237 - When you lose a patient

10 Egis 4974 | Osiri, Yeola-e

Dear Mamin:

Chevenga made us march the day after the battle, even though he usually allows a day of rest, and in fact that is the standard practice. He said it wasn’t that much of a battle and so it didn’t warrant either that much exhaustion or celebration, and now was the time to press Yeola-e’s advantage by freeing as many towns as possible before the Arkans regroup. The only mercy he had was setting reveille two and a half beads late to let his army sleep off the aftereffects of self-induced alcohol poisoning. He didn’t even like that, pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage as the sun got higher, and saying, “I don’t care if everyone else’s tent isn’t broken down for another bead, do mine now!”

Then he decided to roust up five of his highest officers, including Niku, who really hates being rousted up, to do something off in a big tent enclosure they set up just for it. I think he wanted to show them some sort of device, I have no idea what, because he had Diyadesai there, too.

I’ve got to tell you about Diyadesai. I don’t know her surname; apparently she never uses it. She is here as an engineer, though there isn’t much engineering to be done, since Chevenga hasn’t ordered the building of any siege-engines more complicated than giant logs with handles to knock down palisades. But what she really is is an inventor, and she is always working on… something. When we march she doesn’t march, she rides in a biggish cart drawn by several mules, in which she is working. Chevenga says it’s more important that she keep working than spare the mules. “You think I am a maniac for work, you should see her,” he told me after I first met her. “When she’s really on something, she’ll go three or four nights without sleeping at all.”

“What’s she working on?” I asked him.

“I have no idea. Probably several things at once. I asked her to figure out ways to help an army move faster, but there are limits there that no device can overcome. When I ask her about her own pursuits, I never understand what she is talking about. I do it just to humour her. But people as brilliant as her, you just let do what they want. If she comes up with just one device that changes the whole world in her life, it will all have been worth it. She’s healthy, as far as I know, but doesn’t think about taking care of herself much, and she’s getting on, fifty-odd or so. May I ask you to check her every now and then?”

So I’ve started doing that. She is very salfir, a very messy woman, whether it’s her brown-grey hair with the curls every which way, or her clothes, that always seem rumpled or falling wrong, or the inside of her cart, which is full of things I can’t begin to name, and smells like poisons cooking; she always seems to be doing some chemistry. I’ve gone once, and she hardly seemed to notice I was tapping her ribs or pressing her wrists, barely looked away from whatever she was doing when she stuck out her tongue for me. But she is very cheerful and friendly and knows as much as we Haians do about our devices. She has an idea for a device to extricate weapons lodg— …lodged in tissues, I meant to write. Sorry for the squiggle, Mamin, I was interrupted.

When I was writing I was in my section of Chevenga’s tent. Rounds in the infirmary went quickly once camp was set here, at sunset. I’d written that much when there were what sounded like war-cries and then yells of pain in Kallijas’s section.

The two Arkans, him and Minakis, his friend whose femoral artery I repaired eight days ago, were there together; I could hear them talking quietly in Arkan. Chevenga and his squires were out, dining with the allied generals as he has begun to do often lately. He has his tent too lightly guarded in Krero’s opinion, with just ten; “I’m my own guard,” he says, meaning the gift for sensing weapons that he has. When he’s out there are usually just four. Though I think that might change now.

“Guards! Guards!” I yelled in Yeoli. “Something’s happening in the Arkan’s section! Help!” No one answered me. “Oh shit, the Haian’s next door!” someone said in Yeoli, then someone else screamed “Aaaiiiiigh, child-raping Arkan!” in agony. Then a voice I was sure was Kallijas’s, crying “Minakis!!”

My tent-room has two flaps, one that goes to Chevenga’s quarters and the other to the outside. I ran out the outside one. The two guards that should be at the back weren’t there. I ran back through Chevenga’s quarters and then the front room that he uses as an office, where he has his armour-stand and the sword of Saint Mother. The front two guards weren’t outside where they should be, either.

If I looked in the doorway to Kallijas’s tent-room, would someone cut my head off? I did it anyway.

