The Guns Above

by Robyn Bennis

  He smiled back at her. “Make sure you explain that to these people, when you blow up their bridge.”

  She snorted and called to the steersmen, “Two points right and bring us down in the square. When she rises again, put her back over the river. I don’t want to snag the drogue on the bank.”

  The ship swung right, out over the village, and the bow pitched down. With her keel tethered to the drogue, Mistral’s airscrews drove the ship into a smooth descent.

  While still fifty feet in the air, Josette swung herself over the rail, one hand on a suspension cable. She glanced once at the ground, then back at Bernat. “These bumpkins may not care which side of the border they’re on, but I do. If destroying some old bridge can better our odds by the minutest fraction, you may consider that bridge destroyed. I’ll destroy their bridge, and their mill and their granary for good measure, and I’ll do the same in every goddamn village and hamlet from here to Arle. And if I run out of bridges and mills and granaries, I’ll burn the crops in the fields, poison the wells, kill the animals, and foul the meat. And when the Vins send out foragers, I will hunt them down by twos and threes, and hang them at the side of the highway as a warning to the others. I tell you, I will do whatever is necessary to tip the scales, and I won’t stop until every one of those goddamn Vin bastards either retreats to his lands or lies dead on mine.”

  Bernat just looked at her for a while as the ship drove down. “I thought it wasn’t personal?” he finally asked.

  She looked back, her façade cracking wider and deeper. She drew a deep breath. “To them,” she said, and looked down. “I said it wasn’t personal to them.”

  And then she jumped overboard.

  * * *

  JOSETTE LANDED ON her feet in the village square. Private Grey, Chips, and six cannoneers and riggers followed, jumping as the ship brushed the ground. Only one of them hesitated and, by the time he worked up the courage to let go, the ship was lighter by half a ton of crew and rising fast. He fell hard and let out a sharp gasp when he landed.

  He was back on his feet in only a few seconds, unhurt save for scrapes and bruises, but he’d landed on the flat of his saber and snapped it in two. As Josette approached the congregated villagers, she could hear him behind her, bickering with Private Grey.

  “Give me your sword.”

  “No. You already broke one.”

  “What the hell are you going do with a sword, anyway?”

  “Well I’m not going to break it in half, for a start.”

  “Good morning,” Josette said to the villagers. “Who’s in charge here?”

  None stepped forward, but many stepped back from the oldest of them, a man of perhaps fifty, give or take ten years. She was not confident of even this approximation, for the man had a wrinkled, leathery face, weather-beaten beyond its years.

  She looked up at him and said, “The Vins are coming. Take your people and get across the river.”

  “Vins don’t have any quarrel with us,” the man said.

  “They will shortly,” she said, indicating the bridge. “Take whatever you want, but don’t waste time. You have as long as it takes us to blow that bridge, and not a second longer.”

  She turned away without another word, half expecting to find a pitchfork in her back at any moment. But she walked away safely, perhaps because the village elder thought her unworthy of wasting a pitchfork on. As she called her party to the bridge, she could hear the elder shouting up at the airship. “Hey! I want to talk to whoever’s in charge up there! Your goddamn harridan wants to blow up my bridge!”

  The goddamn harridan took her landing party to the water’s edge, where Grey and Chips were busy surveying the underside of the bridge. By the time they finished, only one family had crossed to the safe side of the river, but more had crossed from the other side, going the wrong way. They seemed to be farmers from outlying cottages, drawn by the commotion and unwilling to listen to Josette’s admonitions about an oncoming army.

  Chips made his report to Josette. It consisted in total of the statement, “Never blown up a goddamn bridge before, and don’t know how neither. Sir.”

  Grey’s report was somewhat more specific. She said, “I suppose two casks of gunpowder might do it, sir.”

  It struck Josette as conservative. “Are you sure?”

  Private Grey considered it for a moment, then said, “No, sir. I’ve never blown up a goddamn bridge before, either. But it’s an arch, built to take force from above, not below. If we can put the charge on the underside, it should blow the keystones out, and the rest of the bridge will fall over on its own.”

  “Let’s make it three casks. What else do you need?” Josette asked.

  “A boathook and about fifty yards of rope,” she said without another second’s thought.

  Josette looked up at Mistral, where Ensign Kember was keeping an eye on the landing party. Josette communicated the ground party’s needs with a wigwag signal, dipping her outstretched arms left, right, or forward to spell out her message. Kember acknowledged in the same way, and a minute later Mistral was descending toward the bridge.

  The deck crew pitched Grey’s shopping list to the ground. As the bottom of the hurricane deck kissed the side of the bridge, Kember lowered a line to her captain.

  Josette got a shock when she touched it, the static spark visible as a blue flash in the predawn darkness. She lowered the end of the rope into the river, giving the static fire a clear path to the ground that she hoped would spare the gunpowder from any subsequent spark. She signaled and the crew above tied casks to the line. They lowered them through the fog and onto the bridge, string-of-pearls fashion. In lieu of untying them, she cut the rope, all the more swiftly to sever its perilous connection with Mistral.

