Three Emperors (9780062194138) (15 page)

“By God, I'll have you now.”

“It's better when they resist,” the little ogre encouraged.

The baron's powerful hands gripped the top of my gown and tore it down the back. I twisted to claw at his face, so he stopped to slap me and spit.

We're about to be murdered, I thought dimly. We've come to a devil's lane and found a portal to hell. I smelled it when we entered. Why didn't I run?

A hand grasped my necklace, with its ankh and Eye of Horus, and twisted it tight. I couldn't breathe.

And then Richter howled from a shock of his own. “Bastard imp!” He lurched off me and spun as if stung, and Harry flew hard and banged against a wall. I got enough air to shriek with fury. The tumult had knocked Auric aside, too.

“The whelp bit me!”

The dwarf chortled. “You can have a sip of my soup.”

“I'll bash the hellion's brain in.” He wheezed and bent toward my son. I lurched upward, sick from fumes, breathless from strangulation, my gown in ruin, and reached to grab his arms. The baron was strong as a stag, but I hindered him for just a moment. He tried to shake me off. Auric began banging on me with an iron kettle, baying with merriment at the chaos. The more I resisted, the more he cackled.

Richter shoved again to bounce me on the bed. “Wait your turn,” he growled. He turned back to my son.

And screamed. Horus, in wild desperation, and with the courage of a youth three times his age, had grabbed one of the stone bowls holding the metallic distillates and hurled it at the madman's face.

The potion was hot, acidic, and sticky. A sluice of goo slashed across Richter's jaw and cheeks, sizzling, and more hit a candle and flared up like breath from a fire-eater. My assailant howled in shock and surprise.

“You little demon!”

“Harry!”

“I melted him, Mama!”

“May Satan damn you!” the crazed Richter-Fulcanelli roared, clutching at his burning face as he staggered around the room. His flesh was melting like candle wax.

Auric watched in shocked fascination, the other's pain seeming to calm him. “Don't kill her,” he cautioned. “Not until we have the other.”

Richter found a bucket of water and emptied it over his own smoking head. “Aggghhhh! You bitch of a sorceress!” His flesh steamed.

“We need them all, every one, to control each other,” Auric went on. “The mines, master, the mines!”

And then his kettle swung to strike my dizzy head, and that's all I can remember.

Chapter 17

T
he snow stopped during the night, replaced by cold fog. The long dark seemed endless. It was victory when I was finally able to see my outstretched hand, triumph to make out the prone and hunched forms of my companions, and reassurance to spy the trunk of a tree ten paces away. Dawn was sluggish and clammy. Beyond our immediate surroundings, the world was shrouded. I stood, shivering and miserable, to stamp my feet and rub my gums. Wood was added to the fire, we dipped our last soggy bread in the reheated stew, and we looked to our equipment. The campfire smoke added to the miasma.

“A foul day for fighting,” Hulot muttered. “I need another tonnelet of brandy.”

“Then give me leave to fetch one,” I suggested.

“Ha! You wouldn't stop until you reached Paris, Digeon. None of us would. No, I'll keep you for battle.”

Escape would not be easy.

From somewhere to our right a rumble began, like distant thunder. Someone was shooting at someone. “Our flank is getting an uncomfortable reveille,” Hulot remarked. “It wakes you up, doesn't it?” It did seem to match Napoleon's prediction that the Allies would seek to overrun the French right flank and get into our rear. Yet I'd neither seen nor heard sign that Bonaparte was shifting forces to block such a move. In fact, he'd given up the commanding Pratzen Heights and passively invited attack in this valley. It was foolish and lazy.

I knew him better than that.

Whatever his plan, I was stuck in the middle, hoping that Soult's corps would remain in reserve. If ever there was a war I cared nothing about, it was this one. What cursed luck to have run into Murat in Vienna, chaining me to this madness ever since. The harder I tried to escape, the deeper I seemed to be ensnared.

“Digeon, you'll replace Garat in the front rank,” Hulot instructed as we formed. “The imbecile broke his foot by allowing a cannon wheel to run over it and will miss his chance at glory.”

“Allowed? Or arranged?”

“He wept when told he couldn't fight.”

Good God, the world is full of fools. “I'm rather tall,” I tried. “Wouldn't it be wiser to have me behind, where I could shoot over the heads of others?”

“New men go in front to be watched and backed by their fellows. Besides, maybe the enemy will find you intimidating. Rise up on your tiptoes, Goliath, and put them to flight.”

“As tempting target.”

“Be proud of this opportunity to prove yourself.”

I was frustrated, caught in a vast military machine, with no flexibility to exercise my habitual cleverness. The front rank sponged up bullets, and putting a man of my capabilities there was a terrible waste, at least to me. “I'm actually rather expert with a rifle,” I tried again. “Perhaps I could serve as a chasseur.” These skirmishers moved independently and sought cover.

“Is that a rifle you are carrying, idiot? Did you arrive from a chasseur regiment and dye your coat from green to blue? No, you are line infantry like the rest of us. Shoulder your musket and take your place like a man.”

