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For Wayne, Martin, Shane and Annie
If I should fall in far-off battle,
Cannons roar and rifles rattle,
Thoughts fly homeward – words unspoken,
Valiant hearts are oftimes broken,
Love farewell
– Love Farewell, John Tams/traditional
Contents
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1
I killed my first man today . . .
The air was hot, muggy with moisture, filled with flies. Emily had not known hot before she came to these swamps. Hot had once been pleasant summer days with the corn ripening gold in the fields. Hot had been the good sun and the rich earth, and the labourers scaring crows or bringing a harvest in; a picnic on the Wolds, with a blue, blue sky cloudless above. Hot was a fierce fire burning in the study when the world outside was chill. There must be another word for this all-encompassing heat.
Slowly she advanced, foot over foot through ankle-deep water. There was no sky here; the warp-trunked trees that clawed their way out of the muck on their knotted roots were jealous of the air above. Their overreaching branches intertwined like misers’ fingers until the light battered its way down to her through green on green. She was in the belly of the forest and it was eating her piece by piece with the lancets of mosquitoes and the questing suckers of great black lampreys that squirmed about her boots.
It was a wet, unrelieving heat that plastered her with sweat and then left the sweat in place there, un-drying and unable to leach out into air that was already saturated. It plastered her blouse to her skin, griming its crisp regulation white into grey. It pooled in the armpits of her red jacket with the gold stripes around the cuffs. How proud she had been when she was first given the uniform! Now she wanted nothing more than to lose it. It stifled her. It restricted the movement of her arms. The breeches clung to her legs. Water squelched in her boots with an unholy mingling of the swamp and her own perspiration.
Her fringe, cut short by those butchers that posed as military barbers, clung damp across her forehead, and still managed to be long enough to get into her eyes. She stopped and brushed it aside while balancing her gun awkwardly in one hand.
Abruptly she could not hear the others. She looked around, wild-eyed. To be lost out here, in this hell . . . she would never find her way back alone. Where Mallen should have been, there was no one. The dense, cloudy air of the swamp had swallowed him up, thick enough to shroud the trees only a few yards away. Where Mallen had been was now only the low-buzzing blur of a dragonfly with wings three feet across. It sparkled briefly, some fugitive ray of sun fracturing on its jewelled carapace, then went darting off between the trees.
To the other side . . . she saw Elise there, and felt such a rush of relief that she wanted to cry. The younger woman was fiddling with the strap of her helmet, trying to get the thing to stop sliding down over her eyebrows. Her gun was clasped between her knees. Elise looked up with the same panic Emily had just felt, spotted her and relaxed. She grinned, her teeth startlingly white in the green air, and began to make her way over.
Emily watched, knowing that she should disapprove, because this wasn’t the way they were supposed to do things. In truth she couldn’t care; no amount of training and procedure could brief you for these terrible swamps. Especially not Emily Marshwic, gentlewoman, who had never done a day’s work in her life.
Until now. Now she was rather making up for that.
‘Missing your fancy house, Marshwic?’ Elise asked in a husky stage whisper.
‘That’s Ensign Marshwic to you, soldier.’ But she couldn’t stop herself from grinning back. Right now she needed a bit of camaraderie far more than any privilege of rank.
‘Well, aren’t we full of ourselves.’ Elise was most of the way over to her, wading through the oily water, when they heard Mallen’s whistle.
Contact with the enemy.
Emily felt her heart seize up. What now? She could distantly see the line move forward, beyond Elise, who was now desperately fiddling with her helmet strap again, the crested steel wobbling as she tugged at it. Emily gestured for her to Come on, and began wading forward to keep her place in the line. She heard Elise splashing along behind her.
The air was so thick that the very geometry of the swamps, the pools and twisted trees, the ridgeways of roots, the rotten stumps, all loomed at random from the gloom around her. Her footing was uncertain: things squirmed beneath her tread, or the ground slid aside and gave way. Her progress was a series of stumbles that must be announcing her presence to every Denlander in the swamps. Elise, behind her, was even louder.
Emily reached a wall of arching roots that rose almost to her waist and took her bearings. Some kind of amphibian, slick and black, slid its four-foot length away from her into the water, and was gone.
There was a shot.
Elise, behind her, stopped still at last. The muted echo of the report died into the dank air.
Mallen whistled again. Attack!
‘Attack? Attack what? Attack the water? Attack the flies?’ Elise demanded.
‘Just attack!’ Emily knew the drill, and she hauled herself one-handed over the roots and splashed forward, hoping that she was still going the right way, that she had not been somehow turned around.
