“Doctors? Warriors don’t have doctors.”
“I know they don’t. But….”
“No buts, Stavia. It’s part of the ordinances. Warriors can’t have doctors. And they must fight at close range, not at a distance. And they must see their own blood and the blood of their fellows, and they must care for their own dying and see their pain. It’s part of the choice they have to make. You know all that.”
“Chernon…,” she started to say, then turned away, choking.
“I know. You see him in your mind, suffering, maimed. You see him dying. You feel his pain as though it were your own. I know, Stavia, for the sake of the Lady, you think I don’t know! Every mother of sons knows! Every lover knows!”
“Why!”
“So that they know what they choose and know what they risk when they choose. It’s their choice. They can return through the Gate to Women’s Country or they can stay there, but they have to know what staying there means! They can’t be asked to choose without knowing what they’re doing! It can’t be covered up or gilded or glossed over! Stavia, you know why!”
“And no medically trained people.” It was stupid. The ordinances were simply wrong, that’s all. She didn’t say this, but her tone conveyed her thought.
“No doctors for the warriors, Stavia.”
“You treat them when they catch diseases from the Gypsies!”
“We treat them if they have diseases we might get, yes. But they choose battle. They have to live with the consequences of battle.”
“You give them water from the well,” she argued. “That’s not living with the consequences….”
“The ordinances give mercy, Stavia. That’s all. They’re hard, but they’re merciful.”
They walked on, in silence. Tears were running down Morgot’s face. Inside Stavia was merely a vacancy, a place too deep and empty for pain. She had given Chernon books. It was not merely a bit of rule breaking. She had broken the ordinances as well, and more than that, she disagreed with them. Maybe this was an ordinance that deserved to be broken.
She couldn’t talk to Morgot, but she needed to talk to someone.
WHEN THE WARRIORS RETURNED it was almost midwinter. The whole city assembled on the walls and around the plaza. The air was crisp and cool with autumn’s chill, and brown leaves from the parade ground maples blew in through the Defender’s Gate when it was opened to bring in the dead. Row on row of them, the shrouds turned down to show their faces. Most of the dead, including all of those who had died early in the battle, had been buried on the battleground where they had fallen, and their litters held only their armor and their devices. At the head of each litter stood the T-staff which bore the warrior’s honors. Beyond the wall, in the parade ground, the badly wounded lay on litters. Stavia and a dozen other maidens carried water from the Well of Surcease to the Council Chambers, where the Councillors mixed it with hemlock. Then the Councillors went out to the wounded warriors, offering the water to all in pain. Some warriors accepted it while others rejected it. Stavia went with Morgot on this duty, holding the cup while they drank.
“For release from pain,” Morgot said, offering the flask.
“I do not need it, matron,” said some. Some, those not too badly wounded, even grinned as they said it.
“Give it to me, lady,” said others, and then Stavia took the cup and held it to their lips. They drank and sank back upon their litters, silent. Some smiled. Some merely panted, begging for the flask with their eyes. Some were unconscious but so terribly wounded that their fellows begged it on their behalf. When it was over, someone came behind and pulled the shrouds up over their faces and carried them through the gate where their mothers and sisters waited.
There was no need of the cup for Barten. He was dead when they brought him back, speared from behind. Spearing from behind was what they always did to those who fled, or, sometimes, to those who were merely unpopular. His sister placed a red ribbon of honor on his chest; his mother wept; Myra threw herself upon his litter screaming, “So they’ve killed him, too, killed him, too,” over and over again. When others tried to pry her away from the corpse, Myra clung to it more tenaciously.
“Let her be,” Morgot said to them. “She will come home after dark when there is no one here to see her.” And she did, creeping into the house and up to her room when it was dark and chill. In the morning she went back to the plaza again, but Barten’s mother and sisters had taken his body outside the walls to their family plot and buried him there. They had not sent word inviting Myra to accompany them. Custom dictated dignity at times like these, and her grief had been too self-consciously dramatic, too shrill, too unwomanly to draw their sympathetic feeling.
“Who won?” Stavia asked, wondering why no one had told her.
“We did, of course. Susantown has given up any idea they may have had of attacking us.” Morgot sighed and pushed the hair back from her forehead.
“How many did they lose?”
“As many as we.”
“How many is that?”
“About six hundred,” said Morgot. “Most of them were buried on the battlefield. Another hundred or so will die from their wounds.”
“Mother! That’s more than a quarter of the garrison. Almost a third!”
“I know. War is dreadful, daughter. It always has been. Comfort yourself with the knowledge that in preconvulsion times it was worse! More died, and most of them were women, children, and old people. Also, wars were allowed to create devastations. Under our ordinances, no children are slain. No women are slain. Only men who choose to be warriors go to battle. There is no devastation.”
Stavia heard and was somewhat comforted, but Myra was inconsolable.
