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helmsdeep war battle healer

A/N:  Again, thanks Cairistiona!

Noon approaches.  The healing wards are hot and cramped.  The wounded sit or lie on rows and rows of narrow pallets.  A few soft-voiced healers bustle back and forth between beds, arms piled with bandages or laden with hot water, carefully sidestepping the many obstructions in their paths.  Those obstructions come in the form of the mildly wounded soldiers who line the walls waiting for their turn, their uninjured comrades who pace between cots visiting their fellows, and desperate family members seeking news.  I fall into the last category. 

I elbow my way past two tall infantrymen still in their mail and helms.  I want to plug my ears against the groans and muffled cries all around me.  More disturbing still are the soldiers who make no sound, but lie still with their eyes fixed on the ceiling.  Just a few minutes ago, a healer paused to bend over one such man.  After a moment he straightened and sought out one of his fellows.  The two exchanged a murmured word before returning to the unmoving man.  They lifted him, one by the shoulders, the other by the feet, and carried him into a shadowed side chamber.  I do not know what madness prompted me to follow them, but the image—the two healers draping a linen sheet over the still form in a room piled with similarly shrouded figures—will haunt me for a long time.

I press my way up and down the rows of cots, glancing at each occupant.  I see many young faces, but not the freckled, gap-toothed boy I seek.  A man to my left vomits all over his bed sheets.  I avert my eyes from the blood-flecked mess and struggle to breathe through my mouth.  After the stench of this ward, the caves could be a perfumery.  At every turn, I pause to tug on the sleeves of healers and attendants, repeating what I’ve been saying for hours.  “Please, sir, I’m looking for my brother.  They said he was taken here . . .”  “Please, his name is Haela.  He’s about this tall, has blonde hair . . .”  “Please, they said he was shot on the wall.  They said I could find him here . . .”  “Please . . .” Please.

I am met with blank stares or gruff instructions.  Try another ward.  Try this bed.  Try that one.  Not now, can you not see this man is hemorrhaging?  Get one of the others to help you.  Get an attendant.  Go.  Finally, I have a stroke of luck.  A boy not much older than me staggers past, burdened by several jugs of water.  I take one from him and receive a look of gratitude.  I fall in step beside him, speaking quickly.  “I’m looking for my brother, Haela.  His captain said he was in this ward.”

The young healer looks up.  “Little one?  Eleven or twelve years old?  Light hair?”  I nod, my heart in my throat.  The boy points with his chin.  “Might be him back against the wall.”  I look where he indicates.  A few beds, surrounded by cloth screens, line a small alcove by the window. 

I swallow hard.  “Is he badly hurt?”

The attendant shrugs as much as he can under the weight of his burdens.  “The lord from the North is with him.”  As if that answered anything.  The boy stops by a certain bed.  I set the water jug down and offer a quick word of thanks before edging my way towards the alcove.

My father once told me that when he hunted his vision became like a tunnel.  He saw nothing, heard nothing, but his prey.  I didn’t understand what he meant then.  I think I do now.  As I approach the curtained beds, the sights, sounds, and smells from around me and behind me become irrelevant.  It is as though all my senses have rotated, the way a horse rotates its ears.  Every particle of my being is focused on that one small alcove.

I can hear the soft whisper of many lungs breathing, some rasping as if in pain.  The light from the window casts shadows against the closed curtains, revealing the silhouette of a large figure gently lifting a smaller one.  A soft whimper reaches my ears and rockets through my body, leaving a sharp dagger twisting in my chest, a heavy stone collecting in my stomach.  A deep slow voice follows it, murmuring in Rohirric.  Clenching my hands to keep them from trembling, I step around the screen.

There is Haela, sitting up in bed supported by a pair of strong arms.  His face is pale, but hearing my approach he lifts his head and offers me a weak smile.  I find I am unable to return it; I’ve caught sight of the black shaft sticking out of his shoulder.  “Hi Léo, is it dinner time yet?”  Well, he sounds alive.

The man supporting him laughs softly.  I turn my attention to him, and my breath catches in my throat.  For one wild moment, it seemed my father sat there, Haela’s small form nestled against his side.  Then, the man meets my gaze, and the spell is broken.  This is a stranger with dark hair and stern, gray eyes quite unlike my father’s laughing brown ones.  He does not look like Father—not really.  It was just a crazy impression brought on by his tall frame and low, gentle voice. He addresses me in the Common Tongue.  “He is your kin?”

I nod and swallow past the lump in my throat.  “My brother.”

“Would you brace his other shoulder?  This arrow must come out, and quickly.”  Though I would rather be twenty leagues away, I slowly approach the bed and lean my weight against my brother’s back.  Though I try not to look, my gaze is drawn to the arrow like iron to a lodestone.  The shaft protrudes several inches past the back of the small mail shirt my brother wears.  Its edges are splintered where the arrow head was broken off.  With a sharp knife, the stranger cuts away the worst of the broken ends.  Haela stifles a groan.  I can feel his muscles trembling, tensing as our actions aggravate the wound.  The man continues murmuring to him, his voice almost too soft to hear.  When the near end of the arrow is worn to an almost smooth point, he grasps the fletched end firmly, shoots me a meaningful look, and dislodges the shaft in one swift twist.  Haela cannot quite swallow a yelp of pain, and his face pales to the color of old milk.

