Once a name tag got wet, the letters were the first to blur.
Beside the smeared letters was a small handprint. From that trace alone, he could tell someone had grabbed the roster in haste and moved it.
Ruan did not wipe the handprint away. If he erased it, it felt as though whoever had been there would disappear as well.
Ruan turned over the scraps of cloth on the table.
Blood caked at the end of dog-tag chains, leather markers half torn through, letters barely remaining beneath scratched metal plates.
Such things entered his eyes faster than the faces of the survivors.
The clerk spoke in a low voice.
“Medical Officer. We need to sort the living again first.”
Ruan did not stop his hands.
“If we don’t do this first, the bodies that go back will be switched.”
At the edge of the table, the markers that had yet to find their owners had been set aside.
Some were clotted with dirt and blood, leaving only the first letter of a name; others had broken chains, leaving only half behind.
Ruan picked one up and held it to the light.
One side of the metal plate was deeply bent.
When he scraped it with his fingernail, the pressed-in letter emerged.
De.
The rest was blurred.
He immediately turned his gaze to the damp record sheet.
It was the provisional list of the dead that had been piling up since the previous night.
The paper was warped in places, and there were many blanks.
“Yesterday, third row of stretchers. The unit with the deep stab wounds.”
The clerk turned the paper. Ruan stopped his hand before a name that began with Derin.
“Who confirmed the face?”
“The recovery team has not yet—”
“Call them.”
A messenger passing in front of the table stopped in his tracks.
It was Roen, a scorch mark left on his left cheek.
He was the soldier who had been carried in on a stretcher from the marsh, covered in blood.
Before coming any closer, he took one breath to steady himself.
“I confirmed it. It is Commander Derin.”
Ruan handed him the metal plate. “Go to the shrouds and check again. Take the marker with you.”
Roen held the edge of the metal plate for a long moment, then lowered his head. “Yes, sir.”
On the other side of the table, those still alive waited, tangled together on stretchers and blankets.
If he did not want to lose the names of the dead, he could not lose the breaths of the living either.
Ruan pushed the remaining markers to one side and turned around.
He began by sorting the fevers.
A young spearman was chattering his teeth beneath a blanket.
The wound in his thigh had been tied off, but his face was far too flushed.
Beside him, an archer with his arm slung up was breathing in short, broken bursts.
The bandage wrapped beneath his ribs was soaked darker than the other two.
Ruan went to the patient with the rib wound.
Each time he inhaled, his right shoulder trembled with it.
Ruan loosened the bandage just enough to check where the blood was rising.
“Move this man first. Clear a stretcher.”
When the clerk asked if the feverish spearman should not go first, Ruan briefly pointed at the patient’s chest.
“That one won’t wait.”
Before he had even finished speaking, a stretcher was dragged over. Someone held out cotton, and someone else caught the end of a bandage. Through those hands, Ruan immediately moved to sit before the spearman. He touched the man’s neck and armpit and counted his pulse.
“Boil water, let it cool, and give it to him. Take off two layers of blankets. Don’t reopen the wound now.”
Sera wrote it down. “Will he last until night?”
“We have to make him.”
Instead of answering, the spearman bit his lip.
Ruan had already moved on to the archer.
He loosened the cloth supporting the shoulder and pressed along the edge of the swelling.
The bone was not badly displaced, but sensation in the fingers was dulling.
“No bow. Spotting only.”
The archer’s face stiffened at once. “Then there’s no place for me to stand.”
“Your eyes are still useful. Give up the arm first.”
With that brief order alone, the hands around him began to move again.
Someone cleared the way, someone held the patient down, and someone tried to gauge in advance which direction Ruan would look next.
They were not moving because of a word.
It was a rhythm that had been waiting only for that word to fall.
Ruan did not like it.
Karen had said almost nothing until then.
She was only managing the flow of people along the path between the table and the stretchers.
Who was crowding too close for no reason, who was drawing out their words first, who was shoving their face forward before the supplies.
But today, she kept looking at the table longer than at Ruan’s hands.
She knew what it was to hold on to the living.
But today, the names of the dead were before her.
Two members of the recovery team carried in a body wrapped in cloth.
He had been a tall soldier.
The armor at his side was torn, and his face was half covered in dirt.
Ruan picked up the metal plate he had left at the edge of the table.
“Pull back the cloth.”
Without realizing it, Karen took a step forward.
Ruan compared, in order, the mark on the dead man’s wrist, the knot of his belt, the frayed part of his left glove, and even the scratched line on the back of the metal plate.
Only after checking once more did he nod.
“It isn’t another one. It matches. Write it down.”
One of the recovery soldiers was about to cover the body again, then stopped.
