by Daniel Fox
He would have to walk, because all his horses had run away and all his bannermen after them. He might have armies at his beck and call, but not just now.
Just now he was walking less far, perhaps with greater purpose: from there to here, picking his way around the vast rubble crater this paddy had become in its ruin. Dragon Hollow they would call it, she thought, and never dare grow rice in it again.
Were they the ones to decide this new dispensation, then, the men still standing here: Tunghai Wang, the monksmith, the pirate and the torturer? Power resides, she supposed, where people leave it. Ping Wen had left much unspoken-for. She wanted to press her two old men back from it, spirit them away. But all their bearers had run, and she was slow in any case, slow again. What should she do, hurl herself between them and whatever Tunghai Wang meant to offer, whatever he meant to demand? She was too small to matter, a sparrow to mob a hawk.
He stopped to speak to the monksmith. Behind him, here came his general: too fat to run, she thought, watching how he leaned on the shoulder of his boy.
Dandan didn’t want to watch, didn’t want to overhear.
Tien the same, she thought. At least, Tien was moving toward the smoking chaos of the shattered war-machine, not lingering to listen in. There were men hurt over there; they mattered more.
Dandan had been playing nurse awhile now to Tien’s doctor, to men in pain. It was something to do.
She seized Gieh by the shirt and tugged him after.
BROKEN TIMBERS, splintered bamboo spars, torn bindings. A serpent’s nest of ropes all tangled. In among that ruin, bodies too: broken, splintered, torn and tangled.
Fire too, fire everywhere. They were lucky, she supposed—if anyone remotely wanted to call this luck—not to have seen the whole paddy engulfed in that same fury that had brought the dragon down. Or else the dragon had been careful even in her agony, not to risk still more harm to herself.
Her flailing tail had crushed and scattered, even as it spread fire through so much that was flammable or explosive. Looking around—because fear was only common sense, it was the stitching that held her together when she was being brave—Dandan couldn’t see a single projectile left whole and deadly. Powders and oils mingled and burned in streaks and puddles, wood cracked and snapped in heat, smoke wreathed the scene and made her cough but nothing erupted or threatened to erupt.
She didn’t feel safe, no, the opposite of that. Still, she went with Tien into the smoke, among the flames.
Among the bodies.
SOME OF them were at least moving, dragging themselves toward some dream of safety. Some were barely hurt, except perhaps in their heads. More than one was wandering numbly through the devastation, stumble-footed and directionless.
Tien was the doctor. Dandan herself could be most help to those who didn’t quite need doctoring, only someone to guide them in the smoke.
If an inner voice suggested that she was performing the same service for herself, it was very deep down, a moment of recognition rather than thought: here I am, being me again. Doing what I do.
It was a comfort, or it would be, later. Set it aside.
HERE WAS someone who needed other comfort: a young man not noticeably hurt, not moving either. Squatting dangerously close to a pool of flame, not even shifting the tatters of his ripped and blackened clothing from its licking edge.
She said, “Come. Come with me, let me—”
Then the smoke shifted on a breath of air and she could see past him, just that little way she needed: just far enough to show her why he wouldn’t move, why her voice would never draw him, why encroaching fire couldn’t drive him off.
Another man, just as young: lying sprawled on the ground there but not dead, nothing like dead. Hurt, to be sure; and awake, alert, feeling the pain of it. That was a good sign, by all that Dandan knew.
What was not good—not good at all—was the litter of timbers that lay haphazardly across the lower half of his body, thick heavy beams that made a better job than the smoke of hiding whatever damage had been done him.
More than one of those beams was smoking, and there was live fire somewhere underneath.
His friend should have been frantic, should have been heaving at the timber with his bare hands for want of any better tool. And was not, was just crouched there unmoving by the young man’s head. Holding one hand, she saw, in both of his.
That said plenty, more than was needed. Even so, she said, “Gieh—!”
The squatting one shook his head. “Don’t bother. I know how much these beams weigh. And everyone’s run away, who was fit to help.”
“Even so.” This time she said it aloud. “We can at least try. You’ll have to get out of the way.”
