"Well, it's a relief force." The wry tone of Kohlmann's voice rang from the doorway where he had gone to take the watchman's report. "But I'm afraid it's your lad Detrich."
Gus raised his head from his desk. He could only have had it down for some minutes – surely no more than ten - but it had felt like eons, in the pit of frustration edging into despair. Would anyone come? The question had all but hovered visible in the dark behind his eyelids, as it had for half a dozen sleepless nights. The Essgardt sea-fort was not insignificant, being one of only three that Hyem was now holding on the southern coast: but the entire effort to hold the coast was on its last legs, the bulk of the army already diverted to meet Adalas's brutal push all along the river. In his superiors' place he could not say he would not have left the whole thing, the miserable jut of rock salt-scoured and wind-weary, for the enemy to take or to blow to oblivion. Sixty men, their commander – in his own unfortunate person – the field-promoted grandson of a merchant who had bought his noble name, could be easily forgotten in the extremis of war.
But someone had come – Father Sun smile, but Festus Detrich had come.
He gave himself a moment to breathe through a giddy grin, then stood up to just as Kohlmann came back in. His second had begun two months of siege a rosy-cheeked fellow confident enough of eventual promotion to be a good drinking partner despite his impersonal resentment at serving under a social inferior. By now all that remained was the colour in his cheeks put there by the omnipresent wind.
"Don't tell me you asked for him," he said on seeing the look on Gus's face.
He ought to tamper down on the grin, Gus thought, and dismissed the thought: he'd been through the same two months, damn it, he had other uses for his scarce energy than propriety. "I asked for anyone. Hadn't hoped to be so lucky."
"To get your southwestern farm boy," Kohlmann's crisp northern accent was sharp on every syllable, "that you saw on the field – what – all of twice?"
"Yes - but once was at Apfrieden." Gus rose and walked past his fellow officer to the door without stopping to say anything further. What more was needed? Every soldier in Hyem knew how forty had fought off four hundred in Apfrieden.
"You'd think he'd have been promoted, if that was his doing," Kohlmann muttered behind his back.
Wasn't he? Gus didn't let his surprise stop him. He didn't know what might have gone on in offices much grander and much, much warmer than his own: he knew what he'd seen on the field. What he'd seen Detrich do.
He glanced back over his shoulder. "Do me a kindness, man," he told Kohlmann. "Don't call him 'lad'. Not to his face."
Kohlmann raised both eyebrows. "He's all of twenty-seven."
"Yes. But you'll make him angry. And what we need is a plan for a quiet, safe retreat, not one for some mad brilliant victory just for spite..." Before Kohlmann could do more than open his mouth for a no doubt pointed reply, a gust of wind shrieked between the watchtowers, rattling the tired planks of wood across Gus's window. "And get more firewood in here - don't make that damned face. We can't confer with our teeth chattering themselves to pieces."
"Southerners," Kohlmann snorted, but said no more.
Possibly he, too, was saving his energy for the bulk of an upcoming argument. Gus could not say, and didn't linger. He'll see, or we'll likely all be dead. It was the only sensible way he'd found to conduct himself in the army.
He hurried through the fort, down a staircase and across a courtyard. Bleary-eyed and huddled soldiers passed him everywhere, saluted him distractedly, trying to keep their hands under their tatty woollen blankets as much as possible. The sun was only a last stamp of fire on the surface of the wretched sea and the daytime grey was sinking into nighttime black without much of a fight. Sun's blood, but they might after all survive this place. His feet, his nose and ears might someday have feeling in them again...
The guards at the gate met him with wide eyes, more animated than he'd seen them in many days. "Sir," one said while the other stood stomping and shivering and clearly trying not to look too miserably eager. "Is it true, it's a relief force?"
"The best we could ask for." Gus didn't even hesitate to say it. Even had he not believed it, the men needed every encouragement – and no more reason to doubt their unlikely saviour than his looks, his accent, his age and rank would inevitably provide. "Open up and look sharp!"
Properly he ought to wait for Kohlmann - who was probably lingering on some logistical detail or other, lest he give the impression of being too desperate for rescue. But Detrich and his troops would have fought their way to this point, and every moment with men outside the walls was a risk. And they were desperate, spent, exhausted. Gus was exhausted. Oh for a friendly face, a fresh mind. A heart he knew would not falter!
The gate groaned open. There they were – twenty-odd riders, Gus saw at a glance, some bloodied. A small company, though more would have been hard to get this far if they had relied on stealth. But still certainly too small to make a difference of numbers. Which meant it was their wits and skill they were bringing to bear. Not unexpected. For all he knew, Detrich had volunteered for this, had brought only what men would follow him in that bold and unwise act. But those would be good men, resolute men. A blast of wind came hurtling through the gate ahead of the riders and he swore and tucked his gloved hands in his armpits, not caring that the guards heard and saw. Detrich had come...
The company was all inside, and the guards swinging the gate shut again, before the familiar chestnut mare broke away from the group and her rider dismounted. Gus reached out a hand and resolved to let the guards think of his grin what they will. "Sun's blood, Detrich, what kept you?"
He didn't not expect Detrich to turn away from his offered hand and instead bury his face in a raised elbow with a harshly suppressed cough. Nor for him to linger in the recovery, to quickly, jerkingly neaten his hair and make sure his hat and collar were straight in the midst of all the wind and sleet. When at last Detrich looked his way it was with red-rimmed eyes, his ramrod posture stiff against a shiver.
