3-1
Sara woke up hungry and sore, her heart still feeling the echoes of when it had been reduced to jelly a handful of hours before. Then, several seconds later, she remembered that her sister was gone, held somewhere in the hands of a monstrous nobleman.
Sara woke up sobbing and retching bile onto the floor. She wanted to die, to destroy herself, to be burned up and buried in the ashes of Damascus like the rest of her family had been. She had committed the ultimate crime, the only crime worthy of the ninth and lowest circle of hell: betrayal against the person who relied upon her the most. It was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before she could wipe the tears from her eyes for long enough to realize where she actually was.
The answer was “on someone else’s floor.” One of the poor peasant farmers of the village of Carbennic, a total stranger to her, had taken her and Gilead in when they’d stumbled into town late the night before. The workers were already gone, off to their labor with the rising of the sun, leaving the injured to sleep in and recover. A little while after Sara got up on her feet and started testing her sore joints, an old woman came in, bearing bread and a watery vegetable soup. Sara thanked her profusely.
Gilead was much worse-off than Sara was. That felt unfair, somehow; he, after all, had managed to avoid having all of his vital organs reduced to a soup-like homogenate in the course of the fighting. But Zahra likely wouldn’t have had the strength to draw Ruthven’s attention if she’d healed them both.
His throat was wrapped all the way around with a single solid band of bruises where Ruthven’s hand had seized him, and a couple of cuts on his face had turned red as they scabbed over. His torso and arms were likely much worse; Sara had seen him take slashes there during the fight, and his shirt and coat were all slashed to pieces and soaked in his own blood. The paleness of his already-pasty skin indicated that he’d lost a lot of blood, but whether he was still losing blood, and how bad was the risk of infection, would require a real examination.
Once she had had enough food to keep herself focused, Sara posted herself by Gilead’s side and started the process of removing his jacket and shirt, exposing the pale flesh underneath.
Sara’d barely gotten started when a strong hand snapped closed around her wrist. Gilead’s eyelids flickered, but when they finally opened, they were glaring at Sara with a bottomless anger.
“What, prithee, art thou doing?”
Sara was in no mood for dealing with Gilead’s bullshit right now. “I’m trying to take care of your wounds. I need to make sure you don’t get a fucking blood infection.”
“I am in good health,” he said, protecting his chest with his arm, “and do not much care for women attempting to pry about my personage.”
Sara threw up her hands and gave a brief skyward glance at God, who she hoped was feeling exasperated right alongside her. “What is your fucking deal with your chest? I’ve seen it, you know, there’s nothing remarkable about it! I don’t care about your chest, I’m not going to besmirch your chastity or whatever you think will happen if I catch a glance of one pec while I am treating your serious wounds.”
“I am well, I feel well,” said Gilead.
“Yes, and tomorrow you’ll be dying of a blood infection.” Sara paused. “Oh fuck me, do I have to explain the germ theory of disease to you? If dirt gets into a wound, you will get sick and you will fucking die, Gilead!”
“Then treat me when I am sick in sooth, when illness is upon me apply thy leechcraft, set thyself not to examine my form whilst mine health is intact! And moreover, I shall have thee know that thou hadst only looked upon my body by ambush, ne’er by mine wishing, and that thou shouldst be grateful that I did not react with far more severity than how I did.”
She wanted to punch him. She wanted to punch him so very, very badly. Maybe kick him in the ribs for good measure. That he was complaining about having to take his shirt off so that she could treat his injuries! The audacity to complain after everything he had done to her!
Sara stood up, but instead of stomping Gilead to death there and then, she went for plan B. “First Pretense: Watch the World Burn.”
In about a second, Sara had transformed into a solid mass of plastic explosive, without a face or hair or any other distinguishing features. She had no heart to race, no mouth or nose through which to pant in anger, no skin to feel hot, or really anything to feel with. She was homogenous. With her slab-like feet she stomped over into the corner of the cottage, where she could face the wall and curl up into the fetal position.
This was a waste, of course; she could only maintain this form for half an hour, at the absolute most, and she’d much rather that be when it could make the difference between life and death. Then again, sometimes emotions could be that.
Sara didn’t think about anything at all, allowing her thoughts to fade into nothing. Thinking about something would make it much too easy to start thinking about her current situation, so instead she ran down the procedure for field-stripping an AKM, something she still remembered by heart despite it having been three years since she’d touched one of the things. She had just finished reciting it the third time when Gilead’s voice intruded on her meditations.
“Thou’rt thinking about the fact that thy sister would be in no peril had you not agreed to journey at my side.”
“Fuck off.”
“I, meanwhile, muse on the knowledge that, hadst thou not been with me, I may have lost myself to savagery in that manor, or been overwhelmed altogether.”
“What part of ‘fuck off’ do you not understand?”
