“Not yet. He’s not going anywhere in his state.”
Her jaw relaxes. As they walk, she glances behind her and sees the back of Esube’s bald head. Even this far from the fighting, he walks backwards at the end of a line. Old habits. She understands. She takes another deep breath and faces ahead. “And the others?”
Esube makes a noise. “Better, thanks to you.”
Camule walks on a few steps without answering. Ahead, she can hear the nearness of them, their voices whisper-calling, the occasional moan of pain.
“What do you think did that to them?” Esube says.
“Animal. Jag, maybe” She shrugs, even though he’s watching behind them.
“But a big one.”
She grunts in response.
“They’re resting now, though. Seem more balanced. I think you got them past the worst of it. Clean work as always, Nageh.”
She chuckles, returns the formality. “Thank you, Nageh-tiem.” Her humor is gone as soon as the words leave her mouth.
Her brow is slick with sweat again by the time she reaches the camp, with Esube still walking on his heels behind her. A sentry leaning in the deep shade beneath a tree nods, idly turning a blowgun in his fingers. Others glance up at her arrival—her assistants, the priestess, the haggard fighters, pausing at their half-packed tents or where they’re loading the bundles onto donkeys and long-nosed cobaras or into the wagon. She had lingered longer than she’d thought by the river.
Men and women in bandages sit in the shade, waiting. Some of them look up with sunken eyes, sallow skin and smile at her, spent grins of appreciation. Others stare at the sudden, linen-wrapped termination of an arm, a leg, and do not notice her passing.
Her people, in smocks and skirts spattered with drops in a narrow spectrum of red to dried-up brown, are inventorying bundles and preparing the wounded fighters for the walk back to safety. The bright green, stylized patches on her companion Leeches’ arms are a mockery for the task still ahead. No healer can dress the wound she must see to. She worries her patient has been awake too long, long enough to talk, and she can’t remember if she poured two drams of Dream Honey into his ear or one. Two drams would kill anyone else, but him? No, she must have given him two.
The fighters smoke and mutter together outside the hospital tent containing the three scouts Esube had spoken of, the ones she’d cleaned up and stitched up and who were now resting. Some tobacco would be just the thing right then. Something to calm her trembling hands. She could get a cigarette easily. The soldiers look up and grin or nod at the sight of her. Everyone but the wounded likes a leech. But Camule can’t bring herself to meet their grateful smiles. She makes for one of the sailcloth-walled tents center camp, where Miss Palomo stands wringing her white hands and sweating like a horse after a two-mile. Her face is red, but it’s always red. “What’s wrong?” Camule asks.
“He’s awake.” Palomo’s accent is almost too thick for most of the Olino to cut through, but Camule has grown used to her tripping syllables and shallow vowels. The foreigner wipes sweat from her brow and leads Camule into the little white canvas room.
There’s no ceiling, so there’s plenty of light inside. The man lying on a bloody bed of palm fronds is holding bound hands to his stomach, which Camule only recently wrapped with cotton strips. The strips are already crimson, brighter than the dirt under her feet. His ankles are bound and weighted with a stone. They seldom bind the wounded. Bindings were for prisoners, and until they left Camule and her team’s care, they were patients.
The man is, or was, called the Cutterman, but only Camule knows that.
Tivu crouches at Cutterman’s head, holding his shoulders flat to earth as he strains to curl himself into a ball. Camule kneels at his side and pulls her tools from her satchel. Her back aches. She controls her voice, looks only at her patient. “Has he said anything?”
“Don’t think he can.”
Her ears strain for any hint of guile in sweet Tivu’s voice. Would he even know how to lie? Camule feels Esube behind her, feels Palomo circling to the other side of the wounded man. The prickly, back-of-the-neck feeling of someone’s eyes on her. She doesn’t look up. Can’t. It's just her imagination. Or is it Palomo, watching? The foreigner spends too much time staring and silent, and she smiles too much. No, she’s just nervous about speaking Olino correctly. Camule brings her gaze back into focus on her patient. Her burden.
Veins and tendons bulge in Cutterman’s neck and forehead. He’s lighter of skin than Camule or Esube’s cool near-onyx, but still an islander. Avuntu, from one of the Orange Islands up north, but to anyone else, just another of the queen’s partisans.
