There were three of them in the tent, two men and a woman: three to care for twenty or thirty times that many wounded and dying. As one of them came toward her, she saw that he wore a thick grey robe nearly as vile as the blankets. A length of rope cinched his waist, and from it hung several pouches of herbs-his only medicines-as well as a short heavy sword and a crude saw which he obviously, too obviously, used for amputations. He trembled with fatigue as he approached, a heavy burden of sleep deprivation. Rheum dulled his gaze, and the weak flat sound of his cough told Linden as clearly as blood work that he had contracted pneumonia.
Nevertheless he did his best to accost her. “Begone,” he wheezed irritably. This is no place for you, stranger, madwoman. I will summon-”
Linden silenced him with a sharp gesture. Before he could protest, she drew flame blooming from her Staff.
She had spent ten years without percipience and Earthpower, restricted to the surface of life. During that time, she had lost much of her familiarity with the Land’s gifts. But in recent days, she had made repeated use of the Staff. Unaware of what would be required of her, she had nonetheless trained her nerves and sharpened her perceptions for this crisis, this multitude of pain. To that extent, at least, she was ready.
Carefully she sent out sheets of yellow fire, immaculate as sunshine, and wrapped them like a cocoon around the physician.
She knew exactly what he needed: she felt it in her own blood and bone. Swift as instinct, she found his tiredness, his illness, his unremitting exposure to infection, and she swept them away.
She barely heard the other two physicians yell in alarm. From their perspective, their comrade must have appeared to blaze like an auto da fe. And she paid no heed to the answering shouts from outside the tent. When warriors burst past the tent flaps behind her, she ignored them. Her concentration admitted no intrusion.
The physician’s heart had time to beat twice or thrice while she worked. Then she released him from fire. The emotional and spiritual toll of his labours she could not heal, but she left him physically whole: staggering with surprise, and exalted by relief and wellness.
At once, Linden turned away and dropped to her knees beside the nearest of the wounded.
This warrior was a woman, and Linden knew that she was not yet dying. She might linger for several days, excruciated by fever and infection. The sword-cut which had split her breastplate and opened her ribs was not necessarily fatal. With cleanliness and rest, it might heal on its own. But her left foot had been amputated above the ankle, and there her real danger lay. Her shin suppurated with infection and anguish. Slivers of bone protruded from the mass of pus and maggots where one of the physicians had attempted to save her life.
She was far from being the most needy warrior here. She was simply the nearest. For that reason, Linden had chosen her.
The other physicians still called for help. Linden heard quick steps at her back; swords drawn. No one here could comprehend what she was doing. They saw only fire and were afraid. She needed to show them what her actions meant before a blade bit into her back.
Hurrying, she closed her eyes; refined her attention; swathed the wounded woman in Earthpower. With flame, she burned away infection and maggots, cleansed poisons, excised and sealed necrotic tissues, knit together shards of bone. And she caused no pain: the bright efficacy of the Staff was as soothing as Glimmermere’s lacustrine roborant.
Near her, the physician yelled frantically, “
There must have been whetted iron mere inches from her neck; but Linden allowed nothing to interrupt her as she assoiled the fallen woman’s injuries.
When she was done, she quenched the Staff and raised her head.
The rumpled hood of her cloak touched the edge of a sword. “What madness is this?” demanded one of the warriors behind her, a man. “She has set flame to a woman who might have lived, and you wish her
“Unclose your eyes,” retorted the physician. “Behold what she has done. It is not
“By my life,” he added more softly, in wonder, “I had forgotten that there was once a time when I was not ill.”
The healed woman tried to lift her head from the pallet. “What-?” she asked weakly. “What has become of my pain? Why am I not in pain?”
Daring Berek’s people to cut at her now, Linden braced herself on the Staff and rose to her feet. She felt their astonishment; their reluctance to credit what they saw and heard. They had so little experience of the Land’s true life-They could not imagine its implications.
However, the physician did not leave the warriors to reach their own conclusions. Suddenly resolute, he commanded, “Begone!” as he had tried to command Linden. This lady”- he could hardly find words for his amazement- “will do no hurt. Mayhap she will work great good, if she is not hindered. Depart, that I may beseech her aid.”
Flapping both arms, he gestured in dismissal until the men and women behind Linden complied. Then he turned to her while his fellow healers hastened among the rows toward him.
“My lady,” he began, flustered by healing and hope, “I comprehend naught here. Such fire-It is beyond-
“But”- he seemed to grasp himself roughly with both hands- “I do not require comprehension, and must not delay. Will you grant us further flame? We are badly surpassed. The need is too great to be numbered. Our simples and implements redeem few. Most perish.” The rheum in his eyes had become tears. “I will prostrate myself, if that will sway you-”
He began to sink to his knees.
Still Linden did not falter. The tent had become an emergency room, and she was a surgeon. Grabbing quickly at the man’s arm, she said, “Of course I’ll help. That’s why I’m here. But I need you to do triage for me.” When he frowned at the unfamiliar word, she explained. “I should treat the worst cases first, but I don’t know who they are. You’ll have to tell me.” Guide me. The sheer scale of the suffering around her confused her perceptions. “And get me some drinking water.”
She would need more than the Staff could provide to sustain her during the ordeal ahead.
The man’s mouth formed the word “cases” in silent confusion. Nevertheless he grasped her meaning. “Then commence with the fifth in this row,” he replied, nodding to Linden’s left. He seemed ready to obey her smallest word. “Palla and Jevin will direct you further.” Plainly he meant his fellow physicians. “I am Vertorn. I will command wine from the guards to refresh you.”
Good enough, Linden thought. She had to get to work. Pausing only to say, “I’m Linden. Don’t be afraid of anything you see,” she strode toward the pallet Vertorn had suggested.
When she saw how badly the man there had been slashed and pierced, she might have quailed, overwhelmed by the scale of her dilemma. He looked like he had been hung up like a dummy and used for weapons practice. His life was little more than a wisp of breath in the back of his throat. With her Staff, she had the capacity to fill the entire tent with vivifying flame. The iron-shod wood was constrained only by her own limitations. But she was too human to function in that way. She had to see what she strove to heal; needed to focus her attention on each individual wound and illness. In her hands, an undefined broadside of Earthpower might do more harm than good. She could only struggle to save one patient at a time, treat one need at a time, as she had always done.
And they were so many-
But during the single heartbeat when her courage might have broken, she felt a woman immediately behind her slip into death. After that, she did not hesitate. Unfurling the Staffs severe and kindly puissance like an oriflamme, she began her chosen task.
She had called herself a healer. Now she set about justifying her name.
She did not know how long she laboured; could not count the men and women whom she retrieved from the ruins of war. When smoke and strain blurred her vision, the woman, Palla, led her by the hand while the man, Jevin, called out the location of her next patient. Whenever Vertorn thrust a flagon into her grasp, she gulped down a few swallows of whatever it contained. Everything else was a nightmare succession of rent flesh, shattered bone, rampant infection, and multiplied agony.
People were reduced to this by battle and pain: they became nothing more than the sum of their sufferings.
