Oath Bound - Book V of The Order of the Air (34 page)

The pectoral pulled, a leash tightening. Like to like, one thing to another. Iskinder’s blood, Berenice’s hair…

“This way,” he said, without opening his eyes. “Alexander is this way.”

January 4, 1936

T
he worst thing about mustard gas was that it took time to take effect. Mitch stood on the edge of the road, looking down the steep embankment into the village itself. The houses were all in the lower ground, where the gas would collect, though the pallisaded church and the Red Cross tent stood a bit higher. Alma had already pulled a young man up the slope away from the tent, and as he watched, two men carried a woman from one of the huts and laid her on the embankment, then plunged back toward the village. They had tied strips of damp cloth over their faces, but Mitch doubted they’d be much protection.

“Decontamination,” Iskinder said, coming up at Mitch’s side. “Dr. Biniam!”

A white-coated man emerged from the Red Cross tent, his face hidden beneath a clumsy gas mask. He lifted a hand in answer, but turned to the nearest soldiers. They ducked back into the tent, and emerged again carrying the flimsy wood-and-canvas stretchers Mitch remembered from the war.

“Get them up to our barracks,” Robinson said. “The wounded. We’ve got our own well, we can wash the damn stuff off them —”

“Yes,” Iskinder said, and started down the hill. “Dr. Biniam!”

Mitch started to follow, but Robinson caught his shoulder. “Cover your face. The gas won’t be gone yet.”

Mitch nodded, and dragged his handkerchief out of his pocket. He knew that, had learned it all too well back in Italy, but it was easy to forget when there were people injured. Robinson offered a canteen and Mitch soaked the thin cloth, then tied it over his nose and mouth. It wouldn’t protect his eyes, but if they could get in and out quickly enough, he thought they’d be all right.

It was like being in Italy again, caught behind the lines after the bombers came through. A man in a long robe that looked like a priest’s gown was marshaling the unwounded civilians, sending them up the hill to the road, where a couple of Robinson’s pilots were already waiting. Children were crying, and a man’s voice choked with pain rose in curse or prayer. A woman knelt wailing beside the body of a child. Biniam scrambled from one crumpled body to the next, waving the stretcher-bearers on when he found no signs of life, and leaving them to lift the wounded to safety. He said something as they approached, the mask muffling his words, but Iskinder nodded, and turned toward the tent.

“We can use the cots to carry people, too.”

Robinson was getting his own men organized, fresh teams to carry the stretchers, the men who had been helping sent back up the hill to get the gas washed off them. Half an hour, Mitch remembered, you had maybe half an hour before the blisters came and the burns started, and if you’d breathed it in, there was nothing at all you could do. He remembered Gil standing on the runway’s edge, shouting for everyone to get moving, get their masks on, while the oily, stinking cloud rolled over them like a wave.

There was no time for memory, not when it wouldn’t help. He shook himself, and reached for the last of the stretchers that waited by the tent’s door. One of the soldiers took it from him, and he quickly folded the legs of an empty cot and handed that out as well.

“There are more wounded here,” Iskinder said, from the opening in the partition that divided the tent. “Three more.”

Mitch came to join him, wincing at the sight. The Red Cross had done their best, but none of them looked good; two were shot through the body, heavy bandages still showing spots of blood. The third had his entire head wrapped in bandages, with just slits left for nose and mouth, and his left arm was bandaged as well. “Fresh bandages,” Mitch said, and Iskinder nodded.

“Once we get them out of here.” He hesitated for a moment, then pointed to the man nearest the door. “Let’s go.”

Mitch hoisted the foot of the cot — less weight than he would have expected, which was a mercy — and the man in the next bed dragged himself up on one elbow, calling after them in what Mitch assumed was Amharic. Iskinder answered in the same language, his voice soothing, and then they were through the door.

“I told him we would be back as soon as we could,” Iskinder said, grimacing, and Mitch winced in sympathy, feeling his own scars pull. As they wrestled the cot out into the open, he smelled garlic again, droplets of the gas stirred up from the contaminated ground.

“They’ll never be able to move back here,” he said, in spite of himself, and Iskinder shook his head.

“Maybe, if it were all burned, and then rebuilt?” He winced again, and lowered his end of the cot. “Just a moment, here.”

