Rusty and Iola died a year after the battle, in Maribor, during the largest outbreak yet of an epidemic of viral haemorrhagic fever, a disease also called the Red Death or–from the name of the ship it was brought on–Catriona’s Plague. All the physicians and most of the priests fled from Maribor then. Rusty and Iola remained, naturally. They treated the sick, because they were doctors. The fact that there was no cure for the Red Death was unimportant to them. They both became infected. He died in her arms, in the powerful, confidence-inspiring embrace of her large, ugly, peasant hands. She died four days later. Alone.

Shani died seventy-two years after the battle, as the celebrated and universally respected retired dean of the Department of Medicine at the University of Oxenfurt. Generations of future surgeons used to repeat her famous joke: ‘Sew red to red, yellow to yellow, white to white. It’s sure to be fine’.

Almost no one noticed how after delivering that witty anecdote the dean always wiped away a furtive tear.

Almost no one.

The frogs croaked and the cicadas sang among the willows by Golden Pond. Shani and Iola giggled through their tears.

‘I wonder,’ repeated Milo Vanderbeck, halfling, field surgeon, known as Rusty. ‘I wonder who won?’

‘Rusty,’ Marti Sodergren said lyrically. ‘Believe me, in your shoes it’s the last thing I’d be worrying about.’

CHAPTER NINE

Some of the flames were tall and strong, burning brightly and vividly, while others were tiny, flickering and quavering, and their light diminished and died. At the very end was but one tiny flame, so weak it barely flickered and glimmered, now struggling to flare up, now almost going out entirely.

‘Whose is the dying flame?’ asked the Witcher.

‘Yours,’ Death replied.

Flourens Delannoy, Fairy Tales and Stories

The plateau, extending almost all the way to the distant mountain peaks, greyish-blue in the fog, was like an actual stone sea, here undulating in a hump or a ridge, there bristling with the sharp fangs of reefs. The impression was enhanced by shipwrecks. Dozens of wrecks. Of galleys, galeases, cogs, caravels, brigs, holks and longships. Some of them looked as though they had ended up there not long before, others were piles of barely recognisable planks and ribs, clearly having lain there for decades–if not centuries.

Some of the ships were lying keel up, others, turned over on their sides, looked as though they had been tossed up by devilish squalls and storms. Still others gave the impression they were sailing, making away, amidst that stone ocean. They stood even and straight, the chests of their figureheads proudly stuck out, their masts pointing to the zenith, the remains of sails, shrouds and stays fluttering. They even had their own ghostly crews–skeletons jammed between rotten planks and entangled in ropes, dead sailors, busy forever with endless navigation.