by Robyn Bennis
He tried to keep himself between the mob and that dubious escape route, threatening his own people with his sword when necessary. Many still ran past, or ran toward the houses just far enough to angle past him.
Private Corne took station to Bernat’s left, scooping up the rifle from a fallen saboteur and holding it with the barrel steadied across his forearm, threatening to shoot anyone going for the street, and doing so to much better effect than Bernat. It was amazing what value a grievous wound had in convincing people that you meant business.
The Vins fired again. Bernat flinched, wondering if the next moment would bring oblivion. It didn’t, but he had precious little respite, for the next volley was only seconds away, and between the second spent realizing that he was still alive and the few seconds spent steeling himself for the next volley, there was hardly a moment in which he could think clearly.
Rifles cracked from the second-floor windows of the mob-occupied houses, but on the Vin firing line, only one fusilier fell. It was entirely possible, even likely, that he was the very first Vin casualty in this entire affair—that while Durumites died by the dozen, and were even now dying under those maddening staccato volleys, the Vins had paid for it all with the loss of a single man.
Bernat wondered why the hell he had ever left Kuchin, to come to the edge of Garnia and help lead a ragged band of amateurs in a fight against some of the finest infantry in the world. In the din of the volleys, he couldn’t remember what had brought him to this moment, but he was fairly sure it was Roland’s fault.
Jutes came by with two long rifles slung around each shoulder and one in his hand, and they ran together for the nearest house, diving through the door just as a volley pitted the brickwork with dozens of musket balls. They rose to find Josette taking aim through the only downstairs window. She grinned as she sighted, and without looking up said, “Apologies if our noise woke you, Sergeant Jutes.” She fired and, without looking to see the effect of her shot, began reloading.
“I was just getting up anyway,” Jutes said, and began handing out rifles to those who had none. “Got work to do.”
Without a word of instruction, Bernat went to the window, unslung his rifle, and looked out. The Vins were advancing now, coming on at a quick march, and it took an effort of will to not estimate how long it would be before they reached the house. He picked his target from among their front rank, aimed carefully, and fired.
Josette was still reloading, putting her weight on the ramrod to push the tight-fitting bullet down the rifle barrel. Bernat knelt, pulled his hammer back to half cock, tore open a paper cartridge with his teeth, and tipped a few grains into the priming pan. By the time he had charged the rifle and was ramming the bullet home, Josette was only just taking up a firing position.
“Excuse me, sir,” Jutes said, edging Bernat aside as he piled furniture behind the barred door.
Josette fired, then tapped Bernat on the shoulder and said, “Get ready.”
As he pulled his rammer free of the barrel, he looked up to see the Vins practically upon them. He had only gotten one goddamn shot off, and as he fumbled to slide the rammer back into its slot, he thought for the first time in his short military experience that he would gladly trade in his rifle for an inaccurate but fast-loading smoothbore musket.
Josette had flattened herself against one side of the window, so he flattened himself against the other and drew his sword. Outside, the fusiliers were trying to break down the front door with their feet, shoulders, and musket butts. Somewhere in the back of the house, he could hear Durumite axmen breaking through the rear wall. “Who the hell builds a house without a back door?” he asked.
“Someone anticipating this precise situation, but with the sides reversed,” Josette answered.
He was about to make an insightful comment about civic planning when a bayonet-tipped musket was thrust through the open window. The point was aimed at his belly, but the fusilier who wielded it was not eager to make himself an easy target, and so stabbed blindly from relative safety below the sill. The fusilier’s prudence cost him his weapon, as Bernat grabbed the musket and yanked it right out of his grasp.
“Ha!” Bernat said, letting the gun fall to his feet so he could jab at the man with his sword. “I was just thinking we could use a musket, and now we have one, thank God.”
Josette was hacking with her sword at the point of a second bayonet thrust through the window. “And what do you intend to load it with?” she asked between swings. “Or do you think God will make a second trip to deliver the correct caliber bullets?”
Bernat glanced down at the bore of the musket, which was so wide that his rifle bullets could get lost in it. “Things never go quite right, do they?” He brought his sword down and drew blood from the hand of a fusilier trying to climb through the window.
“Things were going just fine until the day I met you,” Josette said, leaning around the window to stab at a fusilier, then hastily ducking back when another took a shot at her.
“I object to that,” he said. “Not only on the grounds that it is a very hurtful thing to say…” Here he had to pause to pin a thrust bayonet against the windowsill, lest it skewer Josette. “But on the grounds that it must be a lie, because things were going fine for me until the day I met you!”
One of the growing number of Vins on the other side managed to trap Josette’s sword against the jamb of the window. With Bernat’s own sword pinning a bayonet, he couldn’t help her, and with both of them occupied, a third fusilier flung his musket through the window and heaved himself nimbly over the sill to land on top of his weapon, inside the house. The Vin rose into a ready crouch, musket retrieved and already in hand, and from there lunged for Bernat.
