This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “The Embrun is up ahead,” Canker shouted, clapping Rol on the shoulder. “Don’t worry; this is not the first time this has happened. They’ll never make it across the river.”

  A series of shells landed on the battered houses of the street, spraying masonry and clay tiles and knocking men down right and left. Those who could picked themselves up. Others lay motionless, faces set in dulled surprise, and yet more grasped at broken places in their bodies and screamed and screamed. Giffon knelt beside one of these unfortunates and began ripping up his own cloak to bind the man’s wounds. Gallico lifted him by the scruff of the neck, as though he were a recalcitrant pup, and dragged him away. He and Giffon shouted at each other; though they were but ten feet away, Rol could not make out what they were saying.

  They were only a cable or two from the bridges now. There was a broad street that still had the stumps of shell-blasted trees lining it. Once, it would have been a pleasant place to pass a shaded afternoon, but now it was narrowed by the collapsed frontages of the houses that lined it.

  A tide of men came running down the choked roadway with wild eyes and blackened faces. “They’ve taken the south bridge!” one yelled. “They’re across the river!” His words spurred on those around him. Hundreds of men were now streaming eastward in complete disorder, some throwing down their weapons as they ran.

  “Help me!” Canker bellowed to his companions. He was halting individual men, punching them in the chest, shoving them backwards, haranguing them with a scarlet face. He whipped out his sword and beat them with the flat of it, set its keen point at their breasts when they tried to push him aside.

  “What’s this—are we provost marshals now?” Elias Creed demanded, but he drew his cutlass all the same and set about blocking the path of the fleeing soldiers at Canker’s side. One swung his gun-butt at him, but the ex-convict snapped his head back and struck the man a wicked blow on the temple with the guard of his sword.

  Gallico stood like a rock in the middle of the street and roared, the olive-green skin of his face deepening to the hue of seaweed. The mob quailed from that sight. “Stand fast or I’ll break your fucking necks, you worms. Stand fast, I say!”

  The rout’s momentum was broken. Dozens of men stood appalled as the halftroll raged at them. A few arquebuses were raised; Rol slapped one down. Canker was moving through the men now, speaking swiftly, clapping them on the bicep or on the back, shaking them. Elias Creed held at least a dozen at bay with the mere glint of his gray eyes and the bright point of his cutlass. The men in the mob became soldiers again, and stood there panting, willing to be told what to do.

  They were very near the eastern bank. Up ahead, slender twin spires marked the eastern foot of the bridge, and there was movement there in the smoke, a banner sailing above it like the head of a snake.

  “Quickly now,” Canker shouted. “Three ranks. All weapons loaded. Those without firearms to the front rank. You there—Sergeant—get those men in line.”

  The companies filed obediently across the street and presented a barrier of flesh and bone and iron. Rol found himself in the front rank with his friends about him, the soldiers seeming to draw strength from Gallico’s fearsome bulk.

  “Front rank, kneel,” Canker called, waving his sword in the rear. “Second rank, level your weapons.”

  A ragged line of red flashes in the smoke ahead, and split seconds later the cracks of gunfire. Men toppled out of the line, crumpling at the feet of their comrades.

  “Steady!” Canker bawled.

  Two bullets thudded into Gallico with the wet slap of metal meeting raw meat. The halftroll grunted and fell to one knee.

  A harsh baying from the bridge, and then trooping out of the smoke came a company of soldiers in a livery of saffron stripes upon black-dyed linen. They checked for one second at the grim sight of Gallico trying to struggle to his feet, and then marched on, yelling, their leader a short, dark-haired man in half armor who waved a rapier.

  “Second rank, fire!” Canker screamed.

  Rol’s right ear was scorched as the man behind him fired close to his head. A high hissing sound filled his skull. The street disappeared in the volley of fire and fume.

  “Giffon, run,” Rol said to the terrified boy at his side.

  “No, I’ll—”

  “Get the fuck out of here, now!” He drew Fleam as Giffon took off and shared a look with Elias Creed. The dark man nodded and grasped Gallico’s arm, helping him stand.