“I do feel guilt,” said Gilead. “I feel a great guilt. Thou savedst my soul, and in return I allowed thy sister to be captured.”
Sara had no reply, none at all. She could have gone and beat him senseless for the sheer gall to say something like that, when Zahra was languishing in the grasp of a fucking vampire nobleman doing who knows what to her. She could detonate everything below the neck and blow this whole village to hell in an instant if she had wanted to. But it wasn’t entirely his fault, either.
“Sara… I swear, upon my knightly honor, that I shall do everything in my power to aid thee in Zahra’s rescue. What I have allowed to take place, I shall undo, no matter the cost.”
“Fuck you. You don’t get to make up for this by simply dying. Live, you piece of shit, so that I can still be mad with you after.”
Sara let herself flicker out. She was human once more. Somehow, letting that all out had made her realize what she needed to do. Perhaps it was her experience in the resistance that let her do it. How often had she found herself next to some total stranger, thrown together by fate, forced to rely upon his aid for her survival regardless of whether she liked the person? There were too many things about Sir Gilead du Carbennic, knight in shining armor, that made it hard for Sara to trust him, but it was that or go it alone, and going it alone meant death.
She shuffled over across the dirt floor to sit next to him. For a minute, no words were exchanged: they ate bread and watery soup.
“There’s something I think you should know about me,” Sara said. “And I think it might help you to… feel less nervous about letting me examine your wounds.”
She cringed to herself as she said it, realizing exactly how bad this was about to get. But much like a RPG-7 round, there was no stopping it once in flight. And hopefully once it had landed, the world would be slightly easier for her.
Gilead only raised an eyebrow.
“I am… oh shit, what word could I use for this that you would know. I, uh, don’t know how to ride side-saddle?”
“Quoi?”
“Fuck! I’m a bit of a… tomcat? No. Why would you know that.” Sara folded her hands over her face. The only words she knew for this were obscure slang, or slurs. How could she explain what she was getting at to a man from a thousand years ago?
Well, by using the one thing she knew they shared in common. Christianity.
“I am, um. A woman of Sodom. A female sodomite, even.”
Gilead’s expression of faint confusion did not break… at first. But just as Sara started to wonder if she was going to have to spell this out for him, an expression of shock dawned on his face. His eyes flicked down.
“Why are you looking at my crotch? Don’t answer that. Fuck you.”
Gilead’s surprise turned to shame, and he averted his eyes from Sara entirely. “A thousand apologies, Sara. I should never have allowed my propriety to take flight of me, even if I have never before met a tribade in person.”
“Tribade? How was I supposed to guess that… But, yes, if you believe you have never met one in person, it’s likely that you’re thinking of what I meant.”
Gilead took a moment to work up his courage, then slowly looked over his shoulder at Sara. “Why should that make me more liable to disrobe before you?”
“Because I have no interest in men. At all. Never have and never will. Two years before Zahra was born I told my father I’d rather join the resistance and get tortured to death in Guantanamo Bay than marry a man. He was fine because the resistance always needed new recruits and it meant he wouldn’t have to pay a dowry. I didn’t even meet Zahra until she was three. If you tell her that I’ll kick you in the balls.”
Sara wasn’t sure why she’d said all that. Once the stopper was off the bottle on the whole “child soldier” thing, the rest had simply flowed forth, well beyond her ability to stop it. Perhaps it had been too long since she had had anybody to just talk to without an extrinsic goal.
“So… thou art akin to a man?”
Sara slapped him, lightly enough to let him know what she felt about the question without actually hurting him any further.
Gilead took the slap in stride, and after several seconds of intense thought, revised his question. “Thou… feelst as men feel, when it comes to matters of the heart?”
Sara rather wanted to slap him again, but for about the hundredth time she decided that she had no choice but to give him credit. Gilead was like a baby in that way. Or like Zahra. He would learn to do better eventually.
“Yes, in matters of… desire, I am more like a man than like a woman.”
Gilead nodded, stroking his chin as though to ponder the deep philosophical implications of this. Then, wincing and moving very slowly, he started to undress. Rather more than Sara had asked him to, as it happened.
“You don’t need to take off your pants.”
“I do,” Gilead replied. “Duranore slashed me across the leg at least once, if not more. If thou wishest to make examination of me, then thou shalt have to look there as well.”
Sara wondered at first if this was some sort of test about whether she was telling the truth about being a lesbian; but she extended her trust to Gilead, and set to work. There was little that she could do. Her supply of bandages ran out after the two deepest injuries were taken care of, and after that it was just about measuring out the smallest possible doses of antiseptic.
Still, though Gilead continued to flinch whenever Sara’s hands made contact with his skin, he suffered the treatment without complaint, in spite of the fact that he was a complete disaster. There were still bruises from his fight with Qi Zhen that hadn’t faded yet, let alone the ones around his neck which were getting worse with each passing hour. When Sara was done, he replaced his ruined clothes with disdain.
