Elisha Barber: Book One Of The Dark Apostle

by E. C. Ambrose

  He jumped down, staring up at the granite façade before him. To the right stood the ruined church. A huge rosette window filled its peak, the stained glass mostly gone, leaving only a few petals of brilliant color that gleamed in the new sun and cast emerald and gold upon the refectory wall, adjoining the church at a corner. The smaller spire alongside it was missing its top, and a flight of doves burst free, circling it in a swooping frenzy that much resembled ecstasy.

  “Take any room remaining—not far from here, naturally,” the physician said. “I’m off for the generals. I’ll expect to see you at the infirmary soon.”

  “Aye, my lord,” Elisha returned, still gazing at the tower.

  Making a harsh sound of irritation, the physician strode away, barking out his orders to the carters as they began untying the ropes.

  After a moment, Elisha pulled out his own bedroll and small chest, carrying them toward a peaked door just visible at the base of the tower. It hung off-kilter on a single hinge, and vines draped one side. A few footprints showed the place had been explored, but Elisha hoped no other had the same idea. Entering the darkness of a windowless chamber, Elisha let his eyes adjust, then found the narrow stair upward and followed it, his boots loud on the stone steps.

  As he’d expected, the second floor had a small chamber once used for storage, but long empty now save a few leaves blown in. The stairs continued up through a sagging wooden floor, but this would serve well enough for him. Under the stairs, he set down the chest and flopped his bedroll on top. He longed to spread out his blankets and get a decent rest before facing what was to come, but that would have to wait for another nightfall. Crossing the floor, he leaned to look out one of the two broken windows and found a view of the camp below. The other window afforded a sight of the castle on its hill, with sunlight just touching its highest towers. Ranks of fortifications surrounded it like trimmings on a lady’s skirt, while the remains of a town spread out below. The river curved around it, a silver gleam overarched by the fortifications on that side. A few blackened areas could be seen on the castle walls, and a few bites of rubble where the king’s siege engines had struck. The scorched corpses of those engines lay scattered about, testifying to the use of burning oil by the defenders. When the wind shifted, the air smelled of smoke and a strange metallic tang such as Elisha had never tasted before.

  Hills rose up again behind the castle, thickly grown with spruce and oak. The plain separating the monastery from the castle was torn and dark already, crows and vultures circling the pits where unseen bodies lay. Standing there, Elisha realized he had never had such a view before, unobstructed by the buildings of town. He was used to the sight of grubby houses, gated stone manors, and tall shops whose top floors he would never know. The castle back in London rose abruptly to one side, a gray obstruction, featureless and massive, its white tower enclosed in moated walls, cut off from the people it ruled. From a distance, perhaps, it inspired wonder in those who approached it and fear in the hearts of its enemies, but Elisha’s work kept him to the north, and he rarely passed that way. But this place—he hated to imagine it destroyed, the castle brought low, the river black with soot and blood, the trees cut down for battering rams and ladders.

  Even as he thought it, trumpets sounded below, and the soldiers roused themselves, forming up in ranks to greet another day of battle. Elisha turned away. His own duty lay not on the battlefield but behind it. He found his apron and strung it about his neck to catch the worst of the blood.

  Taking up a leather bundle of his instruments, Elisha descended to the lower floor and out, across the grass to the building used for a hospital. A wide aperture gaped where double doors had once been, giving access to a long, columned room with a few steps down to enter. Near the entrance, a series of beds had been cobbled together from scavenged wood or perhaps taken from houses destroyed in the village. Each man occupying one of these had a personal attendant, be it squire or whore, carrying water or fresh bandages. Three men in bloodied clothes circulated—the surgeons.

  Beyond them, a makeshift curtain separated the back half of the room. From there came the piteous cries he’d heard earlier, and Elisha bowed his head a moment, the long and tiring journey suddenly weighing on him full-force. Few attendants crossed the boundary laid by that curtain and with little in their hands to aid those who suffered beyond it. He knew without guidance that this was the hall for the commoners, the foot soldiers who went out first, who died first, who might lie moaning for hours before a crew collected them from that bloody field. His people.

