The air outside the wall was colder than the cellar earth, but Sergeant Berr had not felt cold since the winter of the Great Frost, thirty years before the young showman died on the blue core seal.
He felt the hard crust of frozen mud give way under his right boot-heel. He felt the weight of his iron mail shirt dragging at his collarbones, its rusted links rasping together with a sound like dry river gravel being turned by a shovel. And tucked firmly beneath the crook of his left elbow, resting against the faded orange wool of his regimental tunic, he felt the smooth, cold curve of his own cranium.
Through the empty eye sockets of the skull under his arm, the world had no color.
It had no green in the moss on the limestone boulders and no red in the sunrise breaking over the Black Crags. It was a world drawn in shades of ash, iron, and white frost. From his rib-level view, two hundred paces down the glacis, the front rank of the Royal Border Infantry looked like a gray timber palisade whose stakes were shivering in an easterly gale.
Above him, thirty feet up on the scarred stone of the west curtain wall, four men stood watching from the arrow embrasure.
