Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

  ‘All the way to the Wall?’ shouted Cyan.

  ‘Yes! Tawny and Hurricane will know we have to. If they don’t move, Jant – tell them!’

  Cyan sawed her reins and controlled her panicking horse. ‘Have we got enough cartridges to make it?’

  ‘Well, that depends how fast we go!’

  He walked his horse to the far side of the square and looked south. The Castle’s sun flag holstered to the saddle rippled above him, trailed down over the cantle.

  Insects were seething around all sides now, seeking a way in, but the pikes fended them off and balls were slamming into them. An Insect reared above the line of pike tips and flailed the air with its four front legs – shots blew its head apart in a spatter of thick cream.

  Hundreds of dead bugs were piling up, forming a bulwark on top of which more appeared, running down onto the points. The men were lighting and throwing their grenades now, and explosions blasted in the mass beyond the pike tips.

  ‘Walk!’ yelled Saker. ‘To me! To the colours! Steady … keep it steady!’

  The men and women of the square uprights took a half-turn towards him and began to walk. The whole square started to crawl, crab-wise, over the ground. Acting as a single organism, keeping up the rhythm of shooting and reloading.

  Two dead archers lying in the centre seemed to move across the ground as we progressed. They disappeared out the far edge of the square – the men there, walking backwards, stepped over them and their side reached me: I loped across to join Cyan and Saker.

  Her fingers were white on the rifle stock, she was furious. She bawled at her father, ‘I’m Lightning, not you! I give the orders!’

  ‘You did. I didn’t hear them.’

  ‘Leave it to me!’

  ‘Yes. But …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘They’ll have to go faster than this.’

  She shouted, ‘Quick march!’ and the square began to elongate as the men near her hurried more than the trailing edge.

  ‘Close up! Close up!’ bellowed the sergeants.

  ‘One gap and we’re dead,’ said Cyan.

  Saker pressed his grit-blasted cheek and glanced at the blood. Blood and sweat were running down into his collar. I threw him my canteen and he poured water over his face, wiped it off with his sleeve, and flung the bottle back to me.

  Musketmen chucked out a layer of packing in their cartridge pouches and started on the next. The shoulders of every man and woman jolted with each shot, but so many Insects hemmed us in that every ball ruptured chitin.

  ‘Keep together!’ she yelled.

  Saker sniped the bugs climbing down the pikes. Smoke drifted between us – he faded from view, then reappeared. He said, ‘When the cannon exploded …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That wasn’t an accident.’

  I stared at him. ‘Who’d want to destroy a gun?’

  He shrugged, three fingers around one strung arrow and four more in the same hand. ‘I know what I saw!’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Slow fuse leading into the vent. I only noticed when it sparked over the boss. They must have hidden the length underneath – and packed the barrel with charges. And sealed it with wadding.’ He winced in pain. The whites of his eyes were totally bloodshot. They were running so much they’d washed clear patches on his cheeks.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Men do weird things when they’re scared. It nearly killed us!’

  I blinked, uncertain. Had they blocked their cannon to make a bomb, to destroy as many Insects as possible?

  ‘It was the gun Syrinx,’ I said. ‘Thunder will know their names.’

  ‘Fuck these muskets! I can’t see! Jant, fly over the other squares. See what shape they’re in. Then come back. You have to guide us!’

  I ran diagonally across the square and took off over the jutting bayonets. Smoke rolled beneath me. Our three squares floated like islands washed by the copper waves of bugs. From the camp to the static cannon line, we were pushing through their solid, seething sea, and from the valley yet more were pouring.

  Insects broke against the palisade of men. Tried any opportunity to cut in. Chewed the pike poles, writhed on the points, showing pale undersides, and for every one skewered, five more tried to push beneath.

  Volley fire jetted from the sides of the squares. Smoke puffed along them – the shots crackled like burning pine branches. Our squares pushed through the horde so slowly, it was only when I glanced from Tornado’s to Cyan’s that I saw she’d progressed. Tornado’s square was the most ragged. Its centre was like a hospital, full of dying and mutilated bodies being dragged along, on stretchers made from muskets in the sleeves of bloodstained coats.

