Phoenix and Ashes (6 page)

There
weren’t many shellshock cases in the Royal Flying Corps, anyway. The
pilots and their support crew were well behind the lines, out of reach of the
guns and the gas. That was the lot of the PBI—the “Poor Bloody
Infantry,” upon whose lines in the trenches the pilots looked down in
remote pity, chattering and clattering through the sky.

Or
we do just before Archie gets us, or the Huns shoot us down
—Reggie
amended,
and then the first sight of that azure-winged Fokker interposed
itself between him and the ward, and the shaking began—

He
clawed at his bedside table for a glass of water, the paper the lads had
brought him, anything to distract himself. But then, before he could go into a
full-blown attack, something altogether out of the ordinary distracted him.
Because, coming towards him down the aisle between the beds, accompanied by his
usual medico, Dr. Walter Boyes, was another doctor, but this time it was
someone he recognized.

“Captain
Fenyx—” Boyes began, quietly, so as not to disturb West, who had
subsided into a morphine-assisted sleep, “—I believe you already
know my colleague.”

“I
should say so!” he exclaimed, sitting up straight. He had never been so
pathetically glad to see anyone in his life. “Doctor Scott! Maya! I had
no idea you were on the military wards!”

“I’m
not,” the handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman said, with a smile. Her
exotic beauty was more than enough to make even the stark white hospital coat
and severe black skirt look out-of-the-ordinary. “Good heavens, Reggie,
can you see the War Department unbending enough for that? Now, if I were
unmarried and prepared to volunteer for Malta, they would take me, and they
might
even allow me to practice in Belgium or France, but here? Oh, they
would
accept me as a VAD aide, of course. But because I’m married, they
won’t take me any other way. Heaven forfend that Peter might have to
supervise the household once in a while.”

“Well—when
you put it that way—” He shrugged. The War Department was full of
idiots, everyone knew that. Unfortunately, they were the idiots in charge. Maya
Scott and her fellow female doctors, few though they were, would have made a
big difference to the wounded. And if they were worried about the morals of the
patients being corrupted, or even those of the other military doctors,
wouldn’t a married doctor be “safer” rather than more
dangerous? “But why are you here, then? Surely not just for me?”

“Entirely
just for you; I’ve been sent by a higher power.” A little smile
curved her lips, suggesting that this was a joke. “Walter is a friend of
mine; he worked in our charity clinics before the war,” she continued.
“I didn’t know you were here until Lady Virginia got hold of me two
days ago; she gave me your doctor’s name, and that was when I went
hunting for him and you.”

Ah,
that explained “higher power.” His godmother was a force of nature.

“I
would have been here sooner, but until I got hold of Walter, I wouldn’t
have been allowed near you.” It was her turn to shrug. “I’m a
female, not your relative, your fiancée, nor a nurse, you see. Never
mind that I’m a doctor; evidently it is expected that you would
immediately corrupt my morals, or I yours. Fortunately, Walter has made all
smooth.
He
is allowed to bring in anyone he likes as a consulting
physician, so long as I don’t expect to be paid.”

In
the course of that exchange, Reggie and Maya communicated something more,
wordlessly. A lift of an eyebrow on Reggie’s part towards Dr.
Boyes—
does he know
? The tiniest shake of the head from Maya,
confirming his initial impression—
no
. So, Doctor Walter was
neither an Elemental Mage himself, nor was he among the few who were not Mages
that nevertheless knew of the existence of Mages and magic.

Doctor
Maya, however,
was
an Elemental Mage. In fact, she was an Earth
Master.

“Walter,
can the patient leave his bed?” she asked in the next moment.
“I’d like to talk to him privately.”

“I
don’t want him to put weight on that leg yet, but yes,” Doctor
Walter replied, and sent the VAD girl for a wheelchair. Then he added, in a
hushed voice Reggie was sure he was not meant to overhear, “If you can
get something out of him about his experience—”

“That’s
what I’m here for,” Maya said soothingly. “I haven’t
seen a great
many
shellshock cases myself, but I’ve gotten some.
Nurses are coming back to us in sad condition, particularly the ones
who’ve been on transports that were torpedoed, or shelled while working
near the lines or riding with the ambulances. His grandmother and Lady Virginia
DeMarce, his godmother, thought he might be more willing to unburden himself to
someone he knows.”

