Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  “Let her go.”

  “Why would I do that?” Gede sneered. “She’s going home with me.”

  Allie stood, feeling the new inches in her legs and back that spring had brought, letting her head settle above her shoulders with a feeling of finality.

  “Your argument is with me. I’m the one breaking your rules. I’m the one teaching them. If you have a complaint, make it to me. Let her go.”

  There was a snarl that passed soundlessly across his lips, and he pushed Kenna to the ground to one side, walking toward Allie with an intent. She had no idea what he planned on doing, but she rolled away, having no intention of being there when he got there.

  He caught her by her hair, snapping her short and stripping her bow away.

  “Spoiled brat. You have no idea the weight of the traditions you thumb your nose at. When Drest hears what you’ve done to corrupt this school…”

  He started to try to drag her away by her braid as the girls threw sticks at him and Allie heard the sound of Kenna’s feet scraping on bark as she regained her perch overhead. Someone found pinecones and threw them, but none of them fired an arrow. Allie was proud of that, in that moment, that the girls knew the difference between Gede and a true enemy. As Gede continued to drag her toward the path, her feet constantly searching for space underneath her to keep her weight off of her hair, she caught sight of the dagger at Gede’s hip, Roman iron. She snatched it and, without hesitation, sliced it through her hair and ducked away. He stared stupidly at the rope of hair in his hand.

  “I am not your animal,” Allie said, standing again. “I don’t care what you think of me or what I do. I’m not anything that you want me to be, and I’m not going to be. Go back to your hillfort and manage your master’s kingdom. I belong here, and you won’t take me away, or any of them.”

  She watched him for a moment, the sense of un-reality from the midwinter festival returning. He stared at her, speechless, then looked at the hair in his hand again. She tossed his knife onto the ground, then turned and ran to the trees, the ground under her feet firm and soundless, and sprung for the low branches, finding hands there that pulled her up into the trees.

  There was a long silence as the boys stared and the girls waited, then Gede threw Allie’s braid on the ground.

  “This won’t go on,” he said to Rafa.

  “That’s enough, Gede. Go home,” Rafa answered quietly.

  “I need to speak with you,” Gede growled. Rafa sighed, casting a quick glance up at Allie that communicated nothing to her, then left, following Gede back down the path towards the buildings.

  In the silence after Gede left, one of the girls - Allie hadn’t noticed which - had gone down to steal his knife from where he had left it. As Allie sat high up in the tree again, feeling more disconnected than ever from the Caledd and their traditions, one by one, the girls cut their own braids off and threw them down to the dirt below. Part of her had known they would do it, the moment she had. Part of her worried that they were sacrificing something, in order to be a part of the little troop, but mostly it felt right. They were set apart, women who had rejected the traditions of their people, living a bit wild and a bit alone. Preparing for a conflict that Allie could feel coming.

  It was fate that brought the first of the men that day.

  Toward evening, as the girls came in for dinner, Allie heard footfalls down the path towards Drest’s hillfort. She stood at the front gate and waited to see who it was, recognizing by the sedate pace that it wouldn’t be Gede. The man was too self-important to go anywhere that slowly.

  Eventually, the three of them came into sight, an old man, a young boy, and a third man, slumped over and barely staying on the mule that the old man led. Allie ran into the house, finding Isobel at her table.

  “There’s someone coming,” she said, feeling a bit silly. The third man had spooked her, though. She didn’t know how to understand what it meant. Isobel read something underneath Allie’s words and stood, following her back out of the house and coming to stand at the gate with her.

  “He’s bad, lady,” the old man said as they stopped at the gate. Isobel nodded.

  “How long have you ridden?”

  “Three days,” the old man answered, untying ropes that held the unconscious man on the mule. Rafa appeared with one of the working men and wordlessly took the limp man away.

  “You will stay here tonight,” Isobel said.

  “No. They need us back,” the old man answered. “There are going to be more.”

