“There’s nothing—there’s nothing! Get back!” Yarn calls, and I dart back to cover.

I peer about me desperately looking for Kaladze, but he’s not there. Yarn slips away into the shadows. Who was my sergeant anyway? Am I supposed to be giving orders? I am down now in the shelter of one of the carts, and I peer out through a chink in the wood. In the gloom, I can dimly make out the groove of the road between the slopes. As I watch, three or four blackbirds, all in a row as though linked at the shoulder, fly sideways across the road. I am trying to spot them—the slopes around the road I now see are seething with motion, small groups of soldiers sailing in long bounding arcs, black against the dark, and here and there the muzzle flashes as they fire on us, still moving. They swing back and forth in the air just above the ground like ghosts, silent except for the shooting, effortless, weightless. Makemin’s rifle cracks near me just as another group wafts out nearly too swift to see into the road, and the last one in the group is hit—he flips over his center again and again, arms and legs flailing. He floats in the air toward us, down the slope, limp, turning now shoulder over shoulder as if he tumbled along in the current of a sluggish stream, arms and legs flop and flop. I watch fascinated as the dark body drifts to a halt by the side of the road, backs of its hands dragging in the dust.

Thumping feet behind me—the grenadiers have gathered now. They work in teams, one kneeling primes the grenades and puts them in slings, hands them to the other who stands, twirls the sling and launches the grenade, then crouches again. Loud bangs from the road and slope.

“They are trying to get above us,” Makemin says sharply, pointing to the slope on my right. He orders the grenadiers to concentrate on the road, to cover us as we move to defend the slope. I am ordered to help carry one of the lighter carts. A bullet bonks into the wood near my ear, and shaves splinters onto my cheek.

We clamber up on to the slope randomly dropping our cover, and I stop panting there. Shots rain in from all over and I throw myself down in total confusion. I turn my head this way and that, see at least a dozen men fall before us, and the long-springing arcs of enemy soldiers zig-zagging above us on the slope. I drag the man nearest me behind a boulder and bandage him. He is doing nothing whatever but breathing for all he’s worth, eyes starting from his head. When I look up, I see Yarn come holding the front end of a heavy box, and Silichieh behind holding the rear end. Silichieh shouts something and they drop the box—he begins fiddling with it.