The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster coaaod-9

by Hugh Cook

  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 an accomplished expert.

  Consider then a case more complex than mere amputation.

  Suppose you are fighting in the red dust of Dalar ken Halvar, and that your friend has been eviscerated by a broadsword. Suppose too that a pariah dog has eaten one half of his liver; that a goodly portion of his forebrain has spilt down his face like so much spoilt porridge; that one of his eyes has been plucked from its perch by a battlefield vulture, and that the other is resting on his cheek in the bloody mess of its swordpoint evisceration.

  What would you do?

  Or, to take another case, how would you aid a friend who has been speared most piteously in the anus, assuming that the pair of you are marooned by blizzard in the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus.

  Assume too that all food is gone, that your tent is in tatters, and that your friend's incidental frostbite has led to his left leg becoming one single bloated mass of gangrenous stench-flesh.

  How would you treat your friend?

  Or would you treat him not, but simply content yourself with the stealing of his boots, and the making of a joke about him after his death and his snowfall burial?

  If you cannot give firm answers to such questions, then it is arguable that you are unfit to go to war.

  And what too would you do were your friend burnt from waist to throat by the fire of a dragon? Or burnt below the waist, which is arguably worse? And are you aware that the fire of the imperial dragons of Yestron is sticky, and cannot be removed by rubbing or clawing, but inevitably eats its way through to the bone?

  And have you treatments for malaria, or hepatitis, or typhus, or bubonic plague, or syphilis, or gonorrhoea, or any of those other ailments which are the common property of an army on the march? And know you recipes of genocide apt for the mass murder of the rat and the flea? And which biting insect is it which carries typhus, and what are the symptoms of that disease, and what its treatment? And to remove a bloated tick from human flesh, does one wind it deasil or withershins? And what will you do if the tick has invaded the ear?

  And what would you do – to take case more tractable than some of the traumas detailed above – if your friend were to come to you in panic, declaring a leech to have penetrated his privacy by means of the eye of his male organ? (And if you think this a most unlikely contingency, then know that just such a disaster is said to have befallen one of the heroes who quested with the Rovac warrior Morgan Hearst, when that worthy was in hot pursuit of the renegade wizard Heenmor).

  And (to pursue the subject of the tenderness of the male organ a little further) have you heard of the jilifish? It is a fish of certain of the equatorial jungles, a fish which will swim up the flow of a man's urine, then erect its sharpest fin inside his organ of generation. How would you know a river to be infested with such a fish? And how would you guard yourself against its onslaught?

  It is obvious that you will know a river to be jilifish- infested when your best friend screams in white-hot agony while taking a piss (assuming that he has not been lately to a brothel, in which case his pain may have an alternative cause). And it is obvious likewise that you can best guard yourself against the jilifish by refraining from pissing into rivers, and, further, by making sure that the stream of your cautious micturation passes through a filter fine enough to deny all fishes a route of ardent ascent.

  As for the other questions – why, war will certainly ask them, and if war is your destiny then you had better know the answers.

  Really, considering the grievous contingencies of armed adventuring, it can soberly be stated that no person should be allowed to take up arms without first enduring a full seven years of training in the repair and preservation of flesh and blood, of skin and bone, and of the ever-vulnerable male organ in particular.

  But the more common expedient is to teach young men the mere use of weapons, so that, when placed in the presence of agony, they can but gape – and watch the wounded die. This is the common experience of war; though it is little reported, for it is human to forget, and those who cannot forget it most typically say nothing. So remember, when you find yourself in the presence of a happily loquacious old soldier, that he is but a victim of selective amnesia – a fact which may amply be proved by asking him to narrate for you the manner of the death of those of his friends who took the longest to die.

  Being a very average young man in many respects, Guest Gulkan did just what most soldiers do in the face of those wounded and dying: he paused and he pitied, then he went on and forgot.

  And that was the end of the matter.

  And if you are surprised to find in these pages so much war in combination with so little suffering, why, then know well the reason. This is Guest Gulkan's story, the biography of a warrior, and a warrior of the Yarglat at that. And your every accomplished warrior is necessarily an amnesiac – and, more, neglects to see that which is not useful for his purposes.

  It is said by the tender that any tale of war should concentrate on its suffering, for the tender-minded hold such suffering to be the ruling reality of war. In this they are in error; and, focusing on the dead and dying, they misunderstand that which they deprecate. Misunderstanding the dynamics of war, they cannot thereafter hope to alter those dynamics.

