“Well, gentlemen. I see none of us has yet collected that cognac,” Oglethorpe remarked.
A few hours had done the work of weeks to the commanders of the alliance. Though unwounded, King Philippe was pale and drawn. The tsar's arm was bloodily bandaged. Only Charles seemed unperturbed, his eyes like chips of diamond as he peered across the little prairie.
“This land is all jungle and pine barrens,” he noted. “A prairie seems out of place.”
“Old fields,” Oglethorpe offered. “The Indians girdle trees and burn to make fields, but in a few years the ground becomes unproductive, and they must clear more. In time, they move the whole village. The result is as you see.”
“There is a village nearby?”
“An old village of the Mobileans, yes. Those few buildings in the distance may be what remain.”
Charles nodded. Most of the valley was full of troops. And, of course, guns.
“This is a cul-de-sac,” he said. “If we charge in, we can never charge out.”
“Yes, but what are we to do?” Peter asked sarcastically. “Lay siege to them?”
“The runners from Nairne tell us Franklin keeps the ships on the ground but that he cannot do so for long.”
“There must be a thousand men down there, and plenty of artillery, too. And surely the ships are armed,” Charles murmured. “We have between us—what? Three hundred men?”
“Something like that,” Oglethorpe replied.
“Have you lost your nerve at last, King Charles?” Tsar Peter asked.
“No,” Charles replied coldly. “I've faced greater odds than this, as well you know. But to conquer here—we must believe we can win. I do not think our men believe that.”
“That is our job,” Oglethorpe replied, “to make them believe.”
“Indeed.”
“But look at them,” Philippe whispered. “walk among the ranks. They have come so far, achieved so much, only to see—this. What speech could we give them, what anthem could we sing that could make this last charge seem anything but suicide?”
For answer, Charles gave a harsh chuckle and stood, brushing his knees.
“Tsar Peter, the time has come for me to request my satisfaction.”
“Your Majesties—” Philippe began, but this time something in Charles’ countenance stopped him.
“I am at your service, sir,” the tsar replied.
“These are the terms I propose. We both mount, armed as we please, but with no armor. We ride straight for those guns. Whichever of us survives is the winner.”
Peter's face twitched fiercely, and then he bellowed a savage laugh that rang over their little army, out to the mass of enemies awaiting them. “And should we both live?” he said.
“Why, we shall settle our score another day.”
“And if we both die?”
“Then whoever falls last is the victor.”
“Very well, Your Majesty. I agree to your terms.”
A murmur went amongst the troops as the two removed their breastplates and stripped until they were bare chested. Charles mounted, fiddled with his weapons and saddle, then trotted in front of his Swedes and Janissaries.
“I have said I will never flinch in the pursuit of a just war. There are those among you old enough to know the truth of that, to have ridden from Sweden with me more than thirty years ago. You, my friends, were always my kingdom. I love you all, more than life itself. My younger companions, I love you no less. Not one among you has not shown his heart is strong. I now go to settle my oldest score. What God wills will be. Farewell.”
The tsar had no people to address. He came alongside Charles, a carbine in one hand.
And they rode. The horses were tired, but somehow they seemed to sense that this was the last time they would stretch their blooded legs on the grass of Earth, and they made the best of it, sending clots of dirt sailing out behind them.
Everything was still for a moment, save for those eight hooves, pounding, a tiny and beautiful thunder.
And then one of the Swedes, as if just understanding what was happening, screamed, “Iron Head!” And then everyone of them living—and by the sound of them, perhaps some dead—took it up, shouting to worry heaven, and dashed after their king.
It shocked through Oglethorpe like a dam bursting. He echoed the shout and set his horse in motion; and behind him his men—almost all now on foot—roared like ocean waves crashing on rocks.
Thus began the last charge.
Adrienne lay in a palace built of numbers, of geometries possible and absurd, of theorems solved and yet to be solved and unsolvable; and for the first time in more years than she could remember, she felt joy, the sheer joy she had known as a girl, at night in her room, calculating the motions of the Moon. She traced answers with atoms, or the bundles of affinities named atoms. The Indian posed questions— clever ones she would never have thought of—and she answered by solving them, imprinting the solutions on a parchment of space and time. Around her, the castle continued to take shape, extending upward and downward.
