The Fever in the Reeds
(A horror original)
Written by P.H. Boer
Chapter I: Arrival
I have walked temple courtyards at noon with the marble hot enough to burn your feet through sandals; I have carried incense through deserts so dry the smoke seemed to scratch the air. Those heats are honest. They tell you plainly: this will hurt.
The marsh lies.
It welcomes you with a damp hand and then does not let go.
Our navis lusoria slid on water the color of boiled iron. Reeds rose higher than a man, crowding close, their blades wet and serrated. The oars entered the surface with a soft, obscene sound, and the river took them as if swallowing. Gnats lifted in clouds at our passing and settled back on us as if we were just another piece of rot.
I am Marcus Flavius Crispus, Envoy of the Sacred Rites, an impressive title for a man who mostly carries oils and prayers from one miserable edge of the Empire to another. I was sent to this half-taken province to sanctify the outpost, soothe the locals, and keep the soldiers clean of bad omens. I brought laurel and salt-cake for offerings, a bronze cup for libations, a small wooden figure of my household gods wrapped in linen, and a confidence that ritual, properly observed, can persuade even hostile land to tolerate us.
The land here does not bargain.
I felt it at once, the way the air thickened in the throat, tasted faintly of sweetness gone wrong. Like a tanner’s shed left shut for too long. Sweat gathered under my cuirass, and the leather straps darkened until they bled dye onto my tunic. Every breath was work. I tried to imagine Libitina’s temple, the cool stone, the honest stink of funerary herbs, but the marsh has a talent for occupying the mind completely. It is a crowded god. There is no room in it for any other.
The fort appeared only when we were almost upon it, hunched on a spit of land like a beast that had crawled out of the water to die there. The palisade leaned inward, lower logs already green; the watch-tower roof sagged; the dock posts sweated black. I smelled the place before my sandals touched the timber: wet wood, latrine stench, and under it a sweetness like bruised fruit. The river bumped our hull against the dock in a rhythm that felt too much like breathing.
Centurion Varro waited, helmet under his arm, hair plastered to his skull as if the swamp had licked him. He glanced over my baggage, over the little chest with the laurel branch bound to it, and made a thin-lipped smile that did not touch his eyes.
“Priest,” he said, he always makes the sacred into a rank, something to be obeyed or discarded. “You’ll lodge in the east barrack. Keep your tools dry.” He looked past me at the reeds. “And your skin. The insects are… enthusiastic.”
I made the sign I use when stepping into a foreign shrine, palm over heart, two fingers touched to lips, then brow, and murmured a placation to the numen of the place. I do not flatter gods with eloquence; I offer protocol. “You will not like me,” I whispered to the reeds, “but I will be careful with you.” The reeds quivered as if something big had just slipped away beneath them.
The oarsmen backed away from the dock as if glad to be rid of us, and the fort seemed to settle heavier on its spit of land. By the time I set my chest inside the east barrack, the marsh had already followed me in, its damp smell clinging to the straw and my own skin as if it had been waiting there first.
There is a right order to things. On the first evening I should have erected a small altar stone, burned a pinch of incense to Jupiter for the safety of the garrison, a libation to the local spirits for permission, then carried the laurel around the palisade to mark it cleaned. I did these things. The incense fought the wet, struggling to catch; when it finally smoldered, the smoke lay heavy, reluctant to rise. The wine I poured into the mud disappeared without a trace. The laurel leaves darkened in my hand as if absorbing something they’d rather not hold.
At night the marsh speaks. Not loud. Just… everywhere. The mosquitoes whine until you feel the sound in your teeth. Something breathes beneath the palisade, slow and wet, as if the earth has lungs. And there is a faint gurgle that comes and goes in the reeds, a child trying not to choke. When the wind (if it can be called wind) shifts, the fort smells like a mouth that has forgotten how to swallow.
“Get used to it,” Publius Corvus told me. He is a veteran whose face looks carved by small, irritated gods. “It gets into you. Even when you leave, you’ll find marsh in your sweat.” He paused, scratching at the welted bites on his forearm. “You burn the bites with a coal,” he added. “Hurts less later.”
I did not. I dabbed them with oil and spoke the little charm against fever my teacher had taught me. Words are supposed to keep order. The itching did not listen.
Morning came with the same air, thick and close, as though the night had only changed its color. The men moved about their duties slow as sleepers, their shoulders shiny with bites that no amount of scratching could silence. In the yard, the cook’s pot steamed weakly, carrying with it the sour-salt smell of our rations.
On the second day, I watched the men eat: salted pork gone soft from the air, barley gruel with bits of reed that had drifted into the pot and would not be convinced to leave. The cook swatted insects into the stew and shrugged. A boy, Tiberius Quintus, curls matted to his forehead, brought me a cup with both hands. “For the rites, sir,” he said, eyes bright with the silly pride of being useful to the gods.
“Thank you,” I told him. I set the cup on the altar stone and thought of the ceremony I would perform at dusk: the circuit with laurel, the clean smoke, the way men stand straighter when they believe the world has been arranged.
