Paolo unloaded the ships that came into Genoa in October of 1347, and he remembered, later, that the gulls would not land on the masts.
He noticed it on the third galley, the one that came in low and slow with half its oars out of sync. The gulls circled but did not settle. They stayed in the air, screaming, and when the ship tied up at the quay they moved away entirely. Paolo watched them go and thought nothing of it, because gulls were erratic and the work was waiting.
The galley was Genoese, home port, but it had come from Caffa on the Black Sea. The crew was thin. Seventeen men visible on deck when there should have been forty. The captain stood at the rail but did not call orders. He just stood there, looking at the dock the way a man looks at something he is not sure is real.
Paolo's foreman, Matteo, spat over the side of the quay and waved the crew forward. "Tie it properly and start unloading. We've got two more behind this one and the day's half gone already."
Paolo and the other men moved. Rope work first, securing the galley to the stone cleats, then the gangplank down and the first crates brought up from the hold. Spices, probably. Silk. Tin. The eastern trade ran through Caffa and Caffa's goods paid for half the city's bread.
The first crate came up and Paolo took one end. His partner, Luca, took the other. It was heavier than it looked. Luca grunted and shifted his grip. "What did they pack in this, stones?"
"Feels like tin," Paolo said. They carried it to the cart and set it down. Luca rubbed his hands on his tunic and frowned.
"Smells bad."
Paolo had smelled it too. Not rot, not quite. Something else. Something close and sour, like air that had been shut in a room too long with no windows. He said nothing because there was nothing useful to say and the next crate was already coming up.
They worked for two hours. The hold was half-empty when one of the crew came down from the deck and collapsed at the base of the gangplank. He did not trip. He did not stumble. He simply folded where he stood, knees first, then sideways onto the stone. His face was gray. There were dark patches on his neck.
Matteo walked over and crouched beside him. He touched the man's shoulder, then pulled his hand back quickly. "He's burning."
"Get him to the physician," someone said.
"Get him off the dock," someone else said.
The man on the ground tried to say something. His mouth moved but no sound came out. Then his eyes rolled back and he stopped moving entirely.
Matteo stood up slowly. He looked at the galley, at the crew still on deck, at the men on the quay. "Finish unloading," he said. "Quickly."
They finished. Two more crew members came down from the ship before they were done. One of them made it as far as the cart before he sat down hard and did not get up. The other stayed on deck, leaning against the rail, his head hanging forward. No one touched him.
When the last crate was on the cart, Matteo told them to go home. It was two hours before the normal end of the shift. No one argued.
Paolo walked through the city with Luca. Neither of them spoke. The streets were full of the usual afternoon crowd - merchants, priests, children running between the market stalls, a man selling oil from a cart. Everything looked the way it always looked. Everything smelled the way it always smelled. Bread baking somewhere. Fish from the harbor. Sewage in the gutters.
At the corner near the cathedral, Luca stopped. "Do you think it's plague?"
Paolo did not know what plague looked like. He had heard of it the way he had heard of floods and earthquakes and wars in distant places. Things that happened to other people in other cities. "I don't know," he said.
"I heard it was in Messina last month," Luca said. "A ship came in from the east and half the crew was dead before they docked. They burned the ship. They burned the cargo. They burned the bodies."
"Then they should burn this one too."
"They won't. It's Genoese. The merchants won't allow it."
Paolo said nothing because Luca was right. The merchants would not allow it. The cargo was worth more than the crew, and the crew was already dying, so there was nothing left to protect.
He went home. His wife, Caterina, was at the table with their daughter, Alessia, who was four and singing something half-remembered from the street. Caterina looked up when Paolo came in. "You're early."
"They sent us home."
"Why?"
Paolo sat down. He did not know how to explain the gulls or the smell or the man who had collapsed at the base of the gangplank. "The crew from one of the ships was sick. Matteo thought it was safer to finish quickly."
Caterina's hands stopped moving. "What kind of sick?"
"I don't know. Fever. They couldn't stand."
Caterina looked at Alessia, then back at Paolo. "Did you touch them?"
"No. I unloaded cargo. That's all."
"What about the cargo?"
"I carried crates. Same as always."
Caterina stood up and walked to the basin. She poured water from the jug and brought it to the table. "Wash your hands."
Paolo washed his hands. Then he washed them again because Caterina was still standing there, watching.
That night, two more ships came in from the east. Paolo did not see them. He heard about them the next morning from Matteo, who said they had been sent to the outer quay because the harbormaster did not want them near the main docks. The crews were worse than the first galley. Most of them were already dead. The ones still alive were not expected to last the day.