  Tornado waved me on. Over Hurricane’s square – their rate of fire had slowed, they were throwing their grenades. They must be low on ammo. Hurricane was pressing them hard – he raised his poleaxe and pointed forward.

  To the cavalry. Eleonora was hard-hit and she’d withdrawn to the margin where Insects were more dispersed. She was riding circuits with her men, lancing Insect after Insect with thin spears drawn from the hopper on her saddle. Beyond them, our line of cannon bunkers roared in cover fire.

  Cyan’s square dropped behind as Hurricane’s edged ahead. I flew over her and saw Insects pushing on top of each other. Abruptly, one big ant forced between the shafts and dragged the pikeman to the ground. Sprawling, trying to fend off the claws scrabbling over his armour, he blocked the path of everyone following. The pikeman ahead kept walking, and there grew a gap.

  Insects surged into it. More Insects behind, forced them in. Pikemen on either side slowed to kill them – the gap became a dent in the line – the dent became a concavity and, like a dam breaking, the Insects burst through and raced into the middle of the square.

  The archers spun round and took the first few. The innermost men started screaming, turned to face the Insects, levelled muskets and shot across the square. Never reloaded. The bugs struck into them and they struggled with bayonets. The lining of the square boiled into knots of fighting men.

  The pikes either side dipped in a wave, Insects pulled the pikemen down and the gap widened. Armoured men sprinted away – the giant ants grabbed them and dragged them under the swarm.

  I dropped in over the musket butts rising and falling frantically. Men bayoneting the Insects were bitten to pieces. Saker, trapped at the far edge of the square, was bending his bow and shooting with desperate speed. His face glistened like raw meat. I swooped over his arrows and smacked down beside him.

  The inner ranks of the square now all faced inward, tangling with Insects. Only a few stretches of line unscathed, their bayonets levelled. One shot each, no time to reload. Sudden silence.

  The square collapsed. Insects were grabbing men all around us. Huge gaps appeared, more bugs burst in, then it disintegrated into screaming men battering Insects that cut them limb from limb, sliced into throats and ripped open bellies. Blood spurted, guts uncoiled, and fighting bodies relaxed in the Insects’ claws.

  Saker kicked his horse and galloped from a standstill at the side of the square. Cyan followed. They hurtled through between slashing Insects, and charged away.

  Five Insects closed on me. I crouched, jumped explosively into the air. My first wing beat slapped their compound eyes. The next forced me up. Bugs reared, reached for me. Barbed forelegs scraped my boot toes, jaws sheared closed under my soles. My muscles screamed pain, my sinews strained, but I caught purchase on the air and pulled it down. And climbed.

  I rowed higher. Glanced down. A wave of Insects swept over the square and it was obliterated. All that was left was the shape of a square on the ground, made of piled human bodies, on which Insects fed.

  Sun glinted on the strewn steel. Rivulets of blood rolled over the dry ground, began to soak in. An armoured pikeman, lying prone, jerked fitfully as Insects, standing on him, forced their smaller, inner jaws into the gaps in his armour.

  At t
he edge of my vision Cyan’s horse tore after her father. The flag whipped out behind him. They raced before the front of hordes of Insects chasing, converging on them. Lancers charged to meet them; they passed between the armoured destriers and into Eleonora’s cavalry.

  Seven thousand men just died in less than ten minutes. I turned in the air and sailed over Hurricane. Insects coming at his square, out of the smoke, were covered with the blood of Cyan’s people.

  Hurricane howled and bawled blue murder, swearing his square faster. They nudged ahead, and eventually reached the bunkers of our twelve-kilo cannons, which with spherical case were blowing bare patches in the swarm beyond them. His square ran out of grenades, then cartridges. I watched them stop shooting as they passed the cannons, then Tornado’s came in, back through the Insect Wall. The squares transformed themselves into line, and the men snaked down the welcome path, into our stone-walled camp.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Sun Pavilion

  I landed and made my way past the field hospital to our headquarters. Shouts and screams cross-cut the air – the hospital was overwhelmed. Men lay on the ground alongside its canvas wall. Some were bleeding from Insect slashes, others were pouring tin mugs of water onto their burns. One man, sitting by the path, was binding a gash in his arm that had split dark red muscle to the bone. At the end, near the palisade gate, a boy with a bucket of antiseptic was sponging down horses raked with claw wounds.