Tiberius went on patrol that afternoon, three men in a skiff, pushing a pole through water so black it swallowed the pole whole. They returned at twilight with fish, a length of reed rope stolen from some invisible shore, and Tiberius shivering so hard the boat knocked against the dock posts.
The medicus put a hand to his brow, made a face, and said the words men say when order fails them: “Swamp fever.” It is a category, not an answer. He mixed willow bark and told the boy to drink. I went to the altar to fetch oil.
“If the god is local,” Varro said as I passed him, “it is ours now. Remind it of that.”
“The gods can be made citizens,” I said. “They do not always behave as such.”
He snorted. “Then teach it manners.”
I found Tiberius in the east barrack lying on a straw mat that smelled of damp goat, his lips white and split. His eyes were, how to put it, wet in a way eyes ought not be. The pupils floated, very slightly, as if something beneath them were moving. His skin felt cold and hot in alternating waves, as if the fever could not decide on a number.
“Breathe,” I told him, because the sick need commands that sound like help. I touched oil to his brow and made the circle over his heart. “Mars keep your strength, Apollo your heat in balance; be quiet now.” He tried to smile and split his lip. A thin ooze, black, not red, welled from the crack and hung, unwilling to fall. I wiped it with linen. It left a tarry streak that clung to the cloth like a second skin.
“Just blood turned,” the medicus muttered when I showed him the stain. He would not meet my eyes. Doctors are priests of a different sort; they hate when the body stops answering their catechism.
The barrack lamps guttered low, and I thought the day might end with little worse than fevers. But the marsh waits for darkness the way a predator waits for its prey to turn its back. By the time I lay on my cot, the night had already begun moving in slow, wet steps beneath the floor.
That night I slept badly, the way you sleep in new postings and among new men who snore like cut throats. The marsh’s breath moved under the floorboards. The mosquitoes found places I had forgotten I owned. In a lull between itches I woke, certain someone had stood over me. No one.
Only the sound of a man retching in the darkness and the wet, slow applause of water against the palisade.
At dawn, I took the laurel to walk the circuit. The leaves were limp now, darkening at the edges. I followed the inner line of the wall, speaking the phrases that keep disorder out: “This is a boundary. Within it is clean.” The words worked in other places. Here they felt like telling a flood not to drown.
At the north corner, a little gullied channel leads under the palisade, meant to carry rainwater away. A smear of something black clung to the wood there, beaded, glossy, and very slightly pulsing, as dew does when a gnat struggles caught in it. I touched it with the tip of a laurel leaf. The leaf drank it like wine and went a deeper, uglier green. I burned that leaf in my censer and the smoke came off it thick and low, crawling along the ground.
By midday three more men had fevers. One bled from the nose, the blood slow and dark as syrup. Another’s gums wept black when he tried to chew. The medicus replaced his willow bark with poppy and prayer, which means nothing was working. I moved from pallet to pallet with the oils and the little bronze cup, touching foreheads, speaking order into skin that had turned against its owners. I am not an exorcist. I am a functionary of the sacred. I arrange things. But I let the men believe I could do more.
Tiberius slept, or pretended. When he breathed, I could hear liquid somewhere low in him, like a wineskin turned on its side. The gnats favored him; they always do, the young and the sweet-blooded. I brushed them away and my hand came away with a faint sheen of that same black. It does not smell at first. Only after, when you rub it between finger and thumb, does a sweetness come up, like fruit left in a jar too long.
“Burn the sick,” Publius muttered under his breath when I passed him on the walkway above the gate. “Or the ones who die. Quickly.”
“We are not in Germania,” I said. “We do not make pyres for living men.”
He looked out over the reeds. “You will wish we had.”
At dusk a storm should have broken the heat; instead the air simply thickened. The sky lowered until it met the swamp, and the color between them went the shade of old bruises. I performed the evening libation on the altar stone, wine that tasted stale the moment it left the cup, and felt the land not accept it so much as absorb it like another dampness. When I finished, Varro came to stand beside me, eyes on the river.
“You will keep the rites,” he said, as if threatening me with my own purpose. “Men behave better when things are named.”
“Yes,” I said. I wanted to tell him that names are twine, and this place frays twine with its teeth.
In the middle watch, someone began coughing, a sudden, heaving fit. It went on too long. Men swore, turned over, complained. Then silence. Then the sound of something thick moving across a floorboard. Then another cough, lower, wetter. I sat up, heart hammering, and the marsh outside let out that slow, deep gurgle it has, answering the noise inside as though pleased.
I do not frighten easily. I have stood in plague courts and soothed widows with formulas while the bier was being built outside. But lying in that barrack, the taste of sweet rot in my mouth and my own skin slick as if I had been born again into something damp, I felt the small animal at the base of my spine wake and look for a way out of me.
I took my little wooden gods from their linen and set them where they could see the door. It is childish, I know, Lares are domestic spirits and do not travel well, but it comforted me to imagine their painted eyes watching.
“Keep order,” I whispered. “Hold the line. Help me make this clean.”
In the second before I lay back, I thought I heard someone whisper my name from the reeds. Not a shout. Not a call. A wet sound shaping itself into Crispus, as if a mouth full of water had tried to speak it.