And still he didn’t move. “I have tried. It’s hopeless. All you can do is make things worse for him.” By stirring hope in the trapped man’s heart, he meant, perhaps; or else that any effort to shift the beams only helped them settle, to hurt him all the more.
Well. He would hurt more soon enough, when that fire caught better hold around him. She understood his friend’s despair, and wouldn’t buy into it: not yet, not ever. She could be furious with him, but there wasn’t time. Not yet …
At least she could stop him burning up with his friend. Whether he wanted that or not.
She bundled up the hem of her own skirt, and went to beat at the flames that licked toward him—and did at last, at least startle a movement out of him, a sudden hand that snared her wrist like a cuff of iron. This close, seeing through the filth, she realized that she knew him: Mei Feng’s runner, he had been, in and out of the palace all summer long.
“Not,” he said, “unless you want to burn too. I made that,” a jerk of his head toward the flickering oily pool, “I know how it works. Your skirt will be a wick to it, no more.”
“Then if you made it,” she hissed, edging away, “you will know how to kill it, will you not …?”
A shake of his head: he didn’t know, or it wasn’t possible. Or he didn’t care, or he couldn’t think. Any of those.
Unexpectedly, it was Gieh who spoke, behind her: “The dragon knew,” he said.
And then he loomed up beside her, with something in his hand—a long pole with a spike at the end, that might have been a weapon or a tool, she couldn’t tell.
She hitched herself urgently out of the way as he drove the beak of it into the soil, that narrow margin between the young man and the fire. An hour ago this ground had been baked brick-hard; she didn’t think mere iron would have dented it. That was before the dragon crashed to earth. Her simple weight had cracked it and cracked it, the whole terrace, from the natural rock to the retaining wall; her brutal writhing had ground much of it to dust beneath her belly.
Gieh had seemingly no weight at all, all bone and leather, but his wiry strength was inexhaustible. He broke through the soil’s crust and built a hasty rampart to hold the fire back. Then, when Dandan thought he’d dig more clods and scatter them to soak up the oil and smother the flame entirely, he said instead, “Move, both of you. I can’t help unless you move.”
“You can’t—” the young man began, hopeless as before. Gieh ignored him, driving his spike hard into the ground between him and his trapped friend.
And leaned on it, rocked it back and forth, split the crust again; said it again, said, “Move!”—and now at last Dandan at least understood.
And took action on her own account, two hands under the squatting man’s shoulders and dragging him away by main determination.
“It’s no use, it’s no use …! He can’t shift those timbers, not even with a lever, he’ll just—”
“No, he won’t. He’s not trying to shift the timbers. Look.”
The young man dashed tears and smoke out of his eyes, shook the dread out of his head, and looked.
Gieh was digging away instead beneath the trapped man’s body: breaking the earth with relentless effort, the long handle of his pole rising and falling, rising and falling …
/> “Oh.” For one precious, terrible moment the young man was still in Dandan’s grip; then he had wrenched himself free and run to seize a tool of his own, an iron bar. On his knees beside Gieh—and now suddenly careful of the fire behind its dike—he seized his share of the work, slamming iron into earth, wrenching out clods in a storm of dust.
· · ·
BETWEEN THEM, they hollowed out the ground beneath the trapped man and so tugged him free, out from under the grip of what they couldn’t shift. Dandan saw how his jaw clenched as they dragged his legs across the rubble, how he bit down on the scream he would not utter.
Unexpectedly merciful, she stopped them before they had hauled him all the way to the paddy wall. “That’s far enough for now. Gieh, you did really well. Now do better, go and fetch Ai Guo.”
“Ai Guo?”
“Yes. Hurry.”
Meantime the injured man’s friend looked worse than he did, pale and shaking and needing this respite. Needing to kneel, apparently, with his friend’s head in his lap, needing to see nothing else for a while; needing to murmur, “Oh, why is it always you?” which made small sense in a field of catastrophe and drew an answer so private it had to be expressed without words.
Dandan peeled back ruined clothes while they were distracting each other. She looked, she touched, wiped blood aside and decided not to press more deeply, not to test what moved and what would not.
Instead she lifted her head, spoke to the other one, said, “What’s your name? I don’t remember.”