  Steeling himself, Elisha walked down the few steps and inside between the beds. One of the surgeons seemed to be directing the others, so he sought the man’s attention, joining him at the bed of an older knight, his head wrapped in linen.

  “Sir,” Elisha said, with a slight bow. “I’m Elisha Barber, brought by the physician Lucius.”

  “What?” the man glanced up from a parchment he had been studying. A crude sketch of the human body filled the page, crabbed about with symbols and letters, matched to various limbs and organs. A cord attached the parchment to a rope belt with a half-dozen books and a few more scrolls already dangling from it. “Who are you?” The question furrowed his well-worn brow, gray locks straggling from under a soft, round cap. He looked up at Elisha from liquid brown eyes, his face lined with a weariness beyond the flesh.

  “Elisha Barber.”

  “Good. Been without since the last one took a ball to the chest. Bloody sight.” He looked Elisha up and down, and nodded. “Mordecai ben Ibrahim. My hospital, hear that?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Where’s the physician?”

  Elisha shrugged. “Likely, he’ll be down when he gets his things settled.”

  Mordecai glanced toward the heavens and sighed, a long, weary exhalation. “Man should let well enough alone. Water’s in the court,”—he indicated direction with a toss of his head—“supplies in the vestry. Short on supplies as it is. Don’t take what’s not your due.”

  “Aye, sir,” Elisha repeated.

  Bobbing his head, Mordecai resumed his examination of the chart in his hands. “Get on then, been long enough without.”

  Dismissed, Elisha threaded his way back to the aisle and went to the curtain, drawing it aside to enter his new domain. A series of windows lit the inside wall, with a few narrow slots to the outside. Immediately, desperate voices assailed him from all around. Aside from the usual odor of infection, the place smelled different from the city hospital—fewer diseases and more straight-forward injuries, he guessed. And maybe fewer corpses left about. A tearing sound drew his attention to the corner where a pair of ragged women looked up from their work. “What’s your business?” the older one called out.

  “Barber,” Elisha called back, flinching at the wash of relief which flooded their faces. They dropped the fabric they were ripping for bandages and hurried over. Their skirts were tucked up into their belts revealing sturdy legs and unshod feet.

  “Lisbet,” said the younger, with an awkward imitation of a curtsey.

  The older offered a gapped grin. “And I’m Maeve. Praise the Lord, we’ve been waiting a long time for you.”

  “I’m Elisha. When did the last barber die?”

  “Two weeks now, I mark it. The surgeons come back when they can, but there’s officers and knights for them. And I hear there’s a physician, eh?”

  “Aye, there is. Lucius by name. I’m sure he’ll be along before the day’s out.”

  “A physician? Back here?”

  Elisha nodded. “He’s got some methods to try for the wounds of these new weapons.”

  Lisbet and Maeve stared at each other, and Lisbet shrugged. “Help is surely needed,” she said. “But what’s to be done aside from cautery or cutting?”

  Spreading his hands, Elisha said, “I’ve no experience on the battlefield, so I’ll count on you two. What are we facing?”

  Maeve opened her arms to encompass the men all around th
em. “As you see, Barber. A dozen more a day, and at least half that dying at night, so we keep a steady pace.”

  The room held about fifty men, many unconscious while others gave only incoherent moans. They lay on the floor or on heaps of moldering straw, a few with pitchers by their heads. Flies buzzed in the air around the worst of them, those with stumps of arms or legs, those with their middles swathed in old bandages. Pale hands waved to him, one with no fingers left and a reeking putrefaction oozing down the naked arm. Sheets obscured a few faces toward the far end of the room, where one man kept up a constant stream of curses as his body twitched. Two doors opened out of that wall, one to a set of stairs going up to the second floor, the other into sunlight. Through that door, he could make out a bunch of irregular shapes. He squinted to bring them into focus: discarded feet and arms, and corpses not yet buried. Staggered, Elisha stared a long time at the ceiling. This, then, was the penance that would lay his brother to rest. He was used to handling one patient at a time, perhaps two or three if there’d been a fight or an accident.

