Marsh Fever

Overview

Marsh fever comes up off still water on summer evenings. It is a fever of bouts, shaking cold and then burning heat, that leaves and returns, and in the cases nobody treats it does something worse: it settles in the back and takes the legs. The low river country fears it more than any other summer sickness, because it strikes the strong as well as the weak, and because its second stage cannot be undone.

Cause

Over warm, still water in summer rise clouds of biting gnats and thin, whining flies (see Marsh Insects). Some of them carry the fever. Their bite leaves larvae too small to see in the blood, which grow and lodge in the body and slowly work their way towards the spine. The bouts of fever are the body fighting them; the spine stage is where they arrive.

Who It Strikes

Anyone bitten in fever country can take it. Newcomers and children suffer most, and those who have lived through many summers in the wet often take milder bouts. Reedfolk bear marsh-fever conditions better than any other people. Bargemen, fishers, reed-cutters, and anyone working the banks at dusk are bitten most. The Wrought are not bitten to any effect.

Signs and Course

A week or two after the bites, the first bout begins with a cold that shakes the bed, then a high dry fever and a pounding head, then a drenching sweat and exhausted sleep. The patient wakes weak but clear. Every second or third day the bout returns. Between bouts many can work, badly.

After some weeks the bouts thin out, and a well-fed adult may seem to be over it. Many are not. The fever often comes back in later summers, and in a case where the larvae are left alone, the spine stage follows within a season or a year: an ache and stiffness low in the back and neck, then weakness in the legs, stumbling, numb feet, and trouble passing water. Once the legs fail, they rarely come back.

Contagion

It does not pass from one person to another by touch or breath. It passes only by the bite, and a gnat that feeds on a sick person can carry the fever on to the next, which no people knows.

Treatment and Its Limits

The one sure cure is to drive the larvae out before they reach the spine, with Parasite Expel by a body-purge cast or a herb and basin rite. It is costly to the healer or the patient, and a deep infestation needs the work repeated. Once the legs have begun to fail, driving the larvae out stops the spine stage getting worse but does not give back what is lost.

For the bouts themselves, households give the bitter tea of fever-bark (see Herbs), cool the patient, and keep them drinking. A healer can bleed the heat into water with Siphon Fever. Neither touches the larvae. What prevents it works for the right reason: smoky fires at dusk, nets and shutters, and sleeping high and away from still water.

Mortality

The bouts alone seldom kill a grown, fed adult, though they kill infants, the starved, and those already sick. The spine stage is another matter: of those who reach it untreated, perhaps half are lamed for life and many of the rest die of it within a few years. Survivors who were treated in time keep only a weakness that returns with the summer.

Lore and Belief

Everyone knows it comes from the marsh at dusk, and almost everyone blames the wrong thing: the foul evening air off the water, the mist, the smell of rot. Reedfolk say the river spares those it knows. Lamed survivors are called "marsh-taken", and in some villages a summer child is not named until its first fever season is over.

Marsh outlaws are said to be immune, having had it young, and lords' riders who chase them into the fens in summer come home shaking; the Reedfolk tell it as the marsh taking their side.

In the Medieval Era

Marsh fever is the warm-month fever of the low wet ground of the Confluence Basins and of the crowded towns along the Lower Serath, where the summer low water leaves still pools and backwaters. Village folk healers treat the bouts. Driving the larvae out is work for a trained Vital healer, and families save, borrow, or travel to the river towns for it before the second summer.

Where It Appears

• Insects and Bees (marsh insects, uses and dangers)
• Vital Magic: Parasite Expel
• Reedfolk
• The Confluence Basins (fever of the low wet ground)
• The Lower Serath (fever in the warm months)
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic
• the Writers' Guide chapter Peoples of the Water