I didn’t find out what had really happened until Raskova told me herself.
They had overshot in the mist, and when it parted they were suddenly over the Sea of Okhotsk, where the water in winter is the milky flat of a corpse’s eye, and they didn’t have enough gasoline left for the crossing—they’d flown too high to avoid being shrouded by the fog for a day and a night. They had to turn around and pray for landfall before they dropped out of the sky.
The navigator’s seat—a glass bauble at the front of the plane—would be torn to shreds in a crash, and they were hurting for altitude and out of fuel and gathering too much ice to carry.
Raskova marked a map and jumped for it.
Her copilots crashed into the taiga, the bottom of the plane in shreds from the landing, and waited for her. Even after the rescue crew got to them, they refused to budge. They took watch by the plane for two more days, until Raskova staggered out of the woods.
It had been ten days. She’d had no food or water with her, and no compass when she jumped.
(There was no magic in her—not the sort that I had—but you wonder about witch blood in some people, when they manage things that no one should have managed.)
But more amazing to me even than her ten-day journey was the ten-day vigil the other two had kept, sheltering with the plane that had tried to kill them, without enough supplies, without knowing if she would ever come.
Doubt gnawed at me whenever I thought about it, more doubts than I ever had about being shot at, more doubts than I had about my chances of loosing a bomb just where it needed to go.
How long would they have waited beyond ten days?
How long would I wait when it was my turn?
Would I walk ten days in the wilderness rather than lie down and die?
Osipenko was dead. (Wasn’t even a strafing run; she’d just been going from one place to another, and her plane had turned on her.)
Grizodubova had been sent elsewhere for the war effort. None of us had ever seen her. She was leading a defense and relief outfit near Leningrad, with real bombers and not crop dusters. She was commanding men.
I wondered if she and Raskova ever saw each other, or if they wrote—if it was safe to write. It would be easy to forgive if they had parted ways; it was wartime, and their duty to the nation lay before them.
But sometimes the nights are long and dark, and you feel so alone that you think everyone else must have someone closer than you do, and you think: if they don’t still speak, it’s because they’re both waiting for death, and can’t bear to come close and then be parted.
Then you stare up at the leaking roof and wonder if all each of them carried now was a phantom. When something wonderful or terrible happened, did one of them sometimes glance over her shoulder to look at the other before she remembered she was alone?
Sebrova volunteers to be one of the three planes against the flak, and Popova volunteers second, and before I can do more than glance at Petrova for her agreement (she’s already nodding at me) I’m volunteering, too, because I have few enough friends here. Where Popova is going, I want to go.
It’s a foolish thing to do, volunteering to die on a German gun, but I volunteered for that a long time ago. I’m a quick draw on the controls, so I’ll be of some use, and anything’s better than sitting around waiting, wondering if Popova made it out.
Outside, I smoke a cigarette I won off Meklin at cards and watch the sun going down. I wish I had time to do everything that needs doing.
Popova sits next to me on the fence, lets out a breath at the streaks of gold and pink suspended just above the grass. When she taps me on the shoulder I hand her my cigarette.
She’s a marvelous pilot—light and nimble—but you’d never know it from the way she smokes a cigarette, single loud pulls that leave a cylinder of ash that drops wholesale to the ground.
After a little while she hands me a piece of chocolate from inside her pocket, grainy and already melting across my fingertips. I pop it into my mouth and lick my fingers clean, flushing a little at the bad manners, but Popova only winks. I wonder how long she’s held on to it, doling out to herself one piece at a time on nights she thinks she’s going to die.
“You’ll be all right,” she says.
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” I say. “It’s you I worry over.”
She casts me a look and half smiles.
My lungs are acrid, suddenly. I pinch off the end of my cigarette to preserve the rest.
She shrugs. “We never let them get any sleep,” she says, jamming a pin into her cropped hair and wrenching her cap on over it.
(Petrova sometimes reaches behind her to smooth a braid that isn’t there. I’ve never seen Popova do it.
I wonder what became of Raskova’s dark brown braids, gleaming and pinned to her head as she spoke to us and made us into soldiers.)
Golden hair sticks out just at the edges, half curls below her ears. “I’d hate to see us coming, too. Let’s hope they’re too tired to aim.”
I want to smile or laugh, but I’m staring at my plane and feeling ice down my spine. Why this should be so different I don’t know—slightly more impossible than impossible isn’t a measurement that has much meaning—but I look at the trees instead, after a moment.
“How did you decide to do this?”
I don’t know why I ask. We’re all meant to be without a past, and equal. They were carpenters and secretaries and farm girls, but they’re pilots now, and it shouldn’t matter how they got here.
Popova raises her eyebrows at the setting sun like it’s the one who’d asked the rude question. There are only a few minutes left until it’s dark enough to load up and set off. I should be going back to barracks and getting my gear.
She says without looking at me, “A plane landed near our house, when I was young.”
Young—she’s nineteen now, I think, but I don’t say anything. Rude to interrupt. Not that it matters; she doesn’t elaborate. It’s the biography of a masterful pilot who knows better than to waste a gesture.
