Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Please reconsider . . .’ he said. ‘I . . .’ But he could not say it. Tell the truth all he might, there were yet words that would choke him.

  The tremendous wave of anger that had engulfed her had ebbed away by now, but her resolution was left stranded behind. ‘Mr Northway . . .’ Gentle, now that all was decided. He looked up with hope, though, and she finished, ‘I must go to war.’

  ‘I did not kill your brother.’ His face twisted with something that looked like self-loathing. ‘I did not kill your father. I did not kill your brother. I did not.’

  ‘It changes nothing.’

  ‘I am asking you, Miss Marshwic, to change your mind. There is still time. I do not want you to go to the front.’

  ‘And why not, Mr Northway?’ she said at last. ‘Tell me more of your truth. Tell me why you would commit treason for me and not for Rodric.’

  He stared at her with hollow, hungry eyes. His perennial mask was gone, and the smile with it. So little was left of the urbane, wicked man she had thought she knew. Slowly he righted his chair, slumped back into it. His lips moved, but no words came. He could only stare at her, with all entreaties exhausted. Of the two of them, he looked more like the one facing a death sentence.

  9

  The first task at Gravenfield was to put us in uniform. You may imagine exactly what a travesty that was. Picture a mass of women of all ages, from girls younger than Alice to women older than Cook, cramming themselves into those ill-tailored britches and shirts. There was a great deal of amusement from all concerned, and I may safely describe it as a shambles. I believe women must be of a greater variety of shapes than men. Certainly we are quite different sizes. Nobody received clothes that fit. We looked more like tatty mummers than soldiers, and there was a sense that we were all playing some child’s game of dressing up.

  Then the master sergeant asked for all those who had been dressers of hair or barbers wives, and he had some old men on hand, too, who had shorn a head or two in their time. He had us line up, and then he told these people to cut our hair short – everyone’s hair to be as short as his own in a man’s style. There was no more laughing from that point on. Many complained and we protested, but we were soldiers now and we would dress like soldiers, and wear our hair like soldiers. It was cold in early spring, with our hair cut back to the napes of our necks.

  Those of the women who had trades and skills that Lascanne could make use of were siphoned off to factories and workshops across the country, there to put their experience to work for the King’s shilling. They were the lucky ones.

  Unsurprisingly, being a landed gentlewoman of good family was not a skill the war effort could find any great use for, and so Emily, along with around half the other recruits from Chalcaster, found herself dispatched to Gravenfield to learn how to become a soldier.

  Gravenfield: it had been twenty years since anyone had thought of using that place as anything more than a store. A windswept, walled compound surrounded by bleak moorland, the erstwhile barracks had last seen active service in the Hellic wars. A day’s ride from the nearest railway station, it had been too remote during peacetime to amount to anything more than a punishment. Now, with the advent of the Women’s Draft, some resourceful mind within the army had unearthed Gravenfield once again. This was where the women of Chalcaster, and a half-dozen other towns, were to be turned into soldiers.

  Their transformation would not come easily.

  After providing the uniforms, with all that entailed, they tried to teach the women to march. The duty fell to a portly master sergeant, a few years short of three score, who introduced himself as: ‘I am MASTER Sergeant BOWLER, and YOU will call me SIR. Is that CLEAR?’ His moustache and his belly quivered in unison whenever he shouted, which was almost every third word.

  ‘ON this parade ground YOU will learn to MARCH like SOLDIERS. You are no longer WOMEN. There are no WOMEN in the ARMY. You are in the ARMY so you must be SOLDIERS, and SOLDIERS MARCH!’ he bellowed. A rabble of four hundred women, Emily included, stared at him blankly.

  ‘On my COMMAND, into COLUMNS. Columns NOW!’

  There was a murmur of giggles. Master Sergeant Bowler surveyed his recruits with dismay. There was no attempt to line up in columns, and no real understanding of what a column was. He opened his mouth to shout and swear at them, as he was used to; to belittle and berate until his charges were broken and obedient.

