They hadn’t burned people at the High Fane. That was a lie the Pals told, to justify what they’d done. It wasn’t as if the Pals usually needed to justify themselves, but after the Fane held out for almost a year the army hadn’t been inclined towards restraint when they finally breached the gates. Tallifer was out, at that point. She’d taken a brand from the sacred fire, that had been burning for ten thousand years, and snuck it out under the noses of the besieging forces. She’d been tasked to take it to a new site, start a new High Fane, continue the fight.
It had gone out. In her headlong flight, baton-shot skittering about her like fleas, she had dropped the sacred fire.
Two days later, she’d woken to find Mazdek the Chastising Flame curled beside her, and known that the temple had fallen, and she was all that was left. She had sworn, then, to fight the Pals to her last breath. Such had been her determination to oppose them that she’d even leagued with a digusting disease worshipper to bring them low. Resist them in any possible way, until they killed her and extinguished the flame forever.
She’d been younger then. And here she was, patching their wounds and following in their baggage train as Forthright Battalion went to war.
“Where’s the tent?” Lochiver demands, and as he’s the third person to ask that, Tallifer isn’t exactly diplomatic in telling him where he can shove the tent that isn’t here. Because Forthright Battalion know to have a tent set up for the experimental hospital department but Landwards doesn’t and it’s Landwards who’ve prepared the ground for the big assault.
“I am not doing all this in the open. It’s going to rain,” Lochiver complains. And he’s right, but then they’re in Bracinta, where the local words for ‘rain’ and ‘weather’ are only a slight shift of emphasis different.
Ollery claps his hands together as though the incipient rain needs a little thunder to get it going. “I’ll get a tent sorted,” he decided, and stomps off to shout at people. Chief Accessory Ollery is not someone who should have authority to shout at anyone wearing a regular uniform. The Butcher, on the other hand, is known across the breadth of Forthright Battalion as the man who decides whether the medicos will save you or not, and so when he bellows, those uniforms scramble to get him what he wants.
In the interim, the department unload their boxes and put up their beds. It’s still dry, and somehow it’s bright sunshine and also louring cloud, because that’s how they do weather in this part of the world. Bracinta still calls itself the Rainbow Lands sometimes. The locals have a whole myth cycle about how the rainbows are the roads that the original Bracites walked, to bring them to this promised land of plenty. Tallifer, who has a fire god curled up in her pocket, isn’t about to say any of it’s nonsense. There are most certainly roads that don’t appear on maps, that burrow between the pages of the cosmic atlas like worms, and why shouldn’t they look like rainbows sometimes?
“Landwards’s off then,” Banders notes. She’s standing on the top of a precarious pile of crates, in a way that doesn’t bode well for either her or anything delicate within. Shading her hand against the sharp splinters of sunlight. “Don’t much like the tree cover ahead. Looks like you could hide twenty companies in there. Better them than us.”
“Fighting, yet?” Masty asks her. He’s dragging beds and boxes into position just as if they had a standard army-issue tent there, conjuring perimeters and boundaries into place out of memory. After a bit of this, it looks like they had a tent only a moment ago, and some freak wind blew it away and just left the contents within its notional footprint.
“Nothing yet. Don’t hear the rattle and they’re just marching,” Banders reports, although odds on they’d not hear baton-shot at this distance. “Moving the heavy stavers in now.” Meaning artillery, great bundles of treated rods on wheeled carriages, horse-drawn or hauled by hand.
A faintly resonant stomp-stomp-stomp heralds the arrival of Cosserby and his Sonori – the nine he was able to restore to working order on the flight over. He grins nervously at Tallifer who gives him only stone in reply, watching the bright expression slowly dry and peel away before her regard.
“I mean,” he says, as though instead of just looks they’ve been exchanging harsh words. “Good morning. I suppose.”
“What do you want, Cosserby? We’re very busy.” She’d like to say saving lives but no lives have presented themselves for saving yet. Landwards have their own field hospitals in place, she presumes, and Forthright is just sitting on its hands. Arguably Cosserby is actually more useful than she is right now, and that galls her beyond reason.
“Ideally, to know what’s going on. Last night Higher Orders were saying we’d be taking point, but now we’re just… not. Not doing that. Or anything. Not sure what Uncle’s doing. Was wondering, you know, if you’d heard anything.”
