Rise of the Horde

Chapter 839 - 838

The barbarian who stayed was named Vornak, and he had been a healer before he was a warrior, which in the highland tradition was the same thing because the highland tradition did not distinguish between the two on the grounds that a warrior who could not treat his own wounds was a warrior with a shortened operational lifespan and a shortened operational lifespan was a waste of the training that producing a warrior required.

Vornak had arrived in Yohan’s recovery chambers six weeks earlier, carried on a litter with a spear-point lodged against his left scapula at the angle that removal required surgical precision rather than the field extraction that less careful hands would have attempted and that would have severed the nerve cluster that the precision preserved. Rakh’ash’tha had performed the extraction in forty minutes with the economy of movement that years of healing battlefield wounds had produced in hands whose steadiness was the steadiness of absolute familiarity with the specific texture of tissue and bone that the work involved.

Vornak had been conscious for the extraction. This was unusual. Most patients at the equivalent wound severity were not conscious for the extraction because the pain’s intensity exceeded the threshold that consciousness required to sustain itself. Vornak had watched Rakh’ash’tha’s hands with the specific attention of a practitioner observing technique, the watching of someone who understands enough of what is happening to evaluate the understanding’s quality from the outside.

"Your grip changes at the final pull," Vornak had said, during the extraction’s last phase. His voice was the voice of someone speaking through pain that had been converted, through some internal mechanism the orcish healer did not fully understand, into information rather than experience. "You shift the rotation axis. Why?"

Rakh’ash’tha had not answered immediately. The extraction required the attention that conversation competed for. When the spear-point was free and the wound’s bleeding had been addressed and the packing was in place, the healer had set down the tools and looked at the patient with the specific look of a professional who had been asked an intelligent question.

"The shoulder’s socket rotates the moment the point clears the bone," Rakh’ash’tha said. "If the grip axis doesn’t shift to compensate, the point rotates with it and tears the rear of the wound on the way out. The tear doubles the recovery time and introduces the infection risk that the larger wound surface produces. The shift prevents the tear."

Vornak had absorbed this with his eyes half-closed in the state that significant blood loss produced. "We pull straight," he said. "Highland technique. Straight pull, fast. The speed is supposed to reduce the tear risk."

"The speed reduces the duration of contact," Rakh’ash’tha said. "The contact’s duration is not the tear risk’s primary variable. The rotation is. The faster you pull straight, the more the rotation translates into lateral force against the wound’s edge. You trade a slow tear for a fast one. The wound’s size is the same. The speed’s only contribution is to reduce the patient’s awareness of the tearing, which benefits the patient’s composure but does not benefit the wound."

The patient whose composure was being assessed regarded the orcish healer for a long moment.

"You should not have to teach this in pieces to people who are already bleeding," Vornak said. "You should teach it before."

Rakh’ash’tha said nothing. But the healer noted the observation with the notation that the observation deserved, which was the notation of a thing already known being confirmed by an independent source.

* * * * *

When Vornak’s recovery had progressed to the point that walking was possible, he had been expected to join the withdrawal column that carried the barbarian wounded back to the highland road. The column had departed. Vornak had not been in it.

He had been in the recovery chamber’s anteroom, reviewing the supply manifest that Rakh’ash’tha’s apprentice had been organizing, making corrections in the margin with the flat authority of someone who had been maintaining supply manifests since before the apprentice had been old enough to hold a quill.

"The column departed," Rakh’ash’tha said, arriving at the anteroom with the mid-morning supply assessment.

"I know," Vornak said. He did not look up from the manifest. "Your categorization of poultices by application type is correct in principle but produces retrieval inefficiency in practice. You need everything for wound-packing in one location regardless of the wound’s type, because in a field scenario the wound’s type is determined after the wound is already open and the healer’s hands are already moving. Categorizing by wound type means the healer stops to select from multiple locations. The stop costs time that the wound is spending bleeding."

Rakh’ash’tha set down the supply assessment and looked at the barbarian who had missed his withdrawal column.

