House of open wounds, p.25
House of Open Wounds, page 25
“What am I supposed to do with her?” Goughry jabbed a finger at Lidlet, who was standing as though she was every bit as accused as Jack. “What’s the purpose of her now?”
“I suppose that her case will sort itself out the moment we’re back in combat,” said Sherm philosophically.
“Permission to question the accused, magister,” Lidlet herself broke in.
“The accused? Oh, the Maric here. I’d say you’ve earned the right to slap him about the jaw, but under the circumstances that’s probably not recommended.”
Lidlet was fumbling a tatter of paper out from inside her jacket. “I’ve got some questions I wrote down,” she said, before Sherm’s incredulous stare.
“Good lord,” he said. “You made notes. Very diligent. Top of the class. I suppose you’d better go on, then. Be quick. I’ve got a pair of theft cases before lunch.”
“Maric, you said I can’t harm anyone or it comes back,” Lidlet said, squaring off against Jack. At his nod, she went on, “What if I got someone else to hit you?”
“It still counts,” he said dully.
“Does it matter if I pay them or not?”
Jack frowned. “Why would it – no. I mean, harm is harm. The commerce of it doesn’t really—”
“What if I threatened you?”
“Does this have to be me, specifically?” he asked plaintively.
“Answer the question,” Sherm cautioned him, because apparently this passed for entertainment in judicial circles.
“I don’t think threats do it. I mean, I think if you sort of made to hit me, you might feel a bit of a twinge. I’ve heard that’s how it goes. And maybe if you were just pretending then you wouldn’t even feel that. And if you lamped me straight out, then… well…”
“All right.” Lidlet consulted her notes. She had a peculiarly desperate look to her. “What about if I poisoned someone?”
“That’s still harm.”
“Okay, so what if I put poison in a cup and,” reading her own untidy writing again, “left it somewhere without knowing whether someone would drink from it or not.”
“Why would you do that?” Jack demanded.
“Just what if?” she insisted.
“I… don’t know. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing people do.”
“What if I set a trap. Would I die if someone triggered it later, or would it be when I set it?”
“I don’t know,” Jack repeated.
“What if I set a hunting trap for an animal, but a person fell into it by mistake?”
“I… I really don’t know.”
“What if I accidentally hurt someone? Like, we’re looking out on the edge of the Gallete and I turn round and knock them off without meaning to.”
“I… no.”
“No?”
“I think. I think intent is the thing. So all of the above, if you know you’re going to, or you mean to, then it counts. And if you… don’t…. then… not? Possibly not?” He was looking profoundly harried by the line of questioning.
“What if I help someone who goes on to hurt people, although not through my,” consulting her notes again, “express instruction.”
“Oh my god, you’ve really thought about this haven’t you?” Jack complained.
“Just answer the question. I mean, do I die the moment they hurt someone, or how does it work? What are the rules?”
“You’re fine,” Jack told her. “I know this one. Because I healed you, and Klimmel. And I was all broken up not that long before, and I was healed too. So if it worked that way then I’d be just as dead, wouldn’t I?”
“So you’re in the same boat,” Lidlet concluded.
“I suppose I am.”
She straightened up. Not, Prassel thought, as if a weight had been taken from her, but as though it had shifted a little, balanced more evenly across her shoulders. “Magister.” Addressing Goughry.
Of everyone there, he hadn’t really followed the exchange. Now he stared at his subordinate suspiciously. “What is it, trooper?”
“I am requesting a transfer to the experimental hospital department.”
“You what?” He stared.
“On the basis that I can perform military duties in support of the army through the hospital. And I cannot do so as a regular soldier any more, magister.” She wasn’t looking at Goughry, staring straight ahead in the soldier’s final defence against just about anything.
Goughry was going to refuse, because he was that sort of officer. But then he must have thought just how it would look, morale-wise, with Lidlet dropping dead the moment the first command to fire was given. Or her refusing, and them being back before the tribunal for her own trial. No good options.