“Oh yes,” says Tallifer, glad of the opportunity for some sarcasm. “Because the moment Uncle makes a major strategic decision the first thing he thinks is, ‘Oh I must come and tell the field hospital. They’ll be ever so very grateful for the heads up.’”
“I just thought,” says Cosserby, looking aggrieved. “You know. Someone. Banders? Where’s Banders. She knows things.”
Banders takes that opportunity to prod him in the bald spot with the toe of her boot, given that she’s right there and has the required elevation. “Right here. You need those specs changed or what?”
“Banders doesn’t know anything more than we do,” Tallifer decides authoritatively.
“I know there’ve been messengers going between our Higher Orders and Landwards’s all night,” Banders says. “I reckon there’s been a real hamfight over seniority. And given the Professor’s been sat here with Landwards, I think Uncle got slapped down and they get the honours.”
“I mean, did we want it?” It’s Jack, hauling in the last box of glassware and setting it down in the precise spot Masty’s left for it. “It doesn’t sound much of a good thing, to go in first. Doesn’t that mean you get hurt more?”
“Hark at him,” Banders chuckled. “Here, make yourself useful. Have your bell lads cup hands so I can step down.”
Cosserby gives Banders a look that suggests she doesn’t know just how complicated that actually is, but he does it anyway because he’s a sucker, and she descends from her perch like the grandest lady of the Bracite royal court.
“Thing you don’t understand, Jack,” she says, “is the glory of it. First in, take the city, drive the enemy from the walls. Big feather in the cap for the commander. Looks really good in the dispatches. Commendations all round.”
“Well.” Jack scratches his head, “I mean, fine, but it doesn’t sound much of a good deal for the actual people going in, though.”
“You do not get this army thing, do you?” Banders asks him. Then there’s a shrill whistle and, in its echo, the indefinable sound of hundreds of soldiers getting ready.
“I think that’s me,” Cosserby says almost apologetically, as though he’d promised them a scintillating anecdote and they were all agog to hear it.
Banders knocks twice on the nearest Sonori, a musical ringing sound that goes on and on, fading slowly past the further reaches of hearing. “For luck,” she tells him, a sentiment entirely against Correct Thought but he seems to appreciate it. Then his toy soldiers are clumping off, with him at their back like a fussy shepherd.
The tent’s going up, by then, and it turns out Masty has a pinpoint accuracy of memory that Tallifer can’t quite believe. There’s barely an inch of space between where he’s set everything out and where the canvas goes. Which makes putting the tent up somewhat more complicated than necessary, but then they should have had it ready before the department arrived to set up.
“When do we go out? How does this work?” The new girl, Lidlet. Because Maric Jack isn’t the new one now. And partly it’s that Lidlet is newer, only days in, her first active service within the department. But also, Jack has seen things. Seen enough to be one of them. Stitched wounds, seen death, performed miracles. Literal miracles. Tallifer surprises herself with the sentiment, but he’s One Of Us now. And she watches him set out a line of bandages ready for their first customer, and it’s just like Masty does it, which means it’s the right way. A quick study, our Jack.
He catches her eye. He’s nervous, because they all are, right before Hell opens its doors to the paying public, and because of some crap he’s got going on of his own that Tallifer has no wish to know about. Nervous, but steady. Reliable. All she can ask of her colleagues is that they are reliable.
“The stretcher bearers go out with the second wave,” she tells Lidlet. “By that time the first wave will have served up the starters and you’ll have something to do. Second wave whistle. You know what that sounds like?” And at least Lidlet was a regular before she fell to these depths. She knows the signals. She’s very pale, sweating, biting at her lip like she’s never seen combat. Tallifer rolls her eyes. “What? You’d rather be out there having them shoot at you?” And, all around them, outside the walls of the tent, the soldiers are marching, moving out orderly and tight.
“I. Just.” Lidlet presses her lips together. “You don’t know. What if they. What if the enemy. If I’m attacked?”
Tallifer opens her mouth for a scathing, Well la-di-da, actually doing soldier work too good for you now, but stops. Lidlet is trembling. She has a hand to her breast as though she’s finding it hard to breath. This trooper, this career soldier, as undone as a child. The woman’s eyes stray to Jack but he’s ostentatiously not having anything to do with the conversation, making a big show of counting things that don’t need the enumeration.