She glances over. “And you?”
“Oh, I’m a witch,” I say. “Flying comes naturally.” And she grins as she drops from the fence, snaps her goggles into place.
“Good thing it can be taught,” she says and takes off for her plane.
It can’t, not really. You can teach the mechanics of a plane, but either you have the flight inside you or you don’t.
Her strides kick up puffs of dust in her wake that cover her footsteps; at nightfall she casts no shadow, and for a moment she looks like I’d imagined witches to be, before I knew better.
When she’s gone, I unroll the cigarette and scoop up her ashes from the ground with the blade of my knife.
It’s a sharp blade; I never even feel the cut I make. When the paper gets wet enough, I use the tip of the knife to mix it and drag a line of blood and ash under the nose of Sebrova’s and Popova’s planes.
I do it quickly, my eyes stinging, my heart pounding.
Then they’re coming from the barracks, and I’m out of ashes and out of time and have to step away and get my gear. We’ll need to make sure the altitude gauge is fixed before we’re off the ground.
Petrova, my navigator, is already there, frowning underneath the propeller and tapping our windshields. As I haul myself onto the wing, I press one bloody thumbprint into the canvas just behind her seat, where she’ll never see.
Blood magic doesn’t work as well when you’re asking for yourself, but I’ll protect who I can, however it comes.
Each of us carries two bombs. It’s decided in the last seconds before leaping into our planes that Sebrova will be first, I’ll be second, and Popova will make the final drop, after they’re already on to us.
I don’t like it, but I keep my hands on the controls as we enter the flak zone.
The engines sound impossibly loud—three of them, and we don’t dare cut them with what we have to do, so there’s nothing for it but to go closer and closer, k
nowing they know we’re coming, waiting for the bullets to start.
(I miss the sound of the wind through the wires; it had always sounded to me like an owl on my shoulder, and it was a comfort as you were moving in for the drop.)
The first floodlight is almost a relief—it’s something to do, at least, instead of just something to be afraid of—and I wait two seconds longer than my instincts scream to, just enough that the nose of the plane catches the light, that it can almost but not quite follow me when I snap a turn to one side, dropping out of their sight. A spray of bullets arcs behind me, whistling clean and hitting nothing.
I don’t look for Popova. It’s not safe.
Instead I drop steeply so the searchlights casting at my prior heading can’t find me, and pull up at the last second with my heart pounding in my throat and the engine grinding underneath me. I cut through three lights at once, a dead hover for a moment as gravity gets confused, the blinding flashes underneath us reminding me to bank left and out of the line of fire.
I hear a series of dull thunders, then a thudding rip—a wingtip’s been struck. Nothing serious, it’s a lucky hit for them, that’s all, but my lungs go so tight I have to wrestle them for breath as I circle back. There’s already ice on my tiny windshield; there’s ice in my throat when I breathe.
Then I see Sebrova’s plane arcing up to meet us. She’s done it; the thunders were her bombs hitting home.
It’s my turn.
Petrova gives me the all-clear, and I do a big, lazy loop well out of the scope of the spotlights—I glimpse Popova, barely, practically cartwheeling and vanishing into the dark—breathe deep through my nose as we sail over the iron garden. Sebrova’s been kind enough to mark the way (a fire’s already started next to the drop site), but I want to be careful, and only when Petrova gives the sign do I tilt us five degrees closer to the Earth, no more, and let the unfastened bombs slide forward, hurtling toward the ground with a cheerful whistle.
I sweep up and to the left, taking my place on the flank, and the plane shakes for just a second as the payload explodes, a warm burst of orange in the black night. Petrova whoops; I grin for as long as I can stand the wind in my teeth, which isn’t long, and then push through the acrid scents of fire and guns and panic toward my secondary position.
Popova’s plane drops so fast I think for a second, my grip seizing on the controls, that she’s been struck, but it’s just the way she handles a plane—I hear the whirr of her engines above the tuneless wind as I cut straight across and through the searchlights, distracting them from her, letting them waste two arcs of ammunition trying to pin me as I drop and spin out lazily, letting the wind pull us the last few inches to the top of the arc.
But it’s too bright when I get there, far too bright, and I realize with numb panic that they’ve got me locked, and the next round of bullets will hit home.
I try for more altitude, already knowing I’m too late, and I wonder wildly if I can point the plane at the ground so hard that Petrova and I die without pain. We have to die—we can’t let the Germans take us—but she shouldn’t suffer.
Really, the way to go out is a bullet through the heart. The Germans could oblige. It would keep them from wondering where Popova’s gone.
Better this than ten days in the wilderness, I think; better this than to wait at the Sea of Okhotsk.
I let out my breath until there’s nothing left (blood-ash-air, I think dimly, someplace with no hope left, blood-ash-air), and bank the turn straight into the center of the circling lights.
I die that way, the way Raskova died—in combat, with a strike and a tailspin and then nightfall—but not on this run.
On this run, the spray of bullets never comes, because Popova’s plane soars straight in front of me.
The Germans are only tracking two of our planes, and with the interruption they can’t tell whether or not they’ve tricked themselves into a double image with the swinging searchlights, and in the few seconds where the lights freeze in place as they try to decide what to do, I bank as hard as I can and cut down and out and back into the dark, fingers aching, pointed for home.
We’re the last to get back. When I climb out of the plane I can barely stand; I don’t know where all my blood’s gone. Bershanskaya’s come to meet us. When she nods, I find it in me to straighten up and nod back.
Popova’s leaning against her plane, a few feet back from the mark of my blood and her ashes that she’ll never see. There are three bullet holes through one of her wings, like a smattering of freckles at the tip of someone’s nose, but she’s there.
She grins around a square of chocolate, calls over, “What kept you?”
I put blood and ashes on every plane that goes out after that.
Once I duck out between the planes and see Bershanskaya watching me, her hands behind her. She doesn’t ask what I’m doing there. I never say. It doesn’t matter. It’s what I’ve given over, and you can’t call it back.
It’s on my plane, too, the night I go down, but I never expected that to protect me for long. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.
A little while from now, Popova will go on a raid and get caught in German fire. When she makes it back to the base, there will be more than forty bullet holes in the plane. There are bullet holes in her helmet.
No one will understand how she survived it; no one can imagine what protected her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, which won the 2012 Crawford Award; her second novel, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, came out in 2014, and will be followed by the political thriller Persona. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Fantasy Magazine, and Strange Horizons, and the anthologies Armored, Federations, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, among others, and has been reprinted in several Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction has appeared at NPR, The AV Club, LA Review of Books, and io9.
MERCENARY’S HONOR
Elizabeth Moon
Ilanz Balentos looked at the wall around Margay and nodded his approval. It wasn’t the best city wall he’d ever seen, but it was a start, a good start for a town that had been under Vonja’s so-called protection for many years. The town’s leading merchants smiled. A wall—a defensible wall—had been one of his requirements before he would commit to living here the rest of his life and protecting people as they should be protected.
“You will sign the contract?” asked Ser Unglent, head of the local council.
“I will. You have done well. What did the Vonja militia think of it?”
“They told us we could not have a wall and were going to make us tear it down. We gave them wine, and when they slept the lads took their weapons and next day—”
“Did you kill them all?”
“Kill? No! But we showed them we were more than they, and held their weapons, and they went away.”
Ilanz winced inside. Civilians. If they had killed Vonja’s militia rather than shaming them, Vonja might have let them alone. “Vonja will send more—perhaps even another mercenary company.”
“But you are here.”
“Yes. And we will protect you.” That was the bargain: Margay to become his domain, and his own home, and his troops—or some of them, the ones who would stay when there was no promise of plunder—would protect them. Margay independent, as it had been once, rather than paying taxes to a distant city that never bothered to care for it. “Did you find that wizard you spoke about last time?”
“No . . . we sent an envoy to Sorellin’s fair, and he asked, but the wizard said we were too small and could not pay enough.”
Bad news, but not too bad. Vonja never took wizards on campaign anyway. Ilanz could protect Margay without a wizard’s tricks.
He signed the contract, stamped it with his seals—the seal of the company he had commanded for thirty-one years, and the new seal he’d had made, naming him Count Margay. The
merchants had already signed, and then there was handshaking and talk and food and drink until at last he could climb up the stairs to the bedroom in the house he had chosen.
The long plan had come to fruition. He gave a thought to the mercenaries Vonja had hired this year to do the work their own militia should be doing: protect farmers from brigands and incursions from neighboring lands, policing traffic on their sections of the Guild League trade roads. Halveric Company had been in Aarenis only five campaign seasons, but already had a good reputation. Ilanz had no doubt he and his could defeat Halveric, if it came to it, if the Council at Cortes Vonja sent them this way, but he hoped it would not come to that. He had met the young man in Valdaire several times and liked what he knew of him.
The wall was an arm’s-length higher by the time Ilanz’s scouts saw Halveric Company marching up the road from Pler Vonja. Ilanz wondered what Vonja had told him about Margay. Almost certainly not the whole truth, knowing Vonja’s history.
The younger commander had sense: he stopped a prudent distance away and sent two scouts forward at night, both circling wide of the town. One was captured after he stumbled into a large bramble patch and made so much noise Ilanz’s own militia could not resist “rescuing” him. They sent him back to his own camp. The other was seen only as a shadow in shadows, heading for the Sorellin border. Of course the young commander would want to know if Sorellin backed Margay. Perhaps his men would catch this one on the way back.
Perhaps he could send a message to young Halveric that way. If they come to battle, it would be a bloody business, killing a lot of good mercenaries for the profit of Vonja in the Guild League . . . and maybe that was what Vonja planned. Some realms hated and feared mercenaries, even if they hired them. If that was Vonja’s plan, weakening or destroying two competent mercenary companies—then not only Halveric but other companies were at risk. He paced his office, on the second level of his new house, thinking out the possibilities, and finally sat down to write a message. He would send it even if his people didn’t catch that scout. For the rest of the day, he went out in the town, chatting with his citizens and his own soldiers. At dinner, he told his captains his plan to attempt a truce with Halveric.
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