This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “Are you going out to fight in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  Rafa took his hand and set it on her breast, cupping her own over it. “Be careful, then.”

  Rol kissed her shoulder, marveling that moments of such sweetness could still be found in the foul mess of this world.

  “I will.”

  Sixteen

  A GAUNTLET OF GUNS

  IT HAD STOPPED SNOWING, AND NOW THE BLACK SKY WAS becoming blue with dawn, the moon hanging halfway to the full, reluctant to quit the world. In the vast, cobbled courtyard of the Warder, five thousand men stood waiting in patient ranks, their breaths pluming out into the frigid gloom. Here and there an officer’s horse stamped and blew, but there was no wind, and the regimental flags hung limp and heavy, their heraldry hidden.

  Rol stood some third of the way to the rear among the assembled regiments. He was on foot, as were his friends—half-decent horsemanship did not a cavalryman make. Behind them were Rowen, Mirkady, and two hundred mounted guardsmen, the personal bodyguard of the Queen. Rowen’s horse was so close that sometimes, out of a spirit of mischief perhaps, it nosed Rol in the back.

  He was in armor—even Gallico had been set up with a hastily cobbled set of carmine-lathered half plate—and in addition to Fleam, he bore three pistols tucked into a scarlet sash about the middle of his cuirass. No helmet, though; he did not like staring out at the world through an iron-slit.

  Rol turned and looked at Elias Creed. The dark man stood with one hand on Giffon’s shoulder. He and Rol nodded wordlessly to each other. Giffon’s eyes were calm; he peered up at the brightening sky with something of a smile, remembering the joys of the night before perhaps. They both looked strangely unfamiliar in their breastplates and chain mail.

  Gallico leaned his knotted fists on the head of the long war-hammer he bore and stared up at the sky also. “The sun will shine today,” he said. “I wonder how the wind is, out on the Reach.” And almost to himself: “I hope Thef got the Astraros home.”

  A sharp horn-blast from the hulking gate-towers before them, and the thousands of men in the courtyard seemed to stiffen, like hounds that have seen the fox. There was a grinding noise, felt through the soles of the feet as much as heard, and the tall gates of the barbican began to open.

  Rowen nudged her horse forward. The Queen of Bionar had donned mail so fine it seemed not to be made of metal at all, and her head was bare but for a silver circlet. She reined in at Rol’s side and one black-gloved hand was set on the nape of his neck. He did not turn, but his own hand found her ankle in its stirruped boot and gripped it a moment, no more.

  The files in front began moving. There were a few rasped orders, muffled curses, the clink and clank of metal. The fire-bearers lifted the lid of their pots and blew on the embers within. Arquebusiers wound lengths of match about their fists and checked the charges that hung from their shoulder-belts. The horsemen spoke quietly to their mounts but not to one another. Flagstaffs were shouldered, and the military files became a simple mass of queuing men, bumping, jostling, and cursing as someone stepped on their heels. Back at the tail of the host, there was a clattering sound as a dozen twelve-pound culverins were manhandled forward.

  Through the barbican, the day was lightening moment by moment. Blayloc’s brigade, in the van, was already outside the walls. Black against the snow, his troops began extending from column into a three-deep line. Sixteen hundred strong, they would take up a frontage of over five hundred yards.

  Now Rol was outside the gates, Rowen’s bodyguard behind him. The thunderous rumble of the cavalry brought up the hairs on the back of his neck; but still, there seemed to be no hurry. Now and again the infantry broke into a jog to keep ahead of the horses, but for the most part they kept to a fast walk. The armor bore down on Rol’s shoulders, and he felt a sudden shaft of pity for the Bionese marines he had sent over the side of so many ships with all that iron strapped to their backs.

  He looked back. Cassidus’s brigade was moving up on the left and Remion’s was still coming through the barbican. Men had begun to shout now, sergeants venting their impatience, men swearing, all of them openmouthed and panting the hot breath from their mouths.

  There was a single distant boom, and a globe of smoke blossomed at the loyalist trenches some half a mile away to the north. A courier went galloping past Rol from the cluster that followed Rowen like the tail of a kite. He was off to Blayloc.

