Death - XIII

"Tarot Blanco" - London 1349

Beatitudes luster and call knowingly: Death edges all the hearths. It is London, in the year of our Lord, 1349 - the 23rd Regnal year of Edward III of the House of Plantagenet. The sun grew dark and there came an end because the Great Pestilence came to visit through the spring and hot summer. It came to the Tower of London in the east, to the Blackfriars in the west.

Through the narrow alleyways, many gravemen call for the dead and pile them high without care. The dogs barked, sometimes for their master, sometimes hoping for a mouse or a rat. The fires were kept burning in hopes that they would keep the bulbous skin from popping and then oozing. Near the houses were all black and grimy with soot because no one washed them in the months since the terror gripped the hearts of almost all. The sky was gray and black mold from the weather and all of the chimneys stoking in unison. That day two figures left Blackfriars with the masks of a physician and his apprenticed though the taller one also carried a white insignia on his neck.

In one door, which even before was slashed by debt collectors having to mark the house as unpaid for a variety of goods, was closed and locked. Up to it came two figures, both hitting by white masks that may have come from Commedia dell'arte, and smiled in their grimness of a face that was in torment. The taller of the figures wrapped the gloved knuckles twice and then a few minutes passed and the door slowly opened inward, with only a few candles inside the house to make a little bit of light in the darkness. And then the door closed inward.

The two dark-cloaked figures looked around and saw that there were three children who looked to be dying and another woman whose arm had been populated by the swollen sores but still was sitting. The taller figure examined each one in turn and then turned to the head of the household, a tall burly man with a heavy beard. The figure shook his head as if to say there was nothing that could be done. Slowly the man took out, as if in pain, a groat, and paid the shorter figure hoping to get at least two pennies back but had to settle for one. And it was clipped. Even then he bowed before the taller figure.

The door was closed and the two figures went to the nearby graveman that they knew because they would tell him that that house would have bodies, soon.

The shorter one turned but decided not to speak as they walked down Watling Street with its crowd of buildings which all took the somber pale of a city under siege by deadly forces. They looked had the dead which had not made it to their destination and made their way towards their next appointment in the newly built house. Once upon a time, they were garrulous as they chatted, but that soon stopped as the body count grew higher and almost all were affected.

Finally, the taller figure spoke: “That will be another hearth with no one to tend it.”

The shorter one looked up and quizzically asked: “How do you know?”

“There were dishes on the floor but no cats, the cats are gone. The head of the household had the black swelling on the fingertips. That means that all in that house are infected.”

The shorter one tilted his head down as if to think. Then turned and asked: “Will it come for us?”

“That is God’s to decide, I took note to be the physician and that oath is more important to me than living longer.”

The gray clouds opened and a peek of the sun drifted by. Both of them looked as if in wonder.

They walked another block and saw the old St. Paul, with its Spire pointing upwards and the stained glass catching the sun's rays.

The taller one stood and looked at the cross-shaped cathedral all brown with a gray roof. “I do not know how many days I will see St. Paul’s.”

“Why don’t we go? We could take a ship down the river and escape.”

“Where is there to go? Every town, village, and hamlet is infected.” He then tussled the coins that they had collected that day as a way of telling his apprentice the benefit of staying where they were. But then they went out along the wall, with its slated stones dripped with mortar, to towards the plague pit where the body collectors went to bury the dead. There was, as usual, a line.

The tall one looked for his acquaintance, Paul, who had been close to becoming a doctor but then had to take over the family blacksmith when his father died of natural causes. He sighted Paul and moved over to him.

“I come from the old Bowyer, and it does not seem very long before the house will have bodies rather than people.”

Paul looked at the mask and said “A day do you think or two, Peter?” Then he looked down at the apprentice and pulled off a cup from the wheelbarrow which he plied. “ I think you need some beer it will transform your day almost in an instant.” the apprentice took the cup and drank almost all of the beer in one swallow.”

Peter looked and said: “I think two because the man of the house is still tough even though his life is ebbing.”

With that, Paul just nodded. “And think he survived the war only to be felled by the pestilence.”

“Everyone goes from this world to the next at the time that moment where the end appoints for him. I think that all of us will die and the last judgment will be upon us.”

“Even the Pope and the princes and their armed followers bow before death.”

Then Paul merely nodded and began to sketch on a playing card. He sketched a five-pointed white rose on a flag held by an armored man, but the face was a skull. The shorter figure looked at the drawing in progress and looked over at Peter, figured in a black cloak that went down to the ground as if held by rocks. And he saw not the sinews of the wrist but the white of a skeleton.