One of Us
© 1997 Arref Mak

She was well and truly tired of the smell of blood. She stared thoughtfully at her hands. The calluses and abrasions of her years of training with weapons were faintly dyed mauve with the blood that had soaked thru her discarded gloves.

She had seen death walk a battlefield many times but perhaps not at this week's scale, she admitted slowly to herself. Then one of the sentries outside the command tent hailed Sengheld a moment before the Commander Surgeon pushed back the canvas and entered. Marshall Vekker looked up from her hands to meet Sengheld's eyes.

Dirty sweat tracks channeled in crazed lines over Sengheld's face. A few field dressings showed at the visible edge of the wounds kitbag that he carried. Obviously, he had heard that the Witch had been injured. Vekker's own injuries throbbed automatically at the sight of the bag as if her body had its own memory of torn flesh repaired by the tools within it. Sengheld was good. He also had the temperament for his job. Vekker counted him a good man in battle in addition to his prodigious talents after a conflict.

Sengheld nodded at her, "Vek, I guess I can see to you now." He started forward.

"No." Her voice sounded a bit odd, "The Witch is still alive, I carried her off the field. See to her first." She twitched her head in the direction of the inner partition of the command tent.

The surgeon looked mildly surprised, "I heard she had taken a calvary lance through the torso."

"Yes."

The Commander stopped then and looked askance at Vekker. She must be in shock, he thought. She didn't seem to have any major wounds. But Vek knew wounds, what she had just said was that the Witch had a fatal wound. There was no hardened footman who would survive a lance through the abdomen, let alone the little foreigner, Bhangbadea. And he was fairly sure Vekker just about hated the woman. This request made little sense.

Well. "Fine, Vek. I'll be back as soon as I've tended to her." He walked past his superior and into the other section of the tent.

* * *

Sengheld came back an hour later by the watch cycle with fatigue written in his every move. He kept his balance like a drunk that knows if he moves too far, too fast, he will fall down.

Vek was up and stepping in his direction immediately. With one hand she guided Seng to a campstool.

"Did you have anyone look at you?" he croaked out.

"Ya, I'm fine." she lied. He was too tired to notice.

He wiped his brow with his forearm, holding his hands loose at the wrists, "I guess you heard most of that in there...."

"Ya, I did." she grunted gray faced.

"I don't know that she will live through the night. Waste of time probably." He nodded thanks to the cup of water that Vek handed him with a trembling hand. "She'll probably die before midnight, she's lost a lot of blood."

"Thanks for sending in Drisco and Evet to help hold her down." He looked at Vekker now that he was closer and grinned. "Do you look like hell warmed over or do I?"

She sighed, "I suppose we both do."

Seng said nothing more for a while. He listened when he heard the Witch moan through the canvas of the other side of the tent. He shook his head, "Strange little bitch."

Vekker slapped the water cup out of his hand like a snake striking as she came up out of her seat suddenly standing over him. Seng gaped at her, then her backhand caught him across the face. He had a brief glimpse of the fear in her face. It transformed her into a stranger moreso than the quick blows from a trusted comrade.

"Tell me, Seng. Are you in on it, too?" He recovered slowly as she stood seething over him. A vein of fear opened up inside him as he tried to understand what was happening. "Baldur's balls, I've never heard anyone that you were treating scream like a dying horse. How could you do that to her? What the hell has gotten into everyone?" A strained muscle jumped in Vekker's face as she swallowed.

His pride was stung. He didn't know what she was talking about but he wouldn't sit stupid through this insanity, "It's not my fault, Marshall. I gave her root relief, it didn't work. Then I gave her warrior's sleep on top of that when I was looking for splinter shards and torn intestine and it didn't work either. So I doubled the root relief, for it's safer, and gave her some more while the men held her. She's still barely asleep now, I think. I give her anything else and I'll be the one who kills her." He frowned up at Vekker, looking for some familiar sign of understanding. He didn't see any. He swallowed. "Maybe she's not human after all......"

Vekker swallowed tightly and saw in her mind the smoky tavern room. They had all discussed the Witch that night, for they knew she was in the capital conferring with the Queen.

