Elisha Barber: Book One Of The Dark Apostle (10 page)

In a low voice, Lisbet explained, “We’re sure a man’s to live, we give him a pitcher. Not ’nough of those to go round, see? We think he’s to die, we move him toward the back. Easier to clear them out that way, to the yard.” She glanced over her shoulder in that direction. “Should bring us more gravediggers, they should.”

Maeve picked up the explanation. “Try to keep the cannon shots over here, in case they need the surgeons. And the minor wounds against that wall, as they don’t require dressing so often. Major wounds to the inside—closer to the water—or toward the back. The master surgeon’s been kind enough to pull the arrows these last few days.”

“There’s just the two of you?”

“Plus one at night. We try to bring in some from the whores’ camp, but they get work enough to keep busy, unless they’ve got a favorite been injured.” She shrugged one shoulder. “We stay where there’s a roof against the rain. Sharing a room upstairs.”

Nodding, Lisbet smiled, and he suddenly connected them as mother and daughter in the way they tilted their heads, and the dimples at their cheeks.

“I’ve been conscripted,” he told them, “but how did you come to be here?”

Again, they shared a look, then Lisbet spoke up. “My brother’s one of the king’s gunners.”

“Better to stay with him and know for sure than sit at home dreading to hear,” Maeve put in. “Least here we’ve got a roof, two meals, and charitable labor.”

Once more, Elisha looked around him. “Where am I needed most?”

Maeve took his arm and led him to the wall by the curtain. “New ones, not seen the surgeons yet. Stitching here, I think.” She pointed to an unconscious man. “Cutting there. And this lot were hit by the bombardelles.”

Bombardelles he’d never heard of, but stitching, that he could handle. It was a place to begin, to wade into the shallows of this war before he found himself up to his neck. He knelt at the man’s bedside and peeled back the layers that bandaged his scalp. No sign yet of putrefaction. Good. He drew together the edges of the wound and clipped them with a silver crow’s bill while he set the first stitch at the middle and tied it off. The next stitches he set to either side, drawing the lips of the wound gradually closer before stitching the gaps between. As he dealt with the bloody gash, the two women quietly returned to ripping bandages. After a time, as he drew his needle through the flesh, pinching the edges together with his off-hand, he heard the low murmur of their voices.

“Handsome, what?” the younger one said.

“Aye, he’s that, but not for you. Even such as you can do better than a barber.” Maeve sighed. “Doubt he’ll last long here, in any case.”

Finishing his first task, and paying the women no heed, he moved on to the others, checking the fellow who’d lost his fingers and another with an arrow through his thigh. When he had dealt with the pressing cases, he turned to the amputation. The man was barely conscious, his eyes roving the ceiling, his lips moving as if he were addressing the flies around him. Even beneath the wrapping, his leg looked wrong, misshapen, and Elisha braced himself before he cut away the cloth. He palpated the limb as gently as he might, finding shards of bone that shifted beneath his hands and made the patient cry out. Both lower bones lay shattered at the ankle—too many breaks to set, and the foot skewed to one side. Elisha winced. The crushed foot already smelled foul and showed a sickly edge of green and black. At least it hadn’t reached to the knee. Elisha tugged free a bandage and drew up the man’s muscle and skin as much as possible before he tied it tightly around the leg just below the knee. After the amputation, the muscle and skin would relax to cover the stump of bone. He would have just a handbreadth above the break, but if the man recovered, he should do well with a wooden leg.

“Fetch us some water, would you?” he called out, and the women sighed, taking up their buckets and trudging for the far door.

To the soldier, he said, “Try to lie still. I need to cut your leg, but you’ll be about with a wooden one sooner than you think. I’ll be as careful and quick as I can.”

The soldier moaned, but his face revealed no sign that he had heard.

