There had never been a winter like it before, or perhaps there had never been a winter before. Who knew.
Those who huddled in the ramshackle hovels that huddled round the skirts of the castles and mansions just wished it further as they shivered under their skinny blankets. While the wealthy, whose teachers and scholars might have known, didn’t bother to ask, simply throwing more coal onto the braziers that kept them from the killing cold.
Whatever the case, the frost-bound landscape had a beauty almost beyond description and the children of the mighty and high were allowed out of their establishments of learning to congregate on the icy common, where they slipped and slid in high-pitched glee.
It wasn’t long before some entrepreneurial soul manufactured, or found, skates. Skates on whose wickedly sharpened steel blades it was possible to swoop and glide like land bound birds.
At first it was the children, whose small feet left only fine imprints in the frozen earth, but, needless to say, the joy of skating was soon deemed unwholesome for mere children and the frozen land soon echoed to the slow, deep voices of important men and the silver bell tones of their paid companions. So consumed were they in their own physical prowess, and the opportunity to display the obscenity of their wealth, that they didn’t give a thought to the thin, high wailing that came from beneath their feet.
Day after day they skated and their skates cut deeper and deeper through the ice and into whatever lay beneath.
Afterwards there was some debate as to who drew the first spray of reddish fluid from the wounded land, but what was unarguable was how quickly one ‘bleeding wound’ became a hundred.
As the land screamed and bled, the skaters fled – with the unearthly crying ringing in their ears and their skin spattered with a thick reddish liquid that burned like acid wherever it touched.
It was but a short while, though to those trapped in the chaos it felt long indeed, until the winter land was left to shift for itself. Empty save for those who couldn’t escape.
There was a tall plague doctor standing alone in what was left of an impromptu ballroom. As the blood oozed around his feet an abandoned pianoforte played a desolate tune to itself and the Infanta of Iberia awaited the ship to carry her home.
The plague doctor put down his lantern and began to anoint a thousand thousand bleeding cuts with an orange scented unguent and the tears that dripped from the beak of his mask.
It was probably too late, he thought, but once a doctor…
Picture and inspiration courtesy of Paul Biddle.
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