The next wave hit us, hit us hard, and I could feel the line waver. Trying to follow the arc of the battle I very nearly lost my place in the thick of it, trading blows with a young Dren whose skill belied his age before the chaos pulled us apart. By the time it was over we were down to a skeleton crew, and I knew there was no way in hell we were going to last another attack.
Calloway was a decent sort, been with us eighteen months or so. Nothing particularly special about him – not to me, I mean, though I’m sure his mother thought differently. He was a hell of a scrounger, he could dig up a bottle of wine from ground that had been picked clear by rats and men alike, and he wasn’t slow to share. I guess I’d say I liked him, though truth be told after four years as an officer I didn’t think in those terms. Anyway, he’d shouldered his burden as long as we’d asked him to, and as my gaze roamed over the men who remained, I didn’t spend any particular time checking after him. He stood bent over his weapon, exhausted and near broke like the rest of us, and then his half-pike was in the mud and he was off.
Not a man alive wants to be the weakest link, but curiously, no one gives much of a shit about being the second. Which is to say that once the initial grunt loses his water and breaks out, it’s open season and there’s not much can be done about it. The men of ‘A’ company, veterans of a dozen major battles and hundreds of minor engagements, turned tail with every ounce of energy they had left. I did my best to rally them, yelling threats and exhort-ations, but I was never much of a speaker and no one was in the mood to listen anyway. At one point I was pulling a fleeing man off a ladder, and then I wasn’t doing much of anything.
Later, as the frantic events of the day congealed into something resembling a narrative, I would recognize the gap as being the product of a black-powder bomb detonating a few yards off. But that was later. At that moment I was gone, snuffed out like a candle.
Time passed.
My eyes offered two distinctly separate views of reality, and it took a while to reconcile them. I was lying face up, and the mud was a greedy thing, ever hungry. By the time I’d managed to right myself our collapse was all but complete. A pair of Dren, the first scouts from the next wave or slow stragglers from the last, landed feet first in our ditch, and they didn’t seem in no mood to parlay.
It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself lost on the battlefield, my odds slipping from bad to nil. Always before an immutable presence had my back, shoulders like a bear and a blade keen as winter.
He’s dead, I thought, and it cut through even the immediate haze of the fight, his corpse buried amongst the mounds of surrounding bodies, vacant eyes open at the sky, food for the rats. When I caught him out of the corner of my eye, despite everything, I almost laughed with joy. It took a moment to put together why his back was turned, climbing up the trench ladder.
‘Adolphus!’ I screamed.
He was halfway out but he turned back to look at me, looked right at me, saw me looking back at him.
Then he was gone, up over the side, and I was alone.
When I got my focus back where it belonged it was damn near too late. Only a desperate sideways leap saved me from the full force of the attack, and even so it cut through my armor and ate out a solid few ounces of flesh. The world swayed around me, tilting like the deck of a ship. I threw myself at the one who’d injured me. Sometimes you get lucky with that – a man gets too quick to thinking he’s got you. This one didn’t though – he gave a step, knowing time was on his side. His comrade sidled to my left, streaked with mud from the neck down, but clear-eyed and ready. They knew what they were doing, and I was tired and wounded. I’d played out this scenario on the other end enough times to know where it was leading.
It was chance that saved me, blind random luck. One tried for a cut to my head and we caught our blades against each other, and his fractured straight down the middle. Dren steel was tough as the men who wielded it, but mass produce a half-million of anything and I guess you’ll come up short a few times.
For a singular second we both recoiled, shocked at the development, then I split his neck down into the spine. Too far down, an amateur’s mistake. He collapsed and carried my weapon with him, and I had to wedge my foot against his chest and pull with both hands to get it free. If his second had reacted quick enough he’d have had vengeance right there, but the sudden shift of equilibrium was too much, and he hesitated until I could turn my full attention on him. He wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t good either, and I managed to mop him up after another half minute.
