By the time Faren and I had arrived at the medical ward, Ales was asleep. He’d had a small cut on the side of his back with a handful of stitches beside round leech scars. I’d stayed with him long enough for Faren to get something from the mess, and then he stayed the night with him while everyone else went off to bed.

Geraln’s whisper-scream cut through my sleep. “CALEB!”

I woke drenched in sweat with purple morning hues flooding through the windows. I rubbed my eyes and looked. Geraln lay on his back, and a green mass was on his chest. Davod got up and came closer to look, as did Rock. It was that creature that sniffed us all at the gate as we came in the day before.

Geraln lifted his head up and crossed his eyes to look. It had curled up with its tail and long neck wrapped around its body, and its legs and forelimbs tucked under. He lifted the whole thing up and down with each breath while his fingers trembled. He cried nervously, “why is it here!”

Rock tilted his whole body to the side and knelt down to get a closer look. “She sleep.”

Geraln’s voice quivered, “get it off me!”

The creature lifted its tiny head and stretched its mouth open, showing rows of needles on both sides top and bottom before closing, then turned its head to face him and chirped.

Davod reached out his hands to scoop it up. It looked at his hands, then coiled its neck and snapped, clamping its tiny jaws close to his fingers. Davod jerked his hands away fast, and the creature hissed at him. Then it turned its tiny face to Geraln once more and chirped.

“What do you want?” he pleaded.

I shrugged. “Have you tried sitting up?”

Geraln turned to face me; his eyes were wide. With that, he took in a deep breath and let it out, then slowly propped up on his elbows while the thing stared at him. He kept raising up, and soon the creature chirped again, then jumped off him and stepped onto the floor. As he sat up completely, it continued to stand before him, snaking its neck upwards to look at him, and chirped.

Someone laughed elsewhere in the barracks. It was another man, Herali, who’d watched this ordeal with a smile on his face. “Yeah,” he said, “you’ll get used to those things.”

“Get used to it!” Geraln huffed. “Have you woken up with one of them sleeping on you?”

The man cocked his head and grinned. “Nope.” He then went about stretching his arms and torso, rolling his neck around in all directions. On one shoulder he had a tattoo of Cougar with his mouth open wide showing his fangs.

I asked, “how long have you been here?”

“About a month. Let me tell you this, though…” he stood and picked up a long shirt of toughened leather that was laid out beside another of ring mail. “Whatever you do, don’t pull a weapon on them.”

I looked at Davod, who’d raised an eyebrow in my direction. Rock lifted his chin. “What he say?”

As I translated, another man came around, cinching his belt as he spoke. “Vita’o are honest creatures. If they like you, they’ll let you know. And if they don’t like you… they’ll let you know. They got rules, though; one of them is if you pull a weapon on them, they’re allowed to mess you up. And believe me, I seen ‘em get pissed off, too. They’ll growl, hiss, scream, bare their teeth and snap at you. It’s scary as shit, and you can’t do nothing—just stand there and take it.”

Davod nodded. “Oh, so just like women.”

He earned quite a few laughs for that.

Another man chimed in, chuckling. “You should see what the females do.”

Kelint asked, “what do you mean?”

The man grinned. “Ahmi says to get the male's attention she has to show off how lethal she is. It's like saying ‘look what I'll do to anybody tries to mess with our kids.’ When that happens, just back away, find yourself a nice, comfortable distance.”

The man from the Cougar clan headed out along with several others who’d shared our quarters while one man lingered a bit. He was Herali, but his skin was perhaps a shade lighter than ours and his hair had a hint of wave as it fell down to his chest. On his shoulder was a tattoo of Opossum. Davod nodded to him as he got dressed. “How long have you been here?”

“A couple months.”

Kelint asked, “you see any action?”

“Yeah, man,” he shook his head. “It’s scary out there. They train you, but honestly, training in the yard with spears and shit, that’s a waste of time. Out there in the jungle, that’s not what you’ll be facing. You could be walking on the road, and arrows come out at you from nowhere. You just run. Turn around, half the men you went out with don’t come back and all you can do is move on like it’s nothing. There were four of us called up from my village, six more from the village over. I'm the only one left.”

“Why is that happening?” I asked.

Geraln added, “why are they only pulling men from Heralia? Where’s the Imperial army?”

