Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

The scene was repeated as group after group rode up, until Casus’s yurt was visible only as a shadow through a yellow dust cloud.

I whistled up Rosy, swung into the saddle, and patted her neck. “Ever crash a party before, babe?”

FORTY-FIVE

CASUNI PISTOLS CAN’T HIT A BLIMP outside sixty yards. So, although I was staring down four hundred drawn pistol barrels as I rode toward Casus’s encampment, Rosy and I got within shouting distance without Casus’s guests wasting a first shot.

I popped my visor and yelled, “Casus! It’s Jason!”

He squinted through the dust. “Who else would it be in that armor?” He waved the others to lower their pistols.

When I dismounted, Casus bearhugged me so hard that my armor’s surface stress display winked amber. Then he held me by my shoulders at arm’s length. Tears ran down his cheeks and into his beard. “How did you know?”

“Huh?”

“Yulen spoke of you.”

I nodded. “Yulen. Sergeant Yulen? He did?”

“He said you were the cleverest idiot he ever met.”

“Oh.”

“That’s quite a compliment from a Sergeant.”

“True.”

“Yulen was never so complimentary of my own sons. He taught them all, you know.”

“I didn’t know.” Then I remembered the young cavalryman at the Fair, that Yulen had taken under his wing. Black cloaks. Tears. “Sergeant Yulen is dead?”

Casun stared at the bare ground at his feet. “Soon. He’s receiving the balms.”

“How?”

“That battle at the Fair. A bullet from the black worms.”

It had been ten days, and they didn’t call it first aid for nothing. But maybe. I felt for the Aid Kit in my thigh pocket. Over the last century, U.S. Adviser-team medics had made more friends with Plexytose and Penicillin than the State Department had made with cummerbunds and canapés. “Can I see him?”

“Of course.” Casus hung an arm around my neck, and walked me toward his yurt.

A Casuni woman as gnarled as driftwood held open the big yurt’s entry flap, and Casus dragged me inside.

Through smoky haze drifting off the central fire pit, I recognized Yulen’s tangled gray hair. He lay on his back atop a pile of hides two feet tall. His belly was bare, but robes covered his chest and legs. His eyes were closed, and his breathing shallow.

An old woman in bulky Casuni robes sat cross-legged beside Yulen, rubbing a clove of something across his forehead and humming.

A second woman spooned liquid from a pot on the fire, opened his lips with thin fingers, and drizzled the liquid into his mouth.

A third woman knelt alongside Yulen’s pale, bare belly.

I stepped close to the old soldier, and asked Casus, “May I?”

Casus waved the three crones back, and their eyes burned at me.

I knelt, set my helmet on the hide-covered floor beside Yulen, and whispered, “How you doing, Sarge?”

Yulen’s eyelids fluttered, he stared past me, and his lips quivered. Then his eyes closed, and he let out a thin moan.

I tugged off my gauntlet, and laid my fingertips on his forehead. Hot. I said, “Let’s have a look.”

I shifted my weight, bent over Yulen’s middle, and grimaced. An entry wound as wide as a golf ball had torn Yulen’s belly open, three inches left of his navel.

Slug mag rifle rounds are bigger than a man’s thumb, and they hit hard. An unarmored body shot usually made a corpse, not a casualty, out of a normal-sized GI. Casuni were big and tough, and that was probably why even a Casuni as old as Yulen was still hanging on.

I felt for my aid pack, my hands trembling. There might be a chance.

I sniffed in the direction of the pot the woman had spooned liquid from. It was the peppery janga broth Casus’s man had brewed at his impromptu first-aid station, days ago, back at the escarpment. Then I sniffed Yulen’s wound, and the odor of janga overpowered even the rot of infection.

My shoulders sagged, and I stopped fumbling with my Aid Pack.

A primitive triage for intestinal perforation was to feed the patient an odoriferous liquid. If the intestine was perforated, the smell leaked out the wound.

Casus’s balm squad had been testing Yulen, and they had found the worst. A GI could save a buddy who took a clean shot through the shoulder or thigh, if the bleeding could be stopped.

But this Slug round had torn open Yulen’s intestine. His gut had been flooded with excrement for probably ten days now, and had incubated enough infection to kill ten elephants.

In the history of warfare, gut shots probably killed more GIs than any other single battlefield wound. Ord and I had tamperproofs stuffed with the latest and greatest battlefield meds. If we had known at the time… But all the antibiotics in New Bethesda wouldn’t save Yulen now.

I remembered Yulen, threatening to cut out our lazy tongues one minute, then sneaking us bread the next, and I blinked back tears. I kissed the old man’s burning forehead, then stood, and wiped my eyes.

The woman with the clove knelt down again, resumed rubbing Yulen’s forehead, and said to me, “This will help your Sergeant’s fever.”

“My Sergeant?” I nodded. “Yeah, he is.”

Sergeant Yulen died just before noon.

Casuni funerals, like those of most cultures, are as much a product of environment as of theology. At spring thaw, the frozen tundra of Bren’s High Plains would vomit up corpses buried during her long, bitter winter, if the ground could be dug at all. And during that winter, BTUs are too valuable to waste.

Therefore, at sunset, Yulen ascended, presumably to heaven, in the form of a roil of oily black cremation smoke.

Kindling is as precious as warmth on the High Plains, which is why the mourners who had ridden from all across Casus’s domain brought a tribute of twigs and branches to build Yulen’s funeral pyre.

The mourners formed a circle around the roaring pyre, swaying to the slow beat of one hide drum. I stood among them, downwind, fighting back nausea at the smell of burning flesh.

Casus stood on the opposite side of the pyre. He motioned me to circle around and join him.

When I stood alongside him, he whispered behind his hand, “Stay here. The women like downwind because it’s warmer, and they don’t drink. But the mead tastes better upwind.”

The women left the circle, and returned with mead-filled horn flagons, which they distributed one to each man.

The drum stopped, and the only sound was the wind beating across the prairie, and the crack of burning branches.

Casus raised his cup. “Farewell, brave Yulen.”

All the men raised their cups, and I followed along. Then they spoke a single toast, with one voice, and drained their cups.

I figured, given observed Casuni propensities, that the funeral’s next phase would be for everybody to get hammered like Irish at a wake.

But on the High Plains the nights are too cold for long speeches or parties, mead is hard to come by, and the dehydration caused by alcohol is unwelcome in the cold. So everybody just stood around until the fire stopped putting out heat, and the wind picked up, then they scurried for their yurts.

Casus insisted I spend the night at his place, covered in robes, on a hide pile so thick it would shield a princess from a pea, so the two of us could visit about matters of mutual interest. I figured the topic would be smuggled guns. But across the chamber, he was snoring like an unsuppressed GATr before I could get a word out.

I lay on my side, stared into the fire, and shook my head.

Yulen’s funeral left me empty, guilty, and depressed.

Empty for the loss of a good man. Yulen had suffered, though an old soldier like him probably preferred to succumb to a bullet instead of a coronary.