Square Wave Read Online Free PDF Page B

the wet red one with too few fingers pointing in too many directions. The other four Dutchmen returned fire, but blindly, discharging their muskets with stocks held at their waists. The volley came to nothing.
    A fine buckshot, almost a mist, came in then, from the barrels of a different sort of musket—Portuguese ones, judging by their angular stocks. They’d been fired by two Sinhalese who’d crawled partway out of hatches in the barricades.
    The buckshot washed over one of the Dutchmen. It was too fine, and fired from too great a distance, to kill outright. Instead it scoured his face down to an oily translucence. Swatches of bone shone brightly where the skin had been ground away, around the chin and cheeks. His nose had become a small fibrous nub overhanging raw lips and cracked teeth. From his eyes came a feeble glare that fixed on Haas. The man seemed to choke. Petr caught him with his good hand as the man’s knees buckled, but he could bring him no comfort, and the two lay among the pile of round ball.
    In the dark before dawn, Haas’s men had already primed the cannon. The vent brimmed with the coarse powder, and a thin flax fuse dangled from it, just a few yards from where Haas still knelt. He laid the arquebus down beside him in the soil heavy with water and began to unthread the slow match, still burning from both ends, from the serpentine. The other two men in fighting shape had laid their shortswords down next to them as they reloaded their muskets. Haas held one end of the match to the soil and it sizzled to a silence. He twisted it around his thumb and held the lit end between his fingers.
    The Sinhalese were quiet now. More were surely positioning themselves, and his own squad was in shambles. Once again they would have to give ground to the heathens. If not, there would soon be none left alive to hold it.
    Haas made a hammer stroke in the air to Petr, who pulled a sliver of steel from his boot in response. He tossed it across the other soldiers to Haas, who raised his hand and held it a moment. The two soldiers reloading their guns laid down their ramrods and weapons. One moved to help the two fallen men to their feet.
    Arquebus in hand and the other soldier in tow, Haas crawled toward the cannon. The barrel began to fill with the thick black mud all around as the butt carved a trailing wedge in it. The match’s tip poked up from his hand, safe from the water in the soil. The men got to their knees and with two sharp, coordinated tugs, Haas from the middle and the soldier from the tip, raised the cannon twenty degrees so that it faced directly onto the barricades. Haas took one more look at the target, which could barely be seen through the shrubs surrounding the cannon. Two musket barrels peeked out of the hatches, and behind them he thought he could make out their shadowed faces, the black, animal eyes he was going to blind.
    He turned to his men behind him, at the fort. The others propped up the half-faced one. Haas was disgusted not by his injuries, which were catastrophic, but by his uselessness. He couldn’t imagine him surviving the week. Minutes ago he looked a spectral white and pink; now there was only a crimson visage. At the equator, the fetid was the state toward which everything raced. It was the center. The infection that would finish him had probably already taken root in that mass of pulped flesh. The sooner the better.
    In one motion Haas turned and touched the match to the fuse. There was a hissing, then a rumble. The cannon convulsed, seemed to deform under pressure. The ball came out low. It ricocheted off the dirt and punctured the wooden barricades, leaving them convex and gaping just above the hatches. One of the Sinhalese was in slivers. The other seemed to have been halved by the collapsing wall. The fluttering of his arms slowed, the rhythmic heaving of his chest petered out, leaving only the top of a man, still as stone, clutching a gun.
    Haas dropped the spike in the vent.