Band of Angel (39 page)

One of the cooks, with a large suppurating burn on his hand, threw some tea into the greasy water that the meat had come out of, and then stirred it with a huge wooden spoon. He looked white with fatigue and was shrieking like a madman.

A gust of wind cleared the kitchen of smoke for a moment. “Saucepan!” she shrieked, “I need a saucepan.” But the man shook his head before the words were out. All she could see was a pile of greenish-looking meat on the floor and one or two scrawny chickens waiting to be killed.

Sloshing back across the quadrangle she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Sam had gone before she could ask the question she dreaded, but if it was true that an army marched on its stomach, all of them were doomed. There were too many men here and not enough food, and not enough places to land it. Some things in the end were very simple.

Balaclava, November 1854

Screaming, the black horse fell down through the sky. Strapped in a canvas surcingle, he was flung from the ship, carried through the frozen air like a giant insect and dropped into a small boat in the harbor below. While snow turned to ice on his eyelashes, his mane, his tail, he stared, stupefied, at the men above him, and at the sea. He tried to brace his legs, and then fell on his knees, banging the side of his head on the boat. His stomach was rioting; voices jabbered at him, poked him in the sides with a sharp stick, then threw him overboard again into the sea, where he tasted saltwater and sewage and human remains. Then, a tall, dark man rushed into the water and stood beside him. “Good boy,” he said, listening to the sobbing breaths, “Good lad. You’re all right.” He kissed the horse on the neck. He told him what a clever boy he’d been. They stood absolutely still for a moment while the man put his face close to the horse, absorbing its shock and distress. Deio was so relieved he was smiling. Midnight had landed, stunned but without a scratch.

He was three hundred miles north of where Catherine was. If he’d wanted it, he could have sold his horses quickly and been in Scutari within weeks. His ship, the
Robert Lowe,
was even going there after Balaclava. But he didn’t want it, not yet. She was there of course, always, practically part of his body and blood. He’d felt a kind of pure pain, almost as if he could die of her after she’d left, and a bitter taste, too. Over and over again he’d thought about the night in Llangollen: his clumsiness, his drunkenness, his hunger; but then he would remember how she’d turned to him in the dark
and how she’d looked at him. He’d seen it, felt it, and that was what confused him and made him angry with her.

She’d so confused him: so much the lady sometimes, and at others the wild girl blaming him for her wildness. She’d not played fair, and other people had got hurt, too. Her sister was pale as a ghost at her own wedding—the rumor was she’d only married that dull plodder Gabriel to comfort the father who’d lost a wife and a daughter in one year.

“Whoooa! Whoooa! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!” Bonny fell with a wallop into the waves and let out a terrible groan. Poor bloody bastards, here was a trip they’d never forget. The cob showered him with freezing water as she hauled herself up. He rubbed her head, crooned nonsense, “You’re here now, silly girl, swimming girl, brave girl.” The horse relaxed a little, but he didn’t. To watch his horses falling through space like this, one by one, was slow torture, and yet everything felt so speeded up now: the landing, being here at last after so many days at sea. From the hills above them he could already hear the crump of firearms, the whirr and hiss of shells. So quick!

It was startlingly cold. His hands, blue and useless, fumbled with the horse’s head collar and his eyes and nose stung as though they’d been slapped. But it felt good to be outside—he’d hated being shut up almost as much as the horses did. The beach he led Bonny along was full of sewage and smelled of rotten eggs. A small crowd standing on the pier gaped at him: the man who plucked horses out of the sky. Bonny sniffed the freezing air. She was a tough mare and she was coming around, but he had to hand her to a stranger, a thing he’d normally never do, while he ran back to the ship where another horse was falling.

Magic this time, an Irish draft, flying down like a huge dark bat through the sky.

“Jesus Christ, Magic, keep your head up!” Deio called. The horse looked numb with shock, its nose covered now in the yellow froth of the harbor.

“Nice hossis, mister,” called a man on the pier. “Many more to come?”

Only now he noticed how odd these people looked in their fezzes and
forage caps and long greatcoats, parts of uniforms teamed with baggy Turkish trousers. Lots of foreigners, too—French, Turkish, English—babbling away, staring at him. He hated them seeing his horses, look so wretched and undone.

“Three down, seventeen to go,” he said shortly. “Watch that mare!”

He could never understand why people were so switched off around horses: they had so many ways in which to hurt you—a stamp on the foot that could leave you hobbling for weeks, an agonizing bite, a kick that could be to kingdom come. You had to learn to think before they did.

“I’ll feel calmer when Moonshine’s down,” he thought, watching her fall with a clump into the boat. The knock-kneed gray he’d ridden beside Catherine on the drove was his favorite now. Companion and soul mate. She was in her sling now; he saw her looking for him. She seemed to stay in the sky forever, screaming and falling. When he saw her get up, he could have cried like a baby in gratitude.

The seven and a half hours it took to unload the rest of his horses taught him one fundamental lesson of war: everything took longer than expected.

After the fifth horse had landed, a furious official told him he was holding up four other ships in the harbor that had been due to land supplies before him. Deio told him the horses would panic and bolt if they left them much longer in tiny stables on board without their companions. The man said that was his problem. He left him in no doubt at all about how unimportant a civilian was. Deio raced down to the hold again.