"This wretched cold, if you must know." Detrich's voice was rasping over its deep bass notes. He cleared his throat, and again, unobtrusive and insufficient. "I had to convince my commander I – oh, don't give me that look."
"You're not well." And he'd ridden to the arse-end of the coast, the iciest, foggiest pit of misery Gus had ever had the misfortune to be fighting over –
"Major Basholme." Hearing his name growled snapped him to proper attention, sure enough. "Patronize me over a sniffle and you'll see me turn my men around."
He wouldn't, of course, even if he could in good conscience. It was too late now. I've made him angry.
There was nothing to do but throw his hands up. "Forget I said a thing." He had fought besides Detrich only twice, but Apfrieden had shown him what happened when the man was angry. "Come inside and let's see how much sense you can talk into my second." And whether it was to be a quiet retreat, or Festus Detrich doing what he did when he had something to spite.
~*~
Kohlmann had flagrantly disobeyed the firewood order, the wretch. The impromptu war room in Gus's office was warmed only by what four shivering bodies could provide: Gus himself, Kohlmann, Kohlmann's lieutenant Marcek, and the fort's haggard supplies officer, Erlich, who had spent the last two months aging twenty years. The last two – each a bundle of weary suspicion in his coat, drawing those tight despite all Kohlmann's talk of hardy Northerners – gave Detrich as he entered the exact looks Gus had expected.
"Joining us is Cavalry Captain Festus Detrich," Kohlmann concluded his round of introductions, just a touch snide: at Detrich's crisp salute being disrupted by a sneeze, he saw fit to add, "And his cold."
Gus gritted his teeth, but had nothing conductive to say to this: Detrich's power of presence, that he needed that much more than an ordinary officers, was decidedly frayed by that same cold. Clammy and sweating, he had his handkerchief tucked up his sleeve in a manner just on the edge of respectable and his trim moustache in sad disarray. His bloodshot eyes, set within the bruised sockets of a chronic insomniac, turned his stare from striking into something almost demonic. Marcek and Erlich shifted, visibly uncomfortable.
"What does he bring us other than a cold?" Erlich shot. His resentment at least somewhat founded: that the fort had avoided widespread illness was an act of especially rare divine mercy.
"Twenty-three men," Kohlmann answered before Detrich could.
"Crack troops?" asked Marcek, ever the little council's optimist.
"Scouts, for the most part," Detrich spoke up. Erlich swallowed audibly. "A handful of... your pardon..." he turned fully away from them to strangle a sneeze into painful near-silence. "... of engineers."
"Are you joking?!" Erlich's voice tone to a pitch of near-hysteria.
"How did you get here with a pack of engineers?" Gus cut in quickly, aware that Kohlmann's look was half on him. Your southwestern farm boy. He trusted Detrich, he did, Sun help... "The Adalans are on every road. I'm still amazed my messenger got through."
"Yes – " Detrich's voice cracked, forcing a damp throat-clearing. "Pardon me. That much presence of troops always creates a strain that some in the local population resent. I had help."
"You broke through the encirclement with some reeking fishwives?" Kohlmann was halfway between still snide, and staring.
"Fromen." Detrich straightened to proper attention and folded his hands behind his back. Gus watched him as he had done before, with barely concealed fascination. This strange halfway creature. The first time they'd met, Detrich had been affecting the perfect wellborn officer, down to a northern accent. Only the comments of his supposed peers, the infrequent but never quite ceasing remarks, do you know how to do this, Detrich, lad, we expect only so much from you, Detrich would be used to such subpar conditions, our comrade who has risen so far above himself, only they ever made him turn away and betray with tight eyes and fists the rough, unrestrained peasant in him. Back in Apfrieden, on the field, Detrich had been constantly straddling the balance. Proper and genteel with his fellow officers, but as soon as he turned to his own soldiers they were all common men together, he and the crude cussing rabble that adored him for putting any value at all on their lives.
Some appearance of propriety was still there, zealously kept as the symptoms of ill-timed weakness chipped away at it. But it was not only failing health that muddled its edges. The pose, the tone, were thin somehow. Perfunctory. Detrich's uniform was spotless but his cufflinks undone, his neatly swept-back hair grown just longer than fashionable. Something had happened to his hard-won polish over time: something had grown in him that had cracked through it.
And now he was facing the four of them rhuemy-eyed and sniffling on top of that. Asking awkward pardon for his lapses – and otherwise ploughing right on. "You've observed correctly that Adalas is putting unexpected effort into taking the Essgardt seafort. It stands out even more when one looks at the full picture across the coast. And not only do they want it badly, they want it intact. Am I correct that there's been no attack from the sea siege, neither a landing attempt, nor cannonfire?"
Marcek and Erlich exchanged looks. Kohlmann pushed on with undeterred impatience, "You are. What of it?"
They'd debated this countless times over the weeks before they'd all grown too weary, that and the confounding absence of artillery, to no avail. All of them were inland folk – but so was Detrich, Gus thought, and yet he was seeing something they'd all missed. "Something is special about this fort?"
"It isn't a fort. It's a lighthouse, and I mean to light it."
