The snow takes the sound out of everything. That is the first thing he notices in black: the snow has made the world quiet in a way that a camp or a medical tent or a mess hall is never quiet. He knows the difference. He has stood guard in empty woods. Empty woods have a floor of small noise under them - settling, dripping, the dry tick of cold in the branches - and this does not have that. The world has been quieted, smothered gently in its sleep.
It would be more unnerving if he weren't so focused on his hands.
The musket is spent. He fired it - he is fairly sure he fired it, there was the kick and the white flash that took his night-eyes with it and has not given them back - and a spent musket is a club, a long awkward stick, sometimes, but not today, a Roman's spear. To make it a musket again takes a minute and a half on the parade ground in daylight with a sergeant counting. He does not have daylight. He doesn't have moonlight or starlight. He has an overcast sky that swallows the moon just as the snow swallows the ground. An empty, sightless grey in Heaven and in Earth.
The cartridge first. His fingers find the box at his hip, find the paper twist of it, and they are stupid with cold, they are somebody else's fingers operated at a distance through thick wet wool, and he has to look at them to know they have closed. He brings the cartridge to his mouth. He bites. The powder is bitter, and grit, and he holds it behind his teeth, and does not swallow, and does not breathe it, and this is the part where, on the parade ground, the sergeant says prime, and so he primes - tips a little of the held powder into the pan, by feel, by the memory in his hands, too much or too little, he cannot see the pan, he can only trust the hands - and closes the frizzen. The click of it is enormous. The click of it goes out into the birdless, verminless quiet and does not come back. The world is empty here, it says to him. The world is empty and asleep. The world is not breathing.
Set it down, barrel into snow, butt against chest. Hands.
The rest of the powder down the barrel. He tips the cartridge, the paper of it, the lead ball still in the twist, and he feels the grit go down into the dark of the bore and he follows it with the paper, wadding it with his thumb, and now the ball, and he is breathing through his mouth because his nose has stopped working in the cold, and his breath is loud, his palms are wet with snow, and his heart is beating with recoil. He tries to keep his breathing silent, but his vital organs have better plans. Huff, and puff.
Next. The ramrod. This is the long part. This is the part that takes time.
He draws it from the stock - the whisper of metal on wood, too loud - seats it against the ball, and he pushes. The snow is on the back of his neck now, gone to water, going down under his collar, and he pushes the ball home in long even strokes the way he was taught, home, all the way home, a ball not seated will burst the barrel in your hands. Each stroke is a sound, a dull ringing wooden sound down the length of the iron, and he is making a sound every second now, a lighthouse of sound in the turned-down dark, but the work cannot be done quietly. It has never, in history of man, been done quietly.
His hands have started to go faster.
He notices this for lack of other things to notice, as the snow has taken most of his ears and the dark has taken most of his eyes and the cold has taken his mouth and tongue, for the most part. All he has left is hands, and the hands have decided to hurry. He did not tell them. They are seating the ball in strokes that are no longer even, that are quick and short and getting quicker, and his ears - he becomes aware of his ears, of how hard they are working, of how they have been straining the whole time at the wall of quiet, leaning on it, waiting for it to give - and he understands that the hands can hear something the rest of him has not been allowed to know yet.
He draws the ramrod out, wasting seconds in the process. He returns it to its place along the barrel.
He does not look up. There is no use looking up. There is, in no sense that matters, anything to see. There is the rough grit of a tree root underfoot, to his right. If he moved rightward, he would be braced against a tree. But, then again, in every direction, if he moved in a straight line he would eventually come upon a tree.
The only thing he trusts is his hands, and the orientation of his body in space, and even those are beginning to go. The lack of light has made it impossible to determine up from down, front from back, side from side. And his snow-soaked hands are beginning to lose feeling, taking even that away from him.
He brings the musket to his shoulder. The butt of it finds the hollow there, the place it has worn for itself over a year of this, and it fits. His cheek comes down to the wood. The barrel goes out level into the dark, and his finger finds the trigger and lies against it, not pulling, ready.
He levels out the weight at the end of the gun, until he feels, from memory, that the barrel is parallel to the ground. And he waits.