The Fallen (46 page)

The men stank, of shit and piss and sweat and dirt, as they waited for the vast wave of grey Austro-Hungarian soldiers to rush onto them for a second time. Their uniforms, so pristine when they first boarded the trains in the foothills of Italy, where flags were unfurled and their loved ones bore brave faces and waved lace gloves of farewell, not goodbye, at them from the platforms and bridges, were now torn and bloodied. Their boots had broken open through the heat and the exertion. Caps and hats, once firmly and precisely drawn across heads, were now shoved to the backs of skulls to cover burnt necks. There was no more pride in how one appeared. There was only survival.

Pablo stood cowed beside Abelli on the crest of the Karst Plateau, resting on his rife, using it as a staff with which to hold himself up. He looked down the mountain up which he had walked and crawled and fought, every yard of which had cost a hundred lives. It felt to him that he was standing on top of the world, elevated to the mightiest of positions. Though corrupted by coal smoke and the pungent stink of cordite, the air seemed somehow thinner and fresher, above only blue skies across the entire horizon. Below them,
clouds huddled against the sides of the mountain and Pablo felt that despite being on top of the world near the heavens, he was perhaps nearer to the lowest, darkest voids of hell.

“Does anyone care about us?” he asked, looking down through the clouds to the valleys far below. “Does anyone even know we're here? We have no ammo. We have no shells. We have little food. It seems as if everything we have done and achieved to reach here has been for nothing. It seems as if our sacrifice has been in vain. Why have we taken this place? For what purpose? Does anyone care?”

Corporal Abelli chuckled and took his pipe from the side of his mouth, knocking it empty against his thigh.

“No,” he said, setting the bowl of the pipe in the heart of his palm and filling it with the last of his tobacco from the pouch at his belt. His face was blackened with dirt and dried blood, the filth of four days' battle. “No one cares about us. No one save the Devil. For no one else resides here but him. No God will listen to you here. Only the Devil can come to your aid, can hear your pleas.”

He was aware that Pablo had begun to weep, his whole body shaking with grief, the young man's face racked with sorrow, tears pouring down his face and falling onto the parched rock beneath him. He was bent double, his hand clutched to his mouth, a voiceless cry from his lungs.

“I don't want to call for the Devil,” he wept, pleading like a child. “I don't want to ask him for help.”

But the Corporal laughed. “Neither did I,” he said, lighting his pipe and sending clouds of cherry-scented smoke into the air about him. “But sometimes he is the only one who listens and hears. Look about you, boy. Listen out for him.” The Corporal's eyes grew wide and serious. “Watch for him. He is coming. He is coming here soon.” He tapped the side of his nose and lifted Pablo's rifle so that the young soldier held it firmly into his chest. “His time is nigh. Stay close so that I may keep you safe and lead you to him.”

“Who?” cried Pablo. “Who do you mean to lead me to?”

But Corporal Abelli turned away and joined the other Italian soldiers at the front face of the shallow trench they had built across the long width of one side of the Karst Plateau. On this plateau, a flat circle of rock a mile wide, ringed by jutting conical peaks of green and grey, Pablo knew everything would end. He breathed deep, chasing his tears away. A chill wind picked up and tugged at his hair and his uniform, as if some invisible force was trying to wrench him away.

A shrill whistle cut through the monotonous rumble of troops preparing their defences.

“They are coming!” came the cry. “The enemy! They are coming again! Get to your defences! Prepare your arms! They are coming! They are coming again for another assault!”

Without thinking, Pablo padded to the trench and threw himself down into it. He watched the horizon fill and grow with the gathering of Austro-Hungarian soldiers charging towards them and he knew now the end truly was nigh. For there was nowhere else to go, neither forward nor back. They had gone as far as they were able and he had no more bullets left. And what was more, he knew that most of the men either side of him didn't have any either.

NINETY SEVEN

S
LOVENIA
. N
EARING THE
I
TALIAN
B
ORDER
.

Poré was aware of a shadow falling across him and roused himself from sleep to face whoever it was who had sought him out.

“What is it?” he asked, sitting up on the spot.

The clan leader dropped to his haunches, so that he was level with Poré, and stared hard into the gaunt Cardinal's eyes. The stench of the wolf surrounded him like a mantle, catching Poré hard in the back of his throat and making him gag.

“Why?” the man asked, ignoring Poré's reaction. “Tell me, why are you driven to fight these Priests you say are summoning the seven Princes of Hell? Why should it you care? They hunt you, like they hunt us, if what you have told us is true. Why should you wish to do the duty of the Catholic faith, when they have long turned you from their flock?”

Poré didn't speak immediately. Instead he turned his eyes to the earth and cast his mind back to when he was a young man, beating hard against the church door, as hard as his broken arm would allow.