In the drawn-out pause of all of their gaping, he held the moment, even through the tight suggestion of a suppressed shiver. It set him coughing, two, three hard jags locked between his jerking ribs and shoulder blades. His free hand hovered over the canteen at his belt, but drifted behind his back again instead.
Sharply, Kohlmann said, "Are you delirious?"
Detrich's breath shuddered faintly as he drew it in with slow purpose. Putting that crude peasant anger away along with any aches and pains, Gus mused. "Pardon me. Control of this headland has been disputed for some forty years, but there is historical record. This was a major beacon directing ship traffic supplying every Adalan outpost down the coast and up the river mouth. In our hands... pardon..."
The coughing overwhelmed him now, leaving him hunched over the handkerchief half-blinded. With a shake of the head, Kohlmann leaned in to the others.
"What on earth is this pig farmer about?"
"He is talking some sense." Gus could see it, if he resigned himself to follow Detrich's logic. He trusted Detrich – without reservations, he reminded himself, even if what he'd trusted him for had been a plan for a safe retreat... "We have been wondering where the pressure from the sea was, remember. An unnavigable stretch of coast would explain it."
"And that thing in the cellar," Marcek mused, then made a face. "Still sounds like he heard it in some washerwoman's tale..."
Erlich looked nauseous. "He wants to light it? What does he think he can achieve here? We don't know a blessed thing about lighthouses!"
"We don't, but it sounds like he does. Detrich is..." they were looking at him as though he'd lost his mind. Perhaps he had, two months besieged in hell's frozen back end. Desperate enough to look for rescue from a... a... "Forget what you think he is and listen to him. If we gain control of sea traffic here, think of the strategic implications."
"Rot the 'strategic implications'!" Kohlmann hissed. "What, he fancies himself a general?! He isn't here to win a medal, he's here to get us out!"
"I can get you out," Detrich rasped behind him. "If that is your scope of vision, sir."
He'd been silent for some moments, Gus realized: he'd heard everything. The fit had taken a deal out of him, left visible strain in his shoulders, and between a swollen throat and stuffed nose he'd given up on affecting even a neutral accent. His head remained high, though, and the restrained anger in his eyes was a storming sea under a thin layer of dark blue ice. "What is this war for, but to hold a scrap of sea-access for Hyem? Instead we're being beaten back from the coast with our supply lines falling to pieces. This will make the difference!" He put his hands down on Gus's desk and leaned forward. Careful posture gone and bright eyes boring into them all. "I could smuggle you all out of here to safety like flour sacks. But if you stay with me, fromen, I will fire the beacon and overturn this whole theatre in our favour."
He ran out of breath with that: but the scenario was in Gus's mind already, swirling into being. A steady supply line by sea. No more scrabbling for the most basic of basics, no more soldiers descending like locust over local towns and villages. Enemy ships confused and wrecked, drowning enemy soldiers by their hundreds. This whole stretch of hideous weeks in the fort, ending not in shamefaced flight, but redeemed in victory...
Detrich had seen it. Detrich could do it. If only he trusted Detrich.
He looked at the others, who looked back. Marcek looked halfway between intrigued and terrified. Erlich's lips were moving – Is he supposed to command this plan? Kohlmann...
Kohlmann was staring at Detrich. He saw the same vision, Gus realized, and saw its merits and the accolades it would earn. And now he was seeing a young southwestern farmboy, come shivering and snivelling out of nowhere, receiving these accolades.
Detrich swallowed with a hint of aching effort and murmured a pardon me without clear cause. He stood still at attention, hands behind his back. The very picture of a soldier. He would not go against the ranking officers' decision – of course not, Gus told himself, troubled by having even come up with the question. Of course not...
"This plan of yours, the enemy won't be blind to it," he said while the others stood mulling. "They'll throw all they have at us as soon as they see the beacon lit."
Detrich nodded but looked nothing like deterred. "We will need to defend it for forty-eight hours at most. As soon as it's lit, reinforcements will be coming out way – "
Kohlmann snorted. "Oh, will they? We barely got you." Such as you are, remained unsaid.
"You barely did. But my commander wrote to Kirschen in the regional capital laying out the plan – Major-General Ander Kirschen. He's a man worth the name."
Unlike some remained unsaid. Kohlmann bared his teeth.
"You're a madman, Detrich," he spat. "And an upstart, which is worse. You won't convince me to die so you can try to prove your kind belongs in an officer's uniform."
"A blasted shame," Gus said before he could think a damn sight better of it. "Because he's convinced me."
His heart was hammering rather harder than he'd expected, given that Kohlmann was being an arse – but an arse with a brigadier-general for an uncle and a family titled and landed eight generations back, junior to him only on paper. But Sun's blood, what did soldiers do but tempt death for a snatch at victory, what else were they for? I trust you, he thought, briefly catching Detrich's weary gaze. He didn't even care who took the glory: he wanted to see what Festus Detrich could do.
Kohlmann whirled on him, snarling. "Are you pulling rank, Major Basholme?"
"Isn't that what rank is for?"
"You're aware of our respective positions."
"Oh, exceedingly," Gus said lightly, and was rewarded by a glimpse of a vicious little spark in Detrich's eyes. "It'll be damned easy for you to blame any disaster on me and avoid disgrace to your family name. I'm doing you a favour, man."
"I could see your commission stripped for this!"
"If we fail? You could not, we'd be dead." And if they succeeded...
