“Where are the grenadiers?!” he rants. “Where are my sharp shooters?!”
Nikhinoch, calm but blanched, his blue skin turned grey as ash, flits back and forth like a helper spirit. Bullets pelt and crack against the wood, ping off metal. The Clappers have congregated in a tight knot and their bleating chant drones in the gaps between blasts.
Bald Spot streaks across the open space and folds sideways not three steps from cover, his face crushed in shock his mouth a tight O and a despairing grunt forced out of his abdomen, his hands swing instantly to his right side where his body bends. His momentum takes him one swerving step more and he drops backward onto his left side. I rush to him and turn him over. He is rigid his eyes blank. His right side is smashed in, soft moonlight on jagged ends of his broken ribs. Blood from his wound has swept up onto his grey face, and spattered even his eyes.
“There’s nothing—there’s nothing! Get back!” Yarn calls, and I dart back to cover.
I peer about me desperately looking for Kaladze, but he’s not there. Yarn slips away into the shadows. Who was my sergeant anyway? Am I supposed to be giving orders? I am down now in the shelter of one of the carts, and I peer out through a chink in the wood. In the gloom, I can dimly make out the groove of the road between the slopes. As I watch, three or four blackbirds, all in a row as though linked at the shoulder, fly sideways across the road. I am trying to spot them—the slopes around the road I now see are seething with motion, small groups of soldiers sailing in long bounding arcs, black against the dark, and here and there the muzzle flashes as they fire on us, still moving. They swing back and forth in the air just above the ground like ghosts, silent except for the shooting, effortless, weightless. Makemin’s rifle cracks near me just as another group wafts out nearly too swift to see into the road, and the last one in the group is hit—he flips over his center again and again, arms and legs flailing. He floats in the air toward us, down the slope, limp, turning now shoulder over shoulder as if he tumbled along in the current of a sluggish stream, arms and legs flop and flop. I watch fascinated as the dark body drifts to a halt by the side of the road, backs of its hands dragging in the dust.
Thumping feet behind me—the grenadiers have gathered now. They work in teams, one kneeling primes the grenades and puts them in slings, hands them to the other who stands, twirls the sling and launches the grenade, then crouches again. Loud bangs from the road and slope.
“They are trying to get above us,” Makemin says sharply, pointing to the slope on my right. He orders the grenadiers to concentrate on the road, to cover us as we move to defend the slope. I am ordered to help carry one of the lighter carts. A bullet bonks into the wood near my ear, and shaves splinters onto my cheek.
We clamber up on to the slope randomly dropping our cover, and I stop panting there. Shots rain in from all over and I throw myself down in total confusion. I turn my head this way and that, see at least a dozen men fall before us, and the long-springing arcs of enemy soldiers zig-zagging above us on the slope. I drag the man nearest me behind a boulder and bandage him. He is doing nothing whatever but breathing for all he’s worth, eyes starting from his head. When I look up, I see Yarn come holding the front end of a heavy box, and Silichieh behind holding the rear end. Silichieh shouts something and they drop the box—he begins fiddling with it.
Yarn sprints over to us and his shoulder explodes just above the bicep—he falls on his side his head towards me and, after one numb moment, a howl is forced out of him as though he were being run through a mangle.
His groin ruptures, then his belly and chest at nearly the same moment, and immediately he is lifeless as a stone. A few more bullets pat noisily into his leg, and one dings his ear, causing his head to rock back and forth two times.
A boulder topples and falls away on my left, and two dark figures silently bound through the gap. I am frozen. One of them is in the light now; I see his short beard is white. Something crashes down on me, only sound, and the one I am looking at jerks, his left arm parts from his body, and I can see through the shredded uniform the white of his collarbone in a spray of blood. He glides weightlessly backward into the second one, who is lit too briefly to see by a muzzle flash. I think the bullet strikes his comrade. Another crash above me and now there is only a dim concatenation of whirling shapes there in the vague gap. I look up at Makemin, who has already rechambered his gun. He glances down.
“Get back to the cart!”
