The Black Gums

Overview

The black gums are a sickness of the larder. They come at the end of a long voyage, in the last weeks of a siege, at a deep posting supplied by lift and stair, or in a hard winter when the cellar holds nothing but grain, salt meat, and dried goods. They kill slowly and can be mended completely, so they are feared less for their danger than for what they say about a store.

Cause

The body needs something that only fresh living food gives: green leaves, fresh fruit, fresh roots, kelp, and grain or beans left to sprout. Drying, salting, long boiling, and long keeping destroy it. After a season or more without it, the body begins to fail at its seams. Nothing passes from one person to another; a whole crew sickens together only because it eats from one store.

Who It Strikes

It strikes whoever eats from long stores alone: ships' crews on long passages, garrisons and besieged towns, hold workers, and the poor at winter's end. In the Stonewake Deeps food is the weak point, and Deep Dwarves, for all that they bear lean seasons, take it on long postings below; Kobold vent crews, who eat a little at a time of whatever trade brings, take it with them. Gnomes seldom do, because their meals come from the sea and include kelp, and the Thaluren and Kavari, who eat fresh from the water, are rarely touched. Halfling folds keep hard apples fresh into spring and suffer less than their neighbours. The Wrought do not eat and are never touched.

Signs and Course

Weariness comes first, and an aching in the legs and joints that is taken for age or cold. Then the gums swell, soften, and bleed at a touch, darkening to purple and black, and the breath turns foul. Bruises rise from nothing, small red spots appear around the hairs of the legs, and old scars open again as if the wound were new. Teeth loosen and fall. In the last stage the sick are too weak to stand, bleed inward, and die of exhaustion or of a fever that a whole body would have shrugged off. The turning point is food: given fresh greens or fruit, the sick feel better within days, though loosened teeth seldom tighten again.

Contagion

The black gums are not contagious.

Treatment and Its Limits

Fresh food is the whole cure: leafy greens, onions, and leeks from the garden, sour fruit, fresh roots, raw kelp, and grain or beans soaked and left to sprout in the dark, which a ship or a hold can do from its own stores. Most fresh food helps; dried fruit and long-boiled greens do little.

Magic cannot make up the lack. Blood Quiet slows the bleeding gums for a while, and healing can close a reopened scar, but the healer's lifeforce is spent into a body that cannot hold its repairs, and the scar opens again.

Mortality

Unchecked, the black gums kill, slowly, over a season or more; whole crews have died of them at sea. Taken in time, they are mended entirely, and the survivors keep only gaps in their teeth.

Lore and Belief

Sailors call it the salt mouth and blame salt meat, damp holds, and idleness, and a captain who keeps his crew at work is thought to keep it off. Inland it is the winter mouth, laid to bad air in shut houses and to the cold. That green things cure it is known to every cook and ship's surgeon, but the reason is taken to be the life of the growing year: fresh food, people say, carries the spring in it.

Siege-tales keep the garrison that held out a whole winter on salt meat and lost its teeth before it lost its walls, and the besiegers who brought baskets of green onions to the gate to taunt them.

In the Medieval Era

The black gums are common at the ends of long voyages from the Tidelace Coasts and out of the crowded holding waters of the Soundchain Roads, at winter's end in high holds cut off by closed passes, and in any long siege. Careful houses keep onions, roots, and hard apples through winter, sprout grain in the cellar, and send greens down to deep postings with the stores. Ships that know their business carry kelp or sour fruit, and the station keepers of the Soundchain put greens aboard with the water.

Where It Appears

This ailment grows out of the following pages:

• The Stonewake Deeps (food as the weak point of the deep holds)
• Gnomes (a diet of fish, shellfish, and kelp)
• The Soundchain Roads (stores running short in crowded sounds)