Everyone was dead, dying, or gone, the strange vagaries of combat aligning to ensure a moment of surreal tranquility. If you could ignore the screams of the wounded that is, and I’d had long practice at that. Our defenses had collapsed completely – the next wave of Dren would be able to occupy the position without drawing a blade, and from what little I could tell things were even worse to our right. The scaffolding was well used and sturdy. It had held for the rest of the platoon. It would hold for me.
I don’t know why I stayed. Wasn’t any sense of duty, Sakra knows. I was an ant, and no ant suffers under delusions of their own importance. The battle was lost, me sticking around wasn’t going to salvage anything. Wasn’t pride neither – I’d run before when it had made sense, I’d do it again without any regrets.
I guess I’d say I was just tired. Tired of the whole thing – the weather and the rats, the blood and the shit, death all the time, death everywhere. Maybe the runners had been braver than me. Four years I’d been doing this. Can you imagine? Four fucking years.
The pause lasted only a moment. Then a squad of them came out from the defile to my right, and the window slammed shut, and I readied myself for the end.
The transport trench was too cramped to allow them to swarm me, and I wedged myself into it. The hilt of my trench blade was slippery with mud, or maybe brain, I wasn’t sure. The last of my black-powder grenades was in my other hand – worse came to worst I figured I could set it off and take a few with me. They were thinking the same thing I guess, because they were slow to get moving.
But not too slow. One went off, rashly as it turned out, tripping over the outstretched hand of a corpse, stumbling toward me headfirst. A quick chop creased his brain pan, but it didn’t do anything to slow his momentum and I had to scramble backwards to keep from falling. A second followed close on the first, and we struggled awkwardly in the narrow, and then he was dying at my feet. After that they got hesitant. A few words in clipped gutter Dren that I couldn’t make out and they fell back. Grabbing a missilist, I assumed – no point in losing anyone else.
Dimly I realized that they were taking longer than they should have, that if they were out of black powder they could have just stripped one off the dozens of surrounding corpses. In different circumstances I might have wondered about it. As it was the observation itself represented the absolute apex of what I was then capable – drawing conclusions was as far beyond me as the sky is to a fish.
A soldier came into view, blue trim faint beneath the layer of mud. I blinked away the dust in my eyes and looked again. Still blue trim. My first thought was that I’d gone crazy – no way there were any of us left. I realized belatedly that he was saying something to me, screaming it, and I struggled to make out what it was.
‘Bess,’ I yelled back finally, dragging the day’s password from some hidden corner of my mind.
He bobbed over to me, the mud barely covering his parade-ground polish. ‘We thought they’d taken this sector.’ Silver clustered on his lapel, but he was young. By Prachetas he was young, too young and too excited to have been at this long.
‘What are you . . .’ I stammered. ‘How did you . . .’
‘Make it through the mud? Some new trick of the sorcerers,’ he said. ‘Real hush-hush. They didn’t tell anybody it was coming – firms up the terrain into something you can move over. Marched two companies right around their flanks. Broke their sides while you boys held them.’ The rest of his unit started spreading into our trench. Their uniforms were fresh blue, and they went about their business with a purpose. ‘Buck up, soldier!’ The officer slapped me on the back. ‘You’ll get the Star of Maletus for this – I’ll put you in myself. What’s your name?’
He stood next to a pile of corpses nearly as high as his knees. Behind him a Dren bled out from his gut, frothy pink bubbling out his lips. He begged for water with the rain falling on his face, until one of our reinforcements finished him off.
‘Adolphus,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Adolphus Gustav.’
‘Gustav, huh? Hell of a fight, soldier. Hell of a fight. Why don’t you fall back? We’ll take care of the clean up. Get yourself some rest – the Firstborn knows you’ve earned it.’
Whatever had carried me through the day was gone, even the memory of it, and I was so tired I would have collapsed right there, used the nearest body as a pillow. But the boy officer helped hoist me up, and I managed to
