“As much as I like this Gulliver overall, I think Quindlen made a mistake to have the Houyhnhnms be intelligent draftbeasts.”

“Why?” Spar asked. “Do you think he should have said they were intelligent... what was it in the original? Unicorns?”

---

Quarantine Cove

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 2 of 3

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---

I woke up in the middle of the night with a headache, and lay there suffering for a while before I finally fell asleep again. When I woke up, early morning summer sunlight coming through the window above my bed, I still had the headache, but I felt something else was wrong too. The colors of everything I was seeing were subtly wrong; the blanket was a much brighter blue than it should be, the wood of the bedpost and the wall was a strange shade of yellow instead of the dark brown of sharpleaf wood, and my hand was almost red. The last part might be an effect of the curse on my hand rather than my eyes, though... I felt strange all over. What else...? Yes, the shape of my hand was wrong too.

I sat up and realized what else was wrong. I was in the second bed from the door, instead of the one closest to the door where I had gone to sleep; and in that bed I saw myself still sleeping. I looked at myself more closely. I was Spar now, apparently. The absence between my legs brought back comforting memories of early childhood, in a way, but the things wobbling around on my chest were a novelty.

“Are you awake?” I asked. He wasn’t, yet, but he woke up soon enough, and like me he noticed something wrong with his color vision a moment before he noticed what else was wrong.

“Your voice sounds high,” he said, “and your face is gone all pale... wait a minute, what...?”

“I think you’re me now, and I’m you. That must be the curse, or the beginning of it. I’m not sure what’s wrong with our vision. My skin doesn’t look pale to me, it looks way too red. And does your head hurt like mine does?”

“I don’t know how bad your head hurts, but I’ve got a headache too. Not so bad I can’t concentrate, but annoying.” He had a radiant expression on his face, despite the headache. “I’m sorry this had to happen to you, Toussaint, but if messed up colors and a mild headache is all that’s wrong with me, I’m about ready to thank that Master.”

“We don’t know that this is all,” I said, annoyed. “This could be just the beginning.”

It was.

We ate some of the bread and cheese we’d brought, with a little of the honey from the cabinet, and then Spar took a bucket he’d found and went down to the brook to get some water. We mixed it with some of our wine — we wanted it to last a while, since we just had one bottle — and drank.

Spar read aloud from Gulliver and I started to work on my copy, but I soon found that my penmanship in this body wasn’t what it should be; better than Spar’s, but not as good as my carefully trained book hand. I gave it up for a while.

“As much as I like this Gulliver overall, I think Quindlen made a mistake to have the Houyhnhnms be intelligent draftbeasts.”

“Why?” Spar asked. “Do you think he should have said they were intelligent... what was it in the original? Unicorns?”

“Horses,” I said. “Unicorns had a horn on the forehead, and they weren’t domesticated like horses. No, I think he was right to use our native animals, rather than a legendary animal like the horse that nobody’s ever seen, but the Founder’s accounts say that horses were beautiful, graceful, cleanly creatures — the most beautiful of domestic animals besides the cat. And nobody would consider a draftbeast beautiful or cleanly.”

“So what do you think he should have used?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the darter or the quintacorn; it’s hard to say. Darters are much smaller than horses are said to have been, and quintacorns have those horns, which horses didn’t. And neither of them is domesticated. We just don’t have any animal here that’s a good match for the horse with all the associations the mention of that animal would suggest to Jonathan Swift or his first readers... But it seems very appropriate to imagine an intelligent darter or quintacorn, while an intelligent draftbeast...”

“Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

After a while he practiced shooting at a target that someone had set up on a tree near the lodge, but found that he wasn’t as good a shot as before. We spent some time looking for his arrows that went wide.

“The changing made me lose my coordination for a little while — what with my arms and hands changing shape slightly, and having to find a better stance that wouldn’t have the bowstring stinging my right breast — but by the time I ran away I was about as good as I was before. I wonder how long it will take me to get used to your body.”

“Let me try,” I said when we’d found all his arrows but one and had been looking in vain for that last one for a while. He coached me on how to stand so my breasts wouldn’t get in the way of the string, and I let fly at the target. I did manage to hit it with three of five arrows, though I didn’t get near the center. Apparently some of the skills we had learned stayed with the body.

I was about to draw a sixth arrow but the headache was getting worse, and I told Spar I was going to go lie down. He said his head was hurting worse now than when we woke up, too. We gathered up the arrows from the target and beyond it and then went into the lodge.

