Chapter 3. A Hand Holding Onto Breath
Chapter 3. A Hand Holding Onto Breath
The boy's breath caught as if about to stop every time dawn arrived.
On the corner stretcher, shallow and ragged breaths barely continued.
The cloth wrapped under his ribcage last night lifted slightly with each inhale.
It was too precarious a movement to be evidence of life.
Ruan Hesse counted the intervals between those breaths and rubbed the back of his hand moistened with distilled spirits.
The tips of his fingers had gone numb from the cold overnight, but when he grasped the needle, they still didn't shake.
They couldn't shake.
The rain had stopped, but the inside of the medical tent was still wet.
Water droplets fell sporadically from the tent fabric, and the straw on the floor lay crushed under mud and blood, sunken and blackened.
The only thing reliable in this place now was the skill of his hands.
He wasn't fully alive.
Still, he had made it through the night.
Across from him lay Adjutant Mathias, whose abdomen had been stitched up last night.
His cheeks were flushed with fever, but his pulse was much clearer than the night before.
Sera pushed back her wet hair and assessed the condition, speaking quietly.
"They both held on."
Ruan gave a short nod.
"It's too early to be relieved. Keep monitoring the boy's breathing. For Mathias, change the water immediately if his fever rises."
Sera rummaged through the supply box and sighed.
"There's water to change, but no cloth to change it with. We used it all overnight."
"Tear something up if you have to."
"At this rate, we're not a medical unit—we're a sewing room."
Ruan didn't reply.
He examined Mathias's abdomen again.
The sutured area was barely holding. If it had twisted even slightly more, the wound would have burst.
The spot where he had reached in and tied it together at the very end of last night was still okay.
Just then, a muffled argument came from the entrance of the tent.
"You can't. If you get up now, it'll reopen."
"I have to go."
"You can't go."
Ruan looked up.
A man in a wet military coat was half-rising, gripping the edge of the stretcher.
His face was pale, his lips cracked.
On his left shoulder, a blood-stained bandage was still wrapped.
A wound stitched up during the night.
His name was Hein.
A courier, he had said.
Sera clicked her tongue.
"That man was groaning all night—what's he doing now?"
Ruan walked over to him.
"Lie down."
Hein clenched his teeth and shook his head.
"If I don't go now, it'll be too late."
"If your wound opens again, you won't survive even here."
"Still, I have to go. This order needs to be delivered to the left flank high ground."
At those words, the air inside the tent shifted momentarily.
The left flank high ground.
The road that had collapsed in the rain overnight would be the first place to cause problems.
One of the medics pushing stretchers unconsciously stopped walking.
Sera also put down the cloth in her hands.
Ruan looked into Hein's eyes.
His focus was unsteady, but his mind was clear.
Eyes like these are hard to persuade.
They were the eyes of a man holding on not by his body, but by one thing he had to do.
"Someone else could go—"
Hein opened his mouth to speak, paused to catch his breath, then said quietly.
"The two who came in with me last night are dead. I'm the only one who knows the way."
It wasn't a lie. Ruan remembered.
Under the rain-soaked flag, three had come in at once, and two of them had gone cold before they could even be touched.
Only this one courier had survived.
Bern approached from behind.
"We can't send him. If he rides a horse in that condition, he won't last half a shijin."
Hein spoke through gritted teeth, almost grinding them.
"Half a shijin is enough."
"Enough time for you to die."
"If the order arrives late, more people will die."
A short silence fell.
Ruan undid the bandage on Hein's shoulder and checked the condition again.
The wound itself wasn't fatal.
The problem was that he had lost too much blood and hadn't been able to bring down his fever properly overnight.
Any strain at all, and his vision would go white.
Yet his eyes remained unyielding.
Ruan swallowed an inward curse.
He knew this type of person.
They go even knowing their body can't hold out.
And usually, they're found collapsed.
By then, it really is too late.
He held out his hand to Sera.
"Leather strap."
"You're actually going to send him?"
"Leather strap."
Sera reluctantly handed him a waist strap.
Ruan wrapped it tightly just below Hein's wound to minimize movement.
He also re-bandaged it so the pain wouldn't spread as much when he inhaled.
He added padding cloth to support the shoulder and back, then tucked a small medicine vial into Hein's waistband.
Hein asked with a dazed expression.
"Why..."
"If you think you're about to collapse on the horse, bite that vial first. It'll keep you conscious for a moment."
"You mean I can go."
Ruan said coldly.
"I mean come back alive."
Hein's throat moved with a gulp.
Just then, the noble knight Edwin, who had been watching over Mathias, strode over.
Unlike last night, he didn't shout. Instead, he glanced at Hein's condition and said immediately.
"I'll lend you my horse."
Sera looked up in surprise.
It wasn't common for a knight commander to give his own mount to a courier.
