The Guns Above

by Robyn Bennis

  The voices stopped and Captain Dupre threw open the door. No, not Captain Dupre; but in the faint candlelight coming from the cottage, he could see why he’d been mistaken. They shared the same angry, tawny, sharp-featured face that bore the same go-bugger-yourself scowl, but the woman in the doorway was perhaps two decades the captain’s senior, with longer hair and plumper features, dressed in a humble peasant’s shift. He was half in love already.

  The actual Captain Dupre was behind her, on the other side of an old loom. Bernat smiled to both of them in turn and said, “I brought wine!”

  The captain did not smile back, but asked, “Did you bring a sense of propriety?”

  “Must have left it in the ship.” He flashed another dazzling smile to the woman in the doorway. “And you must be the ravishing Mrs. Dupre.”

  “Oh, it’s just Elise. ‘Mrs. Dupre’ makes me sound so…”

  “Unavailable?” the captain suggested.

  “Dowdy,” Elise said, throwing a nasty glance over her shoulder.

  “So very pleased to meet you. Allow me to present myself, seeing that the dear captain appears unwilling. I am Lord Bernat Manatio Jebrit Aoue Hinkal, son of the Marquis of Copia Lugon.” He bowed low enough to scrape the ground.

  Elise was stunned into complete silence. She just stared at him, eyes wide.

  Rising from his bow, Bernat gently took her hand and kissed it. “I would present myself as your servant, madam, but to a woman of your beauty, I am but a slave.”

  “Oh, good God,” the captain muttered.

  Elise, if not positively enchanted, clearly suspected that a tremendous amount of money was standing on her doorstep. She returned his smile, and he noted with delight that she still had all of her teeth. “Please come in, my lord,” she said. “We were just sitting down to dinner.”

  Bernat entered and bent to sniff at a stewpot on the stove. By the crust around the edge of the pot, he judged that the stew had been bubbling away, unstirred, for at least half an hour while the two women shouted at each other. “I have just the red to go with this,” he said. “And please, call me Bernat.”

  “What are you doing here?” the captain asked.

  Bernat sat at the table and dug into his bag. “Joining you for dinner,” he said. “And I have a lovely cheese to go with the stew. I think you’ll like it. It’s from the south of Kibril and perfectly aged.”

  “Don’t interrogate him,” Elise said, sitting across from Bernat. She looked at him across the table. “You’re welcome here, Bernat.”

  “My God,” the captain said, pacing a few steps and staring out through a small window set in a deep sill. “Of course he is. Of course some fop from the other side of the kingdom is more welcome in your house than I am.”

  “You mind your tongue!” Elise scowled, but it melted away as she looked into Bernat’s eyes. “Bernat is no fop.”

  “Quite right,” he said cheerfully. “At most, I’m a dandy.” He looked about the room, whose corners and edges were deep in shadow. “Could we perhaps get a bit more light?”

  “She says she doesn’t want to waste oil,” the captain said.

  But before the captain could even finish her sentence, Elise had leapt from her chair and was adjusting the lamp to produce a brighter flame. The light revealed the grime on her shift, which she seemed aware of. She bounded up the stairs two at a time, saying, “I’ll be back down with candles and another lamp.”

  The captain took a deep breath. “For me, she doesn’t want to waste oil.”

  “I’ll have a fresh jar sent over in the morning,” Bernat said. “And I do apologize for the intrusion, but I simply had to know what put you in such a state of dread at the thought of coming to Durum. Now I see that you were afraid I’d steal your dear mother away and take her home with me. Well, you may put your mind at ease, Captain. It’s such a lovely town, I think the two of us will live here.”

  The captain rolled her eyes. “If it would get you off my goddamn ship, I would happily give you my mother, and throw a couple of aunts into the bargain.”

  “Your generosity is admirable, Captain. But really, it’s not such a large house. One aunt will do, I think.”

  She leaned toward the stairs and shouted up, “Mother! Does Aunt Yvette still live in town?”