Another shot rang out, closer, and then a third in return fire. Aside from Elise, gamely blundering on behind her, there were no human beings in sight. It was a war between ghosts, a war in the next room. She wanted to shout at those unseen combatants: Where the hell are you?
Another two reports came from within the mist. Somehow she picked up her pace, despite the water and the mud, despite the weight of gun and pack and helm. Suddenly she was desperate to see this fighting, desperate not to be the one left out. Her comrades were shooting and dying somewhere amid this murk, but somehow she had broken the line. Now she had a loaded gun and the fighting was somewhere else.
She lurched on, tripping and stumbling and slipping, wrestling with footing that was constantly trying to betray her. There was a silver flare within the mist: she heard, th
rough the dense air, the shrill searing scream of one of the Warlocks attacking, the hissing explosion of water turned instantly to steam. That moment’s incinerating light served as her beacon, for the enemy had no wizards of their own. She pushed on, fell to one knee – holding her musket up to keep it dry, just as she had been taught – and forced herself back onto her feet through sheer willpower. Simply moving was becoming an intolerable burden to her, each breath of the muggy air harder to inhale, every motion sapping the strength from her limbs.
She finally burst out into a cleared space where the ground was baked hard, where the crooked trees had been seared black all around her, the convolutions of their trunks and branches turned into rigid death agonies. A Warlock had been here only moments before, unleashing his incendiary magic. The fog was just now oozing back in, the water welling up to reassert its dominion. She put a hand near the fire-split wood of the nearest tree, feeling the heat radiating from it like an oven’s open door.
At the edge of that fire-scorched clearing where one of the King’s wizards had stood, she saw a twisted shape. The mist had begun shrouding it already; it might have been a contorted human body or simply a fallen tree – either way it was half ash now.
There was another flash and report from deeper within the swamps, and she lurched on into the fog, desperate to regain her own people and not be abandoned in this green purgatory. The swamp closed about her like a bad dream, clogging her throat and squeezing her heart with its thick gluey air. Attack, the whistle had insisted, but she had been pressing forward and then forward again, and had seen no enemies other than those conjured by her own fears from the mist.
And then she stopped, because she had taken seven steps, now, since she had last heard a shot, and she had no idea where she was. The walls of the swamp rose up on all sides. She was utterly alone. Even Elise was gone, left behind somewhere in that impenetrable murk.
The world seemed to spin all around her and, whichever way it spun, it was the same: the darkened air, coloured by the leaves that the light forced its way through; the twisted agony of the trees; the hundred thousand insects with their whine and buzz.
She took one slow step forward, already knowing that it was pointless for, no matter what direction she moved in, she was still lost.
Then she saw him. Between two trees and beyond a stand of fern, no further away than ten yards: the Denlander. A small bareheaded man with a bowl-cut of dark hair, he was serious-faced, almost neatly turned out in his grey tunic and breeches. He had his gun to his shoulder, squinting into the gloom, sighting along it at something.
Sighting at one of her comrades. It had to be.
She raised her own musket and looked along the barrel, focusing in and in on her target until it almost seemed she could poke him in the eye with it. She took another step, settling into a bent-kneed crouch for stability.
He registered her.
Just out of the corner of his eye first, and then he was looking straight at her, as she stood there with her gun pointing at his head, and he knew that he had been outmanoeuvred.
The swamp held its breath. She could hear nothing, not the flies, nor the sound of firing. The world had gone silent for her in that one moment.
Onto his face there came a lost expression, one of terrible peace and acceptance, and he looked her in the eye and she knew she could not do it.
She had never killed before. She knew it was not in her nature.
But her finger had been trained to pull a trigger, and it did so, independent of doubt or questions.
There was that dreadful heartbeat as the arc-lock spun and sparked and fire met the powder inside the chamber.
In the silence inside her head, the gun was louder than it should possibly be. The stock bucked hard against her shoulder. Smoke belched from the muzzle and chamber to mingle with the filthy air.
And he was gone.
In the blindness of the moment, she did not see his body pitch back into the water, the gun falling from his hands. Compared to the roar of her arc-lock musket, his death was a study in silence.
The gun, smoking hot, was so loose in her hands it was nearly lost in the water. She took a tentative step forward, and then another, her world narrowing, and narrowing further, until there were no overarching branches, no warped tree trunks, nothing but grey cloth stained with a darkness that could have been mud or blood, or anything really. He was there, half submerged, arms flung wide as though seeking some final balance. He had fallen into the dark, though. He was dead.
