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I never thought I’d become part of the crane gunners. Figured I’d just stay at home and be a blacksmith like my dad, or at most be a town guard in some sleepy town near the mountains. But hey, they need strong women to lift those shields, and if there’s one thing I’ve always been, it's strong. And it’s not like I was going to refuse the posting. With the money they pay us, my dad could lose both his arms tomorrow and never work again and I could still comfortably provide for him, and then some. Suppose it’s one of the perks of being in an elite unit.
That’s where I met Jingyi, obviously. We were all getting assigned our partners. The people we were supposed to travel with, eat with, share a tent with, fight with. One of the most important, and nerve-wracking, moments in our entire lives as soldiers. Honestly, I hated her guts at first. I’ve always been quiet. Never really know what to say in a conversation, I always flub my words. And well, fuck up a few conversations in a small town and your reputation’s gone to tatters soon enough. So I always preferred just being in the smithy and working, nice and quiet-like. It gave me a distaste, or, well, more of a distrust for talky people. And Jinyi was talky. Immediately came up to me and started going off like a spinning wheel.. And Emperor’s balls, the puns. Don’t get me started on the puns. At the end of the day I had half a mind to desert, but well, puns are still better than getting hung from the Bastion’s battlements, so I stayed
The first thing they teach you how to do in the crane gunners is not how to shoot a gun or to hold your shield or anything to do with the battlefield. No, the first thing they do is teach you how to set a trap to catch food. And to dress wounds. To start a fire and pitch a tent as well, if you somehow hadn’t learnt that in your previous unit, but that’s unlikely. So yeah, you learn how to go camping. Because the first thing you’ll do with your partner is being dropped in the wilderness somewhere, with some basic supplies. And then you both have to stay there for a month. Just you and them. Only way out is the flares you get for emergencies, which gets someone to come find you. But that’s only for major emergencies. “We’re getting attacked by a feral pack of manticores” kind of emergencies.
It’s a test of character. You and your partner are alone with each other for weeks, dealing with mosquitoes, downpours, angry tigers, the lot. Either you come out of it with an unbreakable bond, or you never want to talk to each other again. I was sure the latter was going to be the case with Jinyi.
But well… she surprised me. There’s a reason I like to call her a mould when I’m feeling petty: she grows on you. Not immediately mind you. I was seriously considering banging her head in with a river rock on the third day if she made one more joke about trees and other long and hard things.
But well… y’know, there’s a simple way that bloodletters beat you. No clever tactics, no showy magic, no nonsense. They just keep on coming and coming and coming until you can’t take it anymore and you’re overrun. You can be in the strongest fortress in Cathay with the best defenses, that’s not going to dissuade them.. Either you kill them all, or they kill all of you. And well, if I was the fortress, Jinyi was the demons, and you can’t kill words. At least not in a way that won’t get you court-martialed. At some point I just… started laughing along, because that’s easier than getting annoyed all the time, especially when she’s picking porcupine quills out of your ass after you pissed one of them off during your hunting trip.
And well, you know, any girl who picks porcupine quills out of my ass, even though I can get very loud and very creative with my swear words while in pain, is a girl worth keeping around. By the end of it, we were the best of friends, and the real training could begin.
I won’t lie. Jinyi isn’t the sharpshooter of the regiment. Nor is the fastest. But I will bet all my money on her being the most steady one. She keeps talking during the shooting and I think that’s what helps. She just starts rambling about that shopkeep who swindled her out of some money in the market for what he promised was good wine from the coastal provinces but was actually just cheap moonshine from the neighbouring town, the same story she’s told a thousand times already, and as if she’s just talking to a friend in a tea house. And throughout it all, She’s shooting like a machine. Load, aim, fire. Load, aim, fire. Load, aim, fire. And repeat until the last of the buggers is dead or we’re ordered to fall back.
It helps me too, honestly. The thing is, the job of shieldbearer is the most nerve wracking of the two, I firmly stand by that. When you’re the gunner, you’ve got the weapon. You can do something actively. Deal with any incoming dangers as best as you can. That’s not the case for the shieldbearer. You just sit there, crouched to the ground, keeping the shield and it’s pins firmly planted in the ground and steady for your partner so she can do her job. You make sure no incoming hits destabilize it, nor any gusts of wind or shocks in the earth or anything like that. And throughout it all, you have no idea what’s going on. Only the chaotic sounds of battle in your ears and the hardwood and steel in front of you. You can’t ever risk a look for fear of upsetting the shield, especially not at the times when you’re most likely to want to look, during a full on charge or assault. It’s easy to panic, to get something in your head. All of us deal with it in different ways. I know some who’ve learnt from the priests how to meditate and focus their mind. Some others have a strict deal with their partner to tell them anything they see, so they can’t be caught unawares. Some even have a habit of singing. I have a friend who sat through an entire bloodletter charge while singing “The big bald tiger went a-roving”! But I just listen to Jinyi reel off her familiar stories, steadfast and sure no matter what sounds I hear around me. I keep the shield steady, sure, but she’s the one who keeps us both grounded.
It’s quite expected for crane gunners to get involved with each other. Not that it’s mandatory, mind you. Hell, some in our regiment even have spouses outside! But it’s hard to maintain anything with anyone outside the army. After all, we’re moved around so much, from this battlefield to the next, all along the length of the empire. It’s hard to manage anything but passing flings with people outside our regiment. And well, nothing gets you quite as close to each other as facing death on a battlefield.