The guards were in here, two of them with swords, trying to hit Kallijas, who had the brass lampstand in his two hands, moving so fast it was a blur. I heard a thump on bone and one of them went down without a sound. The other one turned and ran, screaming, “Help! Help!” Kallijas threw the lampstand, hitting the man in the back but not stopping him, then snatched up a Yeoli sword from the floor. “The Arkans! They tried to escape!” the Yeoli was screaming. But Kallijas wasn’t running anywhere; he went right to his friend, who was lying across the bed, bleeding severely both from his leg again, and his abdomen. There were three Yeolis on the floor, two unmoving, one writhing and groaning.

Kallijas looked all around, and saw me. “Kaninjer! Help him… please…” I was so shocked I’d just been standing there. Now I moved. But there were the others. It was triage. I’d never done it. I needed more help. Why weren’t others coming? They were, I heard pounding feet, as I did quick checks. One broken skull, unconscious and breathing poorly, pupils unresponsive; one concussion with skull intact, unconscious but breathing well, pupils moving but uneven; one conscious and saying “Ohh, my stones, my stones,” a testicular impact and nothing else; one conscious and breathing but with penetrating wounds to femoral artery—the Arkan I’d treated—and abdomen, his intestines and possibly one kidney pierced. His chances were the worst. I heard the voice of the fourth guard again, saying “They tried to escape! The Arkans tried to escape, we tried to stop them!”

“Shit of Saint Mother,” said the man he was talking to, who had some kind of officer’s insignia, “this is the semanakraseye’s tent!”

“I’m on my parole and I ask your protection,” Kallijas said to him in Enchian, unearthly calm. “My friend and I were attacked. If you arrest me, I’ll come peacefully.”

“Please send someone for two more Haians, and three litters, as fast as you can,” I said. Then had to yell it again, over the fourth guard who was shouting, “He’s kyashin lying, kras! They attacked us!”

“Kevyalin shut up and stand down!” the officer bellowed. The man still had his sword out. “Sheathe it! You, get two Haians and three litters, you get Chevenga, say absolutely urgent, go! Nobody else make a kyashin move except the Haian or if… Haian, what should we do?”

“I have this one,” I said. I was applying pressure to the arterial wound; the other would be bleeding mostly internally, nothing I could do until I got him onto a table. “The unconscious ones should have one person each making sure they stay breathing, and give arn—I mean, whack-weed drops, the conscious one, whack-weed too and someone should rap his heels, you know how?” He pointed and people moved.

“He squared me with the kyashin lampstand, kras. He was trying to escape, why aren’t you arresting him or carving out his guts!?”

“You may truth-drug me,” Kallijas said. “It was them who attacked us.”

“You dirty raping straw-haired lying—”

“All of you shut up!” the officer snapped. “You can explain it to the semanakraseye. His tent, his jurisdiction.”

Kallijas was right beside me, his gloved hand on his friend’s forehead. They talked to each other in Arkan, and I got the impression that Kallijas was reassuring, as is appropriate. “My hands are full and my bag is in my room,” I said to the officer. “Will you give him whack-weed?” His pulse was speeding and his skin turning clammy, with shock. He needed to be on intravenous and anaesthetic very fast. With distaste, the officer pulled out his vial and handed it to Kallijas. Though he was Arkan, he knew how to use it. I kept hearing him say his name, “Minakis.”

Then Haians and Yeolis were crowding in and unrolling litters, and I could let myself forget about the other patients for this one. “Let me go with him, I beg,” Kallijas said to the officer. “Only bound and with two guards,” the officer barked. Kallijas held out his hands, submitting to it, and they trussed them behind his back and took hold of his arms. We’d just set off running Minakis to the infirmary when I heard Chevenga’s voice behind me, with an edge like a sword. “If they were trying to escape, why was the fight so deep inside the tent?”

I didn’t have any thoughts other than medical from then, until I had done all that I could do. We all did our best as always, Mamin. Between the two wounds and still being weak already from the previous one, he really never had a chance. He went under saying things to Kallijas that sounded like instructions, while Kallijas kept saying his name and begging and demanding and ordering that he stay with us, I’m sure. As his voice faded weaker he kept saying “Aras,” which I learned later is the name of the Arkan warrior God.

