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Denam looks up from his lap to find the ever-cheerful vartan standing before him, bandaged arms crossed over his chest. As haphazard an affair as always – the gauze is spotted and specked with stains, a few dried, though most are damp. “Canopus. What news?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. A cleric’s seen that Cressida – they’ve given her something to sleep. I’ll be glad of the quiet,” he says with a light laugh. “You might want something of the same, later. I had one set aside in your tent.”
“You ought to worry about yourself. That arm of yours will need stitching.”
“Pah! A scratch, nothing more.”
“If you say so.”
A silence falls. Denam returns his attention to wrapping his own wounds, though he cannot keep his hands from stopping and starting, a ceaseless shake to them, fingers fumbling the cloth. Why the tremors? He did only what he had to. He took no joy in it. Any other would have done the same. What other option was there? That sibyl needed help, and he had to at least try. He did what he could for her. She was comfortable, if nothing else. It was a kinder way to go. Better that than to be mauled by the many undead. Yes, a kinder way – it was the kinder thing to do. He did the kinder thing for all of them.
But they, he knows, did not see it so. They cried and cursed as they fell at his hands, calling for ones once loved, some known to him and some unknown to him, and no difference at all in the end, known or unknown, names upon necrotic tongues. No thoughts to them but those of the hour of their deaths. Gods, and he – he was there, too, one of those stirred from slumber, and he cried and cursed and called as they did, and he bore himself with all his might, a boy of brash bravado even in death, even when weak, and what could Denam do for him but what he did? He did not once raise his sword to him until that final strike. He weathered the worst of it and held until the last.
How light, when he fell, and how little, how lonesome.
“Oh, give us here, won’t you? You’ll have bled half to death by the time you finish if you keep up like that.” Denam is dragged from his thoughts by the sound of Canopus’s voice from behind, and turns on his stool to find him sinking to his knees, sitting back on his heels. He had almost forgotten him entirely, and now cocks his head to the side, curious. “Your arm. You’ve to staunch it yet, don’t you?”
“Huh? Ah…I have it. I’m almost finished.”
“Finished? Looks as fresh as it did in the field to me.”
Denam doesn’t answer.
“Come now, let me have a look.”
“Canopus, really, I’d rather–”
“–I’m not asking, I’m afraid,” he says, leaning forward to snatch the gauze from Denam’s unsuspecting hands before he has the chance to move away. “You need rest. You haven’t the time to bide brooding after a day like this. I’ll bind this and you’re to bed then.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Mirdyn.”
“If you’re not careful I’ll call him to see to you.”
Denam feels he should laugh, but can’t quite manage it; he hangs his head with a short exhale instead, something that might have been a scoff if it were strong enough to be anything more than a babe’s breath. He surrenders himself silently to the care of the Xenobian and watches his hands, one wrapped around his wrist, the other holding the cloth to the gash on his forearm – will it ever stop bleeding, he wonders? The cotton is quick to sag under the weight of the blood it soaks, and Canopus lets it fall to the floor without so much as a glance as he takes another piece from Denam and presses it again against the wound. There is an odd kind of comfort in the pressure, a feeling not so dissimilar to the weight of his armour, his second skin.
“Gods above…we’ll have to get you something a bit better than what you’ve been wearing,” Canopus mutters, as if hearing his thoughts. “A shoddy vambrace it was that would let you get a blow like that.”
“Is it bad?”
“You’d be alright if it wasn’t so close to your blasted elbow.”
“Oh.”
“You know what you need? Something with couters – like what the Bakram have.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Canopus offers no response; there is little to say, and this talk is insignificant – it only sits in the stale air to fill the space so that no other words might find their way in. Couters. He will have to have something crafted. What town, now? Closest is Almorica, though they could take to the seas and make for Port Asyton. Where was that armourer he liked? He cannot rightly remember. Canopus mutters something that he does not hear or heed. One in Rhime? Or farther than that – Balmamusa? He would keep from that grim place if he might, but then, isn’t anywhere a glad sight over this godless Golyat?
His sin is sinking into the soil somewhere not far from here. The earth will eat it but it will not cleanse him of anything. He has cursed the ground so that naught will grow. What might the land produce that could ever put right that which it has been robbed of, anyway? Seeds will not sprout in stained sands; the land will be barren. Denam does not have it in him to care. This pitiful place is no longer home – he wonders idly if it ever would have been again, even if not for what horror happened today. Could it have been? In another time. In another turning. Not in this one. There is no home to be had when hatred lays between the two of them, those whose home is in one another.
And his home is now in the ground; how soon until he might return to him?
His heart hiccups. No, he cannot think such things; the losses lose any hope of meaning anything if he does, and what are they without it? He will not call a death a death. He must find the purpose, the point of it all – it must play some part in something. He has to think that what he did was right. He knows that Vyce would not have wanted anyone else to do it. He called to him. He wanted to see him. He wanted him to be there. Denam tells himself this, again and again and again. Vyce did not want to go alone, and Denam did not let him.
“I did the right thing, didn’t I?”
“Hm?”
“Vyce, I mean,” Denam says, only realising that he has spoken when he hears the name aloud; he had not intended to, but it is too late now to shrug it off as a slip of the tongue. “I did the right thing?”
“Of course you did. What else could you have done for him?”
“Well, I – I could have seen to it that he had not hanged at all, couldn’t I? I was in Rhime when he passed through with the Lodissians. If I had gone to him then, I might have been able to make him see sense.”
“You and I saw him at Balmamusa. You know he was blind and deaf to all reason.”
“But perhaps not to me,” he mumbles. Shameless, to make such a comment – his cheeks flush at his own words, not one to be so forthright in personal matters such as this. “He may have heeded me.”
“With that hard head of his? Not bloody likely.”
“That…may be true enough.”
“You did as right by him as you might have done, Denam. There’s no other kindness you could offer a creature such as that.” Canopus breathes a soft sigh. “I dare say what you did makes right what was done to the lad in the first place.”
“Pardon?”
“At Heim – he would have been calling for you, wouldn’t he? That’s why he called for you today. You couldn’t help that hanging business with us having been at Phidoch, but you were with him this time.”
A lump tiptoes into his throat; how is he supposed to be respond to that?
“You know him better than I,” he continues, “but he’s a sensitive sod at the end of the day, you know? He may well have thought you’d forgotten about him then, what with the sort he is. He might rest easier now.”
“Do you think?”
“Well, he didn’t give a fig for any of the rest of us, that’s for sure. You’re the only one he remembered.” Canopus chuckles, taking a roll of clean cloth from Denam’s lap – he stemmed the bleeding, he sees now, the split skin squeezing only a trickle through in some places. How did he not notice? The vartan follows his gaze. “You’ll need sutures, but leave that for tomorrow until it’s settled somewhat. It’ll hold through the night like this as it is.”
Denam nods, not sure if he ought to say anything else.
“I thought you’d rather see to the stitching yourself anyway.”
“What? Why?”
“It was Vyce’s sword what landed the blow, wasn’t it? You might want to leave it in such a way as that – oh, gods, you know already, don’t you?” An unusual smile as he releases his wrist at long last. “I’ll leave that sort of talk with Mirdyn.”