Below, she found endless lines of nonsense, and set about correcting them, conforming them to the grand equation, formed so long ago in her mind, seasoned and re-formed by her students, now finally attaining perfection and realization. It was, at last, the formula she had glimpsed all those years ago in France, when the world went wrong.
Almost. Something was still missing, something important.
“What are you doing?”
She found a child of some two years regarding her. Her child, her Nico, as she had last seen him in the flesh.
“Solving a problem,” she said simply.
“What is that,” he asked, “on your hand?”
“A pen,” she said, wriggling the fingers of her manus oculatus. “Something like a pen. I write with it.”
“You write as I do.” He cocked his head. “Are you really my mother?”
“Yes.”
“Where have you been?”
“I told you the truth before. I've been here all along, Nico. I've been searching for you, but the angels hid you from me.”
“Why?”
“So they could make you what you are.”
“I am the Sun Boy. I am the god of this world.”
“No, my little Nico, you are not.”
He frowned. “I don't know what to do. I'm supposed to kill you.”
“I know. You will do what you must, and I will love you no matter what. But I know this, and you know it, too, I think. The angels don't want you to know the truth. But they can't stop us, Nico, not if we work together. Remember how we were at the river, at the battle?”
“When you saved me,” he said. “You did save me, didn't you?”
“Nico, you saved me when you were born. Without you, I would have died. And died again, that night when I was stabbed. Me saving you— I am your mother. What else could I do?”
“I still don't like what you're doing,” Nico said.
“Do you know what I'm doing?”
“No. But I don't like it. You have to stop. If you don't stop, I will hurt you.”
“I love you, Nico.” She looked squarely at him, willing him to believe it, desperate that he should know.
“Stop.”
“I can't,” she said, her voice catching.
“Very well, then,” he said, now sounding cross. “But you will be sorry.”
He vanished. Reluctantly, Adrienne returned to her work.
“I see ‘em,” Robert muttered. “God, but there ain't many of ‘em. Like a brace of flies attacking a city.”
Franklin closed his eyes again. Lenka. He ought to go watch, but he couldn't.
“Damn, the stones on them,” Robert said again. “Look at that. I wish I was closer. Hell, I wish I was down there.”
“Can they win?”
“I don't see how—ah, Jesus, there they are at the guns, and still comin', half of ‘em must've—” He suddenly choked off, and Franklin understood his friend was crying.
“They're fightin'Armageddon, and here we sit.”
He seemed to have forgotten his own words of a moment before. Franklin could only nod.
Peter watched the guns grow closer, and he didn't care. He lifted the carbine, not to aim it but to brandish it in the air; and for a moment he felt like one of the untamed Cossacks he had watched his army cut down in the past.
He noticed, behind the guns, the green uniforms of his own troops— or those who had once been his—and that filled him with an almost limitless fury. “I am your tsar!” he bellowed, shaking the gun furiously. “I am Peter, son of Alexei, the emperor, the—” His words were drowned out by the first volley.
It was a sound like ice cracking in the Baltic, all at once, everywhere. He remembered Catherine, his empress and love. He remembered his son, who betrayed him and paid with his life. He remembered building ships, with his own two hands, in Holland; the taste of brandy, Tokay, and chocolate.
He remembered being a little boy, hiding in the Kremlin as the Strelitzi searched for him and his mother and brother. Hiding, cringing, afraid.
Never again. Never.
And then he suddenly understood—a hundred guns had fired at him, and he still sat his horse. He had won!
But no, the damned devil Charles was still in the saddle, too, though his chest was open in two places. In fact, the Swedish king gave a hoarse cry and fired his pistol.
Peter turned grimly back to the waiting guns, where something odd was happening. It looked like their enemies were fighting each other. They were! Russians were turning their sabers on Mongols and Indians.
The second volley crashed, and this time what felt like hot raindrops pattered all over his chest. Blue outlines surrounded everything, and the neck of his horse rushed up to meet him. By chance, his head turned to see that Charles was still mounted, though there was a gaping red hole where one of his eyes ought to have been.
That's when he noticed—the bastard had lashed himself in the saddle. When had he done that?
