The Sacred Blight of Ar

  Elizabeth, a Physician of the High Caste in the mighty city of Ar, stood poised on the brink of an abyss, both literal and metaphorical. The cold morning air of Gor, usually crisp and invigorating, seemed thick with an invisible menace here, at the periphery of the city's refuse grounds. Her assignment, delivered with the terse efficiency of the Caste Council, was grim: attend to injuries in the Dar Kosis pits. This was not a matter of healing, but of maintenance, a grim irony given her profession. Dar Kosis, the "Holy Disease," or "Sacred Affliction" as the common folk and misguided religious zealots called it, was incurable, its contagion swift and merciless.

  Her chamber within the Physicians' complex had been stripped of all but the most essential tools for her current task. Each item had been sterilized to within an inch of its integrity: scalpels, sutures, salves, bandages, and a precious few doses of sedative. Her uniform, typically pristine white, was replaced by a specially treated, heavy canvas suit, thick and unforgiving, secured tightly at every seam and joint. A hood covered her head, a translucent visor obscuring her face, and thick, gauntleted gloves encased her hands. She resembled nothing so much as a strange, pale insect preparing for an unwelcome burrow.

  You have all you need, Physician?" the overseeing Caste official, a grim-faced fellow Physician inquired, his voice muffled by his own lesser-grade mask. Even those who merely supervised kept their distance.

Elizabeth nodded, her voice a flat, practiced monotone. "My provisions are sufficient. The   descent mechanism is secure?"

"It is. The ropes are new, the winch tested this morn."

She felt a familiar ripple of professional disdain. ‘New ropes, tested winch, for those legally dead.’ The Physicians' Caste had long ago rejected the superstitious pronouncements of the common folk. There was nothing holy about Dar Kosis. It was a pathogen, a cruel, relentless invader that ravaged the body, rendering its victims living corpses. To Elizabeth, they were merely the afflicted, victims of a biological horror. They were legally dead, stripped of all rights, all possessions, forced into voluntary isolation in the pits where they would await their slow, inevitable end.

  She stepped onto the circular platform, a simple wooden disk barely large enough for her and her satchels of equipment. Her fellow Physician pulled a lever, and the platform began its slow, grinding descent into the echoing darkness. The air grew colder, heavier, laden with the stench of decay, fear, and something else—a cloying sweetness, like overripe fruit, the distinct odor of Dar Kosis. As she descended, the pit walls, rough-hewn rock scarred by picks and shovels, gradually gave way to a wider, uneven floor.

  The clappers began almost immediately, their dull, wooden “clack-clack” echoing off the rock faces. First one, then another, a discordant symphony of warning. Yellow rags, the "shrouds" that marked the legally dead, appeared in the dim, filtered light from above. Figures, gaunt and stooped, moved through the shadows, their bodies often twisted by the disease's progress, their faces hidden beneath their hoods.

"Physician!" a voice rasped, weak and hoarse, a man appearing from behind a jagged outcrop. He was thin, impossibly so, his yellow rags barely clinging to his frame. His clapper, a piece of scavenged wood, hung limply from his hand. "Do not approach!"

Elizabeth held up a gloved hand, a gesture of reassurance, though she knew it was futile. "I am Elizabeth, Physician of Ar. I am here for injuries, not the sacred affliction." Her words, though professional, carried the inherent barb.

The man stumbled back, his clapper falling to the ground with a soft thud. He retreated into the gloom.

  Her instructions were precise: locate the injured, address their immediate physical trauma, and leave. There would be no healing of the Dar Kosis itself, merely the patching of broken bones, the staunching of wounds, the alleviation of pain that was not directly tied to the primary infection.

  She moved through the labyrinthine pit, guided by the scattered flickers of light from crude oil lamps and the constant, unnerving rhythm of the clappers. The pit was vast, a city beneath a city, its population a silent testament to the plague's indiscriminate reach. Here, caste no longer mattered. Slaves, freemen, even a disgraced minor noble, all wore the same yellow shroud, all carried the same clapper, all legally dead. 

She found her first patient huddled near a small, smoldering fire. A woman, young, perhaps no older than Elizabeth herself, her leg bent at an unnatural angle. Her face, visible beneath the edge of her hood, was gaunt, the skin stretched taut over sharp cheekbones, but her eyes, wide and terrified, still held a spark of life. The tell-tale lesions of Dar Kosis were visible on her hands, purplish-black and weeping.

