The Enterprise of Death

by Jesse Bullington

  “Down!” Monique dragged Manuel underneath the abandoned cart she had found just as the mud around them spit up clods of earth, another volley dodged, another ignoble, anonymous death avoided. Then Monique turned and saw the dead men holding Awa swaying beside the shelter and with a curse she left the cover and snatched the girl from their arms. Back under the filthy tipped cart Monique looked anxiously from Awa to Manuel, then gently slapped Awa’s cheek. “Oi, up, blackamoor, there’s work ta be done.”

  The world came back to Awa, the real, living world, but all the light was gone from it, and everything was the color of old blood and ash. Monique and Manuel were hunched over her and Awa could not tell if they were alive or dead, or which she was, for that matter. She decided they were all still alive, but that meant they were all about to die, and Awa was afraid.

  Death was not to be feared. Awa thought she had believed that, thought that what her tutor intended by stealing her body was obviously different and that true death was natural, benign, sometimes welcome, even, but on the field of Bicocca that conceit was broken.

  The magnitude was what changed everything for her, the sheer volume of spirits ripped from their beloved shells by hard iron plentiful as raindrops in a storm. Those that were blasted out at once were lucky compared to those who lay drowning in their own blood, and as if they were stones to be picked up and thrown she had hoisted one corpse after another and marched them forward, her eyes flitting around the field, her concentration so intense that some did not even hit the dirt before their dead bodies were reanimated, the young Swiss staggering as his throat was shot, his stomach, his heart, his groin, staggering but not falling and continuing to march on the low earthwork wall where row after row of arquebusiers discharged their weapons into the disintegrating columns.

  When Awa was confident she had resurrected a sufficiently deep wall of mindless corpses to march in front of them she had ordered two of them to swoop her up. As they carried her Awa shifted her focus from the physical remains to the almost invisible spirits being ejected from their bodies, from life, and she called out to them. Not all of them listened, many shimmering and fading, not to be recalled unless forced by necromancy, but a dozen heard her call and paused, spirits hovering between worlds, and then another dozen paused, and another, and soon all of Awa’s world was a cloud of spirits, a great thunderhead of death building higher and higher over the field as a hundred men died, then another hundred, and another, and Awa addressed them with her own meager spirit, a spirit protected from the deceased but one of such insignificance when weighed against that dire contingent of dead souls as to flatten her with fear. Awa pleaded, she begged, lost in a miasma of gunsmoke, mist, and death, and then Monique slapped her once, and she was still alive, but the sheer weight of the dead almost crippled her, and she lay shivering like a dying child, eyes staring in horror at the ever larger mass of spirits hanging over the world.

  “Awa, please,” Manuel begged. “Awa, do something! Awa!”

  “Get on up, girl.” Even Monique seemed concerned, a pistol in her scarred but whole right hand. The gunner had not wasted a shot marching in, but the shouting atop the earthwork was growing closer and the tipped cart on the sunken road was not likely to withstand even a single volley were they to be targeted. “Do whatcha come for!”

  Awa closed her eyes and tried to find her breath, then opened them again, careful to focus only on the mud in which she lay. Not letting her vision rise to look at her friends or what loomed beyond them, she rolled over, got onto her hands and knees, then sat back on her haunches. The single torn page she had held as they marched lay crumpled in the dirt beneath her. She faced the wall of mud and smiled to herself, daring to think her mad scheme might actually come to something. Even if the plan failed she was still safe from the dead, and—

  Not safe, Awa caught herself as she wiped the muddy earth beneath her as smooth as she could, nothing about this was safe. The report of another volley shook the cart to punctuate this thought, and she swung her slingbag around, jamming the loose page back into her satchel beside the leather tube Manuel had given her and removing the book. Manuel and Monique were behind her in the cramped hollow, their voices low, but she knew time was running out and addressed the tome.

  “Show me the last page he took from his last body,” said Awa. “I already used one but there were two.”