  Horns were blowing up ahead, faint but insistent. An alarm triangle was beaten. Rol could see hordes of figures running without apparent order from the tented city of the enemy down to the trenches. Someone in the ranks ahead laughed. “Caught the bastards at breakfast!”

  The army had shaken out now: three brigades in line abreast, almost a mile of men in three ranks, Rowen and her cavalry in the center-rear, and Rol and his shipmates somewhere in the middle. The artillery was lagging behind despite the fact that some two hundred men were sweating over the heavy wheeled pieces and their limbers.

  “Sound General Advance!” Mirkady cried. He had dressed for the occasion, a magnificent surcoat of sable and scarlet silk over his armor. Rol wondered if it was a present from the Queen. His own and those of his friends were ill-fitting relics from army stores.

  Horns sounded up and down the red-clad lines. The regimental flags dipped once, then came up again. And with that, the army began to advance. Slow strides, the men looking to right and left, sergeants shouting at them to keep their dressing, and the fire-bearers running up and down the line lighting the match, so that now the acrid burning of it came eddying about the field.

  The regiments and companies hit old snow-filled shell-holes. The line fractured, was re-formed. Officers were shouting at the men to double up, to slow down, to wait for the men on their left, on their right. And now several field pieces were booming out ahead, but so far the shells were overshooting, detonating in spumes of earth and ice hundreds of yards to their rear.

  “Gods in heaven, can they get any slower? We’d be better off on our hands and knees.” This was Gallico, who was marched steadily along with the shaft of his hammer on one shoulder. His free hand rubbed absentmindedly at the iron covering his old wounds, as if they throbbed now in anticipation of another bullet.

  “I say the hell with these pretty lines,” Creed said. “We’d be better off running at those trenches like a bunch of maniacs, shouting our heads off. Yonder bastards are sighting their guns. We’ll catch it in a minute, and the pretty lines will not look so neat then.”

  The advance speeded up, the ranks converging and drawing apart again as men dashed through old craters and negotiated the remnants of stone walls. They were halfway to the enemy trenches when the sun burst over the mountains to their right, and the white plain of snow before them grew dazzlingly bright. At almost the same moment, the guns opened up in earnest.

  A line of smoke exploded all across their front, followed heartbeats later by the stuttering thunder of the retorts. The marching soldiers did not pause, but lowered their heads and hunched their shoulders, like men walking through heavy rain. The shells came on in a shrieking cloud, a volley of blurs that burst in and through the line. Fountains of soil were thrown up by the solid shot, but the loyalists were using hollow explosive also, and when these detonated in the ranks they could tear half a dozen men to pieces.

  Rol saw one cannonball behead three soldiers like dandelions under a child’s switch. Shrapnel from the hollow rounds went spinning red-hot through the ranks, ripping chunks of flesh out of men’s bodies, spearing them with slivers of hot iron, taking off limbs, skewering eyes, disemboweling.

  “Close your ranks!” rose the shout. “Close those gaps!” And the men did so, coming shoulder to shoulder over the corpses of their comrades, marching on. The roar of the barrage swelled, so that individual guns could no longer be heard, just a soaring madness of sound that shook the very air in their lungs. Behind the army, their own guns were now barking out to join in the spectacle
, firing at maximum elevation to pass over the friendly lines. Rol looked back.

  “Lazy bastards. Those guns should be moving up along with us, not sitting out in the open back there.”

  Elias Creed followed his eyes. “They’ll be moving soon enough, once the enemy guns find them.”

  The army stumbled onward. The ridge behind the enemy trenches, upon which Bar Asfal’s tented city sprawled, had disappeared in a towering bank of smoke, and now the very light of the winter sun seemed dimmed and choked by that fuming reek. Shells landed amid the horses behind Rol, and they shrieked and plunged and bucked under their riders.

  “That bastard Canker had best make his move soon!” Gallico bellowed. He was streaming blood from a gash under his ear and his eyes glowed like green coals. Giffon was leaning in against him like a child clinging to its mother in a rainstorm.

  “I thought these fellows weren’t supposed to have much in the way of artillery,” Creed complained. Then he staggered against Rol with a grunt.

  “Elias!”

  “I’m all right.” There was a dent in his breastplate and a ragged piece of iron hissed in the snow at his feet. Creed looked down at it in some wonderment. “We must get some of this stuff for the ship’s guns.”

