Hospes for Hospital
Bendeit
In the realm of days remembered, this one would be a champion.
And this moment would stand as a highlight, no doubt. Even with his hands covering up his face, he was sure the onlookers could still see the red in his cheeks, so he pretended to smooth his moustache. Better not let them get the upper hand, even if they were in the right.
“Swordsworn Franc, leave the room for a moment. Everyone else under my command, too.”
Five voices sounded in unison. “Sir, yes, sir!”
When the young lad and the four others finally left, he slumped forward and allowed that nervous cough in his throat out. His voice wasn’t so loud and commanding as it was when he spoke again, now to the three left in the room.
“I must take the blame, then. If what you say is true… then it was a great misunderstanding, and on behalf of the garrison of Terstein, I deeply apologize, ah, Miss and Mister…”
“Rosemary,” said the lady, “and this is Lepius.”
The male tree-thing waved. Now that all his senses had re-joined him, Bendeit could detect the faintest mana of healing radiating from the tree-thing. So he was a healer. Maybe he knew Healer Pel and Klaztoska from the Infirmary, and it was more likely he did than didn’t, for would any elf not be friends with something that looked like a tree?
Well, a limp tree, at the moment.
His hair of leaves hung in strands across his face, and he looked halfway to death. Splotches of his bark had rotted away.
It must be mana dilation, he thought, all the mana he used up for the men I condemned to pain.
Hs head hung lower.
“I cannot thank you enough for healing my men too. We came here to kill you and instead you have given us kindness. I am sorry.”
Rosemary flapped a hand, “Oh, sprouts, don’t worry so. It was just a huge misunderstanding. We’re glad no one was seriously hurt.”
“The worst of them I’ve treated,” said Lepius, without missing a beat, “They’re in the recovery room. I’ll take you over there.”
Just for these two, he kept his usual grumbling silent and allowed, graciously allowed, for Lepius to lower a shoulder so he could grip it when standing up. Thank the Deity his men weren’t here to see this.
It was at that moment that his eyes landed on the final person.
A bovine.
She was wide-eyed and twitching. Like all other bovines, her knees trembled when he brought down his mana upon her with his stare, the stare all the older recruits warned the firsties about during lunches.
“Oh, you kids thought he wouldn’t see that?” they would whisper, amused, “that old goat sees everything. Everything.”
“Ms. Bovine. You look like you have something to say to me.”
“H-hello. G-good to, uh, meet you, Sergeant Bendeit, sir.”
Bendeit had an inkling that she wasn’t supposed to end it there. So did Rosemary, who trod on a hoof with her foot.
“Ah! Y-yes. I’m sorry! I was the one who, um, t-threw that apple. You fell down because of it. I’m very sorry.”
Well, he almost laughed, forget about demotion. I’m getting retired.
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Lepius
It was Lepius’ first time monitoring the recovery of so many people at once.
The fighting had been too widespread for any effective interference, but it was more or less a brawl with dulled swords and pots, so Rosemary had simply waited for their swings to slow down. Most of them exhausted themselves within minutes. And all she had to do was pluck the weapons out from hands, and seperate the injured.
Then he had taken over.
When he hurried to the first patient, a soldier with a knife sticking out of his arm, his mana roared with him and flowed into the wound. It vanished, and the knife slipped out. He grinned at the soldier gaping at his unblemished skin, and ran to the next one.
Sprouts, I’ve missed this. Come on, next, next, next -
But then, something tugged at him. It was a memory. When was the last time this many people were injured?
The Sanctum.
It returned, all the bodies and burns, and his run slowed to a halt. He was there again, in the row of bodies, and the priestess was shaking him by his shoulders. Her voice was as sharp as it had been on that day.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Why aren’t you healing the ones with their organs hanging out? Why have you wasted your mana on those with burns?”
“I…I..”
A groan to his left pulled him back to reality.
But he remained standing still, just to think. To remember. There were gaps here and there, times when he had focused on the prettiest priestesses instead of the lecturer, but the pieces were enough. A healer’s intuition took him to the rest. Rosemary, who sorting away the weapons, cocked an eyebrow at him.
He ran back to the Hospes in search of Karra and Bendeit.
When he reappeared, he gathered those who could still stand and function. They ended up in front of the Hospes, split into two groups that were glaring at each other. Bovines and soldiers.
There was a large gap in between them.
He gave Rosemary a look, and she clambered up a makeshift dais. They had blundered through the plan minutes ago, but hopefully this would work, at least until they got all the injured treated. She stomped her foot.
Below the Hospes, the ground trembled. Everyone turned to attention.
Rosemary began to speak.
“Listen up, people! I’m here to tell you a story! So, this morning, I-”
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“-and that takes us to now. Sergeant Bendeit, I give the dais to you.”
When she called his name, Bendeit stepped out from behind them. He stood tallest among them, and despite all that had happened, his uniform was still pristine. Not a single wrinkle.
“Soldiers, stand down. What this lady says is true. The assault was a huge misunderstanding, and I as your commanding officer, will take responsibility for it. Stand down.”
When Rosemary turned to Karra, the bovine blushed and stepped out as well. She did trip over her hooves once or twice, but she managed to find her spot next to Rosemary and Bendeit, and stutter something out.
