The Saga of the Witcher

by Andrzej Sapkowski

  ‘But I’ve never done it before, Mr Rusty!’

  ‘You have to start sometime. Red to red, yellow to yellow, white to white. Sew like that and it’s sure to be fine.’

  *

  ‘What the hell?’ Barclay Els twisted his beard. ‘What are you saying, little cornet? Anzelm Aubry’s youngest son? That we’re just loafing around here? We didn’t even fucking budge in the face of the enemy! We didn’t budge an inch! It ain’t our fault the men from Brugge didn’t hold out!’

  ‘But the order—’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about the order!’

  ‘If we don’t fill the breaches,’ Pretty Kitty shouted over the commotion, ‘the Black Cloaks will break the front! They’ll break the front! Open the array, Barclay! I’m going to strike! I’ll get through!’

  ‘They’ll slaughter you before you get to the fishpond! You’ll perish senselessly!’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  The dwarf swore, tore his helmet from his head and hurled it to the ground. His eyes were savage, bloodshot, dreadful.

  Chiquita, frightened by the yells, danced beneath the cornet, as far as the crush permitted.

  ‘Summon Yarpen Zigrin and Dennis Cranmer! Pronto!’

  It was apparent at first glance that the two dwarves had come from the heaviest fighting. They were both bespattered with blood. The steel spaulder of one of them bore the mark of a cut so powerful it had bent the edges of the metal plating outwards. The head of the other dwarf was wrapped in a rag oozing blood.

  ‘Everything in order, Zigrin?’

  ‘I wonder,’ panted the dwarf, ‘why everyone’s asking that?’

  Barclay Els turned around, found the cornet’s gaze and stared hard at him.

  ‘So, Anzelm’s youngest son?’ he rasped. ‘The king and the constable have ordered us to go to them and support them? Well, keep your eyes wide open, little cornet. This’ll be worth seeing.’

  *

  ‘Sod it!’ roared Rusty, springing back from the table and brandishing his scalpel. ‘Why? Blast it, why does it have to be like this?’

  No one answered him. Marti Sodergren just spread her arms. Shani bowed her head and Iola sniffed.

  The patient who had just died was looking upwards, and his eyes were unmoving and glazed.

  *

  ‘Strike, kill! Confusion to the whoresons!’

  ‘Keep in line!’ Barclay Els roared. ‘Keep an even step! Hold the line! And keep close! Close!’

  They won’t believe, thought Cornet Aubry. They’ll never believe me when I tell them about it. This square is fighting in a total encirclement . . . Surrounded on all sides by cavalry, being torn, hacked, pounded and stabbed . . . And the square is marching. It’s marching in line, serried, pavise by pavise. It’s marching, trampling and stepping over corpses, pushing the élite Ard Feainn Division in front of it . . . And it’s marching.

  ‘Fight!’

  ‘Even step! Even step!’ bellowed Barclay Els. ‘Hold the line! The song, for fuck’s sake, the song! Our song! Forward, Mahakam!’

  Several thousand dwarven throats yelled the famous Mahakam battle song.

  Hooouuuu! Hooouuu! Hou!

  Just wait! Don’t be hasty!

  Things will very soon get tasty!

  This shambles will fall apart

  Shaken to its very heart!

  Hoooouuuu! Hooouuu! Hou!

  ‘Fight! Free Company!’ Julia Abatemarco’s high-pitched soprano cut into the throaty roar of the dwarves, like the thin, keen edge of a misericorde. The condottieri, breaking free of the line, counter-struck the cavalry attacking the square. It was a truly suicidal stroke, as the entire momentum of the Nilfgaardian offensive turned onto the mercenaries, now deprived of the protection of the dwarven halberds, pikes and pavises. The thudding, yelling and squealing of horses made Cornet Aubry cringe involuntarily in the saddle. Someone struck him in the back and he felt himself drift with his mare, stuck in the crush, towards the greatest confusion and the most terrible slaughter. He tightly gripped his sword hilt which suddenly seemed slippery and strangely unwieldy.

  A moment later, carried in front of the line of pavises, he was already hacking around himself like a madman and yelling like a madman.

  ‘One more time!’ he heard the wild cry of Pretty Kitty. ‘One more shove! You’ll do it, boys! Fight, kill! For the ducat, as gold as the sun! To me, Free Company!’