The second whistle goes. The second wave begin advancing through the camp. A range of specialists, intelligencers, reinforcements, a handful of front-line patchers and stitchers Tallifer is distantly acquainted with, one professional with another. Hell is about to get busy.
“I’ll go with you,” Masty says, suddenly at Lidlet’s elbow.
“You? Why?”
Because he understands what’s got into her. Whatever happened out in the mud, between her and Jack and death, he was there for it. But all he says is, “Well, you need someone for the other end of the stretcher. Might as well be me.”
A single shudder goes through Lidlet. It’s gratitude, Tallifer decides. Ollery is telling Masty he can’t go, he’s needed here, but the man steps between the words as though he’s dodging raindrops and staying dry. Then he and Lidlet and a stretcher have absented themselves to go join all the Company bearers who are following up on the first advance to pick up its human litter.
“Shambles,” the Butcher complains. “We cross one sea and everything’s out of joint.”
“What are we even fighting for?” Jack asks.
The Butcher turns a louring eye on him. “Have you not had that peacemongering stuff beaten out of you yet?”
“No,” Jack says patiently. “I don’t mean, like, in a wider philosophical way. I mean, what are we doing here. Here right here. Right now. This battle.”
“Oh.” Ollery rubs at the back of his neck. “Banders?”
Except Banders, who probably does know, has knocked off for a smoke somewhere. You never see her go, you never see her come back. Tallifer doesn’t know, but isn’t interested in admitting her ignorance, so pretends she hasn’t heard the question. Then Alv comes in, conspicuous in her absence until now.
“Have you seen my students?”
The Butcher frowns. “What?”
“My new class of students.”
“New class?” His broad face is absolutely blank.
“They didn’t tell you?” Alv is not someone who gets agitated. She is the human embodiment of placidity, like the still mirror of a lake without a single ripple. Right now she’s twitchy as a frog, out of balance. “My students were held back, when we travelled. Ready, they said. Ready for deployment. I was to receive a new class to teach, when we got here.”
This is all plainly news to the Butcher. Bad news, because Alv’s student body was basically a dumping ground for all the small injuries so everyone else could concentrate on the big stuff. And now that entire resource has been stripped from them and nobody except Alv even knew until now.
“Well we’ll…” Ollery looks out of the open tent flap, towards where the soldiers marched off to. “We’ll make the best fist of it, is what we’ll do. Jack, set me out a rack of bandages and some clean needles and thread here by the door and I’ll stitch what I can, when I can.” Big hands and thick fingers, the Butcher, but a very delicate touch with a needle when he has to, just like the tiny pinches of herbs in his cookery. Always precise, whether in dosage or the application of force.
Alv sits on one of the operating tables and takes a deep breath, expelling all that agitation. There’s still a crescent of shiny skin about her jaw, cheekbone and the orbit of one eye, and Lochiver’s injury still troubles her walk, but other than that she’s shed it all like snakeskin. Somehow.
I wonder if she can do it with age, Tallifer thinks gloomily. Be nice to offload a decade on her and then let her piss it away into nowhere for me. She’s scared to ask, in case Alv says yes. Where would that end, exactly?
Jack is setting up the Butcher’s little stitching station, having a muttered argument in his hooley-hooley language. She’d say that the habit would get him into trouble one day, Pal attitudes towards linguistics being what they are, but Jack’s already been in enough trouble that talking to himself in Foreign honestly isn’t going to make much odds. If Correct Speech carts him off again the moment the battle’s over it won’t surprise her.
And still the casualties fail to flood in. It’s been almost two whole hours now since Landwards’s vanguard marched off into those woods. Everyone is getting very twitchy. Ollery puts his head out of the tent and yells for news every so often, but there is none. Nobody’s coming back, that’s the problem. Nobody is returning from the front at all. A thing as powerfully unnatural as anybody ever heard.
Then the word comes that they’re moving, after having everything set up and pristine. Wagons roll in, get loaded up by a skeleton crew of clerks and labourers and general bureaucratic malingerers, and they go into those woods themselves. And it’s dark, and the rain has, true to form, started again. The hissing of it against the foliage that lines the track obviates the need to make conversation. They sit there, hunched under canvas to keep dry, and on either side the darkness between the trees watches back. A thousand unseen eyes, and every pair of them might be sighting along a baton. Lochiver asks loudly if anybody wants him to play, and everyone tells him that they get plenty enough of that when they’re at work, thank you, but Tallifer flicks his ear to get his attention, and gives him the nod.