His fingers trembled briefly in midair.
Ruan lifted the edge of the cloth.
“Tie it. So it doesn’t come loose when you move him.”
Karen pressed down the end of the cloth to match his words.
The recovery soldier opened his mouth for no reason, then met her gaze and merely cleared the passage.
It was not a hand that blocked him.
And yet that touch was lower and firmer than before.
A little later, Roen returned.
This time, a spearman on crutches and an archer with a bandaged arm stood behind him.
All three stopped at a distance.
No one knelt, and no one took off a cap.
Even so, the air sank low.
Roen placed a small cloth pouch at the edge of the table before Ruan.
“These are the markers found at the recovery line. We gathered the ones with names first.”
His words were composed, but his hand was slow to let go.
Ruan opened the pouch and looked over two broken dog-tag chains, a ring with blood hardened on it, and three leather markers. Then he looked at the spearman beside Roen.
“If you’re on crutches, why are you here?”
The spearman flinched. “Because I can move.”
“Then go over there and compare the list of the living first. Don’t carry stretchers.”
He spoke at once to the archer as well. “Before you take spotting duty, read the letters. Start with the blurred ones.”
On one side of the table, markers with only half a name remaining were piled separately.
Ra.
Ben.
Ha.
Until such fragments became a person’s name, they belonged to no one.
Ruan did not let them be mixed together.
Confirmed. Suspected. Not yet touched.
When they were divided into three piles, the clerk’s face turned a little paler.
More categories meant more deaths to confirm.
On one of them, the blood had hardened so completely that the letters were blocked.
Ruan did not pour water over it right away.
If he washed it in haste, even the remaining grooves might be lost.
With the end of a wet cloth, he pressed and wiped only the edge.
In the end, no letters appeared.
The clerk tried to push that fragment toward the discard pile, then stopped after reading Ruan’s expression.
Even so, he did not throw it away.
A name not yet known was still a part that had fallen from a corpse.
The three moved almost at the same time. Roen went to the list of the living and read the names one by one. The spearman on crutches pressed down the corner of the paper, and his gaze often stopped before faces that had not yet returned. The archer with the injured arm felt his way through the blurred letters, and twice he nearly answered though it was not his own name. All three were patients. Even so, the way their hands moved already leaned not toward soldiers after battle, but toward soldiers sorting what remained.
Ruan glanced at them, then immediately looked away.
The fact that those three stood here was, in the end, because they had survived.
One whose breath had held on in the marsh, one who had endured the fever through the night, and one whose arm still retained sensation.
A person with a name could be used again.
Whether those words were something to be grateful for or something terrible, he could not decide to the very end.
Orte came in carrying another ledger.
“I’ll take the omissions first.”
Ruan handed over the metal plate in his hand. “This is Derin. This one has not been confirmed yet.”
Orte wrote them down without a word. Only when recording the second marker did the tip of his pen stop for a moment.
Ruan saw that pause.
“If you don’t know, write that you don’t know.”
Orte raised his head.
“If you leave it blank, any name will be put in later.”
Ruan placed the broken metal plate back on the cloth.
“Mark even what you don’t know. That’s how we find them.”
A groan came again from the stretchers. It was the patient with the rib wound. His breathing had grown shallower.
“Knife.”
Sera handed him a short incision blade. Karen’s gaze dropped once to that knife, then rose again.
Ruan did not aim the blade at the man. He used it only toward the flesh and pooled blood blocking his breath. The movements were brief and precise. When the patient twisted his body, the archer who had been reading markers beside the table until moments ago immediately pressed down his shoulder.
“That’s it. Breathe.”
As the patient swallowed air roughly, the hands gathered around him all loosened at once.
In that silence, Ruan looked again at the edge of the table.
One marker still remained.
Half of its edge was broken, and of the two letters, only one barely remained.
Ro.
He called the messenger who had been comparing names until a moment ago.
“You.”
Roen came over at once.
Ruan held up the metal plate.
“Is this yours?”
For an instant, Roen lost his words. His hand stopped just before it touched the damp metal plate, then he nodded very slowly.
“It’s Roen.”
Ruan did not immediately hand him the plate.
He pulled the blank space on the record sheet toward himself and wrote the two syllables of the name.
Roen.
Orte transferred those letters into the adjacent column at once. Only then did Roen reach out and receive his own name tag. One name had returned, but blank spaces still remained at the edge of the table.
Ruan gathered the remaining pile of markers once with his palm. The edge of a metal plate brushed against the corner of the record sheet with a thin, dry sound.
It was a small sound. Even so, the soldiers left around the table stared for a long time at the place where that line was added. The names of the survivors and the names of the dead were sorted by the same hands that day.