“Well,” sniffs Signe, “she hasn’t changed her décor much.”
They find Rada in the operating room, performing a grisly procedure on a young Voortyashtani girl with a mangled knee. Sigrud and an SDC medic stand beside her, and though Sigrud is in his shirtsleeves and his arm is in a sling, he seems to be acting as a fairly competent assistant.
“Most of the debris has been removed,” Rada mutters—again, Mulaghesh notes, her stutter is gone. “And the wound is clean. I’ll close it up now. You’ll be turning cartwheels again before the end of the month.”
The girl blinks languidly. She’s obviously doped to the gills.
Rada sticks out a hand, and Sigrud—his big, rough fingers surprisingly gentle—hands her a needle and thread. As she takes it Rada glances at Mulaghesh and Signe by the door. “If you w-w-will b-be so k-kind as to wait.”
After about an hour Sigrud and Rada emerge from the operating room, their hands dripping wet and reeking of alcohol. “I d-do n-not normally pr-protest such things,” Rada grumbles, “but I d-do n-n-not relish the idea of p-preferential t-treatment.”
“Then we’ll make it double duty,” Mulaghesh says. “I just spoke with Biswal this morning. You all need to hear this.”
As Rada puts her through her paces—making her extend her arms, stretch her ribs, lift her shirt—Mulaghesh recounts her conversation with Biswal mere hours ago.
“He wants to invade the highlands?” asks Signe, horrified.
“I don’t think ‘invade’ is the right term,” says Mulaghesh. “I expect this will be a much faster, less permanent maneuver. Pursue, engage, eliminate, then retreat. At least, that’s what he thinks it will be.”
“It w-won’t be,” says Rada. “B-bend your h-hip this way, p-please.”
Mulaghesh groans as something in her backside insists it’s moved as far as it possibly can. “It’ll be messy, then?”
“?‘Messy’ doesn’t begin to describe it,” says Signe. “The highland tribes are always prepared for combat. That’s practically all they do. He abandons his duties to go chasing after those who have wounded his pride.”
“Thirty-seven soldiers died,” says Mulaghesh. “Including the commander of Fort Thinadeshi. A lot more got wounded than his damned pride.”
“Fair enough,” says Signe. “But would you do the same as he intends, General?”
Mulaghesh hesitates. “No. He has no plan, no exit. He’s going to lead his kids out there, but how will they get out?”
“And with so many Saypuri forces allocated to pursuing the insurgents, who will be defending Voortyashtan?” asks Signe. “Who will rebuild? They obviously can’t help themselves.”
Sigrud, who has so far been sitting in silence in a moldy overstuffed chair in the corner of the room, rumbles to life. “I have been thinking about that. What if we did that?”
The three of them stare at him. “We?” says Signe. “We who?”
“We as in us,” he says. “SDC.”
There’s a pause.
“What are you saying?” says Signe. “You want us to rebuild a city?”
Sigrud shrugs. “We have lots of resources here. A bunch of workers, builders, construction teams. Surely it cannot be harder than building a harbor.”
“But…But we don’t have the funding for that! If we wanted to do that and keep the harbor on schedule, we’d have to apply for much more onerous loans!”
“Well, I was thinking about that, too,” says Sigrud, scratching his chin, “and I was thinking that I could just ask them to, ah, not make the loans more—what did you say—onerous.”
“What!” says Signe.
“Well…Am I the dauvkind or am I the dauvkind? Am I to put this stupid image of me to no good ends at all? If they want, I will put on as many stupid hats as they like if it gets us more workers and more resources.”
Signe stares at him, suspicious and mystified. “You really want to do that?”
Sigrud smiles slightly as he stuffs his pipe. “It’s as you said the other night,” he says, sitting back and readjusting his sling. “One big push.”
***
“How am I?” says Mulaghesh.
“N-not twenty years old anymore,” says Rada, rifling through a drawer of ointments and salves. “S-so I s-suggest you s-stop acting l-like it.”
“Circumstances dictated otherwise.”
Rada throws a few tubs of something whitish gray and foul-looking into a box for her. Mulaghesh can hear Sigrud and Signe standing outside, talking in low voices about Sigrud’s ostentatious plans. “Then I s-suggest y-you a-uhh-avoid those c-circumstances in the f-f-future.”
“When Biswal gets back, and finds SDC rebuilding a city under his jurisdiction—what will you do, Polis Governor?”
Hearing her own title evokes a sardonic smile. “I am n-not a true actor in th-this play,” she says. “Rather, I d-deal with the consequences of the actions. I will c-continue dealing with the w-wounded. More w-will be coming in. People t-trapped under rubble, tr-trapped in their homes…”
“Familiar.”
“To b-both of us, yes,” says Rada. She slumps her shoulders, sighs, and says, “Have y-you ever h-heard of Saint Petrenko?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“V-Voortyashtani saint. He is interesting, t-to me at l-least. Pr-Probably the antithesis to Z-Zhurgut. Where Zhurgut was all attack and ag-aggression—as you no d-doubt w-witnessed—Petrenko was…passive.”
“A passive warrior?”
“Yes. He p-preached that to live l-life, one m-must accept that one was already d-d-dead. Every m-morning, one m-must arise and m-make peace with death, accept that it was c-coming.” Her words grow stronger as she speaks. “He said, ‘Time is a river, and we are but blades of grass floating upon its waves. To fear the end of the river is to fear being on it at all. And though we may look ahead, and see countless forks, when we look back we see only one way things ever could have gone. All is inevitable. To argue with fate is to argue with a river.’?”
“Why do you bring this up?”
Rada shuts a cabinet with a harsh snap. “I had several deaths on my table last night, and this morning. I will have more today. Some will be children. This, like so many things, is inevitable. I woke up knowing this. And I accepted it. Just as I accept that war is coming here.”
“War?”
“Yes.” Rada stands and looks her in the eye, and her gaze is not half so fearful now. “I can smell it. I have smelled war before, General. Its smell is q-quite familiar to me. This is only the b-beginning. So what I will mostly be d-doing, General,” she says, opening the door, “is awaiting the inevitable. G-good day to you.”
***