The horns of the Clappers blat out loud. Now I see Makemin in a knot of sharpshooters firing from a heap of rocks an explosion from the path ahead cuffs me with its noise and I lunge for Makemin’s cover. I see one of the blackbirds pick up and pitch back one of our bombs, and it detonates close enough to me to shower me with particles of stone. Makemin orders the grenadiers to stop throwing. I’m looking around this way and that—I see Jil Punkinflake flat on the ground with his hands clutching his head and his dog tugging insistently at his coat tails. Going to him I find him unhurt, sobbing and rigid with fear, drag him to cover. Now I see Thrushchurl high up behind the rocks, grinning and methodically loading and emptying his gun without pointing it at much of anything. The fog is lifting a little. Silichieh comes from Makemin’s direction and slides in beside me in a hail of gravel, his face drawn, eyes dull and blank like a doll’s eyes.

“They’re falling back. Makemin wants us to regroup.”

He bustles on past me his sweater brushing over the dog’s head. I don’t know what to do so I stay put and watch. No sign of any regrouping. Another fusillade of shots spatter all around, one of the loonies falls a few dozen yards from me, face down in a mound of black earth. He’s dead when I reach him. I run again for cover, the same stones that sheltered me at the start, years ago. I can see the lieutenant is still there, the whites of his eyes as he peers at me, rigid, breathing hard, face in the grey.

The ground around me stutters with shot like cracking whips and I’m pelted with grit. There are enemy rifles sparking from stones just down the path from me. Saskia is suddenly there between the riflemen and me; she bounds up on their cover and kicks one of the blackbirds in the face the pistol in her left hand is pointing and firing and the sabre in her right swings up and down. She’s leapt right among them—I can’t see—one of them backs into view with his rifle flung up her sabre shears it in two and hacks him so that he is driven back, tumbles over a boulder and falls sluicing blood to the ground. Another is coming up the path rifle level she bounds over the barrier thrusting out her legs and kicks him in the chest. He lands prone and spins but she swifter than thought is upon him and spits his throat, pulls the blade out and chops him across his adam’s apple. Never stopping she flies up the opposite declivity of the path following a broken defile along which some of the enemy are retreating. Up the slope weightless she goes and slices a man’s legs out from under him from below, impaling him in the chest when he falls. The soldier ahead of him she shoots as he crests the grade, the bullet blowing his hat up and off his head. She climbs to him and stabs him, then vanishes over the declivity, firing her pistol. Last I see of her, she is charging down after them, now both hands on her sabre she lifts it over her head again and again, hacking at them like a crazed woodsman chopping logs.