  Outside the Sun Pavilion, Tornado was sitting on the crate that covered the end of the Valley Twenty fuse. He was coughing like Fulmer on a cold deck, parched by the smoke. ‘I collected all the cannon crews into my square,’ he said. ‘The ones that survived.’

  ‘I saw them.’

  ‘There are too many bugs.’ He pressed his eye patch. ‘We should’ve started in square.’

  ‘Where’s Cyan?’

  ‘Inside. Hurricane’s giving her hell.’

  ‘Oh, is he?’

  ‘The bastard.’

  I pushed the flap and entered. Tern was there, thankfully, holding an oval mirror for Saker, who was sitting at the map table with a bowl of steaming water, picking grit out of his cheek with Tern’s tweezers.

  I went to her and gave her a kiss. In the depths of the pavilion, Capelin was issuing commands to his static cannon captains, and on this side of the table sat Cyan, in her filthy shirt and breeches with her rifle across her knees. She was staring emptily at Hurricane, the Polearms Master and inventor of the bayonet, who was stomping up and down dragging his poleaxe.

  ‘You lost seven thousand men!’ he spat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cyan faintly.

  ‘That’s not the work of an Eszai.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not up to it.’

  ‘A breach in a square could happen to any of us,’ said Saker.

  ‘Winning is all the Castle wants. It’s all society cares for. Did you win, Saker? Then what are you? A loser! She doesn’t push herself to the limit. I don’t contemplate anything else. I train hard. No Eszai trains as hard as me.’

  ‘I do train hard,’ said Cyan.

  ‘You’ll lose your next Challenge. And losing equals death!’

  The Castle accrues a particular type of person into the Circle, for it takes an incredible drive to be best in the world at your chosen pursuit, and to dare to level a Challenge, but there’s a – thankfully rare – type of character far beyond the class-A personality, something way off the end of the bell curve. Sadly, in our competitive society, people fight and bully their way to the top, who have the cold psychopathology of Arlen Hurricane.

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ I said. ‘A pike got fouled.’

  ‘And where were you? Dicking about in the air?’

  ‘Watching you.’

  ‘You’ll get more Challenges after this,’ he told her.

  ‘Hurricane, bully your Challengers if you must, but not fellow Eszai.’

  ‘Fuck off, Jant Shira.’

  ‘She’s a better shot than you’ll ever be. Either Challenge her, or leave her alone.’ I slipped my arm round Cyan and felt her shaking. I sat down, pulling a pen and notebook from my back pocket. ‘Say what you want, but it goes in my next dispatch to the Emperor.’

  He reversed his poleaxe and twisted its point in the floorboards. ‘Junkie,’ he said to me.

  ‘I love you too, Hurricane. Go and do something useful.’

  ‘You’re not worth the chair you’re sitting on,’ he said, and walked out.

  ‘It’s all right, Cyan,’ I said.

  ‘That man is incapable of any higher feeling,’ said Saker from beyond the mirror. He dropped a piece of grit.

  ‘Yeah, well, the Front is the best place for him. One day he’ll need us and I won’t be running so damn fast.’

  We sat in silence for a while, contemplating the carnage.

  ‘That’s a lot more tags in the soil of Lowespass,’ said Cyan. ‘Oh, god …’

  ‘We got out,’ said Saker.

  ‘We got out. They didn’t.’

  ‘Capelin,’ I said. ‘Come here.’

  The Trisian joined us, and for a second stared at the map with a curious absence. Either he needed a moment to ponder this loss of life on a deeply profound level, or there’s so much extraneous knowledge floating about in his brain that strands of it occasionally choke the cogs.