Lying down didn’t help; the headache got worse and worse, and was excruciating after another half hour. Then suddenly it got a lot better — not gone entirely, but I could think again. And I realized my vision had returned to normal; the ceiling was the right color, as was my hand — which was also a lot hairier; I looked at myself, and at Spar on the other bed. We were back in our own bodies.

“Good for you,” she said. “Is that all, do you think?”

“If it happens twice, it might happen any number of times. I don’t think we should go to Fleecedale until several days have gone by without that happening again. Until the headache has been gone for a while, too.”

---

We swapped about four or five times a day for the next several days. The next day when we were in our right bodies, we went hunting, and Spar shot a couple of mirrorwings and a bell-ear. I gutted and cleaned them and we had meat with our bread and cheese for a couple of days.

The headache was always there, worst just before we swapped and mildest just afterward. We could more or less use it to gauge when a swap was going to happen, though it didn’t seem to always get equally bad before the swap or equally mild afterward. I copied several more pages from Gulliver’s Travels, always when I was in my own body, Spar slowly reading aloud to me.

I seriously hoped that after a few more days, the headache would end and the swaps would cease, and we could go back to civilization — hopefully in our right bodies. I still felt sorry for Spar, but she was young; I figured she could get used to being a woman easier than Moses could get used to being married to one. But the dice came up showing irrational numbers.

On our third day in the lodge, we were out hunting again, following the tracks of a quintacorn a fairly long way from the lodge, when the headache got worse faster than usual. We gasped and sat down together with our backs to a sharpleaf tree until we swapped again and the headache receded.

“Shall we keep tracking it?” I asked Spar. “I’m getting to be a reasonably good shot in your body, and a quintacorn is a fairly easy target if we can just get in sight of it.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

A while later I was creeping up on the quintacorn from downwind; it was drinking from a pool in one of the brooks that fed into the creek that ran through Fleecedale. I got as close as the cover allowed, drew, and let fly.

The quintacorn leaped in place — I had hit it on the left flank — but then ran off, bleeding. Spar ran up behind me. “After it!” I said.

Spar was running with longer legs than me and soon got way ahead. I kept following the obvious trail at a more relaxed pace. Eventually the quintacorn would lose enough blood to slow down, Spar would catch up with it, and he could dispatch it with the sword — not as good as a spear for this kind of work, but usable.

But I hadn’t gone far when I met someone else.

It was a man almost as old as Nabuco, in filthy clothes that he seemed to have been wearing for a year. He carried a bow longer and more powerful than mine.

“Stay back,” I said, “I’m under a curse. I don’t want you to get it.”

“What’s that?” he said, turning his head. “I’m deaf on that side.” He came closer.

“You don’t want this curse,” I shouted.

“Few things could be worse than what?” he asked. Apparently he was more deaf than not on the other side, too. “Than a girl as pretty as you hunting by herself this far from Fleecedale? There are outlaws around sometimes — you should be more careful —”

“I’m not by myself. Stay back, you could get this curse from me,” I said, and then backed further away.

“Not yourself? What about a first — a first what?”

“Don’t come near me,” I shouted, and turned to run. He was fleeter of foot than I expected a man that old to be, and, like Spar in my body, he had the advantage of longer legs. I still might have outrun him, though, if the headache hadn’t gotten worse suddenly. Before long it was so bad I stumbled to my knees. The man caught up with me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Are you lost, little girl? Do you need —?”

Suddenly, I was myself again, kneeling beside a dead quintacorn with a bloodied sword lying on the leafy mould at my side. I hastily wiped the sword off, sheathed it and ran as fast as I could back along the trail the quintacorn had followed. What might that man do to Spar?

Not as much as I’d feared, it turned out. I ran up to them a few minutes later to find Spar shouting in his good ear, explaining what had happened to us.

“Here he is now,” she said. “My husband, Toussaint. Toussaint, this is Dantas.”

Interesting lie. Well, if it helped keep his hands off her, it wouldn’t do any harm.

“You’ll have to go into quarantine with us, sir,” I said when I got close enough for him to hear me. “You might have already gotten the curse from us, if it’s contagious. We still don’t know.”

After we repeated the message several times with variations, he agreed, but suggested that we come to his cabin instead of going back to the lodge; he said there was room for us there, and he had plenty of food stocked. Eventually we agreed to go back to the lodge for the books and food there, then go back to butcher the quintacorn, and go to his cabin with the meat.