  “I’m all right,” the halftroll said, but he swayed, and out of his chest the blood bubbled in a pink foam.

  More bullets cracking past their ears. The men about them were edging backwards, some firing, some reloading. They looked over their shoulders. Canker’s three ordered lines were disintegrating again. The enemy appeared out of the reek, still in disciplined ranks. Canker tugged at Rol’s sleeve.

  “Come on. Time to go.”

  The enemy officer raised his sword and bellowed wordlessly; about him his men raised a dry cheer, and charged.

  “Help Gallico, you bastard!” And without a coherent thought in his mind, Rol raised the scimitar two-handed and stormed full-tilt into the approaching horde.

  Those before him gave way as will sheep before a wolf, flinching from the light in his eyes. But to right and left their comrades were thundering down the street to encircle him. Somewhere in the rear, Gallico’s deep voice was raised in a bellow of garbled fury.

  Rol’s world closed down to the few feet of space before him, the hedge of contorted faces, the sharp-edged weapons that were seeking out his flesh. Fleam was no longer made of metal; she was a feather of fine wire in his grasp. This kind of fighting she understood. The sword arced left, then came up in a sharp curve to carve a figure eight in the air, a blur of brightness no more. But men were cut cleanly in two by that swift hissing steel. They collapsed about Rol in steaming pieces, their warm blood spraying his face. He stepped forward until he was right in the middle of the enemy, and out of some forgotten recess in his brain Psellos’s and Rowen’s training emerged and took hold of his limbs. He moved as lightly as a dancer, aware of every face about him, each indrawn breath, sudden wideness of eye, tilting of balance. He ducked under a blade, jabbed out with Fleam’s point to pierce a skull, caught a wrist and snapped it cleanly, swung his free elbow into a man’s face to crush the nose, swept the scimitar at an exposed neck, taking off the head with its stunned eyes.

  He was not as quick as he once might have been. Swords nicked him here and there, slashing his clothing, slicing the skin beneath. Blood was running down inside his shirt, but he knew that nothing consequential had yet bitten his flesh. There was no pain or fear, just the deadly joy of the blade in his hand, the all-consuming delineation of his foes’ movements. It was at once a supreme discipline and an animal delight in his own strength, the frailty of his assailants, the slaughter he was inflicting.

  He pushed forward, and the knots of men about him opened out, recoiling from this murderous engine in their midst. Confusion gave way to fear, and the killing became easier. Rol had shattered their lines, smashed the momentum of their advance. It was enough to bring their entire company to a halt. In the smoke and chaos, they no doubt thought that Canker’s men had counterattacked.

  The short, dark-haired officer met Rol blade to blade, eyes flashing above his sword. Fleam cut through the inferior steel, lopped the man’s arm off at the shoulder. He went down with a shocked wail, and Rol’s boot sent him flying backwards into his compatriots.

  They broke. Tripping over one another, lashing out blindly, shouting, screaming; their circle opened, and all at once Rol was staring at their backs. Three- or fourscore men were running away from him in brazen panic. A thing not unlike laughter rose in his throat. He leaped forward in pursuit, cutting them down with slashes at the backs of their knees, their necks. He felled half a dozen more before the first bullet snapped past his ear. Fetching up short, he found himself almost at the lip of the bridge itself. Fifty fee
t wide, it was a massive construction of hewn and mortared stone, and there were hundreds of men upon it still, and more boiling on the western side of the river. Running soldiers were being halted and cajoled into some form of order, and a line of soldiers were leveling their firearms. Rol threw himself to the ground just as the volley cracked out. One ball struck Fleam square on the blade and almost spun her out of his grasp. Another splintered a stone cobble and sent fragments of stone tearing across his face. A third nicked his thigh, blasting away a divot of muscle.

