Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (66 page)

    
“She will not die,” Ancenon assured me.  I had not heard him enter and I didn’t react to his voice.  Yesterday I would have had my sword at his throat before thinking.

    
“Nor will the child,” D’gattis added.

    
“Who else is here?” I asked without turning.

    
“Me,” Dilvesh said.  I finally turned and regarded him with sad eyes.  I had hurt him badly – his hands and his legs shook but he also would not die. 

    
Dilvesh had a secret and I knew it.  In the midst of everything else, I had robbed his very brain.  He knew what had happened as well as I did.  I had no need to reveal him – that is how it would stand.

    
“Conflu
must
retaliate in kind for this embarrassment,” D’gattis told me, coming right to the point. “A troop of no less than 20 left on foot – we cannot both pursue them and protect our assets here.  We can expect a force of equal size in the week before we can recover and move our troops from here.”

    
“Why so long?” I asked.  A week seemed like a long recuperation for any army.  The Dwarves got up and moved the next day after the Battle of Two Mountains.

    
“Wounds become septic,” Ancenon told me.  “Stitches tear, men move slowly.  Better we should be caught here rested than fleeing and wounded.”

    
“Treat the wounds with alcohol and wrap them, then,” I said, looking back at Shela.  Did I have to think of everything?  “Then they’ll stay clean.”

    
“Alcohol?” D’gattis asked. “You would pour wine on an open wound?”

    
I shook my head.  “Distilled alcohol,” I told him.  “Fermented from grain – not wood, that’s poisonous.  To kill the germs.”

    
“Germs?” Dilvesh asked.  “What are germs?”

    
“We don’t drink fermented grain,” D’gattis said in his predictably snotty way.

    
“What are you talking about, Lupus?” Ancenon interrupted both of them.

    
I sighed, watching Shela sleep peacefully while Ancenon’s spell repaired her.  This day just sucked.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

High Spirits

    
Dilvesh devised a spell that could remove the pure alcohol from wine – much to the anger and chagrin of our soldiers.

    
At least they’d been left alive to complain.

    
We marched our two thousand, seven hundred remaining soldiers on the next day with no shirts and no wine – just alcohol, bandages and a burning desire not to meet twelve thousand more Confluni.

    
The female Wolf Soldiers and Legionnaires made for a much more appealing parade.  Foveans had never had a renaissance, a “great awakening,” or any of the countless reformations that my world had seen.  Their acceptance of women in a military came as perfunctorily as men working in a kitchen.  They wore the same armor, they carried the same swords, they fought side to side or they died trying.  Most women couldn’t cut it but there were some good ones who did.

    
And they tended to find their place in the whole unit.  We didn’t have a woman wielding a five-foot sword in the second line of my squad of ten, but many of those wielding the pole axes were women.  Those weapons were light, and although the women didn’t have the height to arc their weapons over the shields of the first line, they
did
come out between and alongside the shields, making for a whole new dimension of attack.  And they made good archers, embracing the precision and working in unity better than many of the men.

    
My Wolf Soldiers and the troops that we had annexed from the Free Legion held the van under Karl – the
Hero of Tamara
.  Who cares if he’d never been there?  He’d received an intentional scar under his right eye like mine, inflicted with one of Genna’s daggers, our Badge of Honor now among the Wolf Soldiers, to be called
The Mark of the Conqueror.
  We would wear our medals at all times.

    
Genna’s daggers would have to serve to remind me of her.  She had vanished, and D’gattis couldn’t find her, neither could Dilvesh.  His last recollection of her came from just before my mad rage.  After that she was gone to him.  We could only assume that we’d lost her in the confusion of the battle.

    
We retreated ahead of the garrison from a Confluni stronghold near Tamara.  Our scouts under Drekk had marked them the day before, another twelve thousand strong or close to it.  I’d have liked to recover her body, but not if we had to fight another battle to do it.

    
It had taken us ten days to march to the Tamaran glen from Teher.  It would take us as many to get back if we marched by the most direct route.  We planned no forced marches and no exploring - just beat feet for home.  I walked Blizzard and could tell that the stallion would have been happier with me on his back, running like the wind. 

    
Sorry, big guy
, I thought to him. 
Not until that whither is healed.
My own thigh burned and I should have been riding, but it made me feel disloyal to Blizzard, and the pain kept my mind off of my wife lying in a wagon.

    
The scar on my face kept my cheek twitching.  I’m not vain but it bothered me.  People looked in my face and focused on it now.

    
Arath predicted that the Confluni would call for relief from another city and send what they could muster to harass us the next day.  Thorn’s woodsmen were forming our rearguard and our six hundred fifty remaining horse were supporting them.  We were safe from anything but an overwhelming force the likes of which we had just defeated.

    
We had sent a squad of ten cavalry ahead with Nantar to inform Henekh of the results he had paid for.  They carried over ten thousand bloody tabards with them on our plentiful spare horses to adorn his city walls.  As far as we were concerned we had earned our money and were just escaping with our victory and our lives.

    
Surgeons had only recently begun to use alcohol to treat scalpels and sutures on my home world, no one had heard of doing that here.      In my history it had begun around the time of WWI; the Civil War had seen the same bloody scalpel used on dozens of different patients and operating tables made of wood and washed off with a pail of water more for the convenience of the surgeon than the health of the patient.  In those times more men died after a battle from infection than during combat from the bullet or bayonet. 

