DEATH

by CelticWarriorQueen17

"Irene!"

The voice echoed eerily down the marbled corridor.

I turned away from gazing out the window at the street below and called, "Nai, mamá?"

When my mother did not answer, I sighed heavily and walked down the hallway, my soft footsteps seeming as loud as an elephant's in the stillness.

Such quiet had not been the norm until a few months prior, when the Plague--as everyone ominously called it--had swept across the golden city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire. Our household had always been one filled with laughter and music, but no longer. My father had isolated himself from the rest of the family, for, being a physician, he was in much demand and exposed to the disease. My brothers had long since enrolled in the army and so had escaped the brutality of the malady. Our servants had fled our household at the very beginning, save our cook and a few of my mother's maids who saw the sense of staying safe in our villa instead of being constantly exposed to the sickness. I had had no sisters and was now alone, left to my own amusements.

"Mamá?" I called again, this time waiting outside the door to her bedchamber.

"Irene," her voice spoke weakly.

All sorts of horrible notions filled my mind and I entered her rooms feeling slightly panicked. "Mamá, what is it?" I strode to her bed, where she was lying, and then stopped abruptly in shock.

"Irene, do not touch me," she choked, coughing. "Bring your father--at once!"

I nodded frantically, stepping backward and closing the door, running down the hall to the lower levels of the house. I burst into the kitchen, startling our cook, Valeria.

"Good heavens, child! What has got you into such a fright?"

"Valeria," I gasped. "I need Patéras--quickly."

"Whatever for? You know you cannot--"

I cut her off. "'Tis Mamá."

Valeria put down her spoon and shooed the other two maids out of the kitchen. "You mean she has the..." She did not complete her sentence.

"Naí, she does."

"Are you certain of this, paidí?"

I nodded. "She has all of the symptoms Patéras warned us about: the sweating, cough, and the gangrene."

Valeria said nothing, only untied her apron quickly and shouted for the maids to return, giving them strict orders before turning back to me. "Come."

I followed her out of the house and into the small courtyard, the bright sunlight shining down from a clear blue sky and radiating the white paving stones until they nearly blinded my eyes. Squinting hard, I followed our cook across the courtyard to a small door to the outside world.

Without a word of explanation to me of where she was going, she led me out into the streets of the city, a place I had not been in since the Plague had begun to sweep through the golden capital of the world.

We passed now-empty villas of friends where my parents had often gone to dinner parties. Their occupants were dead and their mansions boarded up to prevent looters--not that that did much. The whole city seemed to be holding its breath, as if afraid to breathe in the contaminated air and die of the deadly disease.

In the lower streets, where the middle classes and the poor lived, the air was filled with shrieking and groaning. Rotting corpses lay in the filth of the streets and vermin ran rampant. The only living people I saw were picking up the disgusting remains of bodies and placing them in carts to be dumped outside of the city.

Physicians, much like my own father, were occasionally seen going to and fro from houses marked as infected by a bold red cross painted on the doors, the doctors wearing this strange bird mask that they believed frightened the Plague away.

I looked at what could be seen of their masked faces, but none of them looked like my father.

Valeria, who had long since held tight to my hand as if afraid to lose me, called out to one of them.

He hustled over to us, stepping gingerly through the nauseating filth that littered the once clean streets. "What do you want?" he demanded in a husky voice distorted by the bird guise on his face.

"Do you know of Laskaris, the physician?" Valeria replied briskly.

"Aye, I know of him."

"Do you know where he is?"

The man laughed and I felt a tightness in my chest. "Why, he is dead. Passed over a week or two ago. Most of our kind do not last long anyway." He turned away and continued, leaving us standing in the street, stunned at his news.

"Well," our cook mused, "might as well return and do what we can for Clementina."

She led me back, away from the appalling stench of the streets and back into quieter allies of the upper class.

I mind now, turning to look behind me at the dying city, the sunlight striking the golden dome of the Hagia Sophia and nearly blinding my teary eyes. It seemed to mock all that had been, as if saying, Ha, disease and death bother me not. I endure; you shall all fade away into nothingness and be forgotten.

I looked away and angrily wiped away the tears on my face, ashamed lest Valeria should see them.

We had stepped through the door and into the relative safeness of my own courtyard, when one of the maids opened the entrance to the kitchen and ran towards us, panting, "'Tis the mistress! Come, quick!"

She said something more to Valeria, but I did not hear it.

At her first words, I had let go of the cook's hand and rushed up the stairs and down the marbled hallway to my mother's room, throwing open the door.

But it was too late.

I turned away and walked to the window I had been gazing out of before Mamá had called me that morning, feeling now empty and alone.

Death had claimed all that had been mine and left me with nothing.

Mamá - Greek for mother

Paidí - Greek for child

Patéras - Greek for father

Nai - Greek for yes