  He rolled in beaten gray snow, and as he did the killer elation evaporated. Pain racked his torso now; the snow where he lay was blushing with his blood. His mouth was dry and foul with smoke. He crawled crabwise into the lee of a tumbled house at the riverbank, hands shaking. His mind was fogging up like a steamed window. Fleam slipped out of his fingers; the bullet-strike had numbed them to the knuckles. He lay there blinking hard and trying to bring some order to his thoughts.

  A rising clamor of gunfire and shouted commands outside. Fresh companies were arriving on the eastern bank and kneeling in ordered lines. Rol grasped the scimitar again in one nerveless fist and crawled deeper into the ruins like a hurt animal going to ground. The noise beat upon his head. He poked through the lacerated rags of his tunic and found a flap of his own flesh hanging free of his shoulder. Pressing his fingers to the hole, he felt them touch upon bone. He began to shudder, and clenched his teeth until blood started from the gums. Artillery had begun to boom outside, and the ground flinched under him every time a shell fell to earth. Cascades of dust and grit poured down on his head and stuck to the blood that plastered him.

  Psellos would laugh if he could see him now. What had happened to all that training—Rowen’s training? Rol closed his eyes and tried to recall her face, the heat of her as their bodies had fought and joined in the darkness under Psellos’s Tower. He remembered the glorious softness of her breasts, incongruous in all that tautness of muscle. The memory calmed him somehow. Recalling her face, her quiet, priceless smile, he knew that he loved her still. He would love her until the last beat of his heart. It was why he was here, in the eye of this madness—to perhaps glimpse that smile once more. He would do anything to be with her again, anything.

  At last he mustered the strength to rise to a crouch. His feet squelched in the gore that had filled his boots. Gummed-up nicks and cuts reopened all over him as he moved, staggering with the pain in his injured thigh. Several of the houses here had been blasted into one long series of mangled ruins, cast in gloom by what was left of their roofs. He tottered through them, his mind slowly clearing.

  Gallico. Creed. The thought of them sped his feet, and he bared his teeth as the pain came and went in sickening waves. Fleam steadied in his hand, and insane though it might seem, he thought he sensed a kind of amusement thrumming out of the sword, a smugness. He stuffed the bloody scimitar back into her scabbard, not caring that she was caked with hair and viscera and shreds of men’s innards. He staggered on, keeping to the maze within the ruins, glimpsing scraps of the battle here and there through holed walls and empty windows. He did not care who was winning; all he wanted was to find his friends alive.

  Creed saw him first. The ex-convict was quartering the ruins with a cutlass in one hand and a cocked pistol in the other. When he saw a tall figure dressed in brown and scarlet shreds who was weaving amid the rubble like a man drunk, he ran up to his captain with furious concern burning out of his eyes, and steadied him as the taller man’s body tilted toward a fall.

  “Elias.” Rol smiled. “Still alive?”

  “Still alive.”

  The smile disappeared. “Gallico?”

  “We got him to a dressing station in the rear, with Giffon. It’ll take more than a couple of musket-balls to shut his big mouth.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Let’s get you back there to join him.” Creed took Rol’s arm and pulled it over his shoulders. The two limped along, oblivious to the musketry and gunnery that flashed and foamed behind them.

  “Canker is wild with worry,” Creed said.

  “Is he indeed? Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “His people retook the bridge. Your one-man assault on the entire Bionese army paid off, it seems.”

  “They’re all Bionese, Elias. Those we’ve been fighting, those whose side we’re supposed to be on. All the same.”

  “Yes, I know. A man could grow confused. He might wonder what in the hell we’re doing here in the middle of someone else’s war.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  A line of cottages near the eastern edge of the town had been knocked through into one long corridorlike space. There was a charnel-house within. Several hundred men lay on rough straw palliasses or on bare earth whilst half a dozen physicians and surgeons, almost demented with the scale of their task, went from man to man, assisted by some of the local women who had volunteered to stay behind. They sewed up gaping wounds, extracted arquebus-balls with fine-nosed forceps, applied tourniquets, and where the bone had been splintered, they amputated upon a series of red-slimed tables, the patients held immobile by their friends and biting down upon wooden gags until the teeth cracked in their heads.