“Did you find his insignia?” It’d be unusual if she didn’t ask. Camule pulls his hands away from his wound “Hold these, please.” She grunts as he resists, but Esube and Tivu manage to take his arms up over his head so she can look at the dressing.
“None on him.”
She knows. It’s in her pocket. She curses inside. Forgot to throw it in the river in her haste to get the blood off her, get the stink out of her nostrils. She’d forgotten how potent the blood could be. The whole tent reeks of him, makes her skin itch.
“Any information? His regiment, name?”
“Nothing, Nageh.” Tivu sounds frustrated, but Camule doesn’t allow herself the sigh of relief that presses up in her chest.
Cutterman’s eyes open. Red and bleary, they roll to and fro, and he thrashes for a moment in Tivu and Esube’s grip. They raise their voices at the sudden movement and hold him. Camule helps. Cutterman’s muscles bulge and strain beneath her fingers, sweat-slick skin and hard knots and cords beneath, too powerful for his frame, too powerful for someone who’d been torn open halfway to his spine an hour before. A yowl escapes his throat, and Camule prays to Iisha.
“Hey.” She grips his chin and forces his face to hers. “Easy. You’re safe.” Careful. If he’s awake, better hope he’s awake enough. She tries Avuntu, the language flushing more bad memories into the open. “Easy, soldier.” His eyes meet hers and go wide. Careful. Warn him. “Owali yoto.” She uses an Avuntu phrase only used upon a first meeting. “You’re in an Olino camp. Don’t give them a reason to harm you.”
He stares, trying to sit up but gasping, bare chest heaving beneath her hands. His eyes search hers. His stink of blood and fear-sweat sends her stomach rolling again. The mouth, the full lips, twist for a moment. Furrows trench his forehead down the middle in recognition. He’s about to speak. To give it away. Does Palomo understand Avuntu? Esube does.
Then he falls back, and his face goes blank and tired. “Owali yoto.” He winces and lets out another yowl, loud, wild. Tivu and Palomo jump. Cutterman’s guts seeming to clench as he tries to curl up again. They hold him, and he strains, panting. “Please, water.”
Esube moves beside her, unstopping a gourd. Camule catches his hand, and he looks at her. She’s squeezing his wrist. Too hard. She releases him and tries to keep her voice authoritative and unafraid.
“Are you the only one left?”
Esube whispers. “Iisha’s sake, Cam. He just woke up. He doesn’t even know.”
“Drown Iisha.” Tivu gasps at the blasphemy. Blood smell’s gnawing her patience. She feels a wash of guilt as Esube’s color deepens, but she buries it with her other stores. Guilt can be ignored. Avuntu again. “Are you the only one left? Is there anyone else?”
Esube’s voice is gentler. “We found you with your squad. They’re dead. I’m sorry.” Cutterman stares and Esube goes on. “We heard one of our scout whistles and went to investigate. They chased off whatever it was that attacked your troupe, but not before it got them, too. Almost killed them. Only you and the three of ours survived. I’m sorry.”
The man on the ground opens his eyes again and meets Camule’s. “They’re dead?” He chuckles, cringes at his pain.
“Did you see what did it?” Tivu asks.
“Not now, Tivu,” Esube says. “What’s your name?”
> “Are you the last one?” Camule says over him. She fumbles between three languages for a moment, unable to draw up the right one. “Are there any more? Did anyone get away?”
“Cam, now? Give him a moment.”
Palomo clears her throat. “Command expects us to reach Shobasa by nightfall. There’s been fighting all day. Can’t we ask him whatever needs asking there?”
Tivu grunts. “Not that far.”
“Far enough.” Palomo slaps a mosquito on her red neck. A sudden, fresh bloom of blood-smell fills the confined space.
Camule snaps, “Now. We find out now. I need you to tell me if you’re the last one.”
“He needs water,” Esube says again.
She and Gia disagree as one. “With that gut wound, it could kill him,” the foreigner says.
Camule raises a hand. She holds the gourd before Cutterman’s face and flicks his temple. His eyes open and settle on the gourd.
