A worrying thought—“What if he tries to heroically—heroically to recoup his name?”

“Oh, you mean with a something big? He’s tried that too. He has a decoration though he doesn’t wear it.”

Tell, tell ...

Makemin had belonged to a sharp shooter unit that fought at some place on the far side of the mountains called Galleh. The Alaks there had been talking to the Laughing Gas and went over to the blackbirds—that’s Wacagan, the Enemy, you students—and it was a matter of putting the insurrection down.

Soldiers marching on the road through fields and copses. They run right into the rebels set up in a village. Shock, scrambling, shots. Neither side is prepared to pull back, and no reinforcements are coming to the soldiers; head of the local garrison died of the Influence and had not yet been replaced—without him, no good organization.

The fighting breaks up, drags on in skirmishes and both sides find themselves killing their own in the confusion, and through a tormented night of aching watchfulness and impossibly sudden explosions of violence, dying. A flashing steel wing flickers over you and in the next instant half your unit is gone, breaking twigs and random shots all around you, and in the next second it’s just as quiet as before, and you reel bewildered from cover to cover not knowing what you are.

Here’s young Makemin pinned down in a burned-out farm house, the last of his unit. No knowing where the rest of the soldiers are, where the line, if any, is, if there has been a retreat or advance, if there are any soldiers but him left. A distant shot startles the rooks and he shrinks. Hoofbeats, he glances through the window. In watery light just before the dawn he sees one of the rebels ride past at an angle heading for broken ground at the horizon. Makemin can see, in the turmoil of the man’s wildly flailing cloak and loose clothing, that he wears a sword—that makes him one of the leaders. Not having a clear shot Makemin crazily breaks from cover and begins sprinting after the horse. He raises his rifle and sights it on the veering horseman, holding the gun level as he runs all out, his legs slithering and swivelling beneath him to keep his upper body plumb on the perpendicular.