Still the points of the spears and the edges of the swords confronted her. Berek’s forces had grown accustomed to fear and death: they may not have been capable of heeding her.
“I’m a healer.” She walked straight at the barricade of warriors. “I intend to help. Either cut me down”- she did not raise her voice- “or let me pass.”
No one answered her. She heard no order given; felt no conscious decision reached. Yet something in her tone or her manner, her strangeness or her steady stride, must have inspired conviction. When she drew near enough to spit herself on the first of the spears, it lifted out of her path. Abruptly several men and women lowered their swords. More spears followed the example of the first. The warriors stared at her with fierce concentration: their eyes held every shade of apprehension and doubt. Nevertheless they parted so that she could walk between them.
For a moment, tears blurred her sight. “Thank you,” she murmured unsteadily, “thank you,” as she moved unhurt into the encampment.
Men and women formed an aisle for her, a gauntlet, all with their weapons held ready-and all motionless in spite of their uneasy tension. Here and there, firelight reflected in their eyes, or on the battered metal of their breastplates. Many of them wore hardened leather caps in lieu of helmets; leather vambraces and other protection. All were variously clad in blood and bandages. As individuals, they ached with weariness and old wounds, entrenched loss and desperation. Together they hurt Linden’s senses like a festering abscess. Yet she caught only hints of hopelessness or despair. Berek’s people were sustained by their deep belief in him. It kept them on their feet.
She loathed war and killing. At times, she did not know how to accept humankind’s readiness for evil. But she was already starting to admire Berek, and she had not yet met him. His spirit preserved his people when every other resource failed. And he was the reason-she was sure of this-that they had refrained from slaying her. She had invoked his name. They strove to prove themselves worthy of him.
Roughly she rubbed away her tears. Without hesitation, she followed the aisle and her raw nerves toward the nearest pavilion.
As she approached the heavy canvas, torn and filthy from too much use, her perceptions of distress accumulated. The naked human suffering ahead of her was worse than any she had faced before.
She had spent years preparing for such crises. Nothing in that tent was more severe than the mangled cost of car wrecks or bad falls; the outcome of drunken brawls and domestic abuse; the vicious ruin of gunshots. Berek’s people were not more severely damaged than Sahah had been, or others of the Ramen, or the Masters who had opposed the Demondim.
But there were so many of them-And they were being given such primitive care-During the last strides of her approach to the pavilion, she felt three of them die. More than a score of them lingered on the absolute edge of death, kept alive only by simple unbending steadfastness; by the strength of their desire not to fail their Lord. Before long, they would slip away, some stupefied by their wounds, others in pure agony. And this was only one tent: there were two more.
Never before had Linden faced bleeding need on this scale: not by several orders of magnitude. The grim frantic hours that she and Julius Berenford had spent in surgery after Covenant’s murder were paltry by comparison.
And her nerves were raw; too raw. She felt every severed limb and broken skull, every pierced abdomen and slashed joint, as if they had been incused on her own flesh. Nevertheless she did not falter. She would not. Confronted with such pain, she would allow nothing to prevent her from doing what she could.
Trust yourself.
As if she had forgotten her own mortality, she thrust the stiff fabric of the opening aside and strode into the tent.
She hardly noticed that no one entered behind her.
The tent was supported by four heavy poles, each more than twice her height. And the interior was illuminated by oil lamps, at least a score of them. Nevertheless she could scarcely descry the far wall. The whole place was full of smoke, a heavy brume so thick and pungent that her eyes watered instantly and she began to cough before she had taken two steps across the dirt floor.
God damn it, she might have shouted, are you trying to suffocate them? Almost at once, however, her senses came into focus, and she saw and smelled and felt that the rank fug arose from burning herbs. It was a febrifuge of some kind, intended to combat fever. In addition, it had a degree of virtue against infection. Beyond question, it hurt the lungs of the wounded. But most of them had grown accustomed to it, or were too weak to cough. And it kept some of them alive.