  In a low voice, Lisbet explained, “We’re sure a man’s to live, we give him a pitcher. Not ’nough of those to go round, see? We think he’s to die, we move him toward the back. Easier to clear them out that way, to the yard.” She glanced over her shoulder in that direction. “Should bring us more gravediggers, they should.”

  Maeve picked up the explanation. “Try to keep the cannon shots over here, in case they need the surgeons. And the minor wounds against that wall, as they don’t require dressing so often. Major wounds to the inside—closer to the water—or toward the back. The master surgeon’s been kind enough to pull the arrows these last few days.”

  “There’s just the two of you?”

  “Plus one at night. We try to bring in some from the whores’ camp, but they get work enough to keep busy, unless they’ve got a favorite been injured.” She shrugged one shoulder. “We stay where there’s a roof against the rain. Sharing a room upstairs.”

  Nodding, Lisbet smiled, and he suddenly connected them as mother and daughter in the way they tilted their heads, and the dimples at their cheeks.

  “I’ve been conscripted,” he told them, “but how did you come to be here?”

  Again, they shared a look, then Lisbet spoke up. “My brother’s one of the king’s gunners.”

  “Better to stay with him and know for sure than sit at home dreading to hear,” Maeve put in. “Least here we’ve got a roof, two meals, and charitable labor.”

  Once more, Elisha looked around him. “Where am I needed most?”

  Maeve took his arm and led him to the wall by the curtain. “New ones, not seen the surgeons yet. Stitching here, I think.” She pointed to an unconscious man. “Cutting there. And this lot were hit by the bombardelles.”

  Bombardelles he’d never heard of, but stitching, that he could handle. It was a place to begin, to wade into the shallows of this war before he found himself up to his neck. He knelt at the man’s bedside and peeled back the layers that bandaged his scalp. No sign yet of putrefaction. Good. He drew together the edges of the wound and clipped them with a silver crow’s bill while he set the first stitch at the middle and tied it off. The next stitches he set to either side, drawing the lips of the wound gradually closer before stitching the gaps between. As he dealt with the bloody gash, the two women quietly returned to ripping bandages. After a time, as he drew his needle through the flesh, pinching the edges together with his off-hand, he heard the low murmur of their voices.

  “Handsome, what?” the younger one said.

  “Aye, he’s that, but not for you. Even such as you can do better than a barber.” Maeve sighed. “Doubt he’ll last long here, in any case.”

  Finishing his first task, and paying the women no heed, he moved on to the others, checking the fellow who’d lost his fingers and another with an arrow through his thigh. When he had dealt with the pressing cases, he turned to the amputation. The man was barely conscious, his eyes roving the ceiling, his lips moving as if he were addressing the flies around him. Even beneath the wrapping, his leg looked wrong, misshapen, and Elisha braced himself before he cut away the cloth. He palpated the limb as gently as he might, finding shards of bone that shifted beneath his hands and made the patient cry out. Both lower bones lay shattered at the ankle—too many breaks to set, and the foot skewed to one side. Elisha winced. The crushed foot already smelled foul and showed a sickly edge of green and black. At least it hadn’t reached to the knee. Elisha tugged free a bandage and drew up the man’s muscle and skin as much as possible before he tied it tightly around the leg just below the knee. After the amputation, the muscle and skin would relax to cover the stump of bone. He would have just a handbreadth above the break, but if the man recovered, he should do well with a wooden leg.

  “Fetch us some water, would you?” he called out, and the women sighed, taking up their buckets and trudging for the far door.

  To the soldier, he said, “Try to lie still. I need to cut your leg, but you’ll be about with a wooden one sooner than you think. I’ll be as careful and quick as I can.”

  The soldier moaned, but his face revealed no sign that he had heard.