  Elise’s voice was strangely muffled when she called back, “Why do you want to know?”

  The captain’s eyes shifted to Bernat, and back to the stairs. “Just wanted to catch up.”

  Bernat was wondering just how long she could keep this going, when his thoughts were suddenly arrested by the sight of Elise coming down the stairs. She had changed out of her shift and into a green linen gown. It was a simple thing, really. In Kuchin, it would have been laughed at, but in Durum it was surely the height of finery.

  Bernat found himself unable to take his eyes off it. Perhaps Elise had purchased the gown from a slightly slimmer woman, or perhaps it had been fitted to her years ago, when she was her daughter’s size. Whatever the reason, it was deliciously tight on her frame and snug around her features.

  “Oh, good God,” the captain said, accentuating every word. “You went upstairs for candles.”

  Elise stepped delicately to the bottom of the stairs. “I made it to the top of the stairs when I remembered that I keep them down here, in the cabinet.” She fluttered her eyelashes at Bernat.

  While she lit candles and set them about the room, the captain asked, “My lord?” in a suspiciously accommodating tone.

  “Hmm?” he asked, pouring himself a glass of wine.

  “You should really take the place at the head of the table.”

  He coughed. “Thank you, but, ah, I’m quite comfortable where I am.”

  Captain Dupre walked behind him and tugged with seeming helpfulness at his chair. “No, my lord. You’re my mother’s guest; you should be seated at the place of honor.”

  Bernat held the chair firmly in place. “I don’t like this side of you,” he said. He wondered if she would behave this way if she knew he held her destiny in his breast pocket. No, he concluded after a moment’s thought, she would be worse.

  “Leave him alone, Josie!” Elise said. Looking at Bernat, she added, “She’s always been such a bully.”

  “I had an excellent tutor,” the captain said.

  Bernat took a long sip of wine, to forestall the expectation that he comment on any of this. Captain Dupre chose that moment to lean in and whisper in his ear, “Don’t worry yourself, my lord. I’m sure she’ll take it as a compliment.”

  Bernat choked and spat a fine mist of wine across the table.

  “Is the wine not to your liking, my lord?” the captain asked, taking the seat at the head of the table.

  “No, no. It just needs to breathe,” Bernat said, panting. “It just needs to breathe.”

  “We are speaking of the wine, are we not?” the captain asked. This earned her a cuff from her mother, right across the back of the head. She was, for a moment, too shocked to move.

  “She’s always been a vile creature, ever since she was a girl,” Elise said, standing next to the remaining chair but not sitting down. “Traipsing through the forest. Digging up the streets. Running off with men.”

  “Boys, mother. They’re called ‘boys’ when they’re the same age as you. You make it sound like, well, like something you would do. You were how old, again, when you married Dad?”

  Elise returned a sneer.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Was that uncouth? Let me rephrase it: how old were you when you had to marry Dad to avoid a scandal?”

  The captain directed her gaze at Bernat, who’d been hoping that if he pushed himself far enough down in his chair, they would forget he was there.

  “Not that it worked,” the captain continued. “Heny says I was born six months to the day after the wedding. Proof that there are some things you just shouldn’t put off.”

  Bernat really didn’t like this side of her. He stuffed a piece of cheese in his mouth so he
wouldn’t have to answer. A bubble plopped in the stew, still left unstirred in its cooking pot.

  And that was when Elise began to cry.

  It came as a surprise to the captain. She swallowed hard and began stuttering out an apology. But before she could form it, her mother stared balefully at her through brimming eyes and said, “Get out of my house.”

  For a moment, Bernat could see resistance in the captain. She clenched her fist and seemed on the cusp of a tirade. But then she sighed and said, in a very soft voice, “Gladly.” She rose, gathered her things in silence, and left.

  When she was gone, Bernat stood and walked around the table to sit next to Elise. She was not merely crying now, but sobbing.

  He put an arm around her, cradled her head against his chest, and said, “She isn’t very nice to me, either.”

  9

  JOSETTE BILLETED IN the tavern that night. She woke in the morning on the grimy bar floor, her head throbbing, her uniform soaked in ale, and the footsteps of the barman pounding in her ears.

  “Barman,” she said, barely recognizing her own ragged, phlegmy voice, “I don’t suppose I could beg the use of a basin to rinse my uniform? I can’t quite remember the details, but somehow I’ve come to smell like a brewery.”

  The barman, a man she didn’t recognize from her years in Durum, paused and leaned on his broom. “Just give ’em to the missus to wash. She’ll do it good and proper, with soap and everything. And I’ll fetch you water and a bottle of Heny’s best hangover cure.”

  “That’s too kind,” Josette said, clutching her head as she rose.

  “Not at all, Cap’n. Only good business. Your festivities last night will see my family through the winter. With the price of food and coal going up so fast, I wasn’t rightly sure we’d have enough money to make it, until you came from the sky, like a flight of drunken angels.”

  Her memories of the night before were vague, but she remembered, at several points, wondering how the tavern keeper could possibly make a profit from the pittance he was charging for drinks. Now she suspected he’d gouged her, at least by local standards.

  She wrote a report of the previous day’s battle while sitting on a barstool in her underclothes, while the barman’s wife washed her uniform. When she was finished, the barman offered to have the report sent to the base for her, but she had no time to linger, so she donned her damp clothes and took it over herself.

  At the base, the repairs and modifications were coming along well. The dearth of trained yardsmen should have slowed the work, but Martel had drummed the crew awake at dawn and put them to work, despite their aching heads.

  As she made a tour of the ship, Josette heard them grumbling. One crewman complained that “t’wasn’t fair to do this to us, when t’was the captain who got us drunk in the first place.”

  She couldn’t recall getting any of her crew drunk—could not remember them being at the tavern at all. But it was the only tavern in town, and they had clearly been drinking, so she didn’t doubt their story. She could only hope that she hadn’t done anything to permanently hobble their nascent respect for her.

  She informed Martel of her intention to go into the woods and look for Mistral’s wayward cannon, and refused his suggestion of an armed escort, but agreed to go armed herself. In truth, she’d been planning to take a rifle anyway, and hoped to bring home the officers’ dinner.

  Martel must have suspected, for he asked, “I thought east of Durum was all King’s Woods?” Meaning that all lumber and game there was the property of the Crown, unavailable for exploitation by the locals, and certainly not the personal sporting grounds of an army lieutenant.

  She snorted. “If I see the king out there, I’ll give him your regards.”

  She cut through the town to save time, but lost whatever she’d gained when she spotted Bernat strolling jauntily into the town square from Postman’s Lane, and she had to duck behind the tall weeds in the pond to avoid speaking to him. He looked insufferably cheerful this morning, and whatever conversation he might offer would do her aching head no good.

  When he was gone, she continued on and left town by the east gate, the only one of Durum’s gates which had been properly maintained and improved over the years. Just outside the gate, there was a small triangular redoubt, a defensive fortification that sheltered the gate itself from direct artillery fire. The redoubt’s sharp end pointed straight down the road, in the hope that any cannonballs coming in from an emplacement there would hit at an oblique angle and glance off. The redoubt had its own cannon, a modern twelve-pounder, with two older guns supporting it from the walls on either side of the gate.

  The other gates had no such redoubts, but this was the gate facing Vinzhalia, where people looked when they thought of invasion. It wasn’t entirely rational, for the Vins could cut a path through the woods and attack the town from any direction they chose, but Josette understood the sentiment all the same. Though this road and the thick woods around it were Garnian territory, she felt incredibly exposed. Even after years of neglect, the road was still wide, flat, and straight. A Vin cavalryman—and there might easily be cavalrymen in these woods even now, for airships weren’t the only kind of scout the Dumplings had—could hide in the underbrush and see for miles up and down the road.

  In fact, there was a small but very real possibility that she was being observed by the enemy at this very moment. The thought made her recheck her rifle’s flint and the powder in the pan.

  After a few more miles, she began to see signs of the previous day’s aerial battle. There were charred fragments of envelope and splinters of plywood. The cannon couldn’t be far from them, so she left the road and went into the woods. After another mile spent trudging through the underbrush, the squawks of ravens led her to Kiffer’s black and bloated leg, which was being pecked at in the upper branches of a tree.

  She was glad to see it, because it meant the cannon couldn’t be far off. She traced a zigzag path through the woods, keeping her eyes on the canopy to look for splintering or other signs of a heavy object falling from the heavens. It took another two hours of searching, but she finally spotted a thick branch that was broken and dangling by a thread of bark.

  Under it, there was no bref gun, but there was a bref-gun-shaped hole in the ground, impenetrably dark and deeper than her arm was long. At least, she consoled herself, the cannon had landed in soft earth. It was most likely intact down there, and could be returned to service as early as tomorrow, if she brought a work party back in the morning.

  She was about to make her way back to the road when she realized that the hulk of the Vin scout ship had to be nearby. Once she thought of it, it didn’t even occur to her not to look for it, and it was the work of a mere quarter of an hour to find the wreck.

  The aft half of the ship lay twisted and bent in the midst of a burnt-out clearing. The charred underbrush crackled beneath her boots as she approached the remains of the girders. Farther on, she could see the bow had crashed amid ancient oaks. Being only a semirigid, the envelope had collapsed, but the forward keel segments were intact and their fabric skin unburnt.

  As she approached, she heard something rooting around inside. Probably a fox. She readied her rifle and stepped quietly around the wreck. A fox would not do for the officers’ supper—and certainly not this fox, considering what it was most likely eating in there—but the pelt might be worth a rial or two.

  She maneuvered wide of the wreckage, between the trees, trying to get a shot at it through an opening in the keel, but most of the forward section was still covered by canvas. She chose her steps carefully, rounding the bow to look along the other side of the downed airship’s keel. It was only then that she noticed the horse.

  It was staring back at her from atop the remains of the scout’s hurricane deck, where it was tied to a limp suspension cable. When it saw her, it whinnied and pawed the ground.

  A man—a Vin hussar, judging by his blue coat and fur busby cap—came out of the keel. Josette
froze. The hussar glanced about the forest, but didn’t see her in the dim light under the canopy. He walked to the horse and stroked the animal’s neck, saying soothing words to it in Vinzhalian.

  When he finally noticed Josette, she was already squeezing the trigger of her rifle.

  As the smoke cleared, the horse pulled free of its bonds and galloped away, running headlong through the forest, stumbling over roots and uneven ground. The hussar lay on the ground, blood gushing from the hole in the center of his chest.

  “Oh hell,” she said. The hussar would have been a valuable prisoner. If she’d had half a second longer to think, she would have tried to wound him.

  It was then, as she cursed herself for her inattention, that she finally noticed the second horse.

  It was farther away than the first and hidden by a kink in the wrecked keel, but she could hear it plainly enough. She began to reload, but didn’t even get the powder down the barrel before another hussar appeared, squeezing his shoulders through a hole in the wreckage.

  She gave up all hope of reloading in time and simply ran at him, holding the rifle up like a club and shouting one of the few Vinzhalian words she knew, a demand for surrender.

  He was evidently unimpressed by her vocabulary, for he vaulted from the wreck and made a dash for his horse, where he had a carbine musket and the biggest goddamn cavalry saber Josette had ever seen.

  She could see already that he was going to reach them before she reached him. If she kept running, he’d shoot her. If she stopped, he’d shoot her. So she kept running until he drew the carbine, and then she suddenly veered away into the trees. She heard him fire, and heard the bullet smack into a tree just behind her.

  She looked through the trees to see the hussar toss aside his carbine and vault onto his horse. He drew his saber and charged. Though the horse had some trouble maneuvering in the forest, she knew it wouldn’t matter. The Vins were renowned for their cavalry, and she’d just picked a fight with one of them. She was a mere signal officer, while the hussar was a finely honed instrument of death.