I follow him there. Silichieh is crouched down behind the box, which has unfolded to expose something like a metal cask that narrows to a blunt bottle neck. He is reaching and adjusting. I am hidden. Thrushchurl comes stalking up and begins firing around the cart that hides me, and Makemin is aiming and shooting, deliberate and steady. I peer out and see shapes massing high on the slope, all black streaks popping with gunfire.
“Shoot damn you!” someone yells at me.
I pull my pistol, but I can’t clearly see anything to shoot at. My hands rest on the rock in front of me, pistol in my right hand. Explosions all around. My right hand hurts—I glance at it and smoke is puffing from my gun. I suppose I must have been firing it. It was pointing up the slope. It was full, now it’s empty.
Something white, far up on the slope, and almost wholly concealed behind a stone—it’s there only for an instant—an indistinct shape that pulls itself in and is gone.
A sound like popping stitches thunders up behind me. I drop down looking. Silichieh is pumping these two handcranks on either side of his metal barrel, which is mounted on hinges attached to a shield. I see the shield blacken in one spot and the whole thing vibrates, a bullet deflected there. Discrete packets of brown smoke snap from the front of the barrel, and Silichieh, pumping frantically, is peering through a wire circle on top of the barrel, swinging it deliberately from side to side, and Makemin is ordering everyone to shoot. The bottom of the slope, where we are, is exploding with flashes and blasts, and above us I can see the enemy soldiers going down, tumbling in air without hitting the ground. Brown gobs of smoke are growing here and there on the slope, like ghost rocks, and around them the enemy begin to writhe and paw their faces. I hear retching and belching howls. I see an arm spin against the stars, and I hear screams, orders, a weird bleating horn is blowing.
The arcing lines of Wacagan soldiers glide away from us now, back and forth, and turning from side to side in the air. They vanish over the brow of the hills and up the road.
*
It’s dawn as we finally regroup. A quarter of our number is lost or injured. I attend the wounded I find, and presently a triage is organized. Jil Punkinflake I discover asleep, clutching the scroll I’d made him, still under the cart. His dog managed to crawl in beside him, raises his head and looks sorrily at me, one eye pale blue, the other crimson brown. I shake Jil Punkinflake’s shoulder, and he stirs, smiling woozily.
“Was it a dream?”
The cart is riddled with holes. The scroll I take from him is bare—seems he made use of it.
I am taken by the arm and guided into a tent, where Saskia sits angry and weary on her cot. She pays me no mind as I salve and cover an abrasion on her right shoulder, where a bullet had hammered her armor. Her skin is creamy, and there is a thin, soft layer of flesh over strenuous muscle like a flat sheaf of wire. She is scowling at the ground, living the injury time and again.
“Pig! ... Pig!” she curses softly.
I find Sergeant Kaladze among the wounded. They hit him in the gut, and he is unconscious when I get to him. The wound is bad, and I do not think he will survive it. I do what I can for him, but as I lift him up onto the cart he gives a long sigh and his brown face goes instantly grey. No pulse. I leave him in the cart—let them bury him in a proper cemetery.
Thrushchurl is moving in and out among the dead, peering eagerly this way and that. Now and then he will pick up and drop a flaccid arm, or turn a cheek.
During the fighting, I felt alarm, but no real fear. Now that the fighting is over, I
tremble. I tremble with fear. It comes and goes in icy waves. It breaks open an icy cave inside me. When I think about what happened I sss-ss-s-stutt-tu-tut-tut-tut-tt-tt-t-t
*
Eventually we break camp and move out. Makemin, looking drawn, is eager to press on to Port Conget, get out of open country, and hopes to make it there before nightfall. Our line staggers together, passing the bodies of dead Wacagan, many of which still float a few inches off the ground. I ask Silichieh about it, and he points to the thick metal braces they wear clamped to their calves.
“They have some secret way they treat this metal. They make it so light, it won’t stay down. All Wacagan, and some Yeseg too, they train to fight in those. That’s how they move so fast. That’s why we call them blackbirds, didn’t you know? Because they fly.”
