Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

  She turned to go, but Tern kissed her, motioned her to the chaise-longue, and she sat gratefully down. Cyan’s very lissom. Six hours of archery practice a day is carving her body in celestial ways.

  ‘Tern,’ she sighed. ‘Is there any limit to the number of times a man can Challenge me? I had ten Challengers last month, here’s another batch. This Crake … he’s coming at me for the fifth time. He knows he’s good. Last year I only won by a whisker.’

  ‘You still won, my dear. You’re still here on merit, still the paragon.’

  ‘A breath of wind in the wrong direction and I’m doomed.’

  Tern brought up a chair. ‘I’m afraid there’s no limit.’

  ‘Oh, god. So I’m going to get the same assholes year after year?’

  ‘Maybe so, until they grow old. But he can only Challenge you once a year.’

  ‘Some are just attention-seekers!’

  ‘Don’t let them wear you out, Cyan, darling. Collect them together and convince them to agree to a tournament, in the same week. That’s how Saker did it. But you have to shoot against each man personally. You can’t arrange heats.’

  Cyan rested her head on her hand, elbow on the chaise-longue scroll. ‘Dad never had so many Challengers … Well, maybe at the beginning, before he got established.’

  ‘If any harass you, say you’ll tell the Emperor.’

  She passed a hand over her forehead and blinked slowly. ‘I can deal with the harassment. Dad said that every generation turns up five hundred archers willing to cripple themselves to win at all costs. I think that’s an underestimate.’

  ‘It’ll improve,’ Tern said.

  ‘Between them and the suitors I’m on tenterhooks. I can’t settle down. They’re distracting me from practising. They’re a millstone round my neck … Jant? What are you doing?’

  Watching the three-dimensional structure of gems that was the setting sunlight on her shiny jacket.

  Tern gathered up my wings and folded them, placed her palm to my cheek and rolled my head forward. ‘Jant? Come on, Jant. We know you’re in there. We want to talk to you.’

  I offered the pad to Cyan. My hand twitched and rippled the paper. Cyan took it, turned it the right way up and squinted at my tiny, stoned handwriting.

  There I’d drawn: eighty-five centimetre barrel, lead ball wrapped in wadding, ignition cap with fulminate of mercury …

  She yelped. ‘It’s a hand-held cannon!’

  ‘… Equinnes … ah … Equinnes call them muskets …’

  ‘I can use it!’

  I was very aware of every shallow breath through my dry mouth. ‘It’s yours,’ I managed. After all, I had enough on my plate with the telegraph.

  She said, ‘Tern, can your foundries make this?’

  Tern shrugged elegantly. ‘I think so.’

  Cyan examined me with curiosity. Her face was broad and strong, her eyebrows shaped like seagull’s wings … My drug made her eyes seem even more intense and piercing, the sane, vivid blue you find in the heart of glaciers. I really couldn’t stop staring at her, and she was wondering how to bring me round. I said, ‘Make me a small musket, that I can carry in the air. A pistol …’

  She nodded. ‘Tern,’ she said. ‘Ring for some powerful coffee. Let’s go to the Throne Room and tell San I’ve got a new project.’

  And the rest, you might say, is history, except that it was only nine years ago, and nine years isn’t history. Yet.

  CHAPTER 9

  Capelin Thunder speaks

  Comet Jant Shira has asked me to write a few words so you may know who I am and from whence I came, because I am but lately made immortal and my story is an important one.

  I was once an artist, the finest painter in tempera, gesso and oils that the Island of Tris has ever produced … more probably, the best the world has ever seen. I painted the frescos of the Amarot and the debating chamber of the Senate, but my sketch studies and small chiaroscuro portraits are, I think, the most admired.

  I was studying in the library of Capharnaum twenty years ago when Gio Ami put the building to the torch. My notebooks I had deposited there were burnt with all the accumulated knowledge of Tris. I witnessed the library rise in flames, and realised what an uncompromising, warlike people had invaded our island and, like all the Capharnai, I was afraid.

  The ensuing battle, where many of my fellows were killed, put me in mind of a slim volume I had read in that very library. It was antique, by an anonymous author, entitled ‘An Enquiry into the Uses of Saltpetre.’ That essay had been destroyed with the rest, but there is a smaller library, at Salmagundi on the east side of the island.