  “We’d sink everything we fired at.” Rol set him on his feet. “Come on, Elias, keep walking. The sooner we reach those guns, the sooner we spike them.”

  They staggered on in a rising storm. All lines and ranks had disintegrated under the ferocity of the enemy barrage. Rol had never seen so many cannon firing at one time. With shipboard battle, you took a broadside, and then had a pause as the other fellow reloaded. But this was unrelenting. It was madness. It was murder.

  Two hundred yards. They were running now, thousands of men desperate to get out from under that tempest of killing metal. A shell burst to Rol’s right and spun him off his feet, the smoke-stained sky wheeling in his sight. He saw a man tottering along with his lower jaw shot away, his tongue hanging down bright and red. A riderless horse with no hind legs, screaming on its side. Men congregating in shell-holes, heads down, their officers kicking them up again, shrieking like lunatics.

  Gallico picked him up and pulled him onward, dragging him through a deepening mire of bloody muck that slithered with nameless things underfoot. He lost one of his pistols and scrambled for it on his hands and knees, then found his feet and stared around himself, white-eyed.

  The enemy trenches were scant yards away, and the rebels were rushing them in knots and broken clusters of men. All order had disappeared. Rowen was nowhere to be seen, though there seemed to be dying horses everywhere. The guns were firing point-blank now, canister rounds filled with musket-balls by the thousand that disintegrated whole squads and filled the shuddering air with the coppery reek of blood, a fine red fog in the smoke, a rain of steaming things falling out of it. And lines of arquebusiers were crackling out volleys from the lip of the trenches, the heavy bullets snapping and whizzing past Rol’s head, throwing up clods of earth at his feet, thudding into bodies with a slap of meat.

  I will die today, Rol thought, and that knowledge was curiously calming. The looming panic left him. He sucked a breath into his starved lungs and drew Fleam. The scimitar gleamed bright as moonlight, a cold smile of steel. Gallico, Creed, and Giffon crouched nearby, and with them perhaps two dozen rebel soldiers, their arquebuses unfired.

  “With me—come on!” And Rol set off at a sprint for the loyalist trench without looking back.

  A bullet dinged off his breastplate, but did not slow him. He felt a curious feather of laughter flap in his throat, but when it came it blossomed into a maniac screech. He jumped high in the air, and as he did the light in his eyes ignited and caught fire, and when he came down again in the trench, Fleam had kindled like a torch and was burning white and cold, pale smoke rolling off her. He thrust the blazing sword into one man’s face, and broke open his skull as he wrenched it free again. They were flailing at him with swords and the butts of their guns, but he did not feel the blows. He did not feel the ground under his feet, and the roaring cacophony about him no longer troubled his brain. He poured up the trench, cutting to pieces every human being in his path, and when he reached a gun-battery it was a simple thing to slice through the wooden carriages and let the hot two-ton barrels crash to the earth, broken engines of slaughter.

  Someone stabbed him at the base of his backplate, just beside his spine. His legs buckled, but he did not go down. He spun on the man’s frenzied face and thrust his fingers deep into the eye-sockets, popping the soft orbs within. Then he ripped free the bone surround and the man collapsed, still alive, an awful abject howling coming out of that red ruin.

  More men running at him. A bullet blew off the tip of his ear, burst the eardrum. Fleam was a mere flicker of white flame. Men fell cut in two, headless, limbs lopped cleanly free of their bodies. Rol fell to one knee, used Fleam as a staff to lever himself upright again. A volley spattered around him, clanging off his armor. The tip of one finger was blasted away at the joint. He lurched forward again, killed a shouting officer, and laid in scarlet ruin the men he had gathered about him. Then Rol went to his knees again in a puddle of his own blood. The battle roared full-tilt all around, a titanic storm that laughed at his insignificance. Anger flared up in him. A bracing coldness veined through his flesh. He stood up. His feet moved under him, though he could not feel the press of his boots on the earth.

  Gallico and Giffon had reached him, and a score of others. The rebel soldiers hung back at the sight of his eyes, but Gallico cursed and cuffed them onward.

  “Down the trench—take the trench! Giffon, go to Rol, for the love of God—do something.”