*
Now the road is backed up, full of troops and supplies waiting for passes to get inside the town’s walls. I can only vaguely make out the scene—a jumble of hills rolling down toward the far horizon, and somewhere out there a glistening breathing blue flatness that I suppose is the ocean. Port Conget seems to be a disc-shaped irregularity between it and me, planed down flush like a wooden peg into a dip in the landscape. We bunch up against the group ahead of us, a collection of carts, and wait. Hours pass, and no movement. There is talk of our being exposed here overnight. Makemin fumes and paces and cranes.
Presently a doughy corporal with a clipboard makes his way down the cue. As he approaches us, Makemin’s diffuse anger condenses and he strides forward on the beam toward the corporal with me in tow.
“We have wounded and we’ve been waiting more than four hours!”
Without looking up the corporal takes Makemin’s information and flips through his sheets. He ambles further along the line. Makemin, his face horribly drawn, calls after him. The corporal makes a sort of fluttering gesture at waist level, a hold on move, without turning around, which proves to be a mistake as Makemin switches him across the back of the head so swiftly his ferrule whistles and the corporal howls puts his hand to the new part in his hair and spins around his eyes popping. Makemin drives his fist into the corporal’s face splitting his lip and squashing his nose. The corporal makes a choked sound, his knees buckle, and with amazing celerity Makemin’s left hand shoots out to seize him by the lapel and slow his fall to a sag, the better to smash him again bursting the flesh along the left cheekbone. He takes the limp, squealing corporal in both hands and drapes him over his horse’s ass, plucks up a company insignia from one of the casualty carts and claps it onto the man’s lacerated cheek like a bandage. The corporal chirps and his legs flip weakly. Nikhinoch meanwhile has retrieved the clipboard and is there when Makemin reaches for him, calmly pivots the board into Makemin’s hand the proper page bent back. The latter holds it before the corporal’s streaming face.
“Now you’re one of my wounded. Sign.”
The corporal fumbles his signature and presses his seal ring into the document and Makemin calls “Piglets move up! Where’s that worthless standard man?”
He mounts, and Jil Punkinflake, giving me a feeble smile only thinly veneering the fear that has sickened down into him now, advances to walk beside him. Using principally the minatory expression on his face, Makemin clears a path for us right up the middle of the columns ahead. I do not notice much because I’m trotting alongside his horse holding, as best I can, an ether sop under the mouth and nose of the corporal, who seems unhappily unable to lose consciousness for more than a moment or two. He gags a bit, and I clear a plug of red muck from his mouth. Bits of broken teeth come away, adhere to my finger.
Some officer strides up wigging his arms and Makemin without a word points his holdout gun in the man’s face. Thrushchurl’s people are exhilerated by the action and are raving all around us, out in front and on all sides. They gibber and gambol, and the soldiers in the road reel back appalled and avoiding contamination.
And suddenly the sky is interrupted by the arch of the gate passing overhead, and we’re safely inside.
*
No one meets my eyes in the street. Fringes of dread hang in the lower part of the air, roll sluggishly down against the town’s grain. Deserted buildings, houses and stores eviscerated by looters their innards spill from windows and doorways.
Looking around I see a grimy sweat like bitter metal soot on everything, gloom and nauseous headache that makes me wish for something really clean and frightening to happen. I catch myself the object of cowed and smouldering looks from hidden faces; they heat my uniform chemically. I want to escape, but even here there are Edeks. They don’t come from the capital. They don’t have to—they know.
A cry is rising all over the place—“The Redeemer’s coming!”
I blunder along with the other soldiers if only so as not to be knocked down. When I can, I take my chance and slip up a stairway that tops out in a partially covered plaza, street-level with the slope on the far side, a few benches and tables where the town’s old liars could sit drink and play pinochle, so I stagger over and officially commandeer one empty table. From here I can follow the pointing fingers to where something godlike is moving against the horizon.
