Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Major Castwood’s maimed expression, when he saw her before him, was one of disappointment.

  ‘Marshwic,’ he said. ‘I must have seen a quarter of Gravenfield’s complement today, but all of them soldiers-at-arms. At least those I promoted have had the sense and the duty to stay away, and accept what they’re given. Still, I suppose you are gentle born, and that usually counts for something.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Castwood warned her flatly. ‘Your family gives you the right to be told this politely rather than summarily, that is all. There are soldiers required for the Couchant front, and soldiers required for the Levant front. The lots have been drawn. I will not borrow from one to pay the other, nor do I think it just to swap. Not even for your family name will I do this, Ensign Marshwic. The decision was made by pure chance, because in this I must be fair.’

  ‘I understand, sir.’

  ‘Than why are you here, Marshwic?’ Castwood demanded.

  ‘Because I want to go to the Levant front, Major. I know there are dozens, scores who want the opposite, but I want the Levant, and I would gladly swap.’

  ‘Why?’ Castwood leant back in his chair, frowning.

  ‘Because I have a brother-in-law there. Because I had a brother there, until he was killed. Because it was his death that brought me here. Sir.’

  Castwood looked at her a long time, and Emily was aware of that long line of hopeful, desperate women outside, who would be noting the seconds as they dragged on. Bloody Marshwic, bloody nob’s daughter, they would be thinking, but they would have been surprised if they could have eavesdropped.

  ‘A dead brother is a bad reason to choose the Levant,’ Castwood told her. ‘I remember what it felt like to be righteous and noble about things and, believe me, I feel a fool every time I come to shave.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘A brother-in-law, though: living family? That’s better,’ he said. ‘Stick close to him. The swamps of the Levant are a difficult place to be new in.’

  ‘Then you’ll—’

  ‘I see no problem with shipping anyone who asks to the Levant. As you say, there are plenty who want the opposite.’

  ‘Could I ask . . . there’s a woman called Elise Hally—’

  ‘Ensign Marshwic!’ Castwood barked. ‘If I will not dabble in the fate of my recruits for my own pleasure – and the offers I have had today, in money, goods or female flesh would make a bawd and a pawnbroker blush – then I will not do so for you. You yourself have taken the place of one woman who will find the Couchant front more to her liking, but which one you will never know.’

  They were kept waiting in the refectory after lunch, and everyone knew that it was going to be then. Master Sergeant Bowler stepped up onto one of the tables with a great long list in his hands, all of four hundred names.

  ‘These now before me, whose names I read out,’ he called, ‘shall be joining His Majesty’s forces at the Couchant front. Absolon, Theresa; Acherson, Sally; Afland, Leese; Afland, Yolanda; Aillen, Jane . . .’ He marched through the names at a steady, military pace, and pockets of relief burst all over the room as one woman after another heard her name given, and knew that she was to be spared the swamps of the Levant. The quicker women understood, as the alphabet trudged past with no mention of them, and Bowler’s recitation gathered momentum with a growing moan of quiet despair from those who knew that they had been passed over. Emily looked to Elise, beside her, as Bowler ploughed through the H’s, and saw the realization dawn on her friend when the master sergeant got to, ‘Helender, Grace.’

  ‘I guess you couldn’t do anything for me,’ said Elise, with no blame in her voice. ‘I’m sure you tried.’

  ‘I did try,’ Emily told her, mentally marking off the names as they came, and waiting. ‘I couldn’t help you one way or another.’

  ‘One way or . . . What’s that supposed to mean?’ Elise asked, but Emily held a hand up and listened closely as the names paraded across the room, leaving joy and despair in their wake.

  ‘Mabbins, Cath; Masefield, Bridgett,’ Bowler announced, and then, ‘Matchlock, Gemima,’ and then another name, and another, and Emily waited for Elise to catch up and realize.

  ‘But . . .’ And then Elise nodded. ‘So, I reckon you couldn’t shift the old bastard either.’

  Emily was going to explain then just what had passed between her and Castwood, and even about trying to swap with Elise. It would have been boasting, though, and boasting to cover her own fear. She did fear, despite what she told herself. The reactions of her fellow recruits were contagious.

  ‘I couldn’t, no,’ she told Elise. ‘Some things just can’t be changed.’

  They listened together as the roll call continued, and each woman in the room understood what her fate was to be. Elise was trying to look philosophical, Emily saw, but there were tears in the corners of her eyes, and her lips were pressed tightly together. Emily took her hand and clasped it tight.

  ‘It will be all right,’ she promised. ‘I’ll look after you.’ What easy words they were to say.

  ‘Yanlo, Karen,’ said Bowler, and paused a moment before rolling the list up again with the precision of his profession. The room was quite quiet now, aside from a little sniffling, and on the master sergeant’s face there was an odd, awkward expression of sympathy that sat badly there.

