Accidental War Mage

As I passed by the acolyte and Fyodor, I was suddenly reminded that with us setting camp for an extra day, a serious latrine ditch was a necessity. The wind must have blown in from the wrong direction at that particular moment. Thus reminded of my responsibilities, I roamed around the encampment that had been set up in my absence, checking the depth of the latrine ditch and looking for other problems.

Partway through my circuit, I ran into Vitold. I gave him the rock and the head-sized box whose lock I had smashed open, leaving him with instructions to fix or replace the lock and put the rock in the box. When he asked me what the rock was for, I shrugged, then relayed the old woman’s instructions (namely, telling him that it wasn’t particularly important but she wanted me to haul it around for her, at least for a little while). He suggested that I bury the rock in a hole outside of camp, as it was probably something that would bring bad luck; I chided him for his superstition and told him that I would keep my promise to the little old lady.

What I intended as a brief stop at the mess tent turned into an impromptu officer’s meeting, which was not brief. With the scouts in fairly poor condition and both Quentin and Katya out of action, the patrol schedule was more or less completely wrecked, and this is when I learned that each of the captains thought Quentin and the scouts were unofficially their direct subordinates in the chain of command. All of them had been giving him orders on a regular basis and were annoyed that he hadn’t been especially good at fulfilling them all promptly.

I had, I realized, set up this situation when I had drawn up our table of organization and undercut the then-absent Katya by telling each of the other three captains I expected Lieutenant Gavreau to work with them closely. I delegated responsibility for putting together patrol teams temporarily to the infantry captain and resolved to sort out the situation more clearly later, once it was clear that I still had surviving cavalry officers of a rank higher than banneret.

Thus reminded of Katya’s mortality, I made an executive decision to cut the meeting short and stalked off in a foul mood.

Leaving the mess tent, I passed the artillery lieutenant and the acolyte yet again. The acolyte was walking a little oddly and was wearing Fyodor’s parade formal pants in place of the skirt and leggings she had been wearing earlier. Her hair was damp. Why would a young woman be walking oddly while clinging to a man’s arm and wearing a pair of his pants, very shortly after the two of them had gone off together somewhere private? The answer was fairly obvious, although I didn’t see how the damp hair connected to the rest of it.

If their fraternization caused problems, I would deal with them later, I told myself. Or, better yet, the infantry captain would deal with them, first, and I would handle any leftovers that got kicked further up the chain of command. I returned to the infirmary tent.

The cavalry lieutenant was awake, and complaining to the surgeon; a positive sign, really, even if Quentin’s eventual recovery might lead to further drama.

The surgeon looked over at me when I walked in, then looked away, biting his lip. Katya lay motionless on her cot, not stirring as I approached. Her eyes were still closed, though her face had relaxed, and she looked peaceful. When I felt her forehead, it was no longer feverishly hot. She didn’t respond to my touch; just lay there, as still as a wooden doll. The conversation between the lieutenant and the surgeon ended, and the surgeon walked over to me, wringing his hands nervously.

The surgeon spent a little while hemming and hawing before getting to the point. Evidently, having me looming around made him nervous. He repeated his prognosis from earlier, which is to say he expected Katya to die from infection; and suggested, in fact, that this had already happened. She hadn’t groaned or writhed around since I’d left, and for someone in as much pain as she probably was, and as fevered as she had been, that was unbelievable.

If her forehead was warm and not hot, well, it had to become merely warm at some point as her body cooled from burning hot to the temperature of a corpse, he told me. Once the infection passes into the bloodstream and into a burning fever such as the one he had observed, a patient is in for a long period of suffering, he added, saying that she had grown too quiet too quickly for it to be anything but her final point of expiration. His mulish certainty was tempered only by his evident nervousness.

I didn’t believe him and told him as much. He flinched and begged me not to kill him, and told me he’d done as good a job with the amputation as possible. I told him that I wasn’t going to kill him. He didn’t seem to believe me at first, and after a little while I realized that he was drunk, the smell of strong drink on his breath, his coordination impaired, and his sense of proportion distorted.