That’s the Redeemer, the Alak flagship. Even at least a mile away it rises high into the sky, towering over a fleet of massive Alak hulks; its immense, broad prow is shadowed beneath a winged steel colossus, his stern face nearly in the clouds, wings folded back along the lines of the ship, a huge shield in his left hand and his right, brandishing a sword, is raised four hundred feet above the waves. There are guns protruding from hatches in his rippling garment, and his legs are lost in their folds.
The Redeemer is unique, with so many engines and so many guns, all superlative numbers—its battery can, on one side, level a town in minutes. Its grapnels can drag enemy ships on massive steam winches; captured ships may be drawn into bays, or crushed between hydraulic rams in special compartments. Even from this distance, I can see the bristling, smooth-slabbed fortress rising from its midsection, and hear the fury of its engines, sullen and far away. Some of its forward bays are open and emitting barqots, which are not able to escape its shadow for many minutes.
I watch the barqots pull into the harbor and back their drawbridge tail gates to the piers with clamorous reports. Around me, gulls’ wings glint like swords as they circle. In the streets now there are soldiers marching.
These are not conscript hicks. These are Alak regulars, the real fanatics. Now the larger barqots are open and disgorging a phalanx of Ministerial Ghuards. They dwarf the regular infantry around them, striding along the piers.
The armor worn by these Ghuards is worth describing in some detail. It is all or nearly all made of a special paper-light metal, the same kind Wacagan use for their legbands. It’s an uncanny experience seeing the Ghuards in their armor—you begin to wonder if you’ve gone deaf, because, massive as it is, the armor makes almost no noise at all. No thundering footsteps, no clattering. Huge forms sail by you as quiet and easy moving as balloons.
The helmets are traditionally moulded to resemble the heads of berserk jackasses, with ears three feet long bolt upright on top them. The eyes are great blind concavities with a slit for each of the occupant’s eyes recessed at their innermost edges, flanking the false-perspective nose ridge—actually a flat trench, not encroaching on the Ghuard’s field of vision. In a perversely-inspired bid for perfect ugliness, the designers had trapezoidal openings cut on either side of the muzzle, and mail jowls hang flabbily out of these. The rest of the false face is a wedge snout with a horrifying if rather nicely-rendered snarl of projecting axe-head shaped teeth. A narrow, shaggy mane of needles runs in a tapering stripe down the rear of the helmet to the small of the back, rippling hypnotically like the scintillation of a wheeling school of fish.
When have I ever seen a school of fish wheeling?
Those manes must be fantastically expensive and time-consuming to make.
The chest, shoulder, and upper arms are plated
over with two layers of armor separated by an air layer. There are two sets of hands—proper man-sized ones, in fine and elastic metal gloves, and colossal mechanical gauntlets that can crush a man in their grip. Strips of mail hang down from ledges at the tops of the thighs. From chains affixed to each armored groin dangles a pair of dull metal balls, bigger than a man’s head and dotted with scratch-shined pimples, which clack meditatively together with every stride. The legs are thick pistoned trunks with ponderous hinges at the ankles, and incongruously prim pointed feet. They puff along in swarms of flies—their hindquarters and thighs are caked with excrement, as the Ghuards exhibit a marked disinclination to divest themselves of the armor once they’ve got it on.
Makemin watches them disembark with a sour, twisted mouth, and crossed arms. I know from his expression he has not been able to recruit more soldiers. I should go down to him, but I find I would rather not move. I sit and I watch. I will go down to him.
*
With aching legs I drift down mudslopped streets. No more whore’s drums and pimps clapping their horny hands together on street corners. They fled at word of the Ghuards’ arrival. I can see the camp of the Ghuards in the distance, through gaps in the buildings, where it lours like a chancre on the opposite side of town. Smoke, laced with seams of red fire and convolving bulbs of flies, hovers over the camp. Behind a rampart of chain-bound barrels they are smashing their screaming prisoners to paste in massive iron mortars, or pulling them apart in demoniacally gleeful tugs-of-war. I know there will be others, a rape ration is what they call it, brought in soon if they’re not there already. A woman’s, for example, right arm might set alight, or her face, for example, or his, might be mauled by dogs, as the Ghuard travails upon her.
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