By her own estimation, Banders was the most promoted soldier in the entire battalion, possibly in the history of the Palleseen military. She’d lost count of the number of times a superior officer had given her a certificate of rank. She kept them all in her lockbox, treasured each one. That they were all for the same rank was something she was almost as proud of. It took great effort to be simultaneously so useful and so innately imperfect as to get disciplined out of even a lowly rank every time, and then reacquire it. Currently the wheel of her fortune was hauling her through the low arc of its swing, but it would only be a matter of time.
“Oi, Banders!”
She pointedly ignored the ungracious hail, sitting out in the slanted morning sun with her folding desk, working on her triple-entry accounting. The first entry to calculate, the second to check the calculations and the third, on a separate piece of paper, to include all the errant entries that she wouldn’t be reporting to anyone but still felt the obscure need to keep track of.
“Oi!” came the abrasive voice of Statlos Peppel again. “Banders.” And then, when he was too close and too loud to convincingly ignore, “Cohort-Broker Banders, got a job for you.”
She folded her papers into their wallet, slid the pen home into its loop and stood. “That’s Former Cohort-Broker Banders to you, Statlos,” she said, as though it outranked sages and generals.
Peppel was a Watch Statlos, meaning his job was simultaneously very tedious and catastrophic if he dropped the ball. Just like every other Watch officer, that meant he took lording it over anyone below him very seriously. Technically a Former Cohort-Broker was below just about everything, but as Banders was possibly the only one there had ever been, and Peppel was a man of limited imagination, he didn’t know quite where he stood with her.
She was taller than him, too, which helped. He was broad and squat; she, lanky and angular. Somehow, the more formally she wore the uniform, the more of an offence to it she seemed. If anyone got her into full parade-ground dress she’d probably strike Higher Orders dead of apoplexy. Right now she had her jacket hanging open and her shirt unbuttoned to a risqué degree, because it was shaping up to be a warm morning. Her cap had found its customary station perched improbably on the back of her head.
“New recruit for the zoo,” Peppel said. There was indeed a thin, lost-looking man in robes behind him, guarded by an unlikely number of soldiers. Banders took the documents Peppel held out and her eyebrows went up a little.
“Fancy,” she said. “Never had one of them before.”
“Sign off,” Peppel told her.
“You might have told me I’d have to sign something before I put my pen away.” She made a great show of rummaging in her satchel for the wallet until Peppel sighed and slipped his own from an inside pocket. She made an equally great and laborious show of signing off the prisoner docket, Former Cohort-Broker Banders. Doing the capitals with big loops and adding all the optional diacritics and underlinings as though she was still in juvenile phal. She took long enough for Peppel’s patience to completely expire so that he and his men just took off the moment she’d given him the paper back. She wondered how long it would be before he realised she’d kept his pen.
“You dangerous?” she asked the robed man. He had a wooden house on his back, the size of her lockbox. It looked like you might keep rats in it. Quite a lot of rats. It looked quite heavy, too, and he looked quite weedy. The sort of lean you got from not eating well most of your life. Not bad-looking, overall. Fair hair shying back from a high forehead, a rather startled expression by nature, now augmented by actual startlement.
“What?” he said. “No.”
“Only, the escort.” She nodded at Peppel’s retreating squad. And the docket hadn’t said anything about violence, but on the other hand, priests… People did all kinds of crazy in the name of religion. It was one reason why there was no room for it within Palleseen perfection. You killed priests, or you re-educated them, or in some recent additions to the Sway you tolerated them while giving them sufficient rope to weave enough nooses for the whole congregation. Or you sent them to Forthright Battalion for medical experimentation.
She considered that wording, wondering whether someone was signing off on these dockets because they envisaged a convocation of Inquirer-surgeons vivisecting the incurably religious to find out which organ the faith was kept in. It seemed entirely plausible. Banders had met an endless succession of high-ranking officers who only read the headings and not the details. She had exploited the tendency for her own benefit on multiple occasions, as evidenced by some of her subsequent demotions.
“You mad?” she asked the man.
“What?” he said again. “No. Oh, or. Maybe?”
“You worship gods?” Banders asked him. “Priest stuff. Rituals, sacrifices, prayers, all that?” She had to say it again because she spoke at twice the pace of most people when she wasn’t careful, and he was obviously struggling with a second language.
“Am I allowed to say no?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. Are you?” She was no expert in what gods permitted their faithful to do.
“No, I mean. I know it was written down. But I don’t want to get… hurt or locked up or decanted or something. So if I said no…?” His eyes swivelled. He had, she judged, never been in the middle of a military camp before.
