let alone eaten one. And they looked ripe enough, a crimson flock weighing down their boughs. And we’d been walking through orchards for a solid afternoon, and I’d been three months on mealy biscuits and wormy meat – and I filled my stomach so high that a sharp sneeze would have coughed up a pit.
I paid for it soon enough, soon enough and hard, the tart flesh of the fruit turning to poison, sending me retching and sprinting for the bushes. After a few days it stopped. After a few more days it started again, worse this time, a lot worse. I couldn’t keep down water, let alone hard tack. I ached all the time, but in a distant way, and I was having trouble with my eyes – if I focused on anything too long my legs started to shake and I needed to sit down. I couldn’t sit down, of course, but I damn sure needed to.
So it was my own fault, like I said, but still the lieutenant didn’t look happy when he said it. I’d just rejoined the ranks after my third shit of the day, rust-red water leaking out of my bowels, a fist of jagged metal in my insides.
‘I think you need a rest, Private,’ he said to me.
As usual Adolphus had taken the step behind me, and he slapped my back to show off my vitality. I did my best not to stagger from the blow. ‘Come on now, Lieutenant,’ Adolphus said nervously. ‘He’s not so bad as all that. He’ll be all right once he gets a few hours’ rest in him.’
This was an errant lie, obvious to anyone who spared a glance in my direction. In a week I’d lost a newborn’s worth of body weight, and I wasn’t a fat man to begin with. Tearing off my trousers during that last go round I’d felt the imprint of my ribcage pushing out against my skin.
‘I’m fine, Lieutenant,’ I said, holding my hands behind my back so he wouldn’t see them shake. ‘Just a case of the squirts. No reason to send me up. I can still handle a trench blade.’
The lieutenant was a decent fellow, good at his job and still possessed of some remnant of humanity despite the hell we’d all gone through – that was probably why the Firstborn decreed he’d die six weeks later, casualty of a Dren bowman, picked off during some meaningless skirmish that never made it into the history books. He knew what sending me up meant, had held off doing it in the vain hope I’d recover. Still, there was only so much he could overlook. ‘You’ll be fine, Private – a few days off your feet and you’ll be right as rain.’ But he didn’t meet my eyes when he said it, and neither did anyone else as I grabbed my few belongings and got ready to head to the back of the lines.
No one but Adolphus, who squeezed my shoulder and told me that everything would be fine, that he’d stop by and see me later. I was just glad he didn’t try and hug me. Adolphus was always something of a hugger, and in my injured state I wasn’t sure I could take it.
It was a rest day. That was the way we moved – two days on and one day off. We weren’t exactly sprinting through Nestria. On the march our baggage train extended miles and miles behind the infantry, artillery and equipment sharing road with the material indulgences of the officers and a sub-army of merchants, whores and servants keen to fill the needs of the largest horde of men the region had ever seen. It took me a solid hour to reach the wards from my post, though admittedly my pace was slowed by my stomach’s insistence that I leave a memento behind every bush and tree.
Our battlefield hospice met, perhaps even exceeded, the high standards of competency that reigned throughout the Allied military machine. A canvas tent stretched over thick wooden poles, a hundred-odd collapsible beds – the whole thing small enough to be packed into a few mule-drawn wagons. The operation was overseen by a handful of drunkards and dolts with perhaps six months of medical training between them. In theory it was meant to serve as a triage station – the lightly wounded patched up and returned to the lines, the severely injured stabilized and sent to recuperate further afield. In practice, few survived to go home.
Two men sat at a table underneath the awning, playing cards and drinking from an unlabeled bottle. They were out of uniform, and dirtier than doctors should be. My arrival in their midst was not the cause of any great commotion – a solid minute passed before either thought to react.
‘Name and rank,’ one asked finally.
I gave it to him.
‘What you want?’
One would think that was a fair bit obvious, but I didn’t have the energy for sarcasm. ‘Lieutenant says I’m on rest.’
‘Yeah?’ Not exactly brimming with interest.
It was too much effort to answer.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked finally, grudgingly.
‘Got the shits.’
‘You been eating cherries?’
I nodded.
He swatted away a fly and shot his comrade a look. They shared a laugh. ‘You dumb fucking infantrymen. Don’t you know they ain’t ripe yet?’
I wanted to set my hand into his unwashed hair and pull his face down into the wood, watch his nose come apart in my hands. See how much help his partner did him then. As it was I could barely stand, couldn’t talk, and even thinking about sudden motion sent unhappy waves through my stomach. So I just nodded again.
He pulled over a ledger and pointed at an empty spot. ‘Sign here,’ he said, ‘or make your mark.’
I barely managed the former.
He closed the ledger and set it aside. ‘Grab a bed. We’ll bring some soup by later.’ He slapped a high card down against the table. His partner let loose a pretty good stream of invective, for a civilian. After a few seconds of forgetting I existed the first turned back up to me, vaguely annoyed to discover I’d yet to follow his order. ‘Either you’ll ride it out or you’ll die,’ he said, by his tone not strongly invested in the outcome.
That was about the way I figured it too. If it was the former, I promised myself the good doctor and I would have another chat, under different circumstances.
We’d been marching for an odd week, and there hadn’t been a real battle for twice that, but still a good half of the beds were in use. Boys down with the flux, or having fallen prey to any of the various rotting maladies courtesy of the mass of whores that traveled with us, an army only slightly smaller than our own. Most of the patients looked near dead, too weak to scatter the bands of flies that flocked over wounds and open orifices. Some of them I felt certain were so, the corpses yet to be removed by a less than compulsively diligent staff.
I scanned around for a cot that looked cleaner than the rest, but they were pretty uniformly vile, so I dropped myself onto one in the back corner. The beds were composed of the same material as my armor, rough and callous as a camp follower. The bugs had gotten to it just the same, perforating ochre-sized holes in the boiled leather, their attentions as effective as a crossbow bolt. A line of nits marched in admirable formation up the strut and toward the burlap sack serving duty as my pillow.
The orderly came by, a Nestrian, native to the country, one of that proud race whose freedoms I had killed to protect. ‘Liquor?’ he asked in mangled Rigun, and tilted a glass jug of yellow liquid towards me, the rim stained by what I hoped was only dirt.
I shook my head.
He shrugged and downed my ration. I turned myself towards the wall and passed into a fitful sleep.
My dreams were bitter and clouded, and they hung thick as smoke, staying with me even when I lurched up from bed and sprawled my way to the nearest outhouse. Contra the doctor’s promise, no one came by with any soup.
I was ripped firmly back to consciousness by screams and cannon fire. Night had fallen. The only illumination in the tent was provided by a heavy lantern set on a pole in the center. Its light didn’t reach me, but towards the front I could make out the frantic movements of the staff, broken out of their lethargy by an unexpected rash of casualties.
They’d attacked at supper, making us pay for our hubris, for thinking we could stroll toward the Republic without forward pickets and scouts clearing the way. They hit us that night all across the front, the entire retreat revealed to be a feint, our optimism premature and quickly ended. The Dren were proving better than us when it came to grand strategy. The Dren were proving better than us when it came to virtually everything.
The rest are scraps of images out of order, dealt from a shuffled deck, my illness and their own nightmarish quality breaking chronology.
A limbless boy, nubs of flesh waggling at me, begging for someone to kill him, the doctors too busy or foolish to oblige him.
