The Daughters' War by Christopher Buehlman

Author:Christopher Buehlman [Buehlman, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I woke with a fever in the night, and my bedroll was soaked with sweat. My hair was pasted to my head, and Inocenta was sitting up, watching me, just a shadow, but I knew her well enough to know there would be a furrow in her brow.

“You are sick,” she said.

I felt cramps in my belly, and I went with haste to the ditches that served us as a latrine. I will spare you further description, except to say that I was very sick, and that I would spend the next days either on my back or at a squat. At one point I was so weak that I needed to have my arms held as I took relief, because my legs shook so badly I was afraid I would fall into the middens.

A fourth of the army fell ill all at once, and it seemed the whole camp was groaning, and everything smelled of human waste.

The Holtish and Far Banners had brought this scourge with them, and, since we did not know how it was spread, we had only to hope for the best. Fortunately the barber-surgeons were stretched so thin taking care of kings and courtiers that only wise-women were left to us, and I will take one of these with her herbs and her gentle touch over a bleeder and his pans and leeches and burning salves. The woman who saw to me and the others of the lanza was a black-tongued Galt, and, though I was at pains to understand her Ispanthian through that accent, she prepared for us a tea that made us feel better by the second day. We were well within a week. A Coscabraisian dam of our lanza had turned blue, and had come quite near death, but she did not die, and it was only because of this woman’s help.

So, you see, Galts are good for something, sometimes.

The rest of the army was not so lucky as my lanza, to have someone who knew what she was doing. The barber-surgeons caused more harm than healing.

We had six hundred dead of the Western Army of Ispanthia, and I have heard a thousand died of the Gallards and the Far Banners. I will never forget those days of sweating in the summer heat, of thirst and of throwing up water as soon as it had been drunk. Inocenta did not get ill, and she nursed me and wiped my head with a cool cloth. She even cleaned my backside while holding me at the ditch.

A thousand flatterers are not worth one person who is willing to wipe your ass.

The dreams I had in camp were many and vivid, mostly unpleasant, and having to do with things I had seen in recent weeks. A few were of the “I cannot find something I need” or “Why am I doing this task naked?” sort. But one dream helped me a great deal. It was when I was sickest, but it was the one that told me I would not die of this flux.

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