“When you were attacked,” she says carefully. Cutterman meets her eyes.
“It was an animal,” Esube says. “A jaguar, or dogs?”
Camule knows what it was. Once she’d seen the rips, the gnawed flesh, the claw-cuts on their stomachs, she’d known. Once she’d recognized the man who lie covered in blood and still breathing among them, she’d known. And she’d cursed the three wounded scouts for surviving.
“It was a beast.” She uses the Avuntu word that also could mean monster. “I need to know if anyone got away. If there are any more wounded out there. Anyone like you. Then water.”
Cutterman breathes, stares at her. His nostrils flare, but an awful smile crawls its way across his sweat-sheened face. His teeth are bordered in red. “Am I going to die?”
Camule feels the bones, the ribs in his side, quiver beneath his skin. They twitch and then begin, slowly, moving, traveling like waves—the big, slow, portentous waves that come into the coast far ahead of a typhoon. They roll, and her fingers rise over them like ships cresting a swell, then fall into the troughs between as his body changes.
She looks at Tivu, but he hasn’t noticed yet. Her hands subconsciously dig into his side, as if she could hold back what’s happening. The smell thickens. She doubts any of the others can taste it. A sharp, acid stink rises out of his sweat, cat piss and burned hair. The smell triggers something in her—the fear, the animal before a predator. Her fingertips prickle, but she forces the feeling back.
Beneath her hand, his ribs are moving. She whispers. “Just tell me.”
The teeth flash in a grin. “I should’ve killed you. My children’ll find you.”
Camule blinks, nods. “Lift him.” Tivu obliges, and she tilts the gourd to Cutterman’s lips. His eyes widen and, beneath his skin, the muscles and bones rearranging themselves slow. He slurps and chokes and drinks, his throat pulsing like a tide.
“Nageh Camule!” Palomo’s voice rises. Tivu makes a low, surprised noise. Esube, though, is watching Camule from one eye.
Camule speaks Olino. “Listen, you three. The healing art is leeches and pus and fever. Sometimes a fever kills for mercy.” While Cutterman’s eyes close in bliss, Camule picks up her blade from beside her. A shame, so recently washed. She pushes it between the knobby bones where his neck meets his shoulders. It’s a quick, sure motion, a surgeon’s cut. There’s a moment of resistance, then slow, steady pressure. Gia’s jaw works, and Esube lowers his eyes. Tivu makes the same noise, a step lower.
Cutterman twitches. His eyes open, already dead as glass. Camule gives a twist-must be sure-and slides the blade back out. Blood wells from the cut.
“He was going to die anyway. The wound had caught his guts. The blood sickness would have made a fever, and it would’ve got him tonight or the day after.” Gia nods while Tivu lowers the lifeless shoulders to the ground. “We leave him for the jungle.” They nod in understanding, except Gia who has never accepted the practice. “Pack up.”
A cough at the flap of the canvas tent. Camule looks around from where she’s still kneeling.
One of her nageh-tiem. “Nageh Camule? The other three...”
Camule’s stomach leaps to her throat. She starts to rise, but the nageh-tiem raises an open palm, a gesture for her to slow. “They’re dead. None of them made it.”
The tears come, without trying, and she lowers her gaze to the dirt.
Esube’s voice. “How?”
“Nageh Camule, there’s nothing more you could have done. They went peaceful, all asleep.”
While the others work, Camule finds the fighter captain and informs him she’ll catch up to them at command in Shobasa in two days, though in truth, she’s got no idea. The captain asks no questions, thankfully. Esube will be tougher. She approaches him as he finishes binding up the canvas, leaving the dead Cutterman exposed in a flattened clearing on his bloody palm leaves.
“I’ve got to go off a bit,” she says. From the corner of her eye, she watches Cutterman’s body, seeking, but not seeing. Esube looks shocked, but she continues “You go on. Get Gia and the other leeches to Shobasa.”
“Why?”
“I’ll catch up soon.”
Esube faces her, folds his arms. “That man knew you.”
She returns his stare. “He was delirious.”
“Like damn-all he was. He said he should’ve killed you.”
