The Ice Saints

About

The winter of 1709 was the coldest in six hundred years, and a Swedish army spent it quartered in Ukrainian villages that were not asked. Anna Brelin is the regiment's surgeon without being licensed to be one: her husband held the warrant until he froze to death in December, and the colonel decided that a woman who can take a leg off in ninety seconds and keep the patient alive was worth the irregularity. She has one chest, no opiates since January, and a notebook listing every man she has cut. The lieutenant who runs requisitioning has been in love with her since he carried her husband in, and is scrupulously correct about it. He is also hiding his own brother's name on a deserter's roll. The woman who owns the inn and mill at Hadiach has fed nine hundred soldiers out of a village of two hundred and eleven people, keeps a ledger, has buried three neighbours, and understands better than anyone what both armies are. She and Anna have been sharing a stove, and lately more than that. Then the spring requisition is calculated and it takes the seed grain — the village lives through the winter and starves in the autumn — and it needs a medical certificate to justify the tonnage, and Anna is the one who signs. Frostbite, amputation, a mill loft with a deserter in it, and a river crossing in July that fills a notebook with four hundred names. Surgery is described with period-accurate, non-instructional precision. Desire is frank and closes the door. Five endings, and the army loses in all of them.

Cast

• Anna Brelin protagonist; regimental surgeon without a warrant
• Lt Erik Nilsson cavalry lieutenant and requisitioning officer
• Oksana Zhuravel innkeeper and miller of Hadiach
• Colonel Grip regimental commander; signed her irregular warrant
• Petter Nilsson Erik's brother; on the deserters' roll, in the mill loft
• S Sergeant Måns Ek the regiment's provost sergeant; keeps the deserters' roll no portrait yet