“I mean you say what you want to say, friend,” Banders said easily. “If you’re a priest then you’re my problem. Healing priest?”
“Well. No. Maybe. Sometimes.”
“Then you’re my problem. If you’re not a priest then it said revolutionary on that docket as well, and they just get executed. But don’t let me make the choice for you. Some people prefer that.”
“Ah, no,” said the priest. “Let’s not do that. I did that once. I didn’t like it.”
That suggested a story she’d have fun winkling out of him later. “Right then.” Banders folded her desk with a snap – the man jumped – and handed it to him. “Quartermaster’s, first off. What do I call you?”
Between her turning away and him fumbling the desk and his accent, she didn’t actually catch the name. He pattered after her readily enough, though, and she wondered just what he’d done to warrant a demi-squad escort, that wasn’t enough to have him actually executed. The thought had her smiling into the gathering sunlight because this Maric was a nice fresh piece of fruit and she’d have fun peeling his layers over however long he lasted.
*
Cohort-Monitor Fosby was on duty at the quartermaster’s shack, and he had a good line on spiced salt, liquorice and valgaric oil, the latter of which the Butcher had asked her to acquire and the former two she had some potential buyers lined up for. She was somewhat distracted when she filled out the papers for their new recruit, therefore, and most of the writing was just that scrawl she did when she wanted to look like she was jotting something down. She signed the card, though, and anointed it in red ink with Fosby’s little rubber stamp. These were a new innovation, the rubber imported from Oloumann, where the good tea came from, and Banders loved the springy feel when she used them. The first time, they’d had to pry the thing from her fingers after a requisition form had ended up peppered with authorisations.
“Keep this with you,” she said to the Maric, handing him the incomprehensible card. “This says who you are and that you’re allowed to be here.” The first was manifestly untrue although the stamp and her signature just about squeaked the second. “You are now Accessory…” And she still couldn’t remember his name. “You, you are an Accessory in the Palleseen Army.”
“Is that like a…” He fought with a Maric word she didn’t know, and then constructed it piecemeal for her. “Turncoat?”
She judged it was a term for Marics who’d signed up to serve alongside their liberators, and not a complimentary one at that. “Sure,” she said. “Why not? Is that a problem?”
“I mean I’m here, aren’t I?” He looked around as though justifying himself to a larger audience than Banders and Fosby. Fosby took the distraction to slip her a folded paper with the details of where the liquorice and oil was.
“Fine,” Banders said, satisfied on all counts. “Let’s get you out of that clown’s outfit.”
She took him round the back, where the uniform stock was. “You must be sweltering in that nonsense,” she said. “Get it off. Strip to your smalls, soldier.”
He didn’t understand the Pel phrase, because although Pel was a language designed explicitly to preclude slang, Banders was very determined and the words broke before she did. He looked satisfyingly horrified when she mimed it out for him, and she nobly turned her back to hoik out some clothes of the right size. Then had to turn right around and hoik out some smaller ones because he was even skinnier than she’d thought, under all those layers. His smalls were also larger than expected, not because of any heroic proportions but because Maric winters were bitter, and so the underwear went down to their knees and had a built-in vest. Honestly, the way he’d been carrying on she’d expected a full-frontal show. Add Marics to the list of nationalities who hadn’t grown up with en masse unisex washing facilities, she supposed. On the Archipelago you didn’t get a bath to yourself until at least Companion rank, most of the time.
Ah, ambition. Having handed him the clothes she let herself drift into reverie. Work hard, apply yourself and maybe you could make Former Companion-Broker, Banders. Think of the extra cachet you’d have, being kicked out from such elevated company!
He didn’t know what to do with the buttons, so she had to show him. The shirt: cuffs and collar and halfway down to navel. The jacket: cuffs and then secured at the right breast – “No, the buttons down the left are just decoration, don’t try and secure them to anything. Stockings up, then the breeches here, at the knee and… look, you can do your own codpiece flap. I’m not going there…” And there he was, a little Maric priest in an Accessory’s pale grey. Looking as horribly uncomfortable as she could wish, half strangled and as though he’d lost all circulation in his hands and lower legs.
“I can’t help noticing,” he said, “that you yourself are not wearing your clothes like this.” Indicating her loose cuffs, open shirt and the way her jacket was buttoned back open using those forbidden left-hand buttons.
