by Robyn Bennis
Muskets fired below her. She could hear perhaps a dozen men on the road, excited and shouting. A bullet whizzed past her ear. She returned to her station and said, “Bring shells forward for bombing. Long fuses and slow match.”
The powder monkey and one of the cannoneers went up the companionway, coming back with two shells each in the crooks of their arms. They set them into ready racks along the side rails and then went up to fetch more. When they returned again, Ensign Kember followed behind them. She stopped at the foot of the companionway.
“Sir?” she croaked. “I’d like to take my station.” The ensign coughed and instantly winced at some pain it must have caused inside her neck.
Josette was not pleased, but she could hardly refuse. She nodded and said, “Just don’t shout your orders. I don’t want that wound reopening.”
“Yes, sir,” Kember said, her voice a tatter. “Oh, and I believe I owe you a uniform jacket, sir.”
Josette didn’t meet her eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”
* * *
WHILE THE CREW cut wide beechwood fuses and hammered them into shells, Bernat quietly asked Josette, “Is this entirely safe?”
“May I remind you that you’re aboard an airship,” she said. “Nothing we do is entirely safe.”
He frowned. “I mean to say, where would we be if a stray spark set off one of these shells?”
She stared at him. “Technically speaking? We’d be in a lot of places. The surrounding woods and countryside, to begin with. If these winds hold up, parts of us might even make it to Halachia.”
As Bernat watched another load of shells being carried down from the magazine, he said, “Well, I’ve always liked to travel.”
Kember croaked out the order: “Light match.” The cannoneers lit their slow matches and placed them into buckets within arm’s length of the gunpowder-filled shells.
“Bow down seven degrees,” Josette said. “When ordered, bombers will throw for the guns, not the cannoneers. Aim your throws but don’t wait to see where they fall. Just go right on to the next shell. Everyone understand?”
The bombers nodded and took their stations, three to a rail. Perhaps a quarter of a mile ahead, the Vin cannons fired, briefly illuminating forest, road, and cloud cover.
“Light fuses,” Ensign Kember said. At the order, the bombers put slow match to their shells. The fuses hissed and spit sparks, and it seemed to Bernat that they were burning down toward the gunpowder-filled shells at an alarming rate.
“Fire carcass,” Josette said, and quickly covered her eyes.
Bernat followed her example, and only looked after the gun fired. He wasn’t sure what to expect when he heard “carcass,” but it turned out to be an incendiary round, a bright yellow comet streaking toward the cannons, now only a hundred yards ahead. It skipped off the road just behind the Vin artillerymen and sailed over their heads to land on the far side of the protective gabions. From there, it skittered off into the woods, where it continued to burn and illuminate the battery.
“Good enough,” Josette said, just before a trio of musket balls pierced the deck from below. The carcass round had illuminated her airship as effectively as it had the Vin cannons.
Looking down, Bernat found the soldiers on the road even less visible than before. They were too far from the carcass round, which had ruined his night vision. Only when one of them fired could he pick the man out and shoot back. So he took a rifle, waited for a flash, and then fired at it.
Only after the smoke cleared did it occur to him that it was pointless to shoot at a man who, having already discharged his musket, couldn’t hope to get another shot off before Mistral was out of range. As he traded his rifle for a fresh one, Bernat quietly hoped that he hadn’t hit his target. It was one thing, after all, to shoot at a man who might otherwise kill him or his crewmates. What he was doing now, however, struck him as something akin to murder.
“Ready bombs,” Kember said.
The bombers at the rails hefted their first shells, holding the heavy spheres against their collarbones, with fuses fizzing inches from their faces.
The captain’s eyes were fixed on the gun battery closing fast ahead, where the Vin artillerymen were already abandoning their pieces and running for the cover of the woods. She held her hand up. Mistral’s bow was nearly over the guns before she shouted, “Now!” She brought her hand down, though only Bernat saw it in the darkness.
“Drop!” Kember shouted, her enthusiasm winning out against the captain’s advice and common sense.
The bombers hurled their shells forward. They picked up the next shells and had them over the side before the first ones even hit the ground. Then they dropped the next, and the next. By the time the bomber nearest Bernat loosed his fifth shell, he didn’t so much throw it as hastily dump the smoking bomb overboard, double-handed.
The shells bounced like leaping fleas, the mass of them nearly keeping pace with Mistral as they skipped over the road below. Many of them, perhaps more than half, deflected uselessly into the woods on their first or second bounce. A few plopped into muddy spots and stopped well short of the guns. The remainder skipped or rolled or skidded into the battery, either stopping against the gabions or coming to rest between the gun carriages.
Bernat ducked as a volley of muskets peppered the rails. When he looked again, Mistral was past the battery and moving away fast.
Josette stood at the taffrail, looking back. She pointed and said, “Shoot that fool!”
The other rifleman fired immediately, but it took Bernat a moment to realize just what he was supposed to shoot at. It was a man—an artilleryman, he thought—running between shells, pulling their fuses out.
“Shoot him, Bernie!” Josette shouted, taking a rifle.
The range grew noticeably longer as he aimed. Josette fired but missed. Bernat fired. When the smoke cleared, the artilleryman was down, and desperately dragging himself away from the battery.
A shell burst in the woods. Another went off behind the battery, and then all the rest seemed to go off together. The guns were hidden behind the flash and the smoke. The gambions disintegrated, throwing rubble a hundred feet in every direction. One shell was kicked upward by the detonation of its neighbors and exploded a hundred feet in the air.
As the last few straggler shells exploded in the woods, Josette turned to Bernat and said, “Just like bowling ninepins.”
Bernat looked back on the destruction. “I’ve bowled ninepins,” he said. “I can’t recall a game that ended like that, no matter how much wine was invol—”
He was cut short by a sudden punch to the gut, striking harder than he’d ever been hit, bringing more pain than any he’d ever felt. As he stumbled against the back of the companionway ladder, reeling, he tried to sort out who had struck him and what sort of hammer they’d used.
And then he noticed the distant firelight shining through a hole in the wicker taffrail, where a musket ball had passed through on its way to his stomach. He slumped down to the deck, muttering, “I’m shot, I’m shot.” Some corner of his mind was earnestly worried that no one would know if he didn’t tell them. “Oh God, I’m shot.”
And not merely shot, but gutshot. Gutshot and facing that slow, lingering death sentence that came with it. He stared back at the stern, eyes blank while Josette knelt in front of him, frantically tearing his shirt away.
She cleared the area around the wound and, staring at it, grew strangely quiet and serene. Then she looked away, felt around on the deck around him, and held something in front of his nose.
His eyes focused on it. It was a bullet.
“Spent,” Josette said. She let out a breath, fell back to sit splay-legged on the deck, and smiled. “It’s spent.”
Bernat looked down and felt his stomach. Just touching it was agony, but there was no blood, no ragged hole torn in him. Fired by one of the Vin fusiliers they’d left behind on the road, at extreme range for a musket, the bullet with his name on it had lost its lethal fury
during its long flight.
A thought occurred to him, and he grinned despite the pain. “You were worried about me!”
Her relieved expression fell away to leave a poor imitation of her usual stone-faced countenance. “I’m responsible for you, is all.”
“You smiled! You actually smiled! And not a prick-shaped cloud in the sky!” He tried to laugh, but the pain of doing so was too great, so he merely chuckled.
“I suppose I might have been a little relieved,” she said, grimacing at this small admission. “We can’t afford to lose a rifleman. And the crew seem to be fond of you, for what reason I surely can’t fathom.”
“Ah yes, of course. The crew. Such a sensitive bunch, they are.”
“Are you done now?” Josette asked. “Would you like to go to the sick berths?”
He shook his head. “I think I’ll just rest a while here, if it’s all the same to you. Though if someone could fetch a bottle of wine from my bags…”
* * *
JOSETTE LEFT BERNAT to his wine and went to the forward rail. Mistral was just passing over Durum’s east gate, where the Garnian defenders atop the wall raised a wild cheer. She didn’t see how she merited such a reception. Yes, it would take the Vins hours to make their battery operational again, but they would make it operational. She had only given Durum a respite in what still promised to be a very short siege.
She recognized Kadi Halphin, dressed in his full colonel-of-militia regalia, standing atop the gatehouse with his hands on his hips. Someone rushed a speaking trumpet to him, and he called up to Josette, “I see, after all these years, you’re still tearing up my roads!”
So the old bastard did recognize her. She ordered the steamjack power to station keeping, which would balance their air speed with the oncoming wind and so allow them to hover in place. She called for the ship’s speaking trumpet. When she had it, she called back, “Bet you can’t find a man who’ll testify against me.”
This produced a wave of laughter that spread along the thin line of defenders manning the wall.
“Are the civilians evacuated?” Josette asked.
The kadi shrugged his shoulders. “Everyone who’d go,” he said.
Josette knew what that meant. It meant the truly stubborn jackasses were refusing to leave their homes. Knowing Durum, that was most of the town.
“Have you seen any Vin airships?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Then we’ll stay here as long as we can,” she said.
The kadi took off his hat and waved it at her, which set off another cheer among the defenders. Mistral crept onward, out over the town.
“Steer for that house over there,” Josette told Corporal Lupien.
As they passed over a granary, Josette noted with approval that it had pitch-splattered cordwood stacked around its foundation, and militiamen standing guard, ready to burn the grain rather than allow it to feed the Vin army.
She looked back at Lupien and said, “Turn right down this street. At the end, turn us into the wind and lie to.”
Lupien was baffled, but he obeyed, tracking the street precisely until it came to a dead end, then turning into the wind. The ship hung nearly motionless.
Josette pointed her speaking trumpet at the brick-and-stone house at the end of the lane and shouted, “Mother, come out. I know you’re in there.”
A window on the second floor opened and Josette’s mother stuck her head out. She yelled something and waved the ship away.
“You have to leave town,” Josette called. “You have to leave town before the Vins cut the road.”
Her mother yelled again. Josette couldn’t make out the exact words, but they seemed nasty.
Bernat approached the rail, taking tiny steps and clutching his stomach as he walked. He looked over and saluted with his wine bottle. “Good evening, Elise,” he shouted.
Josette’s mother looked somewhat less angry when she saw Bernat, but she only shook her head and muttered something. When she disappeared inside and closed the window, it was obvious that she wasn’t preparing to leave.
“That woman is impossible,” Josette said.
Bernat offered Josette the wine bottle without saying another word. She took a long swig and handed it back.
Returning to her place on the deck, she ordered, “Increase to one-quarter power. Run a circuit around the edge of the town at fifty feet. Lookouts on deck.”
Mistral began its circumnavigation of the town, running from corner to corner to corner, like an attentive night watchman. On their fourth circuit, a lookout saw movement in the fields to the south. Josette, even looking through her night glass, thought at first that the jumpy lookout had seen only stalks of grain swaying in the darkness.
But it would do to be cautious. “Put a carcass shot into it,” she said.
“Why in hell do they call it ‘carcass’?” Bernat asked, waving his wine bottle to accentuate the question.
But no one was paying any attention to him, for the burning carcass round had sailed over the heads of a full company of Vinzhalian fusiliers and landed amid a second. The shot bounced, trailing smoke and fire, to finally burst in front of a third company that was following in the rear.
Josette stared, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “There’s half a battalion out there.” That was several hundred men against half as many Durum militiamen.
