He’s on his feet, dashing up the side of the mountain with the bag in one hand swinging wildly back and forth. The movement is so swift and fateful I shout uselessly after him. A moment later he’s out of sight among the boulders.
The mass of enemy soldiers stretches, making a deliberate lunge along the length of the height and readying themselves to come crashing down on the city. Jil Punkinflake appears from a stand of trees far off, sprinting fantastically for a long, half-ruined wall that runs the length of the ridge for many dozen yards, above the mass of the enemy.
Now a grenade claps among Wacagan below the wall. Explosions erupt in a line, one after another—Jil Punkinflake must be running along the wall hurling grenades one after another over the top. They fall past the bottom of the wall down the ridge and land among the enemy—the explosions are driving them from their positions, further down and into confusion. They flee the explosions the only way they can: toward the city.
At once comes Makemin’s clear shout—“Slaughter them—shoot them!”
—The city is topped immediately with flash-tipped barrels, a crackling that breaks out into blasting like one thunderbolt after another and whole files of the enemy are falling. Makemin is in the middle of his sharpshooters, firing and working his bolt and firing again faster and faster his men shooting and rearming faster and faster some kneeling and some standing over them the better to collect their fire so that their rooftop begins to look like a smokestack or a volcanic vent of fumes and flames—the Yeseg militia has advanced on the ground and their guns level at the enemy as well, and everywhere the same roar shakes the smoke like one disembodied voice of war from every throat. From a broken place in the wall Jil Punkinflake has thrust out his head, laughing like a maniac at the dying blackbirds, his face shattered by laughter.
Exposed in the open, the blackbirds are too crowded together and they are cut to pieces, fingers ears shocking white fragments of bone from splattered heads forms topple down from above throwing those before them to the ground—the sharpshooters are firing faster still and each shot rips a soldier open splinters arms legs so the enemy are wallowing in a slough of human pulp trying to escape. I watch as they claw at the ground trying to pull themselves up and away from the guns, and as the guns split their backs, as invisible hammers smash their arms legs and heads, as swift invisible force plucks at them pulling away fingers toes ears cutting grooves into their chests and along their faces, invisible talons slip along them in convulsions their body cavities open up their tender entrails slither out to be trampled by their routed comrades.
Those who are high enough, or far enough over, swing in their crazy arcs back and forth and escape like ghosts. They leave behind a carpet of screaming men and women.
Later, I see Saskia stride deliberate and cool among them, everywhere extinguishing life with her sword.
*
The outskirts of the city and the heights are blanketed with flies; their buzzing is so loud it can be heard in the harbor. Looking up from the streets I can see, through the buildings, the bodies on the slopes. The slopes look as though they’ve been daubed with tar, so much blood is there. I can’t find a clean spot.
The Edek found me, dragged me to my feet and glared my will out of me, brought me back to the camp. From the city come monotonous bells, four notes, four lower notes, one of the first and one of the second twice, then a final low note before resuming again from the beginning, all the same lengths and intervals, endlessly repeated. To their noise I saw Saskia returning, so weary she barely could walk in a straight line, so drenched in blood that only the whites of her eyes broke the red that covered her.
I hear raised voices sing out in Yeseg. They praise Saskia’s beauty and ferocity.
An Edek’s gaze emerges from every dark spot, like a mask of insane hate, riveted to me, as though the hate were mine.
No reasoning with Makemin is possible—this wasn’t a
mistake
.
There is a bellowing bull-like insanity striding up and down here that I am desperate to escape. Its every step lands in blood, crushes out life. And I didn’t tell them Makemin is a liar and a murderer and I don’t know why. Did I accept the false idea that it was necessary, too?
I can only escape by sea. Looking down I see my hands are shaking. Now I feel the tremor. It’s going to shake me apart.
*
In these few hours I see the soldiers are changing and becoming hostile to the natives, brutal and domineering. That I know the language seems to make me a lesser being myself. They are becoming machines. I saw one of my unit dash a local man to the ground with the butt of his rifle to the face. The more heavy-handed my comrades get, the more deferential and even fawning the natives get. Will that last?
From the attendant, appointed by me, I learn Nardac had dragged herself from her bed during the fighting. He frankly admits he abandoned her and fled toward the harbor; he left her unconscious, near death, and on his return saw the traces—he points to the sheet trailing on the floor where she’d left it, the crablike drag marks written in the dust. How did she pull herself out through the window?
“Did you find her?” I ask.
The attendant waves at the doorway and a compact woman with red-brown skin steps in seriously from outside. He points to her, and she talks to me.
“I was up on the slopes gathering casings. I saw the woman crawl out toward the bodies. The flies began landing on her leg. More and more came, and covered her all over. She took no notice of them but kept on crawling to the battlefield. There were so many flies I couldn’t make out her arms and legs. Even more came, and she was like a hill of flies. But she kept going. Then I didn’t see her any more.”
I quit them and walk a little way to a place overlooking some of the battlefield. The flies still inundate it like a pitching mat, dense on the ground, undisturbed and busy in windless day under an egg shell blue sky, a phrase I’ve never understood.
I have heard that there are blue eggs, but I’ve never seen one.
Makemin even now is in his tent, still sending back punctual bulletins to his lawyers, full of meticulous instructions as to precisely how he wishes the most recent phases of the suit and the divorce to be conducted. I stare at him, through the mosquito screen. I think of the enormity this man, who now sits before me, efficiently writing documents, committed in my sight, and a spur of detestation drives itself into me.
Getting away from the battlefield I see Saskia lying asleep in her tent. The peace that hovers over her sleeping face is so strange, and the streaming, flat hair, like silky brown straw, that I’ve never seen undone from its braid, draping over her shoulder, and across the bed to the edge, looks somehow impossible.
