The Plague Tales Read online

  Also by Ann Benson

  THE BURNING ROAD

  THIEF OF SOULS

  Available from Dell

  HIGH PRAISE FOR

  THE PLAGUE TALES

  “THRILLING … A RICH, TIGHTLY RENDERED TALE … the enticing hold of parallel historical and futuristic stories—with a virulent epidemic as the ultimate common enemy—is a grip that is hard to resist.” —Middlesex News (Mass.)

  “Benson reveals a formidable talent as she blends historical fiction with a near-future bio-thriller …[Her] debut is assured and accomplished in both the past and the present …[She] renders both eras and their characters in vivid detail.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

  “INTRIGUING … Benson neatly alternates between two attention-grabbing stories … [She] describes fourteenth-century Europe realistically and a twenty-first century near-police state in an unsettling, low-key manner.” —Booklist

  “[Benson] uses parallel chapters to great effect … the two plotlines dovetail neatly and boil to a twisted, satisfying conclusion. Readers of books along the lines of Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone will devour this fictional equivalent.” —Library Journal

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Ann Benson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77811-6

  v3.1

  For Robert,

  in honor of twenty years.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to acknowledge the fine work of both Jennifer Robinson and Peter Miller in helping bring this book to print. Jackie Cantor’s remarkably gentle and astute editing improved it immensely, as did the comments of Arnold Silver, Linda Cohen, Robert Benson, Robert Glassman, and Ariel Glassman. I am grateful to them all for their efforts on my behalf.

  Please write to Ann Benson at:

  [email protected]

  or visit her web site at:

  www.plaguetales.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter Zero

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Clutching a musty book to his chest, Robert Sarin lowered himself carefully into a rickety wooden rocking chair and shifted his stiff joints until his position was tolerably comfortable. Once settled, he placed the book in his lap and folded his hands over its cracked leather binding. He rocked slowly, his mind consumed with worry about how he would make it through the next day, and then the one after that, without stumbling over some terrible problem that he did not have the wherewithal to anticipate. He stared blankly at the ancient woman in the nearby bed, whose own unmoving gaze was focused upward on the straw ceiling as if she were searching for signs of some small verminous creature, one foolish enough to reveal itself in her pristine home.

  Out, damned rat! she used to say when an unsuspecting rodent would stray into her protectorate, and the son keeping vigil by her side, though old himself, could still recall the sound of vengeance in her laughter as she planned the intruder’s demise. When he was a child, the force of her will would sometimes scare him so badly that he would scramble under the bed in which she now lay, then peek out timidly and stare up at the straw.

  Out, indeed, the damned rats would go, he remembered, always departing with suitable haste, for his mother was not a woman to be trifled with in her prime. Even in the infirmity of her tenth decade, as her skin thinned to translucence and her eyes grew dull, the keenness of her mind had not deserted her. On the edge of death she still clung to life with all the fierce tenacity of one summoned too soon to the precipice, one who would shatter the bell before allowing it to toll in her memory. She was not ready to jump into the void yet; he thought, with some sadness, that she would never be ready. She had told him often, her voice brittle and bitter, that she had not finished her work on earth. And despite his awe of her, he was always certain that she loved him well. She had taught him everything he knew, and he was not ready to let her go.

  He could see the veins through her parchment skin and wondered how the walls of her heart, themselves by now as delicate as paper, could keep those veins blue with blood. Her face, in youth so clear and firm, was a mass of folds and wrinkles, all spotted with the strange dark growths of age, unwanted splotches of taupe flesh that appeared one day and established themselves, then rudely invited their cousins to camp alongside them. Her chest rose slowly, almost imperceptibly, and then fell again. With each repetition the interval between the peak and the valley of her breath lengthened a bit, and soon, Sarin knew, the gap would lengthen to the point that the rhythm could no longer be maintained.

  Was that all? he wondered. Just a disruption in the rhythm? Surely, he thought, it must take more than that to bring almost a century of constancy to an end. He pulled a feather bookmark from between the pages of the book and reached out, placing it in front of her mouth and nose. Every few moments the feather’s delicate tendrils would stir just slightly from her weak breath. But after a few more protracted and halting breaths the stirrings finally ceased, and the feather remained motionless in his hand. He held it there for what seemed to him like a very long time before he was fully convinced that his mother had passed. Then he lowered his head and cried quietly, his tears falling like soft rain on the book’s mold-chalky cover.