I told myself it was the river.
I told myself many things.
Outside, the reeds stirred without wind, their blades rasping together like the pages of a book being turned. Somewhere far off, a heron, or something that wished to sound like one, cried once and was silent. The marsh took the sound, folded it into itself, and kept breathing.
Chapter II: The Black Blood
Morning came reluctantly, a dull green light leaking through the reed mats over the windows. The air had not cooled in the night; it simply shifted its weight from one side of the body to the other, like a restless sleeper. The dampness in my tunic was not only sweat, I could feel the marsh on me, as though I’d lain in shallow water. The barracks were already restless; men passed my cot in silence, glancing toward the far corner where Tiberius Quintus lay. He was worse.
Tiberius Quintus was worse. The fever made him restless, lips moving in soundless conversation with someone I couldn’t see. When I leaned close, the breath that came from him was strange, not foul, not the rot of the dying, but sweet. Too sweet. It reminded me of the candied figs my sister once sent from Massilia, left too long in the jar until the syrup fermented.
The medicus didn’t look at me as he examined the boy. “Still breathing,” he muttered. “That’s something.”
“It is,” I said, though the tone in my voice must have betrayed me, because he looked up briefly with eyes like flat coins.
The black ooze seeped from the corners of Tiberius’s mouth when he shifted. It didn’t drip, it clung, stringing between his lips like tar. The cloth I had used yesterday was gone, taken by one of the medicus’s assistants to be “cleaned.” I knew it wouldn’t come back.
I offered a blessing over the boy. It felt empty even as I spoke it. The gods are not strangers to pestilence, Apollo carries both plague and its cure, but here, in this heat, the names felt like dry leaves in a flood.
The sun rose higher, turning the palisade into a wall of glare. By midmorning, two more men showed symptoms. One bled from the gums while eating breakfast, black fluid pooling in his mouth until he spat it into the dirt. Another collapsed on the walkway above the gate, skin slick and eyes unfocused, muttering about a woman in the reeds who was calling him home.
I made my rounds with the bronze cup and oil, moving from bed to bed, speaking the words I knew. Some men watched me with desperate eyes, clutching at my hand as though I carried medicine. Others turned away, unwilling to be reminded that their lives were now worth a few drops of perfumed olive oil and a murmur in Latin.
Corvus intercepted me outside the barrack. He looked tired, though I wasn’t sure if it was from the heat or from something heavier. “You’ve seen the black blood,” he said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t stop when they die.” His gaze slid to the north side of the fort. “Had to put a man on the pyre last night. Thought the medicus had declared him gone. He sat up halfway through and tried to grab the man tending the fire.”
I stared at him, unsure if he meant to frighten me or if the truth itself had frightened him. “It could have been a spasm. Heat, gases,”
He cut me off with a short, ugly laugh. “Priest, I’ve seen spasms. They don’t look at you when they happen.”
At noon, the heat swelled. It pressed down until the palisade seemed to sag under it. Insects thickened in the air, a constant flicker at the edge of sight. The smell of the marsh changed, less plant, more animal. I found myself glancing at the reeds, half expecting to see them bulge inward, as though something huge were pushing through from the other side.
Varro paced the central yard, barking at the men to keep patrols tight and watch the waterline. He would not name the sickness. To name something is to give it weight, and Varro believed in weight as much as any general.
I spent the early part of the afternoon preparing the altar for the purification rites. The laurel I had used yesterday was dead, its leaves curled and blackened at the edges. I burned it and fetched another branch from my chest. As I did, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: tiny dark stains along the wood of the chest, as though a wet thing had been set there and left to seep.
That was when I decided to visit the north channel.
It was darker there, the palisade throwing long shadows across the muddy ground. The channel itself was little more than a slit, choked with reeds. I crouched, feeling the heat coming off the earth in waves.
The black smear I’d seen the day before was larger now, spreading along the wood in uneven streaks. It pulsed faintly. I stared at it for a long moment before touching it with the tip of my laurel.
The liquid clung Instantly, running up the stem against gravity, swallowing green into black. I dropped the branch, and it stuck where it landed, glued by the ooze.
From beyond the reeds came a sound, not the breath of the marsh, not the drone of insects, but a wet, deliberate stirring, as though something had shifted its weight in the water.
I stood too quickly and nearly lost my balance. My sandals slipped in the mud, and I stepped back into the light without looking again at the channel. The fort looked no different when I returned, but the air in the yard felt heavier, as if I had carried something back from the shadow under the palisade.
The rest of the day blurred in the heat, but that faint stirring in the reeds stayed with me. By evening, Tiberius was no longer responding when I spoke to him. His chest rose and fell, but there was no rhythm to it, as if he breathed because something inside him remembered the shape of it, not because he needed to. The black ooze now leaked steadily from nose and ears, tracing dark lines along his neck to the mat beneath.
I washed my hands three times after touching him. The smell followed me anyway.
The first scream came after nightfall.
It wasn’t a battle scream, no command, no force behind it. This was thin, tearing, the sound a man makes when he’s drowning but still above water.
