The dull booming on the heights grows louder, the blackbirds are gathering and I see them swinging back and forth there as though a huge invisible pendulum were throwing them this way and that. The grenadier’s weight has been slowly shifting since he fell, and now his body slides down toward Jil Punkinflake on its back, turning in circles the arms and legs limply spiralling. It stops only a few feet from Jil Punkinflake, who stares at it.

No point in calling to him, though I do, unheard. He is reaching for the body. He takes the bag. Jil Punkinflake sits up slowly, puts the bag in his lap, holding it open and peering down into it. He is shaking again. A ragged opening in the noise flits past, and through it I hear his laughter, that makes his head jostle back and forth.

He’s on his feet, dashing up the side of the mountain with the bag in one hand swinging wildly back and forth. The movement is so swift and fateful I shout uselessly after him. A moment later he’s out of sight among the boulders.

The mass of enemy soldiers stretches, making a deliberate lunge along the length of the height and readying themselves to come crashing down on the city. Jil Punkinflake appears from a stand of trees far off, sprinting fantastically for a long, half-ruined wall that runs the length of the ridge for many dozen yards, above the mass of the enemy.

Now a grenade claps among Wacagan below the wall. Explosions erupt in a line, one after another—Jil Punkinflake must be running along the wall hurling grenades one after another over the top. They fall past the bottom of the wall down the ridge and land among the enemy—the explosions are driving them from their positions, further down and into confusion. They flee the explosions the only way they can: toward the city.

At once comes Makemin’s clear shout—“Slaughter them—shoot them!”

—The city is topped immediately with flash-tipped barrels, a crackling that breaks out into blasting like one thunderbolt after another and whole files of the enemy are falling. Makemin is in the middle of his sharpshooters, firing and working his bolt and firing again faster and faster his men shooting and rearming faster and faster some kneeling and some standing over them the better to collect their fire so that their rooftop begins to look like a smokestack or a volcanic vent of fumes and flames—the Yeseg militia has advanced on the ground and their guns level at the enemy as well, and everywhere the same roar shakes the smoke like one disembodied voice of war from every throat. From a broken place in the wall Jil Punkinflake has thrust out his head, laughing like a maniac at the dying blackbirds, his face shattered by laughter.