There came half a dozen shots, hard on each other’s heels, but she did not look away or reload her gun or check for the enemy – all the things they had taught her to do. Her eyes were hooked by the body of the Denlander. Head thrown back into the water, it was impossible to tell anything about him. Had he been old? Young? Handsome? Ugly? The roar and the smoke had erased his face from her memory, and now there was just this thing: this meat.
She dragged her eyes away from him by main force but there was only the clogged, claustrophobic vista of the swamp to take them to. The brooding trees had seen death a hundred times before, and the lapping water was greedy to receive the dead man’s blood. More shots, muffled, in the distance. A battle of the invisible; a war in the next room.
She bent over, reaching out to him as though he could be saved.
The whistle sounded again, Mallen’s whistle.
Retreat.
Emily straightened up instantly, but she thought she had misheard. Retreat? Surely not. We’re winning, aren’t we? Here, in this blighted square yard of the swamp, they were winning. She was alive and the Denlander was dead. How could it be time to retreat?
‘Emily! Marshwic!’
She turned to see Elise ten yards away and closing.
‘Come on, we’re retreating. They’ve made a counterattack!’ the other woman shouted at her as she waded closer.
How do you know? Emily pushed the thought aside and turned towards Elise, forcing her boots through water that seemed thicker than ever. Behind her, no doubt, the carrion eaters of the swamp were already gathering.
‘We have to go!’ Elise insisted, gesturing frantically and nearly fumbling her gun.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Emily was out of breath, or breathing badly. A horror was now clutching at her, though she had not felt it arrive. There was a dead man on her conscience, which had once been so clear.
However has it come to this?
‘I swear—’ Elise began, then something red flowered on her pale shirt, stopping her in her tracks. The sound of the shot was an afterthought, a nothing. Elise stared at Emily with open mouth.
‘Oh . . .’
‘Elise!’
‘Oh, God, I . . .’ Her face white now, her blouse red, Elise was abruptly falling away. Emily ran to catch her, clutching for the woman’s hand. There was a dead weight on the end of it and the dead weight was Elise.
‘Come on!’ she shouted at the stricken woman. ‘Come on!’ Their roles cruelly reversed.
The whistle to retreat sounded again, now closer and more urgent.
‘Elise, come on!’
The Denlander sniper must be reloading, in the quiet moments between reports.
The lifeless hand slipped from her fingers. Emily looked about herself, desperately seeking the enemy, but there was no one, nothing but the swamp.
‘Marshwic! Move your arse!’ Mallen bounded past, bent almost double, his tied-back hair streaming.
‘But Elise . . .’
He paused for a brief instant, but Master Sergeant Mallen had seen death before. ‘Just come on!’ He was gone then, but he had left her some of his energy, his speed. Her skin crawled, and she went floundering after him, to get away from the two dead things in the swamp.
For some time later, Emily could set down nothing in her letter but I killed my first man today. Not because nothing else had registered, but because whenever she remembered holding that hand in hers, or the astonished expression on Elise’s face
as the woman’s words were murdered in her mouth, her fingers began shaking, and she could not hold the pen.
2
And when I returned to camp, I was, for a moment, so grateful that I would have given away everything I had, if I could but find who had rescued me from that dreadful place. I was so very grateful that the ordeal was over and that I had been spared.
Then the understanding came to me that, of course, it was not over: tomorrow or the next day they would desire of me to go and fight once more. I would be required to hunt the enemy amongst those terrible trees. When this realization came to me, I fear I began to cry, and could not stop.
The world had gone mad three years before, when revolution came to Denland. Casting off their loyalties, heedless of man’s law or God’s, a band of greedy, power-hungry men had risen up against poor half-witted King Dietricht. The streets of the capital were soon thronged with agitators, criminals and looters. Half the city had burned, and what had risen from the ashes called itself a parliament that needed no kings.
Denland had always played host to those philosophers, atheists and political dissidents who maintained that all men were fit to rule; and that, while the magic of the blood royal was undeniable, still a king’s head held no greater privilege of leadership than that of any other. The Denlander crown had ever been tolerant of such rantings and pamphletings. Let them talk, had been the policy. Talk does no harm.
But in just one night, that talk had honed itself to a headsman’s edge. In one night, the howling pack of malcontents and anarchists had stormed the palace, let in by traitors from the King’s own guard. Simple-minded Dietricht was shot down, his queen thrown from the highest window of the palace, his newborn son murdered in his cradle.
For the people of Lascanne, Denland’s southern neighbour, that bloody morning was like waking into a nightmare. For centuries the two nations had been siblings – sometimes rivals but always allies against the world. Now Denland, formerly so solid and reliable and plodding, had become a rabid dog.
Guns of the Dawn Page 1
