Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

indifferent to humanity. They were obeying some tangle of rules he simply hadn’t seen yet. If he could find out what it was…

Something made him turn. There was no one in the room, and Megan hadn’t moved. Nonetheless, he sensed someone nearby.

A woman was weeping out in the hallway.

*

Armiger dressed, then blew out the candle, which itself had been an extravagance. In his time here he had heard more weeping than laughter. There was nothing unusual in it. But without knowing exactly why, he found himself walking hesitantly to the door.

It opened soundlessly onto a pitch-dark hallway. There were windows at either end of the corridor, but they didn’t illuminate, only served as contrast to the blackness within.

For a moment Armiger stood blind as any man, surprised at the helplessness of the sensation. Then he remembered to slide the frequency of his vision up and down until he found a wavelength in which he could see. A few months ago, that action would have been automatic. He scowled as he looked around for the source of the sound.

The woman was huddled on the floor halfway down the hall. She cradled something in her lap. An infant, perhaps? Armiger opened his mouth to speak, then thought better. He cleared his throat.

She started visibly and looked up. “Who’s there?” Her head bobbed back and forth as she tried to see. She was middle-aged, matronly, dressed in a peasant frock. Strange that she should be in this part of the palace… no, perhaps it was stranger that these halls hadn’t yet been turned into a barracks.

“I heard you,” he said. “Are you injured?”

It was what he would have asked a man. He didn’t know what to ask when a woman cried. But she nodded. “My arm,” she whimpered, nodding down at it. “Broken.” As if the admission cost her more than the injury, she began to cry all the harder.

“Has it been seen to?” He knelt beside her.

“No!”

“Let me see.” He gently reached to touch her elbow. She winced. Feeling his way, he found the break, a clean one, in the tibia. The bones had slid apart slightly, and would have to be set. He told her this.

“Can you do it?”

“Yes.” She had a tattered shawl draped over her shoulders. “I’ll use this to immobilize it. Just a moment.” He needed something for a splint. The furniture had been completely stripped out of here, but the walls were wood, with a good deal of ornamental panelling and stripping. Armiger found a beveled edge to one of the panels, and with several quick jerks, pulled the wood strip away from the wall. It groaned like a lost soul as it came. He broke it over his knee and returned to the woman.

He didn’t warn her before taking her forearm and pulling it straight. She yelped, but it was all over before she had time to tense or really feel the pain. Armiger aligned the stripping with her wristbones and wrapped it quickly with strips from her shawl. Then he bound the whole assembly in a sling about her neck.

“Why wasn’t it set earlier?” From the swelling, he judged she had broken it earlier in the day.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Yes, it is you see because the soldiers, they, some of them are hurt, so bad, and there’s not enough people to tend them. I, I went there, but one man, his stomach was open, and he was dying but they wouldn’t leave him, and another his eyes were burned somehow. And I stood at the doorway and they were all hurt so badly, I, I couldn’t go in there with just my silly broken arm. I couldn’t…” She wept, clutching him with her good hand.

What Armiger said he said not to comfort her, but because he had observed this in human men: “But the soldiers would have gladly given up their beds to a woman.”

“Yes, and I hate them for it.” She pushed him away. “It’s the arrogance of men that leads them to sacrifice themselves. Not real consideration.”

Armiger sat back, confused. “How did you get in here?” he asked at last.

“I’m a friend of one of the maids. She offered to shelter me when, when the soldiers came. I… I didn’t know where to go, I couldn’t go back and tell her I didn’t go into the infirmary. I had nowhere to go.”

He knew the room next to his was vacant. “Come.” He lifted her to her feet and guided her to it. There was enough light here to make out the canopied bed and dressers, and fine gilded curtains.

“I can’t sleep here.” Her voice held shock.

“You will.”

“But in the morning—if the queen finds out—”

“If they ask, tell them Armiger authorized it. Sleep well.” Without another word, he closed the door. His last glimpse was of her standing uncertainly in the center of the room.

For a long time he stood, arms folded. He heard her climb on the bed at last. Only then did he turn and walk to the stairs.

*

A stable had been taken over to house the infirmary. Despite the lateness of the hour, it was far from quiet as Armiger walked in. Men groaned or wept openly. In a curtained alcove, someone screamed every few seconds—short gasps of unremitting agony. No one else could sleep with that going on, though a good number of men lay very still on the straw, their eyes closed, their chests rising and falling shallowly.

There were twenty men and women here tending the injured. They looked like none of them had slept in days.

These wounded were merely the casualties from the withdrawal of Galas’s hillside defenses. When Lavin stormed the walls this stable would oveflow.

Actually, it would burn, he thought as he walked along the rows of men, appraising their injuries.

