by Неизвестный
Etienne gathered Fanchon in his arms. She licked his hand. The ostler shook his head. “That boy’s got the devil in him.” He knelt beside Etienne, deftly ran his hands along Fanchon’s sides.
“Help her,” Etienne said.
“Nothing I can do for her boy, but end her suffering.”
Etienne opened his eyes. No true sleep had claimed him—only unpleasant memory. Why must he think of Fanchon now? His head ached with weariness and hunger. Shooting pains darted up his legs. His feet spasmed. Etienne rose to walk the cramps out.
His steps crunched in the snow. Muskets stood in regular stacks. A watcher at each campfire huddled in misery, feeding pine boughs to the flames while his comrades slept. The more fortunate wrapped themselves in plundered furs or rugs. Men snored, coughed, broke wind. A sentry stamped his feet and blew upon his hands for warmth, breath clouding white in the icy air.
Etienne’s chest tightened. He loved these men and yet he could not save them, any more than he had been able to save Fanchon so long ago.
It lacked an hour of dawn when Etienne returned to his bedroll. Gerard hunched beside his fire, staring into the flames, the ever-present bag at his side. His eyes looked sunken, his cheeks flushed.
“You have not slept,” Etienne said.
Gerard shrugged.
The bundle moved as if something squirmed within. For a confusing moment Etienne wondered if Gerard had bagged Fanchon and a litter of unwanted puppies to toss into the river. Etienne blinked.
Has hunger addled my wits?
“What is in your bag?” Etienne asked.
“Treasure.”
“Show me.”
Gerard put a protective hand upon the bag, a sullen expression on his face. “You should have eaten.”
“Show me what is in the bag.”
Etienne was certain he would disobey—that the ancient dynamic of older brother versus younger might prove stronger than military rank. But Gerard shrugged, untied the bag. “Look for yourself.”
Etienne bent to peer inside. Difficult to see in the darkness, so he seized a brand from the fire, held it carefully over the bag. Even with the light it took him a moment to understand what he saw.
Not a writhing mass of puppies. Not a crop of strange, partially furred melons. It was the wrong season for melons. Not cabbages.
Etienne straightened abruptly when the eyes of one opened to reveal a milky stare.
Heads. Severed heads. Heads of revenants, gray-skinned, relentless jaws gnawing at strips of cloth gagging them—presumably to prevent their teeth rending the faces of their tumbled, dead fellows. In spite of himself, Etienne retreated a step, just managing not to trip and end up ingloriously on his backside.
“A curious treasure,” Etienne murmured, gratified that his voice remained calm in spite of his startlement. No, not startlement. Fear.
A soldier faced many kinds of fear: the dry-mouthed fear of a cavalry charge, which had the benefit of shared excitement and potential glory; the itching fear of self-doubt and dormant cowardice; the bowel-twisting fear of a surgeon’s knife; but this—this was a primitive and solitary fear—that of dark places and slithering things and churning guts gone to water.
He dropped the burning branch back onto the fire. “And what are your plans for this . . . treasure?”
“I shall give them to maman. We’ll put them in a vitrine and charge a fee to see them. People will come from leagues around and the inn will prosper.” Gerard tied the bag securely.
“You think our mother will enjoy such a gift?”
“She is a practical woman.”
As a soldier’s widow must be.
Before the order to burn the wretched things to ash could pass Etienne’s lips, a trooper ran up to them in a state of agitation. “My captain! The pickets report Russians in the trees!”
“Cossacks?”
“Revenants!”
Dawn brightened the wooded gloom. Etienne’s men had broken camp and formed up, waiting for orders. They looked as little rested as he felt. Nervous. Tired, hungry men facing an enemy that could not die had a right to be nervous. Through his spyglass, Etienne studied the line of revenants staggering through the trees.
Men. Women. Russians. No few of their own men, who had perished before he’d learned to destroy the brains to prevent their rising. Some were partially burned. All were hideous. All were hungry.
So much for the hope they had all perished in Moscow.
