Phoenix and Ashes

riding with the ambulances. His grandmother and Lady Virginia DeMarce, his godmother, thought he might be more willing to unburden himself to someone he knows.'

Reggie almost laughed with pent-up hysteria. Someone he knew! Good God, if that was all it was! If they only knew, all those medicos— if they only knew!

But the chair arrived, and he levered himself into it, wanting nothing more than to be out of this ward, quickly, where he could finally talk to someone who would at least understand. Because he was not 'just' a victim of shellshock. Oh no. That was only the smallest of his problems. . . .

It was an unseasonably warm day, he discovered, as Maya wheeled him briskly and efficiently out into the hospital garden. That was a relief, for she was able to find a little alcove where they could be quite private, and park him with his 'back to a wall. He blessed her exquisite sensitivity, but she was an Earth Master, after all, and a Healer to boot, and sensitivity came with that description.

'Well, Reggie,' she said, the moment she settled down across from him, with their knees practically touching. She took out a bit of paper from her pocket and consulted it. 'I'm going to make this easier and more difficult for you. I have been studying Doctors Freud and Jung's works, and as you heard, I have already seen several normal cases of shellshock. I did my studying of your case before I arrived, so let me tell you quickly what I know, then we'll get to what I don't know. I know you were shot down, your observer was killed—' she looked at the paper in her hand '—Erik Kittlesen, wasn't it?'

He nodded, numbly, both desperately grateful that he wasn't actually having to tell all this himself, and appallingly afraid of what he was going to have to say when she started asking questions.

'You came down close to the Hun side in No-Man's Land. Some of the Huns came to get you out of the wreckage, and a barrage hit, killing everyone but you. Then one of our parties got you out, dragged you to a bunker, and another barrage hit, burying you in the bunker for two days until another rescue party dug you out. Is that the long and the short of it?'

He nodded. His mouth felt horrible dry, and when he licked his lips, he fancied he could still taste that horrible substance that passed for air in the trenches and the bunkers—a fetid murk tainted with the smell of past gas attacks, and thick with the stench of death, of blood and rotting flesh, rats and foul water.

'Now comes the hard part,' she said, and reached over to take his unresisting hand. 'Now I ask you questions. And Reggie, you must answer them. I can't help you if you don't, or won't.'

Once again, he nodded, feeling his throat closing up with panic, and the sting of helpless tears behind his eyelids.

'Why did you get shot down?' she asked implacably. 'You are an Air Master, one of the most skilled I know. We both know it wasn't luck that was keeping you in the sky, particularly not given the horrid old rattletraps you were often given. So what happened?'

'I went up,' he croaked. 'And—Maya, this is a damned wretched thing to say, but—look, the only way I was ever able to face what I was doing was to never, ever think about the Hun as anything other than a target.' He made a sound like a laugh. 'Actually, I was Erik's only chance to go up at all, which was why I was in a two-seater instead of flying solo as usual. Everyone knew that even though Erik crashed more birds than he flew, anything he aimed at, he hit—he even took down a Hun with a half-brick, once! He'd crashed his plane as usual; the only things available were my usual bird, which was having a wonky engine anyway, and the two-seater. They knew if he was in the observer's seat, I could concentrate on flying the bird and he could concentrate on what he was good at. But if it hadn't been for me, he wouldn't even have been up there that day.'

Maya nodded. 'I see why you feel doubly responsible.' Pilots were not in such plentiful supply that Erik would not have been up on his own. He knew that; he'd been told that too many times. She didn't say it, because she must have known that he'd been told it and didn't believe it, and he was grateful that she didn't say it aloud again because she understood it wouldn't help. There were a great many things in this war that people understood, but didn't say aloud. It was probably the only way most people kept from going mad.

But of course, I'm already mad . . . or getting there. . . .

'But why were you shot down?' she persisted, as if she knew that this was where the first crack had appeared in his armor. Maybe she did.

'Because—' he swallowed. 'Because this time, when I went up, there was someone I'd never seen before up there to stop me. Bright blue Fokker. Maya, he was one of us. He was an Air Master too. And—' he shook his head, 'and I felt something. From him. Not his thoughts, more like what he was feeling. He was—he was in mourning.' He closed his eyes for a moment, to fight down his own tears. Words were totally inadequate to what he had felt in that single moment. Mourning? It was deeper than mourning. It had been self-revulsion, hatred for what the man had been doing, and a terrible, terrible sense of loss.

The Hun hadn't only been mourning what he had to do—he was in mourning for the loss of everything he cared for. 'He was—' Reggie groped for words, 'flying with sorrow, the deepest, blackest sorrow I ever felt in my life. And it was because by doing his duty, which was the honorable thing to do, he was being forced to kill us, who should have been his comrades. Because his beautiful blue heavens were filled with a rain of blood, and his beautiful blue wings belonged to the Angel of Death. He knew he would never, for however long he lived, fly in skies free of blood. His world was shattered, and he'd never really feel happiness again.'

Maya's fingers tightened on his. 'Vishnu preserve us,' she replied, her voice full of the shocked understanding he had hoped to hear.