    
Our men complained of the pain that the alcohol brought and of the stitches that held their wounds back together, but almost none became septic and we removed fewer limbs than any of our veterans would have thought possible.  I remembered from training in Navy triage that alcohol applied directly on a wound would damage the tissue and cause as much harm as it could cure – but used sparingly on bandages with witch hazel applied directly on wounds (and alcohol on every scalpel and suture needle) it destroyed the germs which would have fought us more insidiously than the Confluni National Guard ever could have.  By the second day’s march, when our men weren’t dropping dead with fever, there were many more amazed expressions than there were men and women complaining about having to drink water instead of wine.

    
“And we can ferment grain for this?” D’gattis asked me, holding a vial of clear alcohol.

    
“It would be more efficient,” I said.  I couldn’t be sure that the alcohol from grapes worked the same as the alcohol from grain, although it appeared to.  “I wish that I had told you about the alcohol and witch hazel earlier – think how many lives we would have saved.”

    
D’gattis shook his head. “Some, perhaps many,” he said, “but don’t blame yourself, Lupus.  No one can think of everything.  You seemed to believe that we knew this.”

    
I did.  How much had I taken for granted?  How much common knowledge could I use to change civilization here?  I wished I knew how to refine stainless steel – if you refined stainless steel, that is.  I knew from nuclear power that it consisted largely of chromium and nickel – maybe some experimentation might be a good idea.  I knew how to make a one or three-phase AC generator, and how to make a boiler and maintain chemistry in a steam plant.  With that knowledge I could make a power plant.  I did not, however, know how to make a light bulb, a refrigerator, or anything else that
used
electricity.  I would have to look into that, too.

    
D’gattis looked back over his shoulder, then back at me.  Both of our horses had been wounded but he had simply moved to another.  I alternately walked next to the wagon that carried my still unconscious Shela, or rode on the back of it.  I felt sullen after the battle with the CNG, as if my brain were full of ashes.  Miles moved slowly and this talk helped pass the time, nothing more.

    
I paid the price of my berserker rage in days of solemn contemplation.  I had forgotten that.  I knew that my brain had more to handle than it usually did.  I felt sure that War exulted in the wanton violence of it, but it left me feeling like a rapist who hadn’t been caught.

    
Now when in moments of silence I fell into dark consideration of even darker memories.

    
We discussed fermenting, processing and purifying alcohol, and killing germs.  We discussed cultivating witch hazel, an easy plant to find in this forest.  They had actually believed that demons caused infection when they preyed on the blood of the dying and that puss and gangrene were their unholy excrement.  They treated the infected with exorcism, bleedings and fasting – which of course either weakened the infected to the point of death or didn’t kill them because they were strong already. 

    
As we discussed these things, we heard reports from Drekk, Ancenon and Dilvesh from time to time.  The reports were always the same – the Confluni weren’t going to catch us and weren’t going to believe that until they were too late.  Thorn and Arath pretty much kept to the troops and relied on the other three to report for them.

    
We saw no sign of Genna.  We could have used her, because those patrols of ten that the Confluni kept around hadn’t gone away.

    
All day, random arrows flew out of the forest and killed or wounded our men, or lamed our horses.  The enemy didn’t engage – they would be foolish to – but they would fire once, maybe twice, and then vanish.  No way to tell if the same group, many groups or just random Confluni harried us.  We had no way to catch them when they did it, either.  We wasted hours searching the woods for these ghosts.  Twice Dilvesh cornered and destroyed small squads that he came across, but this never lessened the assaults on us, leaving us wondering how many we faced.

    
At night we made camp in our “small city.”  If didn’t matter anymore what the Romans had called it, it had saved us.  I didn’t know for sure if we would see it spring up in the Confluni infantry along with squads of ten, but I didn’t think so.  The men who escaped were foot soldiers and the government they belonged to had long-standing and successful traditions on how to fight war.  Maybe in time our ways would be adopted, but not quickly and not before we could exploit the advantage.

    
On the third day, I’d just inspected the pickets and walked the rows as I always did, and came across Ancenon.  I didn’t see a mark on him – he hadn’t come here for sword fighting.

    
“You seem well occupied, your Grace,” he informed me.

    
I didn’t even know what that meant, so I grunted at him.  I tried to move past him but he didn’t give ground.

    
“I am informed that our troops are rife with healing, even as they march,” he continued.  “Your method invokes no magic and no god, and yet shows power that a dozen Uman-Chi Casters couldn’t match.”

    
“It’s not magic,” I informed him.  “I’ve explained this to you.”

    
“You are free with your secrets,” Ancenon told me. 

    
I looked into his the silver on silver eyes. “It shouldn’t be a secret,” I said.  “It saves lives.”

    
“The lives of your enemies as well,” he argued.  “Would you face the same Confluni army again?”

    
I smiled grimly.  “Small chance of that,” I told him.  I remembered Fat Jack.  “No man should have a limb cut off for no good reason.”

    
That didn’t dissuade him.  “Magic that strong,” he told me “can be taken farther.  If given the ability to kill this in-feg-shun, then why not the ability to raise the dead?”

    
I sighed.  “It isn’t magic,” I told him again, “it is basic chemistry.  You had the knowledge to create it but you didn’t have the technology to use it.  In time someone would have poured alcohol on an open wound, just as you saw me do.”

    
“You speak in odd terms since the battle,” Ancenon accused me, his pencil-thin eyebrows knitting.  “
Chem-stree
and
tek-no-gee
and magic that is not magic.  Next I expect I will see you purify salt water and predict the weather.”

    
“Anyone can do those things,” I told him, turning toward my pavilion.  If Ancenon wanted to argue then let him, just not with me.

    
“You are serious, aren’t you?” he asked, pursuing me.  “You can do these things?”

    
“I could make something that could do these things,” I said.  Actually, maybe not the barometer.  “Where I’m from, it’s simple.”