Mark de Silva - Square Wave

A fine buckshot, almost a mist, came in then, from the barrels of a different sort of musket — Portuguese ones, judging by their angular stocks. They’d been fired by two Sinhalese who’d crawled partway out of hatches in the barricades.

The buckshot washed over one of the Dutchmen. It was too fine, and fired from too great a distance, to kill outright. Instead it scoured his face down to an oily translucence. Swatches of bone shone brightly where the skin had been ground away, around the chin and cheeks. His nose had become a small fibrous nub overhanging raw lips and cracked teeth. From his eyes came a feeble glare that fixed on Haas. The man seemed to choke. Petr caught him with his good hand as the man’s knees buckled, but he could bring him no comfort, and the two lay among the pile of round ball.

In the dark before dawn, Haas’s men had already primed the cannon. The vent brimmed with the coarse powder, and a thin flax fuse dangled from it, just a few yards from where Haas still knelt. He laid the arquebus down beside him in the soil heavy with water and began to unthread the slow match, still burning from both ends, from the serpentine. The other two men in fighting shape had laid their shortswords down next to them as they reloaded their muskets. Haas held one end of the match to the soil and it sizzled to a silence. He twisted it around his thumb and held the lit end between his fingers.

The Sinhalese were quiet now. More were surely positioning themselves, and his own squad was in shambles. Once again they would have to give ground to the heathens. If not, there would soon be none left alive to hold it.

Haas made a hammer stroke in the air to Petr, who pulled a sliver of steel from his boot in response. He tossed it across the other soldiers to Haas, who raised his hand and held it a moment. The two soldiers reloading their guns laid down their ramrods and weapons. One moved to help the two fallen men to their feet.

Arquebus in hand and the other soldier in tow, Haas crawled toward the cannon. The barrel began to fill with the thick black mud all around as the butt carved a trailing wedge in it. The match’s tip poked up from his hand, safe from the water in the soil. The men got to their knees and with two sharp, coordinated tugs, Haas from the middle and the soldier from the tip, raised the cannon twenty degrees so that it faced directly onto the barricades. Haas took one more look at the target, which could barely be seen through the shrubs surrounding the cannon. Two musket barrels peeked out of the hatches, and behind them he thought he could make out their shadowed faces, the black, animal eyes he was going to blind.

He turned to his men behind him, at the fort. The others propped up the half-faced one. Haas was disgusted not by his injuries, which were catastrophic, but by his uselessness. He couldn’t imagine him surviving the week. Minutes ago he looked a spectral white and pink; now there was only a crimson visage. At the equator, the fetid was the state toward which everything raced. It was the center. The infection that would finish him had probably already taken root in that mass of pulped flesh. The sooner the better.

In one motion Haas turned and touched the match to the fuse. There was a hissing, then a rumble. The cannon convulsed, seemed to deform under pressure. The ball came out low. It ricocheted off the dirt and punctured the wooden barricades, leaving them convex and gaping just above the hatches. One of the Sinhalese was in slivers. The other seemed to have been halved by the collapsing wall. The fluttering of his arms slowed, the rhythmic heaving of his chest petered out, leaving only the top of a man, still as stone, clutching a gun.

Haas dropped the spike in the vent. He lifted the butt of the gun high in the air and smashed it with it. The spike twisted and dug into the barrel base. He struck it again, pushing it further into the hole. He struck it once more and a long split ran up the stock. The spike was nearly flush with the vent now, its mass having been molded by the strikes to the dimensions of the hole. The cannon was crippled. If they had to accept defeat, they might at least leave no spoils behind.

For an instant, looking at the ruined stock of the ancestral weapon, he thought to bring it down on his own man, drive his nose like a spike. In the next, he thought to dump the gun. But in the one after, he came away with it — perhaps it could be fixed — down the mountain with his men, the broken ones too, to ground that was still solidly theirs.

The low-e rumble of bowed double basses filled the space. Sustained Es in higher registers, from a pair of cellos and a viola, joined those nearly subsonic tones, a timbral complication to the accord of pitch. Of the basses, Edward Larent’s was distinct. It was miked. The signal ran through an overdriven amplifier coupled to a nondescript speaker cabinet belonging to the little Halsley café. As the sextet held the E, Larent leaned into one of several pedals at his feet, loosing a pitched growl, still an E. It enveloped the few dozen guests. He drew the volume down with another pedal, level with the other instrumentalists, though the tone was still thick with distortion.

A seven-note figure in a minor key cascaded from his bass. The rest — first the viola, then the cellos, and finally the other double basses — adopted ascending figures of the same length, interlocking with Larent’s, and a guttural counterpoint replaced the droning Es.

Stagg sat at one of the tiny metal tables at the edge of the darkened café, consumed. The sextet navigated a series of variations, Larent’s bass growing rawer, more ragged, from one to the next. The phrases crowded Stagg’s thoughts, reoriented them, brought them the veneer of structure before collapsing them down to a measureless point.

The music quieted for a moment, but given the circumstances, her voice could only be remote.

“I never said I wanted to meet them,” she said. “As if I’d have anything to say.”

He looked hard into the dark and made out Renna’s face in the fringes of lamplight at a table three from his. Her chair was pulled back from it, and her words were for a figure, a woman, he thought, by the silhouette of hair, standing even further from the penumbra.

The music stopped. A wave of applause rose and fell as the players cleared the stage, all but Larent. The cellists came down the three or four steps on the left of the stage and sat at a table near Renna, nodding at her as they sat. The contrabassists joined them while the violist, a squat man in a woolly blue sweater, headed toward the door, lighter and cigarette in hand.

“You’ve been here,” Stagg said, standing above her now

“Yes and where were you!” She got up and kissed him, grabbed his hands, wrapped up his fingers and squeezed. He brought his hands together, hers in them, and extended his forearms to keep her where she was. The nausea, the buzzing head, the discarded afternoon, all for naught. At least he’d salvaged what he could, writing through the hangover, after he’d woken as night was falling.

“You said you weren’t coming.”

“Why didn’t you answer? It was just drinks in the end, no dinner. But you weren’t even here!”

“I was.” He pointed over his shoulder vaguely.

Her eyes rolled but she was smiling. “You didn’t check your phone.”

“I left my phone at my apartment last night. You remember this?”

“Oh!” she said, angry with herself, or him, he couldn’t tell.

She hugged him. “Can’t you just be glad I’m here?” She put her cheek flat against his chest. “And how much have you had, my love? I can smell it through your shirt.”

“Some.” He grinned to no one, without choice or pleasure.