The man quickly presses a hand against the wound, but it bleeds only sluggishly.  He waits a moment for Haela’s breathing—and mine—to return to normal.  “Can you lift your arms, lad?”  My brother nods bravely.  The man gathers the skirt of the mail hauberk and lifts it swiftly over Haela’s head.  The boy gasps as the blood encrusted iron is pulled free.  The stranger hands me the mail and goes to work cutting away Haela’s blood-stained shirt.  As the man cleans and bandages the wound, I turn the mail shirt over and over in my hands.  It is heavy.  My brother has been wearing this all night? 

The man expertly loops the bandages to make a sling for Haela’s arm and eases my brother back against the pillow.  With his arm and torso swathed in white linen, Haela looks even smaller than usual.  Finally, the healer steps back.  “Your brother did a man’s work today,” he says, wiping his bloodied hands on a rag, “I’ll give you a few moments, but then he needs to rest.”  With that, the stranger turns and steps a few paces away to bend over another bed.

I keep my voice low.  “Are you alright, Haela?”

He shrugs as best he can.  “My shoulder’s a lot better now.”

“That’s not what I asked, little brother.”

He may be my little brother, but somehow, Haela no longer seems young.  His face is pale, though from pain or weariness or grief, I can’t tell.  He avoids my gaze.  His voice is an agonized whisper.  “They killed Rynan.”

Rynan.  Our neighbor’s child.  The ten year old.  Now it is I who can’t meet my brother’s eyes.  “I’m just glad we got you back in one piece.”  I pat his sling, trying to make light of it, “Mostly, anyway.”

Haela does not smile.  He is looking away, at something I cannot see.  “They killed so many.  I lost track after the first few minutes.  But now, Rynan’s is the only face I can remember.”  I rest my hand on his uninjured shoulder.  I want to comfort him, but cannot; I’ve never walked in his new world.  The silence between us grows and stretches.

Finally, the healer returns bearing a steaming cup and a gentle half-smile.  “Drink this, tithen maethor.  It will speed your healing and grant you a few hours uninterrupted sleep.”

My brother seems to come alive again with the man’s return.  He reaches for the cup, and for some reason I’m reminded of how I reached for Lady Eowyn’s sword just hours ago.  “What’s a ‘tithen maethor’?”  He sips the steaming tea and makes a face at the taste.

A grin steals unexpectedly over the man’s face.  “It means ‘little warrior’ in the Elvish tongue.  It’s something my . . . my father used to call me.”  A twinkle graces his silvery eye.  “He also used to say ‘Drink all of that or it does you no good.’”  Taking the hint, Haela swallows a few gulps of the stinking concoction.  The medicine works fast, and in moments his eyes are drooping.  I help the healer ease him flat.  The boy is asleep before his head touches the pillow.

‘Little warrior,’ the man called him.  Maybe my brother does walk in another world now, but seeing his pale face against the white sheets, I cannot help but plant a kiss on his brow, as though he were still a babe.

The strange healer rises slowly.  For the first time, I notice that his face is just as pale—almost gray—with weariness.  He walks with a slight limp, and I hurry to help him gather the used cloths.  Now that my brother rests, I inspect this man more closely.  He dresses like the other healers in a simple linen shirt and breeches.  His face is clean, but from the grime around his hairline, I gather that this is due to an all too brief scrub.  As he rinses his hands in a large stone basin, I realize that not all of the blood he scrapes away is Haela’s; the man’s knuckles are shredded on both hands, and his palms are riddled with small cuts.  He speaks without looking up.  “Haela will recover with time, but he may never wish to speak of it.”  He glances at me and raises his eyebrows in surprise.  “But, it seems you’ve seen some combat as well.”  When I frown in confusion, he reaches out and takes my right hand in both of his.  I had completely forgotten about my . . . incident the night before.  Now, as he tugs away the grimy bandage, my earlier shame comes back in a rush.

“That’s no war wound.”  I mumble.

The man smiles.  “Who is to say?  There are many types of wars.” 

“It is nothing,” I protest.  The healer ignores me.  I glance pointedly at his own very battered—and completely untreated—hands.  If the man catches the irony, he gives no sign.  I sigh in resignation.

“Whoever tended this had some skill; the wounds have almost closed.”  As he runs a warm stream of water over my hand and dabs it dry with a cloth, I am struck by how familiar it all is—familiar and yet completely different.  The man’s hands have the same corded strength as Lady Eowyn’s, the same quick efficiency, even the same callus patterns from bow and sword, and yet where her hands felt like stone, his are warm and gentle.  There is something delicate in the way they move—carefully dabbing more salve on my hands, rewrapping the bandage—that seems utterly incongruous with their obvious size and power.