"You are describing an improvement to a system you are not part of," the healer said.

"I am describing an improvement to a system that I could become part of," Vornak said. He finally looked up. The highland warrior’s face was the face of a person who had made a decision and was delivering the decision’s implications with the directness that the highlands bred into everyone who grew up there, the directness that did not circle the subject because circling the subject was a waste of time that the highlands’ conditions had never historically permitted. "The things I know, you don’t know. The things you know, I don’t know. Neither of us knows everything that the healing’s full scope requires. You are building a healing system for a city that will have fifty thousand people. Fifty thousand people’s healing needs exceed what any single healer’s knowledge covers. You need the knowledge that the second healer brings."

Rakh’ash’tha was quiet.

"You are a barbarian," the healer said. Not as objection. As the statement of a fact whose implications required examination.

"I am a healer," Vornak said. "The barbarian is the other part. It is a smaller part than it used to be."

* * * * *

Khao’khen heard the situation from Rakh’ash’tha at the day’s end briefing and processed it with the specific quality of attention he gave to things that were not problems but were the kind of things that became problems if they were treated as problems rather than as what they were.

"He wants to stay," Khao’khen said.

"He wants to stay and contribute to the healing system’s development," Rakh’ash’tha said. "His knowledge of highland herbal medicine is extensive. The highlands contain plant species that do not grow in the southern territories. The medicine that those plants produce addresses conditions that our current formulary cannot treat effectively. His knowledge of field extraction technique, though different from my technique in its methods, has produced comparable outcomes by a different mechanism whose understanding could improve my approach."

"He is the first non-orc to request civilian track entry."

"He is."

Khao’khen looked at the map on the administrative hall’s wall, the map that showed Yohan at the center and the treaty’s frontier line to the north and the Threian kingdom’s territory beyond it and the Tekarr Mountains to the northwest where the Arch sat on orcish land under a treaty provision that required its Threian occupants to withdraw. The map showed the world the campaign had produced, and the world the campaign had produced was not the world the campaign’s beginning had imagined.

"The haven is a haven for the orcish people," Khao’khen said. He said it slowly, with the specific cadence of a person who is examining whether the words they have previously spoken are the words they still mean. "The orcish people. The definition of the word I used." He paused. "The haven is a haven for the people who need it. The people who need it are primarily orcs. They are not exclusively orcs. The haven that excludes a healer because his blood is highland is a haven that has defined its walls by the wrong measure."

"The warriors will object," Rakh’ash’tha said.

"The warriors will be told that the healer who saved thirty-seven of their brothers and sisters during the barbarian wounded’s treatment in these recovery chambers has chosen to remain in the city that treated him. The warriors will be told that the healer’s knowledge will improve the survival rate of the next warrior who takes a spear-point against his scapula." Khao’khen’s voice was flat and final. "The warriors’ objection will be brief."

"And if it is not brief?"

"Then the objecting warrior may carry his next battlefield wound to the healer whose bloodline he prefers, and we will assess the outcome’s quality from the results."

* * * * *

The third pillar’s formalization began with the document that Rakh’ash’tha and Vornak produced jointly over four days of collaborative argument: the Healer’s Codex, the first written record of orcish and highland medical knowledge compiled in a single text organized by the principle that both traditions had independently arrived at without either knowing the other had arrived there.

The principle was: the wound does not care about the healer’s method. The wound cares about the outcome. The method that produces the better outcome is the method that the Codex records, regardless of which tradition produced it. The tradition whose method is supplanted by a better method is not diminished by the supplanting. The method’s improvement is the tradition’s continuation by better means.

Vornak wrote the highland sections in the highland script and Rakh’ash’tha translated them into the administrative Orcish that Sakh’arran’s systems had standardized across the city’s official documentation. The translation required, on several occasions, the invention of new terms for concepts that the Orcish language had not previously required terms for, because the concepts were concepts that orcish healing tradition had not previously formalized.

"You do not have a word for prophylaxis," Vornak observed, on the third day.

