Exit Kingdom

to the battle below.Something in him clicks, some knife switch jams into place, and he is suddenly full of
purpose and movement. He scans the structures, mapping them in his mind, determining which ones would be most likely to hold his brother and the Vestal.
    Then he clambers down the face of the hill, sliding much of the way on the dirty ice, controlling his fall by grappling onto the tree branches and draggingthe truncheon behind as a kind of
brake. He slides to the base of the hill behind one of the wide, flat buildings where piles of chopped wood are stacked against the cinderblock wall.
    Before he can think what to do next, one of the foot soldiers speeds around the corner and comes to a halt three feet from where Moses stands. The soldier, little more than a boy, aims his gun
instinctivelyat Moses’ head – but there is fear and trepidation in the boy’s eyes, and he does not pull the trigger immediately.
    I ain’t with them, Moses says.
    I’m shooting you, the boy says, his voice trembling, as though a declaration of violence were the same thing as a bullet.
    You ain’t got to, Moses says. I ain’t one of them. I’m here for my two charges is all. My brother and a red- head lady.After I got em, you can burn this place to the ground
with my good wishes. You seen em?
    The boy’s hand shakes, the pistol remains fixed on Moses’ forehead.
    Hey, Moses says. You hearin me? Let go that trigger. Come on now.
    Something in the boy’s face twitches. He is paralysed. He could fire or not fire at any moment. Moses does not like his fate to be at the hazard of nervous chance.

    Goddamnit, Moses says.
    Then he raises his own pistol with practised speed and fires two shots at the boy that make charred holes in his chest and cause him to convulse as if suffocating on air that is no longer
breathable. The boy’s hand, in extremis, squeezes and fires too, but Moses drops in the same motion and lets the bullet fly over his head.
    Then the soldier boy collapses facedown on the ground. Wisps of his hair are stirred lightly by the wind.
    It didn’t have to go this way, Moses says to the corpse.
    There is arbitrary death by nature, which Moses recognizes is everyone’s equally shared hazard. And then there is arbitrary death by the foolishness of man. And this is something Moses
cannot stomach.
    He checks the magazine of his pistol, and he hefts themassive bladed instrument in his opposite hand – and then Moses Todd leaps out from behind the building and into the fray. And
that’s when he begins to fight.
    *
    The icy earth melts with the steam of warfare, the hot spilled blood mingling with the snowy mud in rivulets of dirty pink like the stain of old wedding roses. The ground is
slippery with gory melt as Moses moves forwardthrough the battle, swinging the cudgel this way and that, firing his pistol with the other hand. He sends the cudgel in a wide arc to his left,
knocking a slug’s head clean off its shoulders, while with his right hand he fires twice at a bandit wielding a sword – the first bullet thunking into his chest and the second piercing
his neck, sending a plume of blood splashing to the ground.He swings the cudgel back around and catches a ragged rifle-carrying woman in the stomach. When he pulls the weapon free, most of her
guts, tangled in its blades, follow. The next time he swings it upwards, it catches a massive, thick-headed slug under the chin, and a rain of shattered teeth go tip-tapping to the puddled
ground.
    Moses does his best to avoid the uniformed men, for he knowsthem to be soldier instruments of a wider order and that they would not kill him if they knew who he was. But he also knows that to
them he looks like one of the bandits, one of Fletcher’s men – and it is a circumstance of war that you cannot stop to palaver about the whys and wherefores of things. So when the
soldiers do threaten, he kills them too. And, he supposes, this is as right as anything– because it is just as likely that, on any given day, he would be on one side as another. He is a
soldier and a reprobate, a lawman and a transgressor. So it makes no difference, at any moment in time, who dies by whose hand – as long as there is some line, capricious and invisible though
it may be, for the combatants to reach across.
    Death is everywhere. His ears are deafened by gunfireand screaming voices.Women and children, too – for the bandits have raised their kind to be warriors. Women with throwing