When I was small, my father used to sit by the hearth with me on his knee, whittling tiny toys out of blocks of wood.  I remember watching his big hands turn the block over and over, shaving away minute fragments, until it took the form of a miniature doll or horse small enough to stand on my palm.  I get this same impression from the strange healer; he uses but a fraction of his strength, so perfect is his control.

“Léo is a strange name for a maiden, even in Rohan.”  His deep voice startles me out of my reverie.

I swallow.  “My proper name is Léoma.”  He doesn’t respond immediately.  I summon my courage.  “You were in the battle?”  It’s a stupid question, and we both know it; every man in the fortress was in the battle.

He glances up as if I, in turn, have startled him from some deep reflection.  After a moment, he merely nods.  “I am called Aragorn.”  The name means nothing to me, and he can surely see this in my face.  He smiles ruefully.  “Lord Eomer, in a fit of melodrama, chose to term me ‘Wingfoot.’”

I recognize that name; everyone in Edoras has heard Eomer’s tale of the three hunters who pursued a hundred orcs on foot.  My eyes widen.  The young attendant’s words suddenly return to me.  “The Lord from the North,” I murmur.

“The fool from the North, more like!”  I jump at the gruff voice, for it comes from behind me.  I turn and am confronted by the hairiest face I have seen in my life.  It takes all my self-control to keep from jumping again.  It is one thing to hear a rumor of such outlandish folk as elves and dwarves in Rohan, but quite another to see breathing proof of their existence.  The Dwarf—for with such a face he could be nothing else—flashes me a grin.  I can see very little of his features—just a brief impression of white teeth behind a russet beard and bright eyes almost completely obscured by the thick linen bandage around his head.  Thankfully, he takes little further note of me, instead directing those sharp eyes at the man behind me.  “For love of mercy, Aragorn, it’s midday!  Whatever became of your lofty aspiration of getting a few hours rest?”

I try to slink back against the wall, only to realize that my right hand is still firmly in Lord Aragorn’s grasp.  He ties off the new bandage and releases me before addressing the Dwarf with a sigh.  “What would you have me do, Gimli?  There were those in need of my skills.”  His eyes dance over the Dwarf’s thickly bandaged head, “Not the least of whom was you yourself.”

“And yet, unless the last half a day has been an invention of my bruised brain, you’ve only a few hours before we ride to Isengard.  You have not slept in . . . how long has it been, now?  I’ve lost count.”

An edge enters the lord’s voice.  “You, too, were ordered to sleep, Master Dwarf.  You should consider it.”  I press close to Haela’s bedside, torn between fear and fascination.  Are they . . . bantering?  Who could have guessed that lords and legends can banter?

“Imagine how it will look in the history books, my lad:  ‘Last heir of Elendil faints from horseback.  Brains himself on a rock at Saruman’s feet.’”

Lord Aragorn groaned aloud.  “So much for the fabled gratitude of the Dwarves . . .”

“I must be sure to devise an appropriate lay.”

“Enough!  In exchange for mercy, I will sleep.”

The Dwarf bounded to his feet with a grin.  If he suffered from his head wound, he gave no sign.  “Excellent!  But not in these quarters.  No offense to the wounded, but I would like to see my own bedroll again, even if it is just a blanket on stone.”  Gimli offered a short bow in my direction.  “It has been an honor, young lady.”  He turns and strides towards the door before I even have a chance to blush scarlet. 

Lord Aragorn watches him go with a wry smile on his graven features.  He offers me a courteous nod, and I hurry to curtsey.  “Your brother should be fine, given time to recuperate.  Make sure that he gets plenty of rest and does not try to use that arm for at least two weeks.”  I stare at this man—this warrior—who sacrificed his own rest to ease my brother’s suffering.  There are no words for this kindness, so I merely nod and curtsey again.

And then he is gone.  The infirmary is no less crowded, but healers and attendants alike part ranks to let the lord pass.  One heartbeat passes, and then the ward is back to its noisy, stinking, crowded state of normalcy.  Slowly, I lower myself to sit on the edge of Haela’s cot and brush back his damp hair.  ‘Little warrior,’ Lord Aragorn called him, and so he is now.  I tuck my hand into his.  His palms are torn and blistered.  Soon, he will have calluses of his own.  My brother is changed; I must come to terms with the fact that the little boy who was dragged to the armories never came back.  Still, looking into his sleeping face, I feel hope for the first time since Father died.  I am able to hope because a stranger from a foreign land has shown me what being a warrior truly means.  I have seen that the hand that deals death can also bring healing, and the mouth that utters war cries can also laugh.  ‘Little warrior,’ he called Haela, and I realize now that there are worse things to become.

A/N:  Hope you enjoyed!  That’s it for this little story.  Purists will note my Bastardized Hybrid of Book and Movie Verse TM.  Sorry about that.  Hopefully, it still worked.  Be sure to let me know!  Give the little review button some love.  I welcome, praise, concrit, flames, and everything in between.

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