through his death, why, that man was no threat. But in the shadow of those labors an assassin might be waiting. And Guest, by slipping and falling, by racketing the night with the clatter of his sword, would have alerted any such assassin to his approach.
The Weaponmaster hesitated, half-minded to retreat to the mainrock's lower levels, and there to join his father in the attempt to fight through to the docks.
He listened.
From far below came the whimpering moth-faint echoes of distant discords – sounds of battle and barrat near-drowned by the gasping labors of the dying man who lay so close above. Those faint hoarse-clash clues from below told Guest that battle was being waged. He thought his father doomed to lose such a battle.
For, after all, this was the mainrock Pinnacle, the mighty stronghold of the Safrak Bank. It was packed with the Bank's mercenary Guardians, and the Bankers themselves would might ably enough when put to the challenge. The Witchlord's men were few, and so Guest doubted his father able to win his way to freedom, not even with the assistance of two wizards and a pair of witches.
But – above!
Thinking of what lay above, Guest overcame his hesitation and barefooted it up the stairs. A dozen steps took him into the light of the next oil lantern. Sprawled on the stone flags directly beneath that guttering source of semi-illumination lay a – a man?
No.
A woman.
A washerwoman.
Yes, it was one of the mighty washerwomen of the mainrock
Pinnacle, one of those whose muscular labors helped winch people up and down from the Palace Docks. And, as Guest had deduced from her breathing, she was sorely wounded.
She was dying.
It is hard, this business of battlefield death. The flesh sweats, and gasps, each breath a clutching. One might think the dying would yield. But they do not. They fight. The closer the death, the greater the battle. Will, identity, awareness – all is reduced to the groaning swoop of this ingasping. Air! Air!
The dying woman did not know where she was, or why. She was unaware of Guest Gulkan standing there. Did not hear him, did not see him, did not imagine him. Her world was the laboring of her dying, no more, no less.
And Guest, standing in the lamplight, momentarily forgot himself and his own predicament. Moved by pity for the woman – this unintended casualty, no enemy of him or his – he wished there was some way to help her. But help was not in his gift.
Just as when his brother Morsh had suffered a broken leg, Guest was helpless, for he had made no study of the healing arts.
Of course, when Morsh had suffered his breakage, the wizard Sken-Pitilkin had been there to help. But where was Sken-Pitilkin now?
Downstairs, doubtless. Guest was half-moved to fetch him, but knew the thought immediately as madness. For the wizards Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin and Pelagius Zozimus would both be embroiled in battle, and no aid could be spared for a washerwoman when the lives of so many were in the balance.
So Guest could but gape uselessly at the turmoil of the woman's gaping-gasping, at her blood-moil clothing, at the red soakage darkening the shadows of her ribs. At 16 years of age, he knew his edged weapons, his tactics and his strategy; he knew the dynamics of patrolling and the logistic difficulties of provisioning an army on the march; he was fit to pillage, and plunder, and burn, and ravage; but in the face of the spillage of blood he was helpless.
Of course, Guest Gulkan should have known the way of wounds, as should we all, for we live in a great age of darkness in which the sword rules, and strikes with impunity at washerwomen and irregular verbs alike. So know then the wound! First one must look, for only by looking can one know. One must seek for the damage, remembering always that piercing weapons – one thinks in particular of a quarrel shot from a crossbow – will damage with both instrike and outstrike.
Having found hole or holes, raggages or cleavages, tears and rips, gouges and gaps, one must patch the same. And immediately!
Have you no bandage? Then your hand must serve! But unless one be naked, then one surely has bandages, for the cloth off one's back will serve when all else fails. The cleaner the cloth, the better, though the cleanest of cloth is no use to a washerwoman who has died of bloodloss while the ardent hygienist has been searching for sterility.
Say it of a certainty: in the face of bleeding, the rescuer must match the urgency of the pumping heart. The wound must be patched, and immediately.
So when you are at war, and your bloodbrother has his swordhand hacked away by a battleaxe, then do no hesitate. First kill the axe-wielder. Then wipe the filth of battle from the palm of your hand, and clamp that living flesh of yours to the pumping agony of your bosom friend. It can be done in moments, if you have the courage to save as well as to kill.
Press your hand to the hot wet pumpage of blood. Press hard, and crush the bloodflow down to nothing. Then keep your hand in place until some hard-panting hero of your acquaintance can spare a few moments from his saga-work to assist with a bandage. Then you had best seek the help of a healer, though the perversity of the world is such that you may find every available pox doctor to have been slaughtered in the first heat of battle.
If such be the case, then your friend's handless arm should for the moment be placed in a sling, so that the well-bandaged wound is kept elevated, for the heart finds it harder to pump blood to elevations. And – mind! – do not allow the wound to be dipped into liquid ordure, or steeped in boiling lead, or packed with red mud, or plunged into the sexual aperture of a menstruating cow.
For, while all such treatments have their vigorous adherents, they are spurious; and the truth is that the simplest treatments are the best. On the battlefield, a weapon-wound should be bandaged, and promptly, with bare flesh serving as a failsafe expedient in the absence of other facilities. Bandage, then – and by promptly rendering a service so simple, you may yet save a life in the heat of war.
There!
It is so simply put!
But did Guest Gulkan know as much?
The unfortunate fact is that the Weaponmaster's brawning courage was much facilitated by his steadfast refusal to contemplate the obvious and inevitable consequences of carnage.
Much did he think of the clash of swords, the brawling of battleaxes, and the winning of glory. But of bloody pain and the sweatwrenching agony of a washerwoman's death – of these he remained steadfastly ignorant.
True, he had seen his brother Morsh Bataar hideously wounded.
But he had relegated all memories of that wounding to those mysterious and labyrinthine depths of his brain where legions of hapless irregular verbs wandered in doomed oblivion. Yes, and he had been wounded himself, and grievously – for the bamboo spike which had sabotaged his foot at the Battle of Babaroth had caused him a great deal of agony and inconvenience. But this too he had managed to shrug off and forget.
So, thanks to his own willed ignorance, Guest Gulkan stood watching as a woman died, and the charity of his pity was no help to her, for pity without action is useless.
And if you believe yourself likewise doomed to go to war, then know this of a certainty: if your study in its folly concerns itself with the mere use of weapons then you too are doomed to stand some day in helpless guilt, watching as the object of your pity dies. So let this text then carry an explicit message, a message apt for our age of ceaseless warfare: those who would study the use of weapons should study likewise the cure of that use.
Above is set a sermon on bandaging, and it will serve you well if you should look up from this page to see a friend come stumbling through the door with a hand missing. Clamp the palm of your hand to the spouting stump, and apply firm pressure!
But of course there is more to the treatment of wounds than this, for a missing hand is simplicity itself, whereas damage to the pancreas is a more delicate matter (for all experts agree that the soul, if it is located anywhere, is surely to be found in the pancreas, since this organ promptly dissolves itself upon death), and the eye is likewise delicate, the treatment of its damage being a matter only to be studied under the close supervision of