  It was to be the breaking of Master Sergeant Bowler, because he found himself unable to do it. After all, despite there being no women in the army, these were unmistakably women and, in the decent middle-class family that had produced Master Sergeant Bowler, one did not swear at women. He regarded them, goggle-eyed, moustache twitching. ‘Into columns,’ he suggested. ‘March?’

  Eventually, and out of mutual boredom, he had them tramping about the parade ground for an hour, but it was a sight of dismal horror to a military man. The problem, Bowler must have realized, was that they didn’t understand the necessity of it. As a career soldier, he knew that to march – to achieve discipline and precision by the repetitious and orderly stamping about on a parade ground – was the very kernel of being in the army. All his previous recruits had understood that too, and if they had not, he had bawled it into them until they had. All his previous recruits, of course, had been men.

  By the end of the fourth day he was beginning to feel like a shepherd without a dog. He gave up, at that point, and passed his grievances on to his superior.

  The commanding officer of the Gravenfield camp made himself known to them on the fifth day, after Bowler had them approximately lined up before the stark grey walls of the main barracks.

  He appeared not at the balcony Emily was looking up at but at the main door: a heavily built man in a uniform with the insignia of a major. He stood very straight, with one hand on the hilt of his sabre, and there was something wrong with his face, something not immediately obvious.

  ‘Good morning, soldiers,’ he said. His voice was quiet and crisp and authoritative.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ came the ragged reply.

  ‘Master Sergeant Bowler has told me you will not march,’ he continued. ‘Very well. I don’t think we have time to drill you, or need. The rest you will learn, though. You will learn it because, when your papers come through, when we are done with you here, you will be going to the war. If you have not learned what we have to teach you, then you will die, and you will cause the deaths of your comrades. Is that clear?’

  He had their utter attention now.

  ‘I can promise you nothing,’ he said. ‘You will learn only what you are willing to learn. I have no faith in sending women to war. If you listen, though; if you watch what is shown to you; if you give us your undivided attention, then you may leave here with half the skills necessary to ensure your own survival.’ The left side of his face had not moved during all these words.

  They were split into classes of forty or so and put to work learning their geography and history, their ranks and uniforms, taking care of kit, basic medicine and the elegant business of taking a life with a gun.

  Emily and her squad filed into the gunnery sergeant’s room with some trepidation. The rest had been window-dressing, they all felt. This was to be the true apprenticeship, the mark of a soldier.

  ‘Ladies, gather round.’ The gunnery sergeant was an unexpectedly small man, sitting low behind his desk at one end of his cramped office. To one side, the long windows had been thrown open to show the brown lawns of Gravenfield, with wooden targets standing mute and blasted.

  ‘How many of you have ever fired a gun?’ His face was creased with old pain, and it creased further when only Emily raised her hand. He took a moment to gather his strength. He was really too young for this, and they all wondered why he was not at the war front himself.

  ‘I am Sergeant Demaine,’ he told them. ‘I will teach you how to kill your enemies, and how not to kill your friends.’ He came out from behind his desk and a shudder rippled thro
ugh the recruits, because his chair came with him, Demaine guiding it around the corners with awkward, angular movements. He had no legs, only stumps. He looked up at them brightly. ‘You think this is bad? You should see my horse.’

  They fell back as he approached, and he wheeled his way spasmodically across the room and onto the uneven lawn outside, where he struggled to force it along.

  ‘Do you want help, Sergeant?’ Emily asked, and he looked up at her warningly.

  ‘No help,’ he said. ‘Now take up a gun, all of you. Get a feel for the weight. Get used to it.’

  It was the death of innocence, that day. Two score women heard the thunder of a discharging musket by their ears, felt the murderous kick at their shoulders and smelt the stink of smoke in their nostrils. When they had been shown how to load, tamp and prime them, after they had put the guns to their shoulders and discharged that first volley, they were changed beyond all recognition. Some had dropped the guns in the instant of firing. Others clutched at their hands, or held their ears in pain. Only Emily remained with the musket butt tight against her shoulder, looking down the lean line of the barrel. The smell of that smoke – the smell of the shuttered room – passed over and through her, and she knew that she would lose the association now. It would not be the death of her father she smelt. It would just be the smoke of a gun, because she would be a soldier.