Cossacks on sturdy horses darted in and out of the trees at a tantalizing distance in front of the revenants, teasing them with the promise of warm, living meat.
Luring them to us. Bastards.
Etienne called a trio of skirmishers to him. “Bring down those horses,” he said. “Then fall back toward the river.”
“Yes, my captain,” they said in unison, saluting smartly in spite of tattered uniforms and skeletal aspects. But for their air of purpose and clear eyes, Etienne would be hard pressed to distinguish them from the revenants themselves.
Perhaps we are already dead and this is our sojourn in Hell.
He hated to sacrifice horses, even Russian ones, but they were a bigger target than their riders, and Etienne possessed no sharpshooters. The revenants would fall ravenously on horse and rider. It would buy his men time. The Cossacks would learn to regret their battle tactics.
Etienne ordered the rest of his men out of the wood, down the slope toward the river. He swept his glass over the bridges. The wider bridge had been repaired overnight, but both were littered with bodies of men, horses, abandoned caissons, stranded artillery, and overturned baggage carts. Fires dotted the near bank where stragglers camped.
Why the hell didn’t they cross?
Perhaps they were discouraged by the congestion he’d seen yesterday when it took hours to move even a few meters. Perhaps, like him, they had decided to wait for daylight: thousands of soldiers—wounded perhaps, or sick—malingering or separated from their regiments—or perhaps remnants of regiments that had almost ceased to exist following battles at Smolensk or Borodino or Moscow. Uniformed Poles, Württembergers, Westphalians, Italians, Dutch, and French formed a polyglot tangle within the Grande Armée. Civilians, too: émigrés, actresses, wives, whores, cantinières, merchants—Etienne had seen them trundling in the wake of the main column, shocked and dispirited and facing an uncertain future. None of them had been able to match the emperor’s headlong flight.
And the rumors: The English had taken Paris. Napoleon, dithering uncharacteristically for days in the Kremlin, was ill. He had been bitten, his blood tainted. The emperor was a revenant.
Etienne believed none of it. If the emperor had been a revenant, he would have no reason to flee. And Napoleon feared nothing. More likely he needed to deal with matters of state.
Leaving the rest of them to perform rear guard action. We die arms in hand. That was the regimental motto. Never mind that he could muster too few officers and too few NCOs for effective coordination of his squadron. Never mind that they lacked horses, food, and any hope of re-supply.
Although the sun had risen, a scan of the stragglers’ camp showed no efforts to rouse themselves and begin the crossing.
At the sound of musket shots, Etienne returned his attention to the wood.
We can’t allow the revenants to cross. The bridges will have to be destroyed.
Etienne glanced at Gerard. Shadowed eyes lent his visage a skeletal appearance. His face had lost color, except for the stain of fever high on his cheeks.
He’s ill and won’t admit it.
“Go down to the river,” Etienne said. “Find out who, if anyone, is in command there. Tell them the stragglers must cross now. Tell them the revenants are in the woods. We will hold here as long as we can.”
Gerard flushed. “You seek to deny me my place in battle?”
“I seek a soldier capable of carrying out his orders!”
Gerard hesitated long enough for insolence, and then loped down the hill toward t
he river, his bag of heads bouncing on one shoulder. Etienne realized that once again he had neglected to order his brother to dispose of the grim trophies.
The skirmishers broke from the trees and raced toward Etienne. “My captain,” one said. D’Hubert, his name was, a soldier so young his cheeks bore not even the first fuzz of beard. “The revenants—there are so many. They paused to feed upon the horses, but stripped them to bone in seconds. They will soon be upon us.”
Etienne nodded, managed to keep the dismay from his expression. The last thing the men needed was to see him waiver. “Well done,” he said.
He trained his glass upon the trees.
Martin. I would have written you, but I broke up my travel desk for kindling days ago. My words would not have made it past the Emperor’s censors, in any case. Nor is it likely I could have kept the ink from freezing.
A ragged line of revenants lurched from the wood.
“Steady,” Etienne told his troops. He formed them in a line three deep. “Courage. Hold the line and hold your fire.”
