There was, of course, a tradition of Palleseen literature. Printed books of appropriately instructional stories were part of a marching army’s standard supply. The problem was that, as a society obsessed with perfection, the Pals had perfected the form of the story to the extent that each one followed a prescribed and exacting format, the protagonist’s symbolic path slavishly adhered to until any incident of interest was ironed away. There were also collected stories from other cultures that had been brought into the benevolent Palleseen Sway. Whatever flourish and character they might have offered a reader did not survive translation into Pel. The language the Palleseen had created from scratch when they set about perfecting themselves, finding their original native tongue too full of vagaries and mystical reference.
For anyone in Forthright Battalion who sought to while away their time in reading, options were limited.
Chief Accessory Ollery, more commonly known as the Butcher, turned a page with great care. His broad fingers did not play well with the tissue-thin paper – the grade that the Palleseen administration used for mass-distributed forms, circulars and notices, and the Loruthi used for books. He was not supposed to have a Loruthi book, of course. He was most certainly not supposed to have a book printed by the Loruthi in Pel, which was a thing they were doing now. Pel books, but using the language in unexpected ways, like an acrobat escaping a straitjacket. It was, he understood, part of the war effort. Loruthi intellectuals doing their bit to fend off the invaders by sneaking morally corrupting literature where sticky-fingered types like Banders could pick it up and distribute it for coins and favours. For Ollery’s part, he thanked them for it. In the rare moments he wasn’t up to his elbows in blood or alchemy, he liked a good read, and this current work was a remarkably perverse piece of smut that fair got his juices going.
Speaking of alchemy, though… Something was troubling his nose, a most sensitive organ. “Boy!” he hollered. He was currently reclining on his bedroll in the curtained off nook of his tent, and there had been a suspicious lack of human activity to be heard from the main space. “Boy, what colour? Have you stirred the distillate?”
The silence that greeted this hail signified a world of guilt. Ollery threw the book down and stormed through. Sure enough, the distillate was already discoloured, and probably that was it and he’d need to start the batch again.
The boy was standing there all duty now, the big spoon in his hands, but Ollery wasn’t fooled for a moment and cuffed him across the ear.
“When it begins to sublimate, you stir. You stir to hold it off, so that the argamesh has time to dissolve properly, without which it won’t catalyse the reaction and the whole thing can’t enter the third house.”
The boy stared at him as though he’d suddenly started speaking fluent Loruthi. “Red,” Ollery snapped. “When it starts to go red, stir.” Another cuff. They’d been here often enough that there was a kind of ballet to it, the boy’s flinch and duck perfectly timed to his swing so that he connected just enough to know he’d done it, while achieving no real impact. “Idiot child.” He lumbered over to the tent wall his ingredient racks hung from, and found the henq salts. “These,” he said, shoving the little clear vial in the boy’s face. “Blue crystals, see? Very pale blue. Not the darker ones, they’ll curdle it. One capful, sifted finely across the surface of the mixture, got me?”
The boy had his intent I’m concentrating look on, which had no real connection to any actual inner concentration that might be going on. Ollery suited action to words, demonstrating how to apply the salts, that would slow the sublimation and just maybe allow something to be salvaged of the mess.
“If we have to start again because you’re too damn idle to watch a pot, I will take it out of your hide,” he told the boy. “And I’ll send you to Fellow-Archivist Plussly to explain why his medicine isn’t ready, and the others. And they’ll each of them be a might less pleased than I am right now, you got me?”
The I’m concentrating intensified until the child looked positively constipated with sagacity, at which point Ollery knew the kid wasn’t listening any more. He grabbed the boy’s ear and hauled him onto his tiptoes.
“This is why we exist,” he growled. “This is what keeps us alive, and the hospital open. Not that we save lives, but that some son of a bitch in Higher Orders can get my unguents for his boils, or a noseful of powdered clappa to take his mind off the fact that he’s just sent five hundred poor bastards to their deaths. And for that, they tolerate all sorts of shit from us that nobody else gets away with. Like your stupidity or all the god-fondling that goes on behind my back or Banders basically existing at all. You get me?”
And the boy didn’t get him. And it wasn’t exactly like Ollery was intending to retire any time soon and give the alchemical farm over to the kid as inheritance. But when you knew something useful and were trying to teach it, it was galling when your sole student was so damn slow.
