The Wandering Soldier, Chapter Five
This addition was a long time coming because life happened to happen. I will endeavour to be regular but that can be easier said than done.
Dazed and confused, the shockwave ringing in her ears stirred her away from sleep. Gorenne lay upon a few layers of pelts and tent strips that still held fast the deep smell of whatever people did to them. Mud and sweat, just like her first battle. Above her the pines stretched toward the cloudless sky and the sun was fast to the west. A sharp pain shot from her leg as she motioned to sit upright, causing her to drop back to the makeshift bedding with gritted teeth. Looking down she saw her bare leg wrapped in thick bandages and they were dry with blood. They hadn’t browned with age so it was replaced recently. Whoever the girl was that joined her on the journey away from that bloodlet day, her hands were deft and precise, for the bandaging was firm and even. Turning her head she began to observe the campsite the girl had fashioned, but she wasn’t nearby. Before her lay a small campfire with a smoky grey cast iron pot hanging just above a small campfire via a simple iron a-frame. The flames wrapped gently around the base, and a low murmur rose from the boiling water within it. A collection of raggedy strips of linen and leather hung in some lower branches and a clothesline of vine rope tired between two younger trees, and the horse, tied to a young beech tree on the oppose end of the clearing, absentmindedly stirred pine needles at its hooves. The majority of their supplies must still lay in the bags tied to the horse when it was discovered. Bracing herself and holding her teeth fast, she slowly pulled herself along by the elbows to the fire to see what was boiling, for despite the soft smell of burning birch the pot rallied no aroma – only the soft murmur of water happily bubbling away. Sure enough, as she reached the fire, wincing against the heat, she saw within it more bandages though they were much cleaner than the ones on her leg.
She clung to that last thought with trepidation and reached for a nearby stick long enough to reach her foot. Prodding it with a sharp jab with the pointy end, she winced and dropped the stick immediately. Gorenne watched as a tiny trickle of blood oozed from the top of her foot. She laid back down on the harder surface of the soil, ignoring the tiny pinpricks of pine needles through her hair and neck. Sure enough, she could still feel it. She opened her eyes and watched the treetops rocking in a gentle wind avove. As a small wren whisked through the branches, shaking pine needles from their delicate bonds, the dappled light caught them as they fell toward her soiled face. She may have lost everything, but that pain in her foot was a small victory to be sure.
“You’re not out of it yet, Gorenne,” a voice called curtly from the direction her head was pointing. Rolling her eyes and tilting her head back, she saw it was the medicine girl, wearing a satchel over her chest and a pair of clean linen trousers. She had her long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. “You don’t know how much damage you did moving around with that arrow in your leg.”
“It was a crossbow bolt,” Gorenne’s voice sounded hoarse and dry, like she hadn’t spoken in days. “How long has it been? Where are we?”
“We are still wandering around in these woods.” She gestured bemusedly with a smooth branch, then used it to fetch a thick blanket from the boiling water. “It’s been a week. I guess we must be really lost because those other soldiers never came after us.” She almost sounded amused by that last jibe.
A week wasn’t that long, but the forest couldn’t be that big, surely. In all likelihood, the medicine girl didn’t understand basic navigational skills and followed whichever way had the least trees or she picked a spot and decided to rest, which would be a fine idea if they weren’t being chased by the King’s own soldiers. At least there must be water nearby or there wouldn’t be a wet blanket being positioned on the nearby makeshift clothesline. A week was a very long time for her to be unconscious though.
“How is it?” Gorenne muttered, looking down at her leg.
“Bad,” she crouched down by the fire and looked at Gorenne with a hard look on her face. “Worse, because I don’t have supplies. Sepsis hasn’t occurred yet and the maggots haven’t gone near it, but without a needle and thread the wound will remain open for a long time.”
“And we can’t travel while I’m in this condition, ” Gorenne finished the thought grimly.
Her friends were gone. Her life as a mercenary was taken from her. Captain Frelon was gone, probably being eaten by crows. Her leg has a hole the size of her sword right through the thigh which she made worse by moving around, and now she and some unusual girl were lost amidst the trees of an unknown woodland without the supplies to sustain themselves. Reality was sometimes pathological. Often it feels like the Stars themselves start these tendrils of misfortune, where one bad thing is rooted to another without the slightest hint of and end. With each successive calamity the next feels so unexpected, for there is a faith that the last was just that. Gorenne kept her mind from slipping every time these things happened. She wanted to slip in to those places. Sure, the comfort of desperation and self-pity was familiar and easy. There she could have a friend, deep down, that understood and shared her anguish. No other friend would be closer, for it would be her, and the darkness would protect her, but it keeps everyone else away and shares in her lonliness. It always felt like such a nice and inviting place but Gorenne held fast to her sanity. She dug her fingernails on the edge of that cosy abyss and spat her defiance at that despicable place, that foul calling that kept her from the world. She believed there had to be a way. Anything at all.
