The smell of blood entered the medical tent before the rainwater did.
The rain had just stopped. Water still dripped from the tent cloth. Each time a stretcher was pushed inside, the muddy water on the ground rippled, and thin streams of blood spread over it. The stench of wet leather and iron tangled together, choking the air.
Ruan Hesse wiped his hands once on his apron. Fresh blood smeared over the blood that had already dried there. His fingertips were wet, and the backs of his hands were cold. Even so, his movements did not slow.
“Next.”
At his curt word, the first stretcher came in.
It was an infantryman with an arrow lodged in his thigh. Ruan looked at his complexion before he looked at the wound. His lips had not yet turned blue. His pupils were wavering, but they had not gone slack. He could be saved.
“Don’t pull the arrow out here. Fix it in place and tie tighter above the wound.”
As the assistant hurriedly tightened the strap, the soldier clenched his teeth. Before the groan could stretch out, Ruan turned his head to the next stretcher.
The second was a spearman with a deep slash across his abdomen. The tip of a spear had glanced off him, leaving his belly opened in a long gash. Too much had already spilled from within. His pulse was shallow, and though his eyes were open, their focus lagged.
Those who could be saved came first.
It was the first principle an army surgeon learned upon entering the battlefield. If you had only one pair of hands, you held on to the one who could endure longer. If you clung to someone with no hope, you lost three more. Ruan knew that. He knew it better than anyone.
And yet the spearman’s hand grabbed his wet sleeve.
“Save... me, sir.”
His voice was breaking.
“Surgeon Bern.”
Across from him, the old army surgeon Bern Dalt raised his head. He was a veteran whose sleeve hung empty on one side. He glanced at the wound once and spoke at once.
“Let him go. Move on to the next.”
“I just need a little time.”
“That little time will kill two others.”
He knew. And yet his hand would not come away. There was still strength left in the spearman’s fingers. If he let go now, it would truly be the end.
“Sera. Hot water. Long thread. Not a fine needle.”
Sera Finn clicked her tongue.
“This man first? Now?”
“Now.”
Sera grumbled, but she moved. Her hands were quick.
At the entrance of the tent, two more stretchers came in as if collapsing through the opening.
“Surgeon, please look at this side first.”
“His breathing is weak.”
Ruan’s shoulders stiffened for a moment. But his hands were already opening the spearman’s abdomen. The smell of rainwater and blood surged up. It was a gut-wrenching stench.
He drew in a short breath and pressed down on the torn place. He found where it was bleeding, tied it off, pressed, cut away, and stitched again.
Beside him, Bern touched another patient’s neck.
“One’s gone.”
Ruan’s fingertips trembled for the briefest instant.
Another voice overlapped soon after.
“This one too.”
Two.
Ruan pretended not to hear. It was something he should not do. The more he pretended not to hear, the clearer the voices became. The breath of someone dying was strangely small. That was why it lingered all the more in his ears.
When he tied the final knot closing the spearman’s abdomen, only then did Ruan raise his head.
“Prepare him for evacuation.”
Sera pushed the stretcher away. Ruan immediately turned back.
One of them was already soaked in blood even through the cloth. His neck was bent back, and he did not move.
The other’s chest was still heaving.
He was a boy.
His armor did not fit him, so it kept slipping down from his shoulders. Downy hair still remained on his cheeks. His chest had caved in deeply. He must have been trampled by a horse’s hoof, struck by a blunt weapon, or had his bones collapse inward.
“Name?”
“We don’t know. Looks like a supply runner.”
Ruan slid down onto his knees beside the stretcher. He opened the boy’s mouth and secured his airway. His breathing was weak. Too weak. Blood foam gathered at the corners of his mouth.
When Ruan pressed his ear to the boy’s chest, he heard a sound like boiling water. It was highly likely a shard of rib had pierced his lung.
Sera crouched beside him.
“This looks difficult.”
Difficult.
No.
Too late.
Ruan touched the boy’s neck. His pulse vanished, then returned. Returned, then vanished again.
Bern came over, took one look, and decided.
“Let him go.”
“He’s still alive.”
“There’s a line of men behind you who need your hands right now.”
“I know.”
“If you know, let go.”
Ruan could not answer. He knew. He truly knew. Those who could be saved came first. If he clung to those who could not live, someone else would die. On the battlefield, that was mercy.
So he had to take his hands away now.
But the boy’s hand groped through empty air. A hand trying to grasp something. Ruan took that hand. It was small and wet. Cold.
The boy’s eyelids barely lifted.
His blurred gaze turned toward Ruan.
“I’m scared...”
He could not finish the sentence.
In that instant, a winter night from long ago flashed past. A child, delirious with fever, had held his mother’s hand and said the same thing. That he was scared and did not want to fall asleep.
That child had never seen morning. After that day, his mother had washed her hands for days on end. Hands that were already clean.
Ruan had never forgotten those hands.
