The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  "Any victory in these times is worthy of celebration," said Har-Ytan. "This is why we praise you, Hem, most modest and youngest of generals." Then, smiling in a most unqueenly fashion, she leaned forward and pinched his cheek as if he were a baby. Hem thought he would never stop blushing.

  Now Zelika, unable to hold it in, did giggle. Har-Ytan glanced at her, her mouth twitching, and began to laugh as well, as freely as if she were not the queen of a city that might soon be trampled to rubble by the army at its gates.

  Not everyone who had been attacked by the deathcrows had fared as well as Hem; some had been sick indeed, and a few had died. The day after Hem had been summoned to the Ernani, Oslar again asked for Hem's help in the Healing Houses, and in the ensuing days Hem and Zelika spent most of their time there. The Healing Houses seemed strangely untouched by the battles outside: an air of tranquillity filled the cool rooms, and the healers moved quietly between their patients, unhurried and grave.

  There were many ill with the crow fever, and Hem was shocked when he saw how sick they were. He had recovered so completely that he hadn't given his own illness a second thought. Oslar had inspected Hem personally before he had permitted the boy to work, his brow furrowed, and Hem had submitted with a barely concealed sigh of impatience; but now he saw why Saliman had been so concerned.

  "You are lucky, my boy," said Oslar, when he had felt Hem's pulse and temperature, examined his irises, tapped his elbows and knees, and been reassured that his appetite was normal. "You have a toughness beyond some of our hardiest fighters. Strong men have withered in this illness."

  "Saliman cured me," said Hem.

  "He is a great healer," Oslar said. "I could wish for his skills here, and I regret that he should be forced to spend his time killing rather than healing. But I am at least Saliman's equal, and I have been able to drive the sickness from the blood of only a few. And even so, they are bedridden for days."

  "Are there many sick?" asked Hem.

  "Not as many as there might be. You will find more wounded by arrows and fire than sickened by the deathcrows. But that is due to you, I hear." The old Bard smiled, and Hem blushed and stammered.

  "Not me, the birds of the city..." he mumbled.

  "There is more to you than meets the eye." Oslar stared into Hem's eyes and a gentle light bloomed in the boy's inner vision, as he felt the touch of the Bard's mind on his own. There was a short silence, and Oslar sighed. "I begin to understand why Saliman has kept you here, although he has his own Knowing, which is hidden from me. Is there any knowledge that does not sadden the knower? But many tasks call me. Come, Hem, I need you to care for those in the Room of Lanterns, which would free Urbika for me."

  Hem followed Oslar, puzzling over what he had just said. What did Saliman think he could do in the war against the Nameless One? Now he had seen the scale of it, he didn't believe he could make any difference. But Saliman seemed to think he had some part to play. Perhaps he would tell him one day what it was.

  In the Room of Lanterns, Hem tended patients with relatively minor wounds – fleshy lacerations or cleanly broken bones. Those who could walk did not stay in the Healing Houses, as there were not enough beds; instead, they were billeted out into the city, and came morning and evening to collect potions or salves or to have their dressings changed. It was peaceful in the Houses of Healing; the thick walls kept out the clamor of battle and the burning heat of the day. The wounded lay on their pallets without complaint, watching the sunlight that filtered through the grilled windows as it moved slowly around the pale blue walls, or talking quietly together. Most of the time Hem was on his own, and he walked confidently from bed to bed, attending to various needs – water here, a new dressing there, a salve or potion or charm to staunch pain somewhere else.

  Hem had never been a boy much given to reflection, but in the cool, wide spaces of the Healing Houses, between one task and another, he found himself ruminating in a new way. It was a novel feeling to be placed in this position of trust, to be needed, and Hem decided that he liked it. The word had spread about the strange Annaren boy with a white bird who worked in the Healing Houses and had driven off the deathcrows. Strangers greeted him smilingly in the musical tongue of Turbansk, calling him by his nickname, Lios Hlaf, and they surrendered without question to his ministrations; no one caviled at his age. He liked the smiles of the warriors whose wounds he tended, their gentle thanks. He liked the feeling that he belonged.