He puts his flute to his lips, that horrible flute, those horrible lips. And plays. And it’s not his god-pleasing votive skirl that so offends the human ear but is irresistible to the things of putrefaction and sickness. Instead, it’s an old Jarokiri song. A shepherd song, that you might hear drifting across the scrubby grazing land in their far homeland. They’re on the right side of the sea for it, for the first time in almost a decade, though Jarokir is a long way from Bracinta. Lochiver plays, and none of them ever heard him actually make music. Nobody understood that you have to be able to play well, if you’re going to play horribly properly. The old man’s eyes are closed, and if he wasn’t quite so filthy and ragged and generally of unfond memory then it might actually have been a moment of beauty. As it is, it manages to overcome the rain and at least stave off everyone’s nerves. Holds the dark at bay until they break out of the trees and into the sunlight. A myriad of rainbows scatter around them like brightly coloured birds and Lochiver takes his flute from his lips.
“They haven’t got a fucking tent for us again,” he notes. “What is the pissing world coming to?”
*
Somehow they survive that, the putting up of a new tent, the setup within. All done slipshod and in a hurry, because there’s no Masty to know exactly where everything goes, and because the casualties must be coming in any moment. Unless it’s worse than that. Unless whatever the Loruthi are deploying this time doesn’t leave any casualties it’s worth bringing back for the medicos to go over. Doesn’t leave anything that can’t be brought back in an urn. And the silence of it is getting to them now. Not that it’s actually silent, because there’s the rain and the sounds of the forest at their backs and the wind and the world and all the rest of it. But what there isn’t is the war. No shooting, artillery roar and baton’s rattle. No screaming. Tallifer hadn’t thought she’d miss it, but apparently that’s just one more way her role here has broken her.
And they wait. And, overblown poetics aside, waiting is far from the worst part of warfare, but it builds up. It leans on you steadily, as the time drags on. It thickens the air so that just breathing in and out becomes oppressive, a surrogate clock reminding you of all the terrible things that haven’t happened yet. And Ollery keeps wanting word, but nobody’s coming back from the front. Not one person. Nobody.
Not Masty and Lidlet, that’s for certain.
“Should we send someone after them?” Jack asks timorously.
“What now?” the Butcher demands.
“Lidlet. Should we? She’s… I mean, something might have happened.”
“It’s a battle,” Tallifer tells him acidly. “A battle is basically something happening to as many people as it can get hold of.”
“Yes, but—”
“Should we send someone to see if something has happened to two soldiers who have gone to a battle? And what if it has, exactly. What will you do? You want to send stretcher bearers to bring back the stretcher bearers? What’s your plan, Jack?” Her voice rising to a vitriolic chalkboard screech because by now she’s jumpy as bugs on a griddle because nothing has happened and nobody has come back.
Jack stares at her. “I just think I may have done a bad thing.”
“Knowing you, probably,” Tallifer tells him dismissively.
“With Lidlet, I mean.”
“Also probably. Will you just—” And then, thank Mazdek the Chastising Flame, thank Sturge the Unclean, thank whatever dumbass gods the Maric worships, someone’s coming in through the tent flat. It’s Masty. It’s Lidlet. Between them, the stretcher. On the stretcher, a soldier with a hastily splinted ankle.
“What’s happening?” the Butcher roars. “Where are the rest? What’s happened to them.”
And they get the casualty, singular, to a table where Alv can look at the ankle – broken, but not messy. And Lidlet sits down and shakes a bit, and Masty accepts the water bottle that Banders – miraculously reappeared – hands him. And, after a long swig, tells the tale.
The army is at the city walls, he says. It’s news to everyone but Banders that they really were trying to get to any city walls, but apparently that was the plan. Landwards’s vanguard marched all the way to the city, and found the gates opened by a populace very keen to show how happy they were to be liberated by returning Pal forces. The Loruthi didn’t even leave a token garrison, just melted away before the superior numbers of the Palleseen. The whole day passed without a single shot being fired and their solitary casualty was brought low by nothing more than a rabbit burrow.