Peter's horse fell, but it hurt no more than diving onto a feather bed. He smelled salt, the wet metallic scent of the sea, and remembered the little boat he used to sail, imagining the day when he—when Russia—would have a real navy.
Somewhere, a storm must be coming. He heard the thunder. Or was that just the wind?
He opened his eyes once more, to see a young man in a green uniform, weeping, kneeling over him, trying to tell him something. It sounded like an apology of some sort.
“I have to go,” he told the boy. “Catherine and I are sailing today.”
The sky was blue. A good day for it, and the storm, by its sound, was receding.
Ilya Petrov knelt in the midst of the terror, took his tsar's head in his lap, and wept. “God!” he cried to the men milling around him. “It is the tsar! I met him four times, rode on campaign with him! We have been betrayed by that snake Golitsyn!” Across the field now, he saw a small company of riders coming through the confusion, wearing the uniforms of the Russian royal guard. They rode with the enemy, as the tsar had.
“We could not have known!” his friend Vasily shouted. “Who could know this? And he rode against us!”
“Then we are wrong! I never thought this was our damned war! I never thought this was right!”
“But now he is dead …”
“Yes, and, by God, I will have my answers. Send out the word everywhere, to every Russian soldier. We are betrayed!”
The guards had arrived, now, and Ilya rose to meet them. Their leader, face smudged with soot, swung down and, ignoring him, knelt to look at the tsar for a long moment, despite that the air still whined with lead. Then he—no, she—removed her hat, and her long black hair fell about her shoulders, and she knelt and kissed the dead tsar on the forehead.
“Sleep, father,” she said.
And Ilya recognized her. “Tsarevna Elizavet!” He had danced with her once, admired her in her velvet evening gown. Beautiful, she had been, a goddess of love.
But now, when she looked up at him, he saw instead a goddess of war, fierce and terrible as her father.
“Who are you?” she snapped.
“Captain Ilya Stepanovich Petrov, Tsarevna.”
“You fight for the devil, you know,” she told him. “You've murdered your rightful tsar.”
“I— We didn't know, Tsarevna.”
“And now you do. And now you will take up your weapons, and you will follow me, yes?”
“Yes, Tsarevna. By the true tsar and the true God, yes!”
A bullet chose that moment to cut past his cheek, and Ilya watched his friend Sergei sink to the earth in surprise, a red stain in the center of his chest.
“God!” Ilya shouted! “Yes! Up, you men! Fight with our tsarevna! Lay low these dogs who have betrayed us into hell!”
And like the roar of a monster, the name of the tsar went out of the mouth of every Russian there, a word of death. And Elizavet, the tsarevna, took up her father's bloody sword and lifted it high; and as they had done for a thousand years, in bitter cold and furnace heat, in mud or on dry sand, on taiga and meadowland, Russians went to fight and die.
Oglethorpe understood what was happening just in time to make some use of it.
Some of the Russians had turned. Maybe they had heard rumors that their tsar was alive—maybe they suddenly recognized him. It didn't matter—all that mattered was that impossibly, there was a hole in the artillery. He sat up straight and pointed the way with his sword, and they rode into the breach.
“Holy Mother,” Robert swore. “What—what's that?”
Franklin dragged himself to the window and stared down.
Something was forming, perhaps a half mile west of the ships. An axis of pure light, a black wheel spinning about it, growing larger.
“Oh, no,” Franklin said. “Look at that.”
“What is it?” Robert repeated.
“The dark engines,” Vasilisa said in a leaden voice. “It's the end.”
“The devil, you say.” Franklin grunted. “Robert, we're going down. Down there, right now.”
“Aye, cap'n.”
“Benjamin, no!” Vasilisa shouted. “Our only hope now is that Adrienne and the Indian—”
“No thank you, Mrs. Karevna,” Franklin said. “We let that thing go, and it kills everyone I hold dear—if they aren't dead already. The hell with the world. I'm saving them. And as to trusting this mumbo-jumbo our friends are up to —the devil with that, too.”
“What can I do?” Don Pedro asked.
“Help Robert bring down the countermeasures, and then check your weapons. We're goin’ into the lion's den for sure.”