  “Do you need provisions?” Isobel asked. Allie felt bewildered. She couldn’t think of a time that someone had said ‘no’ to Isobel without any argument at all.

  “We have enough.”

  “At least let the men give you a drink,” Isobel said. The old man ducked his head in acknowledgment, and Isobel pointed toward the well where the working men drew water for themselves and the livestock. The old man clapped an arm across the boy’s shoulders and led both the boy and the mule in the direction Isobel had indicated. Allie watched until they were out of earshot.

  “They shouldn’t be out at night,” she said.

  “He’s right. They’ll need him at the front,” Isobel answered. “He’s a good man.”

  “Why?” Allie asked. Isobel looked down at her.

  “They’ll tend the injured in the nearby villages. Most of the ones they can’t treat will die, but a few, the ones who hold on, they’ll send here. And he’s right. There are going to be more.”

  “But they can’t defend themselves,” Allie said. Isobel shrugged.

  “War calls on everyone to take risks they wouldn’t normally take. He might save a life, taking a risk to get back sooner.”

  Allie frowned and Isobel turned.

  “Follow me.”

  Allie followed the tall woman down the hallway in the main house and through a door she had never been through before. In retrospect, she should have always known that there was a second story to the house, having seen it from outside, but the height of the house had always been what it was, and she had never been upstairs before, from childhood. It had never occurred to her that there should be stairs.

  And yet there were.

  They went up the stone stairs and into a large, open room under straw rafters. Rows of beds stood against each wall, and Isobel led Allie to the last one, where the man lay under a blanket of leather. Isobel turned the blanket back and cut the linen from around the man’s waist, revealing a compress of old man’s beard that was dark with old blood. Isobel peeled that away and wiped the wound underneath clean, probing it with her fingers.

  “The water, there,” Isobel said, pointing. “It has been boiled over the fire. Take the cloth out of it and clean your hands.”

  “What is this?” Allie asked, picking up a stone-shaped object sitting next to the bowl. It was soft in her hand, like it would scratch, but not deform.

  “Soap,” Isobel said. Allie smelled it.

  “No.”

  “I made it,” Isobel said. “You scrub your hands with it after you’ve wiped them off.”

  Allie glanced at her, but went along.

  “Here,” Isobel said. Allie clamped her mouth for a moment, then came to stand next to Isobel, looking where Isobel pointed. “You can see where the spear split the skin. Normally, they would have sewed the wound closed at the front, and he would have lived or died based on his luck, but someone who knew something treated him.”

  “They left him… open,” Allie said. Isobel nodded. Allie swallowed. “He… smells.”

  Isobel nodded again.

  “His flesh is dying, inside.”

  Allie actually did gag, this time. Isobel was merciless.

  “Look at his skin.”

  “He’s gray,” Allie said. Isobel nodded again, putting Allie’s fingers to the man’s throat.

  “That’s his heart.”

  Allie shivered away, feeling like she was crossing an unspoken boundary. Isobel brought Allie’s fi
ngers to her own throat and Allie had to control herself, not to jerk away. She didn’t think she’d ever touched Isobel before.

  “Tell me the difference.”

  Focusing, Allie found the strange sensation under the man’s skin, keeping her other hand on Isobel’s throat.

  “His is hard to find… and slow.”

  This drew another nod.

  “Good. He has lost blood. A lot of it. His body is shutting down as it dies.”

  Allie felt a cold horror.

  “He’s going to die?”

  “Maybe,” Isobel said, not giving Allie any space for her to feel emotion. “I need to cut away the dead tissue, but he has lost a lot of blood, and doing it will make him lose more. I can wait to see if he gets stronger, which makes him more likely to survive, but the longer I wait, the more tissue is going to die, and I might be too late to save him, even if he survived.”

  Allie waited, and Isobel straightened from looking at the wound to watch Allie. Allie blinked at her.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “His life is balanced on a knife’s blade. I can’t know which is the right path. So you are going to choose.”