They lay on the iron ground in long rows, protected from the cold only by thin straw pallets padded with blankets. But the blankets had been fouled by months or seasons of blood and pus and sputum, urine and faeces: they were caked and crusted with disease. Still coughing, Linden discerned pneumonia and dysentery rampant around her, exacerbating the bitter throng of wounds and a host of other illnesses.
Then she understood that the true horror of this war was not that so many people were dying, but rather that so many still clung to life. Death would have been kinder-The men and women who served as Berek’s physicians had wrought miracles against impossible odds.
There were three of them in the tent, two men and a woman: three to care for twenty or thirty times that many wounded and dying. As one of them came toward her, she saw that he wore a thick grey robe nearly as vile as the blankets. A length of rope cinched his waist, and from it hung several pouches of herbs-his only medicines-as well as a short heavy sword and a crude saw which he obviously, too obviously, used for amputations. He trembled with fatigue as he approached, a heavy burden of sleep deprivation. Rheum dulled his gaze, and the weak flat sound of his cough told Linden as clearly as blood work that he had contracted pneumonia.
Nevertheless he did his best to accost her. “Begone,” he wheezed irritably. This is no place for you, stranger, madwoman. I will summon-”
Linden silenced him with a sharp gesture. Before he could protest, she drew flame blooming from her Staff.
She had spent ten years without percipience and Earthpower, restricted to the surface of life. During that time, she had lost much of her familiarity with the Land’s gifts. But in recent days, she had made repeated use of the Staff. Unaware of what would be required of her, she had nonetheless trained her nerves and sharpened her perceptions for this crisis, this multitude of pain. To that extent, at least, she was ready.
Carefully she sent out sheets of yellow fire, immaculate as sunshine, and wrapped them like a cocoon around the physician.
She knew exactly what he needed: she felt it in her own blood and bone. Swift as instinct, she found his tiredness, his illness, his unremitting exposure to infection, and she swept them away.
She barely heard the other two physicians yell in alarm. From their perspective, their comrade must have appeared to blaze like an auto da fe. And she paid no heed to the answering shouts from outside the tent. When warriors burst past the tent flaps behind her, she ignored them. Her concentration admitted no intrusion.
The physician’s heart had time to beat twice or thrice while she worked. Then she released him from fire. The emotional and spiritual toll of his labours she could not heal, but she left him physically whole: staggering with surprise, and exalted by relief and wellness.
At once, Linden turned away and dropped to her knees beside the nearest of the wounded.
This warrior was a woman, and Linden knew that she was not yet dying. She might linger for several days, excruciated by fever and infection. The sword-cut which had split her breastplate and opened her ribs was not necessarily fatal. With cleanliness and rest, it might heal on its own. But her left foot had been amputated above the ankle, and there her real danger lay. Her shin suppurated with infection and anguish. Slivers of bone protruded from the mass of pus and maggots where one of the physicians had attempted to save her life.
She was far from being the most needy warrior here.
She was simply the nearest. For that reason, Linden had chosen her.
The other physicians still called for help. Linden heard quick steps at her back; swords drawn. No one here could comprehend what she was doing. They saw only fire and were afraid. She needed to show them what her actions meant before a blade bit into her back.
Hurrying, she closed her eyes; refined her attention; swathed the wounded woman in Earthpower. With flame, she burned away infection and maggots, cleansed poisons, excised and sealed necrotic tissues, knit together shards of bone. And she caused no pain: the bright efficacy of the Staff was as soothing as Glimmermere’s lacustrine roborant.
Near her, the physician yelled frantically, “Halt!” She felt him leap to intercept the stroke of a sword. “Do not!” His voice became a roar as he found his strength. “Heaven and Earth, are you blind? She has mended me!”
There must have been whetted iron mere inches from her neck; but Linden allowed nothing to interrupt her as she assoiled the fallen woman’s injuries.