I ran to the east barrack. The door was open, lamplight spilling onto the packed dirt outside. Inside, three men were pressed against the far wall, eyes fixed on the center of the room.
Tiberius was standing.
His posture was wrong, shoulders slouched forward, head tilted, limbs moving in short, uneven bursts. His eyes were rolled up so only the whites showed, but they flicked left and right as if searching. Black fluid streamed from his nose and mouth, thick and steady now, pooling at his feet.
One of the men lunged forward with a spear, driving the point through Tiberius’s chest. It slowed him but didn’t stop him; he clawed at the shaft, black ooze running down the wood.
“Hold him!” someone shouted.
Another man grabbed his arm, and for a moment it seemed they might bring him down. Then Tiberius’s head snapped toward the soldier and he lunged, teeth closing on the man’s cheek. They both went down hard. The barrack filled with shouting, the crash of overturned stools.
I don’t remember drawing my pugio, only the feel of the handle slick in my hand. I slashed at Tiberius’s neck. The blade bit deep, spraying black across my forearm. His head lolled, then hung by strips of muscle, but his hands still moved, still clawed for purchase.
Corvus appeared in the doorway with a torch. “Move!”
We fell back. He drove the torch into Tiberius’s chest, the oil-soaked cloth catching instantly. The black fluid hissed, popping like sap in a fire. The smell that came off it was thick and sweet, clinging to the back of the throat.
Tiberius thrashed until the flames reached his face. Then he went still.
We burned him outside the palisade, the pyre stacked high and fed constantly. The smoke was black, and the sparks drifted into the reeds as if eager to be swallowed.
Varro said nothing afterward. Corvus met my eyes and shook his head once, slow.
I returned to my pallet but did not sleep. The marsh was louder that night, the breathing joined by small splashes and the faint sound of something dragging through shallow water.
I dreamed once, briefly, of my sister’s figs, sweet, overripe, and when I bit into one, black liquid ran down my chin.
The night stretched thin, the sounds outside louder for the silence within. When morning finally came after Tiberius burned, the fort woke quiet.
Not peaceful, nothing here could be called that, but quieter than it should have been. No shouting from the cook, no cursing from the men on the gate, no clatter of armor being tightened. Even the insects seemed hesitant.
When I stepped outside, the heat hit me like an opening oven. The smoke from the pyre still lingered, low to the ground, clinging to the mud.
It carried the same sweet-stink as the black ooze, though dulled now by ash. My mouth tasted of it when I breathed.
Three soldiers stood at the palisade near the north channel. They weren’t on watch, they were staring. I joined them.
In the reeds just beyond bowshot, something had moved the night’s ashes. Not wind. Not water. The ash had been pushed into a long, curling line, looping back on itself until it made a shape I almost recognized. A knot, or perhaps a serpent biting its tail.
“Could be locals,” one of the men muttered, but his voice didn’t carry belief.
“Locals would have left a sign we understood,” said another.
I didn’t answer. The gods speak in marks if they wish to, but this… this felt less like a message and more like a signature.
By midday, two more men were down with fever. One was the soldier Tiberius had bitten. The other had been nowhere near him.
The medicus tried to explain it, the bite carried infection, the swamp carried worse, but his own hands trembled as he spoke. He’d begun keeping his sleeves rolled down despite the heat. I noticed dark stains at the edges of his cuffs.
I prepared oil and wine for the sick, moving between them in the stifling east barrack. The air in there was heavy, thick with breath and sweat and something else, that same overripe sweetness. My sandals stuck to the floor with each step.
The bitten man’s gums were black now. His eyes darted under closed lids, faster than a dreaming man’s. I spoke a blessing, and his lips twitched. For a moment I thought he might wake.
Then he whispered, “You should burn me.”
I found Varro pacing near the central yard. He stopped when I told him.
“We can’t burn them all,” he said flatly. “If we start, the men will think we’ve already lost.”
“If we don’t start, we will lose,” I said. My voice came out sharper than I intended. “It’s not fever alone. You saw Tiberius.”
Varro’s eyes narrowed. “I saw a boy too weak to live in this place.”
I could have argued, but his expression was the same one I’d seen on priests who refuse to admit a ritual has failed: the stubborn belief that control is still possible, even when the sacred has already slipped its tether.
That night, I sat outside with Corvus, sharing the last of my imported wine. The insects were worse than ever, a constant shifting veil in the lamplight.
“They’re feeding on something,” Corvus said, waving them away. “More than us.”
“Bodies?”
“Maybe. Or maybe the swamp just likes what’s coming.” He drank, then added, “Varro will wait until one of them rises in daylight. Then he’ll believe.”
We didn’t speak after that. The marsh was making new noises, small, careful splashes, too regular to be animals. Twice I thought I saw shapes between the reeds, low to the water, heads tilted. Watching.
The second reanimation happened just before dawn.
A soldier on early watch saw movement near the pyre pit. He thought it was one of the locals scavenging for nails. He went to chase them off and found Gaius, burned the day before, crawling through the ash. His skin was cracked black, his eyes blind-white, but his hands still gripped the dirt as though digging toward the fort.