Something in Kohlmann seemed to break. He pulled a hand down his face, rasping against his uneven beard. "Sun's mercy, Gus, I knew a cold could be contagious, but insanity..." he looked to Marcek and Erlich, but they of course were wisely staying out of their superiors' dispute. "To hell with all of you. Onward with Cavalry Captain Pigherd's plan."
In retrospect, that turned out almost the easy part: they spent another long hour hammering out particulars. By the time Gus left, a few steps behind Detrich – who had spent the same time alternating between blowing his nose and offering baffling insights on naval engineering – his head was pounding, and the chill that filled the corridors this late in the evening bit right into his marrow. Not much longer. Everything was easier to bear with a purpose and an end in mind. He looked up from rubbing together his hands, icy-stiff even inside the gloves, to catch sight of Detrich at the end of the corridor, stopped in place as he drove a thumb and forefinger into his eyes with alarming force.
He could only imagine the hammering behind Detrich's eyes. He watched the man reach one hand in a vague aim to brace against the wall, catching himself just barely as a sneeze he was almost helpless to silence folded him in half. Detrich swayed a touch with dizziness as he pulled himself straight and stopped halfway to wrapping his arms around himself in open misery.
Gus found himself unwinding his scarf, the good length of heartland-grown wool dyed a votive soldier's red. He stepped up to Detrich holding it out.
"Bless you. Here."
"Wha...?" Detrich blinked, then shook his head and stopped himself mid wincing at it. "I said don't patronize me, damn you."
"I – " Gus almost pulled back, understanding, to his own dismay. He'd been painfully aware, back in the war room, of the gap between himself and Kohlmann, and that was nothing to what stood between Detrich and the whole of the world he moved in. The world where the fighting he did with gun and sword was the least of the fighting required of him daily, hourly. Even I almost didn't...
But he had, in the end. He stood his ground and kept the cloth held out. "Take it, Sun's sake, for the night if not in public. You won't fire any beacons with lung-rot. And we need..." he hesitated, then decided to plow on as he had all day. "I need you well."
Detrich's eyes widened a touch. The hand he raised to motion rejection halted halfway through the gesture, and that made its shaking all too obvious. Only so much pride to be preserved there: he let Gus drape the scarf over his arm. As he slowly began to wind it over his own cheap cotton neckcloth, Gus marshalled himself on, "I know you didn't come here for me – "
Halfway through struggling at the knot with his thick gloves, Detrich glanced up at him. "Who said I didn't come for you?"
It was Gus's turn to blink, caught without words: he didn't care for that experience, he thought, but it did seem to give Detrich a moment to collect himself. He ran the tail end of the bright red wool between his fingers, his face, his hard eyes for a moment very young.
"I don't have so many friends that I can stand to lose even one," he said quietly; then turned to look at Gus with a crooked grin. "Don't fret, Basholme. Trust me: there's no condition I might be in that would stop me from rubbing Kohlmann's nose in our victory."
~*~
Detrich's plan was straightforward in theory, more challenging in practice. The former beacon watchtower, with its purpose-built chamber on top, required almost no refurbishment. But they needed fuel, of which they had been short for days. Detrich presented the quantity of lamp oil his troops had brought along, and commandeered every drop of cooking and gun oil in the fort, while Gus did the same with every piece of wood and paper and sent a risky excursion to the rocky beach below to collect driftwood.
Forty-eight hours, Detrich had said: once the beacon was burning, that was the longest it might take to guide the resupply ship that Major-General Kirschen would dispatch their way. If he had received the letter sent by Detrich's commander, and approved.
It was an unpleasant if. But Detrich was saved from Kohlmann's recurring nerves by the discovery that another of his gambles had paid off: the fort still held in its cellar a lighthouse's paraboloid mirror, very nearly intact.
"We didn't really know what it was, but thought it must have some value to have been kept so long," Erlich said with a shrug as he led the small party down into the lowest level, lantern in hand.
"It's priceless," was Detrich's reply: for all his wheezing weariness, his eyes were afire with anticipation.
"Fragile, though. We'll have to take it slow, getting it up the tower..."
"They wouldn't know we're at it. And once it's up and the beacon is lit, nothing will take it down but an artillery blast."
He said that with confidence, but Gus saw Kohlmann blanch.
"Here." The lock clicked, and Erlich shouldered the door open to let them step into the storeroom, alarmingly roomy now with the dwindling of all their supplies. The dark bulk stood in its corner under its ancient moulding cover: Detrich rushed at it three steps ahead of the others.
"Sun's grace!" he muttered, reaching out, transfixed, to pull down the fabric covering, and was instantly covered in every kind of dust and muck sent floating up.
Gus cringed; Kohlmann, the refined aristocrat, limited himself to a smirk. Erlich and Marcek did come forward to peer at the silvery half-sphere, moving their lamps this way and that to watch the reflections thrown all over the room.
"Masterful, joining all the facets like that."
"Expensive work, yes. I see why he'd be interested..."
"Can we get it up the tower?" Gus quickly stepped in between the two of them and Detrich, who was at pains to clean himself of the dust with any dignity. "How much does this thing weigh?" Detrich opened his mouth to make a comment, and pitched aside with a brutally stifled sneeze instead.
