Grand Palace of Alozay: headquarters of the Safrak Bank. In multiple levels hollowed from the mainrock Pinnacle, it rises above the adjacent city of Molothair. Access to the Grand Palace is via the winch-baskets which allow one to be raised or lowered from or to the Palace Docks. If graced with the power of flight, one could also win the palace from the air, since several of its levels are fenestrated with windows adequate for the entry of a winged horse or similar.
There was blood on the stairs, and the blood had been tracked upward in a series of fragmented bootprints. Belatedly, Guest realized he was tracking through that blood himself, leaving a series of bare-toe footprints in his wake. He scraped his feet against the roughness of the living rock of the mainrock Pinnacle, then started upwards again.
Then stopped.
For he could hear breathing.
It was heavy breathing, the gasping of a hard-laboring athlete, the wrenching air-spasming of a mountaineer enduring high-altitude duress. A pregnant woman heavily into her labor might make such a sound – as might a man locked in a death-wrestle with a crocodile.
Till now, Guest had been carrying the weight of his sword's nakedness on his shoulder, for the weight of the weapon made it uncomfortable to carry at the challenge. But the ominous, indecipherable threat of that breathing jolted his heart to a stammering run. As the blood-spring impetus of fear shocked his heart to fresh endeavor, he handled his sword as adroitly as if it were no more than a dagger.
With that sword poised like a knife – held low, with the blade slanting upwards, ready to spear through latticed ribs to the sweat-thump heart – Guest took the darkened stairs at a barefooted sprint.
Red fire flashed on his blade as he jolted into a lantern's arc. He crashed to the step-stones, and his blood-red blade went flying to a clattering clang-fall. A moment later, the fallen Weaponmaster realized he must have slipped. On what? On nothing.
It was the sheer impetuosity of his upward assault which had slammed him downwards. Guest recovered himself, regained his weapon, then scuttled upwards, fleeing from the lamplight as a cockroach flees domestic flame. For light was peril.
He halted in darkness, panting, listening, taking stock. The heavy breathing was closer, now. Closer, and more labored yet. It brought back fragmented memories of battle, murder, ambush, war.
It was the breathing of -
Yes, Guest knew what that breathing signified.
Alone in the dark, he hesitated. The man who lay on the stairs above, the man who was surely laboring through his death, why, that man was no threat. But in the shadow of those labors an assassin might be waiting. And Guest, by slipping and falling, by racketing the night with the clatter of his sword, would have alerted any such assassin to his approach.
The Weaponmaster hesitated, half-minded to retreat to the mainrock's lower levels, and there to join his father in the attempt to fight through to the docks.
He listened.
From far below came the whimpering moth-faint echoes of distant discords – sounds of battle and barrat near-drowned by the gasping labors of the dying man who lay so close above. Those faint hoarse-clash clues from below told Guest that battle was being waged. He thought his father doomed to lose such a battle.
For, after all, this was the mainrock Pinnacle, the mighty stronghold of the Safrak Bank. It was packed with the Bank's mercenary Guardians, and the Bankers themselves would might ably enough when put to the challenge. The Witchlord's men were few, and so Guest doubted his father able to win his way to freedom, not even with the assistance of two wizards and a pair of witches.
But – above!
Thinking of what lay above, Guest overcame his hesitation and barefooted it up the stairs. A dozen steps took him into the light of the next oil lantern. Sprawled on the stone flags directly beneath that guttering source of semi-illumination lay a – a man?
No.
A woman.
A washerwoman.
Yes, it was one of the mighty washerwomen of the mainrock
Pinnacle, one of those whose muscular labors helped winch people up and down from the Palace Docks. And, as Guest had deduced from her breathing, she was sorely wounded.
She was dying.
It is hard, this business of battlefield death. The flesh sweats, and gasps, each breath a clutching. One might think the dying would yield. But they do not. They fight. The closer the death, the greater the battle. Will, identity, awareness – all is reduced to the groaning swoop of this ingasping. Air! Air!
