The Enterprise of Death (55 page)

“Oh fuck it all,” Monique hissed, and tiptoed quickly to where Manuel and Monique stood. “It’s Lautrec, it’s fucking Lautrec! He’s coming in!”

“Who?” Awa asked.

“
The
Lautrec?” said Manuel. “Oh fuck.”

“The big boss,” Monique began, “Frenchman who—”

“Allll-brecht!” The dark-haired, squinty man stepped into the tent, the flaps held back by von Stein’s guards. “Just what is the meaning of this?!”

“Ah.” Awa looked desperately at her two friends. “I, ah—”

“A fish breakfast?” The Vicomte de Lautrec walked around the stunned trio and poked von Stein’s trout. Manuel held his breath, wondering if the man could see the commander’s corpse shoved under the desk from his vantage. Spinning around, Lautrec said, “Might we speak in private, Albrecht?”

“What?” Awa squawked. “They, they need to be here.”

“Tosh.” Lautrec shooed them away with his fingers. “I just want to have a quick little word, Albrecht, then you can have your advisors back.”

Manuel and Monique dejectedly marched outside and stood at the mouth of the tent, wondering if everything was about to turn to shit. One of the guards glanced at them, did a double take at seeing Manuel up and about, and swooned. Then the duo
set to explaining to the other guards how Manuel had needed to fake his own death lest there be spies in the camp, obviously, and—

The tent flaps swished and Lautrec stepped out, a curious smile on his thin lips. He looked mischievously at Manuel and Monique. The other guards were standing rigidly in salute and Lautrec looked around, then stepped closer to the artist and the gunner.

“Awa?” Manuel whispered.

“A what?” Lautrec whispered back in French. “Normally I’d take offense to you scum addressing me in your incomprehensible accents, and your uppity refusal to even salute, but thanks to your captain all of you are going to die. Die. Give the Infinite my regards, cowherds.”

“Right!” von Stein boomed, exiting his tent. “To the lines with us, then!”

All heads turned and cocked in his direction, just as the embedded Imperial arquebusiers would soon turn and cock their guns on the advancing Swiss that von Stein would lead. The morning moved very, very quickly after von Stein’s announcement that he would personally lead the contingent of mercenaries from Bern, and as the lines were formed at the front Manuel prayed more and more vigorously. Incomprehensible though it seemed, their orders were to march straight across a field toward a fortified road the Imperials held with pikemen and gunners. As for the boisterous Swiss, their own pikes swayed like wheat, exactly like wheat, and Manuel knew what happened when the wheat grew tall enough to properly sway. Fuck fuck fuck.

“So,” Awa explained after ducking back to von Stein’s tent, altering her appearance to resemble Bernardo again, and returning with the reanimated body of von Stein in tow, “just before we got here von Swine told his master, that Lautrec, that all the Swiss would abandon the fight unless they were allowed to attack immediately. Lautrec was coming to try and change his mind, I think, or maybe just yell at him. But anyway, we’re at the front!”

“Yes.” Manuel panicked at the realization that he had left the satchel with all his planks back in the tent. “We’ve got to go back, I’ve got—”

“That’s the fuckin signal,” Monique observed as a horn lamely tooted somewhere behind them. “Get walkin, lump. Jus’ like von Wine, sendin us straight inta a fuckin killin field. They’ll ’ave all they gunners at the front, mark me, an’ just mow us fuckin down. Only way to use fuckin guns, not that von Wine ever understood that. Never thought I’d say it but wish Doctor Lump had stuck it out with us stead of pissin off ta find those bastards of the Black-wood you was on bout.”

“So what do we do, Awa, what do we do?” Manuel tried to get himself under control. In the past he had not become so flustered before a battle, so goddamn scared, but all he could think about was his wife and his children and his studio.
Focus, Saint Niklaus
, he thought,
focus on what needs must
. “I sent a letter. A few days ago. Inquiring about a civic position, begging for it, really. I’m done, this is it, I’m done, after this, I’m done, it’s charity and tithing and—”

“You tellin us or God?” Monique winked at Awa, who always stood close enough to von Stein to control the walking corpse and have it parrot a word or two if needed. “But lump’s got a point, don’t he, Bernie? What’s the scheme?”

“When the killing starts we secure a small area we can keep people out of, and you, if you’re sure—” Awa began.

“We’re sure, we’re sure,” said Monique as the column began to move. “What we gotta do?”

“Protect me,” said Awa. “That’s all. Make sure no one disturbs the circles I draw.”