  He raised his sad eyes and looked over her still body to the window on the other side of the bed. Several pairs of eyes looked in, their shapes oddly distorted by waves in the uneven glass. He looked from one to the next until he had connected with every pair. There he saw the unmistakable look of fear, the pain of uncertainty. His mother had been their champion, their protector, and with her passing it should have fallen on him to take up the cause. But the violence of his own birth had robbed him of some
of the mental skills he would otherwise have inherited from his mother, and before she slipped into her final descent, she had arranged they would instead champion him.

  She had told him that the book contained everything he needed to know to make a proper job of what lay before him. He looked down at the musty old volume and started to open it, then realized with some panic that he had pulled out the feather marking the page where she had said he should begin. The hot, shameful fear of failing her flooded through him. How could he have lost the page? She had been so careful to mark it for him.

  He began at the very beginning, and turned the pages carefully, muttering to himself, scrutinizing the ancient writings for familiar words. On the early pages the once-black ink had faded over the centuries to a dull brown not much darker than the stained page to which it had originally been applied, and it was a difficult task to make out the letters. The hand was spidery and foreign-looking, and written in a language he could not read; though his mother had tried several times to teach him, he never could manage to grasp it. Feeling very stupid, he moved impatiently through the pages until he came to the place where the writing was in the language he could read; the ink was much darker, though lighter yet than the most recent entries. He did not stop to read until he came to the place where the fresh ink was coal-black and the edges of the letters still crisp, and the writings were in the familiar hand of the woman who lay dead on the small bed. There, he read slowly and carefully to be sure he understood everything clearly, for he wanted very much to do it all just right when the time came.

  She had told him there would come another task for him to do, one that would require more of him, and that everything he needed to know could be found in the book. The task would come to him, she’d said, because it had not come to her, although she could not say just when it would happen. He hoped with all his heart that he would find the courage and strength to carry out his part in the same way she would have, had it come in her time. He glanced up at the eyes in the window, and nodded very slightly. In unison the watchers repeated his gesture, acknowledging their complicity.

  It was something, he thought. He prayed it would be enough.

  Zero

  April 2005

  Just as Janie Crowe was closing in on contentment, something went clunk in the machinery of the world and everything ground to a painful halt.

  “Don’t you think it’s ironic,” said the woman in the airplane seat next to her, her voice nasally distorted by the small speaker in her protective mask, “that it was something so simple? I mean, think of all the cataclysmic possibilities. It could have been a nuclear accident. A comet landing on the earth. Some terrorist group with a truckload of chemical weapons. But no. Nothing dramatic like that. It was just stupid bacteria.”

  “Go figure,” Janie replied dryly, hoping her disinterest would be made clear by the tone of her voice. When would this pain-in-the-ass woman run out of sad stories about all the disagreeable things that had happened to her since the Outbreaks, and stop her pissing and moaning? Janie decided that if she was subjected to a continuation after the “lunch” break, she would interject a few of her own favorite Outbreak anecdotes. The woman’s tales of inconvenience were sure to seem trivial in comparison.

  The plane bumped its way across the Atlantic, heading for London. Janie thought to herself, No more cancer, but we still have turbulence. A steward walked slowly down the aisle, unaccountably surefooted as the aircraft lurched up and down, and handed out to each of the plane’s passengers, a small square box of a nutritional supplement designed to suppress hunger. Another steward followed close behind him, passing out what the airlines called “sterile intake devices,” a medically correct euphemism for what were once called plastic straws. At forty-five Janie was too young to remember the time when straws were made of rolled waxed paper; all the straws in her lifetime had been plastic. She was sure there had been a time when straws were, naturally enough, made of straw, hence their name. She shook her head silently and sighed, thinking about how things always seemed to change, and that the changes were seldom pleasant.

  She glanced over at her suddenly silent seatmate, who was slipping one end of the straw through a rubber hole in the base of her sterile mask. As Janie watched, she shoved the straw upward until it was within reach of her lips. Then she shoved the other end into a small rubber gasket at the top of the box, which closed snugly around the straw and formed an airtight seal. The woman began sucking gleefully, emitting a series of rather suggestive noises, which Janie could hear through her headgear. The woman looked up, saw Janie giggling over the noise, and quickly shut off her own sound transmitter. She gave Janie an embarrassed little smile and then looked away again, preoccupied with her now-silent intake ritual.