  A thick scab ran from the top of the book to the bottom where she had removed the first page taken from Walther’s skin, and this second leaf did not come any easier, even when she ordered the book. When the binding finally gave up the page a trickle of blood began running down the spine, as if the folio were a deeply embedded hangnail. She had it, and placing the page in the mud, she dug deeper in the book’s binding until the flow quickened and she was able to surround the loose page with a ring of black blood.

  Then Awa cut her forearm with the ibex knife. In her haste she went deeper than she intended, and leaning forward she quickly splashed a red ring around herself. She would have continued despite her sudden lightheadedness but Monique had torn her own tunic and grabbed Awa’s bleeding arm. In the shadow of the cart three pairs of eyes focused on Monique’s ten fingers tying the rag around the wound, particularly the disproportionately thin thumb and forefingers on her right hand.

  “Wish we ’ad Doctor Lump or some of your famous stew,” said Monique.

  “That’s good.” Awa dragged her arm away, the phantasmal shapes lurking just behind Monique almost capturing the necromancer’s attention before she turned back to her work. “Now go away, both of you.”

  “Fuck that!” Manuel was shaking his head vigorously. “And fuck you both if you think I’ll go out there! No!”

  “Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern, if you don’t leave you’ll distract me, maybe get us all killed,” said Awa. “Maybe worse.”

  “Fine! Fine! Fuck fuck fuck—”

  “Niklaus!” Awa shouted in his face. “What happened to you? You were brave, gallant, fearless, you saved me and—”

  “Fearless, she says.” Manuel looked between Awa and Monique. “Never fearless, Awa, and brave? More like stupid. Reckless. I—”

  “You saved me,” Awa said quietly. “I’m asking you, Niklaus, to try and save me a second time. To save us all. I won’t be able to do it if you’re here, I’m too scared he … If I, if I don’t have complete concentration I’ll fail and he’ll kill me, Niklaus. Not even that, not death, but worse, he’ll—”

  “Damn you. You told us.” Manuel sighed, the old Manuel, the Manuel who, in that instant, regretted not his decision to leave his comfortable home and loving family, nor his choice to march into the mouth of Hell with his countrymen and these two friends, but only his forgetting of pine planks and charcoal. We always have a choice, and Manuel made his. “Well, Mo, ready to say good morning to the Imperials?”

  “ ’Eard they give’em prime matchlocks of different make than we’s used ta down ’ere,” said Monique. “Let’s get a closer look, then.”

  “Let no one disturb me,” Awa told them. “But stay close, if, if this even works, we’ll still be, well, right here, with all those—”

  A volley cut her off, and before it quieted Monique had given her a kiss on the cheek and dragged Manuel out after her, the artist flashing Awa a crazed smile as the descending cloud of black smoke covered them. No goodbyes, no speeches or tears, just the tide of gunsmoke swallowing them up and leaving Awa in her cart-cave at the edge of the earthwork.

  The rays of sunlight punching through the smoke cloud would have formed the shapes of skulls to the artist if the vapors had not blinded his eyes, and the mud squeezing up between his fingers as he climbed the earthen wall would have looked like worms. Instead everything looked like a blur, which was in and of itself a sort of symbol, but he could not be fucked to sort out what it might mean. Mo had gone straight up the wall and he went after her before his mind could betray him with its logic. Besides, logic was subjective, and as suicidal as scaling the wal
l might be, they would do Awa no good at all milling around beside her cover—the two corpses that had been guarding the cart had been decapitated by a volley and were as dead as was natural, and atop the wall he and Monique could at least distract the arquebusiers from the obvious cover Awa hid beneath.

  Mo stopped climbing. A pikeman or gunner or, if they were really fucked, one of those plate-covered Imperial assholes, must have tickled her brain, and Manuel almost let himself slide back down the wall, but then she crawled a little higher and he clumsily squirmed to her left, and with much sliding and slipping he was able to scramble up beside her. The cloud had dissipated, and with the edge of the earthwork just above them he assumed she was waiting for the next volley to blanket the wall before making their charge. He tried to pray, then, but could not fully concentrate, the best he could manage a muttered promise never to paint again if God would only let him live out the day.