“Yeah. He’s from the other side.”
He waits. Sighs. “I’m going with you. Wherever you’re going.”
“Go with the others. That’s an order.”
“Then court martial me once we get back.”
“Don’t be difficult.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re just making my day harder. Thing’s going to be how it’s going to be.”
“I’m going with you. It’s as simple as that. Or you can come back with the rest of us.”
She considers her answer. His deep brown eyes glint like a polished musket stock. “Why’d you try to hide what hurt that man?” Before she answers, “It was no animal that got him. I saw when you checked the dressing. It was a machete. Someone tried to kill him before they all died.”
She waits, but so does he, and Shobasa is far enough without lingering. “Fine. We’ll talk about it once we get to command. But I need to sleep. I’ll be in the wagon.”
Once they’re underway, Camule slips out of her wagon and into the brush and flattens herself into the undergrowth. Grasses and leaves rustle in the shifting, stifling air beneath the trees. She lies there for a long time while millipedes and ants crawl over her hands and the damp soaks into her clothes. Once she can no longer hear the healers and wounded and their guards, she rises and heads back to the cleared campsite.
Finally alone, she casts about for a likely place, spotting a fallen tree and a mass of vines and fallen palm fronds a few yards off the trampled path. She crouches beside the rotten trunk and digs beneath it in the loamy soil with her hands. Opening her satchel, she removes three empty vials of Dream Honey from a covered pocket. These she places in the hole as if in burial, laying them gently side-by-side, and then covers with dirt and jungle debris. Soon, there’s naught to be seen but wet leaves and bark, and she rises and continues.
In the abandoned camp, the trees and undergrowth are hacked back, the smell of palm sap and spicy ilibo brush coiling around her. Below it, though, is the blood, and the other thing, the acid stink, growing stronger. She makes her way past the palm bark lean-tos, knowing she’s making too much noise, listening and watching for any stragglers from the leech-and-soldier company. In the south, pops and heavy thud-booms roll against a sky darkening to nightshade, the sounds coming faster, louder. There will be wounded. Work to do. She hopes her nageh-tiem arrive safely and in time to help where they can. She finds the trampled clearing and Cutterman’s body and approaches as if stalking, or hiding.
He’s in the same position they left him, but he seems bigger. The shadows of dusk slip over him as the sun sinks. He’s breathing. She can’t see it, but she can smell it,
smell the sour, thin current grazing his parted lips. Each pinched exhalation stronger than the last. She draws closer and the acid predator smell burns her eyes, making them water. It stings inside her nose, gets in the back of her throat, cloying. All her effort goes to surrounding the fear, the fight-and-kill response that threatens to change her, breaking it, driving it down, muscling it back. Meanwhile, Cutterman’s skin stretches. As she nears, the bones in his wrists, rested across his middle, crack as his arms rearrange and the hands lengthen.
The revolution changed everyone. Mostly it peeled back layers to show what’s underneath. Some survived while others thrived. It changed everyone.
Some more than others, she thinks as she stands above Cutterman, above a kind of kin. She watches beads of blood appear and swell at the tips of his fingers. The beads collapse as the claws coming up from inside him break their perilous films and push and curl out of his skin. The smell fills her consciousness as the colors of the world fade to grays. Some more than others, as her own claws prick like needles from the insides of her fingertips, then slide out. A memento from the time, long ago, when the Cutterman didn’t kill her.
Stomach knotted, she remains on her knees and holds it all back `til there’s nothing left but ache after she hacks his head off with her machete. Must be sure. Must be sure.
When she can stand, she faces the jungle. My children’ll find you. The revolution changes everyone, but mostly, it peels back layers. Shows what’s underneath. Camule started as a healer, but survival made her the leech, the pus. The fever.
Misplaced Heroism
Andrew Rowe
Chapter I – Elsewhere
I remember the moment when the light consumed me. I’d been nursing my coffee addiction while browsing the internet, attention consumed by U.S. Marines fighting ten trillion lions on /r/whowouldwin.
Hilarious.
I had taken one final sip when white light emerged from my screen, blinding me.
When I reopened my eyes, I saw a medieval throne room.
Art of War Page 15