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The River Camp, autumn, Third Age 2981
I am Vinyáro of the house of Vanimóre, he himself who was third servitor to the second seneschal of the fourth regent of the High King Ereinion Gil-galad. It has been my great privilege and the honor of my days to apprentice beneath the hand of Elrond Peredhel, the great physician, and to follow him and his household from the ruin of Imladris.
Mine is a clan of administrative-minded men but by the mercy of the One to me was bestowed the gift of the arts physic. In double blessing I came to the Valley at the pinnacle of its scientific advancements, when upon the springboard of his father’s genius the elder son had developed innovations both clever and wondrous, as splendid in their way as the arts of Fëanor, though they served the humbler purpose of restoring the body and not wrecking the world.
The younger son I saw but little, for he often ventured abroad with the Secondborn and was more rarely to be found within the Valley walls. When he was, he sequestered often with his twin, or was absent with his wife, and I knew him not so closely.
Still it was said among the guild’s healers that he was in many ways as skillful as his brother, and so when Master Elrond bade me attend the Lord Elrohir at the military hospital near the center of the refugee encampment, I went gladly, with a fresh book for notes, and all my personal diagnostic instruments, and a mind prepared to offer my advisements when necessary, for it is true I am older by yeni than the children of Elrond, and skillful or not I suspected his tendencies of attending to combat instead of study had left some holes in his scholarship.
Early the first morning I was late because a pack of Secondborn progeny jostled me in a dark street and my stethoscope came up missing. It was only by the good fortune of an attentive fisherwoman that I recovered it, and though it is a barbaric custom not practiced among the First of Eru’s children, I confess I was much gratified to glimpse the little savage be turned up and dusted like a rug for his low thievery.
So it was in the greyest dawn I came at last to that long tent and entered in and heard immediately a voice raised in sharp exclamation. Prepared forthwith for an emergent situation I dashed into the compound and followed the shouts and discovered in an alcove a veritable horde of adolescent Númenóreans clustered around an examination table. Upon it lay one of their fellows, unclad but for boots and breeches and in obvious disgrace, his arm cast over his eyes, while the second-eldest offshoot of Eärendil himself bent low to inspect a great steel wire strung through the boy’s grossly infected mammary papilla.
There seemed to be great merriment among the non-infirm of his fellows. One of them was saying to the Lord Elrohir with great familiarity, “Y’see, m’lord, the bet was this: Medlinion was mouthing off about getting Captain Súlchanar’s daughter to walk down the river with him and we bet him she’d say no and he bit down hard and wouldn’t back off so I says to him hey, if she does I’ll do your privy-work for a month, but if she doesn’t you have to do your nipple like that Dwarvish smith who forges the broadheads for the Rangers.”
The Master’s son said, nudging the crass thing with a gloved fingertip to see the purulence pillow up beneath, “Well, Med, no one’ll ever say you’re one to go back on your bets.”
A third participant spoke. “Aw, we bout had to hold him down to do it, you should have heard him holler.”
“Shut up, Súldor,” the first speaker commanded, “you’d have cried like a girl if it was you who had to do it. Anyroad, m’lord, guess we shoulda made him grease it up with something, cause this morning he came to practice all green in the gills, and that thing puffed up like a... well, anyhow. Thought we oughta bring him in for you to take a look at.”
“Pretty good mates you have here,” said Elrohir Elrondion in a tone of supreme dryness.
“The lot of them can go get drowned together,” the patient muttered.
The child of the greatest Elvish healer in the history of the world laughed silently with his eyes shut for a moment. When he had composed himself he said, “Alright you lot, clear out. Get back to your business, leave this poor kid to his misery. Tell the Sergeant he’ll be back in once I’ve cleared him for drills.”
The spectators filed out and left me alone now with the Lord Elrohir and a red-faced and bepierced juvenile Dúnadan.
The Master’s son glanced up. “Vinyáro,” he greeted me, to my surprise recalling my name unprompted. “You’re just in time for an extraction—the washstand is out there in the hall.”