He was loathe to look Prassel’s way, but it was her hospital.
“Trooper Lidlet, do you have any medical training whatsoever?” she asked.
“Magister, I can carry one end of a stretcher if there’s someone to take the other,” Lidlet said stoically.
Prassel glanced at Jack. There was a terrible hope in his face. There is a limit to how many stretcher bearers this army needs, she considered. He better not take this as precedent.
When they stepped out into the open air, though, she was giving orders to report to Banders for the relevant induction. Her department had grown by one.
Mosaic: Aloft
Time in the air. Below them, only sea. A few days of limbo and it says a lot about army life that sometimes limbo’s what you need. The war can’t reach them. It’s packed in the crates and boxes waiting to be unloaded when they touch land.
When Jack comes back from the trial – he still isn’t entirely sure if it was his trial or Lidlet’s – he finds the box gone. Cue much running around, accusations and panic, until Alv – to whom he’d actually entrusted the thing – produces it on demand. She hid it away, she says, because Fellow-Archivist Thurrel was snooping around. The Decanter, in his jingling vest of charms, turned up with a bold word and a piece of paper sealed with his own signature, telling everyone Jack had been sentenced to death and his effects were property of the army. Alv dumped Jack’s box into a larger box and put yet another box on top of it, and sat on that, turning her blistered face to the Decanter when he arrived. And the Pals are leery of Divinati, and Alv is, if not innately magical, then at least the nexus where a great deal of external magic finds its fulcrum, and thus obscured anything the man might have been sniffing for. And so Thurrel departed, frustrated.
Jack stammers his thanks and re-evaluates Alv. Because she’s severe and calm and not even remotely the sort to thumb a nose at authority. That’s a Banders play, or Lochiver maybe, neither of them respecters of the chain of command. Alv is always compliant and obedient. Except, when it came to the bite of the screw, she stands up – or sits down – for her comrades.
So he takes custody of the box again, seeing his three fugitive gods creep out into the open to stare at him. He takes it to the far end of their dormitory tent, the end claimed by the hospital. He tells God that he has news.
“Look at that big show of relief the man has,” God announces, ostensibly to the other two deities. “As though he wouldn’t be glad to be rid of us.”
“I wouldn’t,” Jack tells Him flatly, keeping his voice down so that the others in the department – and the soldiers in the bunks beyond – didn’t eavesdrop, even though it was Maric he was talking. “Though you give me plenty of reasons why I should.”
God puts tiny hands on bony hips. “You hear that?” He remarks to the others. “And who would he get, may I ask, to miraculously restore his warlike soldier friends to health, when they get themselves stabbed and shot and otherwise punctured? Who would he go begging to, for some bona fide divine healing that won’t last until dawn because everybody around here is such a damned savage?”
Jack winces. “Well, it’s not something you have to worry about now, anyway. Not any more.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” God demands. “You developed the healing touch all spontaneous, have you? Or you’re seeing some other god behind my back? Because last I looked, Yasnic, I’m the only spark of grace you have in your life. These other two are plain useless.”
“It’s been forbidden,” Jack tells Him.
God’s already creased face scrunches up further. “Say what, now?”
“I was on trial,” Jack says. “They don’t like it. The healing where people can’t fight again. I mean, it’s an army. There’s an… ideological issue there, I guess. So they said, no more. No more turning people into where they’re a pacifist or a corpse. So I reckon that’s an end to it.”
God has a good line in pop-eyed stares. For a merciful healing deity, He spends a great deal of time apoplectically angry. “They said what? Forbid me, will they? I am the bloody font of forbiddances. If anybody’s forbidding any damn thing around here then it’s Me. I’m not to be talked down to like that by a pack of Islermen thugs like I’m a part of their bloody chain of command!”
“Pals,” Jack puts in, not for the first time. “They’ve been Pals for, like, centuries. Not Islermen.”