Mitch set his own end down gratefully, and another group of solders trotted over. Their leader, a tall man with sergeant’s stripes, spoke deferentially to Iskinder in Amharic, and Iskinder answered in the same language.

“They say the village is nearly clear,” he added, to Mitch. “They’ll help these men.”

“We should get on, then,” Mitch said, after only a heartbeat’s hesitation. It felt wrong to leave with anything left undone, but Iskinder’s wound was only half-healed, and he himself would never be able to carry a heavy load without risk.

It was eerily quiet in the village. Mitch could hear goats bleating in the distance, and saw a gang of soldiers fanning out to the south to round up what he guessed was the villagers’ strayed livestock. He could see a pen with a broken fence, and winced at the thought of trying to decontaminate a herd of goats. But the alternative was to slaughter the worst hurt rather than let them suffer, and hope some of them survived. Bodies still lay in the dirt, covered now with thin white sheets, and Mitch flinched again at the memory of war. You had to bury them, but the living came first.

Beside the church, a woman knelt in the dirt, the body of a boy no older than Merilee in her arms. Her face was streaked with tears, and already the first gas blisters were rising on her bare arms. A young man in white robes like a priest’s bent over her, urging her to rise, but she shook her head, rocking back and forth over the body. The priest looked up at their approach, saying something urgent in Amharic, and Iskinder went to one knee beside the woman, speaking gently. The priest straightened, meeting Mitch’s gaze with a gesture of despair.

“She will not leave her son.”

Iskinder kept talking, and the woman wailed aloud. The priest spoke as well, low and urgent, and at last the woman allowed him to take the body from her and lay it gently against the church’s wall. Iskinder tried to help the woman to her feet, but she collapsed, legs sprawling — not unconscious, Mitch though, but utterly overcome.

“Come on, ma’am,” he said, and together he and the priest got her to her feet. There were blisters on her face as well, and down her legs where her dress rode up her calf; her eyes were red with more than tears, the lids swollen, and she clutched at Mitch’s sleeve, gasping something he couldn’t understand.

“She says she can’t see,” Iskinder said, his voice tight. “We must get her to Camp Coleman.”

Mitch and the priest clasped hands, and Iskinder got the woman settled between them, exhorting her to hold on. She draped her arms around their necks, moaning softly, and with an effort they got her up the slope to the road.

Alma and the Red Cross staff had set up a decontamination station out back of the barracks, close enough to the well that they’d been able to run a hose from the pump, and soldiers were taking turns working the pump handle while another man stood naked under the stream. Another group was collecting contaminated clothes in a basket, and Alma emerged from the barracks as they approached.

“Bring her in here.”

Mitch and the priest turned toward her, and she and an Ethiopian woman lifted the injured woman carefully from their arms.

“She’s bad off,” Mitch said, and Alma nodded.

“She lost her son. I saw.”

Behind her, Mitch caught a glimpse of another hose and buckets of water, women rinsing each other to get rid of the lingering traces of the gas.

“We’ll take her from here,” Alma said. “Go get cleaned up, both of you.”

Will she be all right? Mitch thought. Will we? There was no point in speaking the words aloud: they both knew what the answers would be. “Right,” he said, and turned toward the line of men at the pump.

The decontamination procedure was almost identical to the one he remembered from Italy, and as he stripped and stepped into the chill stream of water the present blurred and wavered, the past filling his mind so that he could almost see scrub pines behind the airfield and the slope of the mountains rising in the distance. Instead of the unpainted buildings of Camp Coleman, he saw regulation camouflage, and for a moment he could almost feel Gil’s hand on his shoulder, steering him toward the boy who waited with another set of clothes. But the boy was a villager, someone’s spare uniform shirt rolled up at the sleeves and too-large shorts cinched tight with a piece of rope. Mitch took what was handed to him and moved aside to dress, aware that his hands were shaking, and the tears that stung his eyes were not just the aftereffects of the gas.

The shirt and uniform trousers fit well enough that he found himself slapping his pockets for his cigarettes before he remembered. He shook himself hard, trying to push through the sense of unreality, and suddenly Lewis was at his side, holding out a cigarette case.

“Smoke?”