  Good, Janie thought, that’ll keep you quiet for a while. You don’t know how lucky you are, lady. If you’d started in on me again, I might have to tell you my own troubles. Like how I used to be a surgeon, a good one, and how I used to have a wonderful family, but they’re all gone now, and how I was forced by an unsympathetic bureaucracy to be retrained for something else, and I’m middle aged and alone and I’m back in school again.

  She turned off the listening device on her headgear and attacked her own liquid meal. The silence gave her the feeling of being underwater—she could hear some sounds, but they were muffled by the tightness of the air seal. The dead sterile air inside the headgear did not conduct sound well. She closed her eyes and imagined that she was in some quiet forest of tall conifers, and that the only audible interruptions were occasional birdcalls and insects buzzing, which she conjured from memories of childhood excursions into such places. The peace was wonderfully soothing.

  Not so fortunate were the stewards, who were forced to listen to the rubbing of one stiff plastic surface against another as the passengers shifted for comfort in their ungainly sterile suits, heavy, restrictive garments intended to keep any microscopic American beasties corralled so they couldn’t invade the sole surviving piece of what had once been the United Kingdom. It was a sound only slightly less grating than fingernails scraped down a blackboard. To the unfortunate people charged with overseeing the comfort and sterility of the passengers, this and every other transoceanic flight sounded like some weird crystalline crinklefest.

  The plane’s passengers stood in line outside the customs area at Heathrow Airport. Janie looked up at the mezzanine for the hundredth time since the passengers from her flight had gotten into this line, and made a detailed visual examination of the green-suited Biocop who had been standing there, barely moving, holding his chemical rifle in the same ready position for the last two hours. It was pointed directly at the waiting line of incoming passengers and it never wavered. As she watched, the cop straightened himself up and raised his hand to the side of his head to adjust the volume in his earphones. After a few moments of intense listening he looked toward a nearby mezzanine door and within a second or two another Biocop came out, then moved quietly along the mezzanine catwalk and stood next to the first cop. After a brief interchange the first Biocop started walking away, and the new one trained his weapon in the same direction.

  Janie nudged the woman next to her, the same one who’d verbally terrorized her on the flight. The woman was so bored with the wait that she had resorted to memorizing the headlines scrolling onto the huge television screen ahead of them. She turned in Janie’s direction.

  “Look,” Janie said, pointing to the mezzanine. “The Changing of the Guards.”

  After three hours in line Janie finally reached a customs agent, a stony-faced middle-aged man who smelled of garlic and behaved as if he was in need of a strong antacid.

  What a pissy job, Janie thought to herself, and considered momentarily that slightly less luck in the medical reassignment lottery might have forced her into something like customs work. She was suddenly more appreciative of her situation—at least she would be using some of her original surgical skills in her new work when she completed her forens
ics certification. The business she would attend to on this trip to London was the last piece needed before she could start the final application process, and when her certification application was accepted, it would mark the beginning of a new life, one cleansed of all reminders of her old life. One by one the cracked pieces of the person Janie Crowe once was were being replaced by the sound pieces of the person Janie Crowe would soon be. There were days when she thought this was a good thing, and days when the loss of each piece, however cracked it might be, seemed like a little bit of death. She was too tired to think about what kind of day this one was turning out to be.

  Her group was waved forward to a long table where her luggage and boxes were lined up for inspection. An agent asked her, “What is the purpose of your visit?”

  “I’m here to do some scientific research. An archaeological dig.”

  “What is the purpose of this research?”

  “I’m completing certification for forensic archaeology.”

  “And how long will you be staying on our fair island?” he asked with a smile. Janie read it as a challenge to give the wrong answer.

  But she was prepared for this question, as she had been coached by a U.S. Department of Foreign Travel official, one she had bribed handsomely to help smooth out the wrinkled process of obtaining a post-Outbreak overseas travel permit. She answered in the least damaging manner.

  “About three weeks, if all goes well.” She could see the smile fade from the agent’s face. He had just lost an opportunity to make a bodyprint of an unsuspecting visitor. He was clearly disappointed.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s nice. But if your visit extends beyond four weeks you’ll have to report to the Ministry of Identity to be bodyprinted. We have to issue you a card, you understand, and we must print you in order to do that.”