But God is far beyond listening to His devotee. “I will bloody well heal who I damn well please!” He spits. “Anyone who swears the oaths, let them be bloody whole. Just you wait until we have another battle, you shrinking milksop. I shall do such miracles as the shrinking eye of humanity has not seen since—”
“Will you just not!” And – because it’s evening and for some of the soldiers it’s been a packed day of getting their jollies – a fair number of people tell him to shut up, and some of them warn him to stop with the filthy foreign lingo or they’ll report him. And he doesn’t need to be up on a charge so soon after weaselling out of the last one. “I will get shot,” he hissed at God, face down close to the box. “And you will get decanted. I am very, very serious.”
But God is very angry, and no need to keep His voice down given it reaches only Jack. “I am God, you collaborating little shit! I am the all-powerful healing God and I have had temples and priests and sacrifices, the fires of sandalwood, the sweet incense, fine music played on lyres of griffin-bone with inlays of gold and the fair words of an at least moderately talented bard praising the greatness of my beneficence and I will not be told what to do or not do by some Pal bean counter!”
Jack stares at Him. “What’s got into you?” he demands, sotto voce. “You don’t even like doing it. I had to get on my knees for Lidlet and Klimmel. You say it hurts every time they die. You hate it. You bitch about it. What’s this heal-the-world all of a sudden? Even back in Ilmar you never wanted to do it.”
God folds His arms defiantly. “Well Ilmar was back home, wasn’t it. And now we’re on the run, you and I. We’re fugitives. We’re fleeing Pal justice. We’re running mad in the world. Why not?”
“We’re not any of those things,” Jack points out. “They caught us – caught me, anyway, and gave me the choice of sign up or swing. On account of the healing that they now won’t even let me use. So my position here is pretty damn precarious. And you hate healing people almost as much as you hate people. So knock it off.”
“You will not talk to your God like that!”
“I will talk to my fellow fugitive like that, who will end up fuelling a score of tablethi if anything happens to me.”
God sticks His lip out. “This isn’t over,” He said. “I will not be constrained by secular authorities.”
“You will,” Jack tells Him. “That is literally why we’re here.” But God patently doesn’t agree. Jack can only hope that the miniature divinity’s ability to directly interact with those in need of healing remains profoundly limited or probably he’ll be in trouble sooner rather than later.
“You’re just setting yourself up for more pain.” He sets the box beside him. “Me, too. I mean I didn’t like Klimmel, honestly. But I wish he wasn’t dead.”
God’s drawn Himself up for another broadside, then lets it all out and sits on the box edge, feet dangling. “Aye well, I felt him go. And yes, it hurt. And yes, it was inevitable. I just don’t take being dictated to, not by them, not by anyone. If there’s any dictating going on, it should be me. I’m God, after all.”
Jack nods slowly. “It sounds like Lidlet’s going to try and lawyer her way through, though. Honestly, I have some questions about doctrine.”
God considers that, heels knocking against the box. “Who the hell is Lidlet?”
This was where things went even further off course than Jack had thought. “The other one you healed, out on the battlefield.”
“I thought you said they were dead.” God’s on His feet again, jabbing a finger into Jack’s ribs.
“Klimmel died. Lidlet talked her way into being a stretcher bearer. She’s joining us here. So she doesn’t have to fight.”
And God chuckles in a way that Jack doesn’t much like, and after that God doesn’t let up about being taken to see Lidlet. Wanting Jack to talk to Lidlet. Wanting Jack to slip snippets of doctrine into the conversation, when Lidlet was around. And after far too much of this Jack works out that God is rather impressed by the lawyering and maybe wants Lidlet as a convert. Literally the first time in Jack’s lifelong service to the faith when God actually wants to expand the congregation.
“I mean she’s mine now anyway,” God insists. “She lives by my beneficence. So why not?”
“Because,” and by this time Jack’s being loud again, to the annoyance of his neighbours, “she is a Pal and they do not take to religion. That’s kind of their thing.” And God continues to insist and Jack continues to refuse until a large Pal soldier, deciding that having a crazy Maric shouting at himself in the dorm tent is also not his thing, evicts Jack unceremoniously out into the evening.