The profession of sawbones tends to be one surrounded by liquor; used as a disinfectant and anesthetic, surgeons tend to be alcoholics. One of the reasons the surgeon I was talking to was better than most, at least better than the Ruthenian surgeon we’d had to rely on before impressing the mercenaries into our unit, was that he had the sense not to anesthetize himself before performing surgery. When he’d amputated the ragged end of Katya’s leg, he’d been sober.

With no surgeries left to perform, just the task of waiting to see if his patients lived or died, he had turned to the bottle to try to ease his nerves. I considered pulling out my knife to prove my point but then realized he might misinterpret my drawing of a blade in his nervous state. Another reflective surface would be a better choice. I went over to the cavalry lieutenant, borrowed the small hand-sized mirror he kept with him for use in signaling, and held it in front of Katya’s lips. After a few seconds, it fogged with her breath, and I showed the surgeon.

He felt her forehead. Yes, the fever was gone. After a little bit of fumbling, he found her pulse, which seemed to him to be in a normal range. He pronounced it a miracle, asking what sort of medication she might have been given. Of course, she’d had nothing of the sort, simply getting down a little breakfast and drinking the tea the little old lady had pressed upon her, so I simply told him to keep his voice down so as not to disturb Katya’s rest.

He told me that the infirmary wouldn’t be the best place for her in that case, being that his other patients were at times quite noisy. I could see that my staying around the infirmary unsettled him, so I didn’t press the point. Some people work best when not constantly supervised.

I went to Captain Rimehammer to arrange for a private tent to be set up for Katya; and then went back to the infirmary tent and carried Katya out on her cot, careful not to jostle her awake. Arriving at the tent, I found that there was already one cot set up inside; so I simply set the new one next to the old one, shut the tent, and lay down next to Katya on the other cot. I, too, could use some rest, I realized. She stirred, rolling towards me and reaching for me with her good arm, and then flinching back when that brought her weight on her now-armless shoulder. I reached over her and took hold of her hand in mine, then pulled a blanket over the two of us and went to sleep.

Katya woke me up several hours later, sprawled horizontally across both cots, her head in my lap. I think she was reassuring herself that I was still there; still whole, even if she wasn’t; and that I still loved her. I propped myself up on an elbow and stroked her hair.

“Feeling a little better now?” I asked, my breath hitching involuntarily.

“Mmm-hm,” she hummed in reply.

“I love you,” I told her, running my hand down from the crown of her head to the top of her thigh, stopping well short of the bandages that marked its end. I tried to instill reassurance into my hand as I slowly continued to stroke her. She was warm, but not fevered. Her eyes were twinkling, and she seemed in surprisingly good humor for someone who had been just short of delirious just the morning before and so tired that she had fallen asleep immediately after drinking a freshly brewed cup of tea.

“Do you feel well enough to go get lunch? A little fresh air? Not that I’m not enjoying your company, but healing is hard work, and you barely picked at breakfast. I think you might be hungry,” I said. The angle and intensity of the sunlight beating down on the tent suggested it was closer to dinnertime than lunchtime.

“Mmm-hm.” She wiggled her derriere suggestively, then froze in sudden pain when the motion pushed the stump of her thigh against the hard edge in the middle of the two cots I’d pulled together.

“After you’ve had more time to heal,” I promised. “Not that you aren’t tempting me severely at the moment.”

I gently pulled her head out of my lap and carefully unwrapped the bandages around her stump to inspect the progress of her healing. Once we were both fully dressed and I had changed Katya’s bandages for clean ones, we hobbled down to the mess tent. With Katya’s one good arm wrapped around me, we soon reached a good three-legged rhythm; still, I was glad when Vitold scurried over with a crutch for Katya.

We were too early for dinner; the cooks hadn’t quite started making it, in fact, and the mess tent was only still set up because we were spending the day at rest. Vitold, however, scrounged up a cold luncheon for us and started a pot of stew cooking, citing the privileges of rank. He seemed exuberant, cheerful about something for some reason.

Then Ehrhart peered into the mess tent, looking around for a quick moment before cautiously edging away. Strange. Katya and I nibbled our way cautiously through cold sandwiches. The stew was starting to smell good when someone else walked into the mess tent. Lieutenant Fyodor Kransky, looking formal and awkward, and a well-dressed woman hanging onto his arm. I looked at her again and blinked, but she didn’t become more familiar.

I had never seen her before in my life.