Camp Fever

Overview

Camp fever follows crowds that cannot wash: an army a month on the march, a town under siege, a cellar of prisoners, a ship's hold on a long passage, a road full of the hungry. It comes as a fever, spreads its dusky spots across the body, and sinks the sick into a muttering stupor. Captains fear it more than the enemy, because it can take a fifth of a camp without a blow being struck.

Cause

The fever is carried by the body louse, the same vermin of seams and bedding as the Itch. A louse that has fed on a sick body carries the sickness in its filth, and scratching works it into the skin of the next. What passes is too small to see. Lice thrive where clothes stay on for weeks and bodies are packed close, which is why the fever belongs to crowds.

Who It Strikes

Anyone of flesh who keeps lice. Humans take it most because they fill the armies and the town gaols; Goblins and Orcs take it in crowded camps and warrens. Elves fall to it less often. The Wrought carry no lice and never take it. The starved and the old fare worst.

Signs and Course

A week or two after the lice, a headache comes on hard, then chills and a fever that climbs fast. After four or five days a rash of small dull-red spots appears on the trunk and spreads to the arms and legs, mostly sparing the face; the spots darken and may run together. With them comes the stupor: the sick lie dull-eyed, picking at the blanket and muttering, and many no longer know where they are.

The turning point falls near the end of the second week. Either the fever breaks in a long sweat and the sick wake weak and hungry, or the stupor deepens into a sleep they do not come back from. Survivors take weeks to stand steady, and some keep a deafness or blackened fingers and toes.

Contagion

It passes by lice, from the clothes, blankets, and straw of the sick, and by their dried filth shaken out of bedding. It does not pass at a distance between clean bodies. Lice leave a body as it cools, so the dead and dying pass it most readily to those who strip them.

Treatment and Its Limits

Delousing is the real cure and few know it as one. Clothes boiled or smoked, bedding straw burned, heads shaved, and bodies washed stop a camp's fever. At the bedside, care is nursing: water, broth, a cool room, turning the sick. Fever Ease and Siphon Fever carry a body through the worst nights, at the healer's cost, and overused they leave the weak too cold to recover. Cure Affliction can drive the fever out of one patient, but a healer who cures a man and sends him back to his lice has done nothing for the camp.

Mortality

In a well-fed company that boils its clothes, few die. In a siege, a gaol, or a famine camp, about one in five of the grown dies, and more of the old and the starved. Children mostly live.

Lore and Belief

Its names follow where it is met: camp fever, gaol fever, ship fever, the spotted fever, the mutter. Most blame the reek of crowded bodies, which is near the truth for the wrong reason, or the unburied dead of the field. Soldiers say lice desert a man the fever will kill, and so take lice for a sign of health. Burning the straw is done to clean the air.

More sellsword companies have been broken by camp fever than by any enemy, and old soldiers laugh about the siege that both armies abandoned in the same week, each thinking the other had brought the spotted fever on it.

In the Medieval Era

Camp fever goes with every army that stays in the field past a season and with every long siege. It is met in town gaols, in ships' holds, on the roads out of a failed harvest, and in the fugitive camps and crowded repair quarters of the Broken Marches. Wise households boil a returning soldier's shirt. Barber-surgeons shave and wash a camp when its captain will pay for it. The Red Mercy Hospices, the battlefield and plague-care schools of Vital Magic, follow armies and keep fever tents; a clean tent, they know, loses fewer.

Where It Appears

• Vital Magic (the Red Mercy Hospices, Fever Ease)
• Surging Magic: Siphon Fever
• The Broken Marches