The Year of Rice and Salt

Much work had been done in this area by the Zott scholar Istvan Romani, who had done his research around the periphery of the plague zone, in Magyaristan and Moldava; and the plague itself had been studied intensively during the Long War, when it seemed possible that one side or another would unleash it as a weapon. It was understood now that it had been conveyed in the first centuries by fleas living on grey rats, travelling on ships and in caravans. A town called Issyk Kul, south of Lake Balkhash in Turkestan, had been studied by Romani and a Chinese scholar named jiang, and they had found evidence in the cemetery of the town's Nestorians of a heavy die off from the plague around the year 700. This had apparently been the start of the epidemic that had moved west on the silk roads to Sarai, capital at that time of the Golden Horde khanate. One of their khans, Yanibeg, had besieged the Genoese port of Kaffa in the Crimea by catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the town walls. The Genoese had thrown the bodies in the sea, but this had not stopped the plague from infecting the entire Genoese network of trading ports, including, eventually, the whole of the Mediterranean. Movement from port to port, respite during the winters, then a renewal in the hinterlands the following spring; this pattern continued for over twenty years. All the westernmost peninsulas of the Old World were devastated, moving north from the Mediterranean and back to the east as far as Moscow, Novgorod, Kopenhagen and the Baltic ports. At the end of this time the population in Firanja was perhaps thirty per cent what it had been before the onset of the epidemic. Then in the years around 777, a date considered significant at the time by some mullahs and sufi mystics, a second wave of the plague – if it was the plague – had killed off almost all the survivors of the first wave, so that sailors at the start of the eighth century reported witnessing, usually from offshore, a completely emptied land.

Now there were scholars giving presentations who believed that the second plague had actually been anthrax, following on the bubonic plague; there were others who held the reverse position, arguing that contemporary accounts of the first sickness matched the freckling of anthrax more often than the buboes of bubonic plague, while the final blow had been the plague. It was explained in this session that the plague itself had bubonic, septic and pneumonic forms, and that the pneumonia caused by the pneumonic form was contagious, and very fast and lethal; the septic form even more lethal. Indeed, much had been clarified about all these diseases by the unfortunate experiences of the Long War.

But why had the disease, whichever one it had been, or in whatever combinations, been so lethal in Firanja and not elsewhere? The meeting offered presentation after presentation by scholars advancing one theory after another. From her notes Budur described them all for Piali at the end of the day, over supper, and he quickly jotted them down on a napkin:

' Plague animalcules mutated in the 770s to take on forms and virulence similar to tuberculosis or typhoid; – Cities of Tuscany had reached enormous numbers by the eighth century, say two million people, and hygienic systems broke down and plague vectors ran wild; – Depopulation of the first plague followed by a series of disastrous floods that wrecked agriculture leading to starvation; – Super-contagious form of the animalcule mutated in northern France at the end of the first epidemic; Pale skin of the Franks and Kelts lacked pigments that helped resist the disease, accounting for the freckling; – Sunspot cycle disrupted weather and caused epidemics every eleven years, effect worse every time '

'Sunspots?' Piali interjected.

'That's what he said.' Budur shrugged.

'So,' Piali said, looking over the napkin, 'it was either the plague animalcules, or some other animalcules, or some quality of the people, or their habits, or their land, or the weather, or sunspots.' He grinned. 'That pretty much covers it, I should think. Perhaps cosmic rays ought to be included. Wasn't there a big supernova spotted about that time?'

Budur could only laugh. 'I think it was earlier. Anyway, you must admit, it does want explaining.'

'Many things do, but it looks as if we have a way to go on this one.'

The presentations continued, ranging from the recording of the world that had existed just before the Long War, all the way back through time to the earliest human remains. This work on the first humans forced everyone to the contemplation of one of the larger arguments shaping up in the field, concerning human beginnings.