After coming to the battlefield, he had become that same pair of hands countless times. Because he had to let go, because he had to save someone else, because it was the right thing to do. But just because something was right did not mean it could be endured.
“Ruan.”
Bern’s voice dropped low. A warning. The final warning.
The tent was filled with groans. Muddy water, blood, wet cloth, waiting stretchers. No one was watching one junior army surgeon. Everyone was busy dividing the dying from the living.
That was why it was easier.
It would be fine if no one saw.
Ruan took off his wet gloves. He placed his bare hand on the boy’s chest. Over the heart slowing beneath broken bones. Cold. Too cold.
He drew in a long breath.
A sensation rose within him, as if he were forcibly scraping something out from somewhere deep inside his body. It was familiar. A sensation he had never wanted to become familiar with. It felt like pushing the time within himself into his fingertips.
It was not blood, nor was it breath. Any name he put to it felt wrong. Even so, that was the only way he could describe it.
Something tore beneath his fingertips.
On Ruan’s side.
At the same time, the boy’s body lurched violently.
“Kgh!”
Blood foam burst from his mouth. Sera sucked in a breath. Bern’s eyes narrowed.
Ruan could not remove his hand. It was still far from enough. He had to hold together the place that was about to sever for just a little longer. Once more. Just a little more.
His mind went stark white. It hurt as if needles were moving around inside his temples. In his ears, there was a sound like being underwater. The sensation in his fingertips blurred.
And yet the boy’s pulse returned.
Very faintly.
But unmistakably.
Ruan clenched his teeth and pulled his hand away. His body tilted sideways just like that. Sera hurriedly caught his arm.
“What did you just do?”
“Needle... cloth for hemostasis first.”
His voice was cracked.
The boy gasped roughly for air. It was imperfect, but it was the breath of the living. Bern stepped forward at once, felt his chest, and checked the condition of his ribs.
“I’ll take over from here.”
Ruan nodded. He tried to stand, but there was no strength in his legs. Sera held out a waterskin to him.
“Why is your face that color?”
“It’s always like this.”
“At least put some effort into lying.”
Ruan wiped the corner of his mouth with a wet cloth. A red stain came away. He pretended not to notice and crumpled it into his palm.
The tent began moving again. The next stretcher, the next blood, the next groan. Ruan moved again as well. He could not remain still.
Even after that, he could not stop. He cut open a back where an arrowhead had snapped off and pulled out the metal shard. An arm crushed beyond saving was tied off below the elbow and cut away.
On an archer whose face had been burned, he sparingly applied honey and herbal salve. The poppy extract used for anesthesia had run out long ago. Only half a bottle of distilled liquor remained.
Clean cloth had been stacked separately from wet cloth, but as the night deepened, that pile too grew low.
Sera stopped counting the remaining needles and bit her lip.
“Thirteen. Nine usable ones among them.”
Instead of answering, Ruan held out his hand. It meant he wanted even the blunt needles. If they had to, they would sharpen them and use them somehow.
Outside the tent, the wind blew as if rain were about to fall again. Inside the tent, the smell of cooling human bodies drifted through the air.
The faces of the two he had just failed to save were clearer to Ruan than those who had survived. The soldier whose neck had fallen back. The man whose hand had gone cold before he could even hear his name.
Those he saved were immediately pushed on to the next tent, but the faces he had lost remained on his fingertips for a long time. It was always like that.
So he tried to become faster.
He tried to become more precise.
Believing that if he could do just a little better, he might not lose the next one.
Only after the night had passed did the screams inside the tent lessen a little. The breaths of the survivors were ragged, and the dead were covered with cloth.
Ruan leaned against a corner and briefly closed his eyes, then rose again before the darkness had even lifted. He soaked the needles in distilled liquor and gathered the wet cloth, folding it. His fingertips were numb. Even so, his hands remembered what had to be done before he did.
Every time he closed and opened his eyes, the back of his head throbbed, and a high ringing lingered in his ears.
He knew it was not simple fatigue. Even so, it was easier to pretend not to know.
Sera entered carrying a supply box, then stopped.
“Ruan.”
“What is it?”
“Your hair.”
Ruan raised a hand to his head. A single fine strand caught between his bangs. A vivid white thread mixed among his black hair.
He looked down at it for a moment, then let it fall.
“Maybe it’s because I haven’t been sleeping. It’s been falling out a bit lately too.”
Sera stared at him as if dumbfounded.
“You call that a joke?”
Ruan did not answer.
Outside the tent, the sound of another stretcher came.
“They’ve just arrived. Three of them. One abdominal wound. One head wound. The last one has difficulty breathing.”
Ignoring that one whitened strand of hair, Ruan immediately turned.
“Bring them in.”
The smell of blood pushed into the tent once more.
One white strand swayed lightly in the morning wind.
No one yet knew what price it had been paid for.
Not yet. No one.