  Manuel began to panic but caught himself—this was the bravest thing he had ever done, this was his noblest act. Saint Niklaus, the muddy martyr, the man who gave his life so that a witch who denied Christ might live. At least he was not a fucking coward Imperial hiding behind a wall instead of fighting like honest men. His mind began to slide back down the wall, across the field, past the little red millwheel, and up the walk to where his wife and niece and daughter and little boy and even that terrible cat all awaited his safe return, then his eyes fell on the overturned cart beneath him. Smoke was trailing up from the slats like the mud squishing between his fingers, but before he could go back or tell Mo the next volley shook the wall, and with the wave of smoke washing down over them Manuel realized the arquebusiers must be just over their heads, firing at the Swiss who huddled a short distance east along the wall. Fuck them, fuck them and fuck him, and over he went.

  The wind was carrying the smoke down the wall and over the Swiss, which was grand for the pikemen clustering at the base of the earthwork but rather fucked for Manuel, who rolled over the top of the wall to find himself utterly exposed in the early morning light. Thankfully Mo had captured the attention of the dozens of arquebusiers they had emerged on top of, the giantess leaping into their rows with a pistol in each hand. Manuel saw the lines instantly become a disorganized mob as she fell amongst them, both guns discharging as she kicked men down and stomped them into the earth.

  “Ay dios mio!” one of the gunners cried, which only incensed Monique further.

  “Spaniards!” she howled as she dropped the pistols in her hands and drew the pair from her waist-scabbards. “Evil fuckin Spaniard cunnnnts! Fire! Fire!”

  Two heads split, fountains of blood and brains erupting as her second volley struck home, and then the pack of arquebusiers broke, the devil amongst them, and as they ran Manuel went to work with his hand-and-a-half. He had only hacked a few legs out from under the fleeing gunners before his stomach dropped and he took a step back—a dozen landsknechte, the Imperial equivalent of the Swiss pikemen who had proved so effective against the Empire in the past, were pushing through the fleeing arquebusiers. Must have crossed myself with the wrong hand this morning, the artist thought glumly. Then he noticed the plated man at their forefront, and the eager voices of the old Manuel shouted down the less brave ones of Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, would-be civil servant and fusspot. A real fucking knight had come to play, and Manuel would have charged at once if Mo had not dropped to her knees over her discarded guns.

  “Are you—what the fuck are you doing?!” His concern that she had been shot or stabbed by the routed gunners turned into incredulity at her foolishness—she was reloading her pistols from pouches at her belt, as if such a thing were at all acceptable in the midst of battle. “Get up, you fucking cow!”

  “You want me doin what I do best.” Mo winked at him, then raised a pistol in each hand and aimed past him. “Fire. Fire.”

  Her pistols blazed and two of the charging pikemen fell, tangling up the legs of their fellows. Manuel had no more time to reprimand her, the others almost upon him. The heads of the pikes were bobbing at him, and he pictured himself as Sebastian, pincushioned with shafts. Then he cleared his throat and hoisted his sword—this time his last words would amount to more than a string of fucks and a squeal.

  “I challenge you to single combat!” Manuel shouted at the knight, hoping he was an Imperial, or at least bilingual—the soldier didn’t have time to repeat his challenge in Spanish. “Let God hear that I challenge you, in the name of honor!”

  They were almost upon Manuel, the knight’s conical visor reflecting the dawn sun as the pikes jutted out from behind him like the fan of a charging peacock.

  “Let God hear that I am ready to die, and fear not death!” Manuel’s voice broke. “God forgive those who martyr me!”

  “Halt,” the knight said, to Manuel’s tremendous surprise and relief. He came to a stop, as did the pikemen. Manuel heard Mo reloading behind him but over the shoulders of the looming landsknechte he saw the arquebusiers were all engaged in the same act. “Thinking highly of yourself, cow-toucher? Martyr you? Honor you? I’m going to cut you in half, you piece of shit.”

