The Lost Valor of Love

47 | MY NAME IS NOT IMPORTANT

Istara sat back on her heels and pressed her palms against her gritty smoke-sore eyes, waiting for Meresamun to finish. A cold gust bore down on her, carrying the cries of the wounded. She shivered, despondent, noting the fresh losses surrounding them. In the time they spent saving one, ten had succumbed to their injuries.

"He will live thanks to you," Meresamun said, tying off the last suture on the soldier's chest. "By Isis, you are as accomplished as any of Egypt's foremost surgeons." She reached into the satchel loaned to her by the surgeons and pulled out a length of linen, rolling it into a bandage.

Istara hefted the unconscious soldier up, struggling to hold him steady as Meresamun bound the linen tight and tied it off. Breathing a prayer for his protection, Istara packed up her satchel and rose, working the kinks from her back, scanning the wounded for those they still had time to save. She stopped, abrupt. The soldier was unconscious, filthy with mud and covered in dried blood, but he still lived.

"The one there, without a pallet," she pointed, her voice tight. "I know him."

Meresamun stood, shading her eyes, curious. A sharp intake of breath and she was gone, stumbling through the men, falling to her knees beside him, holding his bloodstained face in her hands. She pressed her forehead against his, tears in her eyes.

Istara knelt beside him, assessing his condition, eyeing the gouge in his thigh where an arrow had been torn free, the gaping hole packed with mud.

She touched Meresamun's shoulder. "He is your man?"

Meresamun's eyes met hers, then fell back down to Ahmen. "Once, for a short time," she whispered. She looked back up, taut, pale. "Will he . . . ?"

Gesturing to a passing woman to bring them a pan of warmed water, Istara emptied her satchel. "His injuries are many," she answered, nodding at his leg, "but this one in his thigh needs urgent attention. We will begin there. So long as the blood fever has not yet taken hold of him, he will return to you."

She kept Meresamun busy cleaning and bandaging his wounds while she closed the torn muscles of his thigh with fine inner and outer stitches. It was painstaking work. The arrow had been torn fee with brute force, severing the major fibers of connecting tissue. Mid-afternoon came and went, the cold wind intensified, driving in hard gusts across the plateau. Huddling into herself, she carried on, enduring.

As the sun lowered its weight onto the horizon, she sat back and inspected her work, wiping her hands on a linen cloth. His injuries would heal, and cleanly. She felt the back of his neck. No fever. Meresamun had found a pallet and a thick blanket for him. Cleaned and bandaged, she covered him, wrapping him tight against the chill. There was nothing left to do but wait.

As she collected her things, Meresamun asked, hesitant. "How is it you know Ahmen?"

Istara paused in her work, catching the flicker of uncertainty in the other woman's question. "Do you see the city there, across the plain?" Istara nodded at the walls of Kadesh. "That was my home until I was sent here by the goddess Baalat. It was Ahmen who brought me into the camp, who defended me before Pharaoh. I pray you will not have to wait long until you are reunited."

She continued her work, soothed by the familiar actions of stoppering vials of ointment and rolling up the remaining linens into new bandages.

"We cannot be reunited," Meresamun said, hollow, "at least not like this. I must leave before he wakes."

Istara stopped rolling the linens, intrigued despite her exhaustion, but Meresamun said no more. Returning to the bandages, Istara murmured, "Then you should depart before the evening falls."