The dying woman did not know where she was, or why. She was unaware of Guest Gulkan standing there. Did not hear him, did not see him, did not imagine him. Her world was the laboring of her dying, no more, no less.
And Guest, standing in the lamplight, momentarily forgot himself and his own predicament. Moved by pity for the woman – this unintended casualty, no enemy of him or his – he wished there was some way to help her. But help was not in his gift.
Just as when his brother Morsh had suffered a broken leg, Guest was helpless, for he had made no study of the healing arts.
Of course, when Morsh had suffered his breakage, the wizard Sken-Pitilkin had been there to help. But where was Sken-Pitilkin now?
Downstairs, doubtless. Guest was half-moved to fetch him, but knew the thought immediately as madness. For the wizards Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin and Pelagius Zozimus would both be embroiled in battle, and no aid could be spared for a washerwoman when the lives of so many were in the balance.
So Guest could but gape uselessly at the turmoil of the woman's gaping-gasping, at her blood-moil clothing, at the red soakage darkening the shadows of her ribs. At 16 years of age, he knew his edged weapons, his tactics and his strategy; he knew the dynamics of patrolling and the logistic difficulties of provisioning an army on the march; he was fit to pillage, and plunder, and burn, and ravage; but in the face of the spillage of blood he was helpless.
Of course, Guest Gulkan should have known the way of wounds, as should we all, for we live in a great age of darkness in which the sword rules, and strikes with impunity at washerwomen and irregular verbs alike. So know then the wound! First one must look, for only by looking can one know. One must seek for the damage, remembering always that piercing weapons – one thinks in particular of a quarrel shot from a crossbow – will damage with both instrike and outstrike.
Having found hole or holes, raggages or cleavages, tears and rips, gouges and gaps, one must patch the same. And immediately!
Have you no bandage? Then your hand must serve! But unless one be naked, then one surely has bandages, for the cloth off one's back will serve when all else fails. The cleaner the cloth, the better, though the cleanest of cloth is no use to a washerwoman who has died of bloodloss while the ardent hygienist has been searching for sterility.
Say it of a certainty: in the face of bleeding, the rescuer must match the urgency of the pumping heart. The wound must be patched, and immediately.
So when you are at war, and your bloodbrother has his swordhand hacked away by a battleaxe, then do no hesitate. First kill the axe-wielder. Then wipe the filth of battle from the palm of your hand, and clamp that living flesh of yours to the pumping agony of your bosom friend. It can be done in moments, if you have the courage to save as well as to kill.
Press your hand to the hot wet pumpage of blood. Press hard, and crush the bloodflow down to nothing. Then keep your hand in place until some hard-panting hero of your acquaintance can spare a few moments from his saga-work to assist with a bandage. Then you had best seek the help of a healer, though the perversity of the world is such that you may find every available pox doctor to have been slaughtered in the first heat of battle.
If such be the case, then your friend's handless arm should for the moment be placed in a sling, so that the well-bandaged wound is kept elevated, for the heart finds it harder to pump blood to elevations. And – mind! – do not allow the wound to be dipped into liquid ordure, or steeped in boiling lead, or packed with red mud, or plunged into the sexual aperture of a menstruating cow.
For, while all such treatments have their vigorous adherents, they are spurious; and the truth is that the simplest treatments are the best. On the battlefield, a weapon-wound should be bandaged, and promptly, with bare flesh serving as a failsafe expedient in the absence of other facilities. Bandage, then – and by promptly rendering a service so simple, you may yet save a life in the heat of war.
There!
It is so simply put!
But did Guest Gulkan know as much?
The unfortunate fact is that the Weaponmaster's brawning courage was much facilitated by his steadfast refusal to contemplate the obvious and inevitable consequences of carnage.
Much did he think of the clash of swords, the brawling of battleaxes, and the winning of glory. But of bloody pain and the sweatwrenching agony of a washerwoman's death – of these he remained steadfastly ignorant.
True, he had seen his brother Morsh Bataar hideously wounded.