The others hooted. I pretended I was only joking and lamely tried to retrieve a reputation for courage by demonstrating experience. “Do you have any buckshot? I spent time in America, where frontiersmen shoot with both buck and ball. Given a musket's inaccuracy, it might increase our chances of hitting something.”

“Ah, you mistake me for an armory? All our buckshot seems to be taken, Digeon. The Big Hats must have gone fowling. But here, idiot, is your bayonet, which is guaranteed to hit something should you get close enough to the enemy to stick them with it. Shall I instruct which end is the front?”

This brought another good laugh. The sergeant was on his own tiptoes to address me, his mustache almost close enough to become my own. I could see flecks of tobacco in the hairs.

“I suspect I can remember.”

He rocked back to his heels and clapped me on the shoulder. “If you don't, I will stab you myself.” Then he addressed the others. “
Oui!
Our newest replacement is so stupid that he may forget in which direction the enemy resides! Should he charge the wrong way, toward our rear, will the rest of you kindly shoot him?”

“You may rest assured, sergeant,” Cheval said. “Put the cardsharp in front of me. I will keep him in step.”

“No need to put biting horses in the same harness,” Hulot said. “Digeon here will be near the standard so he can't get lost or waste time experimenting with his musket load.” He nodded at me. “Fight well, straggler, I have my eye on you. Pray that your card luck carries over to battle.”

With this encouragement, I fell in with the fatalism all men feel when marching into combat. One is swept by fate into a torrent. We checked our gear for the hundredth time in the fantasy that something would make a difference. Men entrusted last letters to one another. I had nowhere to write to, and realized Astiza might never hear of my death.

Units began to form in column. We'd wheel into line when at grips with the enemy.

Officers on horseback loomed out of the fog, gesturing with swords, while the thuds from our right grew louder, thumping like tribal drumming. The order came to cease speaking. We obeyed better than schoolboys, in hopes we'd be hidden until the worst was over.

Then began the waiting. I'd experienced this agony at the light winds of Trafalgar while Nelson's fleet closed ponderously with the French and Spanish. Here the anxiety was again. The brain can conjure horrors more terrible than any actual one, and so the tedious standing gave ample time for imagination.

“Let's get on with it,” Gideon muttered under his breath.

We stood still as statues so there wouldn't be a rattle of equipment. I could see only fifty paces in the fog and thus spied little beyond the universe of my small company. In theory, Soult's gigantic corps of twenty-six thousand men was poised around me, but it felt as if my fellows and I were waiting by ourselves for the entire Russian and Austrian armies. We'd eaten little, out of the belief that gut wounds were worse on a full stomach, and drunk less, knowing we wouldn't be allowed to fall out to piss. We preferred not to humiliate ourselves by wetting our trousers. By midday we'd be parched, but better dehydration than embarrassment. So we stood, hungry, thirsty, and cold, our breath adding to the fog, without a word of explanation about what we were supposed to do or when we were supposed to do it.

The light grew stronger, and the mist changed from gray to white. It was a sunny winter's day on the Pratzen Heights, I guessed, reminiscent of the sun that had glowed at Napoleon's coronation the year before. Yet in our valley the fog hung and hid, each man damp and alone with his thoughts. Even prayers had to be silent. It was quiet enough to hear the click of rosary beads.

I shifted, swallowed, and experimented with sleeping standing up, without success. Bored, I opened my eyes again. Nothing had changed. Sergeant Hulot stalked in front of us, puffed and frowning, and a cluster of dismounted officers waited ahead of him, their horses twitching. The thunder on the right kept growing. Musket and cannon fire was as continuous as the roar of surf. Still we did nothing.

I allowed myself to hope that the battle was being decided without me. I'd find an excuse to creep off, and then embroider my army experience a decade from now—warm, well fed, and alive.

My hands were numb. So were my feet, I decided. And my nose.

Nothing. Nothing. What was Napoleon doing?

And then suddenly there were bugles and shouts as crisp as the crack of a cannon, relayed up and down the line. A colonel swung up onto his horse, trotted in front of us, and pointed with his sword, which was helpful, since I'd lost all sense of direction.
“Sacré nom de Dieu, forward!”

A companion looked at a watch. It was ten o'clock. Had my bet failed, and Soult's corps was to engage after all? My luck kept worsening. We stepped off as if one organism, as syncopated as androids, as mindless as golems. Frosted grass at first, and then the crystallized mud of a frozen field. As we marched at the standard pace of seventy-six paces a minute, the land began to rise.

I gloomily guessed our destination. We were marching back to the Pratzen Heights, which Bonaparte has so conspicuously abandoned just two days before. The Austrians and Russians had since occupied them, so now we had to attack uphill? What madness was this? Had the French never heard of Bunker Hill? I couldn't help playing amateur general, and desperately wanted to fall out, rejoin the emperor's command, and point out the error of his ways.