* * *

"She's not human," Marshall Vekker spoke into her ale mug, but everyone at the table nodded in agreement.

"Eats like a bird, she does." grumbled Field Commander Hekt, who's own large frame was layered with muscle, "but she never rides when she can walk. Never sleeps when she can plan. Never speaks when she can just watch ya....."

Sengheld chuckled, "I have to admit, I found her watching me tape up some ribs two weeks ago and didn't like it much. She had walked right up behind me and been standing there for who knows how long. Of course, when I asked her if I could assist her, she just said... 'you are by your excellent treatment of the men and allowing me to watch. Continue, please.' " he rubbed his two day growth, an indulgence he allowed himself as they were all at leave from the front. "I can't blame a body for furthering her knowledge."

Quarter Commander Sysholis growled, "She studies us like we're trained dogs."

"She talks to us like we are court nobles instead of Royal Officers," added Vekker, "and when we don't understand something she has said or asked, she says... 'your pardon' and explains it all over again."

"Like we were children...." spit Hekt.

"Talking dogs..." sniffed Sysholis and she looked for the serving wench.

Quarter Commander Pammil stretched and cracked his knuckles in his lean hands, "She doesn't bother me." he started.

"Crap." said Hekt.

Sysholis and Sengheld both started chuckling at once. Vekker grinned, "She doesn't bother you because she's warm and curvy and you talk so pretty, Pammy."

Pammil was the first to laugh loud as the others joined in.

Sysholis grinned, "I wouldn't bet she's got any soft parts, Pammy."

The dark haired Pammil spread his young hands and upturned palms and lifted his shoulders, "I'm willing to inspect her and report back, Marshall Vekker."

More laughter, with an undercurrent of thinning vigor. Vekker looked at Sengheld. "Well, Seng, you patched up the crossbolt she took for crowding the front line last month. As I recall it was in her upper leg. Has she got any soft parts?"

It was bending the rules to ask this sort of thing, and everyone eagerly watched Sengheld to see what he might say to the Marshall. Everyone's hair was down. They would be going back to war all too soon. They had to work with the Witch and each had to control their troops by never showing how her prescence affected them. At least amongst themselves they could joke about it all.

They had all worked with magicians and even wizards. Queen Halleena trusted this junior spellcaster and had sent her along to the war in the Talltimber province. But where most of the magic workers fell into a pattern of distance from normal men, or avoidance of physical labor and physical danger, this young mistress of magic was always at their elbow, it seemed. Sengheld ran his hand back through his hair, then he laughed. He looked at all the faces around the table and made a decision. "Well, if someone wants to wet my whistle a bit, I might...."

Shouts for the server went out from several of them at once. A small girl in her teens came at the run to serve the staff of the Royal Mortis Heavy Eastern Division.

* * *

"I'm going to ask you some questions, Seng. Off the record."

In the command tent, Sengheld looked up. He still felt the pain of her full backhand. He wondered briefly if the battle today had driven her mad somehow. He had spent years with Vek. Nothing like this had ever happened. He still couldn't penetrate her eyes or her face for any answers to what she was talking about here.

And he must know. "Ask me."

"Did you not notice the lance in the Witch was one of ours? Or did you not care?"

Sengheld thought quickly, "I didn't notice. Vek, what happened out there? When the Murdi came up that rise into your line today and your First Brigade buckled, what the hell happened?"

"Shut up." she growled. "Why didn't you sedate her, Seng?"

"I told you. I tried to give her something for the pain. It didn't work. I may have saved her anyhow. But I doubt it. The pain didn't kill her. The lance didn't kill her. Maybe the wound won't kill her either."

"She shouldn't die." Vekker eased back one step. Seng thought she looked more normal.

"Why?" he dared to ask. "She's not one of us. Why do you care now? I'm a healer, I would try to save her anyhow. I don't dislike her the way the rest of you do."

"I don't dislike her, Seng. I think I hate her." Marshall Vekker turned away and got herself a cup of water. She thought a moment and then she brought one for Seng. She offered it to him. He took it. "Seng, I shouldn't have hit you. I'm sorry. I think the screams got to me. I thought you might be doing less than your best."