"We can do it," Erlich put in. He glanced with some anxiety at Kohlmann, whose look as he watched Detrich struggle with his own airways shone with amusement bordering on glee.
"It needs all the padding we can give it. Is the rod in the middle for the lamp? I don't know a damned thing here..."
"The lamp..." Detrich coughed convulsively, failed to force his breath to settle, and nonetheless soldiered on with sheer undaunted enthusiasm for the device before him. "The lamp goes on the - the central rod, yes. The t- tube at the back serves as chimney, a-and the oil cistern is is here. Crafting the parabolic shape is a marvel - pardon" - " and retreat at last, to blow his nose at miserable length.
"Sun's sake," Kohlmann muttered with just-audible disgust.
For a split-second, Gus had thought the balance would tilt. That between his delight and his confidence in the knowledge no one else in the room had – the brightest Gus had ever seen from the man, where had a lowborn southwesterner turned cavalry officer learned so much about lighthouse mirrors of all things? – Detrich would stop this plainly painful clinging both to control of his body and the stubborn show of that control. Would let himself sneeze, snarl, say something. But Kohlmann's mumbled comment brought all the tension back to his drawn, colourless face, and he drew to attention and fell silent.
This strange halfway creature. Steel-spined and hard-eyed, dust still in his hair and his shoulders low and tight against the cellar's gnawing cold. No anger visible through his exhaustion now. What good would anger do him? If anything it would make control harder to grasp.
"Well, stop gaping and get the engineers in here," Gus snapped at Erlich and Marcek. "Anything they need, they can have, to have this installed where it should be before nightfall."
The two saluted and scrambled out. Kohlmann continued to stand and scrub at his beard as he considered the mirror, his face troubled. When he spoke at last there was no edge to his voice, only sombre thought, "Detrich – the artillery blast you mentioned. How likely...?"
"I can't say." The answer no one wanted to hear, delivered blintly. "They might well decide they'd rather destroy the lighthouse than risk us holding it."
Kohlmann paled further. "They came ready for a siege, not a bombardment. But they do have one high angle mortar."
"We'd wondered, why that finicky bastard of all siege guns," Gus put in, his stomach sinking. "Well. Now we know."
Detrich considered: he was a deft hand with artillery manoeuvres, too, Gus remembered. "They are finicky. In this weather the mathematics would be obscene."
"But one shot would be enough."
"Yes. It's timing again. As soon as it's on the field, we'll have a limited window to destroy it." He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and opened them again, and added, as casual a statement as anything, "I'll lead a sortie."
For all his calm tone his voice was wrecked. Even Gus couldn't help but openly stare. "You?"
"I am the cavalry captain."
"I'm the cavalry major!" Gus sputtered, all but physically choking on the image of Detrich's riders charging the artillery line. The sicker and more tired Detrich seemed, the harder he was pushing. And I'd brought him here, this utter madman.
He could pull rank again. He could. Or he could summon the fort's overworked physician and demand Detrich submit to the examination that would almost certainly leave him ordered straight to bed. He could. For the man's own good. This man who was back to wearing his old cotton scarf lest a living soul see he needed anything more.
Detrich had called him friend.
"Damn your eyes, I know how good you are," he growled. "But there's my blasted pride to think of as well. We'll take two wings and sortie together. And then Kohlmann here can have the satisfaction of being the only man sane enough to preserve himself through your plan."
For a moment he saw the storm swell to live all over Detrich's face. Then – to Gus's astonishment, delight, and astonishment at the degree of his own delight – from out of that storm flashed a sharp, pleased smile.
"Well," Kohlmann muttered while their eyes were still locked on each other's. "I like the sound of only sane man at least."
~*~
Up until the moment the mortar came rolling into view through the fog, Gus had hoped they might avoid the charge. One bit of luck to offset everything else.
He'd spent half the night praying for it, on one knee by his cot with his head bare and bowed. Strange though it was to pray to be spared a battle. He didn't fear death – never had, and counted his blessings for that – and the charge in the face of artillery would be glorious even if he lost his life to it. But how much more glorious would be the moment the resupply ship came in, guided by Detrich's beacon.
That was what he feared, he realized in the frozen night, with only his inadequate coat for company: to die without witnessing the triumph he'd played a part in. Without seeing to completion the most audacious plan from the most audacious man he had ever known.
Come dawn, emerging to a courtyard packed with cavalrymen, he found that same man stomping and stretching where he stood by his horse, trying to keep the warm blood in his hands and feet. Detrich didn't look to have slept, though that was unsurprising. His eyes were overbright, his hair windblown all out of his hasty ponytail. The energy he moved with was a pure twitching want of violence.
"No news from the night scout," he said to Gus without as much as a good-morning. "No telling where they are. I'll take the fishermen's trail the full four miles back and come at their camp from the northwest. If they haven't moved the gun out yet, we can delay them for hours."
It was as an unpleasant an if as they had all been so far, but the chance to stop the mortar while still out of range was their best chance. "You'll have to ride back to us like devils, if they have."
"You'll hold."
The words almost cracked on a cough, a quick shuddering jag into his fist that bent Detrich low. But out they came. They might have been a challenge and a profession of faith, and still more than anything they were in irrevocable statement. I say this will be – and this will be.
I want to live to see it, Gus thought, his own chest suddenly tight with an emotion he could barely name.
