Penance by SurgicalSteel

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Chapter 1

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My wife was right. I am not sane, Nemir thought, and not for the first time. How she would laugh when he made it home and was forced to admit it! She’d opposed him joining this army from the first time he’d mentioned it right up until he left the Free Port to volunteer his services as a surgeon. His cousin Avareth had warned him that these so-called kings were not to be trusted and that the so-called Faithful weren’t, and he hadn’t listened to her warnings. He’d known the reason for her distrust, after all – her betrothed had been handed over to the Temple priests by the ‘Elendili’ because he bore a superficial resemblance to Anárion, that blond blowhard who called himself a co-ruler of ‘Gondor,’ and Nemir knew all too well what happened to anyone out of favor with the Zigûr in the Temple of Arminaleth.

His own actions in the Temple were why he was here, after all. He’d played his own part in the sacrifices there, and he didn’t even have the excuse of belief in the ‘Giver of Freedom.’ His only reason had been curiosity, and recognition of an opportunity that might never come again. Now he was here in this damned black land out a desire to make what amends he could for the men he’d killed in She-That-Fell. His wife insisted that they didn’t owe those treacherous bastards who called themselves ‘Faithful’ a damn thing – and after the way she’d been treated when she’d miscarried their first child on one of the ‘Faithful’s’ ships, he could hardly blame her.

And his mother? Better to not even think about what his mother had told him.

He reached up to adjust the spectacles he’d convinced an Elvish engineer to construct for him, clear lenses surrounded by a leather barrier to keep the worst of the ash particles out of his eyes, and then went back to suturing the dead man’s chest closed.

Black Land, black lungs, black stools, black moods, and damn that so-called High King for not rotating the men out more frequently, Nemir thought, not entirely certain which so-called High King annoyed him more. The Elvish one – Gil-galad – had the oh-so-helpfully condescending herald who insisted on coming to the healers’ tents and getting in the way of the necessary business of amputations and cautery as often as not, and given that there seemed to be a second grouping of Elves who didn’t completely recognize that king’s authority, claiming to be a ‘High King’ seemed a bit ludicrous. Equally ludicrous to Nemir was Elendil, the man who claimed to be a High King of Númenor in exile, who damn well knew that Umbar disputed that claim, and whose sons?

Nemir shook his head, not certain whether Isildur, the black-haired father of Zamîn’s bastards, was more annoying than Anárion, the blond blowhard of Minas Anor, or the other way around. The blond blowhard was the one who’d kept trying to take away little bits of Belfalas’ territory and who only allowed surgeons to practice in his city under the strict supervision of the physicians – so he supposed the blond was at least somewhat more irritating.

In a sudden mean-spirited moment, he decided to leave the chest open, and waved to one of the nearby aides. Grey dust fell from the cloth he’d tied over his nose and mouth as he said, “See if His Majesty has a moment to spare.”

“Which one, sir?” the young aide said.

Nemir could feel his lips curl into a grim smile behind the face-cloth. “Whichever one you find first,” he said. Even the poor surgeons’ aides knew that there wasn’t really any one person in charge of this siege – and when no one knew whose orders to follow, perhaps it was no great surprise that no progress was being made.

He shook his head. For all the Enemy’s faults, at least the Enemy’s forces knew precisely where their orders came from.

“You wished to see me?” came a calm voice from the tent opening, and Nemir sighed. He’d almost been hoping for the blond blowhard. The so-called High King was generally more reasonable than either of his sons. Isildur had a tendency to explain himself when needled, almost as if he didn’t recognize it. Anárion? Anárion fought back, and Nemir would have rather enjoyed the argument.

“Your Majesticness,” Nemir began, looking up from his deceased patient, somewhat annoyed by the look of patient amusement on Elendil’s face. “If you would step a bit closer, my lord, I have something I wish to show you,” he said, pulling his suture line a bit farther apart to expose the lung underneath. “It may surprise your lordship to learn that I, like many surgeons, am something of an anatomist. I have been examining our dead, and have made some interesting observations. Do you see this man’s lung, my lord?”

