Two, Perhaps Three, Still Breathing Below

They sent for me before they sent for anyone wanting the cargo weighed, which told me most of what I needed to know before I reached the Wharfside at a run.

She lay against the outer wall by the time I got there, low in the water, no hand answering hail. Birds on the masts, working at what the deck had left them. A pilot boat’s man swore to two or three still breathing in the hold — swore it the way watermen swear to things, with more certainty than a fever earns from anyone who has actually sat beside one.

The factor would not enter her in his ledger. I understood why standing on the quay, and understood it better once I was down the gangway myself: nothing on that ship would swear to anything. No colors flown. No name a waterman could read. Only a smell I have smelled before and could not, from the rail, say what it was smelling of.

Here is what I did not have, going down: my predecessor’s notes from the Fever Winter, case by case, twenty-three unregistered dead and how each one turned. Whether they came up the Archive’s Steps the night of the flood or went into the water with what the Archivist has never named, I do not know, and I did not have three days to find out before two people finished dying in a hold above the tideline.

So I went by what the body told me, because it is the only text I have never known to lie. Two survivors, not three — the third had gone still between the pilot’s count and mine. A fever with no rash, thready pulse, the particular smell I could not name from the rail and can now: bilge water and the specific rot of grain gone to must in a closed hold, hatches shut six days against a sickness no one on deck lived long enough to name either. Not the sweating kind. Not the winter kind. Something that traveled with the cargo, not the crew — I think, though I have said “I think” to myself twice now and will not write it as more than that until a third day tells me whether I am right.

I have ordered the two kept apart from the harvest crowd, in a room with one door, until I know more than I know tonight. I have not decided whether what killed the rest of that crew will still be in the room with me tomorrow. I boarded because someone had to, and because refusing would have meant guessing anyway — only from a greater distance, and with two more names added to a register instead of a chance at their breathing.

The birds are still on the masts. Nobody has told them to leave, and no one on that quay has the authority to.