They burned him again. This time they kept the fire going until there was nothing left but bone. The smell lingered even after the fire died, and men kept glancing at the pyre pit as if something might still move there. The smell of scorched bone followed us through the gate, clinging to hair and cloth, until every man in the yard knew without asking what had been done. Word spread faster than orders. Men began sleeping in armor. Some refused food, claiming the water barrels had gone foul. A few swore they could hear their own names whispered in the dark.
I heard it too.
Sometimes from the reeds. Sometimes from just behind me.
On the third night after Tiberius, the fever took another three. I tended them as best I could, though I had begun to keep my distance, holding my breath when I leaned close. One of them, the bitten soldier, no longer blinked. His eyes had dried halfway open, but the pupils still tracked my movements.
When I touched his forehead with oil, his lips parted. No sound came out, but a bubble of black rose in his throat and burst against his teeth.
I left the barrack and went straight to Varro.
“We burn them,” I said. “Now.”
He didn’t look up from the map he was pretending to study. “If you’re so sure, priest, do it yourself.”
So, I did.
Corvus helped me. We carried the three to the pyre pit under moonlight, their bodies strangely light, as though the fever had hollowed them out. The black seeped from them as we moved, dripping into the dirt. The smell was worse now, sharp under the sweetness, like metal left too long in vinegar.
I performed no rites. There are times when the words are wrong. We lit the pyre and stepped back.
For a moment the bodies just lay there, flames licking their edges. Then the bitten soldier jerked upright, his jaw opening far wider than it should. No scream, just a gush of black, boiling in the heat before it touched the ground.
The other two began to thrash, limbs twitching in strange rhythm, as if some unseen hand were plucking their tendons like strings.
The fire caught faster after that. Flesh split, bone showed, and the movement slowed until only the flames moved.
Corvus and I stayed until they were ash.
The fort did not greet us when we returned. The watch avoided our eyes, and the lamps in the yard guttered low as though the oil had soured. By morning, a small bundle waited outside my door, a laurel branch, dried and bound with reed. The leaves were blackened at the tips, as if they had been dipped in the same ooze.
I burned it without touching it bare-handed. The smoke crawled low along the ground, curling toward the palisade before thinning into the air.
The marsh was louder that night.
Not just the breathing, now there was a low hum, felt more in the ribs than heard. It rose and fell in waves, like the chanting of a distant crowd. Each time it swelled, the insects grew wilder, battering themselves against lamplight and flesh alike.
Somewhere in the dark, something splashed. Then again, closer.
I thought of the ash on the water that first morning, shaped into a knot. A signature.
The marsh knew our names now.
That was the last night before the wall fell.
Chapter III: The Wall Gives Way
The day began with silence.
Not the quiet of peace, but the kind that comes when something is listening for you. The insects had thinned overnight, their droning broken into short, uncertain bursts. Even the water seemed to hold still, its usual sluggish lap against the palisade replaced by a flat, patient weight.
The men noticed. They didn’t speak of it, but they moved differently, slower, heads turning toward the reeds more than toward their work.
I walked the inner circuit with my laurel and cup, muttering the formulas by rote. The branch was limp in my hand, its leaves bruised from the damp. Near the north channel, the ground trembled faintly underfoot. It might have been a trick of the marsh, everything here shifts, but I felt it through the soles of my sandals: a steady pulse, like a heartbeat deep in the mud.
By the gate, Varro stood with his arms folded, surveying the river. He hadn’t shaved in days.
“More sick,” he said without looking at me. “Five now.”
“We burn them tonight,” I told him.
He didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on something in the reeds. I followed it but saw nothing, only the tight green wall, wet and still.
When I turned back, his jaw was working as if grinding his teeth. “You’ll keep the rites,” he said finally. “Even if you have to do them over ash.”
By midafternoon, one of the sick was gone. Simply gone. His pallet empty, the bedding wet as though he’d lain in it too long. The medicus swore no one had moved him. A faint trail of damp led out the barrack door toward the north side of the fort.
Corvus and I followed it to the wall. The stain ended at the base of the palisade, just below a gap where two timbers had warped apart.
Something had pressed through from outside, leaving the edges dark and glistening.
“Wasn’t here yesterday,” Corvus said.
I wanted to answer, but the reed wall beyond the gap shifted. Not with wind, there was none, but as though something long and heavy had slid between their stalks.
We stepped back together.
That evening, we gathered wood for the pyre. The men worked without orders now. No one joked, no one cursed. Every armful of timber was carried quickly, eyes darting to the reeds.
The pyre burned long into the night. Three bodies this time, two still, one bound and thrashing until the heat made it stop. The black bled from them in thick streams, spitting in the fire. The smell was thick enough to coat the mouth.
Some men turned away. Others stared at the flames like they feared they’d never see another.
Near midnight, I woke to shouting.
The east barrack door slammed open, spilling men into the yard. One of them fell immediately, clutching at his leg. Another stumbled, black spilling from his mouth in a sudden, choking rush.
“Gate!” someone bellowed.
I ran toward it, the heat of the day still trapped in the packed dirt under my feet. Corvus was already there, shoving the bar into place as the first blow hit from outside.
