Below us, I can see a number of fortified positions, small ledges fringed with heavy rocks and sandbags. In the one nearest us I can see two men in civilian clothes huddled there behind their cover, occasionally lowering a lean barrel level and firing toward the enemy. Makemin makes a quick survey and then dispatches each officer to some task taking them away until we are alone together.

One of the defenders below us calls up, waving furtively.

“Help us!” he calls.

“There are still a few injured men back there, among the asylum men,” Makemin tells me. “Go see to them.”

“I’ll need to move them. If you could spare me a few hands—”

Makemin turns and slaps me.

“Why don’t you act like an officer?” he snaps. “Attend to your patients!”

He turns away.

*

The loonies moan and cry behind us. Makemin stands in the little enclosure of the fortified spot. The two men I’d seen earlier, one of whom called to us for help, both lie dead. One is sprawled on his back, draped over one of the stones of the rampart. The other is curled into a letter C on the ground.

Makemin has turned to speak to us. The men are livid with terror, and seem ready at any moment to dash back up the slope. The asylum soldiers, or I presume they were, are moaning and wringing their hands.

“Get back to your ranks!” Makemin screams, his eyes flashing.

“I will not have it said that we cringed here on the heights while the city was taken right under our noses! We have a Narrator here!”

He points at me, and now I am leopard-spotted with their eyes.

I’m paralyzed—I look from face not knowing how to tell them the truth.

“All of history looks at you through him! Now are you soldiers or not? I am a soldier.”

He points to the two dead men.

“Are you going to allow this? These men had less chance than you!”

I weave a little. I feel violent illness coming over me. As he talks, a wild light begins to glimmer in their eyes. I can see the contagion spread.

Makemin is a good narrator. He has his own story, a revenge story, and its power has revived in the men the will to fight. He will get his way. They will fight. They believe him. I failed. I failed as a narrator, because I didn’t tell them that I had had to get my pack from where it fell and was tangled in the bracken by the path, and that Makemin was wrong to believe himself alone in the moments after he struck me.