Leeches

Overview

Leeches are the blood-drinking worms of slow fresh water. Wade a basin fen in summer and they will find the legs; healers in the towns keep them in jars and set them on bruises and swellings. To a fen-wader they are a horror that has to be put up with; to a basin healer they are a tool.

Appearance

A leech is a flat, soft, segmented worm, from the length of a finger to that of a hand when full, with a sucker at each end. The healers' kind is olive-green with rust-orange stripes along its back and a speckled yellow belly; other kinds are brown or black. Hungry, it is thin and narrow; fed, it swells to several times its size, dark and soft as a ripe plum.

It swims with a graceful up-and-down wave of its whole body, or loops along the bottom by its suckers. Its bite is barely felt, a small Y-shaped cut, and it lets go only when it is full.

Habitat and Range

Leeches live in warm, still, weedy water: the fens and ditches of the Confluence Basins, the Reedmere above all, and the backwaters and slow channels of the Lower Serath. They are thickest in summer.

Behaviour and Temperament

A leech finds its host by the stir in the water, warmth, and smell, swims to it, and fastens on: cattle at the drinking place, frogs and fish, waders' legs. It feeds for an hour or more, then drops off and can go months without another meal. Some kinds eat worms and snails rather than blood.

Life Cycle

Leeches lay their eggs in small spongy cocoons in the damp mud of banks. They grow slowly and may live several years.

Uses and Dangers

Healers in the march-towns and corridor towns keep leeches in jars of clean water and set them on bruises, swollen joints, black eyes, and the heads of fevered patients, and leech-gatherers wade the fens bare-legged to collect them, which is miserable work. The bite does no harm in itself, though it bleeds for hours after and can fester. A leech that gets into the nose or mouth of someone drinking from a ditch is a real danger, and cattle drinking from a fen often come out bleeding.

Lore and Belief

Basin healers hold that leeches draw out bad blood and with it the fever, which is believed more than it is shown. Reedfolk wade with their legs bound or greased and say a leech is the fen's toll, payable in summer. Some Basin Humans say a leech will not bite a liar, which leech-gatherers find a useful thing to say.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals