“Oh, no.” Peck dropped on his knees again on the shaking hillside and clapped his hands over his ears, turning the burble to an echoing hiss, like the sound you get when you hold a seashell to your head.
The one thing you could say was that it was better to do the shooting than to be shot at. But the poor bastards their piece was pointing at were another o’ those things it was better not to think about.
At a time like this, best not to think at all.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
There was a sound like a whip cracking in Suval’s ear, there was a great shower of stinging splinters and he cringed as something bounced off his back. A branch fell from a tree nearby and crashed down among the wreckage.
“God help us,” he whispered, lifting his head. Someone was crying. Someone was shouting. Someone was burning. He saw him totter writhing down to the water’s edge and flop in. Someone was trying to drag a limp man back by his armpits. Suval saw him fall with the wounded man on top of him, and struggle up, and struggle on. Desperate to save his friend’s life. Or desperate for an excuse to save his own.
Suval picked up his dented helmet with trembling hands, put it on, dumping dirt on his head and hardly noticing. He spent a moment trying to fasten the buckle on the chinstrap before he realised it was broken. He stared about, no idea where his spear had fallen. But there was a sword nearby, so he picked that up instead. He had no idea how to use a sword. He’d never even held one before.
Murezin had said they would never have to fight, only dress up for some vain man who wanted to say he had a Gurkish Legion, and they had laughed about it while they drank bad tea together. You could not find good tea anywhere in this damned country. Murezin had been wrong about the fighting. But Murezin had also fallen in the river when the bridge collapsed, along with several others. A couple had washed up drowned on the bank, but of Murezin there was no sign.
Suval had said it was just as well the Gurkish Legion would not have to fight because he had never fought in his life and was not Gurkish and, indeed, barely even spoke their language. But it could not be worse than living in the slums in Adua where no one would hire you if you had a dark face. He had been a scribe in Tazlik, where the sea breeze had cooled his clean little office. He had copied religious texts, mostly, with some accountancy work, which was all very boring but paid well. How he prayed now that he might live to be bored again. He hunched down at another ear-splitting crack somewhere over on the left. God, that was a different life, and had happened to a different man in a different world from this one. A world that was not exploding and on fire. A world that smelled of salt sea and blossom rather than smoke and terror.
“God help us,” he whispered again. There were a lot of men praying. A lot of men crying. A lot of men screaming. One sat silent, in the dappled shade of the trees, looking exceedingly surprised, blood streaming down his face. Suval knew him a little. He had been a tailor in Ul-Khatif. No sense of humour. But senses of humour were not at a premium here.
He turned over and shuffled through a slurry of fallen fruit to a twisted tree trunk where several other Kantics were sheltering, along with a Union man in the oddest uniform, half-green, half-brown. He realised as he got close that the man was dead, and the brown half was blood from his arm, which was utterly mangled. He pushed the corpse away with his shoe and wriggled into the place it had occupied, and did not even feel ashamed at his mistreatment of the dead.
He could ask God for forgiveness later.
Someone offered him a flask and he drank gratefully, handed it back. Smoke wafted across the river. Some men had rafted over and now they were huddled trembling on the far bank with one spear between them, one of them pale and bleeding, the raft come apart and its timbers drifting away. Now and again a body would float past, face up or face down, turning gently with the current.
Furious shouting behind them, the sound of terrified horses. They were driving wagons through the carnage. They had rolled one into the river already. Trying to make a bridge, so they could get across. And what? Fight? Madness. All madness. A man they had all thought dead gave a gurgling scream as a wagon’s wheel crunched over his leg.
“God help us,” whispered Suval, but God was not listening. No more than He had been when the riots started in Tazlik and his office was robbed and set on fire and he and his family spent all they had on passage to the Union. Another crash, and he wriggled back against the tree as bits of leaf and twig rained down.
Something spattered his face. Was it blood? Was he wounded? Oh, God, was this the end? He held his trembling fingertips up before his eyes.
Just plum pulp. Just rotten fruit. He wanted to laugh. But he also wanted to cry. His helmet fell off and he jammed it on again, back to front.
There was a big fat man in a big red uniform heavy with golden ropes. The one who had smiled from horseback as they set off a week before. A thin man with combed-back black hair was shouting something at him, stabbing a finger at the broken bridge, at the wagons. He wanted them to cross. But how could they cross with the world on fire? How could they even think of moving? He might as well have demanded they fly to the moon.
Suval was no soldier. He copied texts. He had a lovely hand, everyone said so. Had taken great care over his manuscripts.
“I’m not sure… that is to say… I don’t see how…” Barezin stared about at the ruins of the legion he had been so very proud of, mouth mindlessly opening and closing like that of a fish jerked from the river. “My Gurkish Legion—” And he twisted around as another cannon-stone crashed through the trees no more than thirty strides away, his fat jowls wobbling.
Antaup had never liked the man. Never liked any of these Open Council bastards. Never trusted them. Flatterers and blowhards. But somehow, he’d bought into the big talk. And it was too late now. No choice but to work with what they had.
He grabbed Barezin by a fistful of braid and hissed the words one at a time. “Just… get… them… across!” He pulled his horse around. “Now!”
He had to head back to Leo. Tell him he couldn’t rely on these fools.
He shoved a low branch aside and was out from among the trees. Things were no less confused in the open. Dead and wounded everywhere. One dissolving unit was half moving forward, half back, breaking open in the middle and scattering yellow-jacketed men in every direction. A riderless horse frisked maddened through the chaos, empty stirrups bouncing at its flanks.
Antaup saw a flicker at the corner of his eye then dirt showered up in the midst of a column. Dirt and weapons and bits of people in a flailing cloud. Men were flung down like dolls, flung themselves down, covering their heads.
Antaup only just kept his seat as his horse swerved around the shattered column, soil showering down on him, pinging from his saddle, screams of injured men fading under the drumming of hooves.
That had been close.
Off to the west, through the haze of smoke, he caught a glimpse of more organised lines. Blue-uniformed troops. Isher’s regiments, maybe, spared the worst of the cannon fire, still keeping some shape. But as he galloped across the fields, he saw nothing but an exhibition of cowardice. Every tree had a little clump of men huddled behind it, fighting each other for more cover. Men without weapons. Men without purpose. Wounded crawling for the rear.
A nervous company had gathered at the side of a farmhouse. You could see their terror as they gazed across the body-speckled fields towards the burning orchards and the fuming hill beyond. An officer rode up and down in front of them, waving his sword, screaming himself hoarse. “Forward! For pity’s sake, forward!” But like a stubborn herd of goats refusing the shepherd’s commands, they wouldn’t be moved.