“U-uh, hi, everyone! I’m Karra… and, uh, I-uh, was told to tell the clansfolk that everything is all right! Um, that’s it.”
Human soldiers scratched their heads. Bovines shuffled and whispered to each other.
She could have done better, honestly.
But Rosemary was already in motion, for those who weren’t convinced.
She bounded forwards with a branch of oak, grinning, and bopped almost every head as she chanted the words: “Are you going to fight? Are you going to fight?” When someone did try to speak back, she would smack them again and again with the branch until they kept their mouth shut.
This… isn’t part of the plan.
He tried to tell that to Bendeit, who looked impressed.
But by the end of her assault, the two halves stood a little closer. They still stared at each other and respected that invisible border between them, but their hands weren’t leaping to their weapons, at the very least.
Lepius cleared his throat, and focused his mana. It steadied his voice and projected it across those assembled.
“We’re going to do triaging. This means we will identify the injuries on every wounded person, and categorize them. I have set three categories: mild, medium, emergency. Use your judgement. Emergency is something fatal that needs to be treated immediately. Medium is something that may get worse left untreated, but isn’t deathly urgent. Mild will be things like bruises and cuts. You will not pick and choose your wounded and have a bias. I want to see all of you working together.”
Lepius gave Rosemary a prod with his mana, and she smirked.
This was part of the plan.
She closed her eyes, and the warmth within her built up to glowing. Her arm became a beam of light, and when she lowered it, the largest branch of the Hospes lowered down too, and gave them an eyeful of solid, unbreaking wood. It cast a shadow over the entire crowd.
“What’s happening, small fry?” it seemed to say.
Everyone was nodding now, and a few started shaking hands across the border.
“Good! Now, you will be the Hospes’ temporary nurses. Now quick, go. Some might be on the brink of death.”
They scattered.
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There were only four ‘emergencies’.
What a blessing from the Eldertrees.
Each of those four he treated first, healing them to just the point where the residual mana could stave off death. Touches of his magic delayed the deterioration of the injuries designated ‘medium’, and his nurses gave a branch of thyme to those ‘mild’ and told them to wait.
Now, he needed a place for all of them to stay.
Above the ground floor, he had cleared away all the furniture. Then, Rosemary, eyes glowing, had demanded from the Grove Hospes a proper welcome for the groaning and bleeding.
And the grove acquiesced.
Lepius renamed what was once the main hall on the second floor to… the ‘recovery room’. It had been stretched wide and long to fit the near thousand souls, and due to the expansion, the Hospes looked less like a normal tree and more of… a pregnant dryad? Or a tree with a fat bottom trunk that then curved into to a normal one.
It didn’t really matter what it looked like from the outside.
Inside, spaced from each other were wooden cots padded with grass, equipped with a pillow and blanket of stuffed leaves. They came in every size, from calf to human to fully-grown bovine.
Those last ones took the heaviest toll on Rosemary.
Yet if she had seen the sight before him, he knew she would’ve built a thousand more. He saw calves drooling in bed, humans testing spoonfuls of the carrot broth she had brewed, and adult bovines sinking into their blankets. The calves had already chewed through theirs. Rosemary had placed sunstones at intervals above the beds, and they gave off a warm glow, like a miniature sun for the bovines to bathe in. And the smell… Eldertrees, the thyme. He could have drowned in it.
It would’ve made the High Priestess nod in approval.
But it wasn’t all smiles.
There were still those lingering stares between the two groups, even after Bendeit and Karra had spoken on the dais. Neither were willing to communicate, not without a Rosemary-powered branch. And she couldn’t be everywhere at once, so they huffed and shook their heads, and turned their frustration upon their nurses – they would pile on request after request, even the silly ones.
A popular one from the bovines was to make family-sized beds.
That was never happening. One of the first teachings in the Sanctum was to never put the injured next to the healthy. There was more than one teaching as well, but he hadn’t even come close to finishing his eight years at the Sanctum yet. Maybe there were bovine-immune diseases the humans weren’t resistant to. Maybe humans were allergic to their fur. There was a thousand things that could go wrong that were just waiting for his ineptitude, but he tried not to stress about it too much.
His thoughts accompanied him all the way to the bed of a mother bovine.
Ah, it was this one.
She had kept arguing, even after his best smile, to get a family-bed with her two calves. In the end, she did secede to a normal one wedged between her two calves, both with small bruises on their arms and legs. The mother, however, was a different story. Lepius flipped through the paper pinned on the side of the bed: “Bruises on arms and legs, fractured kneecap, mild.” Fractured kneecap?
How was he supposed to treat this?
His hand pressed upon the knee. Just a small amount of mana. There. A structure of mammalian bone, cracks all propagating from a point, and he winced. It was a big one. Yet somehow the bones were regrowing - tiny filaments stretching their hands and reuniting, and it would take some time, but without sudden movements the bone would heal itself.
That was a thing he learnt today. Nature was smart, and sometimes intruding in made things worse.
“Your bruises should be fine in a matter of days. The little ones, well, we all know how fast children can heal. And for your bone… I would recommend a cast, to tighten the bone around the fracture, and no sudden movements with that leg. Perhaps crutches for the time being. It will heal.”
He was aware of his broad smile. Below, the Voice bubbled, but it dared not to speak. Not yet.
After all, everyone was alive.