  I travelled there, sought out the book and read it. It seemed obvious that, since I had a penchant for invention, my innovations in use from Capharnaum to Galimatias, I could with ease reconstruct this deflagrating substance. The warriors of the Empire would recognise the superiority of Trisian learning and reward me bountifully – more handsomely than the Senate of our ravaged island would ever be able to pay me as an artist. In fact, the greatest patron of all, the Emperor San, would surely give me immortality and initiate me into his Circle so I could bring the fruits of my genius to the Fourlands, forever.

  True, I had to give up my calling as a painter and focus purely on machines of war, but the cannon and mortars were themselves an expression of my creative instinct. I have a prodigious curiosity to investigate and comprehend every aspect of the world, whether it be the brushstrokes that replicate my sitter’s smile, or the possibility of producing a flying machine based on the kinetics of the Messenger’s wings. Some of my fellow Senate say I have sold my soul, sold out to the Empire. They say I have abandoned my artist’s spirit and become a creature of the Emperor and an instrument of war. To those critics I reply: an artist must eat. And it affords me greater freedom to seek one generous patron, than to flatter ten who never pay.

  I conducted some initial tests of the black powder mixture, adding charcoal to make it burn, and forming pellets so the ingredients do not separate. Then, one evening, as the sun set beyond the ocean in a great blaze of carmine – its light refracting on the ash in the high atmosphere from the burning of so many thousands of books – I took my stylus and wrote to the Messenger. I remember sitting at my table on the flat roof of my house, a bowl of grapes before me. The sea breeze stirred the parchment and I wrote calmly, with great confidence. Soon, I thought, soon I will leave this stifling rock I have outgrown, and sail down the path of scarlet on the ocean to the land where the sun sets. A benighted land, till I set foot on its shore; a land which will embrace me. Before the Emperor of the world in his unimaginable glory I will unveil my contrivance, and the thunder will speak.

  CHAPTER 10

  Rearguard

  My wings rode the wind and bore me up. Fresh air hit their leading edges and roared over the surface of my flight feathers, rejoined behind their tips. The wind caressed me and I flew with smooth strokes, and closed my eyes for a second in its warm roar.

  Throughout the night I’d moved the fyrd south, a line of lanterns crinkling as the men kept not quite abreast of each other. The division captains were daunted by my eyes reflecting like bronze mirrors as I’d run from one to the next, through the storm.

  By dawn the Eske and Rachiswater fyrds had reached Main Camp and Hurricane’s were peeling away. The first sliver of sun showed in the eastern sky dotted with clouds. The wind had dropped, the pressure of the breeze on the stretched skin of my leading edges told me how fast I was flying, and as it increased and ebbed with each gust I tilted my wings and kept myself sailing at the same speed.

  Look at Cyan’s musketmen reaping the horde! Look what she’s achieved! It’s fucking fantastic. She’s fielded fifty times more musketmen than Saker fielded crack archers. From the streets, pubs and workhouses of Hacilith, she’d thrust into their arms a musket each – trained them till their actions are so automatic they’re hard-pressed to describe them. Saker says it takes a lifetime’s practice to make
an excellent bowman, it moulds their bodies and their minds. Cyan turns out a musketman in a fortnight. And she’d doubled her numbers by fielding women: your musket only weighs four kilos whereas an archer draws over forty. Crossbows were obsolete, she’d relegated them to our safe forts and rear lines.

  The cannons had been firing for half an hour. Smoke obscured my view of the troops quick-marching, muskets ready. Their white jackets looked like the foam where the edge of the wave bleeds onto the sand. Flashes gleamed along the line as the sun caught their fixed bayonets.

  Between their lines horse teams dragged the field artillery, wheels turning. The captain of each team rode the first horse of the six, pulling the cannon linked to an ammo cart, linked to a wagon with the other five gunners riding high.

  Puffs appeared along the line of Cyan’s musketmen facing the valley. They poured volleys into the dense swarm of Insects escaping it. Saker’s archers beside them were arcing up clouds of arrows, like dashes, reaching their apex below me and hailing vertically down. Insects speeding towards them were festooned in arrows, slowing – the ones that reached the ranks were kebabed, squirming, on the pikes projecting from the front of their line.

