Be a man.
Then everything jolted. Lake never saw why. There was a terrible pain in the side of his face. So terrible and so sudden he vomited. Spat sick. Something in his eye. Coughed and spluttered and groaned. His helmet had fallen off. He was on the ground. How’d that happen? The pain in his face. Boots kicking at him.
He started crawling through a forest of shuffling and stomping legs, light flickering, sound muffled. He pulled his glove off with his teeth, felt at his face with trembling fingers. Sticky. Was he wounded? Cries and snarls and yells. He clutched at a leg. Dead men down here. The pain of it. Was he wounded? Was it bad? He couldn’t see. Tried to open his eye but he couldn’t see.
“Help,” he whimpered. No one could hear him. Be a man.
He clutched at the mud, dragged himself back. Through the boots, through the legs. Something thudded into his ribs, rolled him over, a boot caught the side of his face as it came down and he shoved at it, punched at it, dragged himself on through the feet and the mud and the corpses.
Be a man. What did that even mean?
“Help!” he squealed, hands clutched to his bloody face, and he felt himself caught by the wrists and dragged back.
It took all her strength to pull him out from there. Grown men are heavy, let alone armoured ones. Ariss gritted her teeth and heaved on his wrists as hard as she could. This was no time to be gentle. Then her foot slipped and she went down in the mud with him half on top of her. Hardly mattered, she was filthy as a miner already, her apron spattered with dirt, spotted with blood.
“Up we get,” grunted Scalla, pulling the wounded man off her and dumping him onto the stretcher. She’d almost complained when she first saw how rough he was with them. Like he was hefting sacks of coal. She’d soon learned that delicacy did no one any good. She stumbled to the foot of the stretcher, caught hold of the handles. Scalla had undone the buckle on the wounded man’s helmet and tossed it bouncing away, turned around to grab his handles and looked over his shoulder to meet her eye. “One, two…”
She growled as she lifted the foot end and off they went, bones jolting, teeth rattling, shoulders burning with the effort as they jogged towards the outskirts of town. Chaos here, messengers dashing, other stretcher-bearers stumbling back and forth, boys scrambling with armfuls of flatbow bolts.
Ariss had wanted to do something before she married. Wanted to do something real. Something to be proud of. Her uncle had fought in Gurkhul, long ago. He’d tried to warn her.
“So a battle’s no place for a woman?” she’d snapped at him.
“A battle’s no place for anyone,” he’d said, and she’d walked out.
Now she forced herself to look at the man on the stretcher. There was a great long slash down his face to his throat. She couldn’t really see how bad it was for all the blood. She didn’t really want to see how bad it was. But the blood was not a good sign. It was pouring out of him. Pooling in the stretcher around his head. Soaking through the canvas. Dripping to the dirt where her feet mashed it into the mud. So much blood. You’d be amazed how much a man holds.
He made this long, dull groan with every outbreath. Not even pained. Half-witted. Mindless.
“Shush,” she crooned, but it came out panicked and jolting with her footfalls.
She’d fondly imagined a woman’s voice might help calm them, the way it had in Spillion Sworbreck’s book about that dauntless frontier girl that she’d found so inspiring. But nothing calmed them. Nothing but death, anyway. She’d pictured dabbing sweaty brows, and water gratefully received, and binding the odd wound. Discreet wounds. Neat wounds. Nicks and scratches. Instead she saw bodies peeled open, hacked into, bent backwards, leaking their contents. Bodies that could never heal. Bodies that hardly looked like bodies any more.
Her uncle had been right. She’d made a terrible mistake.
They came to the garden where the wounded were laid out, sending up an awful chorus of pain and despair. Better than the wet screams coming from the tent where they did the surgery, though.
She set the stretcher down and sagged on her knees beside it, utterly spent. Her legs were trembling. Her arms were trembling. Her eyelids fluttered. She knelt there in the mud, just breathing.
The wounded man had stopped his groans, at least. The surgeon’s assistant leaned down to press fingers against his throat, paused a moment, the battle roaring in the distance like a stormy sea. Like an irresistible tide coming in.
“He’s dead.”
Ariss wiped her forehead on the back of her wrist, realised she’d smeared blood all over her face.
Scalla dragged the corpse off the blood-soaked stretcher. “Let’s get another.”
Ariss wearily nodded. “I suppose.” She lurched up, stumbled as someone crashed into her. A boy who went sprawling next to the corpses, cap falling off to show a shock of blonde curls.
“Sorry! I’m sorry.” A girl, then, snatching her cap up and, with one last look back, running on.
Hildi limped for a few strides, rubbing at her bruised leg until the pain faded then upping the pace, ducking through an alley where a couple of men were getting wounds dressed by nurses. She upset a basket full of bandages as she plunged past but couldn’t stop, whipping some washing out of her way and leaving it flapping behind her.
Out of the town and she ran faster, breath cutting at her chest as she hit the grassy slope up the side of the hill. Kept her eyes on her feet. Kept her mind on the few strides in front of her. Orso was relying on her. She clenched her fist tighter around the message. Volunteered to carry it, hadn’t she? More or less insisted on carrying it.
Wanting to prove she was useful. Wanting to prove she was brave. She was the one always carried messages for Orso, so she’d carry this one. Realised her mistake soon as she ran from the town hall and into the madness in the street. She’d hated carrying Orso’s messages to that bitch Savine dan Glokta. Her affected elegance and her gaudy taste and her superior little smirks. But Hildi’s chances of getting killed carrying love letters had been very small.
“Hildi, you damn fool,” she hissed.
The sad fact was, if she was honest with herself… she loved Orso. Not loved loved. Not in love. She loved him like an older brother. Like a helpless, hopeless, hesitant older brother who just happened to be King of the Union. He was good to her. No one else ever had been. No one else had ever thought she was worth being good to. He was above everyone, but somehow he treated her, who was lower than dirt, like an equal. It would’ve been strange if she hadn’t loved him.
But she could’ve let someone else carry the bloody message.
She paused on the hillside to catch her breath. Paused, and prised her eyes away from the grass. Made herself turn to stare out across the valley.
“Oh, fuck,” she breathed.
From here she could see the whole battlefield. The whole grand insanity of it. Over beyond the town, the steep bluff was wreathed in smoke, little plumes and puffs stabbing out. There were fires in the orchards below it, dark columns drifting into the heavy sky. Fires in Stoffenbeck, too. The air was sharp with their smoke.
Curving away from her, the great crescent of the king’s lines. Glimmering metal where the fighting was. Flags limp over the press. Thickets of pikes. Blocks of dark-clothed Anglanders still crawled forward across the open fields. Horsemen moved and wheeled behind.