Later I lie down and look into the fire.
I tremble with hatred.
I think the expression of grief that would come over my parents’ faces when they would get news of some crime, no matter who suffered it. They seemed to take a measure of shame on themselves whenever they were forecefully reminded of the base acts people are capable of. Burning shame is being forced on me now, by this situation and by that man, if that’s what he is. I wipe my eyes. He has to be killed.
Did I think that? If you hate him and kill him you—who am I to think that? If you hate him because you kill him he killed because he hated and you will be no better. That’s not true. He killed two men. He killed them with horrible coldness and all because of some scheme or other. If I kill him I will be doing what’s right because he committed an atrocious crime and he must suffer and die for what he did. It isn’t the same. But there’s no crime in war there’s no crime out here, crime is for nice places and nice people and if I believe that then this shame falls on me too.
But you’re no killer.
I’m no killer. I’m no killer. Who else? If not me?
If I could make Saskia believe he’d turned on our own, she’d think he was a traitor; she’d kill him for sure.
There I am, telling her, even convincing her. And she’s taking his side, telling me it was necessary; the men were losing heart and talk talk talk. She’s telling me I’m the traitor. Would the blackbirds have taken the town if—was Makemin right?
Would the blackbirds have killed everyone in the town, or anyone in the town, if they’d taken it? They wouldn’t. Why would they?
Who cares who owns what? What possession is like life? What possession is like life? I’m surrounded by idiots! All these crazy whores have sold their bodies and souls to the war.
I’m looking out at the fire.
The scene flashes in my mind again. I hear the man below call “help!”
I contract, and clutch my hands to my chest in terror. I hear that shattering cry for help and see Makemin’s cruel answer; that man cries out for my help now. What is humanity if isn’t help? It’s simple.
My mind clears and my body relaxes. When Makemin killed men who had called on him for help, he stopped being human. The back of his tent. His shadow. It’s all a fantasy. The back of his head is good enough for me if it was good enough for him I’m not interested in proving anything.
I don’t move. I don’t budge. I hear that cry for help fall away from me and the night swallows it.
*
Jil Punkinflake drinks his whiskey and sneezes.
Thrushchurl kneels, bends his cheek nearly to the floor, and rattles his long index finger in the mouse hole.
We are in the crypts whose backs line the cisterns. The two funeral men were drawn here reflexively and, as long as I stay underground, I find relief from the feeling of being watched. The light of our lamps, though dim, is warmer and more enlivening to colors than the washed out grey light of the day—I’m greedily looking around at the richly yellow fringes of the woven mats, and the paprika red poms that adorn the picture frames.
Night returns outside. I feel thunder through the stones. Jil Punkinflake slumps against oozing slate, a greedy, vicious light in his look.
I also have drunk, and I’m stupid, like a ghost, but disembodied simply as an accident of perspective since I do not bother to sway my eyes to see the rest of him, Thrushchurl’s hand deposits a candle on a packing case. I look at the flame boring into space; it’s like a hot coal burning a path through a snowdrift. The base is a misty blue cup, and I see a mote, like a grain of pollen, trickle up its curve toward the hollow mane. The tapering upper part of the fire kernel is the color of buttermilk. The flame plummets into a dark opening at its center, hovers over it, and is held to the wick by its suction. I imagine standing at the base of the flame as it ignites, seeing it column up and close around me like a multicolored alembic.
Thrushchurl is gone again, and I don’t want to be alone with Jil Punkinflake now. I hear the clink of liquor in the glass as he raises and lowers the bottle with mechanical regularity, and in between these sucking pauses a soft, mirthless chuckle takes his place.
I get up, thinking that, should he ask me where I am going, I will say either that I need to piss or I am trying to get back to the tent before the rain no that would only encourage him to join me and what I most want is to get quit of his company. He does not address a word to me, but, as I climb the narrow passage to the surface, stagnant chill air daubing my face, the noise of his step slides in behind me and a stripe of repulsion sinks into my backbone. I go toward the bushes working my fly open and he drops his bottom onto a porch stoop. I will have to pass him to escape.
A honey-colored young woman is sulkily pacing up and down. A man, who might be her young father or her older fellow, comes and goes, bringing parcels out of the house and loading them into a wheelbarrow. Getting out, or something. She is impatient and urges him on with grim looks. Jil Punkinflake is eyeing her with a look at once intense and glazed. His face is five other faces at once. She’s noticed his look and is adding extra movements to her pacing, turning away and folding her arms, her gaze scampering nervously from one object to another. Every time her man comes back she throws him a demanding look. Finally she says something and points to Jil Punkinflake, who is reclining limp against the stoop, bottle in his hand. The man stumps over to him.
“You want something?” he barks in accented Alak. All the work, and her fuming, has made him short-tempered.
“I want to make off with her,” Jil Punkinflake says softly and fondly with a dreamy smile. Almost bonelessly he slithers upright before the man, driving the smile of his dreamy teeth into the man’s vision. The man swats at him like a bear, and Jil Punkinflake is knocked down. He smiles and picks himself up, eyes glittering weirdly.
It’s not until he’s on his feet, though smeared with dust, he says, “I answered you.”
But the man is already lumbering off. I don’t believe he cared much one way or another, but felt he had to make a gesture.
“That was unkind, friend,” Jil Punkinflake says into his teeth.
I take him by the arm and guide him away. We’re barely out of sight of them when I feel his face mash into my shoulder and he slumps limp against me. The next moment he pushes me roughly away with a sob he can’t hold in, and leaves me.
*
Another storm hurtles down the mountains at us, a cloud black as smoke. I take refuge in a small house, raised as most of them are here above the ground on short stilts.