Daniel Polansky - Tomorrow, the Killing

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 mêlée 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.

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.