The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [175]
“Down!” Monique dragged Manuel underneath the abandoned cart she had found just as the mud around them spit up clods of earth, another volley dodged, another ignoble, anonymous death avoided. Then Monique turned and saw the dead men holding Awa swaying beside the shelter and with a curse she left the cover and snatched the girl from their arms. Back under the filthy tipped cart Monique looked anxiously from Awa to Manuel, then gently slapped Awa’s cheek. “Oi, up, blackamoor, there’s work ta be done.”
The world came back to Awa, the real, living world, but all the light was gone from it, and everything was the color of old blood and ash. Monique and Manuel were hunched over her and Awa could not tell if they were alive or dead, or which she was, for that matter. She decided they were all still alive, but that meant they were all about to die, and Awa was afraid.
Death was not to be feared. Awa thought she had believed that, thought that what her tutor intended by stealing her body was obviously different and that true death was natural, benign, sometimes welcome, even, but on the field of Bicocca that conceit was broken.
The magnitude was what changed everything for her, the sheer volume of spirits ripped from their beloved shells by hard iron plentiful as raindrops in a storm. Those that were blasted out at once were lucky compared to those who lay drowning in their own blood, and as if they were stones to be picked up and thrown she had hoisted one corpse after another and marched them forward, her eyes flitting around the field, her concentration so intense that some did not even hit the dirt before their dead bodies were reanimated, the young Swiss staggering as his throat was shot, his stomach, his heart, his groin, staggering but not falling and continuing to march on the low earthwork wall where row after row of arquebusiers discharged their weapons into the disintegrating columns.
When Awa was confident she had resurrected a sufficiently deep wall of mindless corpses to march in front of them she had ordered two of them to swoop her up. As they carried her Awa shifted her focus from the physical remains to the almost invisible spirits being ejected from their bodies, from life, and she called out to them. Not all of them listened, many shimmering and fading, not to be recalled unless forced by necromancy, but a dozen heard her call and paused, spirits hovering between worlds, and then another dozen paused, and another, and soon all of Awa’s world was a cloud of spirits, a great thunderhead of death building higher and higher over the field as a hundred men died, then another hundred, and another, and Awa addressed them with her own meager spirit, a spirit protected from the deceased but one of such insignificance when weighed against that dire contingent of dead souls as to flatten her with fear. Awa pleaded, she begged, lost in a miasma of gunsmoke, mist, and death, and then Monique slapped her once, and she was still alive, but the sheer weight of the dead almost crippled her, and she lay shivering like a dying child, eyes staring in horror at the ever larger mass of spirits hanging over the world.
“Awa, please,” Manuel begged. “Awa, do something! Awa!”
“Get on up, girl.” Even Monique seemed concerned, a pistol in her scarred but whole right hand. The gunner had not wasted a shot marching in, but the shouting atop the earthwork was growing closer and the tipped cart on the sunken road was not likely to withstand even a single volley were they to be targeted. “Do whatcha come for!”
Awa closed her eyes and tried to find her breath, then opened them again, careful to focus only on the mud in which she lay. Not letting her vision rise to look at her friends or what loomed beyond them, she rolled over, got onto her hands and knees, then sat back on her haunches. The single torn page she had held as they marched