The red scarf was nowhere to be seen, but he pulled his handkerchief from a pocket and held it out as though bequeathing a token, and, gruffly, said, "We'll hold."
Detrich took it, saluted with the same hand, the white cloth brashly flashing, and pulled himself into the saddle to ride off.
No soldier got very far who didn't learn to wait, and Gus had for some years been a master of switching off all his faculties when in the saddle. But that morning stretched on unbearably. The fog stayed as heavy upon the world as a down cover that leeched out warmth instead of giving it, and the men who might ride out to face the mortar didn't seem to breathe, any exhale that billowed out from them disappearing into the same. In the tower behind them the activity must have been frenetic, but nothing drifted down to the courtyard to tell of it, nor how much longer, nor if it were possible, if it were possible at all...
A horn blasted out, ripping through the sunless white world. Gus turned back in his saddle, looked up, and saw fire.
Detrich's beacon burst through the murky, milky mist like a fist of light. The painstakingly collected oil, the driftwood lives had been lost for transformed into an eye opening over the sea, the mirror throwing the beam out to signal, It's done. All over the coast, every soul that looked up would know that Hyem's claim on Essgardt lived.
Then another horn blast. The men on the tower had sighted the enemy. The mortar.
The silence blew into endless drumming of boots on stone, musket-loading, shouted orders. The screech of the gate joints. His windpipe stoppered with a heart full of terror and wild excitement, Gus squinted into the fog outside. Vague black shapes milled far in the back of the white. The mortar needed to close four hundred yards to be effective. The gunmen protecting it, one hundred at most. No telling where Detrich and his men were. Well. We'll hold.
"CHARGE!" He bellowed, loud as the horn, and led the way.
An answering roar came instantly, horsemen bursting from the distant ranks, trailing fog like ribbons in their manes. Gus flashed past the first to reach him, sword striking out but not caring if it met flesh, eyes only for the line ahead. Roaring on as he went, "The mortar!" Behind him the world turned again like an upset stomach into screaming horses and screaming steel, a splashing tableau of brown and red. He could see it. He saw it. The straining carriage and the fire-spitting maw it bore.
And its defenders around it. Three times as many men as he had and more.
The man to the left of him vanished in a tumble of human and horse limbs. The man to his right failed to check himself and crashed into the bayonets. Gus cut a wide arc, three other riders joining him, hacking and hacking at the throng. His body did its bloody work largely on its own, his eyes and mind all on the artillerymen at their work. He should've told Detrich, no man in his right mind charged at artillery. But they won't waste their shots on us, surely. Every shot was a precious opportunity to stop the beacon for good: every too-fast reload and fire strained the gun. It's possible. We'll hold, my friend.
The mortar boomed out its implacable greeting straight at them.
Three thoughts flashed through Gus's head: first, that Detrich might actually have undersold Essgardt's strategic potential if the enemy were reluctant to destroy it even now. Second, that even should they take the properly cautious twenty minutes to reload – a battlefield eternity – that he and his were now truly charging active artillery. And last, as the plume of earth and body parts rose behind him, that he could not look back.
"To me! To the mortar!" There was nothing but to howl the order again. His remaining troops – fourteen men still, Sun protect! – rallied to him, encircling the gun and its crew as the enemy soldiers encircled them in turn. "Five hundred kroner to the man who takes the mortar!"
The only safety from the blasts was in close range, and close range was full of bayonets. Men fell on all sides of him, and the artillery crew was still working. The increasing report of muskets told Gus that infantrymen from the fort had closed the distance to fire on the further ends of the enemy line, but up near the mortar it was all desperate blade to blade to hoof to fist. He had eleven men still with him, then eight, then six. He had five. He had –
A third blast of the horn, the sweetest that day yet, and he had Detrich's twenty strong storming out of the mist to fall upon the enemy.
All soldiers had their own response to desperate odds turning: Gus whooped with laughter, swung his sabre high into the air. At the head of his men, he saw Detrich do the same.
No, that wasn't a sabre, or even a musket. That was – is that a rifle?
He had no idea where Detrich had even acquired a rifle, and no time to wonder. But a part of his attention remained on the man watching him break away from his fellow riders, opening up distance between himself and the mortar. Where on earth is he going? Not retreating, not Detrich, not reluctant to engage...
He turned his own horse so he could better track the chestnut mare, just as she was shot down from under her rider.
Gus yelled. A howling, stricken sound. Now he too was riding away from the throng and the mortar, digging his spurs into his poor horse's side. He didn't fear death, but he feared not seeing Detrich's ambition realized. And he had never feared anything so much as the thought of the man himself not achieving the same.
He made it just in time to see Detrich haul himself up, bloody but mobile and still holding his rifle, and to sever the arm off the man charging up to run Detrich through.
"Basholme!" Detrich gasped at him, white-eyed and visibly feverish, and not stopping for a moment. "Help me up!"
"WHat - in front of me or – ?"
"Behind. I need you to give me an angle to fire on the mortar!"
"From horseback?!"
"I'm better from horseback than standing!"
In over twenty-four hours of madness, it was the maddest thing Gus had heard from him yet. Their men were dying in the throng. The mortar crew was even now reloading. They'd fought together all of twice, Apfrieden and all, and now Detrich was trusting him with this deadly joke of a task, and he had to trust –
He reached out his hand, and Detrich took it.