The man huffed. “Probably in Kulun fighting the important war. We make due with what we’ve got. Couple things, those native bows don’t get better than fifty yards, so we got ‘em that. Our scout led us to an outcropping, clean view some two-hundred yards out over a war party trying to ambush us, we took out half those assholes before the rest went crying home to mama. We can also use those towers, too; you find a small party you can chase them right into the field and them guys up on the ramparts’ll pick ‘em off. Two tried to escape across the river, damned gators took ‘em; that’s not a fun way to go. Thing is, them eupin bows we got, that’s a hell of a trophy. So if they catch you unaware, who you think they’re going to take out first?”

I glanced at my bow, at the etching of Bear and Cougar fighting over the golden acorns while Falcon cried, and wondered if some enemy took it as a trophy, would they know the story behind it? Would they wonder? Geraln’s bow was etched with a field of flowers in the forest and the mountains and decorated with ancient Herali runes from generations before the conquest that spelled out the last line of Falcon’s Epic, for every flower a place to bloom. If they took that as a trophy, who would read it? Geraln sat cross-legged with the creature in his lap looking up into his face while he looked down, and I felt a stabbing pain in my heart that something could happen to him.

Breakfast that morning was a slimy, grainy mass of paper-flavored goop with bits of shredded coconut mixed in. That was served with clusters of long, yellow fruit they called banana and some off-yellow tea that smelt strong of citrus but had a strange flavor I couldn’t place. After that, Davod, myself, Rock, Northstar, and Kelint along with Geraln and that baby vita’o lizard prancing around beside his feet all left for the medical ward to check in on Ales.

The medical ward was a long building beside the mess hall and the open administration building we’d given our names in, made of the same yellow and gray stones mortared together with smooth ceramic tiles overhanging the roof. Inside was a room off to the left, and to the right it was open, with three rows of cots. Light came through several large, open windows that hosted spider webs each.

The first man I noticed lay down flat in the cot, naked but for a white sheet covering his privates. His body was covered in black from his toes to his face and all inbetween, and his skin hung like a sheet over his bones, with his facial bones clearly visible though he was likely our age. He lay still with his mouth and eyes open, unmoving but for a faint lifting and falling of his chest. A fly landed on his eye and walked around, and the man didn’t so much as blink until the man lying in the next cot waved it away.

Northstar glanced at me; his eyes bulged, and his mouth was drawn with sorrow.

The next man had a bandaged stump where his right arm used to be. Another bandage wrapped around his head and came down to cover his right eye, with crusted blood all around his cheek and more bandages wrapped around his torso. Long, straight, dark green hair fell over the padding he’d been propped on, and he stared at me through the eye he still had.

Other men lay about on several cots. One had a bandage wrapped around his arm, another about his knee. Still another had a bandage wrapped all around his torso with a large pad at the side of his chest. One man didn’t move at all, but rather had flies buzzing around his gaping mouth and eyes along with more flies around an open gash in his belly. Another cot was surrounded by a wooden frame that had a white curtain hanging down on all sides.

Ales was on the fifth cot on the right between two large windows, propped up and awake. Faren sat next to him. Ales turned to look at us, but other than that he didn’t seem to react.

We came up, and I spoke first. “Good to see you alive, man.”

Ales grinned lightly, then returned to his somber expression.

“It’s just… we came all this way here, and you know, with the giant alligators, vita’o, all the ways they told us the jungle was going to eat us for you to get shanked in the market? You could have just gone to Kyoen for that.”

I'd waited all morning to tell that joke, and no one laughed. Instead they all stared at me. Faren furrowed his brow while Ales tilted his head in confusion, and Kelint shook his head. Rock leaned in to ask him for a translation, but Kelint sucked his teeth and waved him off.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Geraln sat on the bed opposite Faren while the rest of us stood. No sooner than he did, that lizard started chirping and jumping up, looking longingly into his chubby face. Geraln hesitated and gazed at the creature with a blank expression. Finally he let out an exasperated sigh. “You want to come up here?”

She chirped.

He reached down, carefully picked her up, and set her down on the bed. She bounded over to Ales and sniffed around him, sniffed his wound and let out a chirp, then came back over to Geraln to sit in his lap.

Ales said nothing but half smiled in confusion while watching the creature. Davod chuckled lightly to himself and explained, “would you believe, they’ve already slept together!”

“Be quiet!” Geraln snapped.

Everyone else laughed a little, but Ales squinted his eyes and turned to look up at him without saying a word. Then he shook his head vigorously and brought his fingers up to his eyes. “I’m freezing.” The air was hot and muggy. “Anybody want to ask that nurse if they got some more blankets or something?”