When she was done, she quenched the Staff and raised her head.
The rumpled hood of her cloak touched the edge of a sword. “What madness is this?” demanded one of the warriors behind her, a man. “She has set flame to a woman who might have lived, and you wish her spared?”
“Unclose your eyes,” retorted the physician. “Behold what she has done. It is not harm.
“By my life,” he added more softly, in wonder, “I had forgotten that there was once a time when I was not ill.”
The healed woman tried to lift her head from the pallet. “What-?” she asked weakly. “What has become of my pain? Why am I not in pain?”
Daring Berek’s people to cut at her now, Linden braced herself on the Staff and rose to her feet. She felt their astonishment; their reluctance to credit what they saw and heard. They had so little experience of the Land’s true life-They could not imagine its implications.
However, the physician did not leave the warriors to reach their own conclusions. Suddenly resolute, he commanded, “Begone!” as he had tried to command Linden. This lady”- he could hardly find words for his amazement- “will do no hurt. Mayhap she will work great good, if she is not hindered. Depart, that I may beseech her aid.”
Flapping both arms, he gestured in dismissal until the men and women behind Linden complied. Then he turned to her while his fellow healers hastened among the rows toward him.
“My lady,” he began, flustered by healing and hope, “I comprehend naught here. Such fire-It is beyond-
“But”- he seemed to grasp himself roughly with both hands- “I do not require comprehension, and must not delay. Will you grant us further flame? We are badly surpassed. The need is too great to be numbered. Our simples and implements redeem few. Most perish.” The rheum in his eyes had become tears. “I will prostrate myself, if that will sway you-”
He began to sink to his knees.
Still Linden did not falter. The tent had become an emergency room, and she was a surgeon. Grabbing quickly at the man’s arm, she said, “Of course I’ll help. That’s why I’m here. But I need you to do triage for me.” When he frowned at the unfamiliar word, she explained. “I should treat the worst cases first, but I don’t know who they are. You’ll have to tell me.” Guide me. The sheer scale of the suffering around her confused her perceptions. “And get me some drinking water.”
She would need more than the Staff could provide to sustain her during the ordeal ahead.
The man’s mouth formed the word “cases” in silent confusion. Nevertheless he grasped her meaning. “Then commence with the fifth in this row,” he replied, nodding to Linden’s left. He seemed ready to obey her smallest word. “Palla and Jevin will direct you further.” Plainly he meant his fellow physicians. “I am Vertorn. I will command wine from the guards to refresh you.”
Good enough, Linden thought. She had to get to work. Pausing only to say, “I’m Linden. Don’t be afraid of anything you see,” she strode toward the pallet Vertorn had suggested.
When she saw how badly the man there had been slashed and pierced, she might have quailed, overwhelmed by the scale of her dilemma. He looked like he had been hung up like a dummy and used for weapons practice. His life was little more than a wisp of breath in the back of his throat. With her Staff, she had the capacity to fill the entire tent with vivifying flame. The iron-shod wood was constrained only by her own limitations. But she was too human to function in that way. She had to see what she strove to heal; needed to focus her attention on each individual wound and illness. In her hands, an undefined broadside of Earthpower might do more harm than good. She could only struggle to save one patient at a time, treat one need at a time, as she had always done.
And they were so many-
But during the single heartbeat when her courage might have broken, she felt a woman immediately behind her slip into death. After that, she did not hesitate. Unfurling the Staffs severe and kindly puissance like an oriflamme, she began her chosen task.
She had called herself a healer. Now she set about justifying her name.
She did not know how long she laboured; could not count the men and women whom she retrieved from the ruins of war. When smoke and strain blurred her vision, the woman, Palla, led her by the hand while the man, Jevin, called out the location of her next patient. Whenever Vertorn thrust a flagon into her grasp, she gulped down a few swallows of whatever it contained. Everything else was a nightmare succession of rent flesh, shattered bone, rampant infection, and multiplied agony.