Before we got to his cabin, which was several miles further from Fleecedale than the lodge, he was already complaining of a headache. It got worse faster than ours did, though it seemed to culminate in something just as bad, and when it receded he was in Spar’s body, Spar was in mine, and I was in his. I was surprised that she didn’t seem bothered by the change. Was she crazy from living out here by himself?

Dantas' cabin was smaller than the lodge, and dirtier, but he did have plenty of food. She fixed us the best meal we’d had since we left Highmarket, and told us about herself. I had to lean close to hear what she said, and I didn’t get it all straight at the time — some of this is what Spar told me later.

She was a native of Fleecedale and had grown up apparently immune, like Spartacus; she didn’t catch the changing curse until she was nineteen years old. By that time she was married and pregnant with her first child. The change caused her to miscarry, and nearly killed her; when he finally recovered, he ran off into the hills and had lived as a hermit ever since. I recognized the name of her husband; old Beecher Timson, whom I’d always thought was a widower. His son Newton — Dantas' son, too — was just a year older than me. I did some math; Dantas wasn’t nearly as old as he — as his original body, which I was wearing — looked; living alone in the woods had taken a hard toll on him.

She seemed pleased by the results of this curse.

“The colors are odd,” she said, as we ate the roasted darter with assorted nuts she had prepared, “but other than that it feels so right. I thought I might get used to being a man after a few years, and be able to go back to civilization, even if I couldn’t face my husband again, but I don’t think I ever did.”

“You’re welcome to it,” said Spar, “for as long as it lasts.”

“You’ve still got the headache, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s not very bad, though.”

“Then we’ll be swapping around again soon,” Spar said. “At least once more, maybe twice, before the end of today. No telling how long this will last.”

We changed again not long before we went to bed; I ended up in Spar’s body again, Spar in Dantas', and Dantas in mine. Dantas made up pallets for us from his extra winter fleeces. We slept fitfully, our sleep interrupted by the headache.

But when I woke up, Spar’s body was gone from the pallet. I was in my own body again for the moment.

“Are you Spar or Dantas?” I asked the old man, who was lying on his bed awake.

“What?” he asked, and sat up. I got up and came closer, and said louder: “Who are you this morning?”

“Spar,” he said. “Where do you reckon Dantas is?”

“She’s probably gone out to pee,” I said. “I need to do that now too.”

But I saw no sign of her anywhere at the outhouse Dantas had shown us yesterday, or anywhere near the cabin. Old Spar came out and used the outhouse after me.

“I’m afraid she’s run off,” I said after he was finished. “She’s come out ahead in the body exchange and wants to get away, maybe see people in Fleecedale she’s been ashamed to go back to before...”

“What are we going to do?” he said.

“I don’t think we can track her. She might have taken any of several routes to Fleecedale. But probably we don’t need to. Whichever one of us ends up in that body next time we swap around can just walk back here.”

“Unless she’s already gotten to Fleecedale by now and exposed other people to the curse... in that case it’s too late to keep it confined to us until it wears off. Maybe we should try to catch up with her? Which route do you think is most likely?”

We headed toward Fleecedale along what I figured would be the most likely route — not the most direct, which would take Dantas to the hills above the village and a steep, difficult descent, but the easiest, which wound around to the east side of the valley, at a spot where there was an easy trail winding along one of the hills south of the village. It was the route hunters most often took when leaving or returning to Fleecedale. The headache worsened as we went, and we had to stop and rest before we were halfway there. This time it was just me and Spar who swapped, leaving Dantas still in Spar’s body, wherever she was. I wondered if maybe the distance between us prevented the curse from working. But after a couple more hours, I found out that it wasn’t so; at least, the few miles between us wasn’t sufficient to stop it. The next time the headache reached its peak and we shuffled, I ended up in Spar’s body; and I wasn’t alone.

I was sitting in a chair in a one-room house; late morning sunlight was coming in through a south window. I’d never been in this house before, but I recognized the man sitting near me in another chair; old Beecher Timson, Dantas’s husband. And sitting on the edge of the bed in the corner was a young man about my age, Beecher’s son Newton.

They looked at me uncertainly; I figured I had shown some startlement when I arrived in this body, or had broken off in mid-sentence.

