The bombardnt kept hamring the defensive lines south of the Western Dvina.
Tree lines, patches of forest, farm tracks, shell holes, dugouts, and the few cottages still standing were being beaten into the sa dark ruin. Above it all, the moon still shone through torn cloud cover, pale and indifferent, laying silver light over a world that shook under German fire.
To the north, Riga crackled with distant gunfire. Here and there, flas rose above the city roofs. But down in the forward Russian trenches, beneath the trees, the world had narrowed to mud, roots, screams, and the endless concussion of shells.
The trench was barely a trench at all.
It was a scar scratched into the earth by tired hands, shovels, bayonets, broken planks, and whatever else n had found to dig with. The walls were low. The bottom was wet. In so places a man could crouch. In others, he could only lie flat and hope the ground loved him enough to keep him alive. Roots clawed through the sides. Branches shook overhead each ti a shell landed close enough to make the trees jump.
Dirt rained constantly.
So did splinters.
So did pieces of n.
A shell burst sowhere to the left, close enough to slap the breath from every lung in the position. Mud flew in a black sheet. Farther down the line, a young soldier scread once, high and shocked, then began crying for his mother in a voice that sounded much younger than the body it ca from.
No one answered him.
No one could.
Another explosion struck farther back among the trees. Sothing heavy cracked—perhaps a trunk, perhaps a gun wheel, perhaps a man's spine. Branches crashed into the trench. Sowhere in the darkness, an officer shouted for the n to stay down. Soone else cried for help. Another man cursed the Germans and fired his rifle blindly into the night, as if anger could hit what fear could not see.
In one shallow section of the forward position, Private Jan Kowalski lay pressed into the mud beside a machine-gun ammunition box and tried very hard not to die.
He was nineteen years old, Polish by birth, Russian by paperwork, and a soldier by what he had co to regard as a series of catastrophic decisions.
Two weeks earlier he had still believed in revenge. In victory. In the idea that enough hatred for the Germans could harden a man into sothing useful. Since then he had learned that hatred did not stop artillery. Courage did not stop aircraft. Patriotism did not stop sniper bullets. The best answer to German fire, so far as he could tell, was to scatter, flatten oneself into the mud, and pray not too many friends died at once.
He wore a cap too large for his head and boots too small for his feet. One sock had worn through at the heel. A strip of white cloth was tied around his left arm because half the n in this section wore different coats, and no one wanted to be shot by his own side in the dark. So had proper uniforms. Others wore old army greatcoats, village jackets, civilian trousers, mismatched boots, scarves, and whatever else command had managed to gather.
Jan was almost certain so of those uniforms had been stripped from dead soldiers still lying in the fields before the line.
No one said that aloud.
Officially, they were the brave defenders of Riga.
Jan thought they looked like refugees who had been handed rifles and told to beco a wall.
He clutched the ammunition box as though its tal fra could sohow keep shrapnel from splitting his skull open when the ti ca.
Beside him, lying with one elbow propped in the mud near the heavy M1910 Maxim gun, Corporal Stepan Yegorovich Sokolov opened his jacket and pulled out a bottle of vodka.
Jan stared.
For several seconds he was so stunned that even the shellfire seed to fade.
Sokolov was older. Not ancient, but old in the way n beca old after too much road, too much hunger, too much weather, and too many officers. He had once been attached to logistics with the First Army, or so he claid. He knew wagons, quartermasters, stolen boots, missing crates, and the secret roads by which forbidden things appeared where they were officially not supposed to exist.
Now, because the army had lost too many trained n, he was a machine gunner.
He drew the bottle from inside his jacket like a priest producing a relic. The glass shook in his hand each ti the ground jumped. Moonlight and shell flashes caught the clear liquid inside.
Sokolov took a swallow.
His face twisted at the burn.
Then he sighed with deep satisfaction.
"Ah," he said. "That is better."
Jan blinked through falling dirt.
"What are you doing?"
Sokolov looked at him.
"What does it look like?"
"That is illegal," Jan hissed, almost whispering, as if the Tsar himself might be crouched sowhere in the shell smoke listening. "The Tsar forbade vodka. In the army too. You know this."
Sokolov stared at him for half a second.
Then he laughed.
"Co now. Unlike that German Iron Prince, the Tsar is not here at the front, is he?"
Jan stared harder.
Sokolov lifted the bottle slightly. "Besides, for a week's pay I got this from the captain himself. And I am not the only one."
"That does not make it legal."
"No," Sokolov said cheerfully. "It makes it available."
