The moons were yellow. We no longer found this unusual, for they had been this way for many months, their pale light filtered through the haze of smoke. There was always smoke now – the funeral pyres were stacked high all along the street, marking the spots where merchant stalls used to stand selling spiced meats and dried fruit and sweet breads. But the smell of roasted meat and cloves had been replaced with the sickly scent of disease and burning flesh and human hair.

The Cerenin women knelt by the pyres praying and wailing and throwing their hands up to the sky. They could no longer see. It was better for them, I think, not to know whose bodies they knelt before. The prayers were the same anyway, whether for old man or child.

The sickness had swept through town without discrimination. Some of us escaped it altogether and we did not know why. Perhaps it was the spark of rage that had lived in us since birth, a spark that had grown as large and hot as the towers of burning bodies. It was a useless, futile anger, the kind that turned back upon itself and gnawed at you because it had no place else to go. We never considered vengeance. We knew it was impossible, mostly because we did not know where to direct it. So those of us who were alive continued living, and those who were not were burned, and the suns rose in the morning and the moons at night.