Chapters (15)
Before they sat down against the tent they had each drunk a cup of vodka, and Marti had treated all of them with her last spell: a cheering charm, typically used when extracting teeth. Rusty felt cheated by this treatment–the drink, combined with the magic, instead of relaxing him had stupefied him; instead of reducing his exhaustion had increased it. Instead of giving oblivion, brought back memories.
It looks, he thought, as though the alcohol and magic have only acted as they were meant to on Iola and Shani.
He turned around and in the moonlight saw sparkling, silvery tracks of tears on the girls’ faces.
‘I wonder,’ he said, licking his numb, insensitive lips, ‘who won this battle. Does anybody know?’
Marti turned her face towards him, but remained silent. The cicadas were singing among the acacias, willows and alders by Golden Pond, and the frogs croaked. The wounded moaned, begged and sighed. And died. Shani and Iola giggled through their tears.
Marti Sodergren died two weeks after the battle. She began meeting an officer of the Free Company of Condottieri. She treated the affair light-heartedly. Unlike the officer. When Marti, who liked change, began fraternising with a Temerian cavalry captain, the condottiero–mad with jealousy–stabbed her with a knife. He was hanged for it, but it was impossible to save the healer.
Rusty and Iola died a year after the battle, in Maribor, during the largest outbreak yet of an epidemic of viral haemorrhagic fever, a disease also called the Red Death or–from the name of the ship it was brought on–Catriona’s Plague. All the physicians and most of the priests fled from Maribor then. Rusty and Iola remained, naturally. They treated the sick, because they were doctors. The fact that there was no cure for the Red Death was unimportant to them. They both became infected. He died in her arms, in the powerful, confidence-inspiring embrace of her large, ugly, peasant hands. She died four days later. Alone.
Shani died seventy-two years after the battle, as the celebrated and universally respected retired dean of the Department of Medicine at the University of Oxenfurt. Generations of future surgeons used to repeat her famous joke: ‘Sew red to red, yellow to yellow, white to white. It’s sure to be fine’.
Almost no one noticed how after delivering that witty anecdote the dean always wiped away a furtive tear.
Almost no one.
The frogs croaked and the cicadas sang among the willows by Golden Pond. Shani and Iola giggled through their tears.
‘I wonder,’ repeated Milo Vanderbeck, halfling, field surgeon, known as Rusty. ‘I wonder who won?’
‘Rusty,’ Marti Sodergren said lyrically. ‘Believe me, in your shoes it’s the last thing I’d be worrying about.’