  A helmetless Nilfgaardian rider with a silver sun on his cloak penetrated the line, stood up in his stirrups, and with a terrible blow of his battle axe felled a dwarf along with his pavise, and cleaved open the head of another. Aubry turned in the saddle and hacked backhanded. A sizeable fragment bearing hair flew from the head of the Nilfgaardian, who tumbled to the ground. At the same time the cornet was also struck in the head and fell from the saddle. The crush meant he didn’t end up on the ground immediately, but hung for several seconds, screaming shrilly, between the sky, the earth and the sides of two horses. But although he had the fright of his life, he didn’t have time to experience pain. When he fell, his skull was almost immediately crushed by iron-shod hooves.

  *

  Sixty-five years later, when asked about that day, about Brenna Field, about the square marching towards Golden Pond over the bodies of friends and enemies, the old woman would smile, wrinkling up even more a face already as shrivelled and dark as a prune. Impatient – or perhaps pretending to be impatient – she waved a trembling, bony hand, grotesquely contorted by arthritis.

  ‘There was no way,’ she mumbled, ‘that either of the sides could gain the advantage. We were in the middle. In the encirclement. And they were on the outside. And we were simply killing one another. They us, and we them . . . Eck-eck-eeck . . . They us. We them . . .’

  The old woman struggled to overcome a coughing fit. Those listeners who were closest saw on her cheek a tear, making its way with difficulty among the wrinkles and old scars.

  ‘They were just as brave as us,’ mumbled the old dear, who had once been Julia Abatemarco, Pretty Kitty of the Free Mercenary Company. ‘Eck-eck . . . We were all just as brave. Us and them.’

  The old woman fell silent. For a long time. Her audience didn’t urge her on, seeing her smile at her recollections. At her glory. At the faces of those who gloriously survived, looming in the fog of oblivion, of forgetting. In order later to be shabbily killed by vodka, drugs and consumption.

  ‘We were all just as brave,’ finished Julia Abatemarco. ‘Neither of the sides had the strength to be braver. But we . . . We managed to be brave for a minute longer.’

  *

  ‘Marti, I’d be very grateful if you could give us a little more of your wonderful magic! Just a little bit more, just a few ounces! The inside of this poor wretch’s belly is one great goulash, seasoned, additionally, by loads of metal rings from a mail shirt. I can’t do anything while he thrashes about like a fish being gutted! Shani, dammit, hold those retractors! Iola! Are you asleep, dammit? Clamp! Claaampp!’

  Iola breathed out heavily, fighting to swallow the saliva filling her mouth. I’m going to faint soon, she thought. I can’t bear it, I can’t bear this any longer, this stench, this ghastly mixture of blood, puke, excrement, urine, the content of intestines, sweat, fear and death. I can’t bear these endless screams any longer, this moaning, these bloodied, slimy hands clinging to me as though I really was their hope, their escape, their life . . . I can’t bear the pointlessness of what we’re doing. Because it is pointless. It’s one great, enormous pointless pit of pointlessness.

  I can’t bear the effort and the fatigue. They keep bringing new ones . . . And new ones . . .

  I can’t stand it. I’m going to vomit. I’m going to faint. I’ll shame myself.

  ‘Dressing! Compress! Bowel clamp! Not that one! Soft clamp! Mind what you’re doing! Make another mistake and I’ll smack you in that ginger head! Do you hear? I’ll smack you in that ginger head!’

  Great Melitele. Help me. Help me,
O goddess.

  ‘There! Better already! One more clamp, priestess! Clamp on the artery! Good! Good, Iola, keep it up! Marti, mop his eyes and face. And mine too . . .’

  *

  Where does that pain come from? thought Constable Jan Natalis. What hurts so much?

  Aha.

  My clenched fists.

  *

  ‘Let’s finish them off!’ yelled Kees van Lo, rubbing his hands. ‘Let’s finish them off, sir! The line’s breaking along the formation, let’s strike! Let’s strike without delay, and by the Great Sun, they’ll fall apart! They’ll scatter!’

  Menno Coehoorn was nervously chewing a fingernail, realised they were watching, and quickly took his finger out of his mouth.

  ‘Let’s strike,’ repeated Kees van Lo calmly, now without emphasis. ‘Nauzicaa’s ready—’

  ‘Nauzicaa is to stand by,’ said Menno sharply. ‘The Daerlanians, too. Mr Faoiltiarna!’