Trumpets and whistles sounded amid the Vin companies, and they sped to a quick march. Quick-thinking Vinzhalian soldiers quenched the fire set by the shattered carcass round with dirt, but not before Josette spotted ladders and the glint of axes. So the attackers had never intended to wait for the cannons to do their work. The cannons were only there to hold the attention of the defenders, to fix their eyes eastward, while the real attack snuck through the woods and across the fields to the south.
“Reload with canister,” Josette ordered. “Pass the word to increase steamjack to full power. Bring us over the gatehouse.”
The colonel was already redeploying his men to cover the south wall when Josette overflew him, calling down her report. He nodded his acknowledgement and called out more orders before joining the militia in their rush to the south wall.
A bright light drew Josette’s eyes to the signal base, where a plume of flame was rising from the shed. Half of the giant shed collapsed around the explosion as she watched, and the other half was already catching fire. In addition to the destruction she could see, Josette knew that thousands of liras’ worth of luftgas had just been released and was rushing invisibly upward, to be lost forever in the rarified air above.
“They’ve blown it up,” Bernat said.
“We’ve blown it up,” she said. She looked at the base through her telescope and saw, in the light of the burning debris, half a dozen men running for the south gate. “That’ll be Lieutenant Garand following his standing orders.”
Mistral passed over the southeast corner of the wall on her way toward the Vin companies. By the light of the burning shed, Josette could see the attackers, at first only as a reflection of firelight off a hundred bayonets. But soon they came marching out of the darkness, casting long shadows behind their loose files. In the gloom, their tall shakos seemed a part of their heads, and their bayonet-tipped muskets melded with their shoulders. They looked like monsters from a fable.
But the defenders had the wall, a cannon emplaced next to the south gate, and an airship over their heads. Josette was beginning to feel the itching, nervous sense of responsibility that comes with a slim hope.
Before they overflew the Vin companies, she ordered steamjack power to be reduced, and took the ship up higher. There were just too damn many fusiliers down there to risk their fire, at several hundred musket balls to a volley and three volleys per minute.
Just before the hurricane deck rose into cloud cover, the south-gate cannon fired, and Josette saw the cannonball pluck an attacker out of his rank. His body went tumbling, arms and legs flailing like a rag doll, and slid to rest ten yar
ds away.
“That’s one down,” Bernat said. He seemed genuinely disappointed when no one made a response, and finally he attempted it himself. “That only leaves … err, how many of them are there?”
“Steamjack to full power,” Josette said. She didn’t wish to ignore him, but she wished even less to indulge him in that stale old quip.
“Well,” Bernat said, “that leaves only that many, less one.” He still received no reaction. “Quite a few remain, at any rate.”
“Bow angle down ten degrees,” she said. She heard scattered shots below.
“By which comment I mean to draw ironic attention,” he said, pressing on, “to the fact that, despite having drawn first blood, the odds are still very much—”
“Let it go, Bernie.”
He looked a bit petulant, but took up a rifle, saying, “Consider it gone.”
“If you’re not too drunk to see them, please aim for the ladder parties,” Josette said. “Ignore the ranks and the axemen. Whatever you do, just don’t shoot your foot off.”
As they began their descent, more musketry crackled from the ground. She heard bullets hitting the bow. A second later, Mistral’s hurricane deck burst out of the clouds. Below them, three escalade parties were carrying their long ladders, illuminated by the shed fire and by torches atop the wall. Here and there, a shot from the Durum militia found its mark and a ladderman fell. This slackened the ladder’s speed only a little, however, for men trailing behind jumped over the dead man and ran forward, racing each other for the honor of taking his place. Such valor was not surprising, for ladder parties were usually mustered from volunteers. Thus, they were filled with men either trying to make a name for themselves, or seeking to commit suicide by way of the army.
Kember directed the steersmen, lined up her gun, and fired. The smoke swept back along the deck to reveal three dead at the front of the nearest ladder. The next man back tripped over their bullet-ridden bodies, and with four men down, the front of the ladder dropped and stuck in the ground. The laddermen behind piled up against it.