“Beecher, Newton, this isn’t Dantas, I’m Toussaint Foucault. We just exchanged places and bodies. What did Dantas tell you about what happened?”

Newton was the first to recover from the surprise. “She was saying as how she met you and your wife up in the hills, and you told her you’d had a curse put on you by one of the Masters; and then a while later she ended up in that body there, and the girl in that body was in her old man body... that’s what I understood her to say. But it wasn’t too clear yet.”

“Listen, this curse is contagious, and it keeps working. My cousin and I — not my wife, Dantas got that mixed up from being hard of hearing, that is his old body is hard of hearing — we’d been swapping back and forth for three days when Dantas met us. So when Dantas ended up in this body that wasn’t the end of it. And since she’s been sitting here with you, you’ve probably both got the curse too; and who knows who else she might have talked to on her way into Fleecedale before she got to your house...! We’ve got to put the whole village under quarantine. We can’t let anybody leave, and anybody that was out hunting or pasturing the herds when Dantas arrived we have to warn off. Tell them to go stay in Bluegate until this curse has run its course...”

It took a little more time to convince them. I recounted our experiences in more detail, from the time Spar and I met the Master on the road into the valley, and finally got Newton, at least, to understand what was needed. We left the house and went down to the far edge of the village, by the stockade, and worked our way up from there warning people about the curse. People remembered the last time one of the Masters appeared, when they set loose the forgetting curse, and how the first village where it broke out didn’t quarantine itself well enough; it was burned to the ground by its neighbors a few months later, in revenge, and none of us wanted that to happen to Fleecedale. Our isolated situation was an advantage. We soon got several volunteers with loud, clear voices to man the stockade and warn off the hunters and herdsmen that would be coming back in the next few hours, while Newton and I went around warning people about the curse, — shouting from a distance, and warning them to stay in their houses as long as they could.

I was worried that I was probably spreading the curse more thoroughly within Fleecedale than Dantas had already done, but I didn’t see any other way to get the quarantine in place quickly and surely, and prevent the curse spreading beyond Fleecedale. Before long, we got to my Aunt Harriet and Uncle Garrison’s house, and though I tried shouting at a distance to warn her off, I couldn’t stop Aunt Harriet from rushing out of her house and embracing me.

“Spar!” she cried, “we were so worried! Garrison went to Bluegate and Songtown looking for you...”

“Aunt Harriet, listen, I’m not Spar, I’m Toussaint. We got hit with a new curse by one of the Masters, and I ended up with Spar’s body and she got mine. I’m afraid you probably just picked up the curse too; it’s contagious...”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, bewildered. “Slow down.” So I started over, explaining at length.

“So in a few hours I’m going to start getting a headache and then swap bodies with you?”

“Or with somebody else that’s under the curse. I can’t tell who it will be. And then we’ll keeping shuffling around every few hours, for at least three or four days, I expect; how much longer it’s going to last I don’t know.” The headache was worsening, and though it wasn’t so bad I couldn’t keep talking with her, it probably made me a little incoherent.

“So where’s Spar in your body now? Why did you come back to Fleecedale now if you’ve got this contagious curse?”

“Well, at first we went off in the hills to stay in that old hunting lodge until we knew what we’d been cursed with, and see if we could wait it out there, but then —”

Before I could finish the sentence I was in my own body again, in the woods somewhere with someone in Dantas' body.

“I’m Toussaint. Who are you now?” I asked.

“Spar,” he said. “So you’ve been in Fleecedale in my body? What’s going on now?”

“I was working on getting the village under quarantine. I’m pretty sure Dantas has already set the curse loose there. Did he tell you?”

“He told me she’d been in her old house, talking to her husband and son, and then jumped back here in your body. So, should we go on down there now?”

“Let’s wait a bit. If we start swapping with somebody in Fleecedale other than Dantas, we’ll know the curse is loose there and we might as well go there tomorrow morning. Or whoever ends up in these bodies out here should go in... maybe I should write a note for whoever ends up here?”

We returned to the cabin and ate, and I wrote a note, for whatever good it would do — only about a third of the people in Fleecedale were literate. A few hours after sunset we shuffled again, me in Dantas’s body and Dantas, it turned out, in mine.

“Did your son fill you in on what I was doing in Spar’s body there in town?” I asked him. “Getting the quarantine set up?”

“Yes,” he said, miserably. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Sure enough you weren’t,” I said. “Was Beecher or Newton starting to complain of the headache yet?”

