“That’s not why I’m here.”
“Why are you here?” asked Zuri.
Same question Broad asked himself when he climbed the ladder, time after time, and men looked at him like he was mad. He’d given up on causes in Styria. He’d given Savine all he owed and more when he risked his life speaking to Judge. He’d never promised to fight. Promised not to, in fact. And yet here he was.
“Gunnar,” said Savine. “Could you do something for me?”
“I can try.”
“Follow my husband.” She stared off to the south. Towards where the fighting would soon be hottest, sliding her hands around her belly. She looked strangely helpless, suddenly, in the midst of all this. “Try… to make sure…”
“I understand.” Trying to keep a man alive in a battle was the very definition of a fool’s errand, but it would hardly be his first. “Just one thing I’ve got to do first. Think you could look after these for me?” He unhooked his lenses from his ears, gently folded them and handed them to Zuri. She’d always struck him as a woman you could trust with something delicate. Then he strode up the blurred hillside towards the dark smudge of the tower, carefully rolling up his sleeves. Helps to have a routine.
Steebling squinted as Broad’s shadow cast him into darkness. “We Steeblings aren’t easily intimidated, you— Ah!” He squawked as Broad caught him by the ear and dragged him from his chair.
The old nobleman hopped and slithered as he was marched back down the hill, whimpering whenever his weight went onto his gouty leg. Broad strode to those wicker screens and kicked one out of the way. He was glad for once that he couldn’t really see, so he didn’t have to look at the overflowing latrine pit in all its glory. But he could certainly smell it.
To Steebling, plainly, it was a new experience. He shrank away, one arm across his face. “What’re you—”
Broad shoved him in.
He vanished below the surface for a moment then bobbed up, his velvet cap lost somewhere under there and his grey hair plastered to his face with the shit of men he’d been laughing at a moment before.
“You bastard!” he frothed, retching as he tried to drag himself out.
Broad was already walking away, headed for Stoffenbeck, a dim ghost now through the dust of marching men.
“What should we do?” he heard Bannerman calling after him.
“Whatever you like,” he said, not even slowing.
He told himself it was loyalty. Told himself a good man has to fight. Same things he’d told himself when he headed off to Styria. But he knew a battle was no place for good men.
He took a long breath through his nose and snorted it out with a growl. Snorted it out like a bull.
When he wept at his own front door, back in the loving embrace of his family, he’d thought he was done with blood. Thought nothing could ever get him back onto a battlefield. But it seemed Judge knew him better than he knew himself. Trouble was like hunger to him. Stuffing your face till you’re sick one day doesn’t mean you won’t want lunch the next. All you do is sharpen your appetite. And here he was, in spite of all his empty promises, back at the table again with his cutlery ready, clamouring to be served.
He slid the warhammer from his belt and felt the steel haft tight in his grip. Fit there, like a key in a lock. He bared his teeth and walked faster.
The Little People
Peck felt a slap on his shoulder and he worked his eyes open, peeled his hands from his ears and—once he’d worked out which way was up, which took longer than you’d think—looked up.
Sergeant Meyer stared back, white lines through the black soot around his eyes where he’d been squeezing ’em shut and one side of his beard a little singed, mouth moving like he was shouting at the top of his lungs. Through the rag-buds in Peck’s ears and the whomp and burble of the other cannons and the rush of his own breath and the thudding of his heart and the constant high whine which seemed to be everywhere now, he heard a hint of Meyer’s voice.
“Sponge ’er, Peck!”
“Oh.” He stumbled up and nearly fell and only kept his balance clutching on to one of the trestles. “Yes.” Where’d he put the sponge? He snatched it up, tearing some grass up with it. “Sir.” Where’d he put the bucket? He nearly tripped over it twisting around looking for it. Why was he even saying yes? He couldn’t hear himself. How could anyone else?
The air was thick with the stink of Gurkish Fire, his mouth sticky with the tang of powder, his throat raw and his eyes smarting. At times, he could hardly see the next cannon along. Their crews were ghosts, crawling around their pieces, swabbing ’em, towelling ’em, loading ’em, feeding ’em powder, tending to their every screaming whim like a bunch of filth-smeared nannies to a nursery full of overgrown metal babies. Babies that spat death.
He stumbled past an engineer fiddling with some broken instrument, careful not to touch his cannon ’cause he’d already burned himself three times, it was that hot. Thick smoke curled from its mouth and he slopped water out of the bucket, dashed the crust of smouldering powder away from the maw, hefted his pole then flinched as a cannon a couple down the row fired, flame spouting, ground shaking.
It had all been such good fun at the Siege School. Good luck to end up there. Better’n working in a mill. Damn sight safer, too. Didn’t seem safer now, needless to say.
Something better not thought about.
“Sponge ’er, Peck!”
He didn’t like calling the cannons “her.” Like they were women. Added a hint of the disgusting to the already unpleasant. Naught motherly about the bastard things that he could see. Murder’s men’s work mostly, after all.
The sponge streamed black water as he shoved it into the cannon’s smoking barrel and gave it a ramming, spraying himself each time. He was soaked with sponge-water and smeared head to toe with soot and his shirtsleeves torn and flapping wet at his chafing wrists, but you leave even a smear of burning powder behind and when they put the new charge in, the lot of you will be blown to hell.
Something else better not thought about.
He could see soldiers below them, through the drifting smoke. Lord Crant’s men, he thought. A ragged-looking regiment, stretched out crooked across the hillside. They’d tried to dig in but had about three good shovels between ’em and the rocky ground wasn’t offering much help. No one was. They were cowering now, at the thunder of the cannons behind them and the masses of enemy somewhere in front. Trapped betwixt hell and hail, as Peck’s granny used to say. They’d flung their weapons down to cover their ears, faces twisted with pain and terror. Peck had seen a couple try to run and be dragged back to their posts. Seemed a feeble sort of defence, if those rebels ever got across that river and up the rocky hillside.
One more thing best not thought about. Awful lot of those in a battle.
Like the Arch Lector, standing in his pure white coat on the summit of the hill. That hard-faced woman, too. Most frightening pair o’ bastards he ever saw. Looked like they never felt a human thing between ’em. He swallowed as he glanced away, swabbed the cannon down and left it steaming.
The boy who held the smouldering match-cord was crying. Streaks through the soot on his face. Wasn’t clear if it was the smoke in his eyes or he was hurt or he was crying ’cause this was so horrible. Peck slapped a hand down on his shoulder, dirty water slopping from his bucket. No point saying anything. The lad gave a helpless little smile, then Meyer snatched the match-cord out of his hand and shouted something.