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He lifted the butt of the gun high in the air and smashed it with it. The spike twisted and dug into the barrel base. He struck it again, pushing it further into the hole. He struck it once more and a long split ran up the stock. The spike was nearly flush with the vent now, its mass having been molded by the strikes to the dimensions of the hole. The cannon was crippled. If they had to accept defeat, they might at least leave no spoils behind.
    For an instant, looking at the ruined stock of the ancestral weapon, he thought to bring it down on his own man, drive his nose like a spike. In the next, he thought to dump the gun. But in the one after, he came away with it—perhaps it could be fixed—down the mountain with his men, the broken ones too, to ground that was still solidly theirs.

3
    The low-e rumble of bowed double basses filled the space. Sustained Es in higher registers, from a pair of cellos and a viola, joined those nearly subsonic tones, a timbral complication to the accord of pitch. Of the basses, Edward Larent’s was distinct. It was miked. The signal ran through an overdriven amplifier coupled to a nondescript speaker cabinet belonging to the little Halsley café. As the sextet held the E, Larent leaned into one of several pedals at his feet, loosing a pitched growl, still an E. It enveloped the few dozen guests. He drew the volume down with another pedal, level with the other instrumentalists, though the tone was still thick with distortion.
    A seven-note figure in a minor key cascaded from his bass. The rest—first the viola, then the cellos, and finally the other double basses—adopted ascending figures of the same length, interlocking with Larent’s, and a guttural counterpoint replaced the droning Es.
    Stagg sat at one of the tiny metal tables at the edge of the darkened café, consumed. The sextet navigated a series of variations, Larent’s bass growing rawer, more ragged, from one to the next. The phrases crowded Stagg’s thoughts, reoriented them, brought them the veneer of structure before collapsing them down to a measureless point.
    The music quieted for a moment, but given the circumstances, her voice could only be remote.
    “I never said I wanted to meet them,” she said. “As if I’d have anything to say.”
    He looked hard into the dark and made out Renna’s face in the fringes of lamplight at a table three from his. Her chair was pulled back from it, and her words were for a figure, a woman, he thought, by the silhouette of hair, standing even further from the penumbra.
    The music stopped. A wave of applause rose and fell as the players cleared the stage, all but Larent. The cellists came down the three or four steps on the left of the stage and sat at a table near Renna, nodding at her as they sat. The contrabassists joined them while the violist, a squat man in a woolly blue sweater, headed toward the door, lighter and cigarette in hand.
    “You’ve been here,” Stagg said, standing above her now
    “Yes and where were you!” She got up and kissed him, grabbed his hands, wrapped up his fingers and squeezed. He brought his hands together, hers in them, and extended his forearms to keep her where she was. The nausea, the buzzing head, the discarded afternoon, all for naught. At least he’d salvaged what he could, writing through the hangover, after he’d woken as night was falling.
    “You said you weren’t coming.”
    “Why didn’t you answer? It was just drinks in the end, no dinner. But you weren’t even here!”
    “I was.” He pointed over his shoulder vaguely.
    Her eyes rolled but she was smiling. “You didn’t check your phone.”
    “I left my phone at my apartment last night. You remember this?”
    “Oh!” she said, angry with herself, or him, he couldn’t tell.
    She hugged him. “Can’t you just be glad I’m here?” She put her cheek flat against his chest. “And how much have you had, my love? I can smell it through your shirt.”
    “Some.” He