To Conquer Chaos by John Brunner

in the dreadful minutes that followed realisation of failure, he found himself thinking: it might have come off, but for this damned green plague !
    “Tell nobody else!” It was easy to say, and impossible to achieve. Within twenty-four hours it had been whispered through the camp: Duke Paul is sick of the mould which killed Ampier !
    The medics did their best—shaving the infected area, burning the infected blanket, setting the men to kill flies with swats and sprays—and for a while Yanderman had expected a false alarm. After all, as Duke Paul himself argued, Ampier had been a sick man, badly wounded, weakened by long and free bleeding. A bull of a man like himself would toss off the infection easily.
    Not true.
    Shaving and antiseptics, first to be tried, failed first. Up till then the Duke had easily been able to disguise his condition—his hair and beard were so dense and matted he could simply comb over the shaven area to hide it. Then the fresh outbreaks rendered that impossible; there had to be bandages, and the staff officers had to know the minimum fact that the Duke was being attended by the medics.
    All the strong liquids, all the curative powders, all the ointments, were tried in turn. They slowed the mould. For a night Yanderman would sleep peacefully, thinking the trouble was over because all day the Duke’s head had been free of the creeping evil.
    But in the morning, a dozen more patches of the stuff.
    They tried, at last, the desperate expedient of cauterisation, burning away the skin with hot irons while the Duke sat in his great chair, impassive except that his knuckles showed very white on his clenched fists. It was while the cauterisation was actually proceeding that they discovered the mould on the whites of his eyes …
    Even then Duke Paul would not admit defeat. He still addressed his officers as though his plans were to go ahead; he still disputed with the heartsick Yanderman about the likelihood of people surviving within the barrenland.
    Meantime, the news spread as the green mould spread—unstoppably, every advance reflecting a weakening of the infected body. In this case it was the entire army. Granny Jassy was plagued with requests for charms against sickness. Under their breaths at first, then openly, men voiced the opinion that this disease had been visited on the Duke because he planned to invade the barrenland.
    If, at that point, the Duke had been able to go out and speak to his men as he would speak before a battle, fill them with the excitement and crazy courage he alone could inspire, the situation could have been saved. But he could not. He was in his tent, alone but for attendant medics and the ever-present secretary Kesford, his shaven, burned head turning into a nauseating mass of green mould.
    It was just after midnight when a white-faced soldier called the sleepless Yanderman from bed to see the Duke at once.
    As he ducked under the door-flap he could not repress a gasp of dismay. The disease had progressed with unbelievable rapidity in the last few hours.
    The Duke caught the sound and gave a rasping wheeze which might have been meant for a chuckle. “I guess I look pretty repulsive by now, Yan!” he whispered. “That’s the only consolation—I can’t see myself in a mirror.”
    Indeed, from under his brows to his cheekbones the orbits of his eyes were now unrelieved masses of the green mould.
    “I shall die tonight, Yan,” he added abruptly, in a tone more like his normal voice. “I know. Already it’s at the surface of my brain—I can feel it, as though mice were gnawing at me.”
    Yanderman tried to say something reassuring, but the Duke cut him short.
    “I know, ” he repeated. “That’s why I sent for you. I may only have minutes before my self-control fails me, and when that happens, the medics have my orders to act. I don’t know what it will be like when the final stage comes, but I—I find that I, Paul of Esberg, who have faced hell, cannot face