But he had relegated all memories of that wounding to those mysterious and labyrinthine depths of his brain where legions of hapless irregular verbs wandered in doomed oblivion. Yes, and he had been wounded himself, and grievously – for the bamboo spike which had sabotaged his foot at the Battle of Babaroth had caused him a great deal of agony and inconvenience. But this too he had managed to shrug off and forget.
So, thanks to his own willed ignorance, Guest Gulkan stood watching as a woman died, and the charity of his pity was no help to her, for pity without action is useless.
And if you believe yourself likewise doomed to go to war, then know this of a certainty: if your study in its folly concerns itself with the mere use of weapons then you too are doomed to stand some day in helpless guilt, watching as the object of your pity dies. So let this text then carry an explicit message, a message apt for our age of ceaseless warfare: those who would study the use of weapons should study likewise the cure of that use.
Above is set a sermon on bandaging, and it will serve you well if you should look up from this page to see a friend come stumbling through the door with a hand missing. Clamp the palm of your hand to the spouting stump, and apply firm pressure!
But of course there is more to the treatment of wounds than this, for a missing hand is simplicity itself, whereas damage to the pancreas is a more delicate matter (for all experts agree that the soul, if it is located anywhere, is surely to be found in the pancreas, since this organ promptly dissolves itself upon death), and the eye is likewise delicate, the treatment of its damage being a matter only to be studied under the close supervision of an accomplished expert.
Consider then a case more complex than mere amputation.
Suppose you are fighting in the red dust of Dalar ken Halvar, and that your friend has been eviscerated by a broadsword. Suppose too that a pariah dog has eaten one half of his liver; that a goodly portion of his forebrain has spilt down his face like so much spoilt porridge; that one of his eyes has been plucked from its perch by a battlefield vulture, and that the other is resting on his cheek in the bloody mess of its swordpoint evisceration.
What would you do?
Or, to take another case, how would you aid a friend who has been speared most piteously in the anus, assuming that the pair of you are marooned by blizzard in the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus.
Assume too that all food is gone, that your tent is in tatters, and that your friend's incidental frostbite has led to his left leg becoming one single bloated mass of gangrenous stench-flesh.
How would you treat your friend?
Or would you treat him not, but simply content yourself with the stealing of his boots, and the making of a joke about him after his death and his snowfall burial?
If you cannot give firm answers to such questions, then it is arguable that you are unfit to go to war.
And what too would you do were your friend burnt from waist to throat by the fire of a dragon? Or burnt below the waist, which is arguably worse? And are you aware that the fire of the imperial dragons of Yestron is sticky, and cannot be removed by rubbing or clawing, but inevitably eats its way through to the bone?
And have you treatments for malaria, or hepatitis, or typhus, or bubonic plague, or syphilis, or gonorrhoea, or any of those other ailments which are the common property of an army on the march? And know you recipes of genocide apt for the mass murder of the rat and the flea? And which biting insect is it which carries typhus, and what are the symptoms of that disease, and what its treatment? And to remove a bloated tick from human flesh, does one wind it deasil or withershins? And what will you do if the tick has invaded the ear?
And what would you do – to take case more tractable than some of the traumas detailed above – if your friend were to come to you in panic, declaring a leech to have penetrated his privacy by means of the eye of his male organ? (And if you think this a most unlikely contingency, then know that just such a disaster is said to have befallen one of the heroes who quested with the Rovac warrior Morgan Hearst, when that worthy was in hot pursuit of the renegade wizard Heenmor).
And (to pursue the subject of the tenderness of the male organ a little further) have you heard of the jilifish? It is a fish of certain of the equatorial jungles, a fish which will swim up the flow of a man's urine, then erect its sharpest fin inside his organ of generation. How would you know a river to be infested with such a fish? And how would you guard yourself against its onslaught?
It is obvious that you will know a river to be jilifish- infested when your best friend screams in white-hot agony while taking a piss (assuming that he has not been lately to a brothel, in which case his pain may have an alternative cause). And it is obvious likewise that you can best guard yourself against the jilifish by refraining from pissing into rivers, and, further, by making sure that the stream of your cautious micturation passes through a filter fine enough to deny all fishes a route of ardent ascent.