  Rol felt Giffon’s hands working at the straps of his armor and slapped them away. He looked up and found a gap in the smoke of war overhead—how blue the sky was—and as he did, some portion of humanity returned to him.

  “Where is Rowen?” he asked Gallico.

  “Mired in blood, out on the plain with her bodyguard dead about her. They were trying to bring on the artillery, but the guns have all been destroyed. Rol, this has all gone wrong.”

  “Take the trench, Gallico. Get them together. We hold here until Canker comes up.”

  “Where is Canker? Where is that bastard, tell me that?” Gallico roared back at him, veins bulging in sudden fury.

  “I’ll find out. I have things to do.”

  “You’re bleeding to death!” This was Giffon. His black and bloody face had white lines cut from eyes to chin.

  Rol smiled at him. “You just keep your head down, lad. Where’s Elias?”

  “Off looking for your bloody Queen!”

  At that, Rol’s smile disappeared. His mouth widened in a rictus. “Gallico, you will fight here. You will make them fight, do you hear me? Silence their fucking guns!”

  The halftroll nodded, fury still bright about his eyes. “What are you going to do?”

  Rol hesitated. More than anything, he wanted to run back the way they had come, to seek out Rowen and get her into safety, to know she was alive. See? he would say to her. This is where your ambition has taken you.

  But they were walled in by a fog of war; there was nothing to be seen beyond a hundred yards in every direction but half-glimpsed groups of men fighting one another with the unthinking ferocity of beasts. Hand-to-hand now, all down the line, or what parts of it he could make out.

  “I’m going to try and turn this thing around,” he said. A fresh concussion of guns broke out to left and right. The other brigades must be in the trenches, too, by now. The tumult of their agonized roaring rose up to challenge even the bellow of the guns.

  So this was war—this murderous stupidity, this stunning waste. Why was it that part of him was laughing, sucking down these sensations like a drunkard guzzling wine?

  He did not care. He looked at Fleam’s blade, and saw blood bubbling and steaming upon it, and knew he had rage enough left to do what he had to.

  H
e climbed up out of the battery trench and set off at a gliding run, north to the loyalist encampment. On his face, the inhuman grin broke out and widened and the light came smoking from his eyes.

  I am among you, and you know it not.

  Seventeen

  THE DARK HORSE

  HE RIPPED OFF HIS RAGS OF SCARLET LIVERY AND EXCHANGED them for the saffron and black surcoat of a loyalist corpse, another man’s blood mingling with his own as it flapped wetly against his thighs. Uphill, the ground rising blasted and broken under his feet, dotted with the broken carcasses of men, shattered gun-carriages, blasted wagons, and dead horses. Streams of limping wounded were trickling out of the trenches below, appearing out of the smoke and then swallowed by it again like demented ghosts. Rol’s mouth was parched. He bent and gathered a fistful of the filthy snow and crammed it over his lips, chewing the foul-tasting ice into water, swallowing grit. He closed his eyes, letting the stuff cool his head. In his fists, Fleam’s trembling eagerness subsided to a thrumming vibration, no more. The fire in him was banked down a little.

  “Where is Aldahir?” a man shouted at him, an officer bearing a pistol and rapier, who did not look quite sane. “Get back down that hill and find the colonel. Tell him—”

  Rol cut his throat, took the pistol, and thrust it in his sash. Then he continued on his way.

  The enemy encampment was ahead, and the smoke was thinner here. Files of loyalist soldiers were running downhill, into the maw of the holocaust, and laboring lines of others were manhandling boxes of shells and casks of powder in their wake. Rol grabbed one gesticulating sergeant by the arm.

  “I’ve a message for the King. Where lies the Royal Standard?”

  “Don’t know. Farther up, a few hundred yards maybe, the big yellow tent. How goes the battle?”

  “We’re winning,” Rol snarled, and ran on.

  The tents ran in streeted lines and the earth roads between them had been corduroyed with thousands of logs. Here, the snow had been trodden down into a brown muck by the passage of countless regiments. Rol passed a huge supply dump, crated and casked foodstuffs piled higher than his head and extending over several acres. The tall yellow tent was just ahead, looking over a squared-off open space like a courtyard, but there was no standard flying from it. There were men on horseback here with clean uniforms and shining half-armor. They stopped him at the point of a lance.