A FLEA BITE

Set in the middle ages during the pandemic known as the Black Death.

It was the middle of a particularly vicious winter in the year 1348 AD, though she didn’t call it by that number, when Lara had a disturbed and freezing night. It happened quite often, what with comfort hard to come by and the cold hard to fight against. To her it was just a year without a name or number, and Lara eventually had a dream. And it wasn’t just any dream but a particularly chilling one because she dreamed that she experienced death in all its macabre blood-stained misery. Maybe it was the cold that had sneaked into her dreams, and that particular night it was, indeed, very cold and she had to struggle to keep any part of her from freezing.

She was wearing her day clothes, a smock she had inherited from a dead woman lying by the stream where she went to wash her clothes, though the river being frozen meant that the clothes didn’t get washed bt the smock did find a new owner. Billy wouldn’t notice that nothing had been washed, of course, he didn’t care how grubby his trews got, but she had an instinct for keeping clean. Bearing in mind the age in which she lived the word clean had a sort of flexible definition meaning more like a little cleaner than very hygienically clean.

Her bed had been fresh hay back in the summer, but what the pig hadn’t eaten was far from fresh. It had a smell to it, a combination of rotting dead grass and pig who wouldn’t urinate in it any more because it was waiting to be cooked once the fire was lit.

She hadn’t like the pig sleeping next to her, but what could she do if it had ignored Billy’s rather raucous snoring and her own close to violent pushes. But before Billy had converted living pig into uncured bacon it at least had helped keep them warm during the long dark nights.

There were a few other things she used in order to stave off the worst of the freezing weather, though truth to tell Billy had nabbed the best of the rags they kept for this kind of weather. But she did manage, eventually, to fall into an uneasy sleep. And it was during that sleep that she dreamed she was in another place, not their single room shack with the howling wind finding every gap in its walls and window, but in the weatherproof hall belonging to Father Cedric, the much feared Priest who had come to them from a far land, a priest whose command of English was tainted by a nauseous accent which made his every harangued warning of the dreaded afterlife and the very flames of hell into a verbal picture of excruciation.

Nobody liked the Father. Her neighbours, those who toiled on the land with her, trying to encourage just about anything to push through the frozen soil, all of them were more afraid of him than they were of their chieftain, the so-called lord of the manor, because it wasn’t much of a manor and she could tell that he was no lord. But the good or bad Father demanded they paid him their offering, their gift to God in thanks for his goodness, and they had nothing to offer, but maybe a few weeds.

And she knew that not all weeds tasted good and even that some were toxic and made those foolish enough to eat them terribly sick, or worse, fit only for the graveyard, and when the weather was like this Father Cedic left the burying of the dead for better weather. So they lay on the solid site where they were to be buried until the sun shone or they rotted away.

And then where?

Well, the dream would tell her. Heavy on the dirge that entered her sleeping mind it imposed an image, firstly of herself in the summer when the sun was shining and Josh, the young rascal from the miller’s cottage found her kneeling by a row of seedlings trying to determine which was most likely to grow to having a rich and life-giving flesh to it, and if she approved of it, transplanting it to where it would flourish all the better.

Josh was about her age, not that she counted her life in annual numbers, but if she had done that she would have counted to fifteen for herself and one more than that for Josh. And, hidden where she was, far from the sight of Billy or Father Cedric or even the miller, he had seduced her. Or she had had seduced him. It was hard to tell which way round the seducing had occurred, just that afterwards she breathed a mighty sigh of relief that it was the time of the month for her bleeding, and he hadn’t minded.

But that was sin. For both of them: she wasn’t going to carry the burden of that sin, that fornication, on her own shoulders because it had been Josh there too. And if it came down to seed, then it had been his seed that had flowed her way. But Father Cedric had declaimed on more than one occasion just how sinful it was for a man and a woman to do that kind of thing without first being joined in marriage in the sight of God, and he had made it plain that the bulk of the guilt lay with the woman, no matter who she might be.

That was in the dream, making her toss and turn on her stinking bed of hay while Billy snored and snorted almost next to her. And her shame was she had more than enjoyed the game with Josh, if game it had been, and in her sleeping head she planned future possible locations for a replay. There were secret places, she knew some of them because she used them when her bladder was full to bursting and she needed to relieve it. Everybody had to do that, though for the men it was easier, just piss where they were working and to hell if anyone noticed. But women, and she though only fifteen was a woman married as she was to Billy, though you wouldn’t have known they were man and wife if she hadn’t cowed down whenever he was near, but women had to be more circumspect. They gad, according to the holy Father, been put on Earth to tempt men to sin.

That adventure with Josh had been her sin, then, and she could almost feel the fires of hell and Satan’s wrath as a shadow loomed over her. The shadow was Billy and he had somehow woken up for his ration of her, the one that was God-given because Father Cedric had pronounced it so.

He grunted that it was cold, that he was freezing, and she must warm him with her flesh. And she had known her duty. So she mumbled something sleepily and arranged herself so that there was closer room for the two of them.

In a way it was better. Yes, he was cold, she could tell he was cold, but when he pressed against her a kind of mutual warmth occurred and even a grey rat detected it and tried to join in the snuggling, but Billy noticed it and smashed its head in with a clenched fist. That was how Billy dealt with rats and how he would deal with her if she displeased him. So she didn’t.

Then, when Billy was refreshed he stayed where he was because his own cot would be icy, and started snoring into her ear. And it was shen that her dream asked her the one question that plagued her quite often.

If hell is worse than this, and hell has fires that rage forever to warm freezing flesh, how can that be worse? For very little can be surely worse than life on Earth, no matter what Father Cedric says.

It was when she finally dosed off that one of the fleas from the dead rat took a fancy for a drop of her blood, and nipped her, and she scratched herself.

“Keep bloody still!” shouted Billy, half asleep and half awake, and the flea took a fancy to him, too.

That was an almost sleepless night as 1348 became 1349. It was the very time when bubonic plague found its way to the village. And the rat that Billy had sent to rat heaven then chose one of its fleas to punish him.

It was only right that he was the first of the two to die, followed shortly by Lara. By then the winter had eased its chilling attack on the village, and Father Cedric buried the two of them in the same roughly dug grave along with half a dozen of their neighbours before lying down himself, waiting for someone to come along and bury him.

He was confident of his place in Heaven as the Universe was blotted out for him and his brain ceased its toil.

© Peter Rogerson 12.04.23

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Reviews

[DIVYA]

Quite a gory description of the medieval days when life was anything but a bed of roses. I'm quite fascinated by this time period in history and this story did great justice to that bygone age. Right from the stinky clothes, to the pig stink, to the priests from hell and finally the fleas bring such uncalled for and needless deaths but then there was little to human existence back then and people died so inconsequentially and without batting an eyelid. Thank you for sharing this wonderful tale. I loved it.

[Peter Rogerson]

Thank you for your comment. I frequently find myself wondering how people who find life so terrible today would react if a time thingy transported them to the 1340s

[DIVYA]

Hahaha yes. They'd drop dead from the shock, literally.