Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [83]
“Why are you doing this for me?” I whispered, my eyes filming over and threatening to spill sudden, warm tears.
“Hussars stick together,” he said, smiling. “That’s why.”
The rotmistr (who I was by then suspecting of being my guardian angel in a hussar uniform) led me to the other side of the station, to another set of tracks. There was no platform, and the only train there was merely a few carriages long, the rest of it composed out of open carts covered with sailcloth, housing the impatient, snorting horses covered with felt and blankets to keep them warm against the Siberian winter. Through the walls made of thick wooden slats, light and resinous, I could see the horses’ breath and the small mincing steps they took in their narrow prisons, I could hear the muffled strikes of their shod hooves, iron against frozen straw, brittle as glass.
“Poor beasts,” one of the cornets (I think it was Volzhenko, younger and sadder than his doppelganger Petrovsky) said, tracing my gaze. “They want to be out of those tiny stables on wheels so bad. They want to run and to feel the dry grass against their flanks, not this cursed cold . . . ” He noticed the curious stare of the other cornet and let his voice trail off, to my chagrin.
I, of course, wanted to hear more—I was always intrigued by how many of my compatriots had such poetic and earnest souls below their jaded exteriors, an almost embarrassing sincerity and blazing conviction one found in certain kinds of drunks.
The rotmistr slapped my shoulder to gain my attention and almost sent me tumbling down on my hands and knees; instead, I managed an awkward hop, stepped too heavily on my injured foot, gave a loud hiss between my teeth but recovered. We stood before one of the carriages of the hussars’ train, and the rotmistr helped me climb its wrought iron ladder-steps, covered with festoons of transparent ice.
Inside, the carriage did not have compartments but merely rows of wooden benches, sparsely populated by soldiers who smoked, played cards, talked loudly, dissected pickled herrings on greasy newspapers, and washed their foot wraps in buckets of murky water. It smelled of stale sweat and mold, and I feared I would not last a day in this place—I would probably shout at someone or hit them with a wet wrap in the face or choke them by shoving a deck of card down their throat. I laughed then, and the rotmistr gave me a concerned look. “You don’t look well, poruchik,” he said. “Let’s show you to the doctor right away.”
The doctor was found in the end of the carriage, where he drank and played cards with a few soldiers. He was a small, balding man with a sharp goatee who seemed genuinely sorry to leave the game in favor of taking a look at some stranger his rotmistr had dragged in.
I sat on an empty bench and the doctor leaned in, as the rotmistr and his cornets watched on. Of course, I refused a too-close examination, and reassured him that taking a look at my ankle would be sufficient. My ankle and leg were so swollen he had to cut open the upper portion of my boot in order to remove it. I peeked at my ankle and felt immediately nauseated—it was red and black and purple, certainly not the color flesh was supposed to be.
“It’s a bad sprain,” the doctor reassured me after he contented himself with what felt like many interminable hours of poking, prodding, and twisting of the tender flesh. “It’ll heal—just stay off it, keep some ice on it, keep your boot off and your leg elevated—you don’t want blood pooling in there. You do seem to have a fever, but I suspect that it is unrelated.”
The moment the word “fever” touched my tympanic membranes, the carriage around me tilted and swam, as if the doctor’s words allowed something I had kept away from my consciousness with a sheer act of will to coalesce and take shape, to fill my ears with sticky cotton so that the din of the carriage became subdued and remote as the tide of my own blood pounded at my ears like