Reggie
almost laughed with pent-up hysteria. Someone he knew! Good God, if that was
all
it was! If they only knew, all those medicos—if they only knew!

But
the chair arrived, and he levered himself into it, wanting nothing more than to
be out of this ward, quickly, where he could finally talk to someone who would
at least
understand
. Because he was not “just” a victim of
shellshock. Oh no. That was only the smallest of his problems…

It
was an unseasonably warm day, he discovered, as Maya wheeled him briskly and
efficiently out into the hospital garden. That was a relief, for she was able
to find a little alcove where they could be quite private, and park him with
his “back to a wall. He blessed her exquisite sensitivity, but she
was
an Earth Master, after all, and a Healer to boot, and sensitivity came with
that description.

“Well,
Reggie,” she said, the moment she settled down across from him, with
their knees practically touching. She took out a bit of paper from her pocket
and consulted it. “I’m going to make this easier
and
more
difficult for you. I have been studying Doctors Freud and Jung’s works,
and as you heard, I have already seen several normal cases of shellshock. I did
my studying of your case before I arrived, so let me tell you quickly what
I
know, then we’ll get to what I
don’t
know. I know you were
shot down, your observer was killed—” she looked at the paper in
her hand “—Erik Kittlesen, wasn’t it?”

He
nodded, numbly, both desperately grateful that he wasn’t actually having
to tell all this himself, and appallingly afraid of what he was going to have
to say when she started asking questions.

“You
came down close to the Hun side in No-Man’s Land. Some of the Huns came
to get you out of the wreckage, and a barrage hit, killing everyone but you.
Then one of
our
parties got you out, dragged you to a bunker, and
another
barrage hit, burying you in the bunker for two days until another rescue party
dug you out. Is that the long and the short of it?”

He
nodded. His mouth felt horrible dry, and when he licked his lips, he fancied he
could still taste that horrible substance that passed for air in the trenches
and the bunkers—a fetid murk tainted with the smell of past gas attacks,
and thick with the stench of death, of blood and rotting flesh, rats and foul
water.

“Now
comes the hard part,” she said, and reached over to take his unresisting
hand. “Now I ask you questions. And Reggie, you
must
answer
them. I can’t help you if you don’t, or won’t.”

Once
again, he nodded, feeling his throat closing up with panic, and the sting of
helpless tears behind his eyelids.

“Why
did you get shot down?” she asked implacably. “You are an Air
Master, one of the most skilled I know. We both know it wasn’t luck that
was keeping you in the sky,
particularly
not given the horrid old
rattletraps you were often given. So what happened?”

“I
went up,” he croaked. “And—Maya, this is a damned wretched
thing to say, but—look, the only way I was ever able to face what I was
doing was to never, ever think about the Hun as anything other than a
target.” He made a sound like a laugh. “Actually, I was
Erik’s only chance to go up at all, which was why I was in a two-seater instead
of flying solo as usual. Everyone knew that even though Erik crashed more birds
than he flew, anything he aimed at, he hit—he even took down a Hun with a
half-brick, once! He’d crashed his plane as usual; the only things
available were my usual bird, which was having a wonky engine anyway, and the
two-seater. They knew if he was in the observer’s seat, I could
concentrate on flying the bird and he could concentrate on what he was good at.
But if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t even have been up there
that day.”

Maya
nodded. “I see why you feel doubly responsible.”
Pilots were
not in such plentiful supply that Erik would not have been up on his own
.
He knew that; he’d been told that too many times. She didn’t say
it, because she must have known that he’d been told it and didn’t
believe it, and he was grateful that she didn’t say it aloud again
because she understood it wouldn’t help. There were a great many things
in this war that people understood, but didn’t say aloud. It was probably
the only way most people kept from going mad.

