by Robyn Bennis
The man stepped closer and squinted at them. “Airmen, eh?” he asked. “That mean you go up in them balloons?”
“Airships,” the officers said, all at once and rather loudly.
“Well,” the man said, looking at the floor and seeming to think. “Always felt better with one of them over my head.” He lifted his head and looked back into the gloom. “Marguerite!”
Footsteps sounded from the floor above.
The man led them to a table, lit the lamp there, and sat them down. He even pulled out the chairs for the ladies. “Marguerite!” he shouted again at the stairs.
“I am coming as fast as I can!” said a voice from upstairs. “And if it ain’t the tax man or the supreme high priest down there, you’re gonna be damn sorry about it, ya old bastard.”
Bernat waited, more uncomfortable than when he was merely unwelcome.
A woman took a few steps down the stairs, then bent over to look into the taproom from ceiling level. “What is it?”
“Marguerite,” the man said, “get these folk some stew, and whatever else they want.” He was already behind the bar and pouring drinks, while Marguerite came down the stairs and went out the back, grumbling all the way.
“So,” Josette said, “you’re a frequent guest at this establishment?”
“One of my favorite places in Arle,” Bernat said. “So quaint. So homey.”
They enjoyed their ale, and earthen pots of stew whose ingredients might as well have been dug up from behind the hospital, though they were still superior to that horrible beef in the ship’s stores.
Marguerite was clearing the plates and the party was on its second round of ale—except for Kember, whom Josette had cut off after the first—when a riot seemed to break out in the streets. The mob came closer until it was just outside the taproom, and then it burst inside, its members pouring through the door.
They were the crew of the Mistral, their numbers shored up by supernumeraries in the form of painted ladies hanging from the arms of male crew members. The one on Corporal Lupien’s arm had to be helped over the doorstep, as she was missing a foot.
The vanguard of the group spotted Josette looking back at them, and stopped cold a few feet inside the door. The rest of the group ploughed into them from behind, nearly knocking them forward, before they too noticed their captain’s icy gaze. They all froze, the crew growing more terrified by the second and the supernumeraries growing more confused.
“Who is this, Lupie?” the one-footed woman asked. “Another of your mistresses?”
Corporal Lupien snapped into a salute, nearly sending the poor woman to the ground. The rest of the crew instantly followed his example.
Josette continued to watch them for a while, then touched a finger to her brow. “Carry on,” she said.
The crew let out their breaths as one. A quick inhalation followed, and then a hearty, spontaneous cheer. The crew spread out into the room, some going to the bar, others finding tables, and some going straight to the ninepins table.
Sergeant Jutes approached and put a knuckle to his forelock. “Don’t worry, Cap’n,” he said. “I’m keepin’ an eye on them, and I won’t let any of them drink more than he can handle.”
“I know they’re in good hands, Sergeant,” Josette said. And without looking away from Jutes, she reached out to stop Kember from drinking the dregs out of Bernat’s first mug of ale. Jutes touched his forelock and hobbled over to the dartboard where Gears was already waiting for him, defending the board from the rest of the crew.
Private Grey and the monkey rigger sat down near the back, at a secluded table next to the rear door. This concerned Bernat greatly, for he’d been just about to get up and visit the privy, and now he had to either go past Grey or explain to his tablemates why he’d gone around the front instead. He decided to put the matter off as long as possible and hope for a change of circumstance.
“I’ve been curious since Durum,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the din. “Why is a hole in the luftgas bags of such small concern?”
Josette answered, “You’ve seen for yourself why it’s no concern. We only need to find the hole and patch it.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I know that. What I wish to know is, why does the gas not escape all at once? It seems to me that a single musket should be enough to sink us.” He was genuinely curious, but his primary interest in asking was to distract himself from the needs of his bladder.
“It’s because it keeps the same pressure as the air,” Ensign Kember said, as if she were reciting it from a textbook. “In a rigid, anyway, and it’s not much higher in a semirigid or a blimp.”
