Steph Swainston - Dangerous Offspring

I wrapped a strip of fish around my two-pronged fork. ‘It was terrible. I’m far too impatient to convalesce in hospital for day after day, with nothing to do but the occasional haemorrhage.’

I had a collapsed lung and pneumonia-which injured Awians are prone to-and a bloody great hole in my side. Sepsis led to organ failure but Rayne knew to let me lie dormant until my body recovered itself. When I came round I screamed solidly, high and eerie like a sick infant until she pumped me full of painkillers. I was in shock; it cocooned and isolated me from reality. I knew I was very badly hurt but could only lie still and trust her. The thought I might never fly again constantly distressed me; if that broken wing had grounded me permanently I would have been vulnerable to Challengers so I made sure Rayne paid it careful attention. I also suffered from a great sense of failure because the mortals who looked to me to lead them had all been killed. I desperately needed to talk but I kept my silence. It was like being in a dark tunnel that very gradually widened and I began to realise what had actually happened to me. I relived it again and again and I grew to understand it. Then I began to talk about it and I healed more quickly.

‘He harried us for all the news,’ Lightning told Eleonora.

‘Four months were missing from my life!’ I said.

Eleonora asked Lightning, ‘Where were you in that battle? Why weren’t you hurt like Jant?’

He shrugged modestly.

‘Go on,’ she teased. ‘Tell me.’

Lightning never needs much encouragement to recount a story. ‘In the preceding weeks,’ he began, ‘everyone seemed tired, overworked and irritable. Little things kept going wrong. We couldn’t know then that it was because something so momentous, so awful, was going to happen that it sent ripples back down the flow of time, to disturb us and disrupt our attention.

‘I was in the Sun Pavilion, writing. You know the story where an Eszai is Challenged, but he sends an assassin to murder the Challenger before they meet, so San throws him out of the Circle?’

‘No,’ said Eleonora.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Lightning. ‘But this is proof that romantic novels can save your life. The ground began to shake and, one by one, the candles guttered out. I could see nothing, not the back of my hand, not the page in front of me. I couldn’t grasp what was happening.

‘I called the captain and together we walked along the line of tents summoning the archers, getting them kitted up and reassuring them. By the time we had one hundred men the rest had gone. They had fled. The ground was falling away under our feet so fast it brought down the palisade.’

Lightning was staring intently, watching the memory. He subconsciously dropped a hand to his sword hilt. With eyes bright and the other hand spread, he leant over the table, talking directly to Eleonora. ‘You should never meet Insects on open ground. Use fortifications whenever possible. I knew that, but what did we have? Two companies of archers and a handful of arrows.

‘We retreated along the stockade until we came to the only corner where it was still upright. I ordered them to form up inside with the fence at their backs. They were breaking down with fear but I made them pull a fallen section in front of us and shoot for all they were worth. We shot straight out over the top, in relays, all night long.’

‘For the whole night?’ asked Eleonora.

‘If we slowed we would die, I knew that full well.’ He swept his hand out over the table. ‘Fss! Fss! Went the arrows. Every time we paused, stragglers were coming in, some no more than naked, and we lifted them over the defence. Insects scaled it and I had teams to chop them down as they reached the top. After the first hour men started giving up, falling from exhaustion and hypothermia. I dragged them to the back and I kept the rest going. We could see nothing. We knew we were hitting people out there, but they were already lost to the Insects. I could not help them. I did what every Eszai should do in a disaster: cut your losses and save your fyrd.

‘When we ran out of ammunition I sent fifty men to bring more. Only ten returned. It was a suicide mission. We had no way of knowing what was happening beyond our palisade. We just kept shooting, holding out against the instant we would be annihilated. I felt the Circle break and I knew Hayl Eske was dead, but I didn’t tell the men.’ He glanced at me. ‘I was waiting for the Circle to break for Comet and Tornado. It was not the first time I have had to leave the battlefield on my own.

‘After that first hour I knew everything out there still moving was an Insect. I kept up volleys in pulses for six consecutive hours, until dawn began to resolve.

‘The light came up slowly, pale grey, and through the murk we could at last see the utter devastation. The ground in front of us sloped straight into the pit. The middle of the camp had vanished. Only the tents at the far end were left standing, leaning inwards. Around us, the corrugated stockade sagged and twisted like a ribbon. Insects were everywhere, feeding on the bodies. We were helpless, stranded in our corner and tired to death. My vision was dark at the edges with exhaustion but I wrapped my wings around me and I persevered.

‘Then came the sound of thunder along the road. Heavy cavalry were riding in. They were armoured head to foot and they poured into the camp with their lances levelled, riding the Insects down. Do you know who was leading them? Rayne. The Doctor. Bundled up in her old cloak on the back of a destrier.

‘She had felt the Circle break. She had been here in Slake with the rearguard and at first light she gathered all the cavalry left and set out to find us. We climbed the palisade and hailed her.

‘She brought her horse around the lip of the crater. “Bracing morning you have for it, Saker,” said she. “Where are the other two?”

‘“I don’t know,’ I said. They were both pulling on the Circle, we could tell that much.

‘She said, “You have exposure. Go back to town.”

‘I did not return to town. I picked my way over the subsiding ground with her, looking for Comet and Tornado. She spotted the sunburst on his shield-’ He gestured at me ‘-through the scattered soil and set her soldiers to dig him out. Finding Tornado was more difficult. She had to bring in some of her trained dogs. But of Hayl Eske we never found a single piece…Long, drawn-out ordeals are the ones that change us. For me it was just one night. But what a night!’

I said, ‘It was my biggest battle.’

‘Falling down the hole was not the best thing to do under the circumstances,’ Lightning assured me.

‘At least I wasn’t as useless as Hayl.’

Frost said, ‘Everybody remembers where they were when they heard the news.’

Lightning nodded. His face was flushed. He unlaced the strings at the neck of his shirt, downed the dregs of his wine and called, ‘Bring some more claret. No, no…that old bottle…You’ll like this one, Eleonora. I had to sell a house for it.’ A servant gave him the bottle and he clinked his intaglio ring against its glass. ‘We shall toast Frost’s dam with this. There are only six bottles left in the world…Well, five. But you only live once.’

I made my excuses, left the table and walked out to the washroom block to have a piss. I was just buttoning my fly when a figure loomed behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Eleonora at the doorway. She looked left and right with a pervert’s smile. ‘Hmm. Interesting in here. Why is it such a mess?’

‘Why are you following me?’ I asked.

‘You have a pert backside.’

‘Oh, bugger,’ I muttered.

‘Don’t give me ideas!’

‘Eleonora…no.’