  The knight came forward, a noble out to earn his name or some such asshole, and Manuel smiled a wry, ugly smile. “Hiding behind that shell, hiding behind those gunners, hiding behind this wall?! You fucking bastard! I’d rather be a cowherd than a coward!”

  The knight was only a few paces away and then, like dogs who have growled enough, they went at each other. The knight seemed almost to fall forward on top of Manuel, the sword he held in both hands coming around fast, and Manuel deftly hopped forward and jabbed his own sword into the slit of the man’s visor. He put both shoulders into the stab and the point of his hand-and-a-half ground through the knight’s left eye socket and killed him instantly. There was an awkward pause as the knight toppled over, and then the ten standing landsknechte all brought their pikes to bear on Manuel.

  “Fuck,” said the artist.

  “Fire. Fire.” The reports deafened Manuel, and so he did not hear Monique repeat the word twice more. The pikemen fell back, nearly half their number gunned down in an instant, but now it was the arquebusiers’ turn to push forward, their rows restored, their weapons reloaded, their vengeance at hand.

  “Saint fuckin Crybaby an’ his ol’ pal Saint Cuntlick,” said Monique. “Did our fuckin all, eh?”

  “What!?” said Manuel, swaying from his ruined equilibrium. “What?!”

  “Never mind,” Monique said sadly, putting her arm around Manuel as the arquebusiers raised their weapons. “Never mind.”

  XXXVII

  Death and the Maiden

  Awa focused on the circle before her, and then the ring of blood started to bubble and the edges of the page in the center began to brown and blacken. The circle she had drawn around herself was bubbling as well, and soon the page caught and the muddy alcove under the tipped cart filled with acrid, yellow smoke. He was coming.

  His shade swirled inside the ring of burning blood, its shape as nebulous as those of the dead spirits congregating over the battlefield, but there could be no doubt that it was him. Awa was trembling, suspecting just how much worse what he threatened was compared to the mundane deaths going on all around her. He could not leave the circle so long as it was unbroken, and she focused on that to calm herself.

  “Decided to trade in that last page?” The black specter looped over and under itself, its eye holes sliding around its head to stay ever fixed on Awa. “Changed your mind about offering up a hundred sacrifices? Hit on a bright idea to fucking end me, as you said? Come to grovel?”

  “I’m done talking to you,” said Awa, the air muggy and cloying. “And I’m damn sure done listening to you.”

  Awa left her circle, crawling over to the edge of his with the book in her hand. Then she set it down just outside the ring of hissing, evaporating blood and opened it at random. Winking at her tutor, she hoisted the pistol Monique had given her, the short-barreled Last Resort that the gunner normally k
ept in a hidden holster at the base of her spine. He was saying something but she refused to hear him. Dumping the shot and powder out of the gun, Awa let the salamander egg roll into her palm, placed it on the ground, then put the open book facedown over the egg.

  “I might not be able to beat you,” said Awa. “But I wanted you to watch me fuck you over as best I can.”

  “Awa?” The necromancer’s voice had grown plaintive. “Awa, I can’t lie, you know this, and when you summoned me before I mentioned that we might find another way together, remember? Before you lost control and banished me? If—”

  “Fire,” said Awa, and the necromancer screamed inside his prison. The egg ignited, the book shrieking like an owl-nabbed field mouse as the flames engulfed it, and Awa rocked with laughter. The powder she had dumped out of the gun caught as well, the ground sizzling and popping around the burning book, and then a deposit of the powder popped at the edge of the circle containing the necromancer. A smoking piece of blood-soaked earth spit up into the air from the tiny blast, and before it had landed or Awa’s laugh could turn to a scream the necromancer came billowing out of the sliver cut from the circle, bringing his vaporous body down atop the book. It went out instantly, and he reared up before Awa, his old face forming on the head of the cloud.

  “Spiteful, nasty little thing! Think I have to obliterate your spirit when I claim you!? Think I can’t keep it around for a few centuries, in constant agony!? Think I have limits!?”

  “Yes,” Awa said from where she lay sprawled on the ground beside the broken circle, and then she pointed at him and said his name.