He just looked at her.
She sighed. “All right, then. What’s his name?”
“Shen. He’s called Shen …”
“Shen, can you hear me?”
His eyes glittered in the drifts of smoke, his head nodded fractionally on his friend’s lap. Pain had pushed him away, but not entirely; he was finding his way back. Hand in hand with hope, perhaps, if he would dare it.
“What’s your friend’s name?”
The ghost of a smile. “Chung. He’s called Chung.”
Chung, yes. That was it. “Good, then. My name is Dandan. I am no doctor, but here,” looming in the smoke, shuffling forward between crutch and boy, “here is Ai Guo, who—”
“Who is no doctor either,” the old man said above her, patiently bewildered. “What game is this?”
“No game. Here,” she said, meaning here where I need you, “you are doctor enough. You know exactly what harm a body has taken, who better?”
He grunted, in acceptance of a self-evident truth. Seemed not displeased, but still said, “Where is Tien?”
“Being a doctor, in ways that you cannot. You can at least tell me whether this one needs her wisdom,” which almost certainly meant whether this one is dying, which she thought he probably understood.
All he said was, “You will need to lift him up.” He might have made it a point of pride, I am not accustomed to stoop to my work—but that would only have seemed to be cover for the truth, I am no longer able to stoop to my work, and he was too proud to allow that.
Gieh was willing, Chung could be bullied; between them, they built a hasty scaffold of wood and stone, and hoisted Shen onto it with what care they could achieve. Which was more than they had shown in pulling him free, but not enough, not now that urgency was gone. He hissed, and turned his face away.
Ai Guo took his time, his professional time overlooking the body before him, assessing its hurts. Touching, twisting in ways that she had balked at, bringing degrees of knowledge to the task that she couldn’t approach. Never shy of making Shen flinch or hiss again or cry out loud: satisfied, seemingly, when he did, because that was information.
At last he stepped back and said, “There is nothing here to concern me.”
Chung had been silent so long, he was suddenly boiling, boiling over: “Nothing? What kind of doctor are you? He’s in so much pain …”
“Pain, yes. I am … the kind of doctor who seeks truth in pain,” without so much as a glance down or a gesture to draw attention to his own visible damage or the constant pain he lived with. “Burns hurt, and so do broken bones. Shen has both. But these are simple burns, and simple breaks. I have looked for deeper harm, crushed organs or interior bleeding. I cannot find either. I may be wrong,” though he clearly didn’t think so, he presumably rarely was, “but I believe your friend will mend entirely, with time and care.”
“Meantime,” Dandan said swiftly, for fear that might prove altogether too much for Chung, “pain can be managed. Here,” she still had a lump of poppy in her sleeve, fetched up against her old men’s needs. They might need it yet; they would have to share. She broke a little off and gave it to Chung. “Feed him this.”
“So little?”
“Yes, and less than that. Less at a time. Rub it on your thumb, and let him suck it.” They’d both enjoy that, she guessed, once they had started feeling easy in this new dispensation. Easier. “Give him more and he’ll sleep,” which would be no bad thing but Chung would worry. “Make him comfortable, and yourself too. Ai Guo will help.”
The old man blinked. “I will?”
“Of course. This is your special study. What else would you do here?”
His hand gestured tightly toward the group gathered around Tunghai Wang: where the world presumably was being meted out, where he might have seized his portion, if he could have held it.
He had perhaps not anticipated Dandan. He was in part her portion, and she was not prepared to let him go.
She wouldn’t willingly let anything go, and she was hoping to use all this smoke and fuss to gather around her what was hers, and what ought to be. She thought all those important people would go soon, walk back down to the city, leave everyone else here doing what they could amid the wreckage. It would fall to her anyway, no question, to bring her old men down at a pace that they could manage; she wanted to let everyone else get far ahead, just keep her own people close. There would be turmoil, she thought. It would be important first to keep out of trouble, and then to rebuild amid the chaos: to emerge stronger, better placed, more secure.
She’d forgotten, though, her own people were not hers alone. Or at least, no one else recognized her claim. The old men, the boy Gieh, any of them would have squabbled with it; and then there was Tien.