"That's a stupid idea." he hissed. She nodded.

"Yes, you're right. But on the field today, the Murdi almost won the war." Seng watched her carefully. He thought he knew the situation. The war was going pretty well. Casualties were bad. But the Tribes were losing their lifeblood week after week. The last briefing Vek had given the command staff had indicated that it couldn't last much longer. The Tribe Fathers would have to turn back soon.

"When they ran up on our position and we set to meet them," she continued, "they nearly got to us before they opened ranks. We didn't see the Eye Tyrants with them in time to do anything about it. Some Tribe Father's bright idea. More probably something the Tyrants suggested."

"They kept the Tyrants in their ranks with loose elk hides over them. Murdi running speed is much better than the fastest speed those floating monsters can make, but there were so many Murdi's, they were pushing the Eyes along with them, Seng. When the Murdi's finally opened ranks, the Eyes were at point blank range. Our set position was a disaster."

"I didn't know." he said quietly.

"The men knew it immediately. The officers knew it. We all knew it. The line went to hell in an instant. Buckled its whole length. Before a single paralysis strike or bar of death could touch us we thought we were all not long for this world."

Sengheld squinted and tried to imagine the field. He had been on the line on the North most position. He had only heard about the near rout.

"If they had rolled over us. Gotten behind our calvary and flanked the north and south positions. They could have killed half of our army." Vek looked tired now. She sat down.

"Well, you stopped them," Sengheld noted. "You can...."

"I couldn't be heard over the wailing of our best troops. She stopped them, Seng. Bhangbadea stopped them."

He looked at her, "She wasn't even with the your...."

Vek went on, not wanting to stop now that she saw it all again in her mind, "She dropped out of the sky, as if she had been thrown by a seige engine. The front line was dying. She landed in front of it. Suddenly, there was a defensible position because the chaos didn't touch her. Even that wouldn't have made a difference, of course. Unless you were on a horse, you couldn't see her there, but our men right around her actually pulled away from her when she landed. As if, she was the enemy."

"But they saw that she was fighting the Tyrants. Our boys are damn good. They knew that you have less chance of dying facing the enemy than you do with your back to them. So they bunched behind her. Used her as a shield. You could see they didn't really know what they were doing yet, but they acted on good instinct." Vekker looked at her empty water tin. Seng was silent listening to his Marshall.

"The monsters took her on. Didn't work. Why I don't know. A handful of the Eyes tried to down her at once. She had some kind of spell in place. I saw the Eyes use the spellkiller of her six times. She held her ground. I don't know how. No spell caster in Mortis would deliberately fight two Eye Tyrants let alone twenty. Suddenly everything started to change. The Eyes should have advanced around her but they wouldn't. More of them moved in the direction of her resistance. Our line was a thousand men retreating as fast as possible. They could have, they should have devoured it. But they wouldn't move past her. Her resistance seemed to draw them."

"The Eyes are clever, but they are lousy in coordinated execution." Seng offered.

Vekker continued, "The Murdi put a couple arrows in her. Magical crap was rolling across the space between her and the Tyrants like an avalanche. I think she was killing some of them, I don't know. The important part was they had stopped killing us. The Murdi's were moving according to what I guess was the original plan. They pursued our retreating line. They folded around the Eyes and kept moving. But Jikks got a trumpeter to sound 'turn and stand' on his end, and I followed suit. In three minutes we had our boys turned around. Then they could all see the fight still going on. The Eyes all tied up trying to kill one strange little bitch."

Sengheld winced to realize that those were his words of just moments before.

"Her position was doomed. I don't know what she was doing. What she thought she was doing. Or how long she was going to be able to do it. She's a lousy tactician." Vek blew out her breath noisily. "I ordered an 'archer advance overstepping calvary'. And I got it. I wasn't sure the line would advance on the monsters."

Sengheld nodded.

"Bhangbadea must have had twenty or thirty men in pyramid behind her. They had formed a wedge, but weren't carrying the fight to anyone. But they held their position beautifully. Maybe ten of them survived it all."