  ‘Yes, your shoulders hurt!’ Demaine confirmed. ‘Yes, they will hurt, and they will hurt every day from now until the war ends, whether on that day it ends for all of us or just for you. Get used to it, ladies. Yes, the guns are loud, the smoke hurts your eyes, and the sound hurts your ears. It is not the smoke or the noise that kills the enemy, ladies. It is the musket ball that you aim with care. You do not close your eyes. You do not flinch. You do not jerk away as you fire. These things a soldier does not do. You look your enemy in the eye as you fire, and, when the noise and the smoke come, you embrace them as your friends and allies, because they mean you have done your job.’

  Emily lowered her musket slowly, feeling the weight of it already familiar. Some of the others were complaining, saying their arms hurt too much to fire the gun again. One said, ‘I thought you soldier types got swords. Why can’t we get a sword? I reckon I could use one of them.’

  Demaine wheeled himself closer to her. ‘I haven’t got a sword myself, soldier.’

  ‘But I could have one,’ the woman pointed out.

  Demaine smiled at her. ‘There is a sabre behind my desk. Go and get it, would you?’

  As the woman ran off inside, he reached out to Emily and took her musket, then reloaded it without looking, fingers practised and nimble. When the woman came out with his sabre, unsheathed, he was aiming at her.

  ‘What . . . what’re you doing, Sergeant?’ she gabbled at him.

  ‘You have a sword, like you wanted. So now what?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t mean . . .’

  He did not lower the gun. ‘If you have a sword, then you must be strong, swift, nimble all at once, and you must have your enemy within arm’s reach. I am no good any more with a sword, but I can kill a man a hundred yards away just with my eye and my finger. A gun makes killers of us all, ladies. It will make the slightest of you as deadly as the biggest, strongest man, and you will never have to pit yourselves against him, to strike and avoid his blows and land your own. All you have to do is pull the trigger and he will be dead. And when your own death comes, ladies, it will not be from a man standing before you, pitting himself against you. It will come suddenly, and you will never see who has done it.’ He lowered the gun at last and gazed down at it almost fondly. ‘With one of these, ladies, and a good eye, I am as deadly as any man that runs on two legs – and so can you be. Practice is all.’ By the end of their first day of gunnery practice, Demaine had deputized Emily as an instructor. She had not realized it before, but she was the only gentlewoman in the whole of Gravenfield. The rest were tradeswomen, farm girls and domestics, and precious few of them had ever so much as touched a gun before. Demaine took her and a few who had been gamekeeper’s wives, and made them his people. Soon they were holding classes of their own, teaching the swift reload, the steady aim, the measured breathing that would make killers of them all, even the weakest and the slightest. Demaine did not believe, as the major did, that women had no place in war. For him the musket had broadened the field of combat to the whole of the human race.

  It was hard for Emily, during those early days. She gave her full attention to the task in hand, and found herself alone, amongst the four hundred women of Gravenfield. When she entered the dormitory, they looked at her as though she had come to tell them what to do. They resented her, because she was well-born and they were not, and it marked her out.

  Oh, they listened to her as she showed them how the lock of a musket worked, or how to clear a misfire. They were quite attentive. As soon as the class was over, though, they turned their backs on her. She was different to them, singled out by birth and by experience. She met such a wave of cold hostility that she could not imagine what could have happened to harden them against her in such a way. She could not know – until it was explained to her later – that the prevalent belief was that she would be spared, held back as an instructor as the rest marched off, or just held back because of who she was. Encountering their coldness, she met it with an aloofness of her own that only reinforced the gap between her and her fellow recruits. It was as much her failure as theirs. She should have seen it coming.