People were reduced to this by battle and pain: they became nothing more than the sum of their sufferings. And like them, she shrank. Long after she had passed the conscious borders of her endurance, and had become mere scraps of awareness, fragments composed almost exclusively of health-sense and Earthpower-blinded by tears, deaf to sobbing and wails, nearly insensate-she continued from hurt to hurt, and did not heed the cost. That she could not save them all, just one tent of three, meant nothing to her. Only the wound immediately in front of her held any significance: the mortifying infection; the instance of pleurisy, or pneumonia, or scabies, or inanition; the mute or whimpering protest of savaged flesh.
Dimly she felt in Pallas touch, heard in Jevin’s voice, that their ailments were no less than Vertorn’s had been. But she had nothing to spare for them. And she neglected to draw on the Staff for her own needs. She had grown unreal to herself; had become mere percipience and flame. A healer who collapsed from exhaustion could treat no one. But she trusted the steady exertion of so much Earthpower to protect her from prostration.
Then, however, she finished tending a man whose abdomen had been savagely lacerated-and Jevin did not call her to a new location. Nor did Palla draw her along the rows.
Instead a voice that may have been Vertorn’s addressed her.
“My lady?” he said tentatively. “My lady Linden. You must desist. You must restore yourself. Lord Berek has come. He requires speech with you.”
When Linden did not respond, the physician reached through flame to slap her cheek lightly. “My lady, hear me. It is Lord Berek who desires to speak with you.”
Linden drew a shuddering breath. Unsteadily she released the Staffs power; let it fall away. Then she found herself hanging between Palla and Jevin while they struggled to uphold her. Blinking at the smoke in her eyes, the blood, the lingering sight of wounds, she saw Vertorn offer a flagon to her lips.
“Drink,” he commanded, peremptory with trepidation. The wine is rank, but I have included herbs to nourish you. You must be restored. It is imperative.”
Dully she accepted a few swallows from the flagon. The wine had an acrid taste, raw and biting, but it gave a small measure of energy to her overstrained nerves and muscles.
Lord Berek-
There was something that Vertorn wanted her to understand.
Lord Berek has come.
She tried to say, Let him wait. This is more important. But she was not strong enough. And Ver
torn’s interruption forced her to recognise that she could not refuse him. She had only reduced the suffering in the tent; the argute throb of infection and fever; the predatory crouch of death. She would not be able to end it alone.
She needed help-
The thought that Berek wished to speak with her seemed inconsequential; unworthy of regard. But she had to speak to him.
Now she clasped the Staff hungrily, almost begging for its beneficence. Without its nourishment, she would hardly be able to walk. The plight of the wounded required more from her.
When she had imposed a degree of Earthpower on her depleted nerves, her worn heart, she murmured hoarsely. “You’ll have to lead me. I can’t see very well.”
There was too much smoke in the air. And the outcome of sword-cuts and disease was more vivid to her than mere rows of rancid pallets or insignificant tent poles.
Jevin and Palla continued to support her. While she moved-slowly, slowly, feeble as an old woman-she sent some of the Staff’s sovereign healing, as much as she could muster, through herself into the physicians. Faintly she gave them a little Earthpower, a small portion of health. Like Vertorn, they were essential: they would have to care for the fallen when she was gone.
In spite of the smoke, she saw her task clearly. It was too much for her. Somehow she would have to win Berek’s aid.
She must have been closer to the opening of the tent than she realised. When Vertorn stepped aside, bowing his deference, she beheld Berek Halfhand for the first time.
Involuntarily she stopped; stared. She had not expected to encounter a man who seemed more compelling, more crucial, than the injuries and deaths of his warriors.
There was Earthpower in him, that was obvious: as potent as Anele’s inheritance, but closer to the surface, more readily accessible. However, his numinous energy was not what caused him to stand out from his escort of warriors as if he were somehow more real than they, more significant and substantial.
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