Edwin asked Ruan briefly.
"Can this kid really be sent?"
Ruan looked at Hein for a moment and answered.
"He'll hold on. But if he falls off even once along the way, it's over."
Edwin nodded without another word.
"Good."
He went outside and called to his escort.
"Lower the saddle. The gentlest one. And clear the path."
In an instant, the area outside the tent became busy.
Hein staggered as he tried to get off the stretcher. Ruan grabbed his arm.
He was as light as if only flesh and bone remained.
Even with that brief support, the courier gritted his teeth and swallowed a breath.
"If you fall, I won't send you again."
"I won't fall."
"I'm sending you because I believe that."
For the first time, Hein looked Ruan straight in the face.
A medic soaked in blood and mud all night.
His eyes were hollow, and among his front locks was a single thin strand of white hair.
But oddly, his hands alone were calm.
The courier bit his lip and spoke low.
"I thought I was dead."
Ruan let go of his hand and replied.
"Not yet."
Hein seemed about to say something more to that, but swallowed it in the end.
Instead, he bent at the waist and gave a short bow.
It was an excessively deep bow for a courier greeting a medic.
Sera muttered quietly.
"Here we go again."
Ruan pretended not to hear.
Outside the tent, the dawn fog had yet to clear.
On the muddy road, boot prints and hoofprints were tangled together.
A black horse provided by the knight Edwin waited.
The saddle had been lowered, and the load was almost completely removed.
The moment Hein grabbed the reins, he closed his eyes briefly. His shoulder trembled as if pain surged up.
Ruan didn't miss that opening and pressed the bandage one last time.
"Return immediately after delivering the order. Don't fight. Don't play the hero."
Hein let out a breathy laugh.
"What would a courier fight?"
"On the battlefield, everyone dies like that."
Hein said no more.
He barely managed to mount the horse.
He almost lost his balance once, but Edwin's escort grabbed the saddle.
When the horse straightened up, the courier's face turned white.
Still, he didn't fall.
Edwin said lowly.
"Go."
Hein gripped the reins and disappeared into the fog.
The soldiers gathered in front of the tent watched his back in silence.
A courier who had been dying on a stretcher last night was now heading back to the front lines with dawn.
Some stood frozen with their mouths open.
Others unconsciously made a sign resembling the cross.
Sera sighed beside him.
"This is how rumors start."
Ruan turned back around.
"Bandages come before rumors."
He entered the tent as if nothing had happened.
The next patient was an engineer whose left thigh had burst open.
After spreading the wound and checking inside the bruise, he picked up the needle.
His hands moved again at their familiar speed.
Whether someone came back alive outside, or whether someone fell,
inside this tent right now, there were more bodies that needed stitching.
Some time passed, unknown how much.
From outside, along with the sound of hooves, a courier slid in as if tumbling.
His face was covered in dirt, and gasping for breath, he looked first for Ruan, not Bern or Sera.
"The left flank high ground—it didn't collapse."
Every gaze in the tent instantly focused on him.
The courier poured out his words in an excited voice.
"The order reached in time, so they shifted the troops. They blocked it just before crossing the bridge. They said if it had been one step later, the flank would have been exposed."
Someone near the stretcher swallowed a breath.
Sera slowly turned to look at Ruan.
Bern silently put down the forceps in his hand.
Ruan simply blinked for a moment.
"And that courier?"
"He fell off the horse the moment he arrived. But he's alive."
The air inside the tent shook strangely.
Someone muttered very low.
"Even a dead courier can be sent back on his feet?"
Another person, unable to laugh, just closed their mouth at those words.
Ruan cut in coldly.
"Stop talking nonsense and bring in the next patient."
But it was already too late.
The courier who had just entered, unable to contain his excitement, started talking again.
"That's what everyone's saying. They said if the courier sent from here this morning hadn't come, the flank would have been torn open. That a dead man came riding back on a horse."
Sera pressed her brow.
"Now the really strange talk is going to start."
Ruan didn't answer.
He picked up the needle again.
But this time, the eyes inside the tent were all different from before.
They weren't simply watching hands stitching wounds.
They were watching hands that had grasped a breath thought to have ended and sent it back to the battlefield.
Outside, the word was already spreading.
That a courier who had died at dawn had ridden through the fog.
That the place he reached hadn't collapsed.
And that the one who had sent him was the youngest medic in the blood-stained medical tent.
Ruan, knowing nothing of such talk, examined the next wound.
Flesh torn by a blade always split the same way.
Blood always flowed hot.
The face of a dying man, the breath barely holding—to him, it was always just the one in front of him.
But the world outside the tent had already begun to see it differently.
That sending one man back alive had saved the front line.
And so, those hands were not simply hands that stitched wounds.
The first rumor was born that way, very quietly, between the smell of blood and the mud.