“Yeah.” Mitch took it, cupped his hand for the light and drew the smoke down into his lungs. Tobacco, the taste of home, of the land that had borne him: he closed his eyes, searching for that center, and when he opened them again, the light was normal, the afternoon sun just touching the trees beyond the end of the airstrip. “Thanks.”

“You all right?”

Mitch shrugged. “How’s Alma?”

“Still with the women. There’s one hurt pretty bad.”

“I saw.” Mitch shivered again, and took another long draw on the cigarette. It was like this after combat, he got the shakes and there was no shame in it, or at least that was what Gil had always said. For an instant, he imagined Gil’s wry smile, his easy drawl:
I don’t care if you dance a tarantella once you’re down, as long as you don’t do it in the air
. Mitch closed his eyes, imagining the weave and dance of the Italian planes. If he’d known what they were carrying, they could have gone for the bombers — except that the fighter screen had been too strong. For a moment, he wished he’d followed up on his attacks, made sure of the kill. Anyone who’d gas civilians — gas a Red Cross station — but surely the Italians had been aiming for the airfield… He couldn’t make himself believe it. Camp Coleman was untouched, the village accurately destroyed. He took a last drag on the cigarette and dropped the stub before it burned his fingers, ground it out in the red dirt as though his life depended on obliterating every spark. “What can we do to help?”

“Damned if I know,” Lewis said. Mitch could feel the banked anger in him, but Lewis had himself well under control. “Stay out of the way, the doctor said —”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw von Rosen emerge from the barracks, his thin mouth closed tight, and Mitch turned toward him, lifting a hand to catch his attention. “Von Rosen!”

The count ignored him, lifted a small black box that Mitch realized abruptly was a motion picture camera. He turned it toward the last few men still waiting to go under the improvised shower, and Mitch felt Lewis stiffen.

“What the hell?” Lewis started toward von Rosen, fists clenching. Mitch grabbed for him and missed, took two quick steps to catch him by the shoulder.

“Hold on —”

Von Rosen turned, lowered the camera. “Good. You’ll take this, yes? The film? They need to know — everyone needs to know what’s happening here.”

Mitch felt Lewis relax slightly, and said, “Yeah. We’ll take it.”

“We’ll tell them, too,” Lewis said, his voice taut. “Your embassy, our embassy, the State Department, every goddamn newspaper in Europe and in America —”

“Not that they’ll listen,” Mitch said.

Von Rosen grunted. “They haven’t so far. Everyone wants to believe that it’s justice, the victory of civilization over barbarism. That’s what Mr. Waugh says, after all! But this — they can’t deny the film. It’s all here, the village, the wounded. They can’t deny this.”

“Reckon they’ll find a way,” Mitch said. He felt hollowed out, untethered, and fumbled in his pocket before he remembered again that he didn’t have any cigarettes.

“Here.” Lewis handed him the packet, and Mitch took it gratefully. He lit one for himself, and only then offered it to von Rosen, who shook his head.

“We have to try. We…”

“We’ll take it,” Mitch said. “Just tell me who it goes to, and I’ll get it there.”

Von Rosen fumbled in his pocket, came up with the stub of a pencil and a grubby slip of thin cardboard. He balanced it on the side of the camera, between the various knobs and the winding key, and scribbled a name and address. “Ernst Wallin. He’s with the Swedish Embassy in Cairo. He’s a friend, and he’ll know what to do with it. It’s proof that the Italians are targeting civilians, deliberately bombing Red Cross hospitals —”

Mitch took the card, checking to be sure he could read the scrawled words. He had no confidence he’d be able to remember anything today, no matter how many times he was told. They weren’t supposed to land in Cairo, of course, but they’d do it, or figure something out. Alma would figure something out. He tucked the card carefully in his pocket, nodding, and Lewis said, “They know. They must know. What good is this going to do?”

“They can’t know,” Mitch said, in spite of himself, and knew as he heard his own voice that it was entirely possible.

“Waugh and his like keep telling everyone that it’s a war against barbarism,” von Rosen said. “That the Italians are civilized people and the Ethiopians are committing atrocities. That the only way to save the country is to conquer it. And no one in Europe wants another war like the last one, so they take any excuse they can get not to have to intervene.”