I did as he bade me and when I returned, the Lord Elrohir had clipped the wire loop open. I drew gloves from the dispenser on the corner stand and said, “If you would direct me to the supplyroom, I will procure anesthetic…”
“Take a deep breath, buddy,” said the Master’s son, ignoring me, and to my horror he got a good hold on the free end of the wire and removed the thing in one wet tug. Bloody materials of abscess swelled up in its wake but he had clamped down with a dexterous gauze almost simultaneously. The boy flinched on the table but made no sound, the Lord Elrohir patting him kindly on the collarbone as he applied the staunching pressure.
In a moment the youngster’s eyes opened. He said up past his covering hand, “I’m sorry to trouble you first thing in the morning, Doc.”
Doc! As if he were a common sawbones!
The Lord Elrohir said with drollness, “Nothing to worry about, Med, you’ve only set me back on my whole day. Since you’re going to be here for a minute, maybe we need to have a talk about sticking dirty things into yourself.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, m’lord.”
“I’ve been more convinced in my life.”
“It won’t happen again, Captain.”
“Good. Roll this way, we’ll get this thing cleaned out.”
I said, “My lord, allow me, I am more suited for such a menial task…”
“That’s alright, Vinyáro, I haven’t had a chance to talk to little Med here for a while. Why the Captain’s daughter, she’s gotta be five years older than you.”
“She says no to everyone,” said the youngster.
“That probably wasn’t the wisest bet to make, then, pal.”
They spoke for a while as the Lord Elrohir flushed out the infected thing, about training at arms, and something I did not have the context to understand about the youngster’s father. At a pace he looked up again at myself and requested I go three turns through the compound to the storage compartment and retrieve antibiotics. There was no need for a tetanus, he said; Ranger cadets received them by rote upon admission.
He did not specify dosage nor means of administration and I suspected this was a test of my experience. I would not err in this the simplest of tasks. I had studied enough to know the Secondborn’s greater susceptibility to sepsis and judged an intravenous dose to be the wisest course of action; the Lord Elrohir had not yet established venous access but I deduced it was from his field medic’s inability to manage more than one task at a time.
When I returned, the boy’s breast was dressed with a haphazard slathering of tape and he had begun to button himself back into his shirt. I arranged my chosen materials on the table with an austere look at the Master’s son, who was clearly losing control over the situation and allowing his patient to dismiss himself before the task was finished. I took a swift, final inventory of the materials laid out in their neat row upon the stand: intravenous catheter, tourniquet, alcohol swab, adhesive patch, flushing saline, gauze and plaster, and 500 milligrams of penicillin drawn up and ready for gradual administration through the line.
The Lord Elrohir finished scribbling (and I use the term intending no occlusion; his writing looked like a barbarian-scrawl) in his chartbook as the boy stood reading over his shoulder and arranging his uniform. Master Elrond’s offspring turned and beheld what I had brought. I straightened a little; my orderly habits and thoroughness were usually sure to earn me a quick word of praise.
“Hey, Vinyo, that’s alright, we usually just do a round of tablets for the boys so they can take it with them and not have to sit around here for another hour.”
Vinyo. Vinyo!
I straightened and said crisply, “Of course, my lord. My apologies. I will return with the proper medication.”
I began to reassemble the constituents but Elrohir Halfelven said, “Nah, that’s fine, this’ll work, I’ll save you the steps,” and swiped alcohol swab and syringe off the table and stuck the latter in his teeth. His teeth! Then without so much as an explanatory word, as if he were doctoring a—a horse! he turned the patient away and tugged down the very top of his breeches and applied the disinfecting wipe and bit off the needle-cap (teeth!) and administered the full dose straight into the boy’s buttock, which must have burned tremendously.
When he finished he recapped the hypodermic (mind your fingers, you fool, I thought, watching him) and tossed the apparatus into the sharps bin and stuffed a wadded scrap of paper into the youngster’s shirt pocket. “This will excuse you from training until tomorrow on my order. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not to make use of it.”
“Sir.”
“Let’s not have a repeat performance of this, yeah?”
“Yessir.”
“You are dismissed, cadet.”
The lad made his obeisance and his departure subsequently.
“Well, Vinyo, let’s go see what else they’ve dragged in for us this morning.”