many. A blackening wilt had destroyed what meagre vegetation the red plains had offered. Rinderpest killed the caprid herds, causing the animals to be so fatigued they could no longer dig up the roots beneath the clay. Animals died in masses, flocks of birds fluttering down from the sky to die amongst the droves of upturned, sun‐swollen caprid bodies.
Travellers told tales that the city of Ur, the only city on the planet of Bassiq, had sealed its great walls for fear of the black wilt. But that did not matter to Ashwana. She had only ever seen Ur once, and even then, only from a distance. The denizens of Ur did not often make contact with the kinships of the plains. Most plainsmen were not welcome there.
Now, finally, the plague had come south. It started with an innocuous cough and an inflammation of the throat. From there, like the others, Ashwana developed a persistent fever and painful swelling in her neck and underarms. Some languished for weeks while others began to die in a matter of days. But it was no merciful death. The sick slowly lost their memory, their eyes becoming dull and their minds deteriorating. There seemed to be no cure and even the medicine men were helpless. White stunt grass did nothing to alleviate the pains and even brewing gecko skin and sunberries only brought temporary relief from the joint pain.
Ashwana still hoped that her sickness was not the plague but a simple condition brought about by weeks of malnutrition. It was a forlorn hope, as the buboes in her neck suggested otherwise. Already, she had experienced brief moments where fragments of her mind seemed to slip, a tell‐tale sign of the plague. She forgot simple things like whether her mumu had put oil on her mosquito bumps or what time of day it was.
‘I don’t need food,’ Ashwana murmured again.
Her grandmumu shook her head, the tightly beaded coils of her white hair rattling.
‘Some roast talon squall,’ she suggested, ‘or maybe a bush tail soup.’
33
‘It wouldn’t matter. I could die soon.’ Ashwana said. The words hung in the air. The bar of honeyed sun shone through the roof hatch, holding tiny motes of dust in suspension.
Neither said anything else and Ashwana immediately wished she’d never let the words out.
She closed her eyes and silently wished her grandmumu had not heard it.
‘You’ll be better, my little duumi,’ said her grandmumu finally. She swung the bow over her shoulder and secured a quiver of long arrows across her hip. Mumu Abena put on a brave face, the same stern face she used when Ashwana refused to drink her bitter bark soup. ‘This will pass soon,’ she said soothingly.
Overwhelmed by fatigue, Ashwana rolled over. She couldn’t remember what they had been talking about. It seemed there was a dark patch in her memory for the past several hours, perhaps even days. Watching with hooded eyes, Ashwana saw her grandmumu step outside their carriage into the white sunlight outside, a bow across her back and a pail in her hands. Try as she might, Ashwana did not know where her grandmumu was going or why.
GRANDMUMU ABENA LEFT the camp at the base of the crater‐like cirque and climbed the highlands with the suns at her back. Before her lay endless longitudinal sand dunes interspersed with shining white salt lakes. Chenopods and the salt‐tolerant eragrostis grasses dominated the fringes of the basins.
Despite her age, she was surprisingly nimble and her old legs carried her well. She crossed the dry remains of a creek, remembering that just two seasons past, broods of barraguana, with their long fleshy tails and webbed feet, had basked in the shallow waters.
It seemed that even before the plague, the climate was becoming harsher and more untenable, or had it always been so?
She was old now, and she could only remember better times and more glorious days.
The plainsmen of Bassiq had always been a hardy people and there had been times in her youth, during the harshest season of Fume, when her kinship would scrape the bark from fissure trees. The bitter bark would be boiled into soup so that its numbing qualities could dull the hunger pains, nothing more. Even then, life had been good. She had been allowed to ride talon squalls and help muster the caprid droves, drink from the communal water jug and sleep on the ground when it rained.
Abena could not remember anything as bad as this before. The plague had taken so many