  ‘Those of you whose names I have just read out are to report to the station on the fortieth, from where you will be taken direct by train to the staging post at Gare. You’ll have to march from there. Remember: left and then right?’ He made a weak smile. ‘You lot go out and make sure you’ve got your kit requisitioned and ready. I want to talk to the rest.’

  After the chair-scraping, the quick steps and the excited murmur of conversation just outside the door, the room was a very still place indeed. About four out of every five of the recruits had gone, Emily saw. The Couchant front was a broader, easier field of battle, and thus could better use the greater numbers.

  She turned her eyes to the master sergeant, as did everyone still there. He faced them with a soldier’s bravery.

  ‘The rest of you are for the Levant front, as you’ve guessed,’ he said. ‘Right then: they’ll be putting you together with a couple of other camps, so as to make you up to full strength, and some of them are behind schedule. They ain’t all such good recruits as you lot, right? You’ve done good.’ He was such an impersonal man, such a bluff and solid soldier, that it was almost embarrassing to hear such sentiments from him.

  ‘What this means,’ he continued, ‘is that you’ve got some time. Maybe ten days, maybe less. Now, anyone as wants can stay here for free, no problem. You can even give some tips to the next lot we’re getting in. Otherwise you can go home and wait for your call-up. Spend a few days with your families. We shouldn’t allow it really, but the major’s put his stamp to it.’ His face went stern. ‘Don’t get ideas. Anyone who doesn’t turn up when you’re called will be a criminal, right off, and they’ll hang you for treason when they catch you. Orders for the army come straight from the King. But, other than that, I’m sure you’ve got people you want to see.’ He surveyed them with such strangled humanity that Emily wondered when he had last seen his own family, for from that same look she knew he had one, and that it had been a long time indeed.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Emily had a musket on an oily cloth spread over her knees, and was cleaning its mechanism industriously. There was only a handful of women in the dormitory, since those destined for the Couchant front had already packed their bags and departed.

  ‘I reckon I’m staying here,’ Elise said. She lay stretched out on her bed in her shirtsleeves, with her uniform jacket draped over the bunk above. ‘Got nowhere else to go, after all.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Emily allowed, recalling Elise’s patchwork history.

  ‘You’ll be going back to . . . what was it? Grimble?’

  ‘Grammaine, yes. It’ll seem very strange to me, now.’ />
  ‘All those sisters of yours getting to see you in your uniform,’ Elise said.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You’ll be the toast of the town. Lady Marshwic come back to say cheerio before going off to do her duty. They’ll be proud of you.’

  ‘Alice will make fun of my clothes, and Mary will cry,’ predicted Emily.

  ‘Still, they’ll be proud. If I had sisters I was on talking terms with, they’d be proud of me.’

  Emily nodded slowly. ‘Elise?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come with me to Grammaine?’

  She looked over to see the other girl sitting half up, staring at her.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Come stay at Grammaine, until we get our call-up. Why not?’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  Emily nodded, watching a few expressions try to form on Elise’s face and fail.

  ‘That’s . . . I always wanted to live like gentry, even for just a few days . . . Hey, you don’t mean as a servant, do you? Because if that’s—’

  ‘I mean as a guest. As a friend,’ Emily said solemnly. ‘I mean, unless you want to stay here with the gunnery sergeant or something, of course.’

  ‘Demaine can live without me.’ Elise swung her legs round and perched on the edge of the bed, still looking a little stunned. ‘You really want . . . someone like me, staying with your sisters and your . . . servants?’

  ‘What’s someone like you? You’re a soldier just like I am.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Miss Ensign.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Besides, you’ll annoy Alice beyond all measure, and that’ll be worth the train fare.’

  *

  As Emily and Elise marched towards the house, the look on Alice’s face battled between mockery and happiness for almost a minute as they came up the path. Then she went flying back into the house calling, ‘Mary! Mary! Come and see!’

  By the time they reached the house, everyone was at the door and waiting. The two uniformed women laid their packs down gratefully, with a clatter of muskets, and Emily embraced her sisters, one after the other, and smiled around at the servants. Everyone seemed to be staring at her as if she was some long-lost relative, returned from foreign parts nigh unrecognizable. Even Mary, letting Emily escape from her arms, looked her up and down as though needing confirmation that this was indeed her sister.

  ‘You’ve . . . changed, Emily,’ she said. ‘You look . . .’

  ‘Like a soldier?’ Emily completed for her.

  But Mary shook her head. ‘I don’t know what,’ she said. ‘Look at you, though. You look . . . strong. Hard, somehow.’

  ‘You look as silly as that little Belchere minx,’ Alice pronounced. ‘But we forgive you. Did they really have to cut your hair?’

  ‘It’s a soldier thing,’ Emily told her. ‘This is Soldier-at-Arms Elise Hally. I’