Lidlet: jug-eared, tough, the trooper’s trooper. No phal education but top-grade credentials from the schools of life and military regulations. A bit harsh to say all she’d ever wanted to do was kill people, but if you grew up poor on the Archipelago the army was the only ladder anyone was letting down for you. And some Maric came and screwed you over with his good intentions, and where did that leave you? In the mud.
She and her fellow bearer had been stumbling through the dark ahead of the Loruthi advance forever, it seemed like. The waning of the smoke passed into the gathering of evening like sentries changing shift. Cosserby’s whimpering, wheezing bulk kept convulsing; so did the footing. They were forever staggering to a halt so one or other of them could shift their grip. The only way Lidlet knew they hadn’t been turned around was that nobody had shot them yet. Yet the Pal lines had evaporated, just more smoke on the wind. As though the cratered mud went on forever.
And then her fellow, the man at the rear end of the comedy horse that was their stretcher, put his burden down suddenly enough that, yes, she assumed he had been shot.
He hadn’t been shot. He was standing there, staring down at Cosserby.
“He’s dead,” the man said. “Give it up. He’s dead.” Lidlet couldn’t see much of their burden in the dark, but she knelt by him and put an ear to where she reckoned his mouth was, listening for breathing. Breathing, yes, though ragged and faint. Where she touched it, Cosserby’s uniform is saturated with wet.
“He’s still alive,” she said stubbornly.
“I’ve heard men sound like that,” the other bearer told her. “He’s dead and the Lorries are right after us.”
“It’s a shoulder,” she snapped. “You don’t die of a shoulder. He’s fine.”
“He’s dead.” And of course people died of shoulder wounds all the time, especially nasty exploded-looking ones. And the blood was slick down Cosserby’s chin, and that suggested that what was shoulder on the outside had a whole nasty hidden cast of characters within.
She crouched by her handles. “Pick up,” she said.
“Give it up, Lidlet. Let’s go.” He was two steps further from the stretcher now, without anything in his body language so much as admitting he’d moved. As though everything else in the world was a boat being taken away by the tide and all he could do was watch.
She didn’t know his name nor where he knew her from. She was mightily tempted by his reasoning. It didn’t go against the writ of Maric Jack, after all. No small print about having to carry Cosserby’s body until it became Cosserby’s corpse.
“Pick it up,” she told the other bearer. “Come on. We can get him back. An officer. Commendations all round.”
The man looked at her then down at Cosserby, or she thought he did from the pale smudge that was his face at night.
“Fuck the officers and fuck you,” he said, and then he was gone, just running off into the night, three times as fleet as two people with a stretcher. And now Lidlet was one person with a stretcher, so that was the decision made, wasn’t it? No way she would be getting a dying man back to camp over her shoulder.
She also let the sinking boat that was Cosserby on the stretcher drift out a little, by way of moving her feet through the mud in a camp-wards direction. She could still see it, a darker smear that the faint, ambient light somehow picked up on. He didn’t sink, and spare her. The harsh wheeze of his breath came to her with a horrible insistency, as though, if she left now, she’d never be rid of it.
She let the stretcher drift nearer across that great, dark ocean, again by way of her feet. The Loruthi still hadn’t caught up and taken the decision out of her hands and, right then, she hated them for that most of all.
“Magister.” She bent low to where she hoped his ear was. “Listen, I need you to get up now. If you’ve got it in you. I can give you a shoulder to lean on but the stretcher, not so much. Magister, can you hear me.” Feeling a slow screw of frustration and fear tighten in her because somehow she was still here, talking to this almost-a-cadaver, telling him to get on his feet. “Come on, magister,” she hissed. “Come on.” Shaking him, exactly what you didn’t do with a badly wounded person. “You… come on, be a brave soldier for Banders. On your feet for Banders. Won’t she be impressed, when you limp in with your wound? Ladies love a scar, magister. Come on up.”
His breathing changed. Not for the better or the worse, really, but now she could hear the faint sobs in amongst the wheezing. Cosserby was conscious after all, however much he’d rather not be. Conscious and weeping. She felt his body shaking.
She wanted him to be brave. She wanted him to say, “Leave me, soldier. You just get clear.” Because she’d be off like a shot and tell everyone how terribly courageous the last moments of Cohort-Monitor Cosserby were. Except he wasn’t that courageous and didn’t say it, just cried.
“She won’t ever, you know,” Lidlet spat at him, feeling that she’d never hated anyone as much as she hated this selfish living bastard right now. Not the Loruthi, even. Give her a green uniform, she’d shoot the man herself. “She’s never going to think of you like that. You’re just not her type. Or mine. Or anyone’s. I mean, I’d say ‘only a mother could love’ but I bet she got shot of you into the phalanstery double time, too.” Listening to him sniffle and gag on his own misery. Thinking, Oh, so I can go for the emotional harm, can I? Have to add that to the notes.
She sat down beside Cosserby, horrified to discover that she was not, in fact, going to leave him. What? What is it? She would at no point describe herself as either courageous or compassionate. But his weeping had a hook in her, somehow. If she left now, she’d dream of it. Cosserby, abandoned out at sea, still alive. Unless she saw him die, he’d never be dead to her. He’d haunt her beyond anything Prassel could have done with his ghost.