  He remembered himself when he first came to Turbansk: it was like thinking about a stranger. He felt no need now to be angry with the Bards; what had seemed to him in his initial ignorance to be patronizing and insulting, he now recognized as friendly respect.

  Sometimes, despite the fact that he was treating wounded soldiers, Hem remembered that Turbansk was at war only when he left the Healing Houses for his evening meal and heard the faint noise of battle carried on the wind. The realization always came with a skin-tightening sense of shock, and induced a strange feeling of unreality: he was more at peace with himself than he had ever been, and yet he had never been in more danger. If only, Hem thought, he had not come here in time of war; if only he could stay here and learn the art of healing from Oslar.

  At such times he thought of Maerad; he remembered a curious expression that had sometimes flashed across her face, when she looked at Nelac's students in Norloch. He thought he understood it now. Maerad had occasionally told him how much she wished she could stay in Norloch or in Innail or in Gent, where she could learn the scripts of Annar and the Seven Kingdoms, and study the lore of Barding. When she spoke of her desire to learn, her voice cracked slightly with emotion, since it seemed that it would never happen: instead of living the quiet, studious life of a scholar, she was fated to follow dark roads on a perilous quest.

  To Hem, Maerad's regret had been mystifying: why would anyone want to work so hard on something that seemed so dry and dusty, when you could go off on an adventure? For Hem's mind was packed with heroic stories that he had made up to comfort himself in the darknesses of his childhood. But now he had encountered real danger, he found that, after all, Maerad was right. In the Healing Houses, a light kindled inside him: he had found something he wanted to do with his life, and he burned with the desire to learn its art. And yet, like Maerad, Hem had discovered what he wanted just as it seemed it was on the brink of being destroyed.

  Now that the deathcrows no longer attacked Turbansk, he left his armor in his room, and looked at it askance when he came back to sleep. The thought that he might have to fight and kill someone filled him with a horror he dared not admit to Zelika. He hated the Black Army, and the terrible wounds he had seen in the children of Baladh had made his heart smolder with anger; he knew that the Dark had destroyed his family and blighted his life, but sometimes he wondered whether he could kill even a Hull. It made him feel ashamed. Even when the Hulls had threatened to cut his throat if he refused to murder a boy – long, long ago, it seemed now – he had not been able to lift his hand. He had no difficulty with breaking someone's nose, but extinguishing the life of another human being was different. He lacked Zelika's ruthlessness.

  All the same, despite her vow to slay as many of the Black Army as she could, Zelika was working in the Healing Houses with Hem, and walked back with him to their rooms in the Ernan each night. He was slightly surprised that she had not demanded to go to the walls to fight alongside the soldiers there, but she had given him a mocking glance when he asked her why she had set aside her sword.

  "I want to see their faces, when I kill them," she said. "I want them to see my face. Arrows are no good. And there will be plenty of time for killing, when the walls fail."

  The cold confidence of her answer made Hem shiver, and he asked no further questions.

  Over the following days, it couldn't escape even Hem's attention that the assault on Turbansk was increasing in ferocity.

  The influx of wounded into the Healing Houses increased markedly, and the injuries were worse. Hem
was called now to help Oslar with more serious cases in the room called the Chamber of Poppies – so called because the painkilling tincture distilled from poppies, madran, was used so often there. He saw soldiers with burns like those he had seen on the Baladh refugees, and heard, with a shiver of dismay, that the dogsoldiers were making their first assaults against the city. Each night now, as Hem wearily walked back to the Ernan for something to eat, he smelled burning on the soft evening air, and tasted a bitter grit of ash on his tongue. There were few nights of song anymore. Often he went back to the Healing Houses after the evening meal, since there were not enough healers to cope with the injuries, and worked long into the night. His fragile sense of peace popped like a bubble and disappeared altogether.

