Lord of Order

by Brett Riley

  Troy spat at Dwyer and took aim.

  But before he could pull the trigger, a Crusader tackled him from the side, driving through Troy’s injured arm. The pistol skittered into the crowd, through pools of blood and innards. It disappeared near the bodies of two felled and flopping horses, the animals’ eyes rolling as they screamed. Troy twisted and landed on top of the Crusader. Then he jammed his thumb in the man’s eye and ripped it from its socket. The Crusader shrieked, his eyeball dangling on his cheek like a wilted flower. Troy punched him in the throat, and his screams turned to hoarse cackles. The former lord of order pulled his other pistol and shot the Crusader in the face.

  Something struck Troy in the jaw hard enough to make the world swim. He fell off the dead Crusader and dropped his pistol.

  Jevan Dwyer stood above him, grinning without joy or mirth or compassion. And then he kicked Gabriel Troy in the face.

  Troy’s head cracked on the pavement. Dwyer sat on him, driving a fist into his jaw over and over, smashing his nose, his eye. Troy went for Dwyer’s eyes, but the herald pummeled his hurt shoulder. Troy grunted and clenched his jaw against the next blow, but by then, Dwyer was off him and dragging him by the hair, headed for the bridge’s edge. With one hand, Dwyer yanked him to a standing position, as if he intended to pull Troy’s head right off his body. The ex-lord’s scalp tore, spilling runnels of blood down his face.

  The herald pointed to the water. Look yonder at the riverbank, he said. See how you have given your life for this city in vain. Dwyer raised his free hand over his head and waved it back and forth. Down on the banks, a man returned the gesture. Then Dwyer made a fist and held it stationary. The man fiddled with something on the levee. Dwyer pulled Troy’s face close to his own. We will destroy those levees. Your city will drown. That is the beauty of the Crusade. Our people give their lives for the greater good. You and yours care only for yourselves, and that is why you fail. Why your triumphs are written in dust, why your hopes are as ephemeral as water in your hand. Watch, Lord Troy. Watch and see.

  You’ll die too, Troy croaked.

  When you are gone, I shall sound a general retreat. My Crusaders will disengage and flee. We may suffer losses on our way to the wall, but you shall vanish from the earth.

  Still fighting Dwyer’s grip with one hand, Troy raised his leg and slipped his hunting knife out of his boot.

  Down at the river, the Crusader darted back and forth across the levee. Then he shrugged.

  Troy grinned with broken lips. Looks like your man lost somethin.

  The herald’s eyes were fiery coals. What did you do?

  Troy’s scalp felt as if someone had scoured it with acid and soothed it with pepper. So did his throat. He could not see the herald for all the blood, but he could feel the mass of the man’s body in space.

  I didn’t do nothin, he said. But you forgot somethin important.

  And what’s that?

  I ain’t alone. For instance, you never met Willa McClure. She’s good at doin odd jobs on the sly. Like slippin in while y’all fight us. Findin your ordnance. Tossin it in the river.

  Dwyer dropped Troy and braced himself against the guardrail as he looked down on the riverbank. Troy struggled to his feet. Now six or eight figures stood in a circle over Dwyer’s man, beating him with sticks, ax handles, the business ends of hoes and rakes. The Crusader lay as still as the grave.

  Damn you to hell, Dwyer whispered.

  Maybe I’ll see you there.

  And then Troy lunged and jammed the hunting knife in Jevan Dwyer’s gut, all the way to the hilt.

  Dwyer’s eyes widened. His jaw clenched. Cords stood out in his neck. He grunted.

  Troy grasped the knife’s handle with both hands and yanked upward, despite the sunburst of agony in his shoulder joint. Amid the din, the squelch of ripping flesh. Blood gushed over Troy’s hands, his forearms, his pants.

  Dwyer moaned, a sound that seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon, and glared at Troy, teeth bared. Then he wrapped his hands around Troy’s throat and squeezed, thumbs driving into the suprasternal notch.