Elisha unrolled his instruments, an assortment of long and short knives, some curved, along with various crows- and hawksbills to clamp off the veins and arteries. He picked one of the larger curved knives and set the blade against the flesh. As he made the first cut, the patient screamed, and Elisha began to hum, low in his throat. The flesh parted, and Elisha shifted his work to the back, supporting the leg on his own, using a smaller blade to snick between the bones and cut the oozing muscle. Too many barbers, his own master included, sometimes neglected that step.

As he reached each large vein and artery, he used a hawksbill to grip the cut end, stitching them efficiently shut. Common practice had barbers cauterize the stump either with a hot iron or caustic oils, but Elisha’s journeyman years had introduced him to the brothel trade—a steady employment for any healer—where a Moorish whore who had worked in a hospital in her native land taught him the alternate technique of binding the vessels. Elisha took to it quickly, allowing him to abandon the torture of burning his patients. As if the loss of a limb were not enough.

At last faced with bone as bare and clean as he could make it, Elisha reached for the saw. His mind cast back to his brother’s house, his brother’s wife sobbing on the table before him as he took up a tiny, delicate saw, and he hesitated, his eyes suddenly hot with tears. He had no time for grief, not now, nor could his patient spare him this sudden reluctance. Elisha firmly took up the saw. He was needed here, and if the ghosts that haunted his memory pressed all the closer now, at least they would know they had not been forgotten.

Setting the saw carefully, Elisha made a slow draw to start the blade. The limb vibrated slightly with each push as he put his strength behind it. He let his humming drown out the sickening creak of blade into bone, silently thanking the saints that the man had lapsed into darkness.

The women settled their buckets beside him, sloshing onto the bloody floor, then went out for more, their feet tracking blood as they moved away.

W
hen Elisha rose stiffly
from his task, he rolled his shoulders and glanced out the windows. Across the grassy courtyard, about at the level of his chest, he saw the legs of the two women near a raised cistern. A channel ran from it out beneath a low arch in the direction of the river. They lugged two buckets each with the sort of resigned tread that told him they had done so many times before. No wonder they lost so many men, if his nurses must spend most of their time simply hauling water. He frowned. Edging between the wounded soldiers, Elisha crossed to the windowed wall, where he could study the stone and the layout of the yard. There must be a better way. He stuck his head out the window.

“Lisbet!” he called. She jerked at her name and turned. “Leave that. Find me a hammer and chisel, and a pick, if you can.” As she set down the buckets with obvious relief, he added, “And a barrel or a cauldron or something.” Shrugging at her mother, she turned to obey.

At his feet, one of the men said, “It’s not so bad as that, is it? You’re not to crack open my head with some bloody chisel?”

Glancing down, Elisha saw the man’s grin and smiled in return. “I might, if you can’t keep silent.” He knelt down, checking the bandages that wrapped the man’s head beneath a shock of deep red hair. The wound seemed to be healing well—another day or so, the soldier could forgo the bandage altogether. It could use a change, but from what he’d seen, there were few enough bandages for the new arrivals.

Even as he thought it, the air roared with the first volley from the castle
bombards, and the ground shook. Elisha steadied himself against the wall as a second impact brought screams from the unseen field. “Sweet Lord, is this what you’ve got all day?”

“Aye,” the man answered, “we’re right pleased they don’t go all night. They’re like dragons out there, spitting fire and boulders. Best get used to it.”

“I’ll try.” He squatted at the man’s side. “I’m Elisha, the new barber here. Can you walk?”

Lowering his voice, the young soldier leaned closer. “I can, but don’t let on to the captain.” He winked, and Elisha had to smile. “Ruari of Northglen,” the man said, sticking out a hand for a firm shake.

“Ruari, I’ll need this area cleared. It’d be a help to me if you can move some of these men, and yourself, out of the way.”

“What’re you planning, then?” Ruari slowly got to his feet, standing a moment to be sure they would hold, and straightened to his full height, a head taller than Elisha.