She grinned at him. She’d been told she didn’t have a nice smile, mostly by people who had found themselves getting into trouble after being exposed to it, but at least partly because someone had punched her front teeth crooked once. “Oh you’ll fit right in. So long as you learn which ranks and officers you do need to get the buttons right for. Now, you need this…” She handed him another card, also illegible save for the signature. “This gets you ammies at the mess come midday.”
He was frowning at the new and context-free additions to his vocabulary, but he’d pick it up soon enough, or starve. “Breakfast you sort for yourself. Evening meal you eat with your department.”
“What if I don’t have a department?” he asked, fighting to get his collar undone.
“I’m about to take you to your department,” Banders told him. “Docket said you’re a healer. A religious healer. You’re seconded to the field hospital. They’ll love you there. Crawling with your sort.” She took pity on him and helped him with his collar. And stopped. He had flinched from the contact of her fingers with his throat. There was a scar there, a weal, as of a rope. Fuck, maybe they did try to execute him. That wasn’t what had stopped her, though. Over his shoulder she could see the top of his weird backpack, that he’d shrugged right back into the moment she’d finished dressing him up. She could see into the little round holes in it. It was dark inside, but she swore she’d seen something move in there. Something nasty. Something weirdly familiar. She froze up, feeling her fingers on the throat of the priest and knowing it to be sacrilege. Knowing herself to be judged.
“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry.” And he turned, jolting the wooden backpack quite viciously as though there really was something there and he was physically shaking it out of sight. Except there hadn’t been anything, obviously. Just a… something. And her fingers were caught in the buttonhole of his collar and he had to free her, a weird reversal of her helping him.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, though by unspoken and mutual consent he didn’t elaborate on just what he might be sorry for. And she sat down on a crate full of boots and pulled out her non-regulation flask and had a nip. Offered it to the Maric, too.
“I’m not supposed to,” he said, and then did anyway. His eyes watered just like any reasonable human being’s, and that brought him back into the realms of the secular and the comprehensible. And he really did look apologetic and small and meek, not a threat to anyone.
She grinned at him experimentally. Nothing bad happened. The nine-tenths of her that was world-weary and pragmatic, and navigated the Palleseen army to her personal profit, reclaimed its upbeat nature and resumed its opportunistic plotting. The one-tenth that had crept down to the caves below the orphanage, and come back bloody and terrified, shook and wept in a far corner of her mind, but she’d learned to ignore that a long time ago.
*
Quartermasters got a shed but the field hospital was a cluster of conjoined tents circumscribed by drainage ditches. When they were at work the canvas walls would all be down, so that those waiting to have terrible, necessary things done to them, or those who’d had such things done already, couldn’t see the ongoing terrible things happening to their comrades. Right now, with all but the most critical casualties sent north to the recupery stations, the medicos had rolled up half the walls to let a bit of air in, and the stench of pain and old blood out.
“Oi oi!” she hailed them, hoping an instant later that the Maric didn’t take that as a regulation military utterance which it absolutely wasn’t.
“In here,” the Butcher’s voice rolled out like rocks down a slope. “Did you get my oil?”
“I’ve got a line on it,” Banders confirmed, and tugged at the Maric’s arm. The Butcher was sitting in the shadow of a slant of canvas, his son just serving up a plateful of chopped eggs and red. It would be to his own recipe, for which Banders had been at him for over a year.
You had to be bold, to enquire after the Butcher’s recipes. You had to be bold to eat at his table. Senior officers had proved too white in the liver to accept his invitation. But the hospital staff had all got used to it, and for that they ate well whenever he was moved to cook for them. And Banders was nothing if not bold.
“Got a live one for you,” she told him. “Chief, this is… a priest. Healy priest fresh from – where was it, priest?”
“Ilmar,” said the Maric.
The Butcher took a mouthful of eggs and then a quick swig of water, which showed the boy had done the red part right. “That’s the place up north with the wood?” he asked. He was doing his jolly favourite uncle twinkle, that could turn into a slap very quickly.
“Yes.” The Maric caught himself. “Magister? Sir? I’m sorry I’ve not been in an army before.”
“This is Chief Accessory Ollery,” Banders explained proudly, as though it was her personal achievement. “He’s in charge of you now. You report to him and do what he says. And you call him ‘Chief’. On account of how he doesn’t warrant a ‘Magister’.”
Ollery, the Butcher, looked the skinny little slice of Maric up and down as though wondering what recipes he had for this particular ingredient. “You any good?”
“No, Chief,” said the Maric promptly. “Not really at anything. Sorry.” Wincing at Banders’s cackle of a laugh.