Faren answered him. “She’s a doctor, and I asked five minutes ago. She said no.”

Ales closed his eyes and leaned his head back.

“Let me see.” I put my hand on Faren’s shoulder to usher him out of the way and leaned down to get a closer look. The cut was small, but the entry was swollen, and purple bruises beneath ran deep. I set my fingers around his neck, on his chest and forehead, and he felt hot. Very hot.

“Look at me,” I told him.

Ales didn’t. Rather, he closed his eyes and rested his head back down against the padding, and took in a deep breath, wincing as he let it out slowly.

“Ales, look at me,” I insisted.

Finally he wrenched his head forward and opened his eyes. He didn’t settle on me, though, but rather gazed off in the general direction of my face.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yeah, man, it fucking hurts.”

I tapped the skin around the wound where the swelling was a lot worse than I’d have liked. “Where? Here?”

“My fucking fingers and toes, man. Everywhere it hurts.” With that, he closed his eyes and rested his head back down once more.

Shit. I stood and stepped away, unwilling to accept what my mind was telling me—he would be dead by nightfall, and there was nothing anyone could do for him. Davod followed me and leaned in close to whisper. “Caleb? What is it?”

Before I could say anything, two women approached us from a doorway at the end of the hall.

Both were natives; they had dark-green skin, white hair, and yellow eyes. The woman on the left was rather short and wore a hard expression on her face. She'd dressed in a blue silk loincloth around a belt with several pouches and pockets, a blue silk band wrapped around each arm embroidered with a yellow, white, and red emblem, and a leather harness that criss-crossed between her bare breasts and held a sword and miniature bow on her back. In her hand she carried a mass of different fabrics. As she came up, she handed out the pouches to those who’d been there.

Kelint spoke up, still leering at her breasts. “You found our money!”

The smaller woman nodded. She spoke Herali with confidence but a thick accent. “Most of it. I have tha boy that stab you. He expect consequences. Tha others also.”

Northstar then looked at his relatively empty sack and spoke something to Kelint, who translated. “What about that girl with the card game?”

The woman’s eyes went wide. “I telled you! You puted your money at tha table!”

With that, the short woman turned and walked off. Kelint’s eyes studied her muscular, dark-green legs on her way out. I… may have stolen a glance myself.

The other woman was average height and had a rather flat face with soft, gentle yellow eyes. She wore her white hair in a series of cornrows that hung down over her shoulders. Barely covering her generous bosom was a beige apron with some old, bronze stains that refused to wash out and several pockets that held an assortment of instruments.

“Excuse me,” she spoke Herali with no accent I could discern. The men moved out of her way and she knelt down to examine Ales, poking around his wound. Her voice was high and girlish despite her middling years. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” he answered.

From a pocket she pulled out a crystal cylinder about the size of a fat finger and held one end up to the side of his neck. “Hold still.” I watched as the crystal changed color. First a dark, cloudy purple appeared, then blue, then green, which then faded into yellow, then continued to shift until it settled on a deep shade somewhere between orange and red.

“Can I get some more blankets, miss?”

“Nope. Watch my finger.”

“Ugh…” Ales sighed and set his head back down.

The woman tapped the side of his cheek and insisted, “watch my finger.”

He tried. He hoisted his head back up and opened his eyes, but as she moved her fingers around in front of his face, I could tell he wasn’t following. After a moment, she nodded quietly to herself and stood. Faren stood with her and stepped close to say something, but I couldn’t hear.

She replied, “today’s going to be tough. He should be fine, but there's a chance he won't make it. We'll know for sure by this afternoon. For now, he needs to rest.”

He said something else to her that I also couldn't hear. She shook her head and answered, “It’s difficult to predict; I’d say… maybe… three-to-one?”

With that, she stepped away and looked around. She’d made it halfway across the room when I walked up to her. I sought to keep my voice low. “Why did you tell him that?”

She looked up at me with a warm expression on her face.

“Why? Why are you giving him odds like that?”

She smiled wide and leaned in close. “Because I'm afraid of being too optimistic. I think his chances are good though…”

“Chances!?! He'll be dead within hours!” The other men glanced in our direction; they'd heard me. I tried to lower my voice some. “There’s nothing anyone can do. The foul has gotten into his blood; if he makes it to lunch, that'll be a miracle.”

“I gave him gebu'i; he should be fine…”

“Gebu'i!” I nearly shouted. The other men kept looking at us with grave concern. “What's that supposed to even do?”

She raised her eyebrows and looked up, directly into my eyes. “Are you Caleb?”

