replacement soldiers – besides Adolphus and I, there were barely a half dozen men remaining who could remember our defeat at Beneharnum, and the terrible days after. Still, under our circumstances, it didn’t take long to turn a recruit into a veteran – anyone left standing after a month was hard as burnt steel. I toured the main trench, nodding at men distilled away to gristle and teeth, watched them sharpening knives and cribbing smokes. Mostly they knew their business, but here and there I made a few adjustments, repositioning guards and sending the weakest-looking back behind lines – though we all looked pretty damn weak, and the support trench wouldn’t hold long if our defenses were breached. Some of them asked for extra bolts or more grenades, and I promised I’d get them as soon as I could. Some of them just wanted to grumble, and I’d listen for a while, then slap a hand on their shoulder and keep walking.
We were as solid as we could be, without supplies, without reinforcements, without there being any reason for us to be there. I figured we’d hold a diversionary attack, but anything more serious and we’d burst like a swollen corpse. Nothing to be done about it. I’d been sending runners to the back lines for two straight days, damn near begging for support and receiving increasingly curt responses. We were on our own. If Maletus was with us, the weight of the Dren thrust would fall elsewhere. But the Scarred One keeps his own counsel, and I didn’t imagine the lives of a handful of infantry figured much into them.
We’d carved the main trench through a low hillock, and if you managed to angle yourself right, there was an overhang that sort of kept the rain off. It was as good as you were going to get, at least. Beneath it I found a wooden bucket buried in the mud, and I flipped it over and sat on it.
To exist without awareness, that was what you aimed at. Memories worn to irrelevance, the future equally insubstantial. Obey orders and don’t think beyond them. Don’t think about your sweetheart back home all alone, don’t think about her pink thighs, or how lonely she must be getting. Don’t think about fresh fruit, or a seasoned chunk of pork, or a strong dark ale. Don’t think about blue skies, or the sun.
Don’t think about the men in the trenches ahead of you, skin like leather, eyes dark as coal. Don’t think about the friend you put in the ground yesterday – maybe not a friend, but acquaintance at least, and in the ground for certain. Don’t think about whether today was your day, don’t think about how many times you’d gotten lucky, whether that luck would hold.
The crack of cannon brought me to. The worst thing about artillery is there’s nothing you can do against it – the whistle of the shot gives you a few seconds’ head start, but if you moved you were as likely to run into it as escape the blast area. Best to hunker down, stay where you are. If the ball had your name on it, then you were good and fucked. Might as well meet She Who Waits Behind All Things with your dignity intact, seeing as your body wouldn’t be.
At first I figured it was a quick burst to unsettle us. The Dren loved that sort of thing – fire a few shots over to make sure you weren’t getting too comfortable. But the initial barrage was followed by another, and another. Two solid hours I spent curled up beneath that overhang, wave after wave of munitions rolling over me. Long gone were the days when artillery was a passing concern – the Dren had gotten scalpel sharp with theirs. They could drop a shell into an outhouse hole six inches round and half a mile distant. They were working against the environment though, like all of us. The one upside to the terrain meant that anything short of a direct hit did nothing more than toss mud into the air. Sometimes the artillery would stop for a minute, or two, or five – the Dren hoping to lure us out prematurely, then make us into scrap when they turned the fire back on.
It had been off for a while when it finally struck me that this was the real thing, that they’d be hitting us soon. I ducked out of cover and sent the alarm as best I could, signaling down both ends of the line to form up. It got to our bugler, who sounded off on his horn, though after the last two hours I doubt many could hear it.
Most of the company were already at the front, and those who had survived the cannon prepped themselves for what was coming. The rest joined us soon enough, slipping in from the support trench. I caught Adolphus’s ungainly bulk drop awkwardly into the mud and waved him over. Even the most haggard son of a bitch gets a shot of energy in the moments before a fight, but just the same he looked lost, battered. I hadn’t the time to worry about it, figured he’d snap awake at the smell of blood. A peek over the precipice showed lines of gray men emerging from the gray mist. I dropped back down and gave the all clear for free fire, and our bowmen, perched inside narrow barricades set above the lines, started sending bolts into the gloom. A trickle of screams made their way in our direction, gratifying if meaningless – our missilists alone wouldn’t be enough, not nearly, not even if they’d had enough bolts. This wasn’t no diversion – the Dren were playing for keeps.