  Zelika still came with him to work with Oslar, obediently and patiently plying the mortar and pestle to grind up medicinal herbs, or running errands. She too was looking strained and depressed, her mouth set in a grim line of exhaustion. She did not speak to Hem of fighting anymore, and in the few spare moments he had, Hem wondered whether the suffering she had seen had dulled her passion for revenge.

  It could have been the heat, which was relentless. The days of late summer pounced on the city like a ravening lion. In times of peace, the streets of Turbansk would be empty after the morning dew had evaporated into the heat of the day, the population retreating to the inner rooms of their houses to sleep until the cool of the evening, when the city would again come to life. But now Turbansk was awake at all hours, pinned by the merciless sun as much as by the enemy at its gates.

  Sometimes at night the city would take hours to cool down. Then those lucky enough to live in the inner city would sleep on the roofs of their houses, beneath the stars. Near the city walls it was too dangerous: the Black Army kept up a constant assault all night, every night, flinging into the city catapults laden with rocks or, more dangerously, liquid magefire – white-hot missiles with a red tail, which would sail through the night air with a strange and terrible beauty and land with a bloom of flame, setting alight everything around them.

  Each successive day felt more grim, and a miasma of despair began to wind through the city like an evil mist. It was one thing to speak of fighting to the death against an enemy that could not be defeated, and quite another to stand, day after day, drained by the heat, while your friends were killed one by one around you, facing an army that remained, despite every small victory, as overwhelming as an ocean. If only the real assault would begin, some whispered, it might not be so bad – but the Black Captain waits and holds fire while the best of our strength is spent on minor skirmishes. The worst is yet to come.

  Others called for a brave sortie against the enemy, to drive the army decisively back from the city walls, although anyone who looked could not but know this to be the most suicidal folly. And others still, in quiet voices, began to speak of leaving the city. Why die for a city that is already doomed? And they looked fearfully across the glittering surface of the Lamarsan Sea, where those with the sharpest sight could see a dark navy of ships grouped ominously in the distance. Perhaps we stay because we cannot get out, the whisperers said: the sea way is blocked, and we are trapped here, and will die whether we choose or no. It is too late, the whispers said, too late, too late...

  Hem did not see Har-Ytan or Juriken again, and hardly saw Saliman. Underneath his every moment lay a dull dread that each brief conversation might be their last; he did not know what Saliman's duties were, but knew all the same that he was never far from danger. When he did see Saliman, the Bard was too tired to talk much, and he seldom smiled anymore. He would stare at Hem with dark inscrutable eyes, ask how he was, nod, and sink into silence.

  Only Ire seemed untouched by the rising despair that pervaded Turbansk. He told Hem, with a hoarse chuckle, that it was a good time for him: he was building an impressive collection of shiny spoons, buttons, and other treasures filched from the palace, which he had hidden somewhere under the eaves of the roof. When Hem slept, he was comforted by Ire's presence, and often, as if he knew this, the bird did not sleep on his perch, but crouched on the boy's bed close to his body, crooning himself to sleep.

  IX

  THE EDGE OF DOOM

  Because Hem was not a native of Turbansk or the Suderain, he did not know most of those he cared for. The men and women he tended were strangers to him, and he learned to steel his mind against their suffering, to do what had to be done to alleviate their hurts. If he had fully acknowledged the horror of everything he saw, he would have collapsed in distress, and been useless; so he turned his mind from that understanding, and concentrated instead on healing spells and salves, bone-setting and pain relief. It had not been so bad in the Room of Lanterns, where none of his patients had been in any danger of their lives; but now that he was helping Oslar again, he saw some terrible things.

  On the fifth day a man was brought in on a litter. He had been above the West Gate, where the fighting was fiercest, and he had been hit by one of the evil projectiles that the Black Army was catapulting at the defenders on the walls. When these projectiles hit, they exploded in a deadly hail of spiked iron fragments and a form of magefire – liquid flames that burned into the skin of anyone luckless enough to be in the way The man had taken the main force of the projectile on his right arm and shoulder, now a mess of ragged, burned flesh and barely recognizable as belonging to a human being. Another piece of metal had shattered into his stomach and, besides scores of lacerations over the rest of his body, his right thigh was smashed so badly that splinters of bone stuck out of the skin.

