Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘This is work,’ Morris panted with a savage jollity, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he came running over. ‘They’ll know they’ve been in a fight before the night falls right enough.’

Now Daunt reconciled Morris’s desertion from the army with the cues from his body earlier — his ambivalence and disgust and shame. A sudden epiphany. Morris hadn’t left the army because he had been disgusted by the carnage of war; he had left revolted by how much he had enjoyed it.

‘Lift his boots; I’ll bear his weight behind the arms. As gently as you can down to the aid station.’

‘Don’t worry, boy,’ Morris encouraged the young soldier. ‘It takes a man’s weight in lead to kill him. Bit of shrapnel like this, it’s only good for a souvenir to hang above your fireplace.’

‘Why me?’ The young soldier didn’t appear to be addressing anyone in particular, his head lolling from side to side as he was borne down the steps.

‘Because you’re here, boy, because you’re here.’

‘Don’t talk,’ Daunt advised him.

‘Those ammunition bags you were lugging, fine bullets they are,’ said Morris. ‘Been sending those arseholes out there back to the ocean all day with them. Lake’s running red with their blood when you can glimpse the waters through the bloody gas.’

The ground they were carrying the soldier along shook with the cannonade of the city’s two giant artillery pieces. Across the lawn of the aid station, bodies lay strewn outside the tents, a cacophony of moans and pleas and screams from militia fighters lying on their stretchers. If war was a mill, this was what it produced. The dead and the dying and the barely saveable; begging for water and the attentions of someone, anyone, who could take away the pain, grow them another limb, close the sight of organs that were never meant to be exposed to light.

‘Attend here!’ Daunt yelled out, lowering the boy down to an already bloody blanket, its previous occupant shrouded and piled on one of the yellow carts waiting behind the tents. ‘Surgeon, attend here!’

‘It’s no good,’ said Morris. ‘The lad’s gone.’

Daunt looked down, stunned. ‘He can’t have done. The boy was moaning, he was calling out in pain just seconds ago.’

‘That was minutes ago. You can see it in their eyes, the ones who don’t want to go on. The look always tells you more than their wounds do.’

I know that look. I used to see it in the mirror most mornings. Daunt touched the boy’s neck, feeling for a pulse. The young soldier was stone cold. It was as if he had been dead for days. ‘He didn’t want to die. This, this was my doing.’

Morris checked his rifle. ‘Some people just can’t take it. It’s a crucible up there. Some melt. Some temper. And I promise you, vicar, this ain’t your doing. It’s them arseholes over the other side of the wall, see. Fairly definite about that.’

‘He didn’t want to die.’

‘Take a rifle, vicar. Take some revenge. You’ll feel better.’

Daunt suppressed something deep and primeval that called out for him to do just that. ‘It’s not what I’m for.’

Morris shrugged. Behind him there was a bubbling vat of cauterisation gel, a soldier with a stump of an arm yelling as two orderlies either side of the man shoved the bleeding remains of his shoulder into the liquid.

‘Come on, climb back up to the wall with me. It’s not really healing you’re doing here, is it? You’re only pushing the dents out of the armour, grinding the chips out of the blades before tossing ’em back into the fray.’

‘Just hold the line, Mister Morris.’

The stocky Jackelian gave an ironic salute and loped back towards the fierce combat along the top of the battlements. Daunt had seen death before… on Jago, in his parish back home, in his trade as a consulting detective. But this destruction was on a different scale. He might as well have been the city’s commander, dispatching thousands to their end with a causal wave of a marshal’s baton. He took the boy’s cold hand in his, rubbing the fingers. ‘You have to be careful with murder like this, murder on an industrial scale. It can do things to you. Send you mad enough to start listening to the old gods, and that can land you in all sorts of trouble.’

I can’t die.

‘No energy is ever lost, young man,’ replied Daunt. ‘Only transformed. That’s how the world works.’

All along the battlements: screaming, yelling soldiers, and the thud of their rifles, the war cries from gill-necks, bayonets being thrust into gas masks and rebreathers as the battle desperately surged back and forth for control of the wall, just energy, trickling from one state to another. That was all it was. Trickle and flow, trickle and flow.

A passing surgical orderly kicked Daunt in the small of the back. ‘Get to the wall, Court man. There are more wounded who need carrying down.’

Daunt reached into his pocket and pulled out his bag of aniseed balls. ‘How about you, would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s?’

‘This is a war, Court man, a war. Get off your arse and help us.’

‘Yes. I am rather afraid this war belongs to me.’ He stood wearily up.

The orderly shoved a red crayon-like stick in Daunt’s direction. ‘Move down the line of wounded. Anyone you think can be saved, mark their forehead with a cross.’

‘Mark them all with a cross,’ said Daunt. ‘We’re pulling back. Prepare to move the aid station.’

‘Back, where?’

Daunt pointed to the volcano. ‘Inside there.’

He picked his way through the wounded littering the lawn, treading through the human debris of war, oblivious to the calls of the surgeons and their medical staff. Up on the gate’s keep, the command table holding the plans for the siege was nearly depleted of counters, only a few of the mayor’s staff left at the table and communication desk to push around the surviving units. The rest were at the battlements, firing desperately out into the wall of smoke. The mayor himself was unchanged, striding between the table and the defenders, a gas rifle cradled under his right arm.

‘Fall back,’ Daunt ordered the mayor, who was looking down at this strange foreigner with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. ‘Fall back to the volcano. There are chambers underground large enough to shelter the town’s population.’

‘This is our city, Court man,’ boomed the politician. ‘Our forefathers-’

‘I know, I know. Lie under the ground, died defending it, you’ll bring everlasting shame on our Lady of the Light. But here’s the thing. The battle of Clawfoot Moor. Same situation. Last great siege of the civil war, and the royalists lost, because just like Nuyok, your perimeter is too wide to mount an effective defence. The Advocacy has enough numbers to swarm over your city and your towers can’t be fortified adequately to hold them off. The volcano complex on the other hand had got limited access points and you can funnel your attackers down to narrow enough streams to make your rifles count. If you stay here and fight from your towers, they’ll become nothing more than coffins for your people. The Catosian city-state of Sathens achieved the same thing I’m proposing against a polar barbarian horde using the Valley of Egon’s slopes. Fall back now, while you can still control the wall well enough that the gill-necks can’t harry your retreat. Pull back your two great guns for protective fire to cover your withdrawal.’

‘Are you a general of your people, Court man?’

‘I understand war, good mayor. Well enough to know this is the only way the people of your city will survive the invasion.’

One of the communications signallers turned around. ‘Sappers have breached the wall on the forest side, a fifty-foot section collapsed. Gill-necks are emerging from the trees and trying to storm the rubble. We are being over-run and the city reserves have all been dispatched.’