“Are you looking for someone?”

He turned to find a red-eyed man in bloodstained jester’s gear watching him from a side table. The table was strewn with bottles and medical instruments. The man’s arms were brown up to the elbows with old blood.

“I can help,” said Armiger.

“Are you trained?”

“Yes.” He knew the human body well, and he could see inside it if he wished. Armiger had never tried healing before.

“It’s hard,” said the jester.

“I know.” Armiger had realized, however, that the same lack of empathy that allowed him to send a squad of young men to certain death for tactical reasons, would allow him to act and make decisions to save them, where other men’s compassion would paralyze them.

He nodded toward the curtained alcove. “What is his problem.”

The jester ran a hand through his hair. “Shattered pelvis,” he said briefly.

Armiger thought about it. “I’ll take a look.” He glanced around. “First though, let’s see the others.”

The jester led, and Armiger moved down the rows of men, and performed triage.

*

Near dawn, Galas stood watching from the window in her bed chamber. Behind her were the carven trees and fauna of a fantastical woodland scene. It was no regular pattern of pillars cunningly disguised, nor a frescoed wall carven and layered with images; the architect had denied the privilege of rectilinear space here. Like a real forest, the lower boughs obscured vision and prevented movement between different parts of the chamber, and the great roots of the stone trees sprawled across the floor with no regard for the cult of the level surface. There was no order to the staggered forms, nor any symmetry save the aesthetic, which made this room into a group of bowers inside the straight-edged castle tower.

The window itself looked like a gap in the foliage of a jade-carved hedge. Each tiny leaf had been faithfully reproduced in stone, and in daylight they shone with a verdant brilliance that would normally soothe the queen’s heart.

She had seldom been here in the day. As she traced the outline of a leaf with the tip of one finger, she knew she might never have the time to be, now. Odd that the possibility of never seeing this window in daylight again, should be what now struck her with the horror of her coming death.

She thought about the strange Wind, Maut, as she sat by the window to watch the moon set. He was letting her look straight into the labyrinth of eternity, at the moment when death was inevitable and imminent. She hated him for that.

She turned to her maid, Ninete, who sat slumped on a divan nearby. Ninete was required to remain awake as long as Galas, and tonight the queen had not slept at all. “He knows there is nothing I can say to him,” said Galas intensely. Ninete was startled at being addressed as a person; she said nothing in reply.

Galas fixed her gaze on the maid. “He is cruel, to put it plainly. Why is he telling me these things? I know he is only telling the truth. It is that which is so terrible. He is telling the truth. As to things which should properly be lied about.”

Ninete recovered herself. “Let me comb out your hair,” she said. The Queen rose with a nod and went to her dressing table. Ninete stood behind her and began letting down her hair into dark waves which tumbled down her back.

“Perhaps he thinks it really will not hurt me to know my whole life has been lived in vain. I wanted to change things, that was what ruled me. I wanted to change what could not be changed, what had never been seen as anything but absolute. I wanted to dissolve the absolute. Maut… Maut, says this has been done before.

“I knew that everything now absolute was once a phantasy. What is good was once evil. He is unaware how devastating such a realization is to human beings. In fact, he’s not really bothering to speak of that. He takes it as a starting point. Takes it as given that this upheaval which has been my life is like the dance of dust-motes in sunlight—just an alternation, and change in height of those motes in the galaxy of relations visible to us. He neglects that I am such a mote myself…”

Bothered, Ninete combed silently. In the mirror Galas could see her uncomprehending look. “We could die in two days,” she said.

“I know,” says Ninete simply. Galas waited for more, but it didn’t come.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“My Queen, I’m terrified.” Ninete’s expression shifted from the neutral silence it had held to an ashen tautness. Her lips thinned, her eyes lost their focus. “I don’t want to die now.”

Queen Galas looked at her, her own eyes taking on a certain coldness Ninete had seen so frequently in them. But Galas’s hand trembles as it searched among the combs, hairpins, pots of makeup on the dressing table.

“You don’t want to die. But you understand what death is.”

“The soldiers will kill us, Lady. I’ve seen people die.”

“Resume.” Ninete brought the brush up again. “Ninete, you will die a good death. You see death so simply. Death to you is the General’s men storming the castle. It is missiles from the air, swords, vindictive rape and humiliation. Most of all never to see those you love again, never again to hold those talks, to make love… You understand death, you have studied it the way all folk do, and for your understanding you have recourse to the religious teachings, the rituals, the tragic lovers in stories. You understand it, in the lyricism of fear you have been taught.”

Galas’s hand hovered over this comb, that pin, uncertainly. “I don’t understand it at