The Librarian (29 page)

C
ROWS FLEW IN
from out of nowhere, anticipating carrion. They called in their repulsive voices, like the cracking sound of tearing rags. My memories immediately blurred and dimmed.

I stood up. The Shironinites also got to their feet. The bustle and hubbub outside the stockade indicated that the enemy had begun preparations to storm us. The combined army numbered about sixty and was divided into three independent brigades, each standing slightly apart from the others. Their shared claim to the Book would not allow them to follow a common strategy. They were simultaneously allies and rivals, which made our task significantly easier. We would not have to fight the whole mass, but only separate groups. It was a different matter that the enemy kept throwing fresh forces into the battle, while we were so weary that we could hardly stand.

The first and biggest brigade was mostly armed with peasant weapons—pitchforks, axes and knives. These readers had clearly not taken part in the fighting yet and were burning with impatience. God only knows what these people’s professions were and what their lives had been like, but now they had all become warriors. They peered at us intently and there was demonic obsession in every face.

The second brigade was a composite one, cobbled together out of our acquaintances of the previous day. I saw padded building workers’ helmets with metal plates sewn all over them, and horned animal skulls. Hunting harpoons, bear spears and lances mingled with gaffs and clubs.

The backbone of the third brigade was the seriously diminished group of armoured warriors. After the skirmish at the roadblock there were only four of them left. But they had been joined by reinforcements—fifteen men. They didn’t look like warriors at all and had no armour of any kind. Instead of weapons they carried strange-looking curved troughs with ladle-like hollows and broad bags hanging on their shoulders. The armoured men were fiddling with a device that looked like a mobile building-site compressor, connecting up boxes of some kind and laying out wires. The warrior with the iron stump was running everything.

Garshenin came over to me and reported in a quiet voice.

“There’s another brigade behind the brick wall. Twenty men. I think it’s so that we can’t get away through the ravine…”

Vyrin built a little artillery pyramid of ball bearings beside my foot and scrambled up onto the platform. Clutching a weighty cobblestone in each hand, I followed the enemy’s manoeuvres intently.

The warrior with the metal stump completed the preparations and declared in a shrill, squeaky voice:

“Music by Pakhmutova! Lyrics by Dobronravov!”

The commander of the first brigade gave an inaudible command. The ranks shuddered, walked forward and spread out into a broad formation. Six readers picked up a trimmed tree trunk that looked like a gigantic pencil.

Maintaining their line, our enemies moved towards the village soviet at a jog, holding their axes and pitchforks ready in front of them. Every third warrior was carrying a sledgehammer on his shoulder.

The air was filled with a strange crackling sound, like dried-out brushwood bursting into flames; then a deafening symphonic fanfare roared out, followed by the booming explosion of a drum, and then violins played a snivelling, jet-plane glissando. A rumbling baritone voice filled all the space within sight.

The rousing song rushed through the air in several directions simultaneously. I saw a double loudspeaker attached to a crooked power-cable post. And there was another pair of stentorian trumpets standing on the compressor.

The melodious call of the soviet skald spread over the forest, summoning warriors to the attack. I didn’t even pause to think how the enemy came to know about this technology of bravery. Probably the discovery of using musical stimulation to stifle fear was not made by Margarita Tikhonovna or the late Ogloblin.

I suddenly felt an emotional exultation I had never known before. The majestic song, the lack of sleep, the stupefying medicines, the memories, the expectation of death at any second—it all heated my feelings to a seething ecstasy, a muscular frenzy.

A shower of stones mingled with ball bearings flew out from behind the stockade. The barrage was so sudden that our enemies never even reached the wall with their battering ram: they lost impetus, dropped the heavy timber and scattered, trying to dodge this precisely aimed death.

The thunderous voice sang and sledgehammers drubbed against the logs of the stockade, sending chips flying, but the stout timber didn’t yield. The long pikes of the defenders of the village soviet attacked the reckless hammer-men from above. The agile points seized on every swing to jab into an exposed artery on a neck, to
thrust in under a collarbone, to tear the tissue of muscles, to drive their tips right into the heart…

The song ended, the skald fell silent, but even before that the attack had choked on blood and the brigade had withdrawn. Eight prostrate bodies were left under the stockade.

In the unbearable icy silence the shrill-voiced eunuch in the pointed helmet shouted again:

“Music by Pakhmutova! Lyrics by Dobronravov!”

The frosty air was filled with rustling and scraping. The crackling needle of the invisible gramophone circled the record again. Orchestral brass responded with the pounding rhythm of train wheels, and piercing trumpets of doom played a towering line. A choir of a hundred young crystal-clear voices soared.

The song inspired the battered brigade, driving them back to repeat their storm. Without taking a second for rest, our enemies slung a reserve battering ram up onto their shoulders and rushed at the village soviet in a new wave. The berserk assault force moved closer with every second.

The second assault did not last long, but it was bloodier. They formed up to protect the battering ram with a living shield and only scattered just before the wall, clearing the way for the decisive blow.

I felt my elbow joint tear apart every time a smooth cobblestone flew out of my crooked fingers. I kept my eyes on one stone, following its trajectory. The projectile dented in an enemy’s cheek with a dull plop, as if it had landed in wet earth. The man struck his head against
the tree trunk and went limp. The massive battering ram, deprived of one pair of its legs, swayed abruptly and veered to one side. Someone got his boot tangled up with the dead man and stumbled. The weakened battering ram didn’t strike the stockade, but fell against it, knocking out a log. The commander of the brigade clambered in though the gap that had appeared and Marat Andreyevich attacked him from above. The sabre whistled and the face distorted by savage fury was sliced across by a slanting crimson thread. It opened, spilling out its deep, fleshy innards. The commander staggered back. Dzyuba tossed another warrior out of the breach with a precise swing of his hammer pick. There were no more takers.

