Soured-Well Sickness
The scouring flux that takes the herds and then the people of a Windscar camp that has stayed too long at one well and fouled its water.
Overview
Soured-well sickness is the sickness of a camp that will not move. Herds gathered too long at one well foul the ground around it, the water turns, and first the beasts and then the people fall to a scouring flux. The kindreds of the Windscar Expanse tell of it in the tale of the Still Well, and the answer they keep is the answer of the tale: break camp.
Cause
Dung, urine, and the waste of a camp soak into the ground around a well or a water hole and seep into the water. With the filth comes a flux that lives in the bowels of beasts and people and passes out with their dung, too small to see. The longer a camp stays and the more beasts water there, the fouler the well becomes. A well rested for a season clears.
Who It Strikes
The herds first, because they drink most and closest to the well-head; young beasts die fastest. Then the people: small children and the old most. Orcs bear wind, cold, and short water better than most peoples, but not foul water.
Signs and Course
The first sign is in the herd. Beasts grow restless at the well, drink and turn away, and the water takes a taste and a smell. Then the young beasts scour, stand hunched, and stop feeding; within a few days some are dead, and the grown beasts begin to scour too.
People sicken a few days behind them, with cramps, a watery or bloody flux, and fever. A grown body is weak for a week and mends; a child can dry out in a day or two, with sunken eyes and slack skin, and that is the danger. The turning point for each sick child is whether it can be kept drinking clean water until the flux slows.
Contagion
It passes by the fouled water, and inside a crowded camp from the filth of the sick to the hands and food of those who tend them. It does not travel with a camp that moves to sweet water and keeps its sick apart; it stays in the well.
Treatment and Its Limits
Moving on is the cure, and it works. A camp that breaks and goes to sweet water leaves most of the sickness behind. The sick are given clean water often and in small mouthfuls, with thin broth or milk, and are kept out of the sun. Herders keep beasts off the well-head, water them at troughs below it, and rest a fouled well for a season. Folk healers ease the cramps and fever with teas and simple care (see Medieval Ordinary Access Reference). Nothing makes a fouled well safe while the camp stays beside it.
Mortality
A camp that stays at a soured well can lose a good part of its young stock and some of its grown beasts in a season, and some of its smallest children and its old. A camp that moves at the first sign loses little.
Lore and Belief
In the tale of the Still Well a camp stayed so long that the water soured and the herds sickened, and still no one would move, until Rakhal the Storm-Caller tore the shelters down and drove them on to sweet water. To an Orc, a herd restless at a well is the wind telling the camp it has stayed too long. Rakhal's wind can clear a stale haze, but the clearing is temporary while the fouled well remains, and the kindreds read that too as teaching: the wind shows the fault, and the camp must still move.
Raiders are said to throw a carcass down a rival stronghold's well to sour it, and the kindreds count it among the deeds that are never forgiven; the kindreds can name blood-feuds of three generations that began at a soured well.
In the Medieval Era
The sickness is met every dry season somewhere in the Windscar. It is rare among the moving kindreds of the High Scars and most dangerous in the dry months at the Rimward Basins, when households and herds draw in to the rims and crowd around the strongholds, which cannot move. There well-keepers and cistern guardians of the Windscar Pacts keep beasts from the well-heads by custom, and a stronghold that sees its herds sour sends them out early under escort. Rakhal's following, growing as the Pact world settles, takes every soured stronghold well as proof.