Vanja Thinks of Death

Camp
64th day of Winter 217, Night

Skau Vanja is familiar with death.

She has seen it since she was old enough to carry her mother’s basket, and to accompany Sigruid to sickbeds that so often became deathbeds. Vanja would sit in those rooms, fragrant with healing incense or heavy with the smoke and sweltering heat of an overstoked hearthfire, lit to sweat out fever. Sometimes, they could not be helped. Then there was the murmur of her mother’s prayers - for peace and an end to pain and safe passage across the river - and the sharp smell of alcohol, for pain relief and antisepsis and to blur the line between sleep and death. For those that followed the traditions of Jorung, Sigruid would sing of their feats, and ensure they crossed the River with weapon in hand.

Often the sick rallied, though, crossed back from the brink, and Vanja would be sent to fetch broth and bread or buckets of snow to be melted into clean water. It took time. Care. But they could so often recover.

Vanja had asked her parents, once, during her tenth winter, after she and her mother had returned from a sick call, if this was the way it was done in Jorung. Her mother hadn’t answered, but her father had shaken his head, and told her, in his heavy Dwarven accent that Jorung was a hard place. That death was not so easily fought, nor often so peaceful, there.

Vanja had pushed. She wanted to know more, and if her father was in the right mood, or if he had had enough vodka, he would sometimes tell fantastic sweeping stories of Jorung. At this, though, Vanja’s brother Mikael had grabbed her arm, hard, twisting it - there were monsters in Jorung, he said, and they’d tear her to pieces, and no one would say prayers for what was left. Vanja had hit him - a short jab with a closed fist. Broken his nose. Their father had pulled them apart and thrown them both outside, to cool their tempers and mind the goats.

She and Mikael had exchanged more blows. She was too sensitive, he said. It had been a joke. She had hit him, hard, with her elbow, and said a hurt deserved a hurt, and an unkindness for sport deserved worse. They’d reconciled by morning. Mikael’s nose healed flat and crooked.

Vanja fought her other brothers, too, for sport. To get strong. But it was only Mikael who she ever tried to hurt, and that only rarely. Even so, during her 14th autumn’s turn, when Vanja had grown enough that Klaus Piotrssen had grabbed her, remarking about down-soft skin and a healer’s touch, it had been Mikael who had shoved Klaus to the barn floor and kicked him in the stomach until their brother Sasha, stronger than them all, grown by then, had pulled him bodily away.

Sasha had chastised Mikael. Not for attacking Klaus, but for taking Vanja’s fight. It made her look weak, he had said, to have one of them fighting for her. Mikael had apologized.

Later, while Sasha and Vanja had been baling hay, harvested early from the winter wheat, Sasha had talked to Vanja of how cruel boys like Klaus often grew into cruel men. Sasha was a man himself, 10 years older than Vanja, but Vanja had scoffed. Said how she was as strong as any of them, and Sasha had told her, in his frank, analytical way, that that was simply not true. Vanja was a good fighter, yes. Blisterkere. But better to be smart. To avoid a fight, if she could. Vanja had taken offense, and left Sasha to finish baling on his own.

The following summer, their father had died. A sickness not even Sigruid could heal. There had been prayers, and incense, and his hands folded over a greataxe on his chest.

Barely a week later, Sasha had cracked Vanja over the head, bringing the haft of his halberd down on her skull with such force she’d lost consciousness. Vanja had no memory of the hit; just sparring. Sportfighting as they so often did. When Vanja had come to, in her parents’ bed, she’d heard her mother shouting in Dwarven. That Sasha had been foolish. That a hit like that could kill a person. Did he want to force her to grieve her daughter so soon after her husband had died? Sasha spoke back in common. It had been a lesson, he said. All his younger siblings were too reckless, and it would get them killed. And in any case he was the son of a healer, too. He knew how hard the hit had been. Vanja would be fine. Sigruid had sworn at him, low, angry oaths. That was true recklessness, she had said, to gamble with another’s life like that. Some injuries were not easily healed.

Once, Vanja had watched her mother peel back a girl’s scalp and remove a careful square of skull, the bone already a cracked eggshell, and the brain swollen with injury. The girl had lived, but she hadn’t been the same. Dull and docile. That happened, with head injuries. Sometimes.

Vanja had been fine, though. She had recovered well, and in the rematch had caught Sasha’s halberd, and wrenched it with such force she’d torn his shoulder, and he’d had to wrap his arm for a season, unable to fight or fell trees. Vanja had taken over this task, herself. Had brought Aric - then only nine - with her to teach him to swing an axe and grow the strength in his arms.

Over the years, Sigruid had taught Vanja to heal. To stitch wounds. To carefully find the bleeding vessels and tie them off or burn them closed, before sewing the skin with catgut or linen thread. Sigruid warned that a person could bleed out into their own body, sometimes, beneath healed skin. Life seeping out even as the body was still whole.

Always, though, there was death. The quiet promise of a River-crossing, that could be delayed, but never stopped altogether.

Even as Vanja found riverlight in her veins and spreading from her hands, her mother taught her that the mark of a good physician was not the number of people brought back from the River’s edge. Vanja had asked, what, then. If not lives saved. Sigruid had told her then that a good healer must try to preserve life, but sometimes, all a healer could do was not cause further harm. Sigruid had told her it was a careful thing. To balance pain and life and death.

And now, in quiet moments, when Vanja is on watch, or patrolling the edge of camp, or when she closes her eyes to sleep, Vanja tries to think of this balance, and instead finds herself thinking of the flash of her axe. The way the beard of the blade can catch on a jawbone, or a rib. The gasping breaths. The iron smell of blood and the putrid stench of loosed bowels. Vanja thinks of her fist behind the boss of her shield. The grip pressing into her thumb, the shock traveling up her arm with the crush of steel and stone against a skull. The slice of fletching against her cheek and the dull thud of a body hitting the earth. The poisonous red edge of corrupted riverlight and flesh melting like wax.

And instead, Vanja thinks of death.

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Vanja Thinks of Death