  "What happened?" Elizabeth asked, her voice calm, professional, cutting through the clapper's cacophony.

  "A falling stone," a voice croaked from nearby. An older man, his face a mask of resignation, pointed to a jagged piece of rock. "From the ceiling."

  Elizabeth knelt, her suit crackling. The stench here was overwhelming, a concentrated essence of the disease. She focused on the limb. It was a clean break, but severe. Compound. Bone protruded. Infection, aside from Dar Kosis, was a certainty in this environment.

  "I must set it," she informed the woman. "It will pain you greatly."

  The woman only nodded, clenching her teeth, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

  Elizabeth retrieved a bone-setting splint and a potent sedative from her satchel. She prepared the injection, feeling the weight of the patient's desperate gaze. It was a gaze that transcended the disease, a raw, primal fear of pain.

  "Hold still," Elizabeth spoke gently, injecting the sedative into the woman's arm. Even through the thick glove, she felt the thinness of the flesh, the underlying weakness.

  As the sedative began to take hold, Elizabeth worked with swift, brutal efficiency. The pop and grind of bone as she manipulated it back into place, the woman's muffled cries turning into whimpers, were almost drowned out by the clappers. She cleaned the wound as best she could, applying a strong antiseptic, then bound the leg tightly in splints and bandages. It was not a cure, not even a true healing, merely a repair to allow her to move without agony, to slow the inevitable secondary infection that would likely claim her long before Dar Kosis finished its work.

  As she worked, another approached, a man with vacant eyes and a clapper that seemed to beat out a funeral dirge. He stopped a respectful distance away, his yellow rags swaying.

"Physician," he rasped, his voice a dry rustle. "You do not fear us?"

  Elizabeth paused, her hands still busy with the bandages. She looked at the man through her visor. "Fear is a luxury I cannot afford in my profession. I take precautions."

  "They call this holy," the man continued, a bitter laugh escaping him, a dry cough. "They cast us out, then call this holy. There is no holiness here, Physician. Only slow death."

  Elizabeth finished securing the splint. She looked into the man's eyes, seeing a human being consumed by suffering. "That is the truth, Master," she replied, using a term of respect rarely given to the legally dead. "There is no holiness in Dar Kosis. Only illness. And my Caste seeks to understand illness, not sanctify it."

  The man nodded slowly, a ghost of understanding in his eyes. He raised his clapper, then let it fall, a moment of silence in the cacophony. He turned and shuffled away, his clapper beginning its rhythm once more, but this time, it sounded different, less a warning, more a lament.

  Elizabeth spent the next hour attending to two more minor injuries – a deep gash, a dislocated shoulder. Each interaction was brief, precise, professional. Each time, the clappers announced her presence, and the gaunt figures in yellow rags watched from the shadows, a silent, spectral audience. She distributed a small amount of painkiller to each, a meager offering against the tide of their suffering.

  Finally, her task complete, Elizabeth returned to the designated ascent point. The Caste official was waiting, his masked face peering down. The platform descended. She stepped on, the weight of the pit, the smell, the clappers, clinging to her like an invisible shroud.

The ascent was slow, allowing her time to reflect. The sheer injustice of it all, the cruelty of nature, the hypocrisy of the "holy" designation. Her Caste, the Physicians, bore the burden of understanding, of facing the truth, no matter how grim. They were the pragmatists in a world often lost to superstition and rigid dogma.

   Reaching the surface, Elizabeth was immediately directed to a small, isolated tent. A blazing fire had been prepared outside. Without a word, she began to strip. Every piece of her heavy canvas suit, her boots, her gloves, her visor – all were carefully removed, placed into a metal basin, and then unceremoniously tossed into the flames. The canvas, treated with protective compounds, burned with an acrid, chemical smell, leaving behind only ash.

Then came the ritualistic scrubbing. A slave, equally masked and gowned, poured scalding water and powerful lye soap over her, Elizabeth scrubbing her skin raw, feeling the burning sensation of the cleanser, as if she could scour away the very memory of the pit. The slave then doused her with a pungent, alcohol-based antiseptic, its fumes stinging her eyes and nostrils. Only when she felt clean to the bone, though she knew the psychological grime would linger, was she permitted to don a fresh, clean uniform.

  Back in her private quarters, the silence was deafening after the incessant clappers. Elizabeth sat on her simple cot, the events of the day replaying in her mind. The hollow eyes of the woman with the broken leg, the bitter truth spoken by the old man, the pervasive smell that seemed to cling to her even after the scrubbing.