The first one came over, a husky motherfucker with mud up to his hips, leaping down from the edge. He bounced his sword off mine but didn’t stop moving, heading down the line, trying to carry the trench by sheer momentum. I hoped one of our boys would set a hand-ax in his brow, spent too long hoping and missed his follow- up – there was a movement at the edge of my vision, and then I was lying face up in the muck, breathless and waiting to die.
He was big, naked from the waist up, and cooked out of his fucking skull. Word was the Dren passed out breath to their commandos, some sort of mass-produced junk. It was a source of great wonder for us, how they were able to get their hands on narcotics, given that our own commissary usually couldn’t provide us with bread. The man towering over me must have been saving up his rations. The veins in his neck pulsed, and the whites of his eyes had swallowed their irises. He carried a self-made mace in both hands, a fence post with a whittled handle and a half-dozen long nails hammered through the business end.
A spearhead peeked out suddenly from beneath his breast, a flap of skin carried along the end – one of my boys looking after his commander. The Dren failed to notice he’d just been murdered, whirling around with such force that he tore the half-pike out of its wielder’s hands, the butt passing over me. He didn’t scream, I remember – he must have been really far gone. I lifted myself out of the muck and started putting my sword into his head, and after the third or fourth time he finally caught up to the reality of the situation, and dropped to the ground.
I was gonna say something to the man who’d saved me but he’d already moved on, and I decided it would be best to repay the good turn. I caught a flash of Adolphus’s bulk off to the side of me, uncharacteristically hard pressed. I had a curved knife near the size of my trench blade swinging from my hip, and I unsheathed it and planted it into his attacker, through the sternum and up into his heart.
In the storybooks people are always recognizing each other on the battlefield, even find time to say a few words of challenge. But in my experience a melee consists of little knots of soldiers backstabbing each other, watching for any opportunity to overwhelm a straggler. The best men in the unit were wiry bastards with roving eyes, wild dogs on the watch for weak prey. In a ditch Adolphus’s size was a quasi-virtue at best, too big for subtlety and an easy target for any man with a crossbow – he did his best work above ground, where he had room to maneuver. Even still he seemed at half speed, as if slow to waken to the seriousness of our situation.
‘Get your fucking head together!’ I screamed, the limit of my wise counsel, events making further discussion impractical. There were fresh targets a plenty, all keen for our little corner of heaven. One of these seemed to have turned his ankle coming down, and he struggled to right himself. I was behind him, and made sure that he didn’t. Never even saw it coming, the lucky bastard.
Taking a trench is a tricky business – send too many men at once and they’ll get bogged down by sheer weight of numbers. Send too few and you risk the enemy defeating them in detail. You have to time your waves right, assault in pulses of movement, breaking the line then clearing out resistance. The Dren had it down to a science, to a fucking science – the very moment you thought things were starting to swing your way, another pack of gray-clad troopers dropped into your home. In theory, the spell-slingers should be raining down fire on anyone making their way to our lines, but I sincerely doubted they’d stuck through the artillery barrage. Either way they didn’t seem to be proving much of an impediment to the enemy’s flow.
At some point I’d picked up a hatchet, and I tangled it in the defenses of a sharp-looking officer, hook-nosed and stern-eyed. In another life he might have been a priest, banging a pulpit till his voice gave out. In this one he fell for a feint and I buried the ax in his chest. It stuck when I tried to pull it out, and a spray of blood got in my eyes and my mouth, and so I said fuck it and left it where it was.
The trenches consisted of wide rectangles traversed by narrow, crooked lanes, the layout dispersing us so that a lucky artillery shell wouldn’t wipe out half the platoon. It also made it damn near impossible to get much of a sense of the ebb and flow of the battle. Still, I was pretty sure we weren’t winning. Corpses lay thick on the ground, more of them than us, but still too damn many of us. There was pressure moving on our right – they’d cleared out a section of the line and were bottling us up. I could feel the survivors getting antsy, losing heart.
‘Keep it solid, boys,’ I yelled. ‘We’ll have back-up here in a moment!’ A lie as sure as any I’d ever told, but there was nothing else but to believe it.
