Franziskus stopped to breathe and Angelika carried on as if she would hear no
more of him. She found a boot sticking from the mass of the slain and began to
twist and pull at it. It was stuck securely to its master’s leg, and resisted
her stoutly.
“Then what is your nature?” Franziskus eventually asked.
Angelika pulled some more at the boot. It would not be budged. She wrinkled
up her nose at it. It was a flaw of her nature, she admitted to herself, that
she was often too stubborn to give up a uselessly difficult task. If she fell
into the same old trap, she could easily stand here for half an hour trying to
get this one stupid boot off, even though she had no assurance that there was
anything good inside it, and even though all around her there were hundreds of
other boots on hundreds of other feet.
She realized that Franziskus had said something else to her, but that she had
not been paying attention and could not say what it was. She wrinkled her nose
again, this time at herself, and then saw a crushed-up hat lying between bodies.
It might have a hatpin on it. She yanked at it and, to control the extent of
distraction he posed, decided to keep talking to the young man, to answer his
previous question.
“You mistake me for some kind of nurse or rescuer. I am here, Franziskus, to
loot the bodies of your comrades.” She jangled her purse in his direction.
“Medals, gemstones, coins.” She freed the flattened hat, but found no jewels or
pins in its band. Instead, there was a small envelope of brown and waxen paper.
She slipped open the flap and looked inside. It contained a darkish powder, one
she recognized from the smell. This man had brought with him a little extra surprise for the orcs,
and its waxy envelope had even kept it dry. But he had not gotten a chance to
use it. Angelika tucked the envelope into the breast pocket of her tunic. The
hat she tossed over her shoulder, and it splatted in the muck behind her.
“Why?” he said. His voice’s pleading tone was gaining in insistence.
She snorted. “Why do you think?”
Franziskus began a greater flurry of wriggling, shifting his shoulders back
and forth in the evident hope of sliding himself free. At the end of his
struggle, he grunted. It seemed to Angelika that he had succeeded only in
settling the bodies above him even more heavily upon his chest and limbs. He
huffed whimperingly as Angelika removed a succession of boots, to find only a
series of soaked and mildewy socks, each covering a set of toes half eaten by
trenchfoot.
“You think I am shocked,” Franziskus struggled to say. He stopped to gulp in
air. “And shocked I am, I’ll admit. I am new to war, you see. This was my first
battle.”
“You should have stayed away.”
“A man of my station is obli—” Franziskus cut off his own thought, as if
suddenly aware of the futility of his line of argument. “Please, there is no
reason not to help me. Please help me.”
“Once,” said Angelika, pausing before the pile of corpses to decide where to
start next, “I came upon a battlefield, and set about doing my business, and
found a man, a big barrel of a sergeant, lying with a broken arm, pinned under a
big piece of cannon. It had exploded at the seams, gone flying through the air,
and flattened him into the soft earth.”
“I have heard of such things,” Franziskus said.
She surveyed his reddened face and leaned back against the bodies as if they
were a brick wall, to rest up a bit. “He just needed it rolled off his arm, and
he called to me, and I had not been doing this for long.” From her new vantage
point, she saw a hand with a fat ring on it, and reached forward to work it down
over the knuckle. The blood that slicked the hand made it easier work than it
otherwise would have been. “I was reluctant, because he was a big man, but he
pleaded with me as you’re doing now. And I went to him, and helped him, and rolled
the cannon off his arm. And then, with his good arm, he grabbed a sabre and
tried to spit me with it, cursing me as a looter and the desecrator of his
comrades.”
“But I won’t do that.”
“So you say.”
“I am of noble birth; my word means something.”
“Perhaps you even believe that, in your current straits.” She moved away from
the stacked bodies to the scattered pile of dead opposite it, where it would be
easier to systematically search each corpse.
“Do you believe in nothing?”
“Yes.”
While he mulled that over, Angelika found a headless artillerist and rolled
him over on his back, for better access to buttons and belt buckle.
“You care for nothing but gold?”
“What else is there?”
“I am only a fourth son but still, my family can pay a good reward if you
free me.”