“You are a cursed imbecile,” he told the boy. “But it looks like this time you’ve not screwed up so bad that the batch can’t be saved.” True enough the redness of the mixture was receding. “Right. Now we add the…?” But that was asking too much. “The Firesian bile, which is the…?” Still, apparently, too much. “The yellow muck in that pot. No, the other yellow. No, fat-yellow, it’s not a fucking custard. And we add how much? Show me with the spoons.”
The boy went for the wooden measuring spoons but then – wonder of wonders! – actually diverted and went to the metal ones, because Firesian bile ate away wood like a termite’s dream. He got the wrong size, but only by a couple. So either he genuinely had been listening or he was lucky today.
“You do it. One spoon, levelled off, pour off into the near side of the cauldron, then the big spoon for stirring. You got me? And now maybe I can get back to my book.” We were just getting to the good bit with the countess and the conjurer…
Back on his bedroll, he tried to find his page again. It sounded as though peace and quiet were commodities in as short supply as good tea and well-fit boots today because someone had started shouting right outside. The Butcher gathered in a lungful to bellow the interloper into silence, then stopped because it was the new man, what was his name? Maric Jack, Banders said. He’d not been here a day and already he was off on one, apparently.
“It’s vitally important I go see the man, the spy,” the man declared, Maric accent making his Pel sound like he had a cold and was doing a funny voice at the same time. And, at whatever brush-off he received, “No, listen. Nobody listens around here. I know you think it’s all roses because he’s back on his feet, but the moment he opens his mouth he’s going to die. It’ll all come back. It won’t last. Unless he swears not to do – no, don’t walk away from me! Why does everyone just walk away from me around here?”
Because you’re a madman shouting in the street, Ollery thought uncharitably. You carry on like this back wherever you come from, see how people react.
The man barked out something in Maric, a language apparently designed for people to use while being strangled – probably it was some colourfully religious oath that simply didn’t exist in Pel, on account of it expressing sentiments unnecessary in a perfected society. Except it was weird how, even after they’d been with the army for years and lost every other word of their native tongue, people always seemed to hang on to the oaths.
“I need to save him!” Maric Jack yelled. “I need you to take me to him now, please! He has to be warned, or else he’ll die. It’s not a blessing you see! It’s a curse!”
Ollery had seen the man that Jack had healed. The spy had looked a long way off dying to the Butcher’s experienced eye. The eldritch sucking wound was gone, the man hale and hearty, not a cough or a fever or a stubbed toe. From death’s door to the healthiest man in Forthright Battalion. If I could bottle a curse like that I’d be a wealthy man.
But enough was enough, and Ollery wasn’t going to find out what the countess was going to do to the conjurer with all this going on just a canvas wall away. He hid the book in the concealed pocket of the sock-stuffed knapsack that served as his pillow and shambled back out. The boy was at least putting on a reasonable impersonation of someone watching the cauldrons, and nothing was on fire, so he judged he was free to go slap some quiet into Maric Jack as a welcome to the hospital department.
Except it turned out to be a lot worse than he’d thought, because Jack wasn’t just ranting at all comers. Instead he was going full force at none other than Fellow-Inquirer Prassel herself.
Ollery’s relationship with Prassel was a complicated thing. Prassel was a woman of many aspects. On the one hand she was exactly one of those ambitious mid-ranking officers that the army was overly supplied with, determined that her future was going to have considerably more badges, medals and certificates of commendation than her present. On the other hand she was the officer in charge of the field hospital, Ollery’s direct superior, the bottleneck through which the medicos communicated with the rest of the army. And the thing that Maric Jack had yet to learn is that neither of these hands was the charitable giving sort. And that was even without bringing up Prassel’s specialism, because necromancy seldom bred kindness. Arrogance, yes. A heedless disregard for human life. And on occasion an academic over-enthusiasm that led to the sort of experimentation that got Correct Speech called in with the correctional thumbscrews. Except Prassel was Correct Speech as well, and that was a whole extra hand poised to slap down Maric Jack if he took just one more liberty.
She was, however, walking away from him, just striding briskly across the little cleared space the medicos’ tents all faced onto. Heroically ignoring the awkward Pel of the Maric’s demands. Until he lurched after her and grabbed her sleeve, hauling the astonished officer to a halt.
Prassel did not like to be touched, Ollery knew that much. Some necromancers went that way, and frankly he preferred that to the alternative. More than that, though, one of the lower orders – an Accessory, lowest of the low – did not lay hands on a superior officer. Most especially not here in the open with every medico there to witness it, and a whole camp of soldiers who could just turn their heads and see. Prassel had frozen, and Ollery did his best to slink back into his tent and pretend to have been somewhere else gathering herbs or something. He was a big man, though, and slinking was not his forte. Prassel’s voice arrested him before he got under cover of the canvas.