“What about,” Gorenne started, turning her head to the girl, not knowing where her thoughts could lead. “You use claws?”
“Sorry, did you say something?” The girl muttered, fishing another sheet from the pot. The steam raced from it and caught in an updraft of smoke.
“Claws. Or even teeth”, her mind started to feel a little clearer now that she had found something to hold to. “You fashion a needle out of claws or teeth. You harvest them, boil them and somehow pass a thread through the rear.” Gorenne’s voice was gaining traction, cadence, and breadth. It felt good to be herself again, to feel the weight of her own words in her soul. She can grieve when the battle was over. If it ever ended.
“The holes will be too big for the thread if we use something like that. The thread will tear through your skin and-“
“Then keep the dressing on so the skin doesn’t stretch.”
Sighing, the girl slung the blanket in a damp heap over the line stretched between two trees. The girl got to her knees and began digging the earth at a loosely disturbed patch of soil nearby the campfire. A few moments later she removed the remains of a rabbit carcass with its head and feet still attached to the empty bones. She nonchalantly tossed it to one side and scooped the earth back over the hole in which she dug. Then she laid down a cloth in an even patch of ground, pulled a knife tied in her trousers and got to work prying the claws and teeth from its body over the cloth. One by one the pieces popped from their joints and tendons and fell to the strip of fabric in a random heap. Rabbit’s claws were especially small and sturdy. Hopefully, Gorenne wondered, a thread could be attached to one of them, somehow.
“This is such a half-baked idea, Gorenne,” she grimaced at the dirty parts on the cloth before her. “I’ll swap out your bandages after I stitch that gaping maw on your leg, but if this doesn’t work then we’re out of ideas and you’ll be in even worse shape than before.”
“You were out of ideas before now,” Gorenne retorted pointedly, lying back down.
“Why are you like this?” the girl retorted, quite unexpectedly. It wasn’t often that people changed the subject as swiftly as sliding snowdrift.
“Like what?” Gorenne was confused. However she acted was entirely within her nature and at no point had anyone suggested they were in any way perturbed by her. Perhaps a few times the other soldiers would speak to her as though they felt intimidated or would rather party and drink than do anything productive. The mere suggestion that others had grievances against her was never mentioned.
“Why are you so,” the girl struggled to find the right words. Perhaps it was because she wanted to be more honest or less hurtful. “Uptight? If dry, stale bread could walk and talk it would be just like you. I mean, the whole camp just wanted you to respect them and-”
Gorenne cut her off, knowing where this would lead. If this was the grievance, she had spoken to Frelon and the others about this several times before. “I respect hard work and dedication, and when I’m on the job I don’t drink or gallivant with my body on display. I’m a soldier, a travelling mercenary, so I’m always working. Besides, I was the one who alerted everyone and nobody listened to me.”
“Why should they?” Her voice was louder, her hands were shaky as she tied the cloth around the claws and teeth in a loose bundle. “You never once asked who they were or what their stories might be or anything more than what you thought they should do for you or your little party.”
“If they listened to me they would have understood I was doing what I was doing so they would live.” Gorenne’s voice was beginning to climb, as well. She felt hot inside, and a deep weight was growing. “Everything I did. Every time I marched and fought and trained and taught what I knew to every soldier who joined us – it was all for them. I couldn’t protect them by myself. I tried that and watched them all die. You were drunk and they were out of their minds while our enemy sat waiting in these very woods laughing at us.”
“They weren’t soldiers, they were people.” The girl was almost in tears by this point while she shook the sack of teeth at her accusingly. Her face was red with grief. “Just like you and me, and you never gave them a chance to show you what that meant.”
“Maybe you’re right. They were people,” Gorenne spat. Her hands clenched in fists so taut her knuckles turned white, and they began to shake. “Because if they had an ounce of a warrior in them they wouldn’t have let themselves fall like wheat to the sickle. I lived because I watched and I learned never to let my guard down in the face of the enemy.”