  The day grew faint again. Sounds faded, only Troy’s own heartbeat strong and clear. He croaked and sputtered and tried to draw breath. He lost his knife. Such strength, as if Dwyer could have crushed stone. Troy fell to his knees, grasping at the herald’s hands, trying to pry the fingers from his throat, but he had little strength in one arm, and his hands were slick with blood. The herald followed him down, his weight inexorable and crushing. The light was leaving the world. Troy drove his open palm into Dwyer’s nose, snapping it. For a moment, the herald’s grip loosened, and he swam into focus, his teeth red. Then he bore down again. Troy had spilled Dwyer’s guts on the pavement, but the herald was still too strong. Troy’s arms fell to his sides, dead weight.

  And then a jerk, and the fingers slipped from his throat.

  Troy gasped, barely able to brace himself before he fell face-first onto the bridge. He looked up.

  The herald’s eyes were wide, unseeing, disbelieving. More gore spouted from his neck.

  Then his head tipped to the left and tumbled off his shoulders. The body collapsed onto Troy, pumping blood directly into his face. The herald’s weight was like a boulder.

  Throat on fire, lungs aching, Troy turned to the side and sucked in air, and then he rolled Dwyer off of him, his knee and shoulder protesting. The herald landed on his back, links of intestine dangling from the abdomen. The head lay nearby, mouth open as if surprised, tongue protruding. Troy sat up.

  Ernie Tetweiller held a broadsword in both hands, its tip against the pavement, the blade dripping blood. Beyond him, men and women and children slaughtered each other, treading on the bodies of the fallen.

  Troy tried to thank Tetweiller, but his croaking voice was unintelligible. Everything hurt, the accumulated trauma of the past weeks nestling in his muscles and bones. Tetweiller tossed the broadsword on top of Dwyer’s body and reached into his poke. He pulled out Troy’s pistols, holding them by their barrels. Troy nodded but held up one hand, palm outward—Wait.

  He dug through the herald’s pockets and found the colored string, balling it in his fist as he stood. He leaned over the side of the bridge and dropped it. The string fluttered in the air, stretching out and out as if some invisible hand were pulling it, molding it into new and alien shapes. It wafted on the breeze until it hit the river. When it disappeared, Troy turned, his body screaming with every movement, every breath.

  Tetweiller appraised him. You look like hell.

  Thanks, Troy croaked. He raised his eyebrows. A broadsword?

  Tetweiller looked at the blade. It was almost six feet long from grip to tip. LaShanda said Dwyer loved em, the old man mused, and somebody dropped this one out yonder a piece. When I seen the herald tryin to squeeze your noggin off, it seemed like a good time to let him have it.

  Troy glanced at the herald one last time and then turned his attention to the battle. Where’s Mordecai and them?

  Don’t try to talk. Looks like he damn near crushed your voice box. Take your pistols and join the party when you get your breath.

  The others, Troy said. Several bullets struck the bridge nearby. Both men ignored them.

  Tetweiller sighed. Tommy Gautreaux’s dead. Shot from the saddle and stabbed like he was a pincushion. The rest are still upright, as far as I know. You gonna take these, or should I hang em from my ears?

  Troy accepted the guns as Tetweiller turned and shot a Crusader off her horse. You gonna take that sword? Troy asked.

  You kiddin? the old man said. I damn near threw my back out swingin it once.

  Tetweiller disappeared into the calamity. Troy knelt against a dead horse for what meager cover it could provide and reloaded with trembling hands. His shoulder buzzed and pulsed. His throat was misery. His knee had gone numb. Above, a sky so blue it hurt his ey
es; below, the river flowed on and on, heedless and eternal. Tetweiller had looked ten years younger. Battle fever, hands and feet and eyes performing the tasks for which they had been made, better than any other restorative. Troy touched his mangled face and winced. Swelling, lacerations, deep bruising, a putty face twisted out of true. But Dwyer was dead.

  Now the rank and file. Smash em into paste or accept their surrender, but leave no threat to the city. This is your callin. Get up and answer.

  He took a deep breath through his swollen lips, not yet daring his nose. All right, he whispered.

  He raised his pistols and stepped forward.