He offered the bottle.
"Drink."
Jan recoiled. "What?"
"Drink, young man. You are shaking like a rabbit."
"I am not."
"You are shaking like a rabbit whose mother was also a rabbit and whose father died of fright."
Another shell landed far enough away that the blast arrived only as a dull punch through the mud. Dirt pattered over their backs. Jan flinched. Sokolov did not, though the vodka sloshed dangerously close to the bottle's lip.
"There," Sokolov said. "See? Rabbit."
Jan swallowed. His mouth tasted of mud and fear.
Sokolov pushed the bottle closer. "Vodka gives courage. Eases the mind. Makes the waiting shorter."
"The waiting?"
"Yes." Sokolov nodded toward the darkness ahead of the trench. "The Germans will co soon. That is what artillery ans. They shake us, then they co. So we wait. We keep the gun ready. We shoot them when they appear. Simple."
Jan looked toward the dark field beyond the tree line.
Nothing there looked simple.
Sokolov took another drink himself, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and settled deeper into the mud beside the Maxim.
"My mother used to say after every storm, fair weather follows," he said. "After hardship, joy. After war, peace. So relax."
Jan stared at him in disbelief.
"You are insane."
"Probably," Sokolov said. "But I am warm inside."
He set the bottle on his stomach and rested one hand over it like a man protecting a sleeping child. The liquid inside trembled with every impact. Around them the earth shook, n scread, shells burst, trees cracked, and the whole night seed to be falling apart piece by piece.
Then, suddenly, the German guns began to fall silent.
Not all at once. The thunder rolled away by degrees, breaking from one endless hamring roar into scattered impacts, then distant echoes. Dirt still trickled from the trench wall. Smoke still crawled between the trees. n still moaned in the dark.
But the barrage was ending.
Silence did not return.
Beneath the fading explosions ca another sound: a low, chanical growl rolling out of the darkness beyond the German line. Engines. Many engines. A whole front of them, hidden behind smoke and moonlight, grinding forward through the torn fields.
Jan lifted his head slightly from the mud.
The vodka bottle on Sokolov's stomach still trembled, though no shell had landed close enough to shake it.
"What is that?" Jan whispered.
Sokolov's smile faded. He pushed himself up beside the Maxim and reached for the gun.
"Tanks," he muttered. "That will be tanks. The Germans are coming."
Then both n heard sothing beneath the growl.
Hooves.
Heavy, fast, deliberate hooves.
Sokolov froze.
Farther down the trench, other n began to stir, lifting their heads from mud and blankets.
"Listen…"
"Hooves?"
"No, that's impossible."
Sothing large was moving through no-man's-land. Not wandering. Not panicked. Coming straight for them.
Sokolov dragged the Maxim toward the open field, its mount scraping over mud and timber. Jan grabbed his rifle and worked the bolt with shaking fingers. Through smoke, moonlight, and powder haze, a shape erged.
At first it was only blackness moving inside blackness.
Then the moon caught tal.
A horse.
A huge black horse in armor, running through shell holes and broken wire as if the battlefield itself had made way for it.
Sokolov blinked. "A horse?"
Jan's mouth went dry.
"No," he whispered. "Not just a horse."
The stories ca back all at once. East Prussia. Broken units. Refugees. The Iron Prince's mount. The black stallion that bit, crushed, trampled, and charged through n like a bull through reeds. So called it Bucephalus, the ox-head, like Alexander's horse. Others called it the black bull. The beast that answered only one master.
"Shadowmane," Jan said.
For once, Sokolov did not laugh.
The na changed everything. A mont ago it had been an animal. Now it was a known terror running out of the dark.
Sokolov shoved the vodka bottle aside and leaned into the Maxim.
"Shoot it," he said.
Jan raised his rifle.
Down the trench line, n did the sa. Rifles lifted. Hands shook. Sokolov's finger tightened on the trigger.
"Kill the damned thing!"
Then the whole German line ahead of them lit up.
Not with muzzle flashes.
With headlights.
Hundreds of white lamps burst from the darkness behind Shadowmane, mounted on low iron shapes and tall armored trucks. The black field beca blinding glare. Smoke turned silver. Moonlight vanished beneath the sudden wall of artificial day.
The Russian trench cried out.
n threw arms over their eyes. Others fired from panic alone.
Sokolov cursed and squeezed the trigger. The Maxim ca alive, hamring into the light. Jan fired too, though he could see almost nothing now but white glare, smoke, and the black blur of Shadowmane vanishing into it.
