looks over the railing and sees that one of the creatures – men, women, people like I am, still people – throws its head back – his head – and roars. It’s a roaring sound like she’s never heard before, a pitch that’s both high and low, that plays the air like a musical instrument, a trilling, piercing, unearthly sound.

That sound brings people out of nearby houses in spite of the rain. Strangers come to stand around Frimelda, staring like she is, over the edge of the bridge. One of the creatures down there is hunched in a ball, and his shoulders are bubbling, glowing, his skin is cracking. The roaring one has massive, sharp teeth – teeth of the wolf or the shark, teeth designed for killing, for tearing raw meat from bone.

Deinros is there amongst them. She can pick him out by his shirt. He’s staggering, glowing, holding his head in his hands, and there’s white-golden light streaming out of his eyes.

“What’s happening to them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they dying?”

“They’re… changing…”

“Into monsters.”

No. Deinros could never be a monster. But the hard shell of his skin gives way along his back, the rough wool of his shirt tears, and lumps of flesh thump their way free. It’s more than flesh… feathers….  Frimelda watches in shock as the wings unfurl. These are true wings, snow-white, feathered, wide and thick. She grips the railing as he slowly works these strange new appendages. Some people on the bridge have turned and are fleeing. More are coming to take their place. Wet chaos up here as it is down there. One man draws a sword.

“No,” she says, finding her voice, discovering it is calm. “Not yet.”

Deinros crouches and leaps, he takes off into the air, and he circles the bridge. The rain batters his wings, but they seem to be strong, they fight back. And he comes to land in front of her. His arms slide around his waist.

“Deinros.”

He speaks, but his mouth can’t seem to form real words.

She looks at his face, looks into his eyes. There is so little left now of her husband. This is a stranger’s face, and it’s the face of a predator – the eyes, the mouth, the teeth of one. But she lets him lift her up, lets him carry her aloft. She can see that there are men running, that there are archers setting up in positions where they might try to fire at these new monster-citizens. She doesn’t think the arrows will go far in this storm.

She grips his neck with her fingers and thumbs, all digits digging in. “Please still be in there, please still be you.”

His voice is utterly unlike his voice, it has to fight its way past those teeth. “I told you. I promised you. A different kind of perfect.”

She can’t decide if she should feel terror or joy; she kisses that sharp, painful mouth, so she won’t have to think about what all this might mean.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work