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bush these past years.
    Probably he should have been relieved at this point. Leading a charge took the kind of clarity it was very hard to conjure in a state of exhaustion. But when the kingdom finally fell in Kandy, he thought, when the natives would submit or be annihilated, he wanted to be there, not Colombo. After the years he’d given, he couldn’t imagine it otherwise, not taking his men to the center.
    Haas tested the trigger’s pull. An even pressure sent the serpentine dipping back toward the pan, the smoldering match in its jaws. He took a small blackened cloth from his coat and wiped down the flash pan and the touchhole. From the horn he drizzled powder until there was a cone of it in the pan. He flattened the charge with his thumb and the powder stretched to the edges.
    He raised his eye to the sight but there again was only the broad barricade of the village. For hours now he and his men had watched little but the sun rise. It might have been a religious observance that kept the Sinhalese so still and silent. Or else they were just waiting for him.
    His arms were burning from this same stillness, holding up the arquebus in the fork of the tree. Finally, there was movement: fifty yards above, high on the rock face, an eagle with chestnut feathers and a face mostly of black rose from its nest. Without a thought he swiveled the gun’s barrel in the fork and set the sight just below the neck of the bird. His arms and his senses revived. The bird stared down from the mountain with unfazed eyes. The men turned to Haas and his peculiar engagement. Their bleary leader only returned the look. They busied themselves with their muskets.
    The eagle shot from the cliff, its wings tucked tight to its body, down to an ancient tree whose branches hung above the path. Near the base of a giant limb, the wings flared, the claws extended, and a twisting wire, iridescent green, took flight.
    The weight of the snake slowed the bird. Haas nearly took a midair strike at it, but just then it swept up the mountain face to its nest. A scrum broke out. He pivoted the barrel in the fork toward the animals, the bloody snake lashing out at the bird lunging at it with a cleaver of a beak.
    Now he bore down on the trigger with stiff fingers. The serpentine struck at the pan in one blinding motion. An ochre flare, the crack of a fifty-yard whip, and a thrashing snake and bird. There were two or three flaps just above the nest before the bird dove into the gray-green underbrush. Caught in its claws in the escape, the snake was thrown from the nest, weltering along the smooth gray face in increasingly vigorous twirls and spins. Finally it arrived at the base of the great tree, directly below the nest from which it had been snatched. It was dewy and raw and still.
    The men stared at it. The chance at ambush was dead, for no reason they could discern. Haas slipped the gun out from the fork in the tree and stood it on the ground. The barrel warmed his hands. It was no clearer to him, really, exactly why he’d fired, except perhaps that the threat of silence, the fatigue it brought, now exceeded that of open combat.
    As he reached for the ramrod to reload, two Sinhalese in long cloaks appeared on the path above, beyond the snake and tree—with muskets raised. Dutch muskets. Spoils.
    Haas’s men scrambled to take aim. He himself knelt behind the rocks that made up the front wall of their outpost, bemused by the contempt and cruelty that suddenly filled him. He heard the thick, resonant pop of four rounds discharged at once, not far off from the sound of cannon-shot, but more complex, chordal. His men played no role in it.
    Petr, the gangly metalworker-cum-soldier Haas had sailed here with years ago, seemed to hurl his gun against the rock front. It clattered about and fell at the base of the short cannon. He went to his knees and into the pile of round ball, scattering it across the wood beams undergirding the fort. With his good hand he clutched