  With the line cut and most of the danger passed, she bent to inspect the casks for damage and was promptly hit on the head by a length of slow fuse and a flannel bag. She could just hear Kember shouting above her as the airship rose: “Sorry, sir!”

  Josette cut a minute’s worth of fuse and delicately filled the bag halfway to the top with gunpowder from one of the casks, making a charge of about half a pound. She took this and a party of two crewmen with axes to the mill, while Chips and Grey set to work on the bridge.

  She entered the mill alone, the villagers ignoring her in favor of her male escorts, whom they variously harassed, harangued, or kicked at. They conveniently soaked up all the villagers’ abuses, leaving Josette entirely unmolested as she set her gunpowder charge inside the eye of the millstone and lit the slow fuse. As it burned down, she slung a bag of flour over her shoulder and left, closing the door on her way out. “Keep them well back,” she said to her escorts.

  She put her fingers in her ears a few moments before the charge went off. The blast sent the mill door flying off its hinges and geysers of flour dust spewing from every window. The water wheel continued to turn, but its axle thumped and grated against the shattered mechanisms inside. On the second full turn, the axle came off entirely and the wheel fell into the river.

  While the villagers variously gaped and shouted, Josette strolled to the granary. It was a small, stout building, held a foot off the ground by stones at the corners. Apart from these smooth cornerstones, made to keep rats from reaching the grain, the entire thing was made of wood.

  “Should we call for some kerosene, sir?” asked one of her escorts.

  “We have plenty of fuel,” she said, tossing handfuls of flour onto the roof. “But hack open the walls and spread the grain as thin as you can.”

  The escorts looked at each other through the fog, seeming to think their captain had gone mad.

  “What, you never made flour bombs when you were kids?”

  They apparently hadn’t, but they went to their jobs regardless. As they swung their axes, cutting through planks and watching the grain spill out, the crowd of irate villagers grew larger and more irate. Josette even spotted a couple of pitchforks. There were something like twenty men gather
ed now. Where they had all come from she wasn’t sure, but they were angry, ugly, and closing in around the granary.

  “I would step away from there if I were you,” she said, spreading spilled grain with her foot and dusting it with flour.

  The only men who moved were the ones muscling between her men and the granary, pushing the axemen away and forming a barrier around their spilled harvest.

  Josette snorted. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She drew one of her pistols, which finally checked the crowd. They didn’t back away, however, and without another thought she tossed her last handful of flour into the air and fired.

  The bullet went high over the villagers’ heads, a danger to no one, but the powder lit the flour hanging in the air. It took flame with a dull, loud whooshing sound and a flash that lit the entire village as bright as the noonday sun. The brief fireball kindled the dusting of flour spread on the grain and atop the granary roof, and within seconds it was all ablaze.

  “Come on!” Josette shouted to her escorts, while the villagers were still flash-blind and trying to find their eyebrows.

  One of her escorts seemed to be having some trouble finding one of his own. “Respectfully, sir,” the man said as he ran, “you ever try not enraging people so much?”

  “Once,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “It didn’t work.”

  The village mob had recovered itself and was right on their heels now, but the bridge party had already formed a line with their weapons drawn. Josette and her escorts darted between them. When the villagers caught up, they faced swords, pistols, and half a saber.

  With her escorts taking up station in the protective line, Josette went to check on Chips and Grey.

  “We’re ready, sir,” Grey said, her eyes flitting to the horde of angry villagers. “But the casks are only tied around the bridge. All they have to do is cut the line and they’ll all drop into the river.”

  “Then we’ll just have to keep them from it.” Josette looked up at Mistral, hanging motionless in a sky turned gray by the first morning light. She signaled for them to back away, then ordered Grey to light the fuse.

  With her ship retreating to a safe distance, Josette stepped into the no-man’s-land between her crew and the villagers. It wasn’t only anger she saw in them now. It was fear, anxiety, and pleading. They were begging her not to destroy the last vestige of their livelihood.

  She didn’t give a damn.

  “I will personally shoot the first son of a bitch who takes a step onto this bridge,” she said, drawing her second pistol. “Do not try me. I have had a very bad week, and I am a very good shot.”

  The village elder took a step forward. This, Josette knew, was the deciding moment. If he attacked, the rest of the villagers would follow, and she couldn’t shoot all of them. Nor were her crewmen likely to fire on fellow Garnians.

  But the villagers didn’t know that, so she raised her pistol and held it an inch from his nose, her eyes daring him to move.

  He stood for a time, staring balefully. Then he stepped back, and in that moment the fight went out of his men. She could see it when she glanced at their faces.

  Josette counted in her head, and when thirty seconds had passed in terse silence, she said, “I heartily suggest you all run for cover.”

  She nodded to her own people, who found shelter behind the bridge’s own stonework or leapt into the nearest convenient hollow. The villagers ran. When she saw that everyone was reasonably safe, Josette crouched down and covered her head.

  The charges went off with a resounding crack, like a knife stabbing at her ear. The center of the bridge disappeared in smoke and dust. Fragments of stone scattered through the air. The largest pieces went straight into the river, but fist-sized chunks rained down around Josette. One hit a crewman on the back and inspired a flurry of curses.

  The ancient bridge crumbled from the center out, stone after stone tumbling into the water until there was nothing left but a pair of abutments facing each other across the river. A three-foot-high wave ran upriver and down, swamping the banks for a hundred yards in either direction.

  And then, as the sun rose through dust and haze, Mistral returned to pick up her landing party. In the village, a bucket line had formed between river and granary, and the villagers were desperately trying to put out the fire.

  It was hopeless, of course. As Mistral pulled up her anchor and turned west, the granary roof caved in, sending sparks and embers swirling into the fog.

  13

  “LOOKOUT REPORTS ENEMY ships closing in,” Jutes called from the companionway. “Firing range in five minutes.”

  Josette couldn’t see the ships from her station on the hurricane deck. They were above and behind Mistral, attacking from the best position they could have asked for. She caught some of the deck crew sneaking worried glances at her.

  “We will hold course and speed,” she said, committing her ship to come under enemy fire. There was cloud cover two thousand feet above, and she could still make it in time to avoid a pummeling. But it would mean giving up what was perhaps her last chance to slow the Vin column cresting the horizon behind them.

  She’d kept ahead of that column all day long, destroying a second bridge late in the morning and two more granaries in the early afternoon. Now she had entered hilly countryside dotted with farms and windmills. A stone granary directly ahead trailed a thin line of smoke from its charred, collapsed wooden roof.

  Bernat came down the companionway. He was wearing a silk robe and had a towel draped around his shoulders. His chin was shaved to exquisite smoothness, his face scrubbed, his hair damp. He wrung the towel around his right ear and asked, “Is there to be a battle?”

  Josette had to look twice before she believed her eyes. “Hoping to leave a good-looking corpse?”

  He grinned. “I couldn’t avoid it if I wanted to.” He looked ahead, to the smoking granary. “I see the campaign against the Vins by way of the common folk continues.”

  Josette fixed her eyes on the smoldering granary. “Actually, it was like that when we arrived. The villagers have fled. They tried to set fire to their granary before they left, God bless them, but they proved woefully untutored in arson.”

  “Well, what do you expect? The schools out here are terrible.” He stood next to her, invading the space that was hers by right of command. “Would it have affected your actions, if they were still here and defending the grain with their lives?”

  She didn’t answer him. “Try a shot,” she said to Ensign Kember. “You might hit it on the bounce.”

  Kember lined up the cannon and fired. The shot skipped on the rocky ground and smashed squarely into the granary.

  Josette looked through her telescope. The stone wall, apart from a cracked stone where the cannonball had hit, stood firm and true. “Who the hell builds a granary like that?”

  “Someone thinking ahead, to the day when rats finally discover artillery,” Bernat suggested.

  She’d hoped to split the wall with cannon fire, spill the grain within, and drop lit carcass rounds to ignite it. Now she had no idea what to do. She could attempt to ignite the grain without cracking the granary, but the villagers had already attempted that without success, the fire having burnt itself out in the confines of the silo.

  The granary was coming up fast. She couldn’t hope to land a party, or even to circle around for a second pass, with those Vin chasseurs so close on her heels. She was so desperate, she resorted to asking the advice of Bernat. “Can you think of any way to spoil that grain?” she asked in a whisper.

  He pondered for a moment, then said, “I hear Vinzhalians won’t eat anything with pesto on it, if that’s useful.”

  She shot him a harsh look. “Did you come down here to help, or just to badger me?”

  “Primarily the latter.” He smiled, and before she had a chance to hurt him, added, “Though, if we lack for pesto, we might consider the contents of the aft reservoirs.”

  Kember fired another shot. I
t struck the granary, but did no more damage than the first.

  “Cease fire,” Josette ordered. “Steersmen, take us directly above the granary. Steamjack to idle.” She held the pull-ropes to the aft reservoirs and waited for Mistral’s momentum to carry them over the granary. The roofless structure slid by below. Josette looked back along the ship, waited until just the right moment, and yanked on the pull-ropes.

  The entire volume of Mistral’s wastewater—a fetid mix of feces, urine, and shaving powder—cascaded from the ballast ports and into the open granary. Some dropped on the far side of the structure, and some on the near side, but enough went right down the middle to make anyone think twice about consuming the grain within.

  Josette released the ropes and ordered, “Emergency power. Up elevators. Maximum climb.” Then she looked to Bernat and said, “Thank you.”

  “Not necessary,” he said, and bowed. “The unending adulation of yourself and your crew is thanks enough for me.”

  The ship, lightened as it was, rose quickly toward the clouds. But forward speed had to be sacrificed to maintain maximum climb, and now the enemy ships were catching up. By Josette’s estimation, Mistral would have to endure several minutes of concentrated fire, and it was going to begin any second now.

  She heard a cannon fire in the distance. A second passed with no impact, and no screech of round shot flying past. Only then did she realize that something was wrong about the sound of that cannon. It was too close, and it had almost seemed to come from …

  She looked up, just as Jutes called down, “Crow’s nest reports another ship coming out of the clouds above us.” Several tense seconds followed. “It’s one of ours! He thinks it’s the Ibis!”

  “Rudderman, come about,” Josette ordered. “Continue climbing. Cannoneers load round shot.”