by P. J. Fox
She wouldn’t think about Kisten. She couldn’t.
“Aria, you need to rest.”
She turned to regard the haggard, drawn face of their only surgeon. Doctor Shah, like herself, was covered in blood and he, like herself, hadn’t slept for more than a brief handful of minutes. Aria had fallen asleep after Zerus died, but she hadn’t slept since then. “Are you resting?” she asked.
“No,” he said apologetically.
“Then I don’t need to, either,” she told him. And then, “we’re out of iodine.”
He let out a string of imaginative curses that she wouldn’t have thought a doctor of his age and erudition knew. She, meanwhile, gazed dazedly about the hall and tried to make sense of what she was seeing—of what disaster had befallen her life, and all their lives.
The tessellated tile floor was covered with men in every pose. Some were half-dressed. Many were seriously wounded. Most were alive. Those able to help had moved the bodies out of view as much as possible, as seeing them was demoralizing to the remaining patients. They couldn’t bring the bodies outside, however, without risking death. Getting caught in a hail of bullets, as Zerus had. Or worse.
A few of the men talked together in low tones. Some moaned quietly, and some stared off into the distance. This last group were as still as statues.
Aria sat down and began wrapping bandages.
Gradually she became aware of the silence. She wondered what it meant. Had the rebels finally overrun the compound, and now they’d all be executed? She brushed the hair back from her face, leaving a swipe of red on her cheek. She envied Aros, not because Aros was asleep but because sleep brought oblivion. She didn’t want to think—didn’t want to be alive, if it meant feeling this pain.
Zerus was lying where she’d left him, his eyes half closed and glazing. As hard as she’d tried, she couldn’t be sorry that he was dead. And it was lucky he was, because after finding out about Kisten she would have throttled the old bastard herself. In three decades, never once had Zerus found it in his heart to appreciate his own grandchild. Or, for that matter, his own daughter. He’d died thinking about how she’d wronged him.
Miserable, insufferable man.
Aria hadn’t met her in-laws, but she liked them. Unlike her own parents, Rajesh and Mahalia felt no compulsion to, as Aria’s mother would put it, fit in. Aria didn’t know if Frank and Georgia Hahn had ever been in love; they certainly weren’t by the time Aria came along. Georgia complained and Frank isolated himself, sinking deeper and deeper into his own world to avoid her. Aria’s, what Georgia described as a happy home had been as traditional as apple pie and everyone in it had been miserable. Rajesh, for all his extramarital affairs and sociopathic behavior, still worshipped the ground that Mahalia walked on as much as he had when she was seventeen. If not more.
She tore another strip off of the muslin petticoat in front of her and began rolling it into another bandage. The various household residents and staff had donated this, and other miscellaneous clothing to the cause along with whatever sundries they could lay their hands on.
The reason that Kisten had so much trouble with his father, Aria thought, was that they were too much alike. She smiled slightly, forgetting for a moment that her life was over. A sob escaped her. She wanted him to come back. She tried to lose herself in her work, but she couldn’t. All she kept thinking was that she wanted him to come back. The words repeated themselves like a mantra, eventually breaking apart into nonsense syllables.
There were so many things she had to tell him, so many things they still had to do. She’d only known him a few months! Most people got longer to decide how they felt, God damn it!
What they felt and what they wanted! For themselves, never mind from someone else! But she’d been thrust into a situation she didn’t understand, in a culture she didn’t understand and, God damn it, she’d thought she’d have more time. Would she even have realized how she felt, so quickly, if she hadn’t been faced with losing him? Her shoulders shook with another sob that she tried and failed to suppress. It wasn’t fair! And here she was, falling apart, when so many people needed her….
She wanted him back so badly that she started imagining his voice.
She fumbled a bandage, and it rolled apart again. She bit back one of what Kisten referred to as her childish curses. She knew she was hallucinating, and knew too that the condition had been brought on by exhaustion. More than once over the past few hours, she’d thought she saw Zerus move. She’d be focusing on whatever she was doing and, out of the corner of her eye, she’d swear he’d just twitched. But when she whirled around, to face him, her heart in her mouth, he was just where she’d left him.
For awhile, in her exhaustion, she’d entertained the odd fancy of zombies rising from the grave….
She heard the voice again. The voice of the man who wasn’t there. Zerus smelled. Maybe he’d decay before he could mount his undead reign of terror. That would be nice. He was certainly being lazy enough about getting going.
Aria brushed another tendril of hair back from her face and supposed that grief had driven her insane.
The notion of Zerus rising from the dead had begun to seem oddly reasonable and that voice didn’t even sound like Kisten’s. Kisten affected an upper crust drawl of singularly minimal character and while he undoubtedly sounded quite normal to himself, those not used to dealing with his general group frequently had no idea what the blazes he was on about. With his clipped phrases and lengthened vowels, off came out awf, lost came out lawst, and house was actually a sound unpronounceable to her that more or less rhymed with mice. He prefaced words like what and when with an almost sharp whistling “h”—hwhat and hwhen. When she made fun of him for it, he just stared at her.