“Oh they love us,” Ollery said, ostensibly to his son who’d sat on the ground with his own little tin plate of eggs. “Look what they send us, boy. They’re just desperate for us to fail. This is how the Fellow-Inquirer will get her ration of corpses. Good soldiers or bad doctors, who kills more in this man’s army, eh?” He ate some eggs philosophically. Not the easiest thing to do philosophically, by Banders’s estimation, but he managed it. “You’d better show him about,” he added, after swallowing. “Most everyone’s up already. And make sure Masty’s done the rounds of the criticals.”
Masty would have done the rounds. Masty, the other orderly, was twice as conscientious about his duties as Banders, which was just as well given her general lack of the quality. Asking Masty if he’d done the rounds was just about the level of responsibility she felt she could handle.
“Alv up, Chief?”
Ollery cocked an eyebrow. “Alv never sleeps, as far as I can make out. What do you think? And why?”
“Want to see Maric’s reaction, is all.” She fished another grin from her inexhaustible supply. Taking the priest by the arm she tugged him towards the main tent, eyes hunting through the shadows for her target. “Now, you’ve got a real good memory for names and faces, obviously?”
“Not really, no,” he said.
“Ah well, that’s a shame, ‘cos you’re about to meet about a hundred different people wearing the uniform and they’ll all expect you to remember them intimately and not get them mixed up, on pain of hating you forever if you make the slightest mistake. That all right?”
“I, what? I mean, no?” He tripped over a guy rope on the way into the tent. He’d looked the type that would do that. Used to the sort of town where all the houses didn’t fold down and go on a baggage train every week or so. “And do I call you Magister or Chief or…?”
She stopped at that. “I reckon calling me Magister is probably a court martial offence,” she considered. “Disrespect to the uniform, probably. You just call me Banders like everyone else, Maric, and we’re fine.” And then, just to avoid any confusion, “On account of it’s my name.”
Then they’d ducked past the drape of the porch into the cool beneath the main canvas, the big space that was common room until the shit came down, whereupon it became waiting room and operating theatre, alchemy lab and necromancer’s playground, more commonly known by its tenders as Hell. Through a flap to her left was the ward, where the criticals were kept – those still clinging to life who couldn’t be safely shipped out to the recupery stations. To the right was a nest of partitioned spaces where the actual sleeping and living went on, for those consigned to Hell for the duration.
A few of the staff were abroad. A couple of junior sympaticos from Alv’s students, washing the bloody clothes from yesterday’s fun and games. Bearded, saturnine Masty at the back, cleaning the saws and catling knives. Alv, doing her exercises.
Alv was the most beautiful woman in the world, as far as Banders was concerned. And Banders didn’t even like women that way. She was lean, compact, not a spare ounce on her. In uniform breeches and shirtsleeves she was moving through a series of passes, so small and controlled that it was as though she had invisible walls penning her on all sides. Nothing so ungainly as the stretches and exertions regular soldiers got put through at training camp. Nothing that really looked like exercise at all, until you saw that every single muscle was under her strict control, restrained and released only on her mind’s express say-so, nothing left to instinct or body memory. She kept one arm close to her side. A little tender, that care said. Not that it had patently been broken so short a time ago. The expression on her face was infinitely serene, and the face itself was weirdly perfect in a way independent of anybody’s personal standards. The beauty of self-possession. Plus, there was enough light coming in from outside to make her skin glitter and shine like butterfly scales.
“This is Guest-Adjutant Alv. She’s in charge if you can’t find the Butcher.” Banders stole a glance at the Maric to see how he was taking the sight. With more equanimity than she’d hoped, honestly. “And I want to you to know that familiarities between members of the battalion is absolutely a breach of military discipline,” garnished with the most enormous wink.
“Right,” said the Maric, and then caught up. “Oh, no. I mean, it’s forbidden anyway.”
“That’s what I said.” Banders tried the wink again, but it just bounced off, and presumably the forbiddance he meant was religious, and he was going to be less interesting than she’d thought.
Alv finished her pass, a kind of circling step with the feet and a bringing together of the hands, all within the sort of space you’d need for a broom closet, then looked sharply at Banders and the Maric.
“Fresh meat,” Banders announced, to the world at large. “This is… Maric. He’s a priest.” And the Maric actually said his name in correction but she’d spoken over it so she’d missed it again.
Alv regarded the man dubiously, and Banders was about to drag him off to inflict him on Masty and the rest of them, but then there was a commotion from outside. Shouts to clear the way, curses from surprised soldiers halfway back from fetching their breakfast, then a dozen stretcher bearers thundering down on the hospital tent like bad weather from a clear sky.