When he turned around, two soldiers had magically appeared and were holding the Maric’s arms. No great feat of conjuration, to find soldiers in an army camp, but the speed with which they’d turned up was impressive. And showed that more ears than just medical ones had been drawn by Jack’s shouting. Which meant that it wasn’t just going to be a case of taking the man aside for a slap and a talk about what it meant to wear the uniform.
Well, crap, Ollery thought. It wouldn’t be the first time by any means. Rather this new boy than Banders again. But still. Not a part of the job that he particularly enjoyed, no matter what people said about him.
“Infringing the dignity of an officer,” Prassel said. Ollery almost mouthed the words along with her. She met his gaze. Younger, more ambitious, more decorated and very definitely superior in every respect, and yet there was room in that shared look for a little give and take. After all, she was in charge of the hospital department but it was the Butcher’s circus.
“Six,” she said. “Here, now. Get it over with.”
Ollery nodded heavily. Six was more than four but less than twelve, as they said. Those being the first three grades of minor correction set out in the manuals.
“You’d better hoist him up then,” he said, because technically he couldn’t order regular soldiers about save in the hospital tent where his word was law. They knew their business, though. There was a post driven into the ground beside Tallifer and Lochiver’s shared tent, that served duty as a notice board and hitching post, but also this. They got Jack’s box off him, then stripped him of jacket and shirt, leaving a bare back skinny enough that Ollery could count every rib and knob of spine. Maric Jack was still protesting that he needed to be taken to the spy even as they got the rope about his wrists and then jerked it over the hook at the post’s top.
“Boy!” he barked. “How’s the distillate?” And, when the child poked his head out of Ollery’s tent to nod that it all looked within tolerance, “Get me the Alder.”
The kid actually flinched at the word, then saw Jack at the post with his bare arms above his head. And Ollery hadn’t ever used the Alder on the boy, but he’d certainly threatened it when he was angry enough. Not something be was proud of, but his hot temper was a storm that rained down any words that seemed satisfying in the moment. And it was the hot temper most everyone saw, of Ollery. The cold one was a knife he tried to keep sheathed.
The Alder was a long, flexible switch of wood. Root, actually. Out in Jarokir they had these weird trees that moved, actually crawled about, even caught animals. Their roots were long and nightmarish vegetal tentacles, and if you treated them properly they stayed supple forever. When the boy surrendered it to him, he flexed it in his hands, bent it into a loop, ran his fingers about the braided leather of the grip. Everyone was watching by then. The entire business of the hospital department, and every neighbouring tent, had come to a halt. More circus than even the Butcher felt like playing ringmaster to, but what could you do?
He was expecting begging. Or, given how hapless Maric Jack seemed, some querulous demand to know what was going on. Instead the man was craning back at him and still wanting to talk to the spy. It was sufficiently monomaniac that Ollery was wondering if he should be dispensing something for it. Wouldn’t be the first man to step into the hospital with his mind cracked open. Wouldn’t be the first on the staff, even.
A memory surfaced then, unwelcome as a cyst. Chief Accessory Erinael, whose shoes Ollery’s big feet had overfilled. The way she could touch the brow of a raving madman and bring calm and clarity. Would she have whispered in Maric Jack’s ear and had this obsession out of him like a gallstone, not even a scar to show for the operation? But, like all good things, Erinael had come to a bad end. And though her fall had meant his own profoundly meagre elevation, Ollery would have given a great deal for her to still be with them.
Because now it was just him, standing here with the Alder in his hand.
The boy knew enough to bring the ulmel in its porcelain pot, the one with the frog on its lid. Ollery let Jack’s words bounce off his ears as he slicked a sheen of it along the rod’s narrow length.
He struck the first blow while Jack was still babbling because it was plain the man wouldn’t shut up. He couldn’t have said beforehand whether Jack would be a clencher or a howler, and what he actually got was more a sort of Yawp! sound as the man’s words got unceremoniously cut off.
“One,” Ollery said, loud enough for everyone, and drew back the Alder for another strike. And stopped.
“Don’t,” he said, quiet and just for Jack now. Or Jack and the boy, who was using his privileged position as disciplinarian’s assistant to get a better view.
Jack drew in a ragged breath. “I mean,” he said, with creditable self-possession. “I’d have thought that’d be my line.”