Gus's warhorse snorted and tossed its head, dismayed to be bearing a double weight through relentless speed and manoeuvring. But finding the right angle for Detrich's shot was an art. It's possible. It's possible. Detrich must have had the rifle loaded already, held up at his shoulder in an iron grip, ready as soon as he was sat behind Gus in the saddle. The movement of his chest through his heavy breathing pressed against Gus's back. Its rhythm, steady through everything, kept Gus himself breathing ‘til they did so as one.
"Warn your men off," Detrich rasped, too hoarse to do so himself. "Any moment now – any moment – "
The mortar crew had put in the gunpowder charge and were clearing the way to fire. The barrel's maw gaped in Gus's sight. The picture came together in his head almost like a fourth horn blast.
He roared at the top of his lungs, "Back! ALL OF YOU BACK! NOW, NOW – !"
Detrich fired.
In the midst of screaming scrambling men, the shot went into the powder-loaded barrel flawless as song.
For a moment, the explosion was brighter than the beacon. A wall of scalding air slammed into Gus even fifty yards away. There was no restraining his horse from flight and he didn't try to, letting it join the scatter of terrified beasts that bore his surviving comrades away. His ears rang so loudly he couldn't even hear himself bellowing the order to retreat.
Detrich slumped against his back, panting, coughing, laughing.
At least a score of men had died. They would reckon with it very soon. But Gus was laughing, too, unable to help himself. The enemy was in utter disarray, the mortar a pulverized wreck, the beacon unstoppable. He had with his own hands on the reins, the hands that had pulled Detrich up, played a part in this victory. And he had lived.
Squinting through the battlefield smoke and clearing fog, he thought he could just about make out Kohlmann on the battlement. Jumping up and down, his hand raised in a madly waving salute.
"Now he's pleased with us," Detrich murmured, never too exhausted for a pointed comment.
Gus snorted, then cackled with delight. "Wait 'til he hears you've won five hundred kroner."
~*~
The resupply ship appeared on the horizon with the first rays of the next dawn.
His celebratory bottle in hand – no wind-blown grey outpost however cruelly pressed was without one – Gus found Detrich on the fort's seaside battlement, standing in a crenel watching the sun rise on his promised victory. Standing, still, spine straight and head high, though Gus knew for an unfortunate fact that he'd not slept that night a wink more than any of the anxious company. But Gus imagined that that made the sight of the distant sails, silvering in the sunrise, all the sweeter.
He would have looked a handsome statue, surveying the distance in the stirring morning breeze, except that that breeze would not have set a statue squinting and sniffling. Likely why he kept apart from the watchmen. Gus marched straight up and stood besides him.
"You did it," he said, gesturing with the still-corked bottle at the approaching ship.
"I did," Detrich said, without any disbelief or even surprise in his voice at all.
How can you – ? Gus almost began to ask, but he knew: No point harbouring your own doubt when everyone else gives you theirs for free.
"We did," Detrich added suddenly, turning to look at Gus – a wide-open look, that permitted fatigue to wipe away any masks in the way of sincerity. "I won't forget, Basholme."
By all rights it was an empty statement – meaningless from Gus's inferior in every respect, status, rank and age, who would never be in any position to deliver on the promise. And yet given as it was, in Detrich's current state, made it glow warm in Gus's chest. It costs him to give this to a man. But he gave it to me.
He grinned hugely. "Just make sure you call on me when you next overturn the balance of power in a whole region. Sun's blood! Imagine if we'd retreated and crawled home on our bellies instead!"
Detrich flashed an answering grin, smaller and very sharp: then the breeze came for him in earnest. It tore at his hair, barely clinging to form this morning, and made his eyes water so heavily he fumbled trying to dry them with one hand pat down the escaping hairs with the other. Scrambling to hold together as much of his frayed respectability as he could.
He hacked and pulled in a thin breath, no doubt for another awkward beg-pardon: Gus cut him off before he could speak. "Don't let them split your prize purse, though. Not even with me."
That distracted Detrich indeed. His voice hardened. "Damn the prize purse. They hand me those thinking I'd forget about promotion..."
"Well, I'm thinking about you needing a new horse." He very much doubted Detrich had a spare – or the spare cash to afford one, and the man's sigh told him he was right. He held the bottle up, conciliatory. "We should toast your old chestnut, what was her name?"
"Just the chestnut." More softly now, with sad affection. "They didn't name warhorses on the steppe, you know. If the horse dies badly the name becomes unlucky..."
Gus found himself blinking like an owl in daylight. The steppe our people left four centuries ago? "Is that where you picked up mounted sharpshooting?"
"I - what?"
"Playing at being a steppe horse-archer?"
Detrich's sallow face made his flush stand out. "I like my histories."
And we'd never have known about the lighthouse if he didn't. Histories, unlikely gunmanship, lighthouse engineering... what else did this backwater pig farmer, mocked and dismissed by all his superiors, know?
What else could he do – if only...?
He was staring, he knew: only too late he realized that doing so sent Detrich desperately chasing respectability's distant spectre. No sooner had the man smoothed his hair and dried his face than all that work was lost to a bout of sneezing he choked off with dizzying effort. In the midst of all his admiration, Gus winced to see it. Poor bastard blowing out his poor bastard ears...
