§
The journey down the mountain and out beyond city limits in one of those huffing mechanical monsters that the knights call a ‘steam carriage’ brought us to the large army camp on the north side of town.
A little over three weeks ago, a massive attack on Narses devastated this place. Mireia told me that she visited shortly after our arrival in Pendor, to help them with her skills as a healer, and saw a decimated ruin where so many soldiers had died. Now, as we arrived in the hour after mid-morning, we beheld a vast field of construction sites, the rubble and damaged buildings gone and rebuilding well underway.
But the army had crowded the main parade ground immediately after the attack with tents, creating temporary surgeries, trauma wards and dormitories for all the medical staff and volunteers brought in from the city and the surrounding region. Unlike the field of rubble, this colossal ad hoc hospital still sprawled in the middle of the base, although the medical corps had begun to remove some tents. Many wounded were now returning to duty, heading out to rehabilitation hospitals, or heading home, and thus the ad hoc hospital should have soon shut down.
The previous night, that plan ended in a sudden influx of new wounded. Or at least, it went on hold. The number of wounded which the air transport corps could ferry from Parna could hardly rival the mass casualty numbers of three weeks ago.
Could it?
I began to doubt that assumption the moment I stepped down from the carriage, in front of what should have been the hospital headquarters tent.
“Did we perhaps arrive at the wrong location, My Lady?” Mireia wondered.
As he emerged from the carriage, Sir Topas assured her, “This is the same location where we have been bringing you previously, Lady Mireia.”
Garen and Hedrit, the contingent from the Pendor House Knights, fanned out to protect our flanks while Lady Halet, Sir Topas’s partner as a royal knight today, joined us.
As a hardened royal knight, she wasn’t bothered by this place. But she sounded perplexed as she suggested, “It may be a poor idea to just wade into all of this. Somebody should notice the vehicle soon enough and come to us, I should think. We shouldn’t get in their way until then.”
All of this was difficult to describe. The staff tent that was our intended location sat back several paces from the lane where the driver stopped our carriage. Between it and us should have been a space left for coaches and wagons to stop out of the path of traffic. But neither coach nor wagon could find any parking here now.
Instead, we saw a yard crammed with occupied stretchers and medical personnel, with no small quantity of clothing and bandages red with blood, piles of bandage materials, medicines and potions, and bins spilling over with discarded used bandages with horrid stains. I had a feeling from the nature of the looks shot occasionally in our direction that we might be in the way of more incoming patients, as well.
Halet looked around again, then wondered, “Having said that, why do you suppose they are all just laid out here in the open?”
I answered, “They are conducting ‘triage’, My Lady. They are sorting the incoming patients, identifying the best place to send them, deciding who to send first, and giving what aid they can themselves in the meantime.”
As if to demonstrate, I heard a runner at that moment arriving to report that a surgeon was available, and a nurse pointed out the patient to send. The stretcher bearers lifted and carried him away in a hurry.
<This is terrible,> Lydia lamented.
<You don’t have any experience with war, I suppose,> I answered. She was a civilian, after all.
<The only large quantity of blood I ever saw was my own as I lay dying, My Lady. I’m sure that fact is no help to me right now.>
Her trouble with the sight reminded me about the other two members of our party. Genette was of course standing quietly with her back to the carriage beside Aira, a motherly Dorian woman. Aira was previously an assistant lady’s maid for Mother serving here in Narses and would be made official as Mireia’s lady’s maid once her concubinage itself was official.
Genette was alright. Her childhood as a river rat had been a harsh environment. It seemed the sight before us did not faze her. But I don’t think Aira was ready for it. She looked like she would back away further, if the carriage weren’t blocking her way.
About that carriage…
“Sir Topas,” I said. “We can’t leave our vehicle blocking the road. Have the drivers return to the open space at the entrance.”
For a brief time, I had the sense he was going to push back. His job, shared with Halet, Garen and Hedrit, was to whisk us out of here at the first hint of trouble, and he wanted the vehicle close by in order to do it.
Yes, his boss was my husband, not me. And yes, my husband had insisted upon this much protection before he would agree to us going to the camp, as well as ten times this number of Pendorian Army personnel who were currently waiting at the entrance to escort us back. But this was my duchy, and I was going to have compliance with my will.
I held his gaze and my ground, raising my chin just slightly.
He twisted his lip and nodded. He went to have a few words with the driving team.
“Mir, should Aira go back with the carriage?” I wondered. “She seems troubled.”
Suddenly in the spotlight, Aira’s eyes widened and she straightened up. “I’ll be fine, My Lady. I apologize for causing you concern.”
It wouldn’t do for Aira to not stay by her lady, after all. Seems she intended to screw up her courage.
Mireia looked worried for her, but nodded. “Alright. Tell us if you’re in difficulty, Miss Aira.”
The carriage made various noises as the drivers worked the controls, and the churning ferment of the boiler increased. The strange machine slowly rolled away, huffing and hissing as it went.
I don’t know why I perceived the bizarre thing as somehow familiar. I felt as if, were it built the way it ought to be, were the controls different, I could drive that contraption myself.
Apparently I can pilot an aircraft. Mireia told me about that. Maybe that’s where I was getting the feeling from.
As that problem was resolved, I tackled the other one. Surveying the area, I pointed to one side. “It looks like we can go down to that tent to make our way around into the headquarters without getting in anyone’s way. Let’s go.”
§
I’m just now becoming accustomed to this perplexing afterlife, watching through the eyes of this strange woman in this even stranger land, but it was difficult at first. I even found it alarming, especially the first time I experienced her practice of drinking the blood of young women. While training in the Spirit Core, I had thought the goddess’s warning that Lady Tiana possessed the natures of both a naiad and a monster to be fanciful.
But my awakening within her vessel occurred in the midst of her feeding. No creature with such a nature would be anything but an enemy of humanity in the stories of my land, a being to be slain by a hero. I could see her only through the mirror of fear, and perhaps that fright closed the door between us.
And so, perhaps that was why she did not ever hear me when I called out. I tried many times, throughout the following day. And for that whole day, obedient to the goddess’s will, I did try to perform my duty. I took control of the ‘blood core’ and the ‘spiritual vessel’ which my host had left unmanaged due to having lost her memory of them. When the strain upon her increased because of the ‘blood effigy’ sapping her life spirit, I tried to encourage her to expand her living will into the vessel, but to no profit. She could not hear me. And as her spirit flagged, I tried to release blood from her core to replenish that which was being sapped, telling her to absorb it. It only evaporated, much to my frustration.
The blood flowed so easily into her core when she drank. Why could she not take it back when she grew thirsty?
As a result, she again became ravenous, before I had a chance to try appearing within her dreams, when she might be more able to hear me clearly. And as a result, the fear in my heart became worse.
When I understood at first that the women who would come to her normally slept with men for a living, something I would never do as a hetaira except with my primary patron, if at all, I had thought the ‘caregivers’ would be common pornoi, lowbred girls, often slaves, who relieved the sexual urges of laborers and soldiers in the back streets of my old home.
Instead, the ‘caregivers’ turned out to be educated, cultured and very well-dressed, seemingly of the same social stratum as my host. They offered the same entertainments as hetairae such as myself, but also sexual services like pornoi. Except, not like pornoi after all. They had training and skills in the arts of the bedchamber far beyond the base animal instinct of common prostitutes. I quickly learned as they practiced their arts on my host and her husband’s mistress that these were highly valued and expensive entertainers, prized even by this land’s king.
And thus, I grew to see the girls whom she was preying upon this time as my fellow hetairae. When she sank her fangs into their flesh and I again tasted the blood running into her mouth, it was as if the monster were feeding upon me. My heart shut ever so much more tightly with every drop trickling down her throat.
But in the night, the goddess brought us together again, forcing the door open, and this time she forged a bridge between us that I could no longer block.
Because of that, Tiana’s simple, sweet affection for the girl who shared her marriage bed, felt so clearly in her affectionate kiss upon waking, struck me forcefully when we woke. I finally understood that this girl, one of those she feeds upon normally, was dear to her. I even finally noticed the honest respect she had for the ‘courtesans’ of the previous night, and the maids who attended her morning bath, and all the others around her, and then I witnessed her devastated heart when hearing the news of the terrible battle and the loss of so many citizens of her land.
A loving monster who worried for her mortal subjects was simply not a concept I could have conceived of, before coming to this place.
But appropriate here, perhaps, in such an oh so very foreign land.
I could see the foreignness even more clearly right now, here in this army encampment. In Athenai, neither my host nor her husband’s prized slave would ever come to this place. Among those of higher status, only women of my profession ever even went out in my land. The world beyond the family’s walls was the territory of men, where the only women who ever joined them in society were those of my calling, and the only other females present were the pornoi and the occasional female slaves. Even those slaves, more than likely, would only be seen on the auction block, or outside the city walls, laboring in fields. Within the city, even the female slaves were a treasure to be protected against the dangers beyond their master’s walls, almost as precious as the wives and the children.
It was so different in this strange country!
Neither a well-born woman of Athenai nor a household slave would ever carry a sword and sweep the crowd for danger with the alert, eagle-like eyes of Lady Halet. Nor would she visit a soldier’s camp like my host and her husband’s prized slave and the two attendants following them were now doing. Nor would she work in that camp, going among the wounded soldiers attending to them as healers and physicians, like several women I could see in front of us. The strangeness of this world just kept mounding up higher, reminding me how truly far from home I was.
And the sight of so much blood made me feel somewhat ill. But I was the one who had insisted she come here, and I had a good reason for it. After all, we were in this place to carry out a labor which the goddess had charged me with. And so, I must stay strong and find an opportunity to carry it out.