“It only escapes at all by mixing with the air, and because it wants to spill upward,” Josette said, “just as water in a damaged rain barrel spills down.”
The example just had to be spilled water. He crossed his legs and said, “Interesting.”
“But if you imagine the effect of a small hole in a rain barrel the size of one of Mistral’s bags, well, it would take a year for it to dribble dry. Drip by drip.” She approximated the sound of running water.
Did she intend to torment him as a punishment, or did she simply have a natural talent for it? In either event, he stood up and said with annoyance, “Thank you very much for that most edifying lesson.”
As he moved quickly for the rear door, he heard Kember ask, “What’s the matter with him?”
“Just a soggy sort of fellow, I suppose,” Josette said.
Kember began to laugh, but Martel only asked, “What have I missed?”
Bernat didn’t hear the answer, as distance and the noise of the room finally drowned out their voices. Just in time, as it happened, to bring him within hailing distance of Private Grey. “My lord!” she called as he approached. “Sit and have a drink with us.”
“Another time,” he said as he went past. He reached the door and pulled on it several times, before realizing he had to push. He did so and stepped out into the blessed quiet of the night.
No, not quite quiet. He could still hear the room through the thin walls of the tavern, and in particular he heard the monkey rigger saying, “He didn’t seem very interested.”
To which Private Grey replied, “He’ll come around.”
He fled as quickly as he could to the privy, not certain at that moment whether he ever meant to return. It took him some time to find it in the dark, but he was reasonably sure he relieved himself in the privy and not the kitchen.
He paused at the door on his way back in, steeling himself for the return trip past Private Grey. While he was waiting, he couldn’t help but hear more of her conversation with the monkey rigger. He could perhaps have helped putting his ear to the wall to catch everything, but it was all of a piece.
“Persistence,” Private Grey said. “That’s what my father always told my brothers. Keep at them until you’ve worn them down.”
“Does he tell you the same, though?”
“I’m sure he would. He doesn’t speak to me much. But all my brothers are married, so it must work.”
“Didn’t you tell me your sisters-in-law were all miserable? That they all regretted ever marrying?”
“Well…” The rest of Grey’s answer was drowned out in a clatter of skittle pins falling, and the congratulatory cheers that followed.
Bernat went around the building in the dark, and stopped only when he saw Private Davies pissing in the street. He walked up to him, but had to dodge aside when the man snapped a salute without interrupting his previous activity. “Oh, it’s only you, my lord,” Davies said, returning the balance of his attention to the task at hand.
“If anyone asks after me,” Bernat said, “I’ll be back at the base.”
And there he went, to wait aboard Mistral until the crew returned. They arrived in the middle of the night, snatched a few hours’ sleep at the insistence of their sergeant, and rose in the predawn darkness to rig for launch.
15
MISTRAL HELD STATION at nine hundred
feet in calm winds, just below the cloud ceiling. Her captain stood leaning on the rail between the new bref gun and the old. She looked down on General Hinkal, mounted on his white mare and parading in front of the thin Garnian line. The general’s speech was inaudible to the crew of the Mistral, drowned by distance and the unceasing whine of the ship’s steamjack turbine. It was, Josette reflected, probably lost on the men in the line as well.
“Why parade in front of the line, giving a long speech that any man can only hear a few seconds of?” she asked.
Bernat looked down and said, “You’re missing the point. The men may only hear him for a few seconds, but he hears himself the entire time.”
She looked through her spyglass at the Vins, assembling by battalion on the other side of the boggy field.
The first elements of the Garnian army had arrived a day ahead of them, and had immediately set themselves to improving their position. Fieren meant to create a killing ground by burning out the vegetation for two hundred paces on the other side of a little stream that cut across the fens, but the brush there was too damp to take a flame. The men—already tired by their forced march from Arle—had to spend the entire day cutting and uprooting shrubs. By sunset, with the skin on their hands rubbed raw, they’d cleared only fifty paces in front of the stream.