  Then the pavement shook again. To the north, thousands riding and running for the bridge, LaShanda Long and Lynn Stransky and Jack Hobbes and Santonio Ford leading them, firing into the boiling maw into which Tetweiller had disappeared.

  The new forces rode down the old, smashing into the Crusaders, stampeding them, splattering guts and brains with guns of every make, cutting throats and lopping off heads with blades confiscated from the dead, bludgeoning with whatever they had found—loose bricks, two-by-fours, broken handles from shovels. Royster’s Crusaders found themselves with missing limbs, shattered spines, stove-in heads misshapen like pumpkins someone had stepped in, burst abdomens. Here a Troubler fell; there a Conspirator was pulled from horseback, his or her killer soon ground to paste under the mob’s boot heels.

  Troy leaned against the bridge’s warm railing and watched.

  Laura Derosier fired her scattergun, nearly cutting a Crusader in two. She brained another with the butt and executed him as he lay at her feet. A third Crusader broke off from a group and aimed at her as she reloaded, but some Troubler blew his face off with a close-range shot. Fifteen feet away, Mordecai Jones sat on a male Crusader’s chest and alternated pummeling the man with his left hand and firing a revolver into the crowd with his right. Antoine Baptiste had holstered his firearms and now used a machete to hack away at a Crusader, who tried to shield himself with a shotgun until Baptiste switched angles midstroke and cut off his fingers. One vicious double-handed right-to-left stroke later and the man’s head rolled down the bridge, tripping up a group of Troublers. They went down in a heap and someone’s weapon discharged, hitting no one. A guard rode by and shot Baptiste in his upper thigh. He fell and rolled and struggled to his feet, grimacing. Troy shot the Crusader off the horse.

  Tetweiller had mounted up again. Screaming something Troy could not hear, he led two dozen men and women armed with hatchets and axes and hoes and knives, perhaps one or two guns among them. They ran into a group of Crusaders and slashed away, blood misting above them like smoke. Tetweiller shot and reloaded and shot some more, his horse leaking from six or eight wounds, a gash across the old man’s forehead spattering his chest with red droplets. Stransky and Hobbes fought back to back, one shooting while the other covered, turning and turning, bodies falling around them in concentric circles. A guard charged at Stransky mid-reload, a spear of some kind raised over his head. When they spun, Hobbes shot the man in both kneecaps. The spear clattered at their feet. Hobbes picked it up and threw it. The blade disappeared in another Crusader’s back, and he screamed until Long’s horse trampled him. She swept back and forth among the groups, shooting Crusaders, bashing their skulls in with a cudgel she had picked up somewhere, rallying troops into better positions. The chaos gave way to a more organized wave of bloodletting, Conspirators pushing Crusaders against the bridge’s railing and killing them there or driving them over the side, where they fell screaming and were lost in the waters below. Here and there, Troy shot someone and reloaded.

  In minutes, it was over.

  Victors picked through the bodies, dragging their wounded or dead friends and kin back to the streets, cutting throats when they found a lingering enemy.

  Long dismounted and made her way to Troy, who sat on the pavement, his weapons holstered, feeling the day’s weight in every part of him.

  She stroked his injured jaw with one hand. It’s good to see you alive. Though you’ve looked better.

  And you’re a vision, he rasped. Thanks for comin. She unstrapped her canteen. He took it and swigged, the water burning his lips, his throat. Everybody alive? he asked.

  She looked back toward the crowd. There’s way too many folks to keep up with. Santonio’s shot up some, but he’s still on his horse. Mordecai got winged. Somebody amputated Laura Derosier’s pinky toe with a paring knife.

  A paring knife. In this mess?

  Believe it or not.

  He laughed, then groaned. Could be worse, I reckon.

  Yeah. We lost some good folks today, but they lost a lot more.

  For a few moments they sat together, taking in the sights, breathing the acrid air.

  So what now, Madam Lord?

  Long shook her head. Uh-uh. Lords serve until they die or resign. You ain’t done either. I reckon even Stransky will follow you after what we did here today.

  Troy considered the scene. Butchery on a scale the likes of which he had only read about. Pavement flowing with human fluid and tissue, the urine and feces of dead horses, corpses reeking in the sun. Weapons in every living hand, clasped in most dead ones. The stick-figure men, the scarecrow women, the emaciated children.

  What exactly did we do?

  We need to find Royster and finish this, he said. For New Orleans.

  Long nodded. She patted him on his bad knee. He grimaced. Then she rose and went to find the leaders of the ragged force walking the bridge. The niceties—the mourning, the services, the prayers, the condolences—could wait.

  Twenty minutes later, Troy sat a spotted brown on a cracked saddle. The mount seemed strong enough, but it did not know him, and he did not know it. It might have thrown its last rider as soon as the first shot was fired. But he had no time to hunt for a familiar horse. The levees and canals had been secured. The explosives caches were being disassembled under the direct supervision of Long’s experts. Survivors of Dwyer’s army were fleeing toward Royster’s position as if it were a sanctuary instead of a killing box.

  No one could rest until the city was secure.

  Troy’s lieutenants sat their own horses nearby—Long, Ford, Hobbes, Tetweiller. So did Lynn Stransky, her black hair like seaweed undulating in the tides. Jones’s right side was sticky with dried blood. Derosier and Baptiste rode beside him, streaked with soot.

  If we’re all Troublers now, we sure look the part.

  Hobbes trotted over and leaned in close, whispering. Reckon you could hang back. Look like you’re about to fall outta that saddle.

  Troy shook his head. This ain’t the time, not with all these Troublers watchin. What we do now will set the tone for what happens afterward.

  Stubborn as a mule, you and Santonio both. What else you want done before we head over yonder?

  Send somebody to contact all the ordnance details. Remind em to watch their backs in case some Crusaders decide to stop runnin.

  What about our own folks who think we’re doin wrong?

  They can live here in peace and disagree with us, or they can go. Their choice. Don’t hurt nobody unless they try to hurt you.

  Hobbes nodded and turned his horse, ambling toward a gaggle of men and women hauling and stacking the dead. As he gave the troops their orders and the ragged survivors trudged down the bridge, Troy gestured for everyone to follow him. Stransky grinned and winked.

  50

  Royster dreamed of lying in his own bed, the window open, a breeze kissing his bare skin. His warm feather mattress enveloped him. The pillow felt cool and soft. He smelled freshly baked bread, likely from that corner stand he loved, the baguettes crusty and crunchy, the insides so gossamer you could practically see through them. His stomach rumbled. What he would not give for a plate of bread and smoked fish and hash browns. But when he sat up, his shoulder was black with blood, which stained the
white sheets deep crimson. Pain struck him like a sledgehammer.

  He awoke on the wall, his shoulder screaming.

  The sun shone in the cloudless sky like God’s own eye. Royster hacked up phlegm shot through with red tendrils. His throat felt parched. He opened his mouth to speak but only coughed. Boudreaux knelt and helped him drink from his canteen.

  Many thanks, Royster said when he could find his voice. What is our situation?

  Boudreaux laughed without humor. Not good.

  He helped Royster stand. Around them, the sixty or seventy Crusaders still alive on the wall looked as frightened and timid as church mice. They were raising their hands in surrender, weapons at their feet. Below, a horde of Troublers watched them, weapons drawn. The leader, a blood-soaked giant with a ruined face, grinned through broken teeth.

  We are lost.

  From the city, the sounds of stamping feet, horses’ hooves, the clatter of metal against metal—not just the usual din, but growing closer, louder, by the moment. Royster stared, his shoulder forgotten.

  Minutes later, gaggles of Crusaders came into view, some mounted, most running. They looked over their shoulders as if certain that all the devils that ever were had risen out of perdition. And, Royster knew, such was not far from the truth.

  51

  When Royster had sent him into the city for reinforcements, Boudreaux had seen bodies piled like raked leaves. When he had come across scattered outlanders or loyalist New Orleanians, he had asked them to follow him. Some did. Others ran—where to, he could not say. But as time passed and ever more desperate stragglers appeared, he had known. Royster’s lost the levees, he had thought as he led his company back to the wall.