In the course of the retreat, most of his hussars had replaced their shorter carbines with the heavier infantry musket, lifting them from dead or dying unfortunates fallen out on the march. With bayonet fixed, the musket was a formidable weapon, though hardly an accurate one.
Volleys of musket fire, so deadly against massed troops, were not so effective against revenants, impervious to pain or the most catastrophic wounds. Hunger spurred the ravening dead ever onward. That had been Etienne’s first lesson in Moscow: to forget what he already knew of war. Though a musket ball to the head would drop a revenant, few soldiers could manage so lucky a shot.
Etienne longed for the feel of a horse between his legs, snorting and bunched and eager to charge. His hussars no doubt felt the same. Fighting on foot lacked the power and dash of all their campaigns before Moscow.
But their horses were dead—of exhaustion and hunger, of shot and ball. A solder must adapt to survive.
“My brave ones,” he told the assembled men, “my comrades. We have faced enemies before—and we have been victorious. Many of us may die today—our efforts may not be recorded in any bulletin or journal—our glory may be lost to history. I am proud of you—proud to fight beside you. We make our stand here—the revenants must not cross the river to imperil our beloved empire.” Etienne drew his saber, raised it high. “For honor! For France! For our emperor!”
The enthusiastic chorus of “Vive l’empereur!” from his weary men made Etienne’s eyes sting and blur. He blinked back tears.
The revenants fell upon them.
The battle raged in near silence. Revenants used no weapons beyond hands and teeth, had no need of breath or battle cry, and did not scream in spite of grievous wounds. They smelled of spoiled meat. For the first time, Etienne was glad of the cold—without it the stench of the revenants would have been much, much worse.
The hussars struck with bayonets, aiming for eye sockets, or the soft bones of nasal passages, or up through the roof of the mouth—anything to destroy a revenant brainpan. The length of an outthrust musket kept the soldier relatively safe from the revenant he’d engaged, though others could swarm and overwhelm him.
The men behind protected against such disaster, using a club, a saber, or sometimes even the butt of his musket to shatter revenant skulls. Etienne witnessed one hussar raise and bring down a medieval mace to deadly effect. He must have looted it from some noble’s collection in Moscow.
A musket would fire occasionally, very sharp in the chill air, when bayonet became stuck in bone and tissue. At point blank range, accuracy was no longer a challenge. Once a hussar had fired his weapon, he stepped back to reload and the second and third man in line moved forward.
All along the line, the hussars fought in relay fashion, in continual snakish, writhing movement, while the revenants struggled to climb over the growing pile of their downed fellows.
The hussars grunted, gasped, sometimes cursed. Their breath plumed in frosty air. They were tiring.
And the revenants kept coming.
Etienne risked a glance toward the river. A handful of stragglers had begun crossing the bridge, but the bulk remained in camp as if lost in some sort of torpor.
What the devil has Gerard been doing all this time? Those people need to cross now!
He had no time to fret over his brother. The line was wavering. To his right, d’Hubert stumbled and went down before one of the revenants. His comrades were battling others.
Etienne ran to the hussar, kicked the revenant aside, and clove the creature’s skull with his saber. He wrenched the blade free, hauled the fallen soldier upright. “Are you bitten?”
Breathless, the young hussar shook his head.
“Carry on.”
Another glance toward the river. No sign of Gerard and no movement in the camp.
Damn them! I’ll not sacrifice my men for imbeciles who make no effort to save themselves.
“Fall back!” he ordered. “Fall back to the bridge!”
They retreated in good order. The number of revenants had thinned. The remaining shambling corpses appeared baffled by the wall of felled dead they must clamber over. A few found their way around the barricade and shambled in slow but relentless pursuit.
The dead never tire.
Etienne followed in his troopers’ wake, using his blade against the skulls of scattered revenants who drew too close. The saber sliced neatly at first, but repeated use turned it more into a bludgeon than an edged weapon.
More revenants spilled from the woods.