And their ordeal had not been over. With the Vin horde due in the morning, they and every subsequent regiment had gone to work building earthworks. They dug entrenchments on the near side of the stream, shoveling and packing the dirt into a wall in front. No regiment, no matter how late it arrived, was allowed to retire for the night until they’d built their earthen wall to shoulder height.
Still, it would have been well worth the effort, if not for the rain that began around four in the morning. The downpour, sweeping in from Lake Magdalene, washed hours of hard work right into the stream. By daybreak, when the airships arrived, the only defensive works still standing were the lumber-and gabion-reinforced walls constructed by army engineers to protect the artillery batteries.
But while the Garnian infantrymen now stood completely exposed, envying their comrades in the artillery, they could at least take consolation in the condition of the field. The rain had turned the already-muddy terrain into a slurry of boot-sucking muck, which the Vins would have to cross under fire.
“What do you suppose he’s saying?” Josette asked. Below, General Fieren’s horse had become mired in the mud for the third time since the speech began.
Bernat thought for a moment, then spoke in a passable impression of his uncle. “Harrumph. Harrumph. Men, I know you’re worried, but you have nothing to fear. For, let me reassure you, the moment the fighting starts, I will take my mustache safely behind the line, there to be guarded by ten stout sergeants, each with a halberd in one hand and a tin of wax in the other. Harrumph. Harrumph.”
Josette put her hand over her heart and said, “I feel better already.”
“So, what are our chances?”
Josette assessed the battlefield for the tenth time in as many minutes. Then she looked southwest to the village of Canard, its wide dirt streets packed with supply and artillery wagons coming from Arle. Garnian infantry regiments were still trickling in along the road.
“I’ll say one thing for General Fieren,” she said, “he has a talent for finding a beautiful piece of ground and compelling the Vins to fight him on it.” She pointed to the fields around Canard, behind the Garnian line. “If the Vins try to flank us, Fieren can pull back and redeploy across solid ground, while they’re still slogging through the bogs out there. So wherever they go, he’ll be waiting for them and already dug in. And with more of our soldiers arriving from Arle every hour, the Vins must either attack now on Fieren’s terms, or turn around and go home.”
Bernat said, “Yes, yes—but do we have a chance?”
Josette ran her eyes across the thin defensive line below, then the seventy-thousand-strong Vin army massing across the field. “I never liked Arle that much anyway,” she said.
“Ah,” Bernat said, and sighed.
General Fieren finished his speech and returned to his staff tent. Josette clapped her hands together. “All right, everyone. The inspiring speech is over. Back to work.”
Crewmen who’d been sitting on the bref guns or nibbling hard tack suddenly leapt to their posts.
“Captain,” said Luc Lupien at the rudder, “what if I don’t feel inspired yet?”
Josette eyed him and said, “I anticipated that eventuality, Corporal, and I’ve made a particular effort to be inspired enough for the both of us.”
Lupien smirked, but kept his eyes forward. “Awfully thoughtful of you, Captain.”
“Message coming in,” Kember called, her voice throaty, the words rattling in her mouth. She was stationed on the starboard rail to observe messages flashed by quicklime lamp from the staff tent. “To St. Camille militia, left flank: withdraw your three leftmost companies to one hundred paces and form a reserve column. To 83rd Fusiliers, arriving: fill line and form reserve to left of St. Camille militia.”
“Relay it,” Josette said to the crewman posted on the port railing. He pointed his quicklime signal lamp and flashed the messages to their recipients.
“Pray tell,” Bernat said, “why are the militia regiments not given numbers, like the regulars?”
Josette considered this, then said, “I suppose they’d give them numbers, if militia officers knew how to count.”
With the arrival of the 83rd, about half the Garnian line was now regular army regiments, and the other half militiamen. Some militia regiments—those whose aristocratic sponsors could afford the expense—wore the standard Garnian uniform: a blue vest and jacket with brown trousers. It made them look almost like real soldiers. Other militiamen wore rough, undyed uniforms, and the worst of them wore no uniform at all, but only their own tattered farmers’ clothes.
Regardless of dress, all any of them could do was wait until the Vins attacked. In the meantime, the Garnian artillery positions tried an occasional shot at extreme range, and Mistral reported on its lack of effect.
And every quarter of an hour, Josette fired off a white flare, to keep the other airships of the squadron on station. There were four of them, hidden above the cloud ceiling in a line astern of Mistral. Closest in line were the one-gun chasseur Lapwing and the two-gun Ibis, whose captain commanded the squadron. Next was a lightly armed, semirigid scout ship, the Grouse. In the rearguard were a pair of inauspicious blimps, too insignificant to merit formal names, but unofficially dubbed the Swamp Hen and the Nowhere Express. The poor blimps didn’t even merit the expense of luftgas. They were buoyed by inflammable air, which the merest spark might set off.
Mistral, in the vanguard position, was the only ship yet revealed to the enemy. She hung stationary and exposed above the infantry, there to relay messages, report enemy movements, and inspire the troops by her presence. The custom was to rotate the ships of the squadron into and out of this vulnerable position, so as to share the risk of enemy artillery equally. In this case, however, orders had come directly from the general, ordering Mistral to hold the station until given further instructions, which would arrive shortly. That had been an hour ago, and no further instructions had yet arrived.
* * *
AT NINE IN the morning, the sun broke out over Lake Magdalene, thirty miles away, but the cloud ceiling above the battlefield stubbornly refused to disperse. As the sun climbed somewhere behind them, the clouds glowed with a diffuse red-orange light that seemed more gloomy, somehow, than the murky dawn preceding it.
The air had calmed to perfect stillness. The battlefield, cast in that strange orange light, had the surreal quality of a dream. More than once, Bernat tried to wake himself up while he watched the Vins unlimbering their artillery.
And then it began to rain fire, and he knew he was awake, for he’d never had a nightmare that could produce the stomach-tightening dread of shells exploding on every side. The Garnian cannons
replied, but their fire passed over the grand battery to fall scattershot into the Vin infantry’s assembly area. Indeed, the cannons on each side seemed entirely uninterested in shooting at each other, but directed most of their fire at the enemy infantry.
While he contemplated what seemed a strange kind of professional courtesy, a shell exploded directly to starboard, sending smoking, red-hot fragments so close he heard them hiss as they sailed past.
“Enemy in sight!” Kember called. As Bernat was wondering how she’d managed to miss them until now, the ensign reported, “Looks like a chasseur. Dead ahead, just breaking cloud cover.”
“That’ll be our counterpart,” Josette said. A shell exploded above, and she had to raise her voice over the noise. “How do you say ‘good luck’ in Vin?”
Bernat spelled it out and Kember sent the message by signal lamp.
He turned to Josette and said, “I thought you were of a mind to sweep these Vin bastards from our lands, kill them to a man, make them pay for what they’ve done, obliterate them, eviscerate them, and et cetera.”
She shrugged. “I am, but there’s no reason to be impolite about it.”
“So, is it personal?”
She didn’t answer.
“Message from the Vin chasseur,” Kember said. She spelled it out for Bernat.
He frowned. “They say, ‘Good luck. Looking forward to killing you. Love, Dimitri.’ Huh. Not a very sentimental people, the Vins.”
A fresh flight of cannonballs hit the Garnian line, leaving man-wide gaps in it. A blast above made Bernat jump, and soon several crewmen in the keel were shouting, “Fire!”
“Form a party and put it out,” Josette said, firmly and calmly.
Bernat felt his guts twist even tighter. He looked up, hearing crewmen climb through the girders.
Whereas Josette stood watching the enemy lines, stone-faced, not bothering to inquire about the damage, as if a little thing like a fire was nothing to worry about.
Soon Jutes called down, “Fire’s out, Cap’n. Some damage to the envelope. A few small holes in bags six and seven.”