  “Me?” Allie heard herself squeak. Isobel nodded evenly, taking a step back.

  “His life is in your hands, Aileen. I can’t tell you that he will survive, even if you made the best decision. He may die, no matter what. You can never know the truth. Today, you will accept that.”

  Allie looked down at the man, heard the raggedy noise of his breath, looked down at the gray skin where it was peeling back from the dark hole in his side.

  “Do it,” she said quickly, pushing herself to speak before she could take it back. Isobel nodded.

  “Go down and tell Rafa that we will need more light.”

  Allie didn’t sleep well that night, her half-waking mind plagued with images of skin, muscle, meat falling away from the man’s body under Isobel’s sharp knife. Allie had watched the men butcher sheep before; she knew all the parts, but it was something disturbing and different, watching the pieces come out of a human’s body and drop onto the piece of skin Isobel had laid on the wood table next to her as she worked.

  She found herself, the next morning, sitting at the girls’ table at breakfast, stony and unwell. She hadn’t had any appetite, and Gwen had seemed to understand.

  “You don’t have to,” her mother had said simply, unprompted.

  “I do,” Allie had answered. Gwen had nodded, and Allie had been unsure if it had been assent or agreement.

  The girls chatted and ate, their short hair falling around their ears like boys. Allie kept pushing at her own hair, annoyed by it.

  “Are you done?” Isobel asked. Allie looked at her empty plate.

  “Yes.”

  “Come with me.”

  Allie glanced at the table of girls, but was unable to offer them an explanation in words. She shook her head and turned to follow Isobel upstairs.

  So started her apprenticeship to Isobel in the sick ward. Isobel taught her to check the windows, re-sealing the cloth covers where a wind had blown them in, or replacing them where they’d been damaged. She would then check the straw thatching for discoloration, signs of rot or bugs, and tell the working men where to repair it.

  “It must be clean, Allie. Everything must be clean,” Isobel said again and again. When a single fly made its way into the room, drawn by the smell, Allie spent an entire day chasing it. She could never leave unless the room was clean, to Isobel’s bizarre standards. After that, if they hadn’t had lunch yet, Isobel would take Allie to a bedside, teaching her to read the signs of a wounded body.

  The men trickled in, one every few days or so, and one by one, the beds filled. Allie took away blankets and mats to clean and made up new beds for the men who could rise; she watched as their health degraded or improved. She grew numb to the aspect of arriving in the morning before breakfast to finding one of her patients cold.

  The first man died.

  It haunted her, even after the second and third deaths and after she learned to recognize how unpredictable the outcomes of the decisions she and Isobel made were. Isobel hadn’t been shielding her, telling her that she would never know whether she had made the right call. And yet, she wondered what would have happened if she had told Isobel to wait.

  The first man had lingered, staying that ashy gray color for days as Isobel dripped water down his throat and kept his side clean, never waking, but holding to life for the longest time, and Allie cried when he stopped breathing.

  The second man died quickly. There was nothing Isobel could do for him, and he was gone by nightfall of the day he arrived.

  The third man, Wyndham, woke after two days, telling stories of the battles he had been in, the Romans he had killed. His skin had been ruddy, and he had eaten heartily, and then one morning, he was dead, too.

  “You have to understand,” Isobel said as Allie had stood over the man, stunned to sickness. “They only send the ones to me that they can’t help. Many of them will die. You must accept that.”

  The fourth man had come with a broken body, trampled by horses, and his skin had been purple and black, even days after it had happened. Allie accepted that he was not going to recover, and had done her work in Isobel’s infirmary silently, not wanting to talk to the man any more than she had to, but as the room steadily filled with men who died and men who recovered and went home, Perth stayed. She came to marvel at his rugged determination to heal and return to his family, a young wife he mentioned often to Isobel, and a father who had been in the wars with Drest’s father.