He said something in a sheepish whisper that I had to ask him to repeat.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid both of them have got it...” And Aunt Harriet, too, probably; and how many others?

“I was talking to my Aunt Harriet — Spar’s mother — when we swapped last. What all did she tell you? Was Uncle Garrison out of the village when the quarantine started? What about my Pa, Wilberforce Foucault?”

“She didn’t tell me. First she asked me what I was started to say, and I figured out you had been in the middle of saying something when we swapped; and then I explained we had swapped again, and Newton told me we’d better go warn other people. But we just warned a couple more, then went back to our house and let other people spread the word further. Newton was starting to get the headache then.”

We went to bed not long after that. I woke up the next morning in Beecher’s body in his one-room house.

I took stock. I was lying on a pallet on the floor; Newton’s body was lying on another pallet. Spar’s body was lying on the bed in the corner, and both of them seemed to be still asleep. I got up and went out to pee and to wash my face, and when I returned Spar’s body was sitting up, the person wearing it examining herself with interest.

“I’m Toussaint in this body,” I told her, “who are you this morning?”

“I’m your Aunt Harriet,” she said. “Is this headache ever going to go away? And why are all the colors so bright?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The headache seems to get gradually worse for a few hours, then suddenly better for a while when we swap. And the colors always seem to be a little different in each body; I think everybody’s color vision has always been different, we just didn’t have a way to compare until now. Hopefully the curse will only last a few days, and hopefully we’ll all end up in fairly suitable bodies when it’s all over. But I doubt our luck will suddenly turn so good.”

Our conversation woke the person in Newton’s body, who turned out to be Spar. We filled him in on who was who.

“So there are at least six people afflicted by this curse now,” he said. “Maybe more... is there anything we can do to keep everybody in Fleecedale from getting it?”

“Stay inside as much as we can. Hope the people who haven’t got it yet will do the same.”

Aunt Harriet told us that Uncle Garrison, and my Pa, and the other herdsmen and hunters had been turned away at the stockade last night by the quarantine guards. Most of them had said they wouldn’t go as far as Bluegate; they would camp in the pastures and wait to see how the curse affected their wives and children in Fleecedale first.

“If we can keep this from spreading any further,” I said, “it will be bad, but we can survive it. We all know each other and whatever bodies we end up in when the curse has run its course, we can work things out somehow about who’s married to who and who owns what; just about everybody here knows the same few trades. But if this spreads all over, and we start swapping with people from Songtown and Highmarket and even the coastal towns and sailors at sea, everything will fall apart. Most of us will end up in places where we can’t practice the trade we know and we won’t know how to do what needs doing there, and we’ll almost always be surrounded by strangers... we’ll all be easy prey for the Masters; they could take this world back easily then. I’m sure that’s what they wanted when they put this curse on us.”

“We’ll have to keep it in the family, then,” said Aunt Harriet.

We stayed in the house as our headaches got worse and worse. I wanted so much to go see my Ma and my sisters and other relatives, but they might not have the curse yet and I didn’t want to spread it to them. Next swap, I ended up in Aunt Harriet’s body, alone in her house. The body was hungry, so I cut some bread and cheese and ate, staying indoors. When I jumped again, I was one of the boys standing guard at the stockade gate. I introduced myself to the others on sentry duty: my cousin Patrocinio, a boy little older than Spar, and a fourteen year old girl named Isabel Takenaka, who was as distantly related to me as anybody in Fleecedale could be; we shared only one great-grandparent. Neither of them had swapped with anybody yet, but they were both starting to suffer the headache. I had the thirteen year old body of Pedro Takenaka, Isabel’s brother.

A while later two figures approached the stockade from down the valley. Patrocinio shouted out the quarantine warning, but they kept coming.

“We should let them in,” I told the others, “they’re already under the curse.” It was my body and Dantas' that were approaching, though I had no idea who was inhabiting them.

“How do you know?” Isabel asked me.

“That’s my original body there, the younger guy.”

The men got close and told us, “We’re already under the curse. Can we come in?”

“Come on,” I told them. “Who are you now? I’m Toussaint Foucault. My fellow sentries here have the headache, but they aren’t swapping yet.”

It was, it turned out, Newton in my body and Spar in Dantas'. I told them they should go to Aunt Harriet’s house and stay there, since it was empty except for whoever had her body at the moment.