The Godless Plague

  From the Journal of Iskandar

  The Siege of Caffa, 1346

  I am Iskandar, foot soldier of the Golden Horde, and I write this with trembling hands so that someone, someday, might understand that we did not merely bring war to Caffa — we brought an end to the natural order.

  We were dying long before the city ever fell.

  The siege was meant to be a swift harvest of glory, but weeks bled into months, and our camp rotted beneath us. We lived pressed together like cattle in the mud, brothers-in-arms by necessity, though we shared more with the vermin than with each other.

  The rats ruled us. They grew fat on our dwindling grain and bold in the dark, skittering across our faces with needle-claws, unafraid of men who already smelled of the grave.

  Then the Godless Plague arrived.

  It began as a whisper in the blood — chills no fire could warm, followed by a fever that poured like molten lead through the veins. Then came the swellings: hard knots of dark bile rising in the neck and groin. When they reached the size of apples, they split and wept a foul grey fluid. Men didn’t just die; they dissolved from the inside out, screaming until their lungs collapsed into rags of wet sound.

  The stench became a physical weight. It clung to our wool tunics, our hair, our very skin. We burned the bodies until the wood ran out. Then we let them pile.

  Our commander, Janibeg, watched his army wither. He knew the siege would not end with a breach of the gates, but with the total decay of his men.

  At a grey dawn, the order came: “Return our dead to the heavens.”

  No prayer followed it.

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  We became scavengers of our own kind. We dragged blackened corpses from the pits. Onto the heap we threw the camp’s filth — bloated dogs, goats, and sacks of bats trapped in the sea-caves, vile leathery things knotted together like wet soot.

  One bat was not dead.

  My brother-in-arms, Tamerlan, lifted it by a translucent wing and laughed, though his own eyes were already jaundiced. The creature was monstrous. Its neck was a mass of weeping sores, its mouth clogged with yellow, gelatinous mucus. It did not squeak; it hissed like bubbling fat. Even as its tiny heart labored, its jaws snapped at the air with blind, predatory hunger.

  “A gift for the Italians,” Tamerlan joked.

  He crushed its skull beneath his boot and tossed the twitching pulp onto a corpse’s chest.

  The catapults groaned.

  When the first bodies cleared the stone walls of Caffa, we cheered — a jubilant, hollow sound. We heard the distant thud?crunch of flesh against cobblestone, followed by screaming. Real screaming. The kind that starts high and never quite finds the breath to stop.

  I thought of my home on the steppe. I told myself this horror was the final price for my freedom.

  The next day, the world went quiet.

  We sent no more bodies, yet the bells in Caffa began to ring — constant, frantic peals that slowly collapsed into a rhythmic, lonely tolling. The screams didn’t fade; they moved, retreating inward, deeper into the city’s heart.

  A week passed. Silence settled like a shroud. No guards manned the battlements. No arrows flew. Even the gulls abandoned the harbor.

  At last, the command was given. Thirty of us were sent over the walls to see what remained of our prize.

  I was the third man over the parapet. I expected a city of ghosts, a wasteland of plague victims rotting in their beds.

  Instead, the streets were a slaughterhouse.

  The bodies were not simply dead — they were dismantled. Ribcages pried open like cupboards. Limbs scattered across the squares like discarded kindling.

  This was not the work of sickness.

  This was a feast.

  They emerged from the cathedral shadows.

  Soldiers in silk. Peasants in rags. They moved with a hitching, mechanical gait, heads lolling at angles that should have snapped the spine. When we loosed our first volley, an arrow buried itself in a woman’s throat. She did not flinch. She did not bleed red. Thick black fluid spilled from the wound. Only when a bolt shattered her temple did she finally fall.

  I looked into the eyes of a fallen guardsman. Pale, clouded globes shot through with ruptured vessels. His mouth was a cavern of rot and wet teeth. He looked like a man who had died three days earlier and simply forgotten to stay still.

  We opened the gates from the inside.

  The city was ours, but no one felt like a conqueror.

  That night, we broke into a tavern near the docks. We drank to drown the memory of the quiet ones we had put down. In the middle of a toast, a shadow lunged from the cellar.

  A woman — skin the color of wet ash — threw herself onto Tamerlan. She did not bite.

  She tore.

  She ripped the muscle from his neck with the ferocity of a starving wolf.

  We killed her, but the damage was done. Tamerlan bled out on the tavern floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling, his face locked in a mask of pure terror.

  An hour ago, I felt it.

  A dull, thrumming heat behind my eyes. I scratched at my neck and felt a small, tender knot beneath the jawline. Hard. Growing.

  I have told no one. The others already watch each other with suspicion, hands hovering near sword?hilts. My thoughts fray, slipping like sand through fingers. I hear scratching beneath the floorboards, and for the first time in my life, I wonder what my brothers?in?arms might taste like.

  I did no

  t enter Caffa damned.

  But I fear the sun will not rise for the man I used to be.