Faerie Knight 172

172 - The Surgeon’s Tents

We pray the Angelus grant us healing, mercy, and a release from the suffering of this world.

• Narvonnian Prayer

☀

17th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297

“How,” Bors panted, settling down to the ground with a heavy thump, “in the name of the Angelus did you do that?”  The older knight fumbled around his belt for a wineskin, but it was Yaél who finally passed him hers.

Trist had collapsed back into himself, as soon as the strike was complete, and it was a relief to be no longer desperately splitting his focus in the midst of battle, or pushing himself to step from one side of the kingdom to the other.  “Something the faeries taught me,” he responded, and then knelt down beside Margaret.  “We need to have that leg seen to,” he told her.

“Aye,” Margaret agreed, gritting her teeth against the pain.  “I don’t suppose you’d give me a drink of wine?”

Trist held his hand out to Bors, and the man handed him Yaél’s half full wine skin.  He teased out the dull red thread which was all that remained of his Graal Boon, and used it to stir the wine.  “I am not certain how much this will help you,” he admitted to Margaret.  “Most of my power is gone.”

“Didn’t look like it to me,” Bors grumbled.

Trist passed the wineskin back to Yaél, who tipped it to Dame Margaret’s lips.  “Help me get her armor off and wrap the wound,” he instructed his squire.  The buckles were slick with blood, but between the two of them, they got the wound exposed, cutting away Margaret’s clothes with a belt dagger to expose four parallel tears in her thigh, from Camiel’s claws.  There wasn’t much more they could do but to tightly bind the wounds with strips of torn cloth, and then carry her back to the camp.  

Trist took Margaret in his arms; by that point, she’d passed out from the pain.  Bors went back to see whether Sir Guiron might still be alive, and to dig the man out from beneath the rubble if so.  Trist could hear the big man calling out to gather a group of soldiers to help with the labor as he and Yaél slogged back over the muddy ground and then up to the ridge where the king’s army had encamped.  

He’d thought about trying to bring her as he’d done with Sir Lorengel, but now that there were no enemies in front of him, Trist found that a deep weariness had sunk into his body.  He no longer had the inexhaustible strength of an Exarch, burning in his core.  Instead of a bright fire, there were only banked embers, barely enough to provide heat and light, and he had simply done too much.  By the time they got into the camp, Trist didn’t even know where he was going, and if Yaél hadn’t been there to guide him he was certain he would have gotten lost.

As it was, when the squire finally led him into the surgeon’s tents, Trist shook himself back to reality without any memory of getting there from the mud flats below.  “I need a surgeon,” Trist called into the tent, over the moans of the wounded and dying.  Every cot was filled, and every empty space to the edges of the tent, as well.  There had only been enough empty room left for the barber-surgeons to move from soldier to soldier.

“Just put him down somewhere,” one of the men with blood-soaked hands and exhausted eyes replied, without even looking up.

“This is Margaret Bowman, Exarch of Rahab,” Trist shot back, raising his voice.  “And I need someone to see to her leg.”

“Bring her over here,” Clarisant called, from deeper in the tent, and Trist promptly put the man out of his mind.  Assisted by Yaél, he picked his way between the cots, the wounded lying on the ground, and the bustle of physicians trying to keep them all alive.  While his wife hadn’t managed to keep any more empty cots than anyone else in the tent, she did have a clear patch of trampled grass about the size of a human body, with a blanket set down over it, and that was where Trist placed Margaret.

“Is there anything other than the thigh?” Claire asked.  Her hands and fingers were red and raw, stained with the blood of who knew how many men.  As Trist sat back from setting Margaret down, he watched her string a steel needle with a length of catgut.

“I don’t know,” Trist admitted.

Claire nodded.  “Yaél, get the rest of her armor off while I stitch those wounds up, so that we can have a look.  Husband, you look like you’ve been through quite a bit yourself.  Don’t go anywhere until I’m finished with her.”

“As you say,” Trist said, glad to take a moment simply to sit and not have to force his body any further.  He watched Claire clean Margaret’s wounds with boiled wine, then slather the ragged tears with honey from a small pot.

“Could you hold her down, please?” Claire asked, pausing with her needle held above the first tear.  “Sir Lorengel thrashed so much it took three men.  We didn’t have another Exarch.”

“Aye.”  Trist leaned forward and put his torso over Margaret’s, grabbing both her wrist in his, while Yaél laid across her lower legs.  “Did he live?”

“When last I saw him,” Claire answered, slipping her needle into the pale flesh of the wounded woman’s thigh.  “He was sent to the king’s tent.”

Margaret’s eyes shot open, and she screamed.  It was all Trist could do to hold her down.  It would have been easy even a day before, but now the strength of her Boons was nearly overwhelming for him.

“Margaret,” he shouted, trying to get her attention.  “Stop moving.  Let her work.”

The Exarch’s eyes focused on him, and Margaret nodded.  After that, she kept her body stiff as a rod of steel, and let out no further sounds but the grinding of her teeth until Claire had finished the last stitch.  Once Trist and Yaél saw the knot tied, they got off.

“Thank you,” Margaret gasped.