  The commander of the Vrihedd Brigade, Isengrim Faoiltiarna, called the Iron Wolf, turned his awful face – disfigured by a scar running across his forehead, brow, bridge of the nose and cheek – towards the marshal.

  ‘Strike,’ Menno pointed with his baton. ‘At the junction of Temeria and Redania. Over there.’

  The elf saluted. His disfigured face didn’t even twitch, his large eyes didn’t change their expression.

  Allies, thought Menno. Confederates. We’re fighting together. Against a common foe.

  But I don’t understand them at all, those elves.

  They’re somehow alien.

  Different.

  *

  ‘Interesting,’ Rusty tried to rub his face with his elbow, but his elbow was also covered in blood. Iola hurried to help him.

  ‘Curious,’ repeated the surgeon, pointing at the patient. ‘Stabbed by a pitchfork or some sort of two-pronged type of gisarme . . . One of the prongs punctured the heart, there, please look. The chamber undoubtedly perforated, the aorta almost severed. And he was still breathing for a while. Here, on the table. Gored right in the heart, he survived all the way to the table . . .’

  ‘Do you wish to state,’ a cavalryman from the light volunteer horse asked gloomily, ‘that he’s expired? We bore him from the battle in vain?’

  ‘Nothing is in vain.’ Rusty didn’t lower his eyes. ‘And for the sake of the truth, then yes, he’s dead, sadly. Exitus. Take him away . . . Oh, bloody hell . . . Take a look, girls.’

  Marti Sodergren, Shani and Iola bent over the body. Rusty pulled back the corpse’s eyelid.

  ‘Ever seen anything like that?’

  All three of them shuddered.

  ‘Yes,’ they all said at the same time. They glanced at each other, as though slightly surprised.

  ‘I have too,’ said Rusty. ‘It’s a witcher. A mutant. That would explain why he lived so long . . . Was he your comrade-at-arms, men? Or did you bring him here by chance?’

  ‘He was our comrade, Mr Medic,’ confirmed another volunteer gloomily, a beanpole with a bandaged head. ‘From our squadron, a volunteer like us. Eh, he was a master with a sword. They called him Coën.’

  ‘And he was a witcher?’

  ‘Aye. But he was a decent bloke otherwise.’

  ‘Ha,’ sighed Rusty, seeing four soldiers carrying another casualty on a blood-soaked cloak dripping with blood. He was very young, judging by how shrilly he was wailing.

  ‘Ha, pity. I would have gladly taken that otherwise decent witcher for a post-mortem. I’m consumed with curiosity, and a paper could be written if one could just take a look inside him . . . But there’s no time! Get the corpse off the table! Shani, water. Marti, disinfection. Iola, pass me . . . Hello, girl, are you shedding tears again? What’s it this time?’

  ‘Nothing, Mr Rusty. Nothing. Everything’s all right now.’

  *

  ‘I feel,’ repeated Triss Merigold, ‘as though I’ve been robbed.’

  Nenneke didn’t answer for a long time, and looked from the terrace towards the temple garden, where the priestesses and novices were busily engaged in their springtime work.

  ‘You made a choice,’ she finally said. ‘You chose your way, Triss. Your own destiny. Of your own free will. Now isn’t the time for regrets.’

  ‘Nenneke,’ the sorceress lowered her eyes. ‘I really can’t say anything more than what I’ve said. Believe me and forgive me.’

  ‘Who am I to forgive you? And what will you get from my forgiving you?’

  ‘But I can see how you’re glaring at me!’ Triss exploded. ‘You and your priestesses. I can see you asking me questions with your eyes. Like “What are you doing here, witch? Why aren’t you where Iola, Eurneid, Katje and Myrrha are? And Jarre?” ’

  ‘You’re exaggerating, Triss.’

  The sorceress looked into the distance, at the forest, bluish beyond the temple wall, at the smoke of distant campfires.

  Nenneke said nothing. She was also far away in her thoughts. Away where the fighting was raging and the blood was flowing. She thought about the girls she’d sent there.

  ‘They talked me out of it all,’ Triss said.

  Nenneke said nothing.