"We have the practice," Rakh’ash’tha said. "We did not previously have the need to name it, because the naming’s purpose is communication and the communication’s audience had not previously been people who required the thing to be named in order to learn it. The apprentice system communicates through demonstration. The demonstration does not require the name. The teaching hall requires the name because the teaching hall’s students cannot observe the demonstration of every procedure before learning the procedure’s principle."

"So the name is for the students."

"The name is for anyone who learns the thing from the text rather than from the doing. Names are how knowledge survives a specific teacher’s death. Without the name, the thing the teacher knew dies when the teacher dies. With the name, the thing exists in the text and the text exists past the teacher."

Vornak wrote the word for prophylaxis in highland script. Rakh’ash’tha wrote it in Orcish below it, the newly invented term already carrying the specific weight that words acquired when they were the words that named things previously unnamed: the weight of a door being opened to a room that had always existed and that people had been entering and exiting through a hole in the wall because no one had yet thought to hang a door.

The Codex grew. Day by day, the wound care and the extraction technique and the infection management and the fever treatment and the bone-setting and the prophylaxis and fifty other entries accumulated in the document that two healers from different peoples were building with the specific patience of people who understood that the document would outlast them and who therefore treated the document’s quality as the investment that the document’s longevity required.

The third pillar stood. Not with the water system’s drama of pipes and sealing compound and the sound of water moving through new conduits. With the quieter permanence of knowledge written down, the kind of permanence that did not echo and did not rush and did not announce itself, the kind that simply endured.

In the recovery chambers, Dhug’mhar submitted to Vornak’s examination of the frost damage’s latest stage with the theatrical dignity that Dhug’mhar brought to every experience that involved another person looking at his body.

"The crystalline scarring is reducing," Vornak said, pressing carefully along the site with fingertips whose sensitivity the highland healer tradition had developed through the same years of practice that Rakh’ash’tha’s sensitivity had been developed by. "The orcish regeneration is working from the outside in. The deepest layer is still fixed. But the boundary has moved inward by approximately half an inch since the last assessment."

"Perfection regenerates at a rate that reflects Perfection’s fundamental excellence," Dhug’mhar said. "The frost damage did not understand what it was damaging. The frost damage has been continuously humiliated by its failure to diminish Perfection in any permanent way. The frost damage will eventually cease entirely, at which point Perfection will write extensively about the experience. The writing will be instructive for future generations who require an example of how to survive encounters with seventh-circle frost magic through sheer magnificence."

"The recovery would be faster if Perfection rested more," Vornak said.

"Perfection rests at the intervals that Perfection’s schedule permits," Dhug’mhar said. "Perfection’s schedule is full. Perfection is composing."

"Composing what?"

"The philosophical treatise on physical achievement that the learning hall’s curriculum requires. Perfection has been informed that future generations will read what the current generation writes. Perfection intends that what future generations read about physical achievement is written by the person whose physical achievement makes the writing authoritative. The alternative is unacceptable. The alternative would be future generations reading about physical achievement from a person who has not achieved the achievement that the writing requires for authority."

Vornak looked at Rakh’ash’tha. Rakh’ash’tha’s expression communicated nothing. This was the expression Rakh’ash’tha had developed specifically for Dhug’mhar-related situations.

"The resting would help," Vornak said again.

"Perfection notes the recommendation. Perfection will consider it during the next composition break. The composition breaks occur at intervals that the composition’s momentum determines. The momentum is currently significant."

The healers left the recovery chamber. In the corridor, Vornak looked at Rakh’ash’tha with the expression of someone processing an experience that defied the categories their training had provided for processing experiences.

"He is always like this?" Vornak asked.

"Always," Rakh’ash’tha confirmed.

"And he led the charge that broke the Threian right flank at the plains engagement."

"He led it while describing his own magnificence in real time. The warriors behind him have reported that it was simultaneously the most effective and most surreal experience of their military careers."

Vornak considered this for a moment. "The highlands do not produce this kind of person."

"The highlands have not yet had the opportunity," Rakh’ash’tha said.