An incessant hail of stones continued to fall on their heads, smashing helmets, breaking arms, crushing knees. Suddenly Garshenin, Dzyuba and Kruchina hopped over the wall. The men outside had not been expecting a daring sortie like this. Before the enemy could gather his wits, the black blade of the scythe had already sheared through someone’s neck, the hammer had butted right through to a backbone, like a horn, and the bayonet had jabbed into a belly. After carrying out this lightning raid, the defenders of the village soviet withdrew through the breach and stones started flying down from the wall again. The attackers collapsed and scattered in disorder, urged on by the sonorous choir.

A scraping acoustic nail rasped out from all the speakers. The choir fell silent. Only the natural sounds of death remained.

Leaning out from the stockade to stab an enemy better with his pike, Ozerov was caught on the curved prongs of a pitchfork. Spiked through the stomach, he screamed horrendously and they dragged him off as a trophy.

To make up for their losses in the lottery, our enemies threw themselves on Ozerov’s prostrate form and ripped open his chest while he was still alive and then, working together from the sides, they broke out all his ribs, like wooden battens. We watched in helpless fury as this performance of diabolical cruelty was played out to the accompaniment of heinously obscene oaths. To work off their rage, before they fixed the break in the wall, Vyrin, Ievlev and Kruchina jumped over the stockade and finished off the stunned and wounded with a few blows from a spade, a hammer or a flail.

The shattered brigade was suffering its own tragedy. The readers had exhausted their reserves of strength. Spent and bitter, they gave way to new challengers. The second, composite brigade entered the battle. Shields made out of sections of fencing were raised above the withered grass. The animal-headed men sheltered securely behind them and all we could see were the tops of their helmets and a bristling array of harpoons, lances and bear spears.

Vyrin smacked a cobblestone down on the planks.

“The last one…” he said in a quiet, despairing voice. “What are we going to beat them back with?”

“With these,” said Ievlev, laying out dead men’s axes. “We can throw them.”

Our Niva came trundling along the road with its overworked engine snorting: it had been transformed into a siege engine. A mighty pointed stake ran right through the interior of the car, with its pointed head protruding a metre in front of the hood.

The moment the Niva had taken up battle position, the “shields” started advancing. The next moment the reinforcements of the third brigade formed up into a free line with wide intervals. The men readied their curved troughs and placed something in the round hollows of the ladles.

“Music by Basner! Lyrics by Matusovsky!” the DJ eunuch announced.

A low bass voice replete with subterranean tragedy intoned to a funereal air.

The “shields” started running and the Niva roared towards us, throwing out a cloud of petrol fumes. The hands holding the ladles all flew upward and fell simultaneously, as if they were lashing whips. I thought I heard a swarm of mayflies go buzzing past close by. Something crashed into the top of the stockade, shattering into pieces, and a sharp fragment from it bit into my cheek.

The ladles flashed again. A buzzing horde of insects soared into the air and a moment later a second barrage descended on the stockade, smashing splinters out of the logs. Before I even realized that we were being bombarded, Vyrin was flung off the platform with a strange crunching smack.

“Slingsmen,” Marat Andreyevich howled desperately. “Get down!”

I dropped onto the planks. Vyrin was squirming about on the ground with his head shattered. Grisha didn’t have a face any longer, the stone ball had smashed it to mush.

The stockade shuddered; the barrels and the planks were overturned. The Niva’s oak bowsprit crashed into the gap and the loosened logs were sent tumbling. Deprived of support, part of the wall collapsed. Following the car, our enemies poured in through the breach in an unstemmable flood. But although the battering ram had thrown them to the ground, the Shironinites still managed to organize their defence. The first enemy line ran straight onto pikes or were struck down by spades and axes. The onrush faltered, fell back and then flooded forward again. Animal-headed
men stubbornly climbed in through the breach, grunting and growling, ready to give their lives in order to topple, tear, strangle.

I rushed over to the spot where my comrades were fighting. A bloody ruck had formed beside the breach and the trampled earth was slimy and slippery. In the intense crush I couldn’t get a proper swing and I poked with my hammer, looking at the drink-soaked Siberian faces contorted in fury, at the fading eyes, still as pitiless as ever, at the bare, grinning teeth with clumps of foam clinging to them…

The bass voice drawled out the words of the refrain mournfully and the music stopped. The needle wheezed and there was a click. Warriors in armour and slingsmen appeared in the breach. There was no one to change the records. Strengthened by the reinforcements, our enemies pressed forward. The carnage shifted to the centre of the yard. The soldiers of the fourth group, the ambush brigade, climbed nimbly over the wall, hurrying to bloody their weapons.

The continuous swirl of spattering blood, clashing metal, yelling and groaning scattered us. Lancemen forced me back against the deepest section of the stockade. Their rapid lunges seemed to trace out an invisible but precise semicircle, within which I remained invulnerable, and I watched as my reading room melted away.

Tanya thrust her rapier into the eye slit of an iron visor and the sharpened rod pierced through the back plate of the helmet. The rapier stuck solid. The ponderous carcass fell abruptly, disarming Tanya. She parried a downsweeping club with an arm that snapped instantly under the brutal blow. An axe sheared through the mesh of her fencing mask and its hooked back emerged in a flurry of bloody spray.