“—They come up fast. No straggling. Keep together. Don’t thin the line.”
We camp in the hollow of three hills, gather in tents to watch night come on. I am in my tent, resting after mess with the others. Thrushchurl gives me his piece of jelly. I chew it gingerly, having bitten my tongue rather badly the night before.
I chew slower and slower ... the flavor is numbing out of my mouth, the cake is turning to sawdust in my mouth. Out of the stillness a feeling sinks long feelers into me, into my bladder, my intestines, creeping up into my heart and lungs, shortening my breath, tingling sick feeling in the scalp ...
“There’s something ...” I look around meaninglessly at the others, who blink at me in innocent incomprehension as I stand up.
“I think ...”
I can’t finish the sentence. My mouth is bone dry; it’s a struggle to swallow.
Then Thrushchurl looks up at me, and says, “Yes ...” with a sort of listening hoist of his upper lip.
Silichieh’s brows contract, looking from one of us to the other.
Rapid footfalls—we all turn our heads at once and there’s Nikhinoch dashing for Makemin’s tent.
Silichieh bolts to his feet saying, “It’s trouble.”
He lunges through the tent flap and hurries off somewhere, shouting—“It’s trouble! Get up! Get up!”
We look at each other. Thrushchurl snatches up his carbine and clutches it. His whole body vibrates with nervous energy like a frightened animal and that song trembles in and out the brink of his lips. Nikhinoch emerges from Makemin’s tent, puts the alarm to his lips and blows an endless fixed ringing note like a baby wailing in a cistern, and Makemin erupts helmeted from the flaps, holding his rifle.
“Soldiers!” he roars. “Soldiers! Get to the edges of camp! Under cover!”
Sergeant Kaladze races by clapping on his helmet stops when he sees us.
“Come on!” he screams. He looks at Thrushchurl—“Get to your column!”
Thrushchurl immediately lopes out into the night. Kaladze runs to a cart near our tent and overturns it, waving us to join him behind it. Other men are now doing the same all around us, stumbling out of tents pulling up trousers and fumbling with their guns, their eyes stark white in the dark as lamps all over are extinguished.
I hear cries.
Screams, from the forward margin of the camp. Without thinking I pop up, trying to drill my vision into the dark.
“Drop down!” Kaladze barks at me as something that whirs like a giant bumblebee passes me on the right. I cower behind the cart, Jil Punkinflake’s grip convulsively tight on my arm, and bullets whack into the wood by our faces. His face seeks mine and he has become a petrified creature, starts to shake, shakes so hard it’s turning into a fit.
A strangled cry from close by us. Kaladze points and I automatically follow his arm. One of the asylum inmates is curled up on the ground there, covered in blood, pain locked up in knots all over his face.
“Get him! Be quick! I’ll keep them off you!”
With empty mind I dart out to the wounded man, feeling myself tear loose from Jil Punkinflake’s grip. Resounding crashes from where I came, and another flash whir bare inches from my nose. I awkwardly drag the man, who cries out as I pull him, back under cover, and begin to tend him. He relaxes as I do my work, and dies.
A shout from somewhere cut off in the middle, and more voices raised in pain. The dark crawls with screams.
“This is a bad spot,” Kaladze says. “Come on!”
“He won’t go,” I point to Jil Punkinflake, who has shrunk into a ball.
Kaladze takes me roughly by the shoulder and drags me to a heap of stones, so that my legs whip up into the air as I am yanked along. He rushes back and overturns the cart on top of Jil Punkinflake, covering him like a turtle in a shell, and somehow gets back to me in one piece. The rock I hide behind snaps hard against my hand and stone chips flicker everywhere.
I follow Kaladze through the stones and trunks in toward the front where the cover is best. What I pass on the way I barely see and can’t describe.
Now I am flung into an enclosure of carts and barrels and I don’t know what, making a hasty barricade. Makemin has hacked a thin slit in the enclosure and snipes through it.
“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.