"Will you not – " But Detrich had fully turned his back now, as resolute as a sea-wall. "Sun's sake, man – " Another suppressed jerk, and another, the last making him grab for the crenel wall lest he lose his footing. Gus's patience snapped. "You can let a senior officer know you think he's a coward, but can't let me see you're ill?"
Detrich's voice came itself half-choked. "I can't, this... exactly the kind of... unclean, unfit wretch they think..."
"They'd still think that if you singlehandedly won the war!"
In Detrich's place, he thought as soon as the words were said, he'd have taken his fist to the mouth that had spoken them. He saw that response rise in the other man. The rage blazing to life like the beacon light, and something in it – Sun's blood! – something in it just as mesmerizing. The fist clenched, rising –
"I know," Detrich rasped, and slumped down to sit heavily within the crenel. "I know."
He'd given up on his hair: it hung over his face in its unfashionable length as he sat there, bent-backed, stoop-shouldered, the first time yet that Gus had seen him look defeated. What does it matter what he could do, when nothing would be enough?
There was nothing Gus could do either, but sit down next to him in the crenel. Close up, since the space was not large – companionably close, their shoulders nearly touching. Detrich half-eyed him, sidelong and wary: wordlessly, Gus offered the bottle again.
Detrich took it and uncorked it with his teeth, spat the cork to the side like the filthiest street thug. He tilted it back and took a long, long drink, and Gus watched uncommenting.
When finished, he reached to hand it back and let his shoulder bump Gus's own.
"You'll catch my damned cold," he said as Gus raised the bottle to his own lips.
"Oh, I've every plan to." Gus wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, handed the bottle back. "I mean to use it to take at least a week's leave. And so should you." Detrich took the offering, but scowled at the suggestion. "You can't change how men like Kohlmann look at you, can you?"
"No."
"Then why bother hurting yourself in the trying?"
Detrich's brows were knotted tight, still, but with something of a newly thoughtful look. He leaned halfway on the stone, letting his head drop back against it: something of the tension he had held at every moment of every hour, something of the fort he had built about his weariness and his body's needs, about everything he was, fading as his eyes drifted shut.
"Imagine how good it'd feel to sneeze right in Kohlmann's face," Gus added cheerfully.
His own snort of surprised laughter caught Detrich unprepared: he drew a helpless gasp and sneezed with open thundering violence.
From the corner of his eye, Gus saw the watchmen jump a little in their stations and glance over, wide-eyed to hear such unchecked noise from an officer. He thumped a hand on Detrich's back. "Needed that, didn't you?"
Detrich groaned aloud, half relief and half revolted misery. "Sun's mercy, I feel wretched..."
"And I shudder to think what you might've done here if you didn't." Would he have bothered with Kohlmann's obstructive authority at all? No, that wasn't a thought to pursue... "Here." He handed Detrich the bottle again as the man began to cough, satisfied to see him no longer harried to bury that need in his lungs, either. "I won't ask what you did with my handkerchief."
"Kohlmann offered me his." Detrich ran one greatcoat sleeve over his nose, bleary and careless. "He thanked me – congratulated me on my vision."
"He might yet support you for that promotion."
"No, he won't," Detrich said, toneless: and Gus knew he was right. If not after Apfrieden...
"You don't expect to be offered command here either, then," he said, realising even as he spoke the words that Detrich was right on that, as well. "Who on earth is meant to receive credit for this? Me?"
"My commanding officer will claim the plan." Detrich leaned back, let his eyes close once more with his head resting on the cold stone. "That was his price for writing to Kirschen. He said no one would believe it was mine, anyway."
That was also true, Gus thought: these simple truths had never needled him before quite like this. "A damned mad risk you took, then, knowing there'd be no reward."
"No reward?" Detrich opened one eye, looked at him. Fire and steel and laughter in the midst of all exhaustion and grey chill. "Imagine crawling home on our bellies instead."
Gus's heart thudded in his chest. He could no longer even imagine it: not in the world he and Detrich now shared.
"Do you know where they'll be wanting you instead?" he asked, shifting to bump their shoulders again. "After leave, that is."
"Garrison duty, most likely. My commander won't like me bringing him too many plans..." He sniffed and not just from the cold. "A duke's son-in-law."
"Of course he is." Gus heaved a sigh, took another long drink. "The way of the world, never going to change..."
Detrich fixed him with both eyes now. "Who says?"
The liquor abruptly burned down Gus's throat. He barely stopped himself from sputtering. His chest locked briefly, a spasm and shudder that threatened to leak into his spine and rush up and down it and through every bone.
Would he have...?
He could tell that Detrich, too, had realized – was looking away, taking up the bottle. Gus shifted his gaze from him and to the horizon, the ship on its way to relieve them both of this scrap of rock and all that stood on it. This was the end of his involvement with the whole lighthouse affair. They could let the words drift into the fog. Let the world be.
"Detrich – " he said, turning, only to find the man pulling a tightly wound length of red wool from under his coat. The scarf. Wrapping it once around his hands with a look of vague amazement.
"Festus, if you like," he said quietly.
Gus looked at him through the last of the night fog: thought of the beacon, its light and its warmth. It hadn't been his own idea, he hadn't seen it, had doubted... but in the end, it would not have been lit without him.
"Gus, then," he said, nodding. "I won't forget, either. The next plan you have that men call you a madman for, Festus... call on me.”
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