Timepiece (2 page)

He picked up the animal’s left foreleg, and saw the problem at once: a stone wedged between shoe and hoof. Freemantle fumbled for a knife. He could not linger here—every moment was precious—but for that reason, he could not grudge the delay to pry out the pebble, or he would be forced to race the sands of time on an increasingly lame mount.

With every instinct screaming at him to hurry, and the forest all around watching him with cold intent eyes, he set to work. Carefully, taking care not to damage the tender hoof any further, he probed with the blade.

The stone hopped out. The bay blew a breath. Freemantle led it forward a few steps, and it put its feet down strongly. No lasting damage, thank heaven. Freemantle swung himself back up into the saddle, and the horse moved forward without hesitation or complaint. Freemantle, still unable to shake the sensation of eyes watching from the shadows beneath the trees, set his mount trotting once more.

The bay kept the pace easily until they were nearly upon the clearing where the special battalion was encamped—and then it checked again, shaking its head and snorting. Freemantle fought the animal’s fear with both hands tight on the reins, keeping its head pointed toward Burnley’s camp through the exertion of every muscle in his body. The horse shook and reared and struggled. Cannon fire could not disturb its calm, but it shrank from the unnatural things beyond the trees.

A few moments later, Freemantle could smell them too—an odor more like a swamp than a stable—and at that moment, a red-coated sentry stepped out to challenge him. “From the Duke,” Freemantle said. “Message for General Burnley.” The sentry at once stepped aside, pointing to a man in officer’s livery who stood a short distance away. Behind him stretched crudely cleared swathes of forest, trees cut down to make and to make room for three enormous corrals with slatted fences ten feet high.

The smell grew, and it took something perilously close to cruelty to keep the horse from bolting. Here actual eyes of actual monsters watched through the slats of the corrals, and the bay knew it. General Burnley looked up, saw Freemantle’s struggles, and raised his voice in an effortless bellow for men to come and hold the Colonel’s mount. Actual men rather than special battalion members came running in response to the order, Freemantle was glad to see. One grabbed the horse’s bridle and the other two tried to calm it as it reared in ragged circles.

Freemantle did not dismount so much as fall from the saddle, but it didn’t matter. He turned the slide into something that at least landed him on his feet, and Burnley did not seem disposed to comment on his lack of grace. “What news, Colonel?”

“It goes badly,” Freemantle said, and rapped out the rest of Wellington’s message.

General Burnley whipped around, calling for aides and shouting orders. “All right, lad,” he added, “you’d better get back, and tell His Grace I’ll have them there directly.” It took two men to hold the horse still enough for Freemantle to get himself back in the saddle, and the bay shot away from the clearing like a bullet from a rifle.

Freemantle was only too glad to put the unnatural air of the special battalion behind him. He gave the horse its head and damned the consequences. Brush flew by in a streak of muddy green, and tree branches whipped at him from all sides, but the bay somehow managed to make it out of the forest without snapping a bone on any of the obstacles within. It burst onto the road with a leap, and pounded toward the ridge and the bellowing cannons as though making for the place it most wanted to be.

Freemantle found himself plagued by nightmare visions of what he would find on the other side of the ridgeline. He imagined cresting the hill to find the line broken and his countrymen slaughtered, a line of French infantry bayoneting the last few who could no longer offer any defense. The scene etched itself so plainly before his eyes that he was almost surprised to find it not true when he reached the ridge. The French infantry had not yet advanced. The British were still holding. Wellington was where Freemantle had left him, and the Iron Duke swung to look at him with no more than a mildly inquiring expression.

“They’re coming,” Freemantle said.

Wellington nodded once, as though the conversation concerned a dinner invitation.

The French guns roared, paused, roared again. Freemantle, following Wellington as the Duke rode from the center to the left, thought he could catch in the moments of relative silence a faint drumbeat carried in the air behind him. He turned, straining his ears, straining his eyes.

He was not imagining it. The drumbeat from the Forest of Soignes grew louder, more distinct, resolved itself into a definite infantry beat.

And they came.

Out of the wood, through the trees, and down the road, huge slavering things marched in something approximating formation. The flesh of their faces hung slack off the bone, and drool trailed from the corner of the mouths they could not completely close. Their overlong arms and thrust-forward necks strained at the fabric of a simplified private soldier’s uniform. A mockery of the uniform, it had been called by some.

Most of them carried muskets. It was in fact easy enough to train them to fire, for they had proven not much more stupid than the average raw recruit. None, however, bore a saber or bayonet. Their primary weapon was instead a large battle-axe, two-headed and spiked like something salvaged from Britian’s savage past, for the special battalion was at its best in close combat. Its members were primitive, resistant to discipline, and incapable of learning sophisticated tactics, but they could be taught to slaughter anyone not wearing a red uniform, and to mostly refrain from slaughtering anyone who did.

General Burnley led them on foot, but managed to preserve a certain grim dignity even while marching like a common soldier. The special battalion was coming up on the left flank. Wellington turned and barked an order to get the remnants of the cavalry out of there.

The cavalry went to reinforce the desperate men at the center crossroads. Wellington followed their progress through a spyglass, and his lips turned upward just slightly at the corners. He slapped the spyglass into Freemantle’s hand and moved to give another order, and Freemantle lifted it to his own eye, curious to see what Wellington had seen.