But now he—this figment of her overwrought imagination—was shouting. Why would he be shouting? She’d never heard him shout, before. He was maddeningly calm, even when clearly furious.
“Where is she, man?”
“Commander, you have to prepare yourself, your—”
“Tell me where she is,” he threatened, “or so God help me, I’ll rip your heart out of your chest with my bare hands and eat it.”
“—grandfather is dead,” the other man finished lamely.
“Good riddance!” bellowed Kisten.
Aria forced herself to look up. And there he was. Soot-blackened and covered in blood, but alive.
FORTY-ONE
She’d expected him to disappear as soon as she acknowledged him, to dissolve into the vapor from which he’d been drawn at her mind’s insistent bidding. But even though he hadn’t, he still didn’t seem real. The only reason she credited his existence at all was that other people seemed to see him, too. She rose shakily to her feet, feeling the full weight of her exhaustion. Their eyes met, and they stared at each other across the hall for what seemed like a very long time. She took a stumbling step forward, and suddenly she was in his arms.
He held her so tightly he almost crushed the life out of her and she clung to him, unable to form any coherent thoughts at all. He smelled of blood and sweat and cordite and engine grease. Tears ran freely down her cheeks, cutting tracks in the blood and grime on her own face, but she didn’t notice. He was alive. Nothing else mattered.
“Thank God you’re alright,” he said, echoing her own thoughts.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, her voice breaking on another sob.
“No such luck,” he said grimly.
“How can you say that?” she cried, and then burst into tears in earnest.
He stroked her hair and held her, and neither of them spoke as, around them, the hall filled with people. Uniformed men who, although grim-faced and purposeful in their movements, looked quite a bit less the worse for wear than either their governor or Aria’s patients. Someone started barking orders, taking charge of the situation, and Aria felt a burden she hadn’t even known she’d been carrying fall from her shoulders. She tried to step back and get a good look at
her husband, but she almost fell over.
He caught her, or she would have. “You need to sit down,” he told her.
Her eyes widened. She hadn’t noticed before, because she’d been too caught up in the wondrous realization that he was alive, but his chest and stomach were wrapped in bandages. His shirt was a mess, and the bandages themselves were soaked with blood. Fresh blood welled through layers of gauze already stained a deep maroon, bright red and glistening.
“You’re hurt!” she cried.
“It’s not serious,” he said flatly.
“What happened?”
“I was shot. But you’re alright? You haven’t been hurt, you swear?”
“You were shot?” she repeated dumbly.
“You’re covered in blood.”
“It’s not mine, it’s….” She made a helpless gesture, taking in the men who were now being seen to by medics—real medics, who knew what they were doing and who had medicine, and supplies. One of them was making Doctor Shah sit down, despite his feeble protests.
And then Aros appeared in the door, saw them, and burst into tears.
Aria, who’d never seen a grown man cry before—other than her father, after he’d quit raping her for the night and started begging her absolution—wondered what that was about. Aros was almost as reserved as Kisten, normally. He rarely laughed out loud, let alone wept like an infant. Someone came up to him, too, and led him off to the triage station that had been set up near the door. A grim-faced surgeon eyed him up and down and concluded that he was having hysterics. Laugh lines around his eyes suggested that this was not his usual temperament. He gave Aros a shot without bothering to tell him what it was and a few minutes later Aros was out cold again, curled up on the floor and snoring peacefully.
Kisten and Aria surveyed the scene before them, both bemused that they were no longer needed. Here were all these people, putting things to rights like a gigantic hive of uniformed bees; as an ending, it seemed…anticlimactic, somehow. Turning, Kisten led her out of the hall and, eventually, into the library. There were people, here, too, but at least there was somewhere to sit down. They collapsed together onto the couch where, not so long ago, they’d sat for their formal portrait. A portrait that Aria hadn’t even seen yet.
He sat with his arm around her, absent-mindedly, staring off into space. She was content to lean against him, continually verifying to herself that he was real and not about to disappear. A medic came in, took one look at Kisten’s bandages and told him that they needed to be changed. Kisten expressed a desire to be left alone. Undaunted, the medic informed him that, “either I can change them here, now, or I can tell Doctor Kolb”—Aria supposed he was the one who’d given Aros the shot—”that you’re refusing to cooperate and have you packed off to the hospital. Your choice.”
Kisten relented, and the medic knelt and began cutting away the blood-soaked gauze.
“I can’t believe,” said Kisten, sounding almost amused, “that I was shot with an actual bullet. Next someone will want to draw and quarter me, or maybe break my skull open with a mace.”
“You’re a lucky man,” the medic replied with no particular feeling. He went on to point out that the bullet—he, too, seemed surprised that the rebels had been using such antiquated technology—had passed through without hitting anything important. There was a nasty-looking hole in Kisten’s side that the medic was probing with a gloved finger. Kisten bore it with good grace, but his lips were compressed in a thin line and looked bloodless.
“I need to stitch this back up.” The medic sat back on his haunches. Kisten’s stitches—and there were a lot of them—had apparently broken open during whatever he was doing.