We opened him and did some work, but he was gone before we were half-way. I was the one who should tell Kallijas, “You need not keep speaking to him. We have failed. We are sorry.” So I did. He just went very quiet and still beside me. I think by then he was expecting it.

“Thank you, Kaninjer, and all of you,” he said, his deep voice very quiet. “You did your utmost. I don’t count it failure. Thank you.”

He needed the medicines for grief, and support from those close to him. Who was that, here? Chevenga alone, but Chevenga was trying to keep their relationship secret. I didn’t even know if he was waiting outside. Spirit of Life, he needed just to have his hands untied. He hadn’t even been able to hold his friend. And I couldn’t authorize that, because the way they look at it, it’s not a healing thing, but a war thing. Mamin… I am learning, sometimes the brutalities of war are the simplest and smallest and somehow still the cruelest things.

He went down onto his knees, and laid his cheek on his friend’s forehead, and closed his eyes.

“Kan, did I hear that right?” Chevenga was outside. He spoke in Yeoli, his voice falsely calm. “He died?”

“Minakis, yes,” I said. I didn’t know what to do—should I do up a report as usual? Who would I submit it to? What would we do with the corpse, when he didn’t have kin or commanding officer here?—so I didn’t know what else to say.

Chevenga came in. His face was pale. “Who in the…! Free him!” The Yeolis with him hesitated, and protested, so he came stamping in, drew his dagger and cut the bonds himself. Then he and Kallijas started talking in Arkan, so I don’t know what they said. I washed up, and got Kallijas to as well, and the three of us went back to Chevenga’s tent. He took us around the front. In Kallijas’s tent-room, his little brother and sister were cleaning up.

As soon as we were in private, Chevenga took Kallijas into his arms, and Kallijas let himself cry. Aside from giving him grief-medicines, I should leave them to it, I saw, so when that was done, I slipped into my room, where I found this letter lying undisturbed, mid-sentence. By now it was late enough that the army should be retiring to their beds, but they were crowding around the tent, and I heard Krero and a few others start saying, “Shove off, bed down, you’ll get all the truth in time, go, that’s an order.”

So I’m writing, and I’m sorry for the shaky letters. I’m imagining your face, and your arms around me. It’s not as if I’ve never lost a patient before, I lost a few before this war, and many, many more here. But this… I don’t know, I somehow felt it more. It’s not even because I’d saved him once already; mostly when you lose a patient you’ve worked on them. It’s because… it’s all so unnatural, I guess. And maybe because I saw the violence, or a bit of it.

Or else it’s because I saw, right in front of my eyes, a person lie about it, and be hateful towards the bereaved. A Yeoli warrior, one of Chevenga’s, one of those I’m working for, one who’s supposed to be on the good side. I don’t believe Kallijas and Minakis were trying to escape. It’s as Chevenga said: if that was the case, why were they so far inside? And it doesn’t make sense for a warrior to grab up a brass lampstand to try to fight his way out. He’d have snuck into Chevenga’s quarters and stolen one of his swords, maybe even his armour, and then done it. It makes a lot of sense, though, for a warrior to grab up a brass lampstand to defend himself when someone comes in trying to kill him. I may not know anything about fighting, but you don’t have to know anything to see that.

Chevenga and Krero will sort it all out, get the full truth. Yeolis have truth-drug now, so maybe they’ll use it. Not on every witness, I hope, because that would include me.

Or maybe it’s because I’m seeing the grief and the pain. I hear Kallijas crying again, half-muffled, so his face must be pressed against Chevenga, and I keep hearing Chevenga say the same thing in Arkan, which I think means ‘I’m sorry,’ and now and then his voice breaks too. He’s blaming himself. He would. I’ve saved Kallijas, too, and come to know him and so feel for him. Maybe I should have handed it off to another Haian, because I was too close.

Or maybe it’s because I’m scared shitless what will happen next.

I’m taking calming essence. I can almost hear your reminder to do that. Have other words of wisdom for me, Mamin? I can always use them. I’m sending this one... I wrote in the last one, that I didn’t send, about Chevenga and Kallijas falling in love, in some way so far beyond my understanding that it might as well be outside the universe, while they were dueling. I knew for sure it was a secret then. It isn’t now.

Love from your powerless-feeling son,
Kaninjer.