Bernat could not use his sword unless he released the bayonet stuck through the window and let Josette be skewered. As the Vin inside barreled on, his own bayonet leveled at Bernat’s belly, he could do nothing but feebly bat at the point with his free hand. Between that and squirming out of the way at the last moment, Bernat managed to save himself. He heard the bayonet hit the wall next to him, but the fusilier was no fool. He kicked at Bernat and put him off balance, pulling the musket back for another lunge.
And just when it seemed that Bernat must either die on a Vin bayonet or let Josette die on another, a rifle crack filled the house and the Vin fell, the momentum of his last lunge carrying his lifeless body to the foot of the window. Private Corne looked over the barrel of a smoking rifle, steadied on his stump. “Sir,” was all he said to Bernat, with a respectful tip of his head.
In the back of the house, a wall gave way and Jutes’s voice boomed through the rooms and hallways, “In good order now! One at a time! Keep a rearguard, goddamn you! And if any of you bloody bastards runs into the streets and leaves the rest of us to the Vins, know that I will survive, and know that I will hunt you down.”
“If it weren’t for the difference in rank,” Josette said, and grunted as she finally managed to get a good angle on the fusilier threatening her outside and put her sword through his neck, “I would kiss Sergeant Jutes.”
Bernat wanted to make a comment on Jutes’s preferences in such matters, and silently cursed the promise that stopped him. “His loss” was all he said.
“Go,” she said, and whipped her head toward the back of the house. “I’ll be right behind you.”
* * *
JOSETTE RETREATED JUST inside the house’s back room, knelt in the open doorway, and drew her pistol. Behind her, the fugitives filed through the hole in the wall with none of the efficiency of professional soldiers. She could hear their clothes catching and ripping on the splinters around the hastily cut passage, heard them trying to push their way through the narrow passage two at a time, blocking the way until Jutes could sort them out.
Her eyes stayed on the window, not fixed but held loose and barely focused, in case a fusilier appeared from an unexpected angle. The top of a fusilier’s shako cap showed over the windowsill, but the
re was something off about the way it moved. She waited. Another shako appeared next to it, rose until she could see the barest line of forehead under the visor. It blurred slightly as she focused her eyes at the muzzle of her pistol to aim, then it leapt back in a spray of red when she pulled the trigger. Both shakos fell back simultaneously, along with the stick one of them had been perched on.
She retreated quickly around the doorjamb and signaled to the others to stay low. True to her expectations, one of the Vins held a musket over his head, pointed it through the window, and fired blind into the house. The flash was still a blotch of purple in her vision when a second musket was blind-fired in the same way, and another, and another.
“I think you’ve made them a little angry,” she heard Bernat say from behind her, as she reloaded her pistol and fitted another percussion cap.
Mrs. Turel replied, “Josie’s always had trouble making friends.”
She looked back. Only five or six Durumites left to evacuate, Mr. and Mrs. Turel among them. “Come on, move while we have them rattled,” she said. “They’re going to unrattle as soon as they remember what they’re up against.”
She looked back to the window, only to see a fusilier’s musket pointed directly at her, and a finger pulling back on the trigger. As the gun fired, she saw but did not hear it going off, and felt a hot pressure on the right side of her face, followed immediately by a strange, chill numbness. She stared into the smoky blur of the room, finally knowing what it felt like to be shot in the head. She had shot so many that way, and thought she was doing them a kindness, but this was horrible.
She saw the unformed shape of a person in front of her. No, above her. When had she fallen to the floor? She heard Bernat telling her to hold still, his voice strangely distant, though he was only inches from her face. Jutes was there, holding her down, and only then did she realize that she’d been trying to push him away. Her vision darkened, and pain returned to her world as Bernat pulled something out of her eyelid. Her vision sharpened slightly, despite the warm liquid filling her eye, and she could just see Bernat holding a three-inch-long, bloody wooden splinter from the bullet-shattered doorjamb.
“Just missed the eye,” he said, as he flicked it away. “Best leave the rest for Heny to sort out. Don’t worry, your cheeks were never your best feature.”
Jutes let her go, took up her pistol, and fired at something toward the front of the house. She sat up and saw that more time had passed than she realized. Everyone was through except the three of them. She looked through the ragged hole in the back wall and could see someone dragging Mr. Turel out of the way on the other side, his hip bloodied by the same bullet that had grazed her cheek and showered her face with splinters.
Jutes helped her up and they retreated together, Bernat firing his rifle before he backed through the impromptu back door himself. As soon as he was clear, a pair of Durumites began piling old timber across the hole, while two more stood guard with makeshift pikes.
For just a moment, she was thankful that they’d come out into a house that just happened to have a stockpile of timber, albeit a bit on the moldy side. But when she saw one of the townsfolk stuff a cracked cooking pot into the hole, her optimism wavered, and when she saw the other toss the ancient, mummified body of a cat on top of it, she groaned.
“We came out in a goddamn trash house?”
“Hardly used,” said a man she recognized but couldn’t quite place. “The front room is only filled to about waist height.”
She took her pistol back from Jutes and stumbled through the short hall leading to the front. She nearly fell, but Bernat was there, and stuck a hand out to hold her in place. “I’d like you to sit down for a bit,” he said.
“And I’d like to be back aboard my ship with a nice cup of tea,” she answered, pushing past him.