"Are we unloading them?" Paolo asked.
Matteo shook his head. "The city council is meeting. They're deciding what to do."
The council met for three days. During that time, no one unloaded the ships at the outer quay. The crews stayed on board. The cargo stayed in the holds. On the fourth day, the council announced that the ships would be burned. The cargo would be destroyed. The crews would be buried outside the city walls.
By then it was too late.
The first cases appeared in the tenements near the docks. Fever, chills, swellings in the neck and groin. Some people died in two days. Others lasted a week. A few recovered, though no one could explain why. The physicians came and looked and left. They had no treatment. They had no explanation. They said it was bad air. They said it was divine punishment. They said it was the alignment of the planets. None of it helped.
Matteo died in the second week. Paolo heard about it from Luca, who had heard it from another man on the docks. Matteo had developed the fever on a Tuesday and was dead by Thursday. His wife and two sons followed within the week.
Luca stopped coming to work after that. Paolo did not blame him. Half the dock workers were gone. The ones who remained moved through the day with a careful distance between them, as though proximity itself was dangerous. No one spoke more than necessary. No one touched cargo without gloves. No one stayed longer than the minimum shift required.
The carts stopped coming to collect the goods. The warehouses filled and then stayed full. The ships stopped arriving. By November, the docks were nearly empty.
Paolo kept working because he did not know what else to do. Caterina said they should leave the city. Go north, to the mountains, to her brother's farm near Alessandria. "There's nothing for us here," she said. "If we stay, we'll die."
"If we leave, we might carry it with us," Paolo said.
"We might. But if we stay, we'll definitely die. Look around. Look at the streets. How many people do you see who were here last month?"
Paolo looked. She was right. The streets were quieter. The market stalls were half-empty. The cathedral was full every day, but the crowds that came were different from before. They came with fear in their faces, praying for something they did not expect to receive.
In December, Paolo stopped going to the docks. There was no work. The quays were abandoned. The ships that had not burned sat tied to the cleats, empty and silent. The gulls had not returned.
He took what money they had saved—sixteen soldi and a handful of smaller coins—and bought a cart and a mule. Caterina packed what they could carry: blankets, tools, a sack of flour, a jug of oil. Alessia rode in the back, wrapped in a wool cloak, singing the same half-remembered song she had been singing in October.
They left the city on a cold morning in late December. The gates were open but there were no guards. The guards had either died or left. Paolo did not look back as they passed through. Caterina did. She looked for a long time, then turned forward and did not look again.
They reached Alessandria in four days. Caterina's brother let them stay in the barn. He did not let them in the house. He stood in the doorway and said, "You can stay until spring. After that, I don't know."
Paolo thanked him. They slept in the barn. It was cold but it was dry and the mule kept them company. Alessia did not complain. She sang her song and played with straw and fell asleep each night curled against Caterina.
In the spring, Caterina's brother came to the barn and told them the city was still dying. The plague had not stopped. It had spread north, south, east. Whole towns were empty. Whole regions had been abandoned. The dead were piled in the streets because there was no one left to bury them.
"You can stay," Caterina's brother said. "Work the fields. There's enough land for another family."
Paolo looked at Caterina. She looked at Alessia. Then she looked at Paolo and nodded.
They stayed.
Years later, Paolo would try to explain to Alessia what it had been like in October when the ships came in. She was older then, nearly ten, and she asked questions the way children do when they are trying to understand something that happened before they could remember it.
"Did you know?" she asked. "When you unloaded the crates, did you know what was in them?"
"I didn't know anything," Paolo said. "I knew the crew was sick. I knew something felt wrong. But I didn't know what it was. No one did."
"But you left."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Paolo thought about that. He thought about the gulls that would not land on the masts. He thought about the smell of the cargo, close and sour. He thought about Matteo and Luca and the men who had stayed because they did not know where else to go.
"Because your mother told me to," he said.
Alessia frowned. "That's not a reason."
"It's the only reason I have."
She thought about that for a moment. Then she nodded, the way children do when they have decided an answer is acceptable even if they do not fully understand it.
Paolo did not go back to Genoa. He heard, later, that the docks had reopened. The ships had returned. The trade had resumed. The city had survived, though it was smaller than before. Quieter. Different.
He stayed in the fields. He worked the land with Caterina's brother. He raised Alessia and, later, two more children. He grew old in the mountains, far from the sea, and he was grateful for it.
He never forgot the October ships. He never forgot the gulls that would not land. And when he died, many years later, his last thought was not of the work or the fields or the family he had built. It was of the docks in the early morning, empty and silent, and the ships tied to the cleats with no one left to unload them.