“How great a reward?”
“Greater than an assemblage of medals and cufflinks.”
Her tongue darted along inside her cheek. She shook her head, moved on to
another corpse. “I believe only in gold I can place immediately in my hand.”
Franziskus began to breathe quickly in and out, in the manner of a crazed
horse or dog. Angelika stood up to survey other areas of the battlefield, to see
which might be safely ripe for plucking.
“Then, in general pity’s name, I implore you. As one child of Sigmar to
another.”
Angelika rounded on her heels, towards him, and for the first time spoke with
heat in her voice. “Your gods and heroes mean nothing to me. They are fairy
stories only, tales we tell one another to persuade ourselves that we are more
than just meat and bone. All is blood and corruption on this plane, and what
lies beyond it is naught. And man—man is nothing more than a finer-looking
orc, wrapped up in brocades and finery and books and music but a ravening savage
nonetheless. I clean up after what you nobles do, with your never-ending wars of
loot and conquest. It’s as close as I’ve found to a
worthwhile pursuit in this stinking charnel house of a world. So do not speak to
me of pity. It is a word without meaning. It is a lie.”
Franziskus listened as Angelika paused to recover her expended breath. “Your
words are well-schooled, your accent refined. How did—
She heard mud squishing under boots and glottal growling in the orcish
tongue. She pushed her arm through the pile of cadavers and clamped a hand over
Franziskus’ mouth. She cursed and said, “They’re coming back.”
“I will let go of your mouth now,” she said, scanning what lay ahead of her,
to the left and to the right. She did not let go of Franziskus’ mouth. She had
carefully surveyed the scene before approaching, but now it had all gone out of
her head. “I will let go of your mouth now, but if you so much as cough…”
It was all flat ground, with hills rising up on both sides, up towards the
mountains. It was scattered bodies all around, and mud, and—there. A good
hundred feet away, an upturned cart, its wheels lopped off its axle, scorch
marks up and down its unfinished wood.
She slowly removed her hand from Franziskus’ face, ready to clamp it back
again if he made a peep. “They’re coming back. Your best hope lies in silence. Be
a corpse, Franziskus, or they’ll make you one.”
Then she sprinted towards the cart. During the length of her run, she heard
nothing but blood rushing in her ears. Saw the battlefield and the strewn
corpses floating past her, slowly, as in one of those dreams where you need to
run from something, but your legs can scarcely move. Finally she hit the ground
beside the cart, rolling in, skidding through mud, slamming into its singed
wooden side. As soon as she stopped she could hear other things again. She heard
the crows overhead, then another orcish sound, possibly laughing, though
Angelika did not know for sure if orcs were capable of laughter. It was not a
cheerful or encouraging sound. She wedged both hands in the tiny space between
the top of the cart and the muddy ground. It hurt; the cart was heavy and her
angle was all wrong. She heard snorting and throaty barking. She girded herself, got the cart up a few
inches and then, on her belly, wriggled under the space she’d made. The cart
fell back down onto her neck and shoulders, but she scraped along anyhow and
worked herself all the way inside. She turned and there was the dead face of a
soldier, burned to the quick and grinning yellow teeth at her.
She winced and wriggled away, up towards the front of the cart. A little
diffuse red light was working its way under the cart, which meant that maybe
there was a space to peep through. Angelika crawled until her eyes and nose sat
right in front of this small space between cart and ground. She saw big boots
made from scraps of fur and cloth and leather. She saw legs: some naked, green,
and muscled; others greaved in mismatched bits of battered metal armour.
Counting them, she decided that there were either five or six orcs. Judging
their size from the legs, there wasn’t a single one of them she’d ever want to
fight against.
The legs were stepping their way through bodies on the scattered plain. They
hadn’t yet reached the big ridge of corpses but they seemed to be poking their
way in that direction. Most of the orcish talk seemed to come from one big
specimen, possibly the one with the most valuable armour. Angelika wished she
could understand them but the orc tongue wasn’t just something you could pick up
by sitting about in taverns or going to study at a monastery. It was a good
enough guess, though, that the well-armoured one’s grunts and hisses were
orders. He stood there barking, and the others, in response, picked their way
through the bodies.