“Just don’t. It’s not clever,” Ollery told him.
“I’m not clever,” Jack said quietly, letting his slight weight pull at the ropes. “Look, this is a thing that’s happening to me, right enough. Just do it, will you. Chief.”
Ollery looked bleakly at the man’s back. Smart mouths on new boys didn’t ever go well. With a convulsive motion he lashed the Alder across the man’s back again.
“One,” he declared again, and even your average soldier knew that wasn’t right, and people began peering to see what was going on. Jack twisted under the blow with another bark of pain, then caught up and started demanding what the hell had happened to two?
Ollery watched it happen this time, the bloom of red just receding into the man’s skin until there was nothing. And that was a fine gift to have in any other damned circumstances but this. He leaned in, one hand a crushing weight on the Maric’s knobbly shoulder.
“Listen, Jack,” he growled. “I figure you don’t understand how they do correction in this man’s army, so here’s the regs. There is an officer in every battalion, the most despised man you can imagine, whose job it is to witness the back of every disciplined man. I have been ordered to give you six, and unless I can show him exactly that many stripes across your back, no more, no less, then you will get this all over again and maybe they’ll put up a big stout post next to yours and give me four for being soft. Do you understand me, you magic foreign prick?”
“Well just do it then,” Jack hissed back. There were tears of pain in his eyes but Ollery would have had more sympathy if they were matched by similar evidence on his back. “Or did I miss the class on Pel where you’ve got more than one number ‘one’ in your bloody maths?”
Ollery blinked. “Do you not know,” he said slowly, “that you’re doing it?”
“Doing what?”
And Ollery told him, setting out in a child’s detail the way things normally went at a whipping.
“Oh crap,” Jack whimpered. “You have to stop.”
“I…” Ollery wasn’t sure just how many ways he could explain what was going on, “can’t stop. Look, you don’t seem to understand how this army works—”
“Not you. You.” And he was looking down at the ground like his feet were conspiring against him. “Stop it. Is this funny to you? Is this… All right, no. You were helping. That’s fine. Help less. Help later. This is serious. This hurts.”
“Hurts still?” Ollery felt that tediously familiar queasy sense of being too close to the uncanny, but that was basically his life since coming to the hospital.
“I mean not now but it bloody did when you hit me. Just…” And Jack was arguing with the ground again, “don’t. Or I’ll disown you, you bastard.”
Ollery caught up, because he’d seen this sort of thing before a couple of times. An occupational hazard of the medical unit. Talking to things that weren’t there. Except sometimes they were.
“Your god,” he said, too quiet even for the boy now.
Jack’s eye swivelled madly to peer at him. “Please.” And then, before he could misinterpret, “Just whip me. If you must. But please, don’t take him away.”
Ollery held his face without expression. He was aware that none of his stock faces would help Jack right now. Not the jolly family butcher nor a great slab of ill temper in the periphery of Jack’s vision.
He stepped back and wound up the Alder again. And there was no prayer in him, good Pal that he was, but he fervently hoped for a lack of divine intervention in the correctional proceedings.
He struck and Jack squawked, and this time the red slash across the man’s shoulders stayed put like it should. The Tally’s script, as the soldiers called it, in reference to that officer whose job it was to make sure every bad student completed their lines. Ollery oiled the Alder with another coat of ulmel, because all the talking had given it time to dry. The stuff was disinfectant and painkiller, because a flogging could go septic if you let it, and if Lochiver wasn’t on his game. In Jack’s case he wasn’t sure it was necessary, but he was a man of routine, even in this.
“One,” he said, with a sick kind of relief, and then went through each of the other five strokes with a solid, ponderous rhythm, calling them out for the crowd. Plenty of the watching soldiers had felt somebody’s lash, and always better when another poor sod was hooked to the post. A mix of sympathy, relief and small-minded betting about when the weeping would start, then. But army life was very dull when it wasn’t far too exciting and so you took your entertainment where you could.
The weeping started after the third blow, early enough that Jack lost a lot of people their backpay or rations. The Maric pressed his forehead to the post and clenched his fists and shook, tensing each time and trying not to scream, and failing not to scream. And Ollery had been whipped himself, more than once, and he’d held out longer than three before even screaming once, but he’d screamed eventually, and wept before the end.
“Six,” he declared. “Now get him to the Tally, double time.” Before he heals and we have to do the whole bloody business again.