No chance. I was sandwiched by men—Gideon at my left shoulder, the regimental standard to my right, and men behind, Cheval lurking back there somewhere. Company after company, regiment after regiment, division after division. I could no more reverse direction than I could reverse time.

The mist thinned as we slogged uphill, and our army rose from a white sea. The flags, with their bright bronze eagles, emerged first, so looking to one side and the other, I could see for one moment a forest of standards with no soldiers to go with them. Then Soult's corps as a whole climbed out of the mist and into the bright low sun, entire divisions sprouting from where we'd been hidden. Tramp, tramp, tramp, steadily uphill. I thankfully warmed.

Soult and Lannes had four divisions in all. Two battalions of light infantry formed a skirmishing line while we line soldiers followed in column, like parallel battering rams. There was a murmur that rose to an exultant shout as we cleared the fog and spied one another. We were not alone after all! Hundreds of flags, tens of thousands of men, syncopated like a vast machine. Cheers rolled to join the thunder of the battle to our right. Batteries of cannon were firing there, guns flashing in the smoke. The sun itself seemed at Napoleon's command, gleaming to illuminate tens of thousands of bayonets.

Bonaparte weather.

I got my bearings. We were advancing more or less east, into the sun. To our right the land fell away into a tangle of wood, stream, and village, and it was from there that the roar we'd heard for the past two hours continued. The fog in that hollow had been thickened by gun smoke. Flags rocked and pitched as if they were masts in a stormy sea. A desperate struggle was going on as the Allies tried to get around us to roll up our formations.

To our left—the north—there was a broad swale between the Pratzen Heights and the wooded hills miles beyond. Huge numbers of men moved there as well, cavalry swirling in great turgid currents. There was smoke, dust, and tendrils of fog.

We were in the center, marching toward the heart of the enemy. It seemed to me it would be a bloody business, yet not only could I not escape, but I found myself unexpectedly caught in the thrill of it. I, the American skeptic, selfish and opportunistic, actually forgot for a moment about my own safety and felt swept up in a greater story.

There's beauty in a military assault, uniforms bright and brushed, crossbelts chalked, buttons and bayonets gleaming that men polish for luck, legs as coordinated as a centipede's. General Duhesme in Boulogne told me once that I should surrender to military passion, give myself over to discipline and courage, and that the greatest exhilaration in life was belonging to a unit and a cause. My futile attempts at personal independence, he predicted, would lead to nothing but misery. I finally understood what he meant. The air seemed charged with the shared camaraderie of sacrifice and danger. We were fused as fiercely as if we'd joined a messianic religion, and at that moment, in that place, there seemed no higher purpose than to close with the enemy. The weight of my weapons was forgotten, hunger and thirst were forgotten, my heart hammered, and I was drugged by spectacle. My only purpose was to keep my place in line as we strode over plowed clods of earth. My life had come down to one chilly, sunlit moment, and Napoleon understood this. He was the conductor of a vast and fatal game in which we were momentary madmen, joyous participants in his ambition, because he'd given purpose to ordinary lives. Close, fight, win.

So we marched up Pratzen Heights.

Battlefields are big. Ours was eight miles wide as the two huge armies stretched to try to flank each other, and our march up that three-hundred-foot-high hill was a mile in length, a lockstep advance that consumed an eternity, by which I mean half an hour. At any moment I expected a barrage of cannonballs and a volley of musketry, and yet the enemy banners couldn't even be seen.

Where the devil were the Russians and Austrians?

Belatedly, I realized what Napoleon had always expected: the enemy had weakened its center to strengthen its flanks.

Suddenly a cannonball did come, seemingly out of nowhere, skipping across the hard ground like a bowled stone. It hit our column at an angle and knocked aside five men with astonishing violence. They didn't fall; they flew, or rather parts of them did, and sprays of blood flew with them. We gasped, instinctively recoiled, and then accelerated to close up the gap.

“Steady. No faltering there! Dress that rank!”

There are many kinds of courage, from facing a peril alone to defending an unpopular opinion. One of the most daunting is standing in the front rank of an infantry line. The dashing uniform makes a splendid target, its crossbelts the perfect aiming point. One is expected to neither duck, dodge, nor turn, lest too much fidgeting dissolve the cohesion of the company. Upright and face forward is the soldier's task, to stand stout even under the worst bombardment and the most terrifying cavalry charge. This expectation is entirely counter to human nature, and the only way to achieve it is ceaseless drill and discipline.

Stiffening a soldier's resolve is the instinct to avoid shame. Few have any idea what war is about. Yet better to be killed or crippled than to let down your comrades and be branded a coward. Men fight to become men—to save this comrade and avenge that one.

The enemy's transfer of units allowed us to climb the long western slope largely unmolested. Orders rang out when we were halfway up, and we deployed from column to line, now presenting a wide hedge of bayonets. I followed Gideon's lead, shoulder to shoulder, and there were enough stumbles on the uneven ground that my untrained awkwardness drew no particular attention. We aimed for a village near the crest of the hill.