"We rolled over the Murdi's advance nearly as fast as we had run away. The archers started using the Eyes for target practice beyond reprisal range. The Witch's knot of troops had someone clever enough to use covering shields to keep themselves and her from taking the missile barrage from our line. Five minutes later, there were no more Eyes alive, those monsters couldn't back up fast enough to get out of arrow range. Most of them were still trying to kill Bhangbadea."

"Vek, she's good, I guess. That's what she's paid to do. No different than us."

Vekker stared at Sengheld, "I haven't finished."

Seng shut up.

"I ordered a calvary 'advance and advantage' and watched our finest lope over the Murdi stragglers and start to spread out looking for weak support in the enemy line that had sent this nasty gambit at us."

"As I stood in my stirrups, I could see that while there was plenty of support in the Tribe ranks behind the gambit, they were in disarray to see our calvary riding down on their position. I'm sure they didn't think any of us were going to be alive. They panicked. I sent in the whole rest of my reserve calvary. We took the whole bloody day."

Sengheld opened his mouth with a question and killed it with a look from Vek.

"So here it is, Seng. Only an officer would have seen how the day was turning. Only one of us. One of my people in my personal unit. One of us, to see how this would kick the whole Tribe position out of line and cause them to scatter. Someone who could guess that the Eyes would not support the Tribes again any day soon after losing those kind of numbers. Someone who could guess that now was a good time to remove a powerful threat to us all. Remove a woman who could stand down a handful of Eyes when we ran. A strange little bitch who is a foreigner and perhaps has too much influence with the Queen."

"An officer to order, or personally run a lance through the back of Bhangbadea. To run her through from behind. To hate her enough for standing when we all fled to kill her under cover of the calvary charge past her position."

"Only one of us, Seng, could move quickly enough to take advantage of her like that."

"Only one of us."

Sengheld said nothing, held for a moment by the words, the images that came with the words. Attacked from behind by an ally. He gathered himself, "Could have been an accident, Vek. These things happen."

"I was there. I was riding towards her position, bringing up the rear of the third wave. And I saw the rider swerve and run her through."

Sengheld stared at her, "Who was it?"

"I wasn't close enough. It could have been anyone. Since I was planning on doing it myself, it doesn't really matter."

Only sounds from outside of the tent filled the night. Popping wood in the campfires. A few walking sentries. Vekker was turning the tin cup around in her hand. Sengheld gripped his hands together in his lap. His fingers were tightening and releasing against each other.

Had Vekker put the lance in her? No. He still didn't understand it all. But he could understand Vek's boiling over. Maybe he could see most of it. Not all.

"I have no part in this madness, Vek. Neither do you. You thought about it. You didn't do it." Sengheld leaned towards his comrade, "She scares some people because she doesn't fit. She has some secret power. And on the field, you saw her do things that you thought no one could do. That's all."

Vekker nodded, "Yes, she scares me. And at the very moment when she was lanced by one of us, I was horrified by it. It was like watching my thoughts realized. Like watching myself do it. I was torn. Broken. The man who ran her through kept going. Left her."

"When I rode up, she was digging up clods of turf with her hands. Face down over two of our dead footman. There was the woman who had saved my command from disaster, maybe saved my life. Certainly saved the lives of many men. I had been ready to kill her myself just a couple moments before, and instead I got down off my horse and started trying to save her."

Sengheld hoped he could convince Vek this was just shock.

"I cut the lance down with my sabre, and got her in my arms." the Marshall was watching Seng, looking at his face and waiting to see something there. Revulsion. Illumination. But Sengheld was slack faced with the power of her words. "She weighs about as much as a bird. Hekt was right about that. Can you believe I was able to mount with her under one arm? I moved back to the rear as soon as I could. I wasn't really thinking whether she would live, I just wanted to make sure somebody tried to help her."

"You have had a rare gift, Marshall Vekker," whispered Sengheld, "you got to see something from the outside, that you have been carrying around inside of yourself. And you didn't like what you saw."

"Was that what it was......?" she mumbled.