“I’m going to pick you up now,” she decided, and got as far as getting her hands under his armpits before he screamed so loud she was amazed the entire Loruthi army didn’t turn up. She dropped him sharpish, and he screamed again from falling the whole half inch she’d lifted him by. And still didn’t just pass out so she could pretend he was dead. Just kept on whimpering, breath sobbing in and out and truculently refusing to stop like any decent person’s breath would at this point.
She put her head in her hands.
“All right, magister,” she whispered. “It’s like this. I can get you out of this. I can help you stop the pain. But you have to agree to something. It’s just rules. You know how the army likes rules.”
She could see the faintest glint where his eyes were. He was watching her.
“I mean, not like you were ever the type to go down swinging your fists at people anyway. You’re giving up practically nothing.”
She found his hand and there was just enough left in him to clasp weakly about her fingers. She heard his voice, or thought she heard his voice. “Please…”
Where the hell’s Jack when you need him? But there was no Jack. There was just her, Lidlet, adherent of God through a legal loophole. But she was the eternal pragmatist. She’d pray to anything right now, and still call herself an atheist tomorrow. Because if God had rules then she doesn’t have to believe in Him any more than she was required to have ardent faith in the disciplinary code or the proper sequence of parade-ground baton drill. It just was.
She bowed her head and began to petition God inside it, just as if she was wrangling for leave privileges with a recalcitrant duty officer. There must be some combination of words she could use that would reach God and bring Him round. Come on, just this once. He’s not a bad man. Okay so he’s an officer, and his job is to make those big bastard metal lads go, and that’s probably two strikes against him. And he’s a Pal like me, but you did me when Jack asked. Why can’t I pay that forward? Come on, God, be a mate, now.
“A mate, is it?” said a voice. A very faint, very crotchety voice, with an accent like Jack’s only more so. And she opened her eyes and couldn’t see anyone there.
“A friend. A favour. Come on,” she said out loud. Maybe it was the Loruthi after all, and they were having a fine old game at her expense. Seemed unnecessarily nuanced, given the leverage of their respective positions, but she’d take it.
“You’re not what I look for in a follower,” said the voice, and Lidlet blinked. There was something on Cosserby’s chest. Someone. Or, no, maybe something. Some kind of beardy monkey got up in a dress. And see-through. Barely there at all, except it was dark so she shouldn’t be able to only-just-see anything. Except she could.
His face, that screwed up raisin of a thing behind the beak nose and the goat’s ass snarl of beard, had on an expression that suggested He was just as disappointed by her.
“What,” she said. “I’m doing my best, all right?”
“You’re still alive, you mean,” God said. It was God. Or else it was a hallucination, but surely she’d have imagined God a bit grander, left to her own devices. “You can see me, then?”
Lidlet shrugged.
“Only I’ve been riding about on your shoulder half the damn time and yelling in your ear. But oh no, it’s only when you want a favour. I swear you’re as bad as he is. What?”
Lidlet felt like she was going to join Cosserby with the weeping any moment. Oh, not from wonder. Not because she was confronted by the awful majesty of the divine. Because this, apparently, was it. The ghost of a hundred-years dead monkey. Jack’s God.
“I am so tired,” she told God. “I cannot drag this stubborn bastard back and he’d not survive it if I could. Please make him whole so I can get home and not die.”
“He’ll only die again. You may as well just leave him,” God said. “You Pals, you make brutalising the world a way of life. What I’ve seen today, I never thought…” And He cocked His head at her again. “But you’re still alive.”
“I know how rules work. I listen. Help him. And I’ll tell the rules to him. He’s the rules-y type too. I’ll make sure he gets it. And all the rest. Don’t think I didn’t see you picking them up. We got twice as many out as we had stretchers. I’ll track them down, tell them how it is.”
“You’re mad,” God told her. “You’re a soldier. They’re all soldiers. In an army. How do you think this is even going to work. You’re mad and Jack was right.”
“I’ll find a way. It’s what I’m good at. What else do you want? Sacrifices? I’ve got spare boots back at camp, and a good pair of gloves I won at coinsy. I’ve got a pair of trousers I could do without, seeing as you’ve got none. Or you like honey?”
“I… what?” God demanded. “Are you trying to get me in the bloody uniform? I’m bloody God, you authoritarian bastard. I do not march. Although,” He added, “I will take the honey. Just a little. Spill it somewhere out of sight.”
Lidlet pictured God fighting ants for it.
“And I want you to become a priest,” God threw in, but Lidlet recognised when someone was testing the limits of a system because she’d been there herself.
“I am not giving up my shagging privileges,” she said. “I’ve heard Jack. I know what goes on with that. Or doesn’t go on. Look, do we have a deal or—”
But God was gone, if indeed He’d ever been there. Lidlet swore, and knew then that she would leave Cosserby now. Just walk away. She’d done all she could, up to and including proactive theology. Time to call it a night.
For the form of it, she reached out to close his eyes, and yelped when he gripped her wrist.