Work Text:
The River Camp, autumn, Third Age 2981
He loaded up Dagomir until he was hunched over with the weight and shouldered up his own similarly laden pack and together they wound down through the tented streets and mud puddles until they came to those low hills, some of them now chimneyed and set with little doors. He skirted round their walkways on the main path and came to the cottage on the brookside and bent to knock upon the door.
Mistress Donnamira answered in her crisp white apron and matching cap and looked up grinning at him.
“Master Halfelven! ‘Tis a pleasure to see you again.”
“At your service, madam,” said the Captain. “We’ve brought the things we discussed while on the Road together, plus a few in addition.”
“Yes, come in, come in. Mind your head, lad, you’re a tall one. I’ll just tod off and get the kettle on and you can show me what you’ve brought us over tea…”
“Tea?” Dagomir whispered.
“And you’ll drink it like a man, pal, and thank her for the courtesy.”
He did just that, while the Captain laid out what they’d brought all across the table. Heaps of gauze and packing and rolls of bandage stacked like hay-bales. A set of surgical instruments in a clever case, forged for little hands. Splints and tourniquets and sutures. One of the Feanorean’s cunning little hand-lights. Stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, ophthalmoscope, fetoscope. A glass thermometer in a tube. Lab strips and specimen containers. Bottles enough to fill an entire corner of the table.
Tape. So much tape.
“This is a crafty thing,” said the little matron, sticking a piece to the back of her hand.
“Can never have too much of it,” agreed the Captain.
“Can I see your tongue? Stick it out like I’m your sister, good boy. Now leave it there and growl at me.”
He did not wish to do it but was wakened early one morning by the sensation that someone was putting a long hot poker into either eye. Halos all around the lantern-lights. He threw up for a while and Delwen nagged him half to death and finally he went, if only to get away from the noise.
At least it was Rangers who ran the hospital. Not a bunch of fussy arm-bleeding leeches. Get him in and get him out.
He couldn’t see very well, obviously, but he immediately knew the voice that said, “Sergeant.”
He stood and saluted in the general direction. “My lord.”
“Not here, Cúthon. You’ve earned the right to hang that one up.”
“Never, lord.”
“Getting worse, yeah?”
“A bit.”
“You’ve been using the drops?”
“Until they were gone.”
“How long ago was that?”
“…a while ago, my lord.”
“Alright. Let me have a look, and we’ll get you something for the headache. I’m so sorry, bud, this is a really a lousy draw. I’m going to keep looking into it. Wish there was more I could do to make them start to work again.”
“Something for the headache will suffice, Captain.”
“That I can manage.”
“So now that we’ve isolated the artery, we’re going to divide and ligate the—what’s it called, Belien.”
“The appendiceal… mesentery?”
“Yep, good, this sinewy bit—Nin, watch the light, pal, I need to see what I’m doing here—so what do I need next.”
“Umm… clamp?”
“Clamp. Clamp, Nineth, pay attention, and I’ll need suture after that, be getting it ready. The black kind, remember, it absorbs inside them.”
“How?”
“Conversation for another time, children. So we do a blunt separation right here at the base from the appendix and…”
He came too late, of course. Never there at the moment he was needed most, not here where men were killed and wounded out at their trades and labors instead of just down the skirmish line from him. They had already pulled bodies out of the wreckage, and were digging for more, the white dust from the cave-in a high and billowing cloud.
They were laid out on the quarry floor, the fierce sun trammeling down. At least two compound fractures, at a glance. One poor guy off to the side with his skull smashed in. They would have to triage, and fast. Get your gloves on, Dag, it’s time to go to work.
“We gotta have more of the tetracycline, they’re cropping up all over the place. Every day there are more with the rash, and the encephalitis is starting to present now, too, Bren, it’s getting out of hand.”
“You can give them antibiotics ‘til it runs out of their ears, but if we don’t get rid of the lice—”
“Well, we need to get to work on that too, then!”
“We will. Elrohir. Everything just takes more time.”
“I know. Bren, I’m sorry. I know. I don’t mean to snap…”
“We’ll get it figured out, okay? We’ll get on it.”
He was a filthy, skinny derelict someone had dragged in and dropped out by the barrels in front of the doors for them to find. Belien did, on her way home for the night; she burst back in hollering for help, there was a dead guy out on the doorstep…
He wasn’t dead. Not yet. The dogs had done a number on him. Elrohir thought he might be able to save the ear, but there would be a chunk gone from it forever. The skin over his eye was slack and sagging from where his scalp had been ripped open, ruining the tension all down the left side of his face.
They stripped him down and found it then, cauterized in deep with a hot knife across his chest: CHILD RAPER.
Nineth said go dump him in the ditch and let him die.
Elrohir ignored her and scrubbed up for what would be five or six hours’ worth of suturing. Already he had sent a couple of runners in a couple of different directions; he would know more when he emerged from the theatre.
Nineth said, “You’re going to waste that on him?”
Elrohir pushed the morphine slowly and flushed the line when he was finished. Only then did he say, “Accusations are cheap, Nin.”
“Look at him.”
“I have. Being dirty doesn’t make you a rapist.”
“But—”
“Why don’t you go get a few more blankets out of the warmer. We don’t know anything for certain yet, except that he’s hurt bad, and that we’re going to take care of that part.”
“Madam, you cannot empty the garder pots right out in front of your tent, your children are sick from playing in the mud the waste makes.”
“’Tis a boggle wot hexes ‘em with the flux, are ye a leech or ain’t ye?”
“The same with the water there in the pond, it’s not good to drink because all this runs into it. They won’t get better unless you start going in to draw from the well for your drinking water.”
“See here, medicament man, I sent for ye so ye could give me a faerie bag for these here young’uns to ward off the bogeys. D’ye got a charm or don’t ye? Ones wot got the misseltoe are the best for a boggle.”
The trick when a toddler got a foreign object stuck in their ear was to keep their attention fixed on something else while he had to dig for it. He cast around for a moment and then squeezed his wristwatch over his hand and bequeathed the child with it. Her mother looked at him like he’d handed her baby a butcher knife.
“My lord, she—”
“She won’t hurt it.” Just slobber on it. Not like that had never happened before. “Now you get that other hand wrapped up while she’s busy, this will hopefully only take one try…”