It could not have been ten minutes since they had hit the gate. They had shot, burned, chopped, slashed and stabbed their way up a quarter mile of snow-covered cobblestones, leaving nothing but flames, chaos, marauding warriors and bloody piles of meat in the snow behind them. RavenSong snarled at him approvingly and patted his butt, pointing to the top of the cobblestone street where half-dressed men gathered before the white painted house. Musketeers could be seen lighting their wicks, pike-men were readying their weapons. There may have been fifty men up there.

Take the lead man. Push it!

He looked behind them as they neared the top of the street. The squirrel ducked down onto his collar and chattered manically. He had 30 men left behind him and they were crashing into twice that many. He signaled for them to get triple file behind him. He then hefted the door in front of him and charged. As he slogged up the slippery snow-covered cobbles a tremendous roar blew out the lesser sounds of battle like a torrent putting out a fire. The ground beneath his feet quaked and his legs quivered.

That’s the powder magazine. Suck it up boy.

He roared and charged up over the crest with thirty screaming killers behind him. All at once, like the God of Thunder had smacked his improvised shield with his hammer, dozens of .75 caliber slugs slammed into the half-foot thick oak door. The shock almost knocked him back. Instead of falling back he threw the door before him and ran over it as he ripped out his pole-axe. The squirrel was now clutching the suspenders in the middle of his back and warriors were fanning out around him loosing arrows into the ranks of half-naked pike-men and musketeers who were clubbing their muskets.

Three rich looking men that seemed like they had been dressed up for a party—one with wine stains on the ruffle of his vest—were barking orders from behind the soldiers. A pike ripped right through his right chest and out the back. As he cut two heads in half in response the pike-haft snapped off and he was left with a spearhead sticking through him and out his back.

He waded into the ranks of men kicking and swinging his axe with his left hand. He did not aim or chop. He was just a big human pendulum describing an arc of death and dismemberment among small terrified half-dressed men. Half of the men who attacked him fell with arrows in their face. The other half he stomped and kicked, and cleaved.

He no longer possessed any sense of time and could hear nothing. His only senses were spatial and tactile. He did not even know if he was injured or fatigued. He just waded through the twitching falling bodies and gushing near-corpses to get to the rich men, the men with swords. They all three fixed him with terrified eyes and the smallest, wearing combed-over red hair but being only about twenty-years old, leveled a pistol at T.T. and fired. The slug hit his breast bone and stuck. He could vaguely feel something crack in the center of his chest but he felt fine.

Get to them boy!

He lurched forward as the rightmost man literally seemed to sprout arrows and become a porcupine. The man with the pistol lunged at T.T. with a slim sword and slipped in the snow, running the blade through the outside of T.T.’s left thigh. It felt like a novocaine injection at the dentist’s office. T.T. drove the iron-sheathed haft of his pole-axe through the top of the man’s head.

The haft became momentarily stuck. As he wrenched it free and attempted to extend his right hand to ward off the thrust of the tall black-haired gentleman he could tell that he was late. The man was lunging in surefooted at T.T.’s throat with a long measured step as his remaining men fell to knife thrusts and tomahawk blows behind him. T.T.’s axe lifted too slowly. His right hand extended not high enough, his shoulder not responding properly with a pike-head through it.

Here I come Grandmamma.

He decided just to walk forward like a dying monster and fall on the man so that he could not get away after he ran T.T. through. Then something amazing happened, or perhaps T.T. was becoming delusional by this point of the battle. A tiny tuxedoed form with a red striped tail dived from his head onto the face of the black-haired swordsman and began biting his face. As the man stalled his thrust and reached for his face T.T. brought the pole-axe around with one mighty-slow chop and cleaved the man in half just above the hips. The screeching head atop the spurting gut-spilling torso fell to the bloody cobbles. Unfortunately the squirrel was slammed to the hard surface half beneath the falling human head. The little hat went flying and the squirrel gave out a low cluck, even as T.T. fell to his knees and blood-crazed warriors danced around him like demons at Armageddon.

He sang on his knees up into the falling snow, “Swing low, sweet chariot…” and the world spun.