It wasn’t like a ram. It was wet, heavy, the sound of a carcass dropped onto wood. Then again, harder. The timbers bowed inward.
Something screamed beyond the gate, not human, not animal. A high, shivering pitch that rose until it was swallowed by a deeper note, almost a growl.
The third impact cracked one of the horizontal beams. A slick line of black seeped through the splintered wood and dripped onto the ground.
“Back!” Corvus shouted.
The gate held, but the wall didn’t.
The pounding at the gate faltered, replaced by a groan from the far wall — a low, splintering sound that pulled every head toward the north side.
On the north side, where the channel met the palisade, the timbers groaned. Men ran toward it with spears, but the first reed stalk punched through before they reached it. The stalk wasn’t green anymore, it was black-streaked, bent, and whipped aside as a hand forced its way through.
Not a living hand. Grey-green skin, nails blackened, wrist dripping thick, slow ooze. It gripped the timber and pulled. More followed, another hand, an arm, half a shoulder forcing its way through the gap.
The spear points struck home, punching through chest and throat, but the thing kept coming. When its head emerged, the mouth was open wide, black spilling steadily down its chin. The eyes were blank, but they shifted in their sockets, searching.
Behind it, more shapes pressed forward, close enough to make the reeds sway.
“Fire!” I shouted. “Burn it!”
One of the men dropped his spear and grabbed a torch from the walkway. He thrust it at the thing’s face. The ooze on its skin sizzled, the flesh blistering. It didn’t recoil. It shoved harder, shoulder wedging into the gap until the timbers cracked.
The breach tore open.
They came through in a spill of limbs and snapping jaws. Some crawled, some stumbled, some half-dragged themselves, but all moved with the same jerking rhythm, a rhythm that seemed to match, as if they were keeping time with something we couldn’t hear.
The fight was chaos.
Swords cut, spears thrust, but the pieces didn’t stop. Severed arms crawled, fingers clawing at leather and flesh. Heads bit down and held until crushed under a boot. The only sure end was fire, and there wasn’t enough of it.
I saw Varro on the walkway, sword in one hand, torch in the other, shouting orders lost in the screams. One of the dead leapt at him, leapt… from the ground to the walkway. They went down together, the torch tumbling away. The thing’s jaw clamped on Varro’s throat, and black gushed over his cuirass.
I don’t know if I ran to help or just to get away, but I ended up at the pyre pit with Corvus and three others. We grabbed burning logs and ran back toward the breach.
The fire worked, but too slowly. Every body burned was time for another to push through. And they were pushing, not in mindless rushes, but in bursts, hitting one section, then another, as if they knew where the wall was weakest.
By the third wave, the fort was half lost.
The east barrack was overrun, the doorway blocked by thrashing shapes. The ground was slick, treacherous, the ooze sucking at sandals. Men slipped, and the dead were on them before they could rise.
I stumbled clear of the press, my breath raw in my throat, and found myself by the temple shed, the only place in this fort that had ever been mine. My chest of offerings was still there, the laurel inside already dark at the tips. I grabbed the oil flask and my bronze cup. Habit, maybe. Or the need to carry some fragment of order in the collapse.
When I stepped back out, I saw them.
Just beyond the breach, in the reeds, a line of figures stood waist-deep in the water. They didn’t move, didn’t charge. They just watched, heads tilted. The light from the burning barrack caught the black running down their bodies into the marsh, carried away in slow spirals.
Some faced the fort. Others faced each other, motionless.
A moment later, the next wave hit.
We fell back toward the center yard. Corvus had a bandage around his forearm, black already blooming through the cloth. He met my eyes but didn’t speak.
The pyre was gone, scattered, the fire drowned in mud and trampling feet.
The yard was chaos, firelight snapping over mud and blood. In it, I caught sight of Varro… he was dead. I saw his body near the gate, black still running from the hole in his neck. One of the dead crouched over him, jaw working.
The ground shook once, sharply. Not from the weight of men, deeper, as if something beneath the fort had shifted.
We made our stand in the yard. The remaining torches were planted in a rough circle, the flames guttering in the damp air. The men stood between them, weapons slick. I took my place beside Corvus, laurel in one hand, torch in the other.
The dead didn’t rush this time. They circled, just beyond the torchlight, eyes moving in their sockets. The steady trickle of black from their mouths and noses pattered into the mud.
When they came, it wasn’t all at once. One from the left, two from the right, then a sudden crush at the front. Always testing, always pressing.
The circle broke.
The last thing I saw before the fight swallowed me was the reeds swaying without wind, bowing inward toward the fort.
After that, the night was only fire and running, each turn through the smoke leading to fewer voices and more of the dead.
Chapter IV: The Last Rites
The fort was gone.
The fight had pulled us into smaller and smaller pieces until the dead and the living were no longer separate in the yard. Every shout was matched by a scream, every gap in the wall answered by more of them pressing through.
I don’t remember choosing the storehouse. I remember fire, black ooze splashing the dirt, Corvus dragging me by my cloak toward the last building still standing with its door intact. Someone slammed it shut behind us, and we dropped the bar into place.
