Wound Flies

Overview

Wound flies look for an open wound on a living body and lay their eggs in it. Their maggots do not eat the dead flesh, as carrion maggots do, but the living, and widen the wound as they go. On the routes of the High Scars an escort with a wounded traveller rides hard for the next passward shelter, where the wound can be cleaned and covered. On a battlefield in summer they come with the crows.

Appearance

A wound fly is a little larger than a house fly, stout and bristly, with a metallic blue-green or bronze body, an orange-red face with large red eyes, and clear wings. It flies fast and lands without a sound on blood. Its maggots are white, pointed at the head and blunt at the tail, ringed with tiny dark spines like the thread of a screw; a wound full of them seethes, weeps a thin bloody fluid, and gives off a sweet, rotten smell that draws more flies.

Habitat and Range

They live in warm, dry, open country where herds are many: the shelves of the High Scars, the rims and floors of the Rimward Basins, and the edges of the Glassbelt. They follow herds, camps, and fighting, and in the warm months turn up on battlefields on both sides of Caeldon. Cold drives them under; they are a summer plague.

Behaviour and Temperament

A female finds a wound by smell: a branding cut, a navel of a newborn calf, a tick bite scratched open, a fighter's gash under a dirty bandage, a sleeping traveller's sore. She lays a raft of eggs at its edge. Within a day the maggots hatch, bury their heads in the living flesh, and feed outward in a pack, opening the wound into a pocket that draws other females to lay again. Untreated, a struck beast can be eaten to the bone.

Life Cycle

The maggots feed for about a week, drop out of the wound, burrow into the ground, and come out as flies a week or so later. In hot weather a generation passes in a few weeks, so a dry summer with many herds and much fighting builds them into a plague by its end.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. They kill lambs, calves, and foals at birth, take herd beasts after branding or a fight, and turn small wounds in people into deep, festering ones (see Wound Rot). Orc herders brand and cut in the cool months, tar every wound on a beast, and check the herd each evening. Escorts carry clean cloth and pine tar for wounds, and every passward shelter keeps a pot of salt and spirit for picking out maggots and washing the hollow they leave. Healers clean the wound first; Cleanse Wound washes it clear.

Lore and Belief

Orcs say the fly is sent to a wound that was got dishonestly, and an escort whose traveller takes flies is made to answer for it at the route moot, where the kindred with more spears behind it is usually believed. Salvagers of the Glassbelt edge hold that a wound fly never strikes a body that has drunk its fill of water that day, so they drink before they work. Human soldiers believe the maggots eat only the bad flesh and leave a wound cleaner, which is true of carrion maggots and false of these, and the mistake has killed men.

After a battle the flies come in a cloud, and the songs of the Windscar wars tell of more warriors lost to the flies in the days after a fight than to the swords in it.

Where It Appears

• Wound Rot