It’s a funny story actually, how me and Jinyi got together. She has… a flair for the dramatic, as you can probably tell from everything I’ve said so far. And she really, really does not like fighting Nurgle demons. She can handle regular wounds and stuff like that, but something about all the rot… it gets to her. Makes it hard for her to eat anything that’s remotely mushy or smelly for days. But that had been exactly what we’d been doing. Some demon rift had opened and the entire land had turned into one big, fetid marsh. Even on the firm hill we were positioned on, the ground was soggy like overly warm cream cheese. It fucking sucked. So once we’d sent those blistery cunts back to where they came from and we were getting ready to go back to our camp, she jumped into my arms. Insisting I should carry her because she was not stepping on ground that could erupt into pus at any moment.
Y’see, I used to be quiet, and usually I still am. But I’ve learnt to banter back to Jinyi over the years, so naturally that’s what I did. I told her that if she wants me to carry her like that, she should either lose a leg or marry me. Instead of getting some snarky answer back, well… she got the local priest to do the ceremony the next day. It was all very… her. Though I’m still not sure how she managed to get the parrots there in time.
I haven’t regretted it since, honestly. Not that things are terribly different now, mind you. In a lot of ways it’s still the same as before. I have her back, she’s got mine, literally. We’re not exclusive either. We’ve both had flings on the side, and a long-standing agreement that if lady Ying ever propositions one of us the other will do it without a second thought. But at the end of the day we know we’re each other’s priority. And that’s just… nice, y’know? To have this one person who not only wants to, but plans to live and die with you, no ifs or buts about it. And it doesn’t have to be more than that. No kids, no imaginary perfect retirements to a farm in the east, no great fates awaiting you. After all you’re just two soldiers who choose to love each other throughout all the chaos. It’s simple, but it’s nice.
So… yeah, you can imagine how fucking shitty it feels when you think that that person has died.
I’m a strong woman, as I said. And I think I’m a damn good shieldbearer. But I have my limits, I’m just human. I think. I don’t know there were always rumours grandmother fucked a monkeyman. But that was- I’m getting off track. Point is, I can’t bear everything. And even the most experienced shieldbearer has trouble standing against ogre cavalry charging. You get like one volley in and if you don’t retreat then while some jade warriors with pikes form up behind you, you’re in trouble. Only thing you can do then is pray that the spirits are interested enough in you to keep you alive.
We didn’t have jade warriors behind us that time.
It was a chaos. We’d turned to run and at first she’d been right beside me, and then she was gone, and an ogre was riding past me, laughing his ass off. I remember turning around but battle is a mess, especially during a rout. There’s dust and cries everywhere and those ogres were milling about and I just.
I remember on instinct trying to calm myself and listen, just like I’d gotten used to. Try to hear Jinyi telling me about something that had happened in her father’s shop when her little brother had gotten into the fireworks supply. And I just couldn’t. I heard nothing and. Well, the rest was all a blur. I’m not even sure how I managed to get out of it alive, considering I must’ve been wandering around lugging that shield with me without any sense of where I was, that’s how panicked I was when she wasn’t there anymore.
At some point the Longma knights showed up. Scared the ogres off, and soon the whole horde was in retreat after their tyrant had been slaughtered. And I remember wandering the battlefield looking for her, trying to find the spot where she’d suddenly gone. Emperor, I must’ve looked half mad to anyone watching. Though I suppose soldiers wandering the battlefield all disheveled is not so unusual as the stories like to say…
I’m not sure what I was going to do. I mean, I couldn’t find her body anywhere and… ogres, they have a reputation y’know? A well-earnt one. I thought they’d taken her with them, as provision. And the thought of Jinyi being made into sausages in some filthy, reeking camp, without there being anything I could do about it was absolutely maddening. I vaguely remember looking around for something else. A tree? A weapon? I’m not sure and honestly I don’t like to think back on it. Suffice it to say I would’ve done something very dumb if Yazhu hadn’t come to find me. She’s a good kid, Yazhu. Was a fresh recruit at the time, very eager. I think that might’ve been her first battle. Apparently she’d seen the wounded get dragged back to camp and Jinyi had been one of them. I’m not sure she said much else than that because as soon as I heard that I was already running towards the tents.
I must’ve looked like a mess barging into the healer’s tent. Jinyi certainly seemed to think so. The first thing she said was some dumb joke about whether I’d switched careers to become a hobgoblin shaman. I would’ve punched her if she didn’t already have several broken ribs and difficulty breathing, so I just settled for crying and holding her hand instead. Yeah yeah, it was pathetic. But I honestly couldn’t care in that moment. My wife was going to be okay and that was all I needed to know.
Anyway, she’s better now. Healed right up. Apparently she’d just fallen unconscious after that mournfang knocked her over. She didn’t get trampled in the melee, Emperor knows how. A part of me thinks it must’ve been divine intervention saving her because that’s the only explanation. But however it happened, she’s safe now, and that’s all that matters to me. We’re both here, alive, and together.
Or, well, for now anyway. We haven’t had any such close calls since. But well… there’s rumours along the Bastion. We all know something big’s going to come out of the north. It won’t be stopped by a quick, bloodless skirmish or two. People are going to die, we’re going to die. And I don’t want that. I don’t want Jinyi to die and I don’t want Jinyi to have to live without me.
I know I don’t have much to offer. Some incense. Some weird foreign coins I got from a caravan master. That’s all. I know that those… things in the north must’ve sacrificed several times the value of that in human blood by now. But it’s all I can offer. Well, that, and my soul. For whatever that’s worth. I know a soul for two lives is a bad deal but… it’s the best I can do.
Just keep us alive, whoever’s listening. That’s all I ask. Just keep us alive.