Sengheld rolled his shoulders to loosen them, "Maybe. Or maybe you never really intended to hurt her. You've talked about her for several months in less than generous terms but that's all you've done. And you've maintained discipline over the troops. And they don't know what to make of her, either. They don't like things they don't understand. People don't....."

Vekker advanced a step on Sengheld and leaned forward, "What I despise is that we are not people, Seng. We are professionals trying to save a province from a bunch of barbarians. Bhangbadea is a professional. And isn't she one of us? And isn't she trying like hell to save this province like we are?. She sure proved that today. Who are the barbarians here?"

"And I try to kill her. One of us does kill her, in fact."

Sengheld stood up, "You didn't try to kill her. You thought about it."

"You said she's going to die."

"Yes. I guess she is." Seng said tiredly.

Vekker moved closer and put a hand on the battle surgeon's shoulder. "It was my anger with myself and that unknown officer that made me suspect you. I wouldn't have thought it if I had my wits about me."

"Will you try and find that man?" asked Sengheld.

"Personally, I would like to. The way I feel right now, that bastard should be hung for cowardice and murder, in that order." she said with an edge to her voice, "But there is a lot of work to do. And we are here to get this war won. Tracking down that man will divert us from that and raise up all of the hidden anger and fear the soldier has for these mercenary magicians."

"Do me a favor, though Seng, keep an eye on the officer cadre." Vekker said with feeling.

"Yes?" questioned her friend.

"Anybody who celebrates the death of Bhangbadea. I want their name."

Sengheld nodded. They shook on it.

* * *

Leaving the ceremonies behind, Queen Helleena entered the small chamber and the waiting Marshall came to attention immediately.

"Well, Marshall, that was really most satisfying. Bhangbadea was surprised, I think. I am pleased with the result of our little presentation."

Vekker felt there was nothing to add. She nodded once and waited to be dismissed. Instead, the Queen dismissed her chancellor and her steward.

"Drink, Marshall Vekker?"

"I think not, your majesty. I'm technically on duty and...."

The Queen smiled, "Come now, Vekker, if we can give a medal and a Royal Eastern Division officer's commission to a young magician. We can certainly get our ex-Marshall of that division to have a drink." And so saying she poured it and turned with it in hand.

Vekker inclined her head, "Thank you, your Majesty. Of course, I accept."

"Of course you do. Sit down, Vekker. You promised to give me the rest of the gruesome details of the campaign if I agreed to let you retire naming your successor. I just gave Sengheld his promotion to Marshall. Eveyone wil be talking about this day for a while. So now I want to know everything. Not the usual staff report forms, either. You promised every nasty moment of the campaign was mine for the asking, and I intend to hold you to it."

"Yes, your majesty. As a retired officer, I can be completely candid. Ask me anything." she relaxed and sat down with her drink. Damn if it wasn't Antioch brandy. Retirement was official.

Queen Helleena moved behind a chair and pushed it much closer to Vekker's seat, surprising Vekker quite a bit. When she sat, her full skirts were lapping over Vek's boots.

"By the way," the Queen began, "as you are probably aware, retired officers may be called up if the crown has urgent business or need."

Vekker stiffened. "The war's over, your majesty."

Halleena smiled and studied Vekker's lined face, "I remember. Yes, thanks in no small part to you. Well, it happens I am without a Minister of Justice. I have entered your name for the position. I hope you accept."

Vekker took a sip of her drink and thought quickly. "I was going to buy a ...."

"Farm?" laughed the Queen. "Don't be silly. Why is it that retiring officers think they can be farmers. I really don't know how they get that idea."

Vekker felt slightly affronted but amused by the Queen's candor, she had never seen Helleena like this. There had been no discussion about any position. What the hell was the queen thinking? This wasn't part of Vek's plans.

"You don't have to answer today. Today I want to hear about the Talltimber Campaign." she eased back into her chair and studied the retired officer.

Vek gestured. "Ask away, your majesty. I'm good to my pledges."

"Yes." the Queen's eyes actually twinkled like a much younger woman, "I know you are. Well, let's start with ......."

END