“I was an Inquisitor,” he revealed, and the wretched man hissed and showed blackened rotten teeth, rearing back, his long gnarled fingers
splayed wide like talons about to strike. “For two months and only ever an acolyte.” The words seemed to momentarily quell the Hombre Lobo's anger. “I was forced to commit to their cause and, when I refused, they beat me, mercilessly, until one day they beat me too hard.”

Poré recalled the day he went to the Church to ask to be excused from the organisation, the memory still bitter. Still raw. “Cardinal Gílbert,” said Poré, and the pallid filthy man could tell at once it was a name loathed by the gaunt figure in front of him. “He wore a robe of gold to greet me that day, the day of hearing, but a cloak of black suited his soul better.”

Poré remembered the way the opulent Cardinal's glowering eyes had darkened and the scowl on his face deepened as he'd approached the dais, how Cardinal Gílbert had run his hand down his long black beard as he watched the broken man labour down the aisle towards him, while figures in the shadows inched into the light for a better vantage point. “I told them my wishes, that I wanted no part of the Inquisition, that I wished to return to the mainstream faith, to open worship. To lead services. To offer hope to the needy. To provide solace for the weak and afflicted within my local church. ‘Weak and afflicted like yourself?' the Cardinal spat, and the flanking Bishops made no effort to mask their laughter.”

The crouched man before Poré sneered and felt the rage of deception seize him. “So this desire for revenge, it's solely because of how you were made to feel, ridiculed when you asked to leave their employment?”

But Poré hardened. “No. It's because of what they took from me afterwards.”

“And what was that?”

“My family.” In the dark of the cavern, Poré's face blackened to match the shadows around him. “They took my parents, my brother, for what purpose I cannot, or do not dare to think, only that they assured me that my failings would be branded onto my family for eternity.”

“And so you plotted your revenge?”

Poré nodded.

“And yet still I do not understand. If you wished revenge upon the Inquisition, upon this Cardinal Gílbert, why does this summoning fascinate you? How is it that it drives you and compels you to act? Why do you not seek out Cardinal Gílbert yourself?”

“Who says I have not?”

“I don't understand,” growled the wolf.

“The one who committed the final excommunication upon your kind
and Cardinal Gílbert are the same person, the High Priest who is to perform the final ritual on the topmost pinnacle of the Carso.”

NINETY EIGHT

T
HE
I
TALIAN
F
RONT
. T
HE
S
OČA
R
IVER
. N
ORTHWEST
S
LOVENIA
.

All the fighting that had gone before, every barrage, every charge, paled into insignificance ahead of the horror which filled the Karst Plateau now. Pablo clutched his rifle as a club, no longer as a firearm. It seemed that few in the Third Army in fact had any ammo left, and those that did used their allocation sparingly. Instead soldiers fabricated themselves weapons from whatever they could lay their lands on, barbed wire wrapped about clubs, nails driven hard through sticks, the handles of axes finished to a sharp stabbing point, brutal barbarous things for an army long brutalised by the torturous climb, reduced to animals in every sense.

And it also proved true that the Austro-Hungarians had very little ammunition either, two armies starved on that mountaintop, that bowl of blood, save for their fists and whatever weapons they could fashion themselves. So the battle of these two great seas of men, fifty thousand strong on both sides, crashed into each other, fists, feet, blades, maces, the butts of rifles being their tools of war, only the occasional crack of a bullet punctuating the terrible clamour. They were marooned on the plateau with only their anger and their hate and their brawn.

Knuckledusters and knives, anything which could be wielded quickly and still be delivered with force, proved the most efficient. Very occasionally an explosion rocked one corner of the plateau, a bomb thrown, annihilating several soldiers on both sides. The butt of a rifle or the blade of a spade was often enough to take an enemy down. There was no need to hit such an enemy twice. If the blow was good, it would do for him, and if he only went over onto his knees or side, the ground and the relentless feet would pound him slowly to death. There was no need to waste time and energy on one mortally wounded. Pablo soon learnt all this, that it was more important to worry about those who weren't being slowly crushed on the floor of the plateau.

Soon it was impossible to tell who was who, everyone so drenched in blood that soldiers paused, looking for a sign to tell friend from foe, so that they didn't kill an ally. Fighting became more a game of wits and luck than skill. Everything turned red, a slick, stinking convulsing mess in the mounting heat of the day.

And all the time Pablo fought surrounded by a slowly dwindling shield of Italian soldiers, as if they were his own bodyguards, his protectors.

NINETY NINE

T
HE
I
TALIAN
F
RONT
. T
HE
S
OČA
R
IVER
. N
ORTHWEST
S
LOVENIA
.

It felt to Isabella that they had been walking in infernal darkness for days. After leaving the train, clapped in handcuffs and led like a prisoner by Georgi, he had commandeered a truck which had taken them the last few miles to the foot of mountain she supposed was the Carso, the place Tacit had spoken about so often. They'd been met by others there, awkward wicked-faced people, with a hurried excited look about them. They'd watched her as if she was some great prize that had been obtained for their pleasure.