Silent shapes wheel around us with long nasal shrills splitting the air like bugles—figures detach from the trees ahead swinging crazily back and forth in the air. Shots patter all around us and our guns return fire—Makemin leads the snipers and Saskia is whipping through the air already flashes over my head firing, her voice cuts under the screamed alarms. Soldiers and trees flash by my sights but I can’t line up my shots, fire always too late. They stay in the same area directly ahead of us, dim flashes in the trees, pale moonlight on their shoulders and helmets, caps. Suddenly the flying shapes break and fly toward the enemy still wailing, and Wacagan retreat.

Makemin snaps to his feet and we are charging headlong through the dark and dark trees against the white ground—still firing at the retreating figures I see Makemin run his rifle level and the enemy are being cut down, punched in half, wrenched round and torn apart. The carbine butts and jolts in my hand like a bucking snake but I’m not shooting at anything, I can’t manage it somehow. I glance around—the enemy shoots back at us but not one of us has fallen, a mob erupting with flashing guns like a churning thundercloud ...

... ahead and to my left the Captain stands in a plume of brass fire with his arms flung out, warding me off with his hands in a flash that leaves a shadowy scar in my vision, blotting him out. Did I see him? What did I just see? The blackbirds ahead scatter and bound off to the left—a few of them stand out distinctly in the moonlight—they are not swinging back and forth as they usually do: they are leaping with both legs, like hares.

Around Makemin, Saskia and the others, I see the wan dream tremble in the air like diamond haze, the chance at last to crush the enemy, hammer their bodies and break them open, dash them to smithereens—the same dream drove me forward against my exhaustion and flooded my arms and legs with miraculous, fresh strength, but now it recedes from me, though it wheels all around in them. No one is really dying.

Those aren’t people. Their guns aren’t guns. None of our number has fallen—what kind of ambush works like that? Following their charge a body of our soldiers on the left plunges after them and I don’t see them any more. From out of invisibility ahead I hear them scream. The screams are cut short, each one.

Makemin suddenly drops to a walk and calls “Halt! Halt!”

Saskia barrels up to him in a flash demanding to know why we’ve stopped—he wants us to advance slowly, expecting a trap.

“They may have found help. Those birds warned them we were coming.”