The storehouse once smelled of grain and damp leather. Now it smelled of blood and sweat. The air was hot, tasting faintly of ash and barley, and every man who’d made it inside was already marked by soot or blood.
There were six of us. Myself, Corvus, the medicus, two soldiers whose names I had never learned, and a boy from the kitchen staff whose hands shook so badly he could barely keep his dagger upright.
The walls rattled with every impact. The dead hit them in rhythm at first, then in scattered bursts, as if feeling out the wood. The sound was worse than the gate had been, less the slam of force and more the dragging, rubbing scrape of bodies pressed against it.
Corvus found an old table and shoved it against the door. We added barrels, sacks of barley, anything with weight. It would not hold forever.
I lit one of the two remaining lamps. The flame was weak, stifled by the air already thickening with smoke from outside. I hadn’t realized how close the fires had come until I smelled the pitch.
We sat in a rough circle, each man keeping his weapon in reach. No one spoke for a long time. I could hear my own heart, the shallow rasp of my breath. Outside, the moaning was gone. The dead were silent now.
That silence was worse.
When I finally moved, it was to pull my satchel into my lap. Inside was my little wooden chest of rites, the laurel branch inside limp and browned, the bronze cup, the stylus and wax tablets I kept for my reports to the temple.
The tablets would not be enough. There was paper here, and ink, the storehouse kept the quartermaster’s ledgers. I pushed the ledgers aside and took a clean sheaf. My hands shook as I dipped the quill, not from fear alone but from the nearness of the heat outside.
“I’m writing this,” I told them, though no one had asked. “If the building holds long enough, it should be found.”
The medicus snorted quietly. “By who?”
“By whoever needs to know.” I didn’t look at him. “And if no one ever finds it, I’ll have said it aloud in the only way I can.”
I began with the first day, the black-stained cloth from Tiberius’s mouth, the way the marsh had watched us. I wrote as the heat thickened, as the dead thudded against the door. The words came faster than I could think them.
Outside, something new began, not pounding, but dragging. Wood scraped on wood. I pictured them pulling the barrels away, one at a time.
Corvus stood, torch in hand. “If they get through, you burn as many as you can,” he said to me.
I nodded without looking up from the page. I wanted the words down while I could still hold the pen. The smoke already made my eyes sting.
The dead hit the door again. Harder this time. The bar bowed.
The boy with the dagger began to cry quietly, not moving, the tears leaving pale tracks through the grime on his cheeks. One of the nameless soldiers put a hand on his shoulder. Neither spoke.
I wrote about the north channel, the gap in the wall, the hands forcing their way through. I wrote about Varro’s throat spilling black onto his armor, about the way the dead had leapt, not stumbled. I did not try to explain it.
The storehouse shuddered. Dust fell from the rafters into my ink.
The medicus moved to the small window slit, peering out. “Fire’s almost to the east wall,” he said. “If the wind shifts, we’ll go before they get in.”
“That’s a comfort?” Corvus asked without looking at him.
“Better than their hands on you,” the medicus said.
The smoke thickened until the lamp’s glow was just a soft blur. My throat itched. The grain sacks had begun to smell faintly toasted.
I wrote about the line of figures in the reeds, the way some had turned toward each other as if conferring. I did not write the thought that had struck me then, that they had been waiting for the breach, not merely drawn to it.
The pounding came again, faster, no longer in rhythm. Splinters jumped from the door.
The boy stood suddenly, dagger in hand, and moved to the door. I think he meant to help hold it, but the moment he touched the wood, a crack split through it, a pale wedge of night appearing.
A grey-green hand shot through and grabbed him by the wrist. He screamed and dropped the dagger. The hand pulled, and his arm bent at an angle it shouldn’t. Corvus slammed the torch down on it, and the flesh sizzled, the grip loosening just enough for the soldier beside him to pull the boy back.
The hand withdrew. The gap stayed.
The boy was sobbing now, a thin sound under the hiss of the torch. I turned back to my page. I wrote faster. My letters slanted, ink blotting in the corners. The smoke made the page ripple. I could feel sweat running into my eyes.
The dead outside had gone quiet again. The heat in the wall on my left told me why. The fire was there now, licking up the outer planks. The sound of it was different from the crack of timber breaking, it was a dry, patient whisper, like someone breathing against your ear.
The medicus coughed hard, black flecks in his spit. “Not much time,” he said.
I dipped the quill again. My hand ached from gripping it.
I wrote about the black blood, the way it oozed, constant and foul, but never on its own. Always inside something moving, something hunting. I wrote that cutting them apart wasn’t enough, that only fire stopped them. I wrote that the bite spread the sickness quickly, but the air here might carry it too.
The pounding started again. The gap widened. A face pushed through, not Tiberius’s, not anyone I knew. The mouth opened, and the black poured from it in a steady sheet onto the dirt. Hands reached through on either side, clawing for purchase.
Corvus shoved the torch into the face, and the screaming started, high and wet, cut off when the thing jerked back.
