The battle is long and gruesome. The city walls have been pummeled for a week. They will hold, they say.
Several times the townsmen sally forth to break the siege, several times they lose many friends.
The enemy began catapulting the dead into the city.
The bodies landed. The bodies festered. How could anyone know they were diseased,
diseased with what was soon to be known across Europe as the 'Black Death'…
I fled the city with the traders, leaving the smoking city in ruins, the hordes intent on raping, murdering, pillaging.
On this chilled and moonless night we found a trading ship readied for Genoa.
The seas were high, the ship tossed wildly; I was nearly washed overboard, twice. Oh, that I might have been...
I found my bed below among the stores of grain, where it was quite, where it was dark, where it was dry…
Early next morning I could smell the buboes that signified the onset of Black Death.
They were forming on the limbs of the huddled passengers and on the tired crew. That night low moanings grew to cries of terror.
There was nothing the Captain could do. Superstition leads to throwing the two cats overboard…
It is mid-afternoon. The sun is hot, not a cloud in the sky. There is one sole surviver on board, Aldo.
He stands at the helm, and guides the ship through the mirrored waters of Genoa.
Two ships drift away to starboard. The crew and passenges have been dead for weeks.
They are the ghost ships. There are many. Cities will no longer take them.
We are allowed to dock. I scamper down the mooring line, the same way I boarded…
for I am a rat. The Black Death is carried by fleas, the fleas are carried by rats; and I am infested with them.
Even I can sense that my days are numbered, but I need fear no cats here- they have all been killed from superstition…
I find a warm home, there are several children at play. I watch from a darkened corner, and shake myself. Fleas escape.In two nights there is unfamiliar coughing and complaining. The mother is concerned, and fear grows in her heart…
I am about to die now. I am bloated, on my side, bleeding through open sores; there are fleas everywhere...
The mother is weeping, sadly weeping. Three of her children have died already,
and her three remaining children are now so sick that they cannot get out of bed to eat her supper. They are weakening...
The sun rises and I look out the door and see the stained glass windows in the church across the street.
All is silent. All is quiet.
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