“So that’s it, then.” She murmured, shaking her head. Her voice was quieter but it carried the edge of fresh steel. “You won’t even acknowledge them as human beings. Cattle to the slaughter.”
“I did not-“
“That day I had a visitor, a soldier carrying a bald man with this belt of fingers. He had an orbital fracture, a broken nose and several of his front teeth were shattered. The pieces were lodged in his cheek. To ease the pain, we lit a burner of Guarna. It’s poisonous when ingested or injected but the smoke can make one very inebriated and also very numb. I had to stitch his face back together and file back the edges of his teeth, then fill the cavities with boiled Jalva sap which turns very hard, almost like stone, when it cools down. After, we stitched and bandaged his nose, but his face would be permanently misshapen because of that fracture in his skull.”
“He came at me, with this … this look in his eye after his friends told me to lie with them.”
“His name is – was – Undril. He was a regular farmer just like you were, Gorenne, but he watched his brother die after debt collectors made him watch. They had the wrong farm, but they kept going because they liked it. Debt collectors was all he ever hunted. He wasn’t even that kind of man, so what you say surprises me.”
“We all have stories,” Gorenne said, quietly.
“What’s my story, then?” the girl asked after her monologue. “Do you even know my name?”
She didn’t answer. She lay there in deep thought as the girl – this unnamed girl – meandered about the campsite, fishing the boiled dressings from the fire to hang them on a makeshift tripod then dropped the rabbit claws and teeth in the water thereafter. It was true that she didn’t know her, nor did she bother to learn of anyone but the Captain. The names she was aware of she learned through their times on the fields or on the roads. Names she ended up committing to memory as they marched beside her and rattled on about their own stories, like Thorin who abandoned his failing oxcart trade or Imad who just liked killing people if she wasn’t sharing their tents. Thinking about it, they were all lost souls, joined under a single banner and a single name who united them all, so they had each other except for her. Gorenne didn’t like being at the whim of anyone but her own so rarely did she have to face her own mortality as she had in the week she was unconscious. She learned all she had and exercised that knowledge to ensure she would avoid this exact predicament, but it was hard to believe it was her fault. It wasn’t, because everyone around her had ignored the crucial detail that they were led to a literal battlefield and pretended to ignore it. No matter whose fault it was, everyone was dead, and she had nowhere else to go. Everything had changed. Regardless of whose fault it was, Gorenne was at the mercy of this girl she barely knew. Gorenne needed this girl to stay alive, and at any point she could have just abandoned her or killed her and left for her own safety. Saving Gorenne wasn’t conducive to an efficient escape.
“Why didn’t you just leave me behind?” Gorenne called, her head low in thought.
“I wanted to do the right thing, and I knew how to do it.” The girl sat down and removed some fish from the satchel slung over her chest. She held each fish firm against a stone as she drove a metal skewer through their mouths, then she dipped them tail first in the flames with the ends of the rods pointing proud of the stone border of their campfire.
“Why?” Gorenne asked, even more confused. “As far as I can tell you don’t even like me.”
“Ypubthink I need to like you to help you? Alright then,” the girl piped. “Maybe I don’t like you. Maybe I don’t feel like helping you anymore.”
Gorenne gave her a level look. “But it’s your job.”
“It is?” The girl looked at her quizzically, acting as though the concept confounded her. “Funny, I was led to believe jobs entailed some payment of a kind. I checked your satchel and you don’t have a single slip of copper to your name so I guess I'm out of work.”
“But you have to!” Gorenne wailed. She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. She had the skills, so she should be the one to do her part. She had been up until this point so why had she changed her mind do drastically?
“No, I don’t,” she huffed nonchalantly with a wave of her hand. “I don’t feel like doing it anymore. We’ll travel but that leg, and everything else you need, is your responsibility.”
And just like that, Gorenne had to do everything by herself again. It was exactly what she asked and trained for, but something about it felt wrong somehow. Perhaps the change from being in a large group to contending with all that idiocy concentrated in one individual was grating on her mind. She found it hard enough to ignore the pain of that day one week goes by tearing her to pieces each time she closed her eyes or felt her leg or could hear nothing but her own heartbeat as the girl walked away again, but at this point her mind whirled with all the things she had to do to survive while her body struggled to stay alive. No matter the trouble, she would face it, and defy the Stars as they mock her. She will survive, always.
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