The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [18]
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Jamie, and started to rise, but Quire laid a hand on his arm and pushed him down.
Walker had passed on, turning his vitriol upon some other victim.
“You stay put, if that’s what you fancy,” Quire told Jamie. “Sergeant doesn’t get to decide whether the King pays you enough to die for him. You do that for yourself, lad.”
He surged up, got an elbow set on the parapet. He was looking out over a great mass of men, pressed up right to the base of the wall. Hundreds of them, all pushing forwards; some climbing already on the backs of their comrades, or hoisted up by the strength of their arms, scrabbling for handholds to haul themselves over into the gardens.
Quire took measured aim at the nearest of them and fired. Scraps of the man’s uniform were blown off his shoulder and he fell back amongst the throng. Quire spun his musket about in his hands and used the butt to batter at another Frenchman as he tried to get astride the wall.
It was instants from then: snatched moments of consciousness, of awareness, pulled from the frenzy of carnage; offered to Quire as all that would be left of the long, bloody day by way of memory. The few minutes of ethereal quiet that came upon them now and again, unexpectedly. Wilson Dunbar running along the line of defenders, a heavy bucket full of paper cartridges packed with ball and powder in each hand, shouting: “Get your cartridges while you can, boys! Plenty for all!”
And Jamie twisting and shouting at the stocky little soldier’s disappearing back: “Impervious Dunbar! Stay here, stay with us. Give us a bit of your luck.”
The French coming again, more fiercely than ever. Sounds of chaos rising up from the farm buildings, so that everyone thought for a time they were fallen. But no; the struggle there receded, that around the gardens thickened. Quire stabbing a man in the face with his bayonet.
The gardens themselves, ruined, churned to bare earth and debris. The little low hedges, cut in straight lines, trampled by the soldiers running back and forth. The wounded lying there, on what had been flower beds, crying or wailing or dying silently while they waited for someone to take them to the barn where the surgeons were.
Sergeant Walker returning, standing there and screaming at Jamie Boswell, stabbing a rigid, accusing finger at him.
“You will get on your feet, boy, and kill some fucking Frenchmen, or I’ll see you flogged. You mark my words, I will.”
Quire would have turned about and told Walker where to go, but a Frenchman had reached up and had hold of the barrel of his musket, trying to pull it out of his grasp. Quire struggled to twist it into line with the man’s chest.
Jamie Boswell rose at his side, then, and clumsily thrust his own gun over the top of the wall. He fired, punching a ball harmlessly into the earth at the foot of the wall. The surprise and noise of it was enough to loosen the Frenchman’s grip on Quire’s musket. He pulled it free, and shot the retreating figure in the back.
“Reload,” he shouted at Jamie.
Then half of Jamie’s head was suddenly gone, flicked away like a leaf in the wind, leaving Quire a glimpse of bone and brain. Gore splattered his face. Jamie fell in the heavy, limp way a dead man did. For a moment Quire could taste him on his lips, but he wiped his mouth and his eyes clean. He stared down at the young man’s ruined visage. And vomited, heaving up a thin gruel. Something he had never done before, even when faced with worse horrors.
The insistent rhythm of the slaughter carried him numbly on. Scores of corpses piled up outside the walls, flotsam strewn along a shore after a storm. Quire drifted through it now, his mind detached from his body, which mechanically followed the habits the years had taught it. He saw both the seething mass of the French advancing once more, in futile, dogged determination, and Sergeant Walker, retracing his steps, his ire cutting through the raging cacophony.
Quire lifted his musket and set it to