The whole of Santung would squabble with her over Tien. Here came Li Ton into the smoke now, stiff and stately, looking for the doctor.
“Oh, are you hurting too?” Of course he was hurting, he always hurt. Like Ai Guo, though, he rarely asked for help.
“Not for me. For Tunghai Wang, he wants her.”
“And what, he sent you to fetch her? You who can barely walk?” Disappointment made her snappish. She’d hoped power would just walk away and leave them here, leave them all to her.
“Why not?” the pirate said equably. “This at least I can manage. I can play messenger, so long as there is no hurry. And Ai Guo is over here already, and you had taken our boy too. There was no one left but me.”
That was clearly not true, Tunghai Wang still had an entourage of sorts; or there was the monksmith, or the fisherman, or …
Still. Li Ton it was that came, one of her own; and he came to take it all away from her.
“Gieh,” he said, “now that I’ve found you, run and fetch the doctor.”
“She’s busy,” Dandan asserted, last desperate defense, “she’s being a doctor …”
She was; but Gieh went anyway into the thick of the smoke, and he came back coughing with Tien in tow.
She said, “There are people hurt here, badly hurt …”
“Ping Wen’s men,” Li Ton said, with a shrug. “Eventually, Tunghai Wang will remember that they are his men now—but not yet. Just now, all he remembers or understands is that you and I and Ai Guo know more about the dragon than anyone else in Santung—I have been at pains to impress that upon him, in case his spies had missed it—and that he needs dragonlore more than he needs anything else in Santung. She has made a dragon-sh
aped hole in his head, and he wants us to fill it for him.”
“I’m a doctor,” Tien said—but even she sounded unconvinced, and she couldn’t keep her eyes from the southerly horizon, where the dragon had gone.
“Then you shouldn’t have made yourself an expert in something he values more. The generalissimo has been a soldier all his life, there are few things he values more than a good campaign doctor; and yet here you are, and he will take you away from all your doctoring. Come.”
“No, wait, I can’t”—and yet she was, already moving unhappily in his wake, looking back only to say, “Dandan, you’ll have to look after them up here, until I can arrange—”
Dandan surprised herself perhaps as much as anyone else there, perhaps more. She said, “No. If Tunghai Wang wants Li Ton too, he will need me to come too. If he wants Ai Guo too, he will have to wait; I can’t manage more than one of them at a time down that hill.”
“There’s always Gieh.”
That was Li Ton, and Dandan laughed at him. “Would you trust your pain to that boy? Or Ai Guo’s? Besides, in Tien’s absence, Ai Guo knows more about bodies than anyone else. No,” she said, astonishing everyone, taking charge entirely, “we will leave Ai Guo up here for now. With Chung’s help, he will organize a hospital for you, Tien. Chung, there are all these others you can use,” the walking wounded and the merely shocked, those she had guided herself out of the smoke, who were still milling around or else just sitting and nursing their memories and griefs. “Round them up and make them busy. See the injured as comfortable as they can be, with whatever you can gather,” coats and flags abandoned by the fled. On beds of earth at first, but at least the dragon had broken it up for them. “I will give you the rest of this poppy, here, and you are not to give it all to Shen,” which—said aloud—meant that Shen would refuse even what little Chung might offer him, and so save more for others who might be in greater need. Or not, but the two young men would feel better for it. Ai Guo should probably take some too, and would not. “Tien may have more that she can leave with you,” if she hadn’t used it all already, knowing that Dandan had some to spare. “Ai Guo will use his own knowledge, to help you make them easy. I will go down with Li Ton, and come back with more help. With Mu Gao and a squad of men.” Dandan was forming another plan as she spoke, as all these more important people unaccountably stood and listened and allowed her to do it. It was necessary to be changeable, in these changeable days. “Be as useful as you can, Chung, and as patient as you must. It will take me half the day, but I will be back; and we will make a camp of tents for everyone who can’t be moved, and live up here until they’re better. And you can make fireworks while you wait for Shen to mend, and we will let them off in triumph when he does.” And then—well, by then she would count these young men among her people, these and perhaps more, because that was what she did, she cared for those who needed it and so made them her own. Her outraged heart took seize.