She emerged into the front room and swept her eyes across it. Two windows. One door. No stairs. Three men at each window, kneeling in trash and firing at something across the street. More huddled in the corners and along the wall, packed in, terrified, not running only because there was nowhere to run. Corne performed the act of a brave leader admirably, though he too seemed on the edge of despair.
As she picked her way over the shifting, unstable terrain of garbage, one of the men’s rifles hung fire—the priming powder ignited but the gun didn’t go off. He ought to have known to hold the weapon steady, but he desperately pulled at the trigger over and over, always expecting the next pull to produce a different result, and when after ten tries it didn’t, he began thrashing the weapon about, as if he could shake the bullet free.
“Remain calm,” she said. Her thick voice drew their attention to her bloodied face, and had rather the opposite effect than what she’d intended. “Focus on your targets. What are we firing at?”
“Company of Vins occupying the house across from us,” one man said, then flinched as the rifle which had hung fire suddenly discharged, flew out of its owner’s hands, and landed behind him.
Josette laid belly-down in the trash to count the puffs of smoke from the windows on the other side of the street. There was certainly not a company over there. At most, it was a dozen men. “Patience and calm,” she said. “Keep up a steady fire while we get organized and prepare to sally.”
They should have sallied already, up against that meager handful of fusiliers, but they were no longer a fighting force. They had barely been one to begin with, and now the morale shock of so many dead friends, and the grating fear of their precarious situation, had turned them all to water. She had to restore them to some semblance of fighting spirit before she could take them out of here, or they’d run at the first opportunity, and whatever hope remained would be lost.
Rifles fired in the back room, painting even more fear onto the faces in the front. “Private Corne, keep them spitting, keep them steady.”
Corne nodded to her, appearing somehow relieved to have a direct order telling him to do exactly what he’d been failing to do already, and the mob seemed relieved to hear him get that futile order. Battle did curious things to the mind.
She returned to the back room to find Mr. Turel still quiet, but sweat soaked, ashen, and gritting his teeth with the pain. Bernat and Jutes were firing into the half-clogged passage between the houses, and a couple of fusiliers were firing back. No one was hitting anything, which was hardly surprising. The cover was good and the angles bad.
She was worming her way around the room when the gap in the wall erupted in flame. A piece of burning wadding paper had landed in the hole in the wall and set their makeshift barricade of desiccated trash on fire. The way her day was going, how could it not?
On the other side, the Vins fired through the flame and smoke, making no effort to extinguish it, for they could run away if it got out of control.
Without a further word, Jutes pulled off his deel and began beating at the fire with it
“Bernie, you too!” Josette cried, as she pulled a piece of rotten burlap from the trash and went to work on the flames.
Bernat took off his coat, a fine green affair with embroidery on the breast, and looked at it with lamentations swelling in his eyes. Then he took off his shirt and put the jacket back on. “It’s the best I can do,” he said, as he joined them.
Amidst the cracking muskets and the roaring fire, Josette became aware of a strange musical sound. She’d had enough time to make several swings with her makeshift fire blanket and dodge two bullets before she recognized it as laughter. It took her another bullet, barely avoided and zinging past her ear, to realize it was coming from Jutes.
“And what the hell is so funny, Sergeant?”
Jutes ceased laughing, she thought, not in response to her question, but because he’d simply run out of breath. He gulped air and said, still wheezing with mirth, “I was just thinking how boring our lives were, before we met Lord Hinkal.”
The warped lumber stuffed into the passage caught flame now, and the fire roared up to blacken the surface
of the wall, threatening to spread to its timbers as well. Despite it all, as he stared into the inferno, Bernat laughed as well. “If you can find any thread of logic that ties me to this monumental degree of misfortune, I will gladly remove myself from society to save its people from my curse, and take up vocation at the most secluded monastery I can locate.”
“No, sir!” Jutes roared. “I beg you to stay. Those poor monks never did anything to you.” And at that, the three of them laughed so much it drew the baffled and alarmed stares of everyone else in the room, the stricken Mr. Turel among them.
The wall itself caught fire now, the flames reaching the ceiling and flattening against it in curious, ever-shifting whorls of light. The Durumites were scrambling out, dragging Mr. Turel and crowding into the relative safety of the front room. The Vins weren’t even shooting now. They must have evacuated the house behind. The three Mistrals backed away, but kept swinging at the fire with their makeshift fire blankets.
“Private Corne, you better be ready to leave in a hurry,” Josette shouted down the hall, “because we’re not staying long.” The intensity of the fire had her backed against the wall next to the short hallway, and the smoke had her coughing for breath.
“Corne? Are you ready?” There was no answer from the front room. “Goddamn it, Corne, answer me.” No answer still. “Corne, you had better be dead out there, or you’ll wish you were.”
“Captain,” came the reply, finally. It was Corne, but there was a resigned tone to his voice that she didn’t want to identify. “It’s over.”
“Like hell it is,” she said, unslinging her rifle and charging down the hallway. She emerged from the smoky twilight to see the front door hanging wide open. Through it and the windows, she could see a line of fusiliers that stretched left and right as far as she could see.