Tom Pymn, the tiny lad who’d been helping him with the horses, was there. He was one of sixty hastily assembled recruits going to plug up some hole in a regiment in Balaclava. Seventeen years old, his one passion in life was horses, although he’d never owned one. With some training, he’d been useful in the mornings, his skinny shoulders straining as he hurled heaps of droppings over the deck rails into the sea. During several bad storms on the way out, when
the floors got wet and slippery and the horses fell, and sometimes fought and screamed, the boy had moved among them, surprisingly bold, crooning at them, patting them with the entranced absorption of a lover.

When he got down Tom had changed into his new uniform. His forage cap still had creases in it where it had been folded; his new boots were streaked with horse manure.

“Silly buggers outside,” said Deio. “They think horses are the same as sacks of coal.” The boy said a horse wasn’t a sack of coal, and a tremor of feeling seemed to go through him. He put his arms around Honeypot, his favorite. He buried his head in her mane.

Deio told him to watch out, that he’d have plenty of time to mess up his uniform when they landed.

“Funny thought, in’t it?” said the boy, trying to look brave and unconcerned. “I could be in the trenches tonight. Where will you be?”

“Not far from Sebastopol,” said Deio, as if he were in the habit of riding toward enemy lines quite regularly. “The Fifth Dragoons have some stables up there.” He pictured proper sheds and beds of straw. And then, he finished to himself silently, I’ll see some action and then go and see Lady Catherine and tell her what’s what. He often addressed her more sternly in his thoughts than he really felt.

“I don’t know where I’ll be, do I, Honeypot?” The boy put his face next to the horse and closed his eyes. “I expect we’ll get our orders when we land.”

Deio wanted to put a hand on his shoulder but he didn’t.

“Have you ever fired a musket in your life?” Deio asked.

“Not yet.”

“I could give you a quick lesson.”

“I would like that.”

“Have you been on a march?”

“No.” The boy suddenly creased his face up and beamed as if this was a good joke.

“Well, Honey will cry her little eyes out tonight. She says you’re the only one who’s ever understood what a top horse she is.”

The boy could not joke about this. “I’ll miss her,” he said. “It’s been the best two weeks of my life.”

* * *

When they landed the rest of the horses in the late afternoon, two soldiers from the Fifth Dragoons were waiting to meet them. Deio tried not to feel shocked at their scruffy appearance: the mangy greatcoats, the tattered fez one wore, and his truly wretched horse. He wanted to find his earlier mood of excitement again, to start strong and stay that way.

The officer pleased him by admiring the horses. He’d have no trouble selling them, he said, money was just about the only thing they weren’t short of. He asked if any had been seasick on the way out. Deio told him horses couldn’t be sick, which was why the sea was so dangerous for them, they were either dead or alive and there was not much in between.

The adjutant frowned, annoyed he hadn’t known this himself.

“Well, I hope you’ve brought plenty of supplies with you, young man—this place is on the bones of its arse.”

Deio pointed toward the two packhorses weighed down with barley and oats. He was trained to provision, to imagine the worst.

“I won’t be here long,” he said.

The officer gave a hollow laugh. “Oh, won’t you indeed.” He looked down at the jumble of ships in the harbor.

They tied the horses one behind the other and rode through the main road of Balaclava toward the hills behind, dodging a stream of dirty brown water that ran down the street. The rocky hills, the robed men, the strangeness of it all, it was like something out of those Bible books his mother had read him, but it smelled more. When they came to a hovel with a few loaves of bread in the window, the Turkish shopkeeper rushed out at them yelling, “Yes plis Johnny bonno. Come inside! Come inside!”

Swaying and weary, the horses had no energy to shy at him, but made funny faces as their acutely sensitive noses examined the sick, sweet smell of Balaclava, that combination of badly buried corpses and rivers of sewage. Deio tried to close his mind to it, too, and to the emaciated men they passed on their way. He would do it all in stages. Get the horses up the hill. Make them dry and comfortable.

As they climbed, the duty officer, Captain Charles, made breathless conversation.

“Hard to believe this place was once a beauty spot, roses, grapes, so forth. Shit hole now.”

The dark hills in front of them suddenly boomed with a sound like thunder, and then there was a shrill whistling sound, sheweeeeeeeee.

“They’re shelling up there, a place called Sandbag Hill that the Cossacks want. Seen any action yet?”

Deio’s reply was interrupted by the appearance of two young cavalry officers, who admired the horses and then began a lengthy conversation with Captain Charles about some tavern they’d been to the night before.

“Sorry not to introduce you, Jones,” said Charles in an offhand voice as they rode away. “Now, where were we? Oh yes, action—have you seen any?”

The question annoyed Deio. No, you bastard, he thought, but I’ll be up to it if that’s what you’re wondering.

“Not yet.”

“Quite exciting really.” The officer’s pale eyes flickered. “It gets quite hot up there.”

“I’d like to help in any way I can,” said Deio.

“Help?” the man said, as if that was the last thing on anybody’s mind. “Well, action can be arranged if that’s what you mean,” he said smoothly, and stroked Bandit’s mane. “Give me a good price for that horse and I’ll arrange anything you like.”

Deio felt a hot surge of triumph. New boy he might be, but the first part of his plan was working.

At the top of the hill, the wind veered around from the north, cutting like steel.

“We’re lucky to have made it,” said the adjutant. “This road is often impassable.” Now Deio was on top and could see the whole harbor, he saw all the traps: the clogged muddy streets, steep hills, a tiny harbor already jammed with ships, the bottleneck entrance into the Black Sea beyond.