On an open plain without cover such a seemingly simple request might prove impossible, but her two friends nodded.
Saint Niklaus enters the scene
, he thought with a smile, and they were off, moving with agonizing slowness across the field. The stiffly
marching corpse of von Stein did not respond to the coded orders one of Lautrec’s pages gave him to wait for the French artillery to bombard the fortified position of the Imperials, instead pushing ahead across the field of Bicocca. The second column, led by a provincial Swiss captain jealous of von Stein’s bravado, did not wish to be left behind and likewise ignored the order to hold.

Then light appeared in the east and the Imperials, embedded atop the earthworks they had built immediately behind the sunken road that cut across the field, opened fire, a second dawn blooming in the south as a hundred muzzles flashed. The noise was deafening, not of the guns but of the pikemen screaming as they fell by the score. A mist of blood enveloped the columns as they rushed forward, scrambling over their fallen comrades, and every few breaths another volley would cut down the first few rows of charging Swiss. Awa had never experienced anything like it, but neither had Manuel or Monique or any of the men present, and only the sight of their brave captain von Stein trudging ahead with half his arm blown off kept the troops from routing.

“Cowards!” Manuel screamed, his voice cracking to see the Imperials hiding atop their wall. “You fucking cowards! Cowards!”

Awa kept a wall of marching dead men in front of her and her friends, and if any of the Swiss mercenaries noticed that their companions rose despite mortal wounds they themselves were killed before they could spread the word. Then the columns reached the high wall of mud the Imperials had built and the massacre worsened. Looking beside him, Manuel was horrified to see that two of the dead men carried Awa between them, the witch no longer disguised as Bernardo, her eyes twisted back in her head and foam running from her lips, a piece of damp parchment clutched in her hand.

“Fuck!” Manuel screamed, pressing himself flat against the wall as gunners leaned over the edge to fire down into them. “What do we what do we what do we—”

“Lump!” Monique slapped him in the mouth. “Shut it! She’s been ’avin that fit since ’alfway cross the plain, so jus’ fuckin shut it! The, the dead ones are still walkin, aye? So she knows what she’s bout, aye?”

“I don’t know,” Manuel whined, his face covered in blood. “I don’t fucking know!”

“Well I do.” Monique grabbed Manuel’s arm and impatiently began dragging him along the wall, as if it were a country hedge they were strolling beside and not a deadly fortification. The corpses carrying Awa followed them, which encouraged Monique even if she was not sure what it portended. “There, that cart stickin out the fuckin wall. Let’s get under there an’—”

Another volley from just overhead brought bells to their ears, and as the cloud of black smoke rolled down the wall to envelop them Manuel saw von Stein’s corpse methodically climbing straight up the mud embankment, pikemen rallying behind him. Couldn’t they see that the morning light was spilling through dozens of wet holes piercing his fat frame? Maybe they were already dead, Manuel suddenly realized, maybe he and Monique and all the rest had fallen and Awa was just marching them forward, and—

“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 lay crumpled in the dirt beneath her. She faced the wall of mud and smiled to herself, daring to think her mad scheme might actually come to something. Even if the plan failed she was still safe from the dead, and—

Not safe, Awa caught herself as she wiped the muddy earth beneath her as smooth as she could, nothing about this was safe. The report of another volley shook the cart to punctuate this thought, and she swung her slingbag around, jamming the loose page back into her satchel beside the leather tube Manuel had given her and removing the book. Manuel and Monique were
behind her in the cramped hollow, their voices low, but she knew time was running out and addressed the tome.

“Show me the last page he took from his last body,” said Awa. “I already used one but there were two.”

A thick scab ran from the top of the book to the bottom where she had removed the first page taken from Walther’s skin, and this second leaf did not come any easier, even when she ordered the book. When the binding finally gave up the page a trickle of blood began running down the spine, as if the folio were a deeply embedded hangnail. She had it, and placing the page in the mud, she dug deeper in the book’s binding until the flow quickened and she was able to surround the loose page with a ring of black blood.

Then Awa cut her forearm with the ibex knife. In her haste she went deeper than she intended, and leaning forward she quickly splashed a red ring around herself. She would have continued despite her sudden lightheadedness but Monique had torn her own tunic and grabbed Awa’s bleeding arm. In the shadow of the cart three pairs of eyes focused on Monique’s ten fingers tying the rag around the wound, particularly the disproportionately thin thumb and forefingers on her right hand.

“Wish we ’ad Doctor Lump or some of your famous stew,” said Monique.