  Elisha unrolled his instruments, an assortment of long and short knives, some curved, along with various crows- and hawksbills to clamp off the veins and arteries. He picked one of the larger curved knives and set the blade against the flesh. As he made the first cut, the patient screamed, and Elisha began to hum, low in his throat. The flesh parted, and Elisha shifted his work to the back, supporting the leg on his own, using a smaller blade to snick between the bones and cut the oozing muscle. Too many barbers, his own master included, sometimes neglected that step.

  As he reached each large vein and artery, he used a hawksbill to grip the cut end, stitching them efficiently shut. Common practice had barbers cauterize the stump either with a hot iron or caustic oils, but Elisha’s journeyman years had introduced him to the brothel trade—a steady employment for any healer—where a Moorish whore who had worked in a hospital in her native land taught him the alternate technique of binding the vessels. Elisha took to it quickly, allowing him to abandon the torture of burning his patients. As if the loss of a limb were not enough.

  At last faced with bone as bare and clean as he could make it, Elisha reached for the saw. His mind cast back to his brother’s house, his brother’s wife sobbing on the table before him as he took up a tiny, delicate saw, and he hesitated, his eyes suddenly hot with tears. He had no time for grief, not now, nor could his patient spare him this sudden reluctance. Elisha firmly took up the saw. He was needed here, and if the ghosts that haunted his memory pressed all the closer now, at least they would know they had not been forgotten.

  Setting the saw carefully, Elisha made a slow draw to start the blade. The limb vibrated slightly with each push as he put his strength behind it. He let his humming drown out the sickening creak of blade into bone, silently thanking the saints that the man had lapsed into darkness.

  The women settled their buckets beside him, sloshing onto the bloody floor, then went out for more, their feet tracking blood as they moved away.

  Chapter 8

  When Elisha rose stiffly from his task, he rolled his shoulders and glanced out the windows. Across the grassy courtyard, about at the level of his chest, he saw the legs of the two women near a raised cistern. A channel ran from it out beneath a low arch in the direction of the river. They lugged two buckets each with the sort of resigned tread that told him they had done so many times before. No wonder they lost so many men, if his nurses must spend most of their time simply hauling water. He frowned. Edging between the wounded soldiers, Elisha crossed to the windowed wall, where he could study the stone and the layout of the yard. There must be a better way. He stuck his head out the window.

  “Lisbet!” he called. She jerked at her name and turned. “Leave that. Find me a hammer and chisel, and a pick, if you can.” As she set down the buckets with obvi
ous relief, he added, “And a barrel or a cauldron or something.” Shrugging at her mother, she turned to obey.

  At his feet, one of the men said, “It’s not so bad as that, is it? You’re not to crack open my head with some bloody chisel?”

  Glancing down, Elisha saw the man’s grin and smiled in return. “I might, if you can’t keep silent.” He knelt down, checking the bandages that wrapped the man’s head beneath a shock of deep red hair. The wound seemed to be healing well—another day or so, the soldier could forgo the bandage altogether. It could use a change, but from what he’d seen, there were few enough bandages for the new arrivals.

  Even as he thought it, the air roared with the first volley from the castle bombards, and the ground shook. Elisha steadied himself against the wall as a second impact brought screams from the unseen field. “Sweet Lord, is this what you’ve got all day?”

  “Aye,” the man answered, “we’re right pleased they don’t go all night. They’re like dragons out there, spitting fire and boulders. Best get used to it.”

  “I’ll try.” He squatted at the man’s side. “I’m Elisha, the new barber here. Can you walk?”

  Lowering his voice, the young soldier leaned closer. “I can, but don’t let on to the captain.” He winked, and Elisha had to smile. “Ruari of Northglen,” the man said, sticking out a hand for a firm shake.

  “Ruari, I’ll need this area cleared. It’d be a help to me if you can move some of these men, and yourself, out of the way.”

  “What’re you planning, then?” Ruari slowly got to his feet, standing a moment to be sure they would hold, and straightened to his full height, a head taller than Elisha.