One bent down low enough that its head suddenly entered her field of vision.
It was big, shaped like a malformed melon, with a face that was mostly jaw, from
which well-chipped ochre tusks, each about the size of Angelika’s dagger, jutted
unevenly up and down. The orc grabbed at a corpse’s wrist with its massive green
hand, and stared at it long enough for a white globule of snot to gather in one
of its tiny, triangular nostrils, then slide down to its lip, finally
disappearing into its mouth. Then the orc, blinking its red-rimmed eyes in
frustration or annoyance, let the body’s wrist flop listlessly back into the
mud.
Angelika could not think what it was they were looking for. Not valuables,
certainly. Nor weapons—there were a few pieces lying only partially buried in
the mud, and these the orcs ignored.
She turned her head slightly to see what was happening to the side, closer to
the body pile. She saw another orc, this one with pus-filled buboes, each the
size of a copper coin, all over the skin of its squashed and narrow head. It
ducked down over the body of the old bearded soldier, the one she’d helped die.
The orc sniffed the dead man like a dog would, then rubbed its purulent face
over the torso. Then it shook its head and vengefully spat a wad of phlegm into
the corpse’s dead eye.
Angelika understood: they were looking for someone who was still alive. This
one could tell somehow that the old veteran was still warm. But not warm enough,
which is why he was angry. They’d keep going, she realized, until they found
Franziskus. And then the boy would take his revenge on her, pointing out the
cart. Angelika told herself that she should have slit his throat when she had
the opportunity. But the trouble is, you almost never know whose throat you
should cut until afterwards.
A round of low shrieks and gravelly gabbling rose up to the left. Angelika
could no longer see any orcs and scrambled to adjust her position, to change her
field of view. She hit her knee on a rock and nearly cried out. She pushed her
body up flush with the front of the cart, and through the crack could now again
see orc feet. Some were dancing up and down. Others were firmly planted. They
were in front of the corpse pile. Angelika could not really see what was going
on, but from the positions of the legs could guess: they’d found Franziskus and
were hauling him out.
She turned again, in the confined space under the cart, looking for a better
weapon than her dagger. She imagined them suddenly pulling the cart away and
tried to think of the best defence. Probably it would be to leap towards them as
soon as the cart moved, to scrabble her skinny, mud-slicked body between orcish
legs, and keep on going past them. She would run to the right, past the corpse
ridge, then up into the hills. Angelika was fast but had never tried to outrun
orcs.
Her spindly legs might not be a match for the big pillars of muscle
underneath those brutes, but that would not stop her from trying. From the
sidelines, she’d watched several battles, and knew that often soldiers died
because they gave up too soon. Angelika would not die from giving up.
It bothered her that she would not be given the chance to avenge herself
against the boy for squealing. Still, he would meet a gruesome end, though at
hands other than her own.
She saw Franziskus dangling upside down, then being dropped headfirst into
the muck and blood. He rolled over onto his back and reached to his belt for a
weapon, but a vast orc boot came crunching down on his wrist. Franziskus bucked
and cursed. His face turned red with the effort, but they had him good. His
off-hand was still free and Angelika readied herself for what would happen next.
The boy would not speak orcish but he could still tell them what they needed to
know.
Then the pustule-ridden orc bent down over Franziskus’ legs with an
oversized cabbage sack. For some reason, its burlap had been dyed a splotchy
purple. It had a big drawstring on it, of muck-stained cord. The buboed orc
rolled the bag up over the boy’s feet and shins while two others held his legs.
The bag went up over Franziskus’ waist. Then to his chest. The orcs roughly
jammed his seized arms down over his torso. Then the bag went up past his
shoulders.
Franziskus turned his head towards her. He surely couldn’t tell, Angelika
knew, that he was meeting her eyes. He directed an imploring expression at her
nonetheless. Moving his lips in slow exaggeration, he mouthed the words:
Please. Help. Me.