All along the trench, rifles cracked.
n fired blindly because there was nothing else to do. The sudden blaze of headlights had turned the battlefield into a wall of white glare, and every frightened Russian along the line shot into it on instinct alone. Muzzle flashes flickered under the trees. The Maxim hamred in Sokolov's hands. Sowhere farther down the trench, another machine gun joined in, then another, their desperate fire swallowed by the rising roar of engines.
For a mont the black shape of the charging horse was lost in the light.
Then it vanished entirely.
Jan saw nothing but smoke, brilliance, and branches shaking overhead.
And then, from farther down the trench, a man scread.
It was not the cry of a man hit by a bullet.
It was the cry of a man who had seen sothing impossible at arm's length.
Another shout followed. Then a crash. Then the thud of sothing heavy striking earth and wood, followed at once by another scream cut short in mid-breath, as if a body had been kicked clean out of the world.
Jan turned toward the sound.
Shadowmane was there.
The stallion had co over the trench line in the darkness and confusion, clearing the shallow earthwork and broken roots as if it had not existed. Now he stood only a few paces away, half in moonlight, half in the pale wash of German lamps, frad by splintered trunks and shattered branches. Steam blew from his nostrils. His black barding was scarred by mud and debris. His eyes burned beneath the armored faceplate with a terrible, living intelligence.
For one frozen instant Jan only stared.
Then all the stories beca real at once.
"Oh, shit—"
He lurched to his feet in the narrow trench and stumbled backward, trying to work the bolt of his rifle. He had fired only a mont before into the glare and now his hands, slick with mud and fear, fumbled against the tal. The bolt jerked back. The spent casing flew free. He tried to ram the rifle up into his shoulder, but panic had already made him slow.
Shadowmane ca at him in a blur.
The stallion leapt forward, landing almost directly in front of him, close enough that Jan slled hot animal breath beneath the smoke. Then, with shocking speed, the great horse twisted sideways and lashed out with both rear legs.
Jan barely had ti to throw his rifle across his chest like a shield.
The kick hit anyway.
It smashed through rifle and body together and sent him flying backward like a stone from a catapult. For one impossible instant he seed to hang in the air. Then his body struck a low branch jutting over the trench, spun off it, and vanished into the darkness beyond in a wild cartwheel of limbs, broken wood, and dropped steel.
Sokolov heard the impact and turned from the Maxim.
He had only enough ti to see Shadowmane looming there in the trench, black and huge amid smoke and moonlight.
His mouth opened.
"What in the—"
That was all he got.
Shadowmane dipped his armored head, caught Sokolov by the coat and webbing, and flung him aside with the brutal contempt of a beast throwing away sothing small and irritating. The corporal flew out of the trench like a rag doll, struck one tree shoulder-first, rebounded in a limp spin through snapping branches, then hit another trunk with a crack and disappeared into the dark undergrowth.
The vodka bottle rolled free from the mud, struck the abandoned Maxim, and burst, spilling clear liquid into the dirt.
For a heartbeat Shadowmane stood alone in that shattered section of trench, snorting hot breath into the cold night while frightened Russian soldiers farther down the line stared in disbelief.
Then soone found his voice.
"The black horse!"
Another man shouted, louder, shriller, near panic.
"Shadowmane! It's Shadowmane!"
Rifles ca up all along the trench. A few n fired wildly. Muzzle flashes strobed between the trees. Bullets snapped through branches and kicked mud around the stallion, but Shadowmane was already moving again. He bounded out of the shallow trench, crashed through the broken tree line, and drove onward toward the north, toward Riga, as if gunfire, shell holes, and n were all equally beneath his notice.
And behind him, the German line ca alive.
The headlights that had blinded the Russians now advanced with terrible purpose. From out of the glare erged the squat, iron shapes of the Panzer I tanks, their tracks grinding over the torn earth, their turrets traversing as they ca. Around and behind them roared the armored trucks, machine guns mounted high and already spitting fire into the Russian positions.
Then the tanks opened fire.
Cannons bood.
Machine guns chattered.
A sheet of tracer and muzzle flash tore across the dark fields. Trees burst apart. Mud leapt into the air. Russian rifle fire was drowned beneath the full violence of the German advance.
Under moonlight, headlights, and gunfire, the whole front suddenly erupted at once.
And ahead of it all, Shadowmane ran on through smoke and ruin toward the city of Riga, while behind him the German breakthrough began in full.
User Comments
0 comments from readers