It was astonishing how much the set of a man’s shoulders and the tilt of his head could tell you. Even with the spyglass, Freemantle could not read anything as specific as expressions, but he saw the shift in posture move from man to man, all along the center of the ridge, as the cavalry came to reinforce the position. The men in the center had considered themselves under an inevitable sentence of death a moment ago. Now they glanced over their shoulders at the horses and straightened as though they still had a fight left in them after all.

The reaction of the men on the left was even more dramatic. Positioned as they were, they could not see what manner of reinforcements approached from their rear, but they heard the drums and the marching feet, and some caught a glimpse of the flag. The words ran through the ranks of exhausted men like wind through a ryefield: “Reinforcements have come.”

The French artillery chose that moment to crash to a stop. The relative silence rang in Freemantle’s ears, more deafening than the noise. He made out a drumbeat, slightly out of cadence with the British one behind him. The French infantry advance.

He heard his name in the Duke’s distinctive bark, and hastily kneed his horse to follow Wellington higher up onto the ridge. The Duke put out his hand for the spyglass, and Freemantle handed it over.

Even without it, Freemantle could see clearly enough. This high up, the visibility almost qualified as good, and even through the powder smoke that still hung densely over the valley, Freemantle could discern precisely which French troops were marching over the churned mud. The Emperor, expecting imminent victory, had sent in the Garde.

The Imperial Garde was the elite of the elite of Napoleon’s troops, distinctive by their height and the bearskins that were part of their campaigning uniforms, usually held in reserve until the moment of victory and partially for that reason never defeated. The day was traditionally as good as won when the Garde took the field, and certainly the rest of the French troops assumed this would be the case at Waterloo as it had been so often before. They cheered as the tight columns passed, a wave of sound that started faint but grew into a crescendo from every part of the valley.

 The monsters of the special battalion were not particularly suited to defensive fighting. No one, including Freemantle, had expected them to
hold
the left flank, and they did not. But they came screeching over the ridge instead, howling and brandishing axes as tall as men, and the French Garde—said to know how to die, but not how to surrender—took one look at this terrible vision and broke. 

“The Garde is retreating!” It was shouted all over the battlefield, in triumph by the British and in horror by the French. The rest of Napoleon’s infantry stopped, gaped, then turned and likewise fled for their lives. The French cavalry squealed and trampled, trying to get away from the monsters. The monsters pounded after them, huge and bloodthirsty and completely unfatigued, leaving gore and destruction wherever they passed.

Leaving, too, some fair bit of consternation in the British ranks behind them. It took fast talking and firm handling to keep the British troops who had gotten a good look at their new allies from sprinting away in the opposite direction. No one but the Iron Duke could have managed it, but Wellington rode hard up and down the lines, visible and shouting, and soon enough had them organized to join the monsters’ pursuit of the French. By then some isolated fire had resumed from the French side, but Wellington acted as though he did not care. “Forward and complete your victory, my lads!” His voice pierced the chaos. “Look, they fly before us! See them off our land!”

“For God’s sake!” Freemantle heard someone else shout in exasperation. “Don’t expose yourself so!” He turned his head in time to see a horseman come pounding past. The man reined up beside Wellington, and Freemantle saw that it was Lord Uxbridge, the Duke’s second in command. Uxbridge’s words were lost in the surrounding noise, but his gestures suggested he was attempting to persuade the Duke of the need for some caution. Wellington shrugged him off, as he had shrugged off all other similar arguments that day. Uxbridge persisted, and Wellington seemed to answer tersely, then made an obvious gesture of impatience and drew his mount an exaggerated step backward. He turned from Uxbridge to continue the coordination of the pursuit.

 A sound like the snapping of a tree branch hit Freemantle’s ears, and he looked over just in time to see the red stain blossom and spread fast on the white cloth of Uxbridge’s trousers. Wellington swung around in the saddle, catching his second before he could slide to the ground, holding him with one arm as Freemantle struggled through the press toward them. Uxbridge’s face had gone the color of whey. “By God—” he said in hoarse surprise as Freemantle reached them. “I’ve lost my leg.”

White fragments of bone poked from the mangled hole that had been his knee, stark against the dark blood. “By God,” Wellington said, “so you have.” Uxbridge’s eyes fluttered closed. “Freemantle—” the Duke commanded, and Freemantle reached to take his limp burden. “See to him,” Wellington said, already turning to the job still to be finished. “Get him behind the lines.”

Freemantle summoned a couple of soldiers with a snap of his fingers, and with their aid managed to ease Uxbridge off his mount. As they turned for the relatively safe ground where the wounded were being tended, he paused to take one last look at the battlefield. The road that led out of the valley, the route back to France, was choked with a sickening swarm of fleeing humanity. Nightmarish things pressed close at their rear, hacking through their back ranks.

It was well into the evening and the light was fading before General Blücher’s long-promised Prussian reinforcements emerged from the red setting sun.

But Wellington’s troops no longer had any need of their aid. By the time the Prussians arrived on the ridge, the French army was thoroughly routed, and England’s monsters were observed making for a steadfast square of Gardes who put up such a passionate defense that they must surely be guarding something worth capture—the Emperor himself, perhaps, or at least the Imperial Eagles.