  ‘They talked me out of it all,’ Triss repeated. ‘So wise, so sensible, so logical . . . How not to believe them when they explained that there are more and less important matters, that one ought to give up the less important ones without a second thought, sacrifice them for the important ones without a trace of regret. That there’s no point saving people you know and love, because they’re individuals, and the fate of individuals is meaningless against the fate of the world. That there’s no point fighting in the defence of virtue, honour and ideals, because they are empty notions. That the real battlefield for the fate of the world is somewhere else completely, that the fight will take place somewhere else. And I feel robbed. Robbed of the chance to commit acts of insanity. I can’t insanely rush to help Ciri, I can’t run and save Geralt and Yennefer like a madwoman. But that’s not all, in the war being waged, in the war to which you sent your girls . . . In the war to which Jarre fled, I’m even refused the chance to stand on the Hill. To stand on the Hill once more. This time with the awareness of a truly conscious and correct decision.’

  ‘Everybody has their own decision and their own Hill, Triss,’ said the high priestess softly. ‘Everybody. You can’t run away from yours either.’

  *

  There was a commotion in the entrance to the tent. Another casualty was being carried in, accompanied by several knights. One, in full plate armour, was shouting, giving orders and urging the carriers on.

  ‘Move, stretcher-bearers! Quicker! Put him here, here! Hey, you, medic!’

  ‘I’m busy.’ Rusty didn’t even look up. ‘Please put the wounded man on a stretcher. I’ll see to him when I finish.’

  ‘You’ll see to him immediately, stupid leech! For it is none other than the Most Honourable Count of Garramone!’

  ‘This hospital—’ Rusty raised his voice, angry, because the broken arrowhead stuck in the casualty’s guts had once again slipped out of his forceps ‘—this hospital has very little in common with democracy. They mainly bring in knights and upward. Barons, counts, marquises, and various others of that ilk. Somehow few care about wounded men of humbler birth. But there is some kind of equality here, nonetheless. That is, on my table.’

  ‘Eh? You what?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter—’ Rusty once again stuck a cannula and pair of forceps into the wound ‘—if this one here, from whose guts I’m removing bits of iron, is a peasant, a member of the minor gentry, old nobility or aristocracy. He’s lying on my table. And to me, as I hum to myself, a duke’s worth a jester. Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Your count will have to wait his turn.’

  ‘You confounded halfling!’

  ‘Help me, Shani. Take the other forceps. Look out for that artery! Marti, just a little more magic, if you would, we have se
rious haemorrhaging here.’

  The knight took a step forward, teeth and armour grating.

  ‘I’ll have you hanged!’ he roared. ‘I’ll order you hanged, you unhuman!’

  ‘Silence, Papebrock,’ the wounded count said with difficulty, biting his lips. ‘Silence. Leave me and get back to the fighting—’

  ‘No, my lord! Never!’

  ‘That was an order.’

  A thudding and clanging of iron, the snorting of horses and wild cries reached their ears from behind the tent flap. The wounded in the field hospital moaned in various keys.

  ‘Please look.’ Rusty raised his forceps, showing the splintered arrowhead he had finally extracted. ‘A craftsman made this trinket, supporting a large family thanks to its manufacture, furthermore contributing to the growth of small craftwork, and thus also to general prosperity and universal happiness. And the way this ornament clings to human guts is surely protected by a patent. Long live progress.’

  He casually threw the bloody blade into the bin, and glanced at the casualty, who had fainted during the operation.

  ‘Sew him up and take him away,’ he nodded. ‘If he’s lucky, he’ll survive. Bring me the next in the queue. The one with the gashed head.’

  ‘That one,’ Marti Sodergren said calmly, ‘just gave up his place. A moment ago.’ Rusty sucked in and exhaled, moved away from the table without unnecessary comments and stood over the wounded count. Rusty’s hands were bloody, and his apron splashed with blood like a butcher. Daniel Etcheverry, the Count of Garramone, paled even more.

  ‘Well,’ panted Rusty. ‘It’s your turn, Your Grace. Put him on the table. What do we have here? Ha, nothing remains of that joint that could be saved. It’s porridge! It’s pulp! What do you whack each other with, Count, that you smash each other’s bones like that? Well, it’ll hurt a bit, Your Grace. It’ll hurt a bit. But please don’t worry. It’ll be just like it is in a battle. Tourniquet. Knife! We’re going to amputate, Your Grace!’