A Dying cough
A cough.
Was it? A real cough, not just a revoke of slime from his throat, which mocked this paranoia?
Susi lay silent in his bed. He felt his breath and listened. Was always this hard? Or was it just the excitement?
A rush it certainly was. He could feel his heart jumping as he periodically looked under his armpits for any remarks…
There wasn’t anything there. No abscesses, nothing out of ordinary.
Oh my Jesus!
Susi let his breath moderate itself. He sighed hard and relaxed his body. It was a mere cough nothing more. No need to worry, no need to write down anything terminal. He wished for the sleep to come and completely numb his weary thoughts, but everybody knew that a man of such age, falling asleep was not matter of haste.
He sighed again; it was going to be one of those nights again.
He woke up sweating and breathing hard. Oh my Jesus! The sticky feeling run across his upper body and he threw the pelts away, rising up to hold his chest. The heart…it drummed like a madman and if Susi wouldn’t have had lot worse seizures in the past, he could have though this is it, the end…
But it was not. Susi knew that it would pass away; once he would concentrate… it was just excitement and the dream that caused it. Nothing to be afraid of.
But the dream…
Those words…
1399
It was approaching.
Oh my Jesus
Susi lay back again to his bed and to his thoughts. It was approaching. 25 years. Susi knew that he wouldn’t be there to see it. But his children, the Children of Dôn… they would be. Reko II would reign then if God forbid it. But the dream told him otherwise.
Well it didn’t exactly but it was confusing; like a riddle or divination. The king shall speak English by 1399… or else…
And then there was lot of death…Black Death in the dream. Is if the plagues wouldn’t have wrecked the nation so hard already. Or did it mean that if by 1399 there would be English king, the Wrath of God would pass away? The plague was showing already signs of defeat… it had almost passed Denmark, and lots of the coast in the Cornwall tended to have gotten immune.
What did it mean?
Reko was a good son and good king to be. But he spoke Finnish as every other Dôn had done for almost 200 years. How could these haunting thoughts lure him to treason against his own kin?
Susi laid there in the bed. George was a good lad. His grandson… one of them. A ominous little boy who had spend his early years so close to his mother that he barely spoke the tongue of Härmä anymore… but his English was flawless.
Could he be the Dôn in the throne by 1399?
Would he prevent the new plague that was to come?
Or was there?
Was it just a dream?
For the first time Susi had seen it, he had passed it by as silliness caused by stress and dealing with the nation’s affairs during the plague seasons. A second time would have been just memorizing a dramatic of his subconscious, as would have been the third…
…but how many nights there had been now? eight? …or even nine…
Susi had lost the count. And more he dreamed, more lively…or deadly the dream had begun to appear… and as if the original message was fading away, the fear of plague did not. It had begun toil his senses. His sanity…oh Jesus! Save me!
A paranoid fear of the plague catching him and revealing him from the duties to his crown, and to his family.
Reko was a good son; he didn’t fear the realm trembling away once his own time would be up.