  If history has any moral mission, then it is this: to render to the fullest the complexities and uncertainties of the living human reality which we endure. For it is we ourselves whom we seek to understand when we read in the pages of
history – we, the human people, wizards and warriors, wonderworkers and washerwomen.

  If we study the affairs of puppets and poppets then we will be well-equipped for life in a doll's house; but the world is not so amiably constituted, and attempts to treat it as if it were lead commonly to disaster.

  Let us then stage no moral charades with puppets and poppets.

  For if we do, then we delude ourselves; and, surely, to choose to be wilfully blind as to our own nature is the greatest of crimes, for without self-knowledge there can be no governance of the self by the self.

  Yes, and there are those who deny this, and say that it is sufficient to yield in faith to the diktats of some deity such as Zoz the Ancestral or similar. In such faith, they are prepared to burn all history, blaming the page for the battle, the court record for the crime. The reason for their willed ignorance is simple: self-knowledge and self-awareness are painful, so the weak and the inadequate customarily prefer the numb oblivion of the slavery of unquestioning faith.

  In defiance of such wilful ignorance, this history speaks, holding truth to be the highest virtue. For only through an acknowledgement of the living realities of our world and our own existence can we attain self-knowledge and autonomous adulthood.

  And only by acknowledging the living realities of war can we hope to understand the persistence of war, which continues to blight our world despite the best-hearted efforts of those tender-minded moralists who would have us believe that war is one mass of conscious suffering, and that every warrior is a victim.

  This book is a history of the warrior's living reality. And the truth of the warrior is ambition combined with amnesia, selective vision supplemented by selective memory, and the belief that victory is the validation of all suffering. Therefore, believing truth to be the highest virtue, we will not distort the record with moral charades of painful remorse, charades incompatible with the truth; but, rather, will note the plain fact, which is that Guest Gulkan swiftly forgot the dying washerwoman as he hastened up the stairs toward the Hall of Time.

  In his barefoot panting, the Weaponmaster gave no further thought to the sorrows of war or the suffering of the injured.

  Rather, he was seized by an electric excitement. His eyes glittered as if frenzied by a lightning bolt; his sword trembled in his battle-ready hand; and his thoughts were focused entirely on his long-delayed but now-inevitable confrontation with Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, Demon By Appointment to the Great God Jocasta.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sod: Banker Sod, aka Governor Sod, aka Lord Sod: a merchant banker graced with the pale skin, the yellow head-hair and the thick white body hair, the golden eyes and the jet-black fingernails so typical of the iceman breed. His daughter is Damsel, she who so recently seduced and betrayed the Weaponmaster.

  So Guest Gulkan ventured up the last of the stairs and entered into the Hall of Time, where the gutter-gubber nightlight of oil lanterns spilt a garblage of shadows across skull-pattern tiles. Many of those nightlamps had flubbered their last, and by expiry had left great gouts of shadow sprawled across that cavernous chamber.

  Cavernous? Yes, the word was exact, not capricious or spuriously decorative. Carved as it was in the living rock of the mainrock Pinnacle, and breached as it was by the venting draughts of aerial ice which shuddered by histle and scree through the slits in its windows, this gloom-gaping barrow was much more of a cave than a hall.

  At the far end of that oval engapement, a full hundred paces from the entrance where Guest Gulkan stood, something glowed cold and green.

  The demon.

  The night of their first encounter was so long ago in the past, so heavily overlaid by memories of battle and disaster, that

  Guest from time to time had been half-convinced that the whole thing had been no more than a figment of his fevered imagination.

  After all, he had been ill at the time, had he not? Grievously ill – near dead from influenza, and many of his erstwhile companions literally dead.

  So, while the Weaponmaster had rehearsed his memories a thousand times, he had half-suspected their vivid solidity to have been no more than that spurious hyper-realism which characterizes the most gripping of sweet-dreams and nightmare. In its very nature, that first encounter had been half sweet-dream, half threat. For the demon had promised to make Guest a wizard, had it not? That was sweet: the prospect of being able to amplify his swordstroke with powers equal to those of a Zozimus or a Pitilkin.

  But the demon had also told him that wizards were allies of dark things from the ruins of former times – allies of the Mahendo Mahunduk, a race of demon-flavored beasts left over from the wreckage of gods.

  Whatever the true nature of the Mahendo Mahunduk – and Guest was uncertain that he had construed that nature with absolute accuracy – they were most certainly creatures of the World Beyond.