But
of course, I’m already mad… or getting there…

“But
why
were you shot down?” she persisted, as if she knew that this
was where the first crack had appeared in his armor. Maybe she did.

“Because—”
he swallowed. “Because this time, when I went up, there was someone
I’d never seen before up there to stop me. Bright blue Fokker. Maya,
he
was one of us. He was an Air Master too. And—” he shook his head,
“and I felt something. From
him
. Not his thoughts, more like
what he was feeling. He was—he was in mourning.” He closed his eyes
for a moment, to fight down his own tears. Words were totally inadequate to
what he had felt in that single moment. Mourning? It was deeper than mourning.
It had been self-revulsion, hatred for what the man had been doing, and a
terrible, terrible sense of loss.

The
Hun hadn’t only been mourning what he had to do—he was in mourning
for the loss of everything he cared for. “He was—” Reggie
groped for words, “flying with sorrow, the deepest, blackest sorrow I
ever felt in my life. And it was because by doing his duty, which was the
honorable thing to do, he was being forced to kill us, who should have been his
comrades. Because his beautiful blue heavens were filled with a rain of blood,
and his beautiful blue wings belonged to the Angel of Death. He knew he would
never, for however long he lived, fly in skies free of blood. His world was
shattered, and he’d never really feel happiness again.”

Maya’s
fingers tightened on his. “Vishnu preserve us,” she replied, her
voice full of the shocked understanding he had hoped to hear.

“I—couldn’t
shoot him. He couldn’t help but shoot me. I—” he shook his
head. “I didn’t evade. He got Erik first, then my tank, and then my
engine. He got Erik, and I felt him die, and it was my fault—my
fault—”

Once
again her fingers tightened on his, but she did
not
say, as so many
fools had, that it wasn’t his fault. “You made a mistake,”
she said instead. “At some point, Reggie, you have to stop paying for it,
and forgive yourself. But only you can decide how much payment is
enough.” Then her voice strengthened. “You were shot down. Your
collarbone and your knee were both shattered, your ribs were cracked, and I
think only your Mastery saved you from worse. Then the Huns came to get you out
before your plane went up in flames. Something happened then, too, didn’t
it?”

“
A
Hun came to get me out
,” Reggie corrected. “
A young fellow
came pelting out regardless—I suppose our boys must have seen what he was
doing, because they held their fire. He came pelting out, into No-Man’s
Land, over the wire, and hauled me out while the bird was burning. And he went
back for Erik, and
—” he swallowed “
that was when the
shell hit. Young fellow, he couldn’t have been sixteen. Maybe less
.”
He felt his throat closing again at the thought of that earnest young face, at
the young voice that told him “Stille, stille, bitte. Ja, das ist gut,
stille.”

“The
boys that came after me found some bits of his things, a letter from home, a
picture of his mother. His name was Wilhelm, that’s Hun for William, like
West in the next bed over from me in the ward. PBI, like young Willie, too.
Wilhelm Katzel. That’s
two
fellows that died because of me, in
less than five minutes.”

She
nodded, but said nothing for a moment. “I think,” she finally said,
“When this is over—you should tell his mother how brave he
was.”

That
was not what he was expecting to hear. “How will that help?” he
asked angrily.

“I
don’t know,” she replied, not reacting to his anger at all.
“But I do know that it won’t hurt. It will let her know he
hadn’t lost his decency or his honor in this vile slaughter, and
that’s something for her to hold onto. This war has made beasts of so
many—perhaps it will comfort her to know that her Wilhelm was still a
man.”

It
was not the answer he had been expecting, and he flushed a little. But she was
right. She was very right.

But
of course, the worst was yet to come.

“That
isn’t where the real trouble lies, though, is it?” she continued.
“Oh, it’s horrible, and you are burdened terribly with guilt, but
that isn’t the worst.” She tugged a little on his hand, forcing him
to look up, into her eyes. “The worst came when you were safe,
didn’t it? In the bunker. Buried alive.”

He
almost jerked his hand out of hers, and began to shake uncontrollably.
“How did you—”