It was time, and his heartbeat echoed in his ears.
“You go back if you want, Reverend.” It was Marion, bending down from his horse, his breath visible in the chilly air. “You aren’t sworn nor paid to be here.”
“I’ll stay.” He couldn’t tell whether he’d said that or only thought it, but Marion straightened up and drew his sword from its scabbard, resting the blade on his thigh. He had a blue tricorne on his head, but there were dewdrops in the puffs of hair that covered his ears.
Roger took hold of his borrowed sword, though God knew what he’d do with it. God knew. That was, in fact, a comforting thought, and for a moment he was able to draw a deep breath.
“Save your life, maybe,” Lieutenant Monserrat had said, handing it over yesterday. “Even if you don’t mean to fight.”
I don’t mean to fight. Why am I here?
Because they’re here. The men around him, sweating in the chill, smelling death with the scent of fresh-baked bread.
There was a roar from the first column that spread over the field, and he was seized by panic.
I don’t know what to do.
Mortars nearby fired with a sudden bomph! and he found that his knees and his hands were shaking and he urgently needed a piss.
You didn’t know what to do when the bear killed Amy Higgins, a voice that might have been his said inside his head. But you did something anyway. Things would have been worse if I hadn’t, I know that much. I have to go.
The first column suddenly began to run, not in tidy lines but a mob, surging toward the redoubt and the crack of musket fire, yelling their lungs out, some firing, some just running and screaming, a knife in one hand, clawing their way over the abatis, and they were falling as the bullets struck, those farther out knocked down like bowling pins by bouncing cannonballs. A panicked frog erupted suddenly from a patch of wiry yellow grass near Roger’s foot and landed in a puddle, where it vanished.
“I don’t like this, me,” Marion said, in a brief moment between explosions. He shook his head. “No, I don’t.” He raised his sword. “God be with you, Reverend.”
IT WASN’T GOD he found with him, but the next best thing. Major Gareth Barnard, one of his father’s friends, an ex–military chaplain. Barnard was a tall, long-faced man who wore his graying hair parted down the middle in a way that made him look like an old hound dog, but he’d had a black sense of humor and he’d treated Roger, thirteen years old, as a man.
“Did you ever kill anyone?” he’d asked the major when they were sat around the table after dinner one night, the old men telling stories of the War.
“Yes,” the major replied without hesitation. “I’d be no use to my men, dead.”
“What did you do for them?” Roger had asked, curious. “I mean—what does a chaplain do, in a battle?”
Major Barnard and the Reverend had exchanged a brief look, but the Reverend nodded and Barnard leaned forward, arms folded on the table in front of him. Roger saw the tattoo on his wrist, a bird of some kind, wings spread over a scroll with something written on it in Latin.
“Be with them,” the major said quietly, but his eyes held Roger’s, deeply serious. “Reassure them. Tell them God is with them. That I’m with them. That they aren’t alone.”
“Help them when you can,” his father had said, softly, eyes on the worn gray oilcloth that covered the table. “Hold their hands and pray, when you can’t.”
He saw—actually saw—the blast of a cannon. A brilliant-red flowering spark the size of his head that blinked in the fog with a firework’s BOOM! and then vanished. The fog blew back from the blast and he saw everything clearly for a second, no more—the black hulk of the gun, round mouth gaping, smoke thicker than the fog rolling over it, fog falling to the ground like water, steam rising from the hot metal to join the roiling fog, the artillerymen swarming over the gun, frenzied blue and brown ants, swallowed up the next instant in swirling white.
And then the world around him went mad. The shouts of the officers had come with the cannon’s blast; he only knew it because he’d been standing close enough to Marion to see his mouth open. But now a general roar went up from the charging men in his column, running hell-bent for the dim shape of the redoubt before him.
The sword was in his hand, and he was running, yelling wordless things.
Torches glowed faintly in the fog—soldiers trying to re-fire the abatis, he thought dimly.
Marion was gone. There was a high-pitched yodeling of some sort that might be the general, but might not.