Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [355]
Half an hour later, he was dead. His companion stayed with him for a little while.
When the house rat came past the corpse of the strange black sewer rat, which had no business to be there, he saw that it was surrounded by a pool of blood. He sniffed the corpse cautiously, uncertain what to make of it: and it was at this point that the flea, the companion which had been living on the body of the black rat for a week, left the corpse and transferred itself to the house rat. Soon afterwards the house rat and the flea moved on to another part of the building.
It was the following morning that the flea made an unusual move. It did so because it was ravenously hungry. For some reason, when it fed on the house rat, its hunger was not satisfied. And so, when a cart containing a man and a ten-year-old boy stopped at the mill and the boy wandered by some sacks of flour where the house rat was scavenging, the flea, which normally did not feed on humans, left the rat to try the boy. It was no good. A few minutes later the flea hopped back to the rat.
The reason for this failure on the part of the flea was that the blood of the black rat which it had been secreting in its stomach had developed a new and hideous life of its own, breeding bacteria that had already sealed off the entrance to the flea’s stomach so that it could not draw in any fresh blood. When the flea tried to ingest blood from the boy, it was unable to do so, and it spat the blood, together with bacteria from the entrance to its stomach, back into the boy’s skin before leaving him.
The boy’s name was Peter Wilson.
It is a tiny life-form, a small collection of cells. Under a powerful microscope, the little bacterium has a shape that resembles nothing so much as a safety pin.
It is asexual: like other bacteria, it replicates itself by splitting in two.
The bacteria form colonies, residing in the bloodstreams of small rodents, from which fact medicine has allotted them the name yersinia pestis, and these live for the most part quietly and in peace. They have done so – and still do today – for who knows how many centuries, in obscure regions in places round the globe from the Crimea, to India, and the United States of America.
Normally the yersinia pestis bacteria are contained by antibodies and do not overwhelm the other cells in the blood of their hosts and this stable condition, which may last indefinitely, is called the chronic condition of the disease.
Why is it then that at isolated periods, something extraordinary occurs? Why, after remaining in this peaceable state for perhaps a hundred years, should the little cells suddenly spring into hyperactivity, replicating themselves with an urgency that develops into a kind of seething rage, a rage that turns into an explosion? What is the alteration in the environment, the unexpected catalyst that begins the process? Various explanations are offered by science, but no definite answer is known.
Whatever its first cause, once the sudden expansion begins, it is almost unstoppable. Nothing but a barrier of the highest mountains, a polar ice-cap, or an impassable sea, seems to bring their expansion to a halt.
Or almost nothing. Modern science has found preventative treatments which were effectively applied when the disease began to break out in the United States of America in the 1970s so that only a few lives were lost. But the third pandemic of the plague, which killed some ten million in India at the turn of the century, is still continuing, although contained, to this day.
In the 1340s, such an explosion occurred.
It began in central Asia. From there it spread outwards – eastwards to China, southwards to India, and southwest along the old trading routes to Asia Minor and Turkey. By December 1347, probably carried by ship, it simultaneously appeared in Constantinople and the borders of Greece, Genoa in north west Italy and Marseilles in southern France. Then it swept, like a madness, through the whole of western Europe. No one had seen such a thing before.
The Black Death is a single form of