  Giffon was there in the midst of the bloody work, arms scarlet to the elbows. Gallico sat propped up in a corner with bandages crisscrossing his chest to keep blood-soaked pads of linen in place. Rol collapsed beside him. The halftroll smiled and laid a hand upon Rol’s head like a father. “There he is; the hero of the hour, or most of him. There is more blood on you than in you, Rol.”

  “I can believe that.” Creed left and brought back Giffon and one of the harried nurses, a young girl with brown hair scraped back in a bun and eyes as old as a matron’s. They cut off what was left of Rol’s clothing and began to mop and stitch. Rol felt the needle popping in and out of his skin, but the pain was little more than an irritation. He stared out at the writhing carpet of broken humanity that covered the ground before him.

  “It would seem we joined Canker’s war,” Gallico said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Looking for transport, I think. He took off like a scalded cat when those fellows crossed the bridge, but, to give him credit, he came back shortly after with a whole bloody battalion at his back. Good for us he did. Creed and I were getting tired. He’s looking for you too. Worried your appetite for glory may have been your undoing.”

  “It damn near was.”

  Rol tried to raise his hand to see if it still shook, but Giffon slapped it down. “Be still. It’s like trying to sew the tail back on a pig.” The boy’s tone was bantering, but there was a hurt shine to his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Giffon.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for, skipper. Hold still now.”

  Rol turned to Creed. “Elias, I need fresh clothing. The horses?”

  “All dead, blown to bits. I’ll see what I can pick up. There must be a few long-limbed corpses lying around.” He winked at Rol and left, picking his way through the bodies.

  The fighting sank down as the day drew on into an early-winter dusk, and a thin veil of snow began floating down upon the tortured earth of the battlefield. The bridges remained in rebel hands, the loyalists withdrew to their camps west of the river, and the wounded were hauled off to hospitals in Gallitras in open wagons whose every jolt produced a litany of screams from the unfortunates within. Rol and Gallico were luckier; Canker procured a covered carriage for them and an escort of dragoons. Their well-sprung vehicle covered the league or so to Gallitras in less than an hour, taking to the frozen earth off the road when the highway itself was too choked with military traffic to proceed.

  It was dark as they clopped in through the massive barbican of the city and made a slow progress through the dense-packed cobbled streets within. There was destruction here, but nothing on the scale to match Arbion. Rol, Creed, and Giffon hung their heads out of the carriage window and studied the passing city like gawping tourists. Gallico was p
erched on the roof like some monstrous figurehead. The sight was enough to halt pedestrians in their tracks.

  “How come you didn’t have to blast this one stone from stone?” Creed asked Canker, who had reverted to his face-in-cloak mode.

  The Thief-King shrugged. “Gallitras fell to a subtler assault. Her governor was assassinated by persons unknown and his replacement proved a venal man.”

  “A pity more of these fellows were not so amenable,” Gallico snorted above them. “You might have a kingdom left with one stone upon another.”

  Canker did not reply. His eyes glittered. He was watching Rol.

  Their carriage pulled up in front of a grand, colonnaded mansion with large windows that had light streaming out of them. Footmen opened the carriage doors, but stepped back as Gallico leaped down from the roof, letting the vehicle bounce up on its springs as his weight left it. He staggered as he hit the ground and stood for a moment with head bowed, eyes tight shut in pain.

  The five of them were met in the grand hallway by the sound of music—strings and pipes bubbling in sedate merriment. Candles burned by the score all about them and in a massive chandelier above their heads. A knot of darkly garbed men stood waiting. Canker dropped his cloak from his face and his entire manner changed. He became brisk, commanding. He shook someone’s hand.

  “We need beds, maids, clothing, food, and wine. It is late, and my fellow travelers are wounded and exhausted. We will talk tomorrow.”

  “My lord Chancellor,” someone said, and everyone bowed low. Canker caught Rol’s eye and he gave a rueful grin that had yet something defiant about it, as though daring him to be amused.