Melville had just dispatched a loose Goblan with a downward slash, and it took him a split second to dislodge his sword from the body. The oversized cur in front of him swung a ferocious, overhand sword stroke at his head, and he was out of position to block it.
At times like this the senses can become acutely, intensely clear, seeking to find any escape or alternative. Besides the obvious one. In this case the information provided by that vivid clarity served only to confirm the fact that Melville was doomed.
I shall not die alone, alone,
but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and
fighting like the flowers.
* * *
So, thinks Melville, This is how it will come. This is how I will die. This is the being who will kill me. He is astounded to find that there is no anger in him, not even resignation, just wonder and . . . a fierce joy!
One sound shall sunder all the spears and
break the trumpet’s breath:
You never laughed in all your life as I shall
laugh in death.
His sword comes up in slow motion. He can tell that it will be too late. The rest of the battle doesn’t exist. All sound is gone, only eery silence remains. His tunnel vision permits him to see only his opponent’s head, torso and upper arms. He doesn’t see the sword tip crashing down. Sword tips move too fast to follow, best always to watch the enemy’s arms and project the position of the sword.
His sword is still moving up. Too slow, too slow! He is looking upward. At the edge of his vision he sees his monkey’s belaying pin, a tattered, splintered, torn, beautiful belaying pin, meet and slightly deflect the huge Guldur sword. The long, straight, sword is deflected to his left! He jerks his head and body to the right. So little time. Time to move just slightly right. The enemy sword clips his hair, clips off the top of his left ear and slices deep into his left shoulder. He is alive!
Funny, he feels no pain as the sword slices through his flesh. Only the pressure of the blade cutting through the muscles of his shoulder. He also feels the pressure of his sword in his hand, coming up, thrusting forward. His left leg thrusts his body forward. His right knee bends. His sword point, a gory, dripping, hungry red sword point, lunges home:
Through teeth, and skull, and helmet
So fierce a thrust he sped,
The good sword stood a hand-breadth out
Behind the Tuscan’s head.
The enemy drops, with Melville’s sword through its brain, protruding out the back. Its tick leaps down to the deck where it dies, almost casually, anticlimactically, sliced in half as the tip of Corporal Kobbsven two-handed claymore begins an upward sweep.
Melville watches his enemy, his noble, noble enemy, fall.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes!
I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet
of the brave.
Melville asks himself, “Why are there tears in my eyes?” Water for the dead. Water for the brave. He has killed the enemy captain. Brave, brave captain.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and
love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing
falls shattering from the sky.
Hans and Valandil are coming toward him from the enemy’s quarterdeck. Only a handful of Guldur and Goblan are still on their feet. It’s only a matter of time now and this mighty Ship will be his. The rightful fruit of honorable combat. Melville drops to his knees and looks down at his fallen foe.
The hour when death is like a light and
blood is like a rose,—
You have never loved your friends,
my friends, as I shall love my foes.
Somewhere in the darkness of interstellar space, a wooden ship drifts. Perhaps, in the unthinkably long lifetime of the universe, some alien race will find that ship. Inside this bizarre wooden vessel they will find the corpses of many doglike creatures, and gray, goblinlike beasts, all dehydrated and mummified by the vacuum of space. As they examine these corpses, if they look closely at their faces, and if they understand such things, perhaps they will be struck by the fact that all of them appear to be very, very surprised.
Chapter the 7th
Recovering from Battle:
Lief Should I Rouse at Morning
Could man be drunk forever
With liquor, love or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down at nights.
“Could Man be Drunk Forever”
A.E. Housman
Melville was hung over. Seriously, seriously hung over. He hadn’t touched a drop of liquor, but he felt like a sailor the morning after he got knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk, got beat up in a bar fight, and then got falling-down, belly-crawling drunk.
He’d been going on a physical and emotional high from the minute the apes attacked him on Broadax’s World, up until the capture of this Ship. Man could not be “drunk forever, with liquor, love or fights.” Now, finally, things were slowing down, and he must pay the price.
During combat an effect called vasoconstriction makes the veins constrict. The arteries are wide open, but just before the capillaries the return flow is cut off and the veins collapse. This is why a person’s face will go white under intense stress. The blood pools in the body core and in the large muscle masses. Blood pressure skyrockets and, unless an artery is hit, bleeding from wounds can be very limited. In effect, the whole outer layer of the body becomes a layer of armor. Immediately afterward a powerful backlash can occur. Vasodilation sets in, the veins are wide open, and the face turns red and flushed.
For Melville that meant the blood loss from his shoulder wound was limited, initially. Shortly after combat was over and he relaxed, the blood began to gush from his wound and he christened the deck of his new Ship with a fair amount of his blood. The last thing he remembered, before he slept and woke up with this incredible “hangover,” was Lady Elphinstone applying a little psychological first aid as she staunched the bleeding and plied her Sylvan skills to stitch up his wound.
He was lying on the deck where he had collapsed after slaying the enemy captain. His shoulder was a blaze of pain. Anesthetics and pain relievers did work in Flatland, but any complex chemical compound that wasn’t part of a living creature tended to slowly break down. Thus, over time, the effectiveness of pain numbing medication grew weaker and weaker as it sat in storage. The Kestrel had been at sea for a long time and the stuff he’d been given was very weak.
He’d once read an early twenty-first century book entitled Ether Day, about the invention of anesthesia. The book fortunately survived the Crash since it was deemed fit to include in military archives, which the paranoid military types kept religiously separate from the vast interlocking Info-Net. A certain line from that book stuck in Melville’s mind. “When one speaks of ‘pain’ during an operation without anesthetics, it is a word with ragged tails of meaning and imagery that permanently dye the mind: the peculiar red of one’s own blood, the echoing blue of a limb dropping to the floor.” Yep, that was about right. There was a lot of that going around today. Pain is relative. It doesn’t get any more intense than when it’s related to you.
The warriors of Westerness had found mind control tools, based in warrior science, to help them handle their pain. In the early twenty-first century, elite military units learned to apply the precepts of “Lamaze” to combat. Lamaze was initially a tool that was used to permit women to go through the very painful process of childbirth without pain medication. Soon the basic process of breathing, relaxation, visual concentration, and listening to a coach were applied to a wide variety of situations where individuals were in pain and medication wasn’t immediately available or effective.
Melville was applying his Lamaze skills diligently. He was doing his breathing. He was working consciously on relaxation, avoiding the tension/pain/more-tension/more-pain cycle. He was listening very intently to Lady Elphinstone. And he was concentrating his vision intensely on a focal point, a knot in a rope far above him as he lay flat on the deck of his new Ship. Lovely, fascinating, remarkable knot. The combined effect was such that so many senses were being used, and so much thought processing was going on, that there was little mental capacity left over for feeling pain.
It really did work. One author called this the “ceremony of diminution,” quite rightly stating that, “this stoical appearance of indifference in fact diminishes the pain.”
It really did work. Melville kept telling himself that. Trying hard to believe it.