  And so Allie spent her summer.

  The war had gone against the Caledd, from the reports the wounded brought back with them. The front farms were all gone, and the clans were sending family north to stay with relatives and friends. Those who didn’t have either were coming to Drest’s hillfort for sanctuary, and the hillfort was being stretched to capacity, housing and feeding them all, according to accounts.

  As the summer worked its way into fall, the girls were getting more and more confident in themselves, each other, and their skillsets, and Allie was becoming more of an assistant to Isobel in the infirmary, beyond just being a fly-chaser.

  She appeared to have stopped growing, finally, and the muscles in her arms and back began to catch up with her long limbs. The bow, always a comfort to her through her days in the infirmary, began to feel like an extension of her body.

  She came to recognize the parts of the day when the couriers, the young boys and old men who contributed to the war by escorting the wounded, were likely to arrive, and would stand at the gate to wait for them each day. Some days Kenna or one of the girls would stand with her, or Rafa or Gwen, but mostly she stood on her own, ears tuned for the soft sound of footfalls over the far hill.

  It was a dusky evening that had forgotten that fall was coming when a tall warhorse crested the hill. This surprised Allie, as it was normally farm animals that would carry the wounded away from the war. She stood taller, waiting to see who was leading it. In the dim light, it took her another minute to recognize the two older men who accompanied the horse, but she frowned to see that there were two more at its flanks. The men who brought back the wounded traveled in twos for safety, but never more, because the work of harvest and taking care of the clans was already too much for the adults left in the clans.

  She called for the working men to come help with the warrior on his horse, then waited as they made it the rest of the way to the school.

  “We’re to see him settled,” the man at the horse’s head said as he stopped and the serving men started to untie the wounded man from the horse. Allie frowned, then a groan from the warrior nearly stopped her heart. She knew that voice.

  “Drude,” she whispered, going around the warhorse that she should have recognized to touch the young man’s face. His skin was hot and slick under her fingers, and his eyes were rolled up under slack eyelids.

  “How long
since he was last awake?” she asked.

  “We left the front this morning,” the first man said as Drude slid off the horse without reaction. “He was awake then, but bad.”

  “Bad how?”

  “It’s his leg,” a second man volunteered.

  “What happened?”

  “He took an arrow. We thought he was going to recover fine, be out with the lads again in a few weeks.”

  There was the smell. She knew it too well, now. Rotting flesh. She nodded.

  “Do you think it was poisoned?”

  “The Romans couldn’t trust their archers not to kill themselves with that stuff,” a third man muttered, and there was general agreement. Allie nodded, pulling Drude’s eyelid back to find his eye. The pupil was contracted, but his eyes were white, and the sighted part of his eye jerked away reflexively. She nodded.

  “The first bed on the left,” she said. She’d just made it up that morning, and she knew it was clean. She looked at the men who had made up the escort. “You can go in and find yourselves some food and drink. The kitchen will take care of you. You can come up after Isobel has seen him, and then I expect you’ll want to get back to your kinfolk.”

  The men looked at the first who had spoken, and he nodded. Allie left them, there, following Drude through the house and up into the infirmary. Somehow, she had never prepared herself for the possibility that she would know one of the warriors. Even after she had spent most of her life at the school where they trained, she had imagined that they were all safe, invincible under Rafa’s training.

  Isobel was in the infirmary, caring for two men who were going to die, one who would go home soon, and two that Allie couldn’t tell what was going to happen to them, yet. The men laid Drude on the pallet that Allie had indicated, then left quickly.

  “Isobel,” Allie murmured. Isobel glanced at her, then took in Drude. She pressed her lips together, then returned to what she had been doing. Allie busied herself cleaning her hands, then cutting away the bandaging on Drude’s swollen leg. The closer she got to the injury, the worse the symptoms became. The stench, the color, Drude’s lack of response. The bandaging was wet, but not dark. He had stopped bleeding a while ago.