The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [81]
“Wait,” this one says, as I’m raising my hand for Head’s attention. “Just bandage it.”
A thigh wound, pouring blood. Thighs I’m supposed to treat, but surely he’ll just bleed to death. I look at the face, look again.
“Quality!” Lysimachus laughs and then grimaces. “I am the lucky man.”
I tie a tourniquet, tight as I can, and press a bandage to the wound with both hands, leaning all my weight onto it.
“Curse your mother,” he says.
Head looks over my shoulder, walks on.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“Retreat.”
I try loosening my grip and the blood wells up again. I bear down.
“Just to the river,” he says. “I need to get back. We need every man.”
“The prince?”
He grins, grimaces. I ease up and the bleeding’s less. I help him stand.
“I’ll give him a kiss for you,” he says.
The work continues. My mind categorizes automatically, ahead of my desire to categorize; I think faster than the willingness to think. Matter and form: the soul gives form to the matter of the flesh; I don’t think that’s merely a metaphor. It’s like wax, and the impression in it. Then, some bodies are natural, some are not; some natural bodies have life, some have not. There is, too, the matter of purpose; can one say the soul is the purpose of the body? I feel a woolliness there, a gap in the teeth of my logic. Pythias has such a comb, of tortoiseshell, which she tries to use despite a gap the width of two fingers where the teeth have broken off. She brought it with her from Hermias’s court, and won’t allow me to replace it for her. Set aside purpose for now. The attributes of life: mind, sensation, movement in space, and the movement implied by nutrition and decay. Sensation comes first; animals, for instance, can sense before they can move. I wipe my hands on a rag, which is already wet and black with wiping. Not all creatures have all these faculties; plants, for instance, have the nutritive faculty but no sensation; animals lack what in humans is called mind, and are incapable of rational thought.
“Hey.” The medic is shaking my arm. “You need to sit, yeah?”
“No.”
“Yeah, go on. It’s over. Don’t you hear?” Roaring from outside, the ocean pulling up close. “Head!”
I wonder who’s dead. Then hands are on me; I’m being sat. Head pinches my nose with two fingers, jerks my head back, pours wine down me. Something strong, not last night’s. I gag.
“You’re all right, old man.”
He lets go of my nose and I jerk away, spluttering. “What happened?”
The young medic puts his face up to mine, his own eyes wide as he looks at my pupils. He taps his temple. “You went away.”
“We won,” Head says.
I retch purple. Head tousles my head, grinning, and walks on, pouring a shot for every man in his tent.
“Home now, eh?” The medic taps his temple again.
I nod.
“Lie down, if you like.”
“Can we go out?”
“Soon. We’ve got a long day ahead still. Head will take us out to look for survivors. Each medics’ tent gets assigned a different section of the field; we have to wait and see which is ours.”
“All survivors, or just ours?”
The medic nods. “You’re learning. Bread?”
I take the chunk he offers. It’s smeared with blood off his hands, blood with substance in it, like Pythias’s menstrual gore. The taste is salt; I manage a bite or two. I watch Head bend his head to listen to an officer at the tent flap, then turn back toward us.
“Macedonians and Athenians. Everyone got that? Macedonians and Athenians. If you’re not sure, ask.”
“What about the others?” I ask the medic.
“They have a detail for that. Bring your kit in case you get one that can’t be moved.”
“East field,” Head repeats to every man as we file through the tent flap. “Horses down. Watch for the horses. East field.”
Outside, at first I can’t see. The sun hurts everything it touches. We walk into a world of men and horses, milling it seems like, the men stunned by the rent in the fabric they’ve just come through, the walk back from the killing field to the false world of tents and bedrolls and meals and living. They need to