Will Starling by Ian Weir Page A

back to the ship and following a grumbling subaltern down a ladder.
    Mr Comrie had shared a small cabin with three field officers. His kit was stowed underneath a berth, along with a flat rectangular metal box, considerably scuffed and dented. I opened it, just to be sure, and there they were — gleaming back at me.
    With luck, you’ve never seen a surgeon’s tools. Ranks of them, laid out each in its place, with military precision. Most of them I could scarcely guess at, though I was to find out soon enough what each one did. There were needles and bone-handled amputation knives, two smaller ones and one long wickedly curving blade such as an Arabian pirate might clench in his teeth as he boarded your ship in a penny-blood tale. Forceps and tweezers and surgical hooks, and a long slender probe for musket balls, and a cranial drill and a sleek finger-saw. There were three separate bonesaws besides, the largest like a hacksaw with a detachable blade. You knew they were bonesaws just by looking; wedged amongst them was a sharpening stone. Sharpness of the blade was a constant issue in battlefield surgery — so I was soon to learn. If you’re going to have a limb removed, try to be first up. After an hour or two, blades will start to bind as a saw will do in green wood.
    I swear that they really did gleam, in the dim light that filtered through a porthole. I looked up to find the subaltern eyeing me slantways. You could see what he was thinking, of course. A box of precision-made tools, in the clutches of a shifty little chancer like Your Wery Umble.
    â€œGot any idea what them things is worth?” he asked narrowly.
    And yes, it had crossed my mind: close the box, flash the smile, and hotfoot straight to the nearest pawn-shop. But curiosity won out that afternoon — I won’t call it virtue — and I did as I’d been commissioned. Clutching the box under my arm, I carried it back like a catamite bearing ritual knives to the priest who waited, bare-armed, at the sacrificial altar. Or no, not a catamite — wrong word — I looked it up just now, in Sam Johnson’s dictionary. I believe I intended acolyte instead.
    The crowd at the tavern had grown even larger, and in the midst of it Mr Comrie waited impatiently. “Thaire you are! Put them on the bench — beside me, close to hand.”
    The stricken man lay on the table, raising himself on one elbow and clamouring for another dram of pale before they set the bone. I saw with a start that it was Sidewhiskers. Mr Comrie ignored him.
    â€œYou, you, you, and you,” he said, jabbing a finger at four strapping sodgers. “Hold him down.”
    They exchanged looks of alarm, but did as they were bid.
    â€œKnife,” he said to me.
    â€œKnife?” cried Sidewhiskers, as realization dawned.
    â€œBest to do it now,” the surgeon told him. “Straightaway, while you’re still in mettle. More chance of survival. The agony is diminished.”
    â€œYou’re not going to have my leg off — just set the thing!”
    â€œWon’t heal. Fester and rot, gangrene next. Dead inside a week, shrieking.”
    â€œLook here,” someone was saying. “It’s his damned trotter. His decision.”
    Apparently it wasn’t. “Knife,” Mr Comrie barked to me, again. “No, the other — with the curving blade.”
    The Arabian pirate’s knife. It was used — I was about to discover — to slice through skin and muscle. Many surgeons still employed a technique known as the Master’s Round: one sweeping circular cut. Mr Comrie insisted on carving a “V” instead, leaving longer skin flaps to suture together afterwards, over the stump. Much less pain, and a better chance of healing without rot.
    â€œHold him fast,” he said to the four strapping sodgers, who now looked as chalky as Sidewhiskers.
    â€œNo!” wailed the stricken man.
    â€œTwo