The next fifteen minutes were a blur, and would remain so for the rest of his life. Not that he wanted to remember any of it. The fight lived on in his mind as little snapshots of horror. The hospital, looking as though a scythe-wielding tornado had passed through it, leaving Dr. Kirschbaum and Lieutenant Colonel Kessey in mingled pieces. Nail standing, eyes bulging, holding down the Reaper as it stiffened with his spring knife in its eye, feeling its clawed hand digging bloodily into the muscle of his thigh, searching for the femoral artery as it died. The wave of Reapers, a dozen or more, coming across the hillside, throwing aside men like a line of hunters knocking over cornstalks for fun. One Reaper descending into the ready magazine for the 155s and a resultant explosion, lighting up the night and sending a railroad tie skyward like a moon shot. The Bears and Ahn-Kha meeting them, backed up by the Thunderbolt's old marines, clustered in a protective ring around Valentine, pikes and guns working together to knock over the death-machines and then pin them until they stiffened. Styachowski, fear-whitened face like ice in the moonlight, carrying Solon's bow and sending an arrow into a leaping Reaper just before it landed on Post's back. When another Reaper broke the antique as she used it to ward off a blow that threatened to remove, her head, she thrust up with another arrow held near the tip, putting the Quickwood into its yellow eye. Max the German shepherd, a pet of one of the construction engineers, licking the face of his dead owner, stopping only to snarl and stare at anyone who approached the body. The screams of panic from the maternity ward, where the pregnant women had drawn one of the sappers, a dozen men dying as they tried to pull it down as they protected the mothers to be with nothing but their knives and scissors. Hurlmer finally sticking a pike into it, his head torn off for the act. The fearful, confused eyes of the last Reaper to die, a wounded beast trying to escape by crawling amongst the cows, harried by bullet and pike until it died beneath a feed trough, corn-meal dust sticking to the blood coating its face. All the while there was rattling fire from the crestline, as Quisling troops probed the hill.
* * * *
At dawn there were fifty-three corpses lined up. Thanks to the backhoe and a lot of sweat from soldiers with shovels, each would have an individual grave. Woodworkers were hammering together the arrowhead tepee-cum-cross design of a Southern Command grave post and passing them on to painters. The men were gray and haggard after last night's bitter fighting and the probe up the hillside. Valentine pulled as many men out of the line as he could and gathered them by the graves. They had to follow a circuitous path to get there to avoid observation from the spotters on Pulaski Heights; any gathering of men in the open drew mortar fire.
Ceremonies weren't for the dead; they were for the living. There was a lay preacher to say the right words over the bodies. When they were rested in their graves, Valentine walked down the line of bodies in their shrouds, searching for words to add meaning to what had been random slaughter.
"We're in a siege, men. This hill is like a medieval castle, and the enemy is at our gates. That enemy, the TMCC, is in the first phase of taking a position by siege. It's called the 'Investment' He's already put an effort into destroying us. Last night we killed eighteen Reapers, thanks to the Quickwood. Eighteen Reapers." Nothing else could explain the malevolent choice of targets: the magazine, the infirmary, the maternity ward. "That means there's more than one Kurian Lord in the area, perhaps four or five... even six. Not many Kurians can work more than two or three Reapers at once. Thanks to the rising that we began across the river, I suspect some governors have already been kicked out of their holes."
He picked up a handful of dirt, and tossed it on the row of corpses.
"Last night they tried to get our lives cheap. We kept the price up, thanks to the Quickwood, your courage and especially the sacrifice of those killed last night. Solon's investment isn't paying any returns yet.
"The fifty-three soldiers we're putting in the ground pinned down thousands of troops with their lives. Those mortars, and the guns that will probably soon support them, could be used outside Hot Springs, or against the Boston Mountains. The forces around the hill, from the snipers to the machine-gun crews, are looking up the hill at us instead of at Southern Command's Archangel operation. They're here because our guns are covering the rail and water nexus for Solon's territory. There's no fast and easy way around us; it means moving on broken-down roads, crossing bridge-less rivers. Nothing moves by water or rail, east-west or north-south, without our stopping it. They're not able to shift troops fast enough, and Southern Command's eating up what they can move piecemeal."
They liked the sound of that. Bared heads of all skin tones and hair colors, sharing a common layer of sweat and dirt, lifted, nodded, turned to each other reassuringly.
"Every town Southern Command takes is liberated partly by us ... though at the moment we're doing nothing here but having the occasional mortar shell dropped in our laps.
"Unless we're lucky, the fifty-three here are going to have more company as the days and weeks go by. It could be that we'll all end up on this hill with them. If that's our fate, I hope we cost the TMCC as much as they did. If any of you want to say anything, now's the time."
"I've something to say," Yolanda, the woman who had mutilated the captured guards back at the prison camp, began. "It is not right for such men to go into the ground without a flag to be under. They are soldiers. Soldiers are their flag."
Free Territory flags weren't stocked in the warehouses we raided , the overtired part of him said.
"So I made them one. The men who came in to get us, I thought of them as I made this. Styachowski helped me with the wording, and Amy-Jo on the mortar team drew the animal."
She held it up. It was not a big flag. The base of it was red, rimmed with blue and gold roping ... probably from a curtain somewhere in Solon's imperial Residence. In the center was a silhouette of a tusked Arkansas razorback in black, pawing the ground angrily and lowering its head to charge. Blue letters stood out against the red as if luminescent, don't feed on me read the block-letter slogan.
The men laughed, not at the amateurish nature of the flag but at the pithy sentiment it expressed. They liked it. Valentine felt a little electricity run through the men as she turned it so everyone could see. It was a fighting flag: black and blue set against red, the colors of a brawl. A team could rally round the image of an animal-that was part of the Lifeweaver Hunter Caste appeal-and a savage boar was as good as any. Wily, tough, stubborn, a brute that would gore any animal that dared hunt it-and ugly as its mood when challenged-it suited the dirty funeral attendees.
Valentine went to Yolanda's side, and Styachowski came forward to admire the flag in the sun. Three parallel wounds, probably Reaper claw marks, stood out on her forehead.
"Let's have it up," Valentine said. "Ahn-Kha, where's the pike Hurlmer got that one with?" Ahn-Kha walked along the graves until he found the aluminum conduit pipe.
It took a few minutes to rig wire through the grommets and fix it to the pole. Valentine recognized Yolanda from the prison yard, but he only knew Amy-Jo as one of the heroes from the hospital fight. She'd snatched up the infant Perry and barricaded the babe and his mother in a bathroom, holding the door shut as the Reaper pried it off its hinges before it was swamped by pursuing men.
"Where do you want it, sir?" Yolanda asked.
"Here at the graves," Valentine said. "You said they deserved a flag above them. Can you think of a better place?"
"Make some more," Ahn-Kha said. "Or at least another, for the headquarters. This battalion needs an emblem."
"Hell, with the prisoners, we're a regiment," Styachowski said.
"Valentine's Razors," Post suggested.
The phrase passed up and down the ranks and more cheers broke out.
Valentine looked at his feet, embarrassed for the tears in his eyes.
Styachowski dug the pole into the ground and Amy-Jo and Yolanda found rocks to pile about its base. It wasn't a big flag, nor was it high off the ground, but every eye was on it as it flapped in the fresh spring breeze.
* * * *
"What kind of shape is the battery in, Hanson?" Valentine asked, after the memorial service dispersed.
"Is 'piss-poor' an appropriate military description?" the new lieutenant asked.