The Summer Flux

Overview

The summer flux is the sickness of hot weather and crowded water. A household takes it from its well, a town from its river, a camp from its own latrines, and every people that eats and drinks takes it the same way. Most cases pass in a week of misery. In the very young and the very old it empties the body of water faster than anyone can pour it back in, and in its bloody form, in a siege or a crowded camp, it kills grown fighters too. The peoples speak of two kinds, the watery flux and the bloody flux, and treat them as one sickness at two strengths.

Cause

Living sickness too small to see passes out of the sick in their filth and back in through the mouth: in water drawn below a midden, a latrine, or a retting pool, in food handled by a sick cook, on flies, and on hands. Summer makes it worse, because low water concentrates the filth and heat breeds the flies.

Who It Strikes

All who eat and drink take it, and the young and the old suffer most. Goblins, whose stomachs are strong, often shrug off the milder kind but not the bloody one. Halflings smell spoiled food and avoid it, which spares them some flux but not that of fouled water. The Wrought do not eat or drink and never take it.

Signs and Course

It begins with cramps and loose, watery stools many times a day, often with vomiting, then thirst, a dry mouth, and weakness. In the watery flux this lasts a few days to a week. The danger is drying: sunken eyes, a sunken soft spot in an infant's head, skin that stays pinched, little or no water passed. A dried-out child grows listless and quiet, and that quiet is the sign to fear.

The bloody flux comes on with fever and cramps that bend the patient double. The stools carry blood and slime, and the straining does not stop. It runs a week or two. The turning point in either kind is whether the patient can keep drinking more than they lose.

Contagion

The flux passes from filth to mouth. The sick spread it through the water they foul, the food they touch, and the flies on their bedding; those who nurse them take it on their hands. One fouled well can sicken a street.

Treatment and Its Limits

Drink is the cure. Water that has been boiled, thin ale, broth with a pinch of salt, and whey, given a little at a time and often, keep most patients alive until the flux passes. Herbs for the bowels ease the cramps (see Herbs). A healer can draw moisture into a drying body with Draw Thirst, and a priest's Cure Affliction, fed by clean water, can turn a bad case. Neither cleans the well, and a patient sent back to the same water takes the flux again.

Mortality

Most grown adults recover from the watery flux. It kills many infants and small children, and the old, by drying. The bloody flux kills more; in a siege or a crowded camp it can take one in five, and it kills more fighters than the enemy does.

Lore and Belief

Most peoples blame the heat itself, green fruit, cold drink on a hot day, or the stink of the summer midden, and the last is nearer the truth than they know. Corridor Humans pray to Serovan the River-King, who cleanses the Serath only slowly and only when the people stop fouling it. The Dark Elves of the Roothollows drink running water and never the standing black water of their chambers, and tell their children why with a story.

Soldiers say the flux kills more than the sword in a summer siege, and the songs agree: the great siege of the old river wars is remembered for the army that sat outside the walls until the flux had done the defenders' work for them.

In the Medieval Era

The flux comes every summer to the river towns of the Confluence Basins and the Lower Serath at low water, and to every army in the field. Towns quarrel over where a retting pool may foul the water (see Flax and Hemp), and many keep their wells above the middens by custom. Camps and sieges send their worst to the Red Mercy Hospices of Vital Magic.

Where It Appears

This ailment grows out of:

• Flax and Hemp (retting fouls the water downstream)
• The Roothollows (standing black water)
• Herbs (brews for the bowels)