“Cross the bridge! Double quick!” He grabbed the arm of the nearest soldier. “We must set fire to the bridges as soon as we cross. Pitch, oil, gunpowder—anything that will burn—pass the word.”
“Yes, my captain.”
Etienne maneuvered the men from line to column to cross the nearest and most narrow of the twin bridges. Etienne’s attention roved among the closing revenants, the progress of his men, and the still silent camp of stragglers. The revenants were beginning to shift their attention from the hussars to the stragglers’ camp.
They had their chance. Still, guilt twisted in Etienne like a bayonet.
On closer examination, the bridge proved a precarious thing, only about five meters wide and perhaps a hundred meters long, built of supports which resembled sawhorses, and covered with planks the pontonniers had had no time to secure. Mounds of corpses were heaped upon it: horses trapped when their legs stepped into gaps caused by shifting boards, soldiers felled by musket ball and cannonade, civilians crushed or trodden upon in some prior mêlée. Corpses lay four or six deep, horses, men, women, mashed past all recognition, making it nearly impossible to tell where one body ended and another began, flattened by the tread of so many relentless feet.
The frozen corpses made for grim mortar and uncertain footing, Etienne discovered. The dead beneath his feet were firm, unyielding as wood or stone, but ice-coated and slippery. He fell once, worried more about revenants than patches of frozen blood.
Careful. Surviving the revenants will do you no good if you slip into the river.
Etienne sweated with effort, the dampness turning to ice on his face. Adrenaline had carried him through the battle, but the strength it lent was tenuous and fleeting. After the initial shock, a plunge into the waters of the Berezina might prove as pleasant as a tumble into a featherbed.
I’m so tired.
Martin would never forgive me.
I can’t abandon the regiment.
Etienne stumbled, nearly fell, but a hand steadied him.
“Lean on me, my captain,” d’Hubert said.
The two scrambled the rest of the way across the bridge. Etienne’s legs trembled with fatigue. His numbed feet barely registered the step onto frozen marshland.
An anxious glance back revealed no revenant looming behind. The bridge lay empty. Etienne sheathed his saber, pulled the spyglass from his coat. A flock of crows had settled on the pile
of slain revenants. Black wings shone darkly in the morning sunlight as they fed. The tide of revenants spilling from the woods had slowed, and turned toward the encamped stragglers, who appeared unaware or uncaring.
Etienne could see no sign of Gerard on the opposite bank. Where the hell is he?
“My captain,” d’Hubert whispered.
Etienne returned the spyglass to his pocket. “What is it?”
D’Hubert had come to attention.
A general stood before them. General Eblé. Etienne recovered quickly from his surprise, drew himself up, and saluted.
Eblé said, “You are no more than just in time, Captain . . . ?”
“Captain Etienne Feraud, my general, at your service.”
Eblé was a handsome man of middle years, clean-shaven, with a slight dimple in his chin. His expressive eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.
“Captain Feraud,” he said. “You have done well.”
“Thank you, my general.”
General Eblé offered Etienne a flask. A pleasant warmth spread as Etienne took a swallow of excellent brandy. “Thank you, my general.”
Etienne passed the flask to d’Hubert, who hesitated briefly at such impropriety, then took a deep gulp before returning it to the general.
“Fall in with the others,” Etienne ordered d’Hubert, who snapped a smart salute and scurried away with seeming relief.
Eblé gazed across the river with a mournful expression. “We must fire the bridges, of course.”
“Yes, my general.”
“Too many of my boys died building them,” Eblé said. “But the army survives and we managed to save some of the artillery.”
Etienne scanned his troops to see if Gerard had somehow crossed ahead of them. He had not. Damn you, Gerard! What will I tell our mother?
“My general, I request permission to return to the other bank. I gave my brother the task of rousing the stragglers and—”
Eblé gave him a sympathetic clasp upon the shoulder. “Denied. It is too late for that. And the stragglers . . . I tried myself to rouse them earlier. They are stupefied with exhaustion, insensible to their danger as stone. They have given up. We have not that luxury. We must do our duty.”