  Hem took one look at the man and knew he was doomed; it was amazing that he was still alive. His skin had the gray, dusty hue of one who was already dead, and his breath was harsh and irregular. His face was spattered with blood, and around his mouth the saliva had dried into a white foam flecked with black. At least, Hem thought, he can feel nothing... But then, to the boy's astonishment and distress, the man turned his head and opened his eyes, looking straight at Hem. With a cold shock, which went down to the soles of his feet, Hem recognized Boran the coffee seller.

  Hem was already holding the potion of madran, the poppy tincture that stayed pain, and gently he lifted Boran's head to drip it into his mouth. Boran stirred, and his blurred eyes suddenly became very clear and present. Even in his extremity, he tried to smile.

  "It's the bird boy, isn't it?" Boran's eyes were fixed intensely on Hem, as if he were the only thing left in the world. Hem nodded.

  "Hello, Boran," he whispered, leaning close to the man's face. "Drink this. It will help with the pain." He held the potion to Boran's lips, but he turned his mouth away.

  "It will send me to sleep, huh? And I will not wake up." Boran winced, and struggled for breath.

  "No, you will wake," said Hem, knowing he was lying. "It will be all right."

  "Hey boy, I know the lies of healers." Boran swallowed convulsively, and his body shuddered. "Don't try to fool old Boran. I know I'm done for. I can't feel anything, anyway." He shut his eyes for a moment, and then stared intensely again at Hem, struggling to speak. Hem leaned closer to him. "I don't regret anything, boy," Boran said. "I fought with honor. I'm glad I sent my daughter away. But all the same..."

  Boran shut his eyes, and, putting the potion to one side, Hem wiped his forehead and mouth with a damp cloth, pity wringing his heart.

  "All the same," said Boran, so quietly Hem could hardly hear what he said, "I would have liked to have seen her again. She is so lovely, my Amira, so lovely. She was lovely when she was born, and she is lovely now."

  He lay very still, and Hem wondered for a moment if he were dead. But then Boran's eyes opened again. "If you see Amira, tell her that I love her," he said, in a voice that was suddenly clear and strong. "Tell her I will see her at the Gates, and that I thought of her when... I thought of her..." He trailed into silence, and Hem leaned over him, tears starting in his eyes.

  "I'll tell her," he said fervently, taking Boran's hand, the one that
was not shattered beyond recognition, in both of his own. "I'll tell her, I promise, I'll tell her." But Boran was already dead, his glazed eyes staring into nothing. A drop of water fell onto the still face, and Hem realized that he was crying.

  Hem stayed bowed over Boran's corpse for a long time, until Oslar, who was attending another soldier with serious injuries, noticed him. The old Bard called another healer to take over his task, and came across to Hem and embraced him, saying nothing. Hem burst into convulsive sobs, and Oslar, with a strength that Hem had not suspected he possessed, lifted him up as if he were a small child and carried him next door into a tiny storeroom, where he put him down on a low bench and sat next to him, his arm around his shoulder.

  "It was Boran, the coffee seller in the market," said Hem, when he could speak again. "He – he – he just – died."

  Oslar nodded, staring at Hem with compassion and concern, and took his hand.

  "I think, Hem, that I have been asking too much of you," he said at last. "You have such amazing untaught skill as a healer, and we have such need, I had forgotten that you are still a child."

  Hem brushed the tears from his eyes with an impatient hand. "I'll be all right," he said gruffly. "I want to help. I'm not a baby."

  "You are a child, Hem." Oslar looked at him soberly. "An unusual child, certainly. But a child, all the same."

  "I hate war," said Hem, suddenly and passionately. "I hate all this killing. It doesn't mean anything. It's such a... waste. A terrible, terrible waste..." He felt the tears rising up inside him again, a whole sea of tears, which would still never be enough to express his grief.