*
Outside the Tally Officer’s tent, after the man had pedantically counted the stripes twice over, Ollery sat Jack down. Banders had come along, carrying shirt and jacket draped over that wooden box, and normally he wouldn’t have thought the man would needed either garment for a while, but in this case…
“I have a salve,” he said, “for your back. But I don’t know if you want it. You may as well do your thing.”
Maric Jack was bent over, his hands clenched on his knees, the bloody topography of his back and shoulders set out like a campaign map of difficult terrain. His head jerked up and he said, “I can’t. I don’t do anything. I didn’t heal the spy. I don’t control it.”
“Learn to control it,” Ollery advised flatly. “Wrangle whatever god or spirit or ghost it is that dogs your heels, or you’re no use to anyone.”
“I’m no use to anyone,” Jack agreed. “I never was. Not like that. It’s all…” And he jerked his head towards the box, which Banders promptly put down like it was full of snakes, wiping her hands frantically on her breeches.
Ollery was about to ask why Jack kept his god in a box. Then he considered how many little round door holes the box had, and got a bit of a creeping moment when he wondered just how many residents had been signed up as hospital staff under Jack’s one card.
“God is a healing god,” Jack said. The pain was still there, a wire of it weaving through his words. “He’s a truculent bastard. He won’t do anything any way but his own. He has rules.”
“So does the army,” Ollery said. “And I’ve seen god rules and army rules clash before. And the army is still marching.”
“God’s rule is ‘do no harm’. And if you do harm, after God heals, then he takes it back. I’ve seen it happen. Far too many times. That’s why I have to warn your spy.”
“This again?” Ollery demanded. “Forget it. It’s not your business.”
“It’s a man’s life!” Jack actually leaped to his feet, fists clenched. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to make our business, at your hospital?”
Ollery blinked at him mildly. “Turn around,” he suggested, “if you please.”
Jack looked shifty, turned a shuffling full circle. When he came back round, his eyes were on the box. The house for gods.
“Give him his shirt back,” said Ollery wearily. While the man struggled back into his clothes he added, “Give up on the man. They won’t let you see him. Some things you can’t help. That’s another rule of army life. Unless you’re Banders, who seems to be able to get away with anything.”
Banders gave a little laugh, although she was obviously still a bit spooked by the box. Her eyes followed it as Jack hoist it back onto his unblemished shoulders. When he addressed her directly, she jumped, as though gods would come out of his mouth instead of words.
“Find him, please,” Jack said. “Tell him: do no harm. Nothing that would bring harm to anybody, not friend, not enemy. Just tell him that’s the pin that keeps the healing in place.”
“I mean,” said Banders slowly. “This is an army. You know what an army is, right? I’m sure you Marics had them.”
“Oh the Marics didn’t have any time for God either,” Jack said in a small voice. “Believe me, you Pals didn’t get much persecution in, when you conquered us – sorry, it’s ‘liberated’, isn’t it. Silly me. We were already pretty much persecuted out of existence by then. Except for me. Except for me, and God. It’s just us. But please, Banders. I’ll… owe you, I guess. Whatever that means. Please do this for me.”
For him, and for some spy he never met and knows nothing about, Ollery thought. And surely there was an angle, but right then he couldn’t see it, and that was profoundly more disquieting than any amount of double-dealing and corruption. He caught Banders looking at him, and gave her a nod on the sly, because what could it harm? She rolled her eyes, but then was off on her mission, high-stepping over tent-ropes like a heron.
“Can you walk?” he asked Maric Jack.
The man nodded, though not without a little hesitation. Yes the welts had gone from his back, but not from his mind. Still a lot of tenderness there.
“Learn,” Ollery told him. “Look at me, Jack. You see this face? You see these hands? They do not belong to a good or kind man. Good, kind men do not prosper in war. But they belong to a man who understands how to behave within an army. Learn. Learn about orders and obedience and privileges of rank. I have cauldrons that need watching back at my tent. I don’t want to spend time writing tallies into your back. I have better things to do with it.” I am a brute. I care about nothing but myself. Aware that he didn’t quite have the act down, that some errant humanity was still guttering about the edges of his words.
“I’ll learn,” Jack said, and worst of all, “thank you.” So that Ollery wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled.
“You need some time to recuperate.”
“I’m fine.”
“You need a couple of hours. Standard after a flogging.” If not for the pain, then to get your head around how your life is now. “Someone to talk to.” Someone to convince you about the ways of the world because I don’t have the time or the energy. “Come with me. I’ll take you to Mother Semprellaime.”