  And Guest, for reasons which he had never been able to even halfexplain to himself, had always flinched from knowledge of the World Beyond. As he had remained wilfully ignorant of the whole bloody business of wounds and eviscerations, so too he had closed his mind to the realm of talking bones and boneless voices, though in Gendormargensis there had been shamans sufficient to those mysteries, so he would not have lacked for tutors had he ever sought the endarkenment of his blank-faced daylight.

  Now far from all thoughts of day, Guest Gulkan prolonged his hesitation, more than half-hoping for a distraction which would prevent him from venturing forward. For the plain and simple truth was that he was afraid. In its silence, in the green glimmer of its cold continence, the demon was possessed of a terrifying Patience. It had sat there for – for how long? For generations, surely – for generations at a minimum.

  Enduring the weariness of the toiling years, the demon had served the Safrak Bank as Guardian Prime and as Keeper of the Inner Sanctum. Sitting there, year after year, listening, learning, planning, waiting, thinking, the demon had had time to ripen into the full malice of its manipulative cunning. It reminded Guest of one of those turtles which has a tongue twisted into an imitation of scrapmeat, and, seeking to tempt unwary fishes with this offering, spends all its life in imitation of the basic manoeuver of the rock, its jaws constantly agape in the exercise of alluring entrapment.

  As such a beast seemed the demon, only more so. Hence Guest hesitated, and to such an extent that he had quite positively halted – and was halted still when he heard someone coming stumping up the stairs behind him.

  The Weaponmaster wheeled, his sword ready for butchery. But it was no enemy who was encroaching upon his vacillations. Rather, it was the dwarf Glambrax, who had blood on his boots and a bloody hatchet in his hand.

  "How goes it below?" said Guest.

  "Badly," said the dwarf.

  Coming as it did from Glambrax, this baldly monosyllabic statement was ominous in the extreme. Nevertheless, the arrival of one of his comrades heartened the Weaponmaster, and he said:

  "Guard well this gate. For I have business with the demon of this place."

  "Demon?" said Glambrax. "What demon?"

  "I mean that iceblock yonder," said Guest. "That great green iceblock at the far end of the hall."

  "Then do your business, master," said Glambrax, starting to recover something of his customary loquacity, "and give the thing a lick for me. And I in my mightiness will hold this gate against giants and against dragons, against trolls and orcs, and even against the very elven lords in their arrogance. I will guard it against all onslaught of vampires, though their wings be a league of uncrimped crimson, and I will guard it against the footpad jaws of the werewolf, and the spikes of the Neversh itself. Yea, verily, while Drangsturm burns and my heartbeat thunders, I will hold the door against all such, though I cannot guarantee to hold it against men, and unfortunately it is men we fight tonight."

  "Then do but consent to hold your tongue," said Guest, "and with that I will be content."

  Thus spoke the Weaponmaster, speaking roughly out of habit, though he was hear
tened by the dwarf's recovered powers of the tongue. Having spoken, Guest Gulkan scraped his feet to remove any last traces of blood – though blood would surely have dried during his prolonged prevarications – and then with his sword at the ready he ventured forward.

  In his venturing, Guest kept to the center of the hall, the part which was darkest since it was furthest from the wallside lanterns – for he favored the dark like a fugitive. A central course also kept him clear of the deep embrasures and the time pods, and hence guarded him against ambush.

  With such caution, Guest dared himself some ninety paces through the gloom of the Hall of Time, halting some ten paces short of the green-glowing menace of Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis,

  Demon of Safrak. Guest had expected this monolithic chunk of jade-green stone to recognize him, and to acknowledge him. But it did not. It stood there in square-cut continence, formidable in implicit rebuff, rising in looming silence to twice his own height. Beyond it, he could see the single flight of stairs. Guest Gulkan now stood on the floor of the Hall of Time, the single chamber which dominated Zi Obo, the Pod Stratum of the mainrock Pinnacle. If he could dare his way past the Demon of Safrak, then he could ascend the stairs which would take him to Jezel Obo. And Jezel Obo was the Sky Stratum, the topmost level of the mainrock Pinnacle, and home to its Inner Sanctum, the abditorial holy of holies to which none could penetrate but by the demon's leave.

  But Guest had no thoughts of penetrating to Safrak's abditory. He had not come here to plumb for secrets. He had come to seek for help in war – help which he must have lest he die. And the demon's silence, rather than intriguing him, irritated him intensely.

  "Italis!" barked Guest. "It's me!"

  Then, getting no response, he elaborated:

  "It is me! Guest Gulkan! The Weaponmaster! I was here before, remember? You told me about Jocasta, the Great God. A prisoner.