Aria wanted to know what that had been, and why they were all still alive.
He was about to explain when someone else appeared. Deliah. She’d been just as flat-out as Aria during the siege, and was undoubtedly just as sleep deprived. But she’d dragged herself out of whatever corner she’d been in to find Kisten and stood here now, regarding him, the question plain in her eyes. Aria remembered, with a sinking feeling, that Deliah’s husband had been on duty when the world erupted in chaos. Had been with Kisten, in fact, at some inspection. Kisten had mentioned something about it, but Aria hadn’t really understood. That conversation, and their fight, felt like it had been a million years ago.
Kisten didn’t beat around the bush, as that subaltern had done with him, earlier, about Aria. “He’s alive,” he told Deliah, referring to her husband, Major Isha Hanafi, “but he’s in critical condition. The roads aren’t safe, but as soon as they are someone can take you to him.”
Deliah staggered out, weak with relief, having not uttered a single word.
Another first.
The medic finished up what he was doing, gave Kisten a shot of penicillin and a stern warning not to exert himself and returned to the more critical patients. A slave came in with ice water, bread and cheese, the only food that could be found. Aria stared down at the cream-colored upholstery and thought again that her wedding belonged to another lifetime.
Beside her, Kisten said nothing. She wondered how long they’d been sitting here, together; she wondered how long they’d been under siege, and when exactly the siege had lifted—and how, still how. No one had explained. No one had explained anything. She’d lost all sense of time, and felt instead like she was floating through some strange ether of sights and sounds, all disconnected and lacking in sense. She’d never been so tired.
And finally, she remembered what had been so important. “I love you,” she said.
The look he turned on her was so frighteningly intense that she thought she’d said the wrong thing. She chewed her lip, worried. His eyes searched hers. God, they both needed a bath. She couldn’t believe he was seeing her like this; she was still wearing the same outfit she’d had on the last time he’d seen her—how long ago now?—only made disgusting in the meantime. Her hair was pulled back in something resembling a bun; she looked more like the twelve year old boy whose uniform she’d borrowed than a married woman.
“Do you?” he asked, deceptively calmly. His eyes were flat and emotionless.
“Yes,” she said in a small voice, hurt and frightened by his reaction. “I’m sorry if it’s not what you want to hear, but the whole time you were gone all I could think was that—”
He pulled her to him for the second time, and held her. She tensed in surprise and then went limp—in relief and gratitude and a thousand other emotions she couldn’t name. “You’re the only thing I love in the world,” he murmured, and then she understood. As much as he loved her, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that she might love him in return.
But she did, and as she leaned against him and let him hold her, she realized once again how much she did love him despite everything. Or perhaps because of it. And for the first time since crawling out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night and possibly in her whole life, she had faith that things would somehow be alright.
And then he told her what had happened.
Aria had been shocked to learn that the siege had lasted two days—much longer than she’d thought. Granted, she’d lost all sense of time, but it had felt like an afternoon. Kisten and the men with him, as well as the men in the rest of the cantonment, had held out as best they could. Losses had been heavy, on both sides, although much heavier on the rebels’.
Kisten had sent numerous requests for help to the garrison inside Haldon and to the fort, by every means at his disposal, and had all but given up hope of a response when help finally arrived. The garrison inside Haldon was a lost cause; it had been comprised almost entirely of local troops, and at the first outbreak of violence half of the men had turned on the other half and all of their commanding officers had been killed. Which was just as well, Kisten pointed out; he’d been going to disband that regiment, anyway, and reassign the men in it to more stable regiments where they could hopefully be brought under control. But the fort had respo
nded and its commander, a crafty man who’d been born on Tara and lived on Tarsonis since his school days, had known better than to rush in with guns blazing.
Instead, he’d formulated a plan wherein his men cut across the foothills at an angle and so utilized the rebels’ blind spot. In so doing, he’d used the very flaws that Kisten had spotted in the cantonment’s position to save it from certain disaster. By the time the rebels realized that they had company, it was too late. Colonel—soon to be General—Raza had divided his men into three main groups, each tasked with a separate purpose.
What began as a mutiny and exploded into the first stages of a full-on rebellion had ended as a rout. Flush with apparent victory, many of the mutineers had raided the cantonment storehouses and gotten drunk. The civilians who’d joined them were mostly undisciplined rabble with no clear concept of what war even was. And once things started looking up for the Alliance, and it even appeared that they might win after all, a great many of the mutineers changed sides again—and a great many formerly enthusiastic civilians slunk quietly back to their homes. It was, said Kisten, a strange and sudden end to a conflict that he’d been sure would mean his death.
Through it all, Isha Hanafi had somehow clung to life. Naturally, Kisten made it out to sound like the major had done all the hard work and Kisten had merely happened to be there. “I’m sorry it took me so long to come home,” he said, as casually as if he’d been late for dinner, “but I had to make a slight detour, in order to get Isha to the hospital.”
Aria found out later that what Kisten described as a slight detour had in actuality been a harrowing adventure that had culminated in him being shot.
