Camp again.

*

Shouts—

—and something beating me—

—rain is falling hard—men are veering this way and that in it.

I lurch up and a hand yanks at me.

Shots—a man slops up near me aims and fires—turn and see another firing in the other direction. Jil Punkinflake sprints by, face and eyes white, his black mouth open, groaning with a kind of rage again and again, like a stricken horse. Dark shapes run and shots snap all around—the night explodes in shooting.

A despairing voice wails somewhere near me. “Where did they get guns?”

I run, I get down, I want to ask somebody something—man splashes to within a few feet of me raises his gun aiming and it bursts in his hands swatting him to the ground and he’s clawing his face and kicking on his back. I get to him and start trying to stop the bleeding, sew his face shut. He screams at me the bone of his jaws bare on one side his eye is red black jelly his nose is a rag. He punches and rips at me gulping and crying a flurry of explosions comes down like an avalanche on top of me and I can’t think, I’m staring weirdly at my own sopping hands streaked with rain-thinned blood fingers pale thick and nerveless like sausages fumbling stupidly with the suture—a yakking face shoves into mine—

“He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!”

Figures dropping down onto their knees around me with heavy thuds thrusting out their rifle barrels like lances firing jubilantly and I swim past them in the other direction. I hear them sing out all around me like men at a wedding party. What are they shooting at in this pitch dark? Shapes in the rain. Saskia yelling “Press forward!” Which way is forward? All of them? The mud by my left calf shudders flying up into the air—dressed only in a long shirt, one of the women from the asylum staggers toward me making a convulsive animal sound in her throat, six or seven carbines hanging on straps from her shoulders and arms. She empties the smouldering one she has in her hands—and just shot at me with—firing now over my head into the mayhem behind me. She drops the empty carbine and unslings another still making that noise, a depraved giggle, firing into the movement, shooting anything that moves, and I know there’s no one back that way but our own. I throw my hand out toward her.

Someone comes up from behind and to the side of her, opposite me; Nikhinoch, even in the mud he is neat and orderly his step still springs light as a jackknife. With one smooth continuous motion he pulls a compact gun from his vest pocket and fires a bullet into her head. She collapses in a heap of rattling carbines. Nikhinoch steps over to her body and checks the guns. He takes a loaded one and continues looking, his pursed blue face unhurried, lit sideways by muzzle flashes from the soldiers at the tree line. He takes another loaded gun and tosses it sideways to me, economically indicates I should follow him and walks toward the shooting with the same heron step he always uses.