He walked on through the tent city, as the people appeared, blinking, from their sleep. Scattered firing continued from the citadel; the vast cloud of dust rolled over the parade ground from the great tumbled breach in the towering walls. Another shot from near the curtain walls; another ground-quaking detonation that brought a whole side of the citadel down, the stones bursting from the wall as though with relief, falling and tumbling in their own rolling dust; released, returning to the earth.
There was less firing from the citadel ramparts now, as the dust drifted and the sky slowly lightened and the frightened people clutched at each other outside their tents. More firing came from the breached curtain walls, and from inside the parade ground, within the tent city.
He walked on. Nobody stopped him; few people really seemed to notice him. He saw a soldier fall from the curtain wall to his right, tumbling into the dust. He saw the people running this way and that. He saw the Imperial Army soldiers, in the distance, riding on a tank.
He walked through the clustered tents, avoiding people running, stepping over a couple of the smouldering fires. The huge breaches in the curtain wall and the citadel itself smoked in the increasing grey light, which was just starting to take on colour as the sky burned pink and blue.
Sometimes, as the people milled and streamed around him, running past, clutching babies, dragging children, he thought he saw people he recognised, and several times was on the point of turning and talking to them, putting out his hand to stop the snowfall effaces rushing past him, shouting after them…
Suddenly aircraft screamed overhead, tearing through the air over the curtain wall, dropping long canisters into the tents, which erupted in flame and black, black smoke. He saw burning people, heard the screams, smelled the roasting flesh. He shook his head.
Terrified people jostled him, bumped into him, once knocked him down so that he had to pick himself up, dust himself down, and suffer the knocks and the shouts and screams and curses. The aircraft came back, strafing, and he was the only one who stayed upright, walking while the rest fell to the ground; he watched the puffs and bursts of dust fountain in lines around him, saw the clothing of a few of the fallen people suddenly jerk and flap as a round hit home.
It was getting lighter as he encountered the first troops. He dodged behind a tent and rolled as a trooper fired at him, then got back on his feet and ran round the rear of a tent, almost bumping into another soldier, who swung his carbine round too late. He kicked it away. The soldier drew a knife. He let him lunge and took the knife, throwing the soldier to the ground. He looked at the blade he held in his hand, and shook his head. He threw the knife away, looked at the soldier — lying on the ground staring fearfully up at him — then shrugged and walked away.
Still people rushing past; soldiers shouting. He saw one take aim at him, and could not see anywhere to go for cover. He raised his hand to explain, to say there was really no need, but the man shot him anyway.
Not a very good shot, considering the range, he thought as he was kicked back and spun round by the force of the impact.
Upper chest near the shoulder. No lung damage, and possibly not even a chipped rib, he thought as the shock and pain burst through him, and he fell.
He lay still in the dust, near the staring face of a dead city guardsman. As he'd spun round, he'd seen the Culture module; a clear shape hovering uselessly over the remains of his apartments high in the ruined citadel.
Somebody kicked him, turning him over and bursting a rib at the same time. He tried not to react to the stab of pain, but looked through cracked eyes. He waited for the coup-de-grace, but it did not come.
The shadow-figure above him, dark against light, passed on.
He lay a while longer, then got up. It wasn't too difficult to walk at first, but then the planes came back again, and though he didn't get hit by a bullet, something splintered somewhere nearby, as he passed by some tents that shook and rippled as the bullets hit them, and he wondered if the sharp, puncturing pain in his thigh was a bit of wood or stone, or even bone, from somebody in one of the tents. "No," he muttered to himself as he limped away, heading for the biggest breach in the wall. "No; not funny. Not bone. Not funny."
An explosion blew him off his feet, into and through a tent. He got up, head buzzing. He looked round and up at the citadel, its summit starting to glow with the first direct sunlight of the day. He couldn't see the module any more. He took a shattered wooden tent pole to use as a crutch; his leg was hurting.
Dust wrapped him, screams of engines and aircraft and human voices pierced him; the smells of burning and stone-dust and exhaust fumes choked him. His wounds talked to him in the languages of pain and damage, and he had to listen to them, but paid them no further heed. He was shaken and pummelled and tripped and stumbled and drained and fell to his knees, and thought perhaps he was hit by more bullets, but was no longer sure.
Eventually, near the breach, he fell, and thought he might just lie here for a while. The light was better, and he felt tired. The dust drifted like pale shrouds. He looked up at the sky, pale blue, and thought how beautiful it was, even through all this dust, and, listening to the tanks as they came crunching up through the slope of wrecked stones, reflected that, like tanks everywhere, they squeaked more than they roared.
"Gentlemen," (he whispered to the rabid blue sky) "I am reminded of something the worshipful Sma said to me once, on the subject of heroism, which was something like: "Zakalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots."" He sighed. "Well, no doubt she didn't say every age and every state, because the Culture just loves there to be exceptions to everything, but… that was the gist of it… I think…"
He rolled over, away from the achingly blue sky, to stare at the blurred dust.
Eventually, reluctantly, he pushed himself over, and then half up, then to his knees, then clutched at the tent-pole crutch and forced down on it, and got to his feet, ignoring all the pestering aches and pains, and staggered for the piled wreckage of the walls, and somehow dragged and hauled and scraped his way to the top, where the walls ran smooth and wide for a way, like roadways in the sky, and the bodies of a dozen or so soldiers lay, blood pooling, the ramparts around them scarred with bullet holes and grey with dust.
He staggered towards them, as though anxious to be one of their number. He scanned the skies for the module.
It was some time before they spotted the «Z» sign he made from the bodies on the top of the walls, but in that language it was a complicated letter, and he kept getting mixed up.
I
No lights burned on the Staberinde. It sat squat against the grey leechings of the false dawn, its dim silhouette a piled cone which only hinted at the concentric loops and lines of its decks and guns. Some effect of the marsh mists between him and the ziggurat of the ship made it look as though its black shape was not attached to the land at all, but floated over it, poised like some threatening dark cloud.
He watched with tired eyes, stood on tired feet. This close to the city and the ship, he could smell the sea, and — nose this close to the concrete of the bunker — a limey scent, acrid and bitter. He tried to remember the garden and the smell of flowers, the way he sometimes did whenever the fighting started to seem just too futile and cruel to have any point whatsoever, but for once he could not conjure up that faintly-remembered, beguilingly poignant perfume, or recall anything good that had come out of that garden (instead he saw again those sun-tanned hands on his sister's pale hips, the ridiculous little chair they'd chosen for their fornication… and he remembered the last time he had seen the garden, the last time he'd been to the estate; with the tank corps, and he'd seen the chaos and ruin Elethiomel had visited upon the place that had been the cradle for both of them; the great house gutted, the stone boat wrecked, the woods burned… and his last glimpse of the hateful little summer house where he'd found them, as he took his own retaliatory action against the tyranny of memory; the tank rocking beneath him, the already flare-lit clearing whiting out with bright flame, his ears ringing with a sound that was no sound, and the little house… was still there; the shot had gone right through, exploded somewhere in the woods behind, and he'd wanted to weep and scream and tear it all down with his own hands… but then had remembered the man who had sat there, and thought how he might treat something like this, and so had gathered the strength to laugh at it, and ordered the gunner to aim at the top step beneath the little house, and saw it all finally lift and burst into the air. The debris fell around the tank, sprinkling him with earth and wood and ripped bundles of thatch).