So here Jack sits, he and God not speaking to one another. Follower of a forgotten god, and how many times in his life has he been desperate to share that burden with someone. Back in Ilmar, it had happened occasionally – often not for long given God’s punitive stance towards those who bucked His commandments. And that fellowship of faith had never actually brought Jack any real benefits, yet he had still craved it. God’s refusal to engage with the world had been only frustrating.
And now God wants to flex His muscles, if only because the Pals had said not to. Jack finds himself terrified that an active, troublemaking God is a far worse prospect than the guttering ember he’s been carefully husbanding all his life. What do you do when your insignificant and long-forgotten deity suddenly remembers His own purpose?
When Lidlet turns up, a kitbag slung over her shoulder and asking for Banders, Jack turns away and won’t look at her. Not to salve his own conscience, but so he doesn’t infect her any further with his curse.
*
Lidlet has always been career military, because if you’re born on the Archipelago it’s a good career. See places, meet people, perfect them at the point of a baton. She was never phalanstery material, to be taught the finer points of Correct Thought. She just follows orders. Except, as a long train of superiors would tell you, that’s not quite what you get from Trooper Lidlet. Lidlet, it turns out, would probably have made quite a good jurist or critical scholar. Not a corkscrew mind, more a prybar. Good at finding the seams of things and prising them apart in case there’s something useful within. Not the soldier always on a charge and in trouble, but the soldier always almost on a charge, standing at the very periphery of trouble with the toes of her standard-issue boots edging over the line. For someone with no great amount of book-learning in her past, she has a very good head for rules and how to play them. Because the problem is, when you condense anything down to a set of rules there’ll be someone who can game it.
And right now, Lidlet feels she’s pulled the ultimate fast one. Lidlet has gamed death. Not that she’s the credulous sort but there’s precious little leeway in interpreting what happened to Klimmel. She saw him die in the camp of the wound he received days earlier on the field. She herself has a punctured lung on credit, waiting to be delivered post haste the moment she breaches these new rules that she finds herself penned in by. Learning the tenets of whatever mad Maric curse she’s under is a matter of life and death.
Do no harm. As a soldier, in an army, in a war.
She is beset by nightmarish thoughts that even this, her current strategy, might not be enough. What if she jogs the stretcher too hard when she’s manhandling some casualty to the hospital? Does that count as harm? What if the malingering son of a bitch is complaining and she gives him a jolt just to shut him up? She is going to have to pin this Maric Jack in a corner and give him a thorough grilling about how their deal works. She never found a system she couldn’t twist to her advantage, but the stakes were never this high before.
But Jack is avoiding her. Oh, he tried to make it look like he was a man with an errand but Lidlet’s played that game before, too. She knows when it’s turned back on her. Well, she’ll stalk him. She’ll ambush him. She’ll grab him by the throat and shake—
No. No she won’t. And even the thought gives her a sudden tightness in her chest, a faint flower of pain where the shot went in. Which, she reflects, is handy enough.
So it’s Banders she finds. She and the former Cohort-Monitor square up against one another, each recognising something of a kindred spirit. Someone who’s adapted to thrive in the army ecosystem by filling the niche of parasite at least some of the time.
“Name and rank?” Banders asks, filling in the papers.
“Trooper Lidlet, formerly Third Company.”
“Nicknames?”
“What?”
“Any amusing nicknames? Stinky? Jug-ears? Beefy? Beefy Lidlet has a ring to it.”
Lidlet who, truth be told, is broad across the shoulders, whose cropped hair does make her ears stick out a bit and who could stand to wash a little more frequently, shakes her head. “None of that. You start with that and I’ll…” A tautness, just there, behind her left nipple. “You just watch it.” Her comrades in the Third called her Claws, sometimes. A Pel joke, because she’d been quick to rough-and-tumble if she considered she was being disrespected, but also a pun on ‘clause’ because of how she could reel off regulations, chapter and verse to the last sub-section, when she was getting out from under trouble.