  ‘Comet, this fiasco is by no means my fault,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is. You should have checked the barrels. Now we’ll be fighting here for weeks. We lost seven thousand Zascai and almost lost Cyan and the king.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I wish to god we’d burnt Salmagundi Library down, too!’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’ I sighed. The map in front of me showed range and graze of our static cannons at various elevations of their barrels, and Saker’s bloodstained water drops were puffing up the paper as they soaked in. ‘Anybody could have found the recipe. I could have found it … You didn’t invent gunpowder, you just rediscovered it.’

  ‘I reinvented it! I improved it, from an inflammable, unstable, unusable compound, into an explosive. Nobody ever used it to propel a missile before!’

  ‘Well, light the fuse now.’

  ‘I will, though I fear it’ll have little effect.’

  Tern poured me a glass of watered wine, but when I raised it to my lips, soot floated off them and formed a scum on the surface. ‘I’ll send a telegraph to the Emperor. I’ll write a full report and send it by rider. I’ll visit your fucking powder mills and find out which bastard sold us short. Then I’ll have him hung. Thunder, Cyan, stay here and bring up the cannon wagons from the fortress. Their draught horses stand a chance this side of the Wall. Tern, my love, will you go back to Wrought?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Saker dipped a sponge and sloshed his face until the water ran clean. He took a towel and dabbed his cheeks as if shaving, though it left blood on the loops of the cotton. Tern lowered the mirror, and he said to me over the sliding reflection of his chin, ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘To the mills?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Fraud shouldn’t happen in my kingdom.’

  ‘It’s Castle business.’

  ‘A thousand Micawater men just died. This swarm threatens Lakeland. And there was foul play with the cannon exploding.’

  ‘You think.’

  ‘There has been foul play,’ he insisted. ‘It would’ve killed me if Balzan hadn’t taken the blast.’ He stripped off his ruined crested jacket and pressed a finger through a burn hole in the fabric, widening its crisp, brown edge.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And … maybe if I better understand gunpowder, there’s some way of making it so it doesn’t give off so much smoke.’

  Thunder said, ‘The names listed for Syrinx cannon are Morenzian: Tressel, Lagan …’

  ‘Find out if they’re still in the camp,’ I said. ‘If they are, arrest
them.’

  Eleonora entered, in full armour, carrying her helmet with its great sky-blue horsehair crest in the crook of her arm. The plates slid over each other soundlessly as she walked. She passed a glance over Cyan and settled on Saker. ‘You’re very lucky.’

  ‘I don’t feel it,’ said Cyan.

  ‘I’ve never seen a battalion disappear so fast.’

  She put the helmet on the table. As well as the nodding crest, which trailed to drape down her back, it bore two splays of iridescent-blued steel feathers which tinted from teal through purple to gold. She reached a hand under her armpits, unclipped her pauldrons, lifted off the curved metal and stretched her sweaty wings.

  ‘What hit you?’

  ‘A cannon exploded,’ said Saker, with an edge of adrenaline.

  ‘Well, typical! Us lancers miss all the excitement.’ She unclipped her rerebraces, flexed her arms.

  ‘I lost the first Micawater.’

  ‘Careless. Are you getting careless, love? That’s your evenings spent writing letters for a week.’

  ‘My whole town will be in mourning.’

  ‘Are you going home? I just heard you say you’re riding to Wrought with Jant.’

  ‘I am. What will you do?’

  ‘Stay, of course. Don’t make me leave when I’m loving it.’

  She unclipped her vambraces and stacked them into the rerebraces, into the pauldrons like shells. Her plates were scallop-edged, embossed entirely with swirling plumes, the spaces between their smooth textures inlaid with gold. The plates on her limbs were fluted for strength. Their edges were tapered so Insect jaws can’t find purchase – only the vambrace for her left forearm deliberately has a ridge she lets mandibles close upon so she can swipe the Insect’s head off. Recent scratches shining bright on it showed she was adept at this move.

  She leant over Saker, put a hand on his shoulder and kissed him, then, as he spread his wings a little for her, she pressed her face to one of their hands, smelling the plumage. She preened her fingers down his flight feathers, zipping the barbs closed, turning the tattered flat bottle brushes back into perfect secondaries.