it wasn’t this. He held his pants up with his wounded left hand and the musket in his right. And the musket was heavy! His heart was heaving and everyone else was running faster than he was.
He had little sense of what was happening anywhere else. A man who roared that the soldiers could call him either god or Master Sergeant Galan Delelo ran at the front, urging his men on. The backs of the other soldiers filled the rest of Kip’s vision, and the pain of running distracted him from all else except for the intermittent whistling, which he couldn’t place at first—until he realized it was the sound of musket balls flying past, and then he could hardly think of anything else.
For a moment he saw the city walls as the men in front of him disappeared in a ditch before scrambling up the other side. He remembered dismissing these walls not even a week ago. Now they looked pretty impressive. The side of the wall was encrusted with slums like barnacles, and King Garadul’s men were already swarming there, trying to use the low buildings and rough shelters as a ladder. But even in the brief glimpse Kip had, one of the slum buildings on which the men were climbing teetered and then collapsed, crushing men and sending up a cloud of dust.
Something wet and chunky splattered across Kip’s face as he ran. He turned, vaguely saw a man dropping beside him—and then the ground suddenly wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
He went down hard in the dry irrigation ditch. He skidded on his face, flipped over, rolled, the wind knocked cleanly out of him. As he moaned, struggling to regain his breath, he realized he wasn’t alone. The irrigation ditch was full of men cowering inside its marginal cover.
Master Sergeant Galan Delelo appeared back on the lip of the ditch. “Get up, you pathetic rats! They’ve got an angle right into this ditch from the wall, you damn fools. Get up! If you’re anything less than dead, get up or I’ll shoot you myself!”
For a second, no one moved.
“You wouldn’t,” a man said.
The master sergeant drew a pistol and shot him in the belly. “Who’s next?” he yelled. He pointed his other pistol at a man carrying a large robin’s egg blue sack.
“I’m a messenger!” the man screamed.
“You’re a soldier now,” Master Sergeant Delelo shouted. He was either unaware or just didn’t care about the musket fire raining around him, sending up little puffs of earth. “Now, move!”
The man dropped his messenger sack, grabbed Kip’s musket, and ran forward, along with everyone else.
Lying on the ground, Kip was left with the other corpses. When he had his breath back, he touched the side of his face. Gore, gray-red chunks of… He didn’t want to think about it. What mattered was that he was free. At least until the next officer commandeered the cowards who filled up this ditch again.
There wasn’t much time. If Kip thought too much or waited too long, he wouldn’t move, and he needed to move now. The master sergeant was right, this ditch wasn’t out of the line of fire. If Kip waited, he was going to get killed.
He wanted to see more of the battle, make a good plan. He didn’t know what kind of a judge he would be of whatever he saw, and he didn’t even know which way to run.
He grabbed the messenger’s sack and slung it over his shoulder. He saw the wreck of a wagon farther back away from the wall.
Did we run right past that? Kip hadn’t even noticed. Regardless, the oxen who’d been pulling the wagon were dead or mewling, screaming in pain, bloodied. Kip ran for it.
He ducked into the shadow of the wagon and found two other men already there. They looked at him with wide, fearful eyes. “Move!” he shouted.
Kip climbed up on the wreck and looked out on the plain. At first all he saw were the dead bodies. Several hundred perhaps. Mostly he couldn’t see any blood, so it looked like people sprawled about sleeping. It wasn’t so great a toll, considering how big the army was, Kip thought, but seeing so many dead wasn’t really something he could merely think about. Those people were dead. He could have been one of them. He could still be.
He tore his eyes away, tried to look for something useful. In a few spots at the wall, King Garadul’s men had