“Dost thou have a needle and thread, perchance?”
“I do, but you’re going to need more than a needle and thread to repair that. Honestly it would be easier to see if there’s any bulky townsfolk willing to trade.”
“Trade for what thing?”
Sara frowned, but only for a second. “Do you think they’ve already looted the castle? We get up there right now and we might be able to find some valuables.”
Gilead chuckled. “I had nearly forgotten; for so long, it had been my habit to leave the loot for the poor. But we are the poor now, are we not?”
“That’s the spirit!”
They couldn’t move very quickly, going uphill with Gilead so badly wounded, but it scarcely mattered. The townsfolk hadn’t heard the news yet that the Black Knight was dead and gone, and Ruthven had departed, and so were still staying well away from Carbennic Castle. There also wasn’t nearly as much loot on offer as Sara had hoped.
Most of those who had been fighting and who had died bore no loot at all; the ghouls were animals, and when the skeletons fell, all of their equipment rusted into uselessness. While about a dozen of Ruthven’s soldiers had fallen, most of them had already had their equipment reclaimed, most likely by their fellows as they went back to the airship. But not all. Sara and Gilead spent an hour thoroughly searching the environs, and discovered two bodies that had not already been gone-over. They were far afield, one buried amidst shrubbery and the other lying dead in a ditch a football-field’s length from the castle itself. Sara could only speculate on how they’d ended up there.
What she was far more intrigued by was their guns. As soon as she got the rifle into her arms, she swore with relief; it was like seeing an old friend.
“Thou art quite excited by this wooden gun,” Gilead remarked.
“It’s not just any gun. This hot girlfriend is a No. 1 Short Magazine Lee-Enfield,” Sara said, testing the smoothness of the bolt by racking it back with the heel of her palm. “The British left behind hundreds of thousands of these things when they left Furat. The first time I ever trained with a gun, it was this one; too expensive to use an AKM for anything but the front-line, you see.”
Gilead looked unimpressed, but Sara was much too lost in nostalgia to care. The psychic impact of her first time carrying a gun was stamped onto her memory, a fourteen-year-old who felt for the first time that she could be the one in charge. No matter how much subsequent history proved that notion wrong, the memory still gave her warm feelings.
The rifle worked beautifully, of course. That only made sense; the ones she was used to were World War-vintage, refurbished and repaired a hundred times over. In Leedsrealm, though, Lee-Enfields were still coming fresh off the production line. The gun she was holding mustn’t have been more than a decade old.
“I’m keeping this,” she said in summary. “At least until I can resupply my Glock.”
The rifle and its associated pouch full of shells wasn’t the only thing that the first corpse had on offer. They took his clothes—though much too small to fit Gilead, they would trade well—and some other small things, a knife, a water canteen, a box of matches.
The second corpse was much the same, with the exception that, whether out of personal choice or as some kind of reward for his rank, this one had a saber on him. Gilead took to it, doing his usual twirling practice while Sara took a second rifle for herself and as much as she could stuff into her backpack. With his chipped shield picked up from exactly where he’d dropped it, Gilead was armed once more.
They returned to the village of Carbennic heavy with loot and ready to trade. As it so happened, there was a man in town who was almost as tall and well-built as Gilead was. In exchange for a Lee-Enfield, he gladly handed over a full set of clothes that the knight could change into. A knife got traded away for food, though all the villagers could offer was bread, butter, and cheese. Given that they were suffering from a critical shortage of guests, the folk of Carbennic insisted that Gilead and Sara stay at least until midday tea, and given Gilead’s injuries, neither of them could deny the offer.
They sat together in the largest house in town, sitting at the mayor’s table along with all of his friends, and shared news. Sara was the one who knew anything to share, news from far afield about the latest border skirmishes with Topeka, the disastrous tower crane collapse in Blackpool, the impending ball at Ruthven’s palace. Gilead only had the energy to briefly mention that King Arthur was a real person.
Once both of them were stuffed full of potage and mutton pie, they were left to pack up. It was a slow, plodding process thanks to that stuffing. Gilead, not having to deal with a rifle, finished packing first.
“Where wend we next?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“Havest thou a plan for thy sister’s rescue? I am not one for planning; thy mind is far the keener.”
Sara smirked. “I don’t have a plan, not precisely. But I know where we’re going. I don’t know that we can do this with just the two of us, but as it happens I have a friend who is excellent at operational support. You’ll love her, I think.”
Gilead groaned in pain from all of his bruises as he hefted his bag onto his shoulder.
“Why dost thou think that she and I will make good company?”
Sara couldn’t help but smile at the question. “She’s a fairy.”