The air grew hotter. I could hear beams splitting outside as the fire reached them. The medicus sat down heavily, his head in his hands. The boy clutched his injured wrist, rocking back and forth.
The two nameless soldiers stood at the door with Corvus, torches ready. I realized mine was still unlit.
I set down the quill and picked it up.
The building groaned. Smoke boiled through the window slit. Sparks landed on the floor and died in the grain dust.
I took one last page. On it I wrote:
To whoever finds this, if you find only ash, then let it be a warning still. This sickness walks on legs and wears the skin of the dead. It will find you if you give it ground. Burn the bodies. Burn the pieces. Do not let the marsh take root in you.
I set the pages in the corner, beneath the ledgers, hoping the fire might miss them even if it did not miss us.
The pounding reached a fevered pitch. The bar on the door cracked.
Corvus looked at me once over his shoulder. “When they get in, we hold the line until the fire takes us.”
I nodded. My torch caught on the second strike of flint, flame blooming fast in the smoke-thick air.
I don’t know if I’ll write another word. The walls are blistering. The sound outside is no longer pounding, it’s all around, footsteps on every side, the scrape of nails on wood.
If the fire doesn’t reach them first, they will come through. If it does, the smoke will take us before they do.
Either way, the marsh will go on breathing.
I can hear it now, under the fire, the slow, wet pull of air through reeds.
Somewhere beyond the walls, the reeds stirred without wind, just as they had on the day I arrived.
That’s the last I’ll give you. The rest is heat, and the press of bodies, and the sound of the door giving way.
Epilogue: The Ledger in the Ash
The fort had no name on the maps anymore.
The marsh had eaten its outline centuries ago, the palisade reduced to leaning ribs of blackened wood jutting from the water. What little dry ground remained was carpeted in reeds, their stalks whispering against each other in the faint wind.
The excavation was not meant to come this far. The men muttered about the stench, about the way their boots sank too deep into the mud. Still, orders were orders, and the promise of coin from relic-hunters kept them moving.
It was by accident they found the storehouse. A timber shifted under a spade, revealing a hollow beneath the muck. When they pried it open, the air that rose was hot and sweet, though no fire had touched this place in lifetimes.
Inside was nothing but ash, scattered across warped floorboards. At the far corner, half-collapsed under a beam, lay the chest. The lid crumbled at the first touch, revealing a bundle of scorched cloth wrapped around brittle parchment.
The top page was black at the edges, the ink faded to a brownish ghost, but the writing was still legible in places. It began mid-sentence:
“…burn the bodies. Burn the pieces. Do not let the marsh take root in you.”
They read the rest in silence, the words a record of heat and fear, of black blood and the press of the dead. The name signed at the last page, Marcus Flavius Crispus, Envoy of the Sacred Rites, meant nothing to them.
When they finished, one man laughed softly. “Old soldiers’ tales,” he said, and tossed the top page aside. The wind caught it, carrying it out over the reeds before it sank into the water.
The others kept the ledger. One wrapped it in oilcloth to sell in the city. They did not notice the thin film of dark clinging to the paper, or the way the reeds nearest the open storehouse had begun to sway without wind.
By the time they reached their boats, the whisper of the marsh was loud enough to almost sound like breathing.
{Translator’s and Historian’s Note}
The so-called Crispus Ledger is presently housed in the private collection of the Aulus Veranius Antiquities Archive, Ostia. The circumstances of its discovery remain contested; the sole surviving account comes from an anonymous pamphlet circulated in Puteoli in the late 3rd century CE, which claims the text was found “in the reeds of a drowned fortress, bound in a scorched oilcloth wrapping, though the Archive’s own catalog makes no mention of it.”
The manuscript consists of twenty-three folia of coarse parchment, unevenly singed at the edges. The ink is of a composition common to the mid-1st century CE, though modern analysis suggests contamination by an unknown organic residue which has resisted all cleaning attempts.
Internal evidence places the events described during the governorship of C. Julius Lupus in the Marethensis Marshes (a minor province along the eastern littoral), circa AD 48-49. No corroborating military dispatches survive, and Marethensis itself is absent from imperial records after the mid-2nd century.
The author, Marcus Flavius Crispus, signs himself Legatus Sacrorum Provincialis, a title unattested elsewhere, though the duties described are consistent with known practices of religious envoys attached to frontier garrisons. His account of a wasting fever, the discoloration of the blood, and the subsequent reanimation of the dead is unparalleled in extant Roman sources. The work’s final passages, written during an active siege, terminate abruptly, suggesting the author perished during the events described.
Some scholars dismiss the Ledger as an elaborate soldier’s fiction, composed to explain the abandonment of an unprofitable province. Others note that the remains of the Marethensis fort were found in an area where human activity has been absent for centuries, despite navigable waterways and arable land.
Notably, several members of the original excavation party who handled the Ledger later reported persistent coughs, fever, and a blackened discharge from the gums. These claims were never substantiated, as the Archive refuses to release relevant medical records.
The final folio bears a faint notation, seemingly in a later hand, in Vulgar Latin:
Adhuc Spirat Palus
“The marsh still breathes.”
Tales from the Boer’s Head 