“Just an idea I have.” Elisha returned to the latest arrivals as Maeve came up with her buckets. They sloshed a bit as she dropped them and rubbed her back. Patting her shoulder, Elisha told her, “Don’t worry, I’m working on that as well. In the meantime, give a hand with this fellow’s arm.”

The fellow in question, little more than a boy, had his arm hanging limp and awkward—dislocated at the shoulder without doubt. He sat solemn, his lower lip gripped between his teeth to keep from crying.

Kneeling, Elisha said, “There’ll be a sharp pain, then you’ll be all right, hear me?”

The boy nodded fiercely, his eyes flicking first one way, then another as Elisha directed Maeve to the boy’s other side, to hold him firmly.

“Excellent. I’ll bet you’ve seen some things in this battle, eh? Do you have a girl back home to tell the stories?” As he spoke softly, Elisha took a careful hold of the boy’s arm.

Brightening, the boy replied, “Aye, sir, and she can milk a cow so—” He broke off at a yelp as Elisha twisted his arm back into place. Pulling away, red-faced, the boy stopped. Staring first at Elisha, then at his hand, he slowly waved his hand, then his face spread in relief. “That be a good deal better, thanks!”

A blast sounded outside, and his smile trembled into apprehension.

Studying his face, Elisha said, “Better, but not yet well. You’ll need at
least a day of rest to recover. Maybe you can help our Ruari with my little project.”

“Aye, sir,” said the boy as he scrambled to his feet, eager enough for anything that kept him from the line of fire.

Maeve met Elisha’s eye and shook her head. “Ach, but you’ll have us done out of soldiers, you will.”

Quietly, never moving his gaze from her scowling face, he replied, “Let him live an extra day. Or don’t you think his mother would approve?”

“We’ve all been here a bit longer than you, Barber, and some like to be here longer yet.” She got up without his offered help, but she relaxed a little, the scowl settling into a rote expression rather than an offense.

Still on his knees, he turned to the next patient, but a voice called out, “Come, Barber, it’s time I apprise you of my plans.”

Lucius Physician stood at the door, just the other side of the curtain, a cloth scented with rosewater bound over his face. His gown today was of a modest cut, the outer sleeves turned back as if he might actually perform some labor, worn with a hat that trailed only halfway to the ground.

Elisha rose even as his two soldier-assistants collapsed, moaning together as if they could stand no longer. It was a near thing: if Lucius suspected them recovered, he’d send them back to the front. Elisha bowed to the physician, and extended his arm to usher the man inside.

Shifting his gaze about, Lucius declined. “I’d like the surgeons to consult.” When Elisha had joined them, garnering the stares of the physician’s three assistants and the younger surgeons as well, Lucius said, “I have formulated a sort of liquid cautery to be tried on these bombard wounds. Not the larger cannons, mind you, but the portable variety.”

Cannons were the latest way for lords to devastate each other’s knights, but they were monstrous things it took special wagons to haul. Now they were
portable
? Crossing his arms, Elisha tried not to show his surprise. From the look on Lucius’s face, he did not succeed. “I suppose one could hardly expect a barber to be familiar with the new weapons. They are fashioned much like the larger variety, but are of a size to be carried forth, propped by a rod to steady the shot. These duke’s men have a store of them which they were meant to deliver to the royal armory. They fire a ball the size of your thumb at high speed. Bombardelles.”

“Ah,” Elisha returned, as if this made everything clear.

With a long-suffering huff, the physician continued, “Since there are not enough skilled men to apply the irons, we needs must have a system of cautery which might be employed by such as you. Therefore, I have developed a solution of hot oil with such herbs as may draw forth the poison of the powders.”

The surgeon Mordecai nodded sagely but without taking his eyes from one of his documents.

“I propose that half the men so wounded shall be treated with my solution, the others with cautery, so that we may better compare the effects of the one to the other. One of the surgeons,” —he waved his fingers in the air until one of them stepped forward— “shall perform the cautery on such victims as he feels appropriate.”