  History was taught by Mrs Melchance, a grey-haired schoolmistress drafted in because no further soldiers could be spared for the business. Emily considered that she did not really need to know about the causes of the war. Surely the fact of it was enough. For a soldier fighting at the front, the inexorable tides of history were as unalterable as the weather.

  Still, some bureaucrat had insisted that the recruits should be educated, and so she listened grimly as Mrs Melchance recounted the shock that had gripped the country when the war started. Denland and Lascanne had been the sibling states, politically united against a hostile world. Their royal families had been close cousins, had intermarried. Soldiers from Denland had fought alongside the heroes of Lascanne as recently as the Hellic wars.

  And then came the regicide. As all there recalled, the cowardly assassination of Denland’s royal family had been news that cut through the heart of Lascanne’s people like a scythe. Without warning, a friendly neighbour had been gripped by madness, casting off the cautioning reins of monarchy and adopting a proletariat government that turned its hate-filled eyes on Lascanne. To justify its existence, Mrs Melchance explained, the Republic of Denland felt bound to destroy that which was not like itself. A flourishing and happy monarchy next door might give its newly enslaved subjects hope.

  That was why they must fight, the old woman told them, with tears in her eyes. The whole Lascanne way of life hung in the balance. If the monsters of republicanism and their Denlandish slaves prevailed, then Lascanne’s centuries of history would be rewritten in a day.

  And she showed them the pages of a geography text that had been repurposed as a map of the warfront. She showed them where the lines were drawn. Here was the broad expanse of the Couchant front, the high country that formed the borderlands between Denland and Lascanne. There the war was being prosecuted in lightning manoeuvres by the dashing royal cavalry sweeping across the plateaus, or in pitched skirmishes in the canyons. Over there the great bulk of both nations’ forces struggled, each reaching desperately to establish a new foothold on the native ground of the other.

  Regarding the Levant front, its dark swamps and desperation, Mrs Melchance said almost nothing, and yet a knowledge of it came seeping into the minds of the recruits like damp. The horrors of that inimical place were already the stuff of nightmares to them, even looking upon a simple and stylized depiction of it here on out-of-date maps.

  Her mind full of hard, stale crusts of history, Emily was on her way to the refectory when she
was called out.

  ‘Oi, miss!’ a harsh voice yelled at her, and she turned to see three of her classmates glowering at her. She recognized the woman who had shouted as Sally something-or-other, a burly creature whose uniform shirt strained over her large belly, and whose arms were heavy with muscle from a life of toil. Two women of more slender proportions, but the same unpleasant expressions, flanked her menacingly.

  ‘Were you addressing me?’ Emily asked them coldly.

  ‘Was I addressing her?’ Sally mocked. ‘How posh you do talk, miss. Think you’re the bloody arse of the earth, don’t you?’

  Emily made herself calm as she realized what they wanted. This was their own little republican struggle, she supposed, inevitable as history.

  ‘Go away,’ she told them disdainfully, and Sally jeered back at her.

  ‘Won’t you say please, posh miss? I thought it was proper to say please.’

  ‘Please, go away.’ Emily kept her hands at her sides, but she was tensing up inwardly. She guessed that she could say anything and everything, and there would still be hell to pay at the end of it. If only the major, or Bowler, would appear round the corner. Nobody did, though. This once, the world had left her to her own devices.

  ‘Know what?’ Sally said. ‘I’m going to teach you how much better you are than me. I’m fed up of you going about with your nose in the air, thinking you’re such a bloody gentlewoman. Maybe you’ll change your mind once I’ve mashed it a bit.’

  ‘What have you got against me?’ Emily asked. She’s working her courage up, she realized unexpectedly. Sally was far larger than her but, even so, the woman had to talk a fight up. It gave Emily a sliver of hope.

  ‘You nobs! You know how long I was in service? Fifteen bloody years! And soon as the Draft comes along, I get chucked out here without a word of bloody thanks, cos they’re too bloody scared to send their own. Bloody cast-off, that’s what I was.’