Now the road is backed up, full of troops and supplies waiting for passes to get inside the town’s walls. I can only vaguely make out the scene—a jumble of hills rolling down toward the far horizon, and somewhere out there a glistening breathing blue flatness that I suppose is the ocean. Port Conget seems to be a disc-shaped irregularity between it and me, planed down flush like a wooden peg into a dip in the landscape. We bunch up against the group ahead of us, a collection of carts, and wait. Hours pass, and no movement. There is talk of our being exposed here overnight. Makemin fumes and paces and cranes.

Presently a doughy corporal with a clipboard makes his way down the cue. As he approaches us, Makemin’s diffuse anger condenses and he strides forward on the beam toward the corporal with me in tow.

“We have wounded and we’ve been waiting more than four hours!”

Without looking up the corporal takes Makemin’s information and flips through his sheets. He ambles further along the line. Makemin, his face horribly drawn, calls after him. The corporal makes a sort of fluttering gesture at waist level, a hold on move, without turning around, which proves to be a mistake as Makemin switches him across the back of the head so swiftly his ferrule whistles and the corporal howls puts his hand to the new part in his hair and spins around his eyes popping. Makemin drives his fist into the corporal’s face splitting his lip and squashing his nose. The corporal makes a choked sound, his knees buckle, and with amazing celerity Makemin’s left hand shoots out to seize him by the lapel and slow his fall to a sag, the better to smash him again bursting the flesh along the left cheekbone. He takes the limp, squealing corporal in both hands and drapes him over his horse’s ass, plucks up a company insignia from one of the casualty carts and claps it onto the man’s lacerated cheek like a bandage. The corporal chirps and his legs flip weakly. Nikhinoch meanwhile has retrieved the clipboard and is there when Makemin reaches for him, calmly pivots the board into Makemin’s hand the proper page bent back. The latter holds it before the corporal’s streaming face.

“Now you’re one of my wounded. Sign.”

The corporal fumbles his signature and presses his seal ring into the document and Makemin calls “Piglets move up! Where’s that worthless standard man?”

He mounts, and Jil Punkinflake, giving me a feeble smile only thinly veneering the fear that has sickened down into him now, advances to walk beside him. Using principally the minatory expression on his face, Makemin clears a path for us right up the middle of the columns ahead. I do not notice much because I’m trotting alongside his horse holding, as best I can, an ether sop under the mouth and nose of the corporal, who seems unhappily unable to lose consciousness for more than a moment or two. He gags a bit, and I clear a plug of red muck from his mouth. Bits of broken teeth come away, adhere to my finger.