Flapping both arms, he gestured in dismissal until the men and women behind Linden complied. Then he turned to her while his fellow healers hastened among the rows toward him.
“My lady,” he began, flustered by healing and hope, “I comprehend naught here. Such fire-It is beyond-
“But”- he seemed to grasp himself roughly with both hands- “I do not require comprehension, and must not delay. Will you grant us further flame? We are badly surpassed. The need is too great to be numbered. Our simples and implements redeem few. Most perish.” The rheum in his eyes had become tears. “I will prostrate myself, if that will sway you-”
He began to sink to his knees.
Still Linden did not falter. The tent had become an emergency room, and she was a surgeon. Grabbing quickly at the man’s arm, she said, “Of course I’ll help. That’s why I’m here. But I need you to do triage for me.” When he frowned at the unfamiliar word, she explained. “I should treat the worst cases first, but I don’t know who they are. You’ll have to tell me.” Guide me. The sheer scale of the suffering around her confused her perceptions. “And get me some drinking water.”
She would need more than the Staff could provide to sustain her during the ordeal ahead.
The man’s mouth formed the word “cases” in silent confusion. Nevertheless he grasped her meaning. “Then commence with the fifth in this row,” he replied, nodding to Linden’s left. He seemed ready to obey her smallest word. “Palla and Jevin will direct you further.” Plainly he meant his fellow physicians. “I am Vertorn. I will command wine from the guards to refresh you.”
Good enough, Linden thought. She had to get to work. Pausing only to say, “I’m Linden. Don’t be afraid of anything you see,” she strode toward the pallet Vertorn had suggested.
When she saw how badly the man there had been slashed and pierced, she might have quailed, overwhelmed by the scale of her dilemma. He looked like he had been hung up like a dummy and used for weapons practice. His life was little more than a wisp of breath in the back of his throat. With her Staff, she had the capacity to fill the entire tent with vivifying flame. The iron-shod wood was constrained only by her own limitations. But she was too human to function in that way. She had to see what she strove to heal; needed to focus her attention on each individual wound and illness. In her hands, an undefined broadside of Earthpower might do more harm than good. She could only struggle to save one patient at a time, treat one need at a time, as she had always done.
And they were so many-
But during the single heartbeat when her courage might have broken, she felt a woman immediately behind her slip into death. After that, she did not hesitate. Unfurling the Staffs severe and kindly puissance like an oriflamme, she began her chosen task.
She had called herself a healer. Now she set about justifying her name.
She did not know how long she laboured; could not count the men and women whom she retrieved from the ruins of war. When smoke and strain blurred her vision, the woman, Palla, led her by the hand while the man, Jevin, called out the location of her next patient. Whenever Vertorn thrust a flagon into her grasp, she gulped down a few swallows of whatever it contained. Everything else was a nightmare succession of rent flesh, shattered bone, rampant infection, and multiplied agony.
People were reduced to this by battle and pain: they became nothing more than the sum of their sufferings. And like them, she shrank. Long after she had passed the conscious borders of her endurance, and had become mere scraps of awareness, fragments composed almost exclusively of health-sense and Earthpower-blinded by tears, deaf to sobbing and wails, nearly insensate-she continued from hurt to hurt, and did not heed the cost. That she could not save them all, just one tent of three, meant nothing to her. Only the wound immediately in front of her held any significance: the mortifying infection; the instance of pleurisy, or pneumonia, or scabies, or inanition; the mute or whimpering protest of savaged flesh.
Dimly she felt in Pallas touch, heard in Jevin’s voice, that their ailments were no less than Vertorn’s had been. But she had nothing to spare for them. And she neglected to draw on the Staff for her own needs. She had grown unreal to herself; had become mere percipience and flame. A healer who collapsed from exhaustion could treat no one. But she trusted the steady exertion of so much Earthpower to protect her from prostration.
Then, however, she finished tending a man whose abdomen had been savagely lacerated-and Jevin did not call her to a new location. Nor did Palla draw her along the rows.
Instead a voice that may have been Vertorn’s addressed her.
“My lady?” he said tentatively. “My lady Linden. You must desist. You must restore yourself. Lord Berek has come. He requires speech with you.”
When Linden did not respond, the physician reached through flame to slap her cheek lightly. “My lady, hear me. It is Lord Berek who desires to speak with you.”
Linden drew a shuddering breath. Unsteadily she released the Staffs power; let it fall away. Then she found herself hanging between Palla and Jevin while they struggled to uphold her. Blinking at the smoke in her eyes, the blood, the lingering sight of wounds, she saw Vertorn offer a flagon to her lips.
“Drink,” he commanded, peremptory with trepidation. The wine is rank, but I have included herbs to nourish you. You must be restored. It is imperative.”
Dully she accepted a few swallows from the flagon. The wine had an acrid taste, raw and biting, but it gave a small measure of energy to her overstrained nerves and muscles.
Lord Berek-
There was something that Vertorn wanted her to understand.
Lord Berek has come.
She tried to say, Let him wait. This is more important. But she was not strong enough. And Vertorn’s interruption forced her to recognise that she could not refuse him. She had only reduced the suffering in the tent; the argute throb of infection and fever; the predatory crouch of death. She would not be able to end it alone.
She needed help-
The thought that Berek wished to speak with her seemed inconsequential; unworthy of regard. But she had to speak to him.
Now she clasped the Staff hungrily, almost begging for its beneficence. Without its nourishment, she would hardly be able to walk. The plight of the wounded required more from her.
When she had imposed a degree of Earthpower on her depleted nerves, her worn heart, she murmured hoarsely. “You’ll have to lead me. I can’t see very well.”
There was too much smoke in the air. And the outcome of sword-cuts and disease was more vivid to her than mere rows of rancid pallets or insignificant tent poles.
Jevin and Palla continued to support her. While she moved-slowly, slowly, feeble as an old woman-she sent some of the Staff’s sovereign healing, as much as she could muster, through herself into the physicians. Faintly she gave them a little Earthpower, a small portion of health. Like Vertorn, they were essentiaclass="underline" they would have to care for the fallen when she was gone.
In spite of the smoke, she saw her task clearly. It was too much for her. Somehow she would have to win Berek’s aid.
She must have been closer to the opening of the tent than she realised. When Vertorn stepped aside, bowing his deference, she beheld Berek Halfhand for the first time.
Involuntarily she stopped; stared. She had not expected to encounter a man who seemed more compelling, more crucial, than the injuries and deaths of his warriors.
There was Earthpower in him, that was obvious: as potent as Anele’s inheritance, but closer to the surface, more readily accessible. However, his numinous energy was not what caused him to stand out from his escort of warriors as if he were somehow more real than they, more significant and substantial.