  More Insects closed on Cyan’s lines because the musketmen couldn’t load fast enough. They were running onto her pikes four, five at a time as I went over her two battalions. Her lines were each three ranks deep. The first rank was four thousand armoured pikemen, with a flag bearer where they’ll turn. Behind them, two ranks of musketmen were firing precisely by company.

  Cyan, on her strapping horse, listened to their rhythm. I swooped down and landed beside her. ‘Your pikes are filling up.’

  ‘I know,’ she said sternly.

  ‘You should form square.’

  ‘It’s too slow.’ She pressed her lips together. No Eszai can show a sliver of weakness. No Eszai can waver. Six thousand men were relying on her, and if she didn’t radiate confidence no way would she keep them in line. And if the line breaks, they’re dead. We’ll only stay alive if we hold steadfast together to Main Camp. But Cyan had been tempered in the furnace of her Challenges.

  ‘We can take it,’ she said.

  And the cannon stopped.

  It was the gun on our right. The others continued, but from that side was silence. I suddenly heard Saker’s shouts it had masked. I looked down the neat line of whitejackets, but all I saw was the stoop of their backs, their arms working as they ramrodded balls down scalding muzzles.

  ‘Now what?’ said Cyan.

  ‘I’ll go see.’ I sprinted to the rear, along the line of men reloading furiously. They didn’t notice me in the drifting smoke. I ran past jackets pulled taut between wings and over curved spines. I ran past the rattle and scrape of plunging ramrods, elbows crooking as their fingers, blackened with split nails, dug into the ammo boxes slung on their shoulders. They plucked the cartridge from the criss-cross cardboard, raised it to their mouths; I knew the pleasing weight and tallow taste of the lead ball between my molars.

  I ran through a denser patch of smoke, emerged seeing the end of the line and pelted down until I jarred to a halt behind the last man.

  The two line-end sergeants with their pennants weren’t looking at me. They were gawping at the cannon. The brass six-kilo gun on its spoked wheels was completely unmanned. It stood alone, the lids of the ammo cart open, no sign of the detachment anywhere.

  ‘Where’s the cannon team?’ I shouted.

  ‘They buggered off!’

  Lack of fire had created a gap into which Insects were closing. The archers on the nearest flank of Saker’s battalion were desperately trying to kill as many as possible, but Insects were surviving around the edge of their range and racing towards us. In a minute this gap would be full of them. The ends of Cyan’s line and Saker’s wouldn’t have a chance. Then bugs would pour up the gap between their ranks and tear their battalions apart.

  I turned to the sergeant. ‘Form square! Now, now, now!’

  He ripped his bugle from his belt and blew the command. The ends of the lines glanced at him, a nervous ripple went over them, but the musketry crackle drowned the double note and nothing happened.

  ‘Tell Lightning,’ I yelled at him. ‘Square! Go!’

  He raced into the smoke, and at the same time Saker on his white horse plunged out of the ranks of archers. He took it in with a glance. ‘The cannon six?’

  ‘Fled.’

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘Saker—’

  ‘Slow fuse!’ he snapped. ‘Look—!’

  Something picked me up and smashed me into the ground. A ball of flame blinded me. My eardrums punched agony – a wall of heat and I screamed – grit cut into my cheek – and my whole body began to shiver.

  From a far place I heard my own voice in my head. Insects are coming! Get up! I clamped my tongue in my teeth and forced myself to my feet. All around was carnage. Musketmen lay on one side, their clothes blown off, skin raw and the bare ground sprayed with blood. Archers on the other side flayed to the bone. Some were just blackened flesh. Some kicked and flapped – flames sputtering over their melting wings.

  The cannon had exploded. We were on the lip of a dish-shaped crater. The end of its barrel lay peeled back in bent strips like orange rind. Its chamber was riven with deep cracks. Saker’s horse had been eviscerated by brass shards of the barrel. On the other side shrapnel had gouged through the thighbone of a musketman who lay unconscious, thick blood pumping out.