“What?” The question threw me off. “Uh… yeah. What's that got to do with…”

“Come. I have something for you.”

A quick glance over at the men, and Davod urged me on. So I followed. “What about Ales?”

She turned and smiled at me. “You said yourself there's nothing anyone can do. This way. My name is zʊɣi, by the way.”

She led me through an open doorway to a small room with a desk and a shelf filled with books and leather cases. A large window covered in multiple spider webs took up most of one wall, and the clattering of rain started suddenly outside. There on the desk sat a leather satchel with a brass buckle on one side. She picked that up and handed it to me. “They said you’re the field medic for your unit.”

I returned the satchel to the desk and pulled my face back. “Who said that?”

“Hmm.” She furrowed her eyebrows. Then, she opened up the satchel and reached in, pulled out a bone saw, an arrowhead clamp, a scalpel, and numerous other tools, and arrayed them on the table. Then, she reached down from behind the desk and found a small glass vial with a cork stopper. She opened it and held it up to her forearm, then tilted it as she dragged, allowing black ink to spill in a line along her dark green skin all the way to her wrist. Then she looked up at me with a serious expression. “I’m bleeding profusely.”

“Huh?” I looked at her, confused.

She blinked a few times and waited while the sound of rain crashing onto the roof continued. “I’m about to bleed out. I’m going to die.”

“Uh…” I tried to figure out what she was doing. “Is this a test or something?”

“Uhh,” her voice quivered and she held her other hand over her forehead, still reaching her wounded arm out towards me. “Mother in heaven! The light, I can see it!”

“Huh?”

She waved her head back and forth. “I'm feeling delirious. Oh, I've had a good life…”

“OK, fine,” I said, and looked over all the implements she’d laid out over the table. I needed a tourniquet, and found a mass of cloth strips beside a stack of metal sticks. I took up one and unrolled it.

“... no regrets. Except sleeping with that one guy; he was so fine. I can’t tell if I regret hitting it, or not hitting it again? Still struggling with that.”

That got me laughing, and I needed a moment to settle down.

“If you think that’s distracting, try doing this while getting shot at.”

Right. I shook it off and wrapped the cloth around her arm, just above the elbow, and fitted the rod inside the knot, twisting it around to tighten it. She winced.

“Sorry…”

“Don't apologize.”

Then I looked around for something to ‘clean’ the wound while she looked up at me expectantly. Outside, the rain had stopped.

“Um…” I said. “I’d… try to clean off the wound, see if I can get it to clot.”

She looked off. “Oh, forgive me Mother, for I have sinned. I ate way too much cake last night. And the night before… and the night before that… it’s not my fault. I don’t understand why they have to make it soooo good?”

“Fine,” I laughed, unable to get over her girlish voice. Then I took up a roll of gauze and set about dabbing up the wet ink, being careful not to pull at her skin.

At that, she turned her arm and looked at it, nodded, and undid the tourniquet. “Seriously, though, those maple-cream cakes you people have… I do wish we could get maple here. I will never get over that taste.”

That made me smile, but it didn't change anything. “Look,” I said. “I don’t know if I can do this. I’m not a real medic. I don’t have any real training…”

As she packed up everything back into the field kit, she handed me a small, folded piece of paper filled with some kind of powder and sealed with wax. “This is gebu’i. After you cut off circulation and clean up the area, make them eat it. It’s disgusting. If you have clean water you can mix it with, that will help it go down easier, but make sure they take all of it. Any time you think you’re dealing with a wound that might take the foul, give it to them. The sooner the better.”

Except it did nothing for Dune, and I had no reason to believe it would do anything for Ales. “I grew up in a church, alright? The friar’s wife was a doctor in the Great Plague; she brought home my best friend when she was an infant, actually. Her parents died, Sarina barely survived. Sorry, that's beside the point. Anyway, Mother Searnie helped anyone in the village who needed it, and she had me help out. That's all, really. I'm not qualified to be a field medic.”

“So… you’re a boy.”

That took me aback. “Uh… no, I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. I’m a grown man…”

“A man steps up to responsibility; a boy says he is not qualified. Which one are you?”

I looked at the satchel as if the answer was there.

zʊɣi smiled and rested her hand on my arm. “I don't need you to open anyone's brain up and do surgery; I can do the heavy stuff. What I need you to do is patch them up well enough to bring them back here. That's all. And if you can help me teach the others how to tie a tourniquet, that would be nice, too. Are you man enough for that?”