As for the other questions – why, war will certainly ask them, and if war is your destiny then you had better know the answers.
Really, considering the grievous contingencies of armed adventuring, it can soberly be stated that no person should be allowed to take up arms without first enduring a full seven years of training in the repair and preservation of flesh and blood, of skin and bone, and of the ever-vulnerable male organ in particular.
But the more common expedient is to teach young men the mere use of weapons, so that, when placed in the presence of agony, they can but gape – and watch the wounded die. This is the common experience of war; though it is little reported, for it is human to forget, and those who cannot forget it most typically say nothing. So remember, when you find yourself in the presence of a happily loquacious old soldier, that he is but a victim of selective amnesia – a fact which may amply be proved by asking him to narrate for you the manner of the death of those of his friends who took the longest to die.
Being a very average young man in many respects, Guest Gulkan did just what most soldiers do in the face of those wounded and dying: he paused and he pitied, then he went on and forgot.
And that was the end of the matter.
And if you are surprised to find in these pages so much war in combination with so little suffering, why, then know well the reason. This is Guest Gulkan's story, the biography of a warrior, and a warrior of the Yarglat at that. And your every accomplished warrior is necessarily an amnesiac – and, more, neglects to see that which is not useful for his purposes.
It is said by the tender that any tale of war should concentrate on its suffering, for the tender-minded hold such suffering to be the ruling reality of war. In this they are in error; and, focusing on the dead and dying, they misunderstand that which they deprecate. Misunderstanding the dynamics of war, they cannot thereafter hope to alter those dynamics.
If history has any moral mission, then it is this: to render to the fullest the complexities and uncertainties of the living human reality which we endure. For it is we ourselves whom we seek to understand when we read in the pages of history – we, the human people, wizards and warriors, wonderworkers and washerwomen.
If we study the affairs of puppets and poppets then we will be well-equipped for life in a doll's house; but the world is not so amiably constituted, and attempts to treat it as if it were lead commonly to disaster.
Let us then stage no moral charades with puppets and poppets.
For if we do, then we delude ourselves; and, surely, to choose to be wilfully blind as to our own nature is the greatest of crimes, for without self-knowledge there can be no governance of the self by the self.
Yes, and there are those who deny this, and say that it is sufficient to yield in faith to the diktats of some deity such as Zoz the Ancestral or similar. In such faith, they are prepared to burn all history, blaming the page for the battle, the court record for the crime. The reason for their willed ignorance is simple: self-knowledge and self-awareness are painful, so the weak and the inadequate customarily prefer the numb oblivion of the slavery of unquestioning faith.
In defiance of such wilful ignorance, this history speaks, holding truth to be the highest virtue. For only through an acknowledgement of the living realities of our world and our own existence can we attain self-knowledge and autonomous adulthood.
And only by acknowledging the living realities of war can we hope to understand the persistence of war, which continues to blight our world despite the best-hearted efforts of those tender-minded moralists who would have us believe that war is one mass of conscious suffering, and that every warrior is a victim.
This book is a history of the warrior's living reality. And the truth of the warrior is ambition combined with amnesia, selective vision supplemented by selective memory, and the belief that victory is the validation of all suffering. Therefore, believing truth to be the highest virtue, we will not distort the record with moral charades of painful remorse, charades incompatible with the truth; but, rather, will note the plain fact, which is that Guest Gulkan swiftly forgot the dying washerwoman as he hastened up the stairs toward the Hall of Time.
In his barefoot panting, the Weaponmaster gave no further thought to the sorrows of war or the suffering of the injured.
Rather, he was seized by an electric excitement. His eyes glittered as if frenzied by a lightning bolt; his sword trembled in his battle-ready hand; and his thoughts were focused entirely on his long-delayed but now-inevitable confrontation with Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, Demon By Appointment to the Great God Jocasta.