“I don’t see anything else that needs work,” Claire admitted, poking about beneath Margaret’s sweat-soaked white linen shirt.  “Bruises and scrapes aplenty, but if you’re anything like my husband they will heal on their own soon enough.”

“They will,” Margaret confirmed.  “Could I ask one of you to help me to my tent?  You have little enough room here, and I can sleep just as well on my own cot.”

Trist helped her up onto her good leg, and got her arm over his shoulders with a minimum amount of whimpering from the other knight.  Yaél again helped them find a way out that wouldn’t be in the way, and to his surprise Claire came along with them.

“I’ve been sewing for hours,” she admitted once they were out into the open air.  “My fingers are shaking.  I don’t think I can do any more until I’ve gotten a bit of rest.”  Trist nodded, and the three of them managed to get Margaret settled in her own tent.

“I will come to check on you in a while,” Claire assured the other woman, but Trist observed that Margaret was already almost asleep.

“Do you have a tent?” he asked, once they’d left her there and gotten back out into the sunlight.

“This way,” Claire told him, and led the way back through the camp.  Everywhere, soldiers were returning from the fighting.  Many were helping their comrades to the surgeons tents, while others were stripping off armor.  Exhaustion and pain were writ plain across nearly every face.  Finally, they reached a pavilion larger than Trist had expected, and his wife pulled a canvas flap aside so that they could enter. 

Inside the tent, Trist became aware of the reek of battle, made obvious by the sudden lack of it.  His own sweat, blood, and filth became all the more repugnant now that he was no longer one man among many on a battlefield.  In the braziers that lit the tent, incense from Pārsa or perhaps the Caliphate, scented the smoke.  Where an empty wooden tub, lined with linen waited, he caught the traces of rose petals, oils, and soap scented with citrus and spice.  How long had it been since Rocher de la Garde?  He found it difficult to even count the days since he had last been in the same place as his wife.

While he’d stood in a stupor, Clarisant and Yaél had already begun to work the buckles of what remained of his armor.  Trist himself removed his sword belt, taking a long moment to consider the blade of ice he’d first seen wielded by Dame Etoile in Raetia.  He hoped that she was still alive, and Henry, as well.

“There is a story behind this,” he guessed aloud.  Yaél’s eyes widened, but Claire simply nodded.

“There is,” she confirmed.  “I will tell it to you later.  My hands are filthy.  How long since you’ve been clean?”

“I don’t know,” Trist admitted.  “Days, at least.  Since I left Niviène’s fountain in the Ardenwood.”

“I thought so.”  With the filthy armor stripped off and set aside, Claire turned to Yaél.  “Go get yourself clean, as well,” she told the squire.

Once the girl had left the tent, they faced each other alone.  “The baby?” Trist asked.

“Growing,” Claire said.  Reaching out, she took his hand and placed it on her belly.  “I don’t feel sick so often.  I keep waiting to feel a kick, but nothing yet.  Your eyes?”

Trist lowered his head.  He had not removed the cloth tied around his face for days.  “Avitus ripped them out,” he said.  “While he had me caged.  I thought that I might be able to grow them back, but…”

“Let me see.”  She raised a hand to his face, and cupped his cheek in her palm.

“You don’t want to,” Trist warned her.  “It doesn’t look good.  It’s ugly, and scarred.”  A roiling fear built in his belly, that if she saw his eyes she would turn away from him.

“I’ve sewed your wounds before,” Claire said.  “And I just came from a tent full of maimed and dying men.  I’ve had my hands wrist-deep in their guts, trying to put them back together.  Your scars won’t be anything worse than that, Husband.”

Trist did not reach back to untie the cloth, but he also didn’t stop her from doing it.  When it came away from his face, he flinched.  Claire’s cool fingers felt around the bones of his face, but did not touch the scars.

“They really are gone entirely, aren’t they,” she said, finally.  “How do you see?”

“The same way that I am here,” Trist said.  “My mother was an Exarch while she carried me.  I was in her belly when they all went into Vellatesia.  Auberon said that I am something different.  Something between one of them, and human.  It is… it is like I am not entirely rooted in this world.  Like I can take a step back, and look at it from a distance.”

“Is that how you came to me,” Claire asked him, “in Raetia?”

“Yes.” He reached out for her, and rested his hands on her hips, feeling the warmth of his wife’s body beneath the fabric other skirts.  “Acrasia taught me some, and then Queen Niviène taught me more.  But I am no longer an Exarch.”

“No?” Claire stepped into him, resting her head on his chest.  “You sent the faerie away?”

“I set her free,” Trist confirmed.  “After we destroyed the Gate.  She’s gone, back to the depths of the Ardenwood.”

Something left Clarisant’s body, then, some coiling tension in her muscles that Trist could feel relax as she pressed against him.

“Good,” she said.  “Then it is finally just you and me, and our child.  Let us get cleaned up.”

They left the bath for later, and used cool water left in a basin, and a fresh cloth.  When they were scrubbed, Clarisant led him to the back of the pavilion, where they laid down among the blankets and furs on the bed, in each others’ arms, and Trist finally let himself fall asleep.