  My hearing tuned back in an agonising whine. I staggered over the matchwood of the block trail, to Saker’s stallion. Its ribcage was opened as if with a butcher’s cleaver. One side of ribs, with a stiff leg and hoof, projected at the sky. Its guts were blown out, pasted to the ground, and hanging over the raised leg.

  Saker, beyond it, lay on his side with a wing in the air. His silk gambeson was scorched black like the crust on beef. His face was speckled with grit blasted into it – blood was welling to the surface.

  Then there’s a pulse. I drew my sword, stood by him. His eyes were shut. Insects were running towards us, serrated jaws wide, and jerking back as shot raked them. The archers saw him, and faltered.

  ‘Keep shooting!’ I yelled. ‘Nock!’

  Their ranks seemed to surge up as each man stepped towards me and those behind, onto tiptoe, trying to see over their shoulders. A shout rang out – ‘The King is down!’

  Their faces set hard. The first men ran towards us, their line followed. Their arrowheads raised simultaneously. Immediately I had a rank of archers in front of me shooting straight at the closing Insects, and another behind me, at the back of the crater, shooting over our heads.

  Awians are fucking impressive. But there were too many Insects and they were still closing. At my boot toes, Saker stirred. I whacked my heel between his wings. ‘Get up!’

  The stench of burnt flesh and feather, scorched wool and sundered metal made me vomit into my mouth. I spat. The nearest Insect ran at us, pinned with arrows, then musket fire plucked it off its feet. It collapsed and crawled in circles, gouging the soil into peaks with the edge of its mandible.

  I kicked Saker on his thigh armour. ‘Get up, you big sod!’

  He rubbed his wing over his face, wiping off the blood. Then he scrabbled onto hands and knees, crawled to his bow and grabbed it. His men gave a cheer as he rose to his feet.

  Twenty, thirty Insects closed and crossfire from musketmen and archers dropped them, but thousands were speeding towards us. The Awians’ wings clamped tight to their backs in terror, all along the line. They knew they were finished but they didn’t miss a shot.

  ‘Form square!’ rang over Cyan’s battalions.

  At last! I helped Saker up, thinking he’d lean on me, but he pulled away and ran at Cyan’s ranks as the two lines morphed into square before us, like this: the men in the middle of the front rank stayed in place, those on either side of them ran to the rear and turned outwards to form the sides of the square, and Saker stood in the middle of t
he nearest side with his wings spread, as the ranks behind us ran into the hollow square, and lined it. The outermost division of the armoured pikemen sealed it.

  Saker had kept a gap, yelling, ‘Get my archers in! Get them in!’

  Cyan curvetted her horse in the centre of the square behind him. ‘Receive troops!’ she shouted at our side. Her musketmen and pikemen shuffled left and right away from Saker, widening the gap. ‘First Mica!’ he yelled at his archers. ‘Shelter in the square!’

  They’d drilled this often. They ran towards him – the lines ahead and behind me, and the rest latched on, still flexing their bows and loosing. The whole battalion followed, sprinting across the shallow crater to the gap in the pikes.

  Archers shouldered between the pikemen, through the levelled muskets and poured into the square. Saker waved to me and I ran with them – passed through in the middle of the crush. Inside, the men pressing me slowed and turned to each other.

  Outside the square, Insects stampeded onto the archers waiting to push through. They slung bows on their shoulders and drew swords. They didn’t have a chance. Cyan’s pikemen closed ranks – trapped them outside. I saw one man raise his sword, an Insect lunged and cut him in half at the waist. Insects streamed past, rattling down the pike points, and pulled the last of the archers under.

  Saker bawled at the ones packed around me, ‘First Mica! Are you on holiday? Pathetic! Rank up! These musketai need you!’

  The archers complied and lined up behind the musketmen along the inside of the square, making each side of nearly two thousand people now four ranks deep. The musketmen were shooting and reloading as fast as they could, and the square filled with suffocating smoke and the stench of burnt grease.

  Saker pointed at the colour ensign. ‘You. Off!’

  The young man dismounted and Saker wedged his boot into the stirrup and stepped up to the saddle. He looked out over the west side. ‘Tornado and Hurricane have formed square too. If we stay here we’ll run out of shot. Walk them.’