Elendil stepped closer, peered into the man’s chest, and clapped one hand to his mouth, breathing heavily.

“Much as you and your men have found amusement in my garb,” Nemir said, waving at his face, “it would likely behoove you to do the same. The soot that’s constantly in the air here – it tends to settle in a man’s lungs. See the black spots? Healthy lungs are more of a pink color. The face cloth which is the source of such hilarity to your golden-haired son will prevent most of the soot from entering the lungs. Now, there is something in the air here which causes the lungs to fill with fluid,” he continued, slicing into the greyish tissue to demonstrate. “The face cloth would not prevent that, but rotating the men out with some regularity may allow them to recover and return to battle.”

Elendil had lowered his hand from his mouth, and he shook his head, saying, “We need every available man…”

“You won’t have many available for long if you leave them here,” Nemir said, rolling the dead man over to a prone position and spreading the buttocks apart. “The black drainage? The fumes affect the intestines as well. Would you care to look…”

Elendil waved a hand in the air and shook his head. “I would not,” he said. “I shall consider your suggestion – although I am more than a bit dismayed by the lack of respect you show for the dead…”

“More disrespectful to let them keep dropping without determining why,” Nemir said, interrupting him, and then adding, “Your Majesticness.”

“You’re Avareth’s brother? Or cousin,” Elendil said.

“Cousin,” Nemir said.

“The cousin with the grandson studying in Umbar,” Elendil said.

“With the grandson who was studying in Umbar,” Nemir corrected. “Your army sadly doesn’t pay me well enough to pay the required fees to their Healers’ Guild. He works for his great-aunt now,” he concluded. He rolled the dead man up onto his side, picked up his grimiest needle driver and a needle and suture and began to close the chest.

“No one conscripted surgeons,” Elendil said very quietly. “You’re free to leave…”

Nemir shook his head at that and continued working.

“Surely your grandson’s parents…” Elendil began.

“Killed in Minas Ithil,” Nemir said. “Building a damn city right on the borders of this wretched place was like making a rude gesture at the Zigûr, you know. Like daring him to attack.”

Elendil opened his mouth to say something else, but then closed it, his eyes narrowing as he stared at Nemir’s hands.

Oh, fires below. I forgot, he thought, looking at the ring his mother had given him.

“Where,” Elendil said very carefully, “did you get that?”

“From my mother,” Nemir said. It wasn’t a particularly large ring, and it was so often caked with grime and blood from his work these days that he often forgot the image on the flat surface of the signet.

“Where did she…?”

“From the man who sired me,” Nemir said, remembering his mother’s explanation as she gave him the ring and the other token, which he pulled out from under his shirt, the coin that she’d had made into a necklace. “The one who paid off my grandfather with these,” he added, brandishing the coin, and then looked at his hands again, at the ring with the stylized image of a tree superimposed on a background of a tower.

The tower of Oromet. The Tree of Arminaleth, his mother had explained, and although he’d never seen the tower, Nemir had lived in Númenor. He knew before she’d even explained any further that Oromet was close to Andúnië.

“I’ve never been unfaithful to my wife. You cannot possibly think…” Elendil began.

Nemir snorted. “No one’s suggesting that you did, Your Majesticness. And given our respective ages, you’d have been rather precocious. My mother had her flaws, but that wasn’t among them.”

Elendil’s eyes narrowed as if calculating something, and then he sighed and muttered something about Amandil’s casual reaction to Isildur’s liaison with Zamîn, and Nemir snorted again. If Elendil had something else to say, though, it was interrupted by the tent flap being thrown open by one of a pair of elves – the one who wasn’t trying to bleed out from a scalp laceration. “I’ll consider your suggestion,” Elendil said, exiting the tent.

“Suggestions, plural,” Nemir called after the so-called High King of Númenor in exile, shook his head, and wondered again why he hadn’t moved his family down to Umbar. Zamîn had been wise enough to keep her land out of this conflict. But he sighed again, and washed his hands quickly before moving over to examine the exsanguinating elf. “You people are supposed to have such miraculously protective helmets,” he began.

“Which aren’t issued to the surgeons,” the injured one said, sucking his breath in with a hiss as Nemir probed the wound. The skull underneath the lacerated scalp felt smooth, except… no, that was simply the frontal suture, where the frontal bone met the parietal.

“Damn lucky your skull wasn’t cracked,” Nemir said. “What in the name of all that’s holy were you doing so close to enemy combatants…”

“Bauglir’s balls, don’t you have any coca tincture? That fucking hurts!” the elf said as Nemir began irrigating the injury.

“I’m to instill coca tincture only to wash it away?” Nemir said. “If you’re really a damn surgeon, you know about the damn flies,” he added.

Damn black flies, he thought. Nemir normally didn’t mind a few flies on a wound. Normal maggots, Belfalas maggots, they did a damn good job of keeping wounds clean. Oh, they didn’t look appealing, but the maggots produced by Belfalas flies only fed on dead tissue. Those in Mordor? They preferred living tissue, and damned if Nemir was going to take a chance on any of them being left in this wound.

The elf grunted his agreement as Nemir continued to rinse the wound with the cleanest water he had, and then hissed again as Nemir started applying coca tincture to the wound – and bless Zamîn for continuing to send it to his family, even though she surely must know where it was being used.

“I didn’t think she was a combatant and I didn’t know she had a defender,” the elf said as Nemir began suturing the laceration.

“She?” Nemir asked incredulously. “The Khandri men protect their camp followers rather zealously. Lucky he didn’t go for your manhood!”

“She wasn’t Khandri,” the elf said in such flat tones that Nemir didn’t question him further, but focused on placing the sutures, a full-thickness bite on one side, and then the other, and then a partial thickness bite on both sides going the opposite direction.

“Vertical mattress sutures,” Nemir’s patient said. “A full thickness laceration, was it?”

Nemir made a wordless noise of agreement and continued working.

“Then it truly is luck the skull wasn’t fractured,” the elf said, more to himself than to anyone else.

“Done,” Nemir said as he snipped the last suture. “You should have those removed in a few days – for one of my own kind I’d say a week to two weeks. For you? More like four or five days, I’d think. You can come back to me, or…”

“Who should I ask for?” the elf asked, which startled Nemir – and thinking about it further, it was startling that this elf had even come to him in the first place. Most of them preferred their own healers to mortals for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to Nemir – but as it lessened his workload, he didn’t worry about it much.

“Nemir,” he said, adding, “Or if you ask the few men from Umbar who volunteered for this damn thing, they sometimes call me Nimruzîr.”

The elf gave Nemir an odd look at that, but pointed at himself, saying, “Brethilion.”

Oho, Nemir thought. The one who seemed almost as annoyed with Gil-galad’s too-helpful herald as Nemir was. Small wonder he might look for someone else to tend his injuries.

“Nimruzîr,” Brethilion said. “Isn’t that Adûnaic for elf-friend?”

Nemir shrugged. “A bad joke. I’d never even met an elf when the name was given to me, but my colleagues thought my name sounded a bit like it – back when I was more anatomist than surgeon.”

Brethilion cocked his head to one side with a curious look on his face.

“In Arminaleth,” Nemir said in answer to the unspoken question, and then using the original name, “Armenelos.”

Brethilion blinked at that, clearly wanting to inquire further, but simply pointed to his head and said, “Thank you. Four days.” And with that, he stood and left the tent.

A black land. Black lungs, black bowels, black moods, and the damn black flies.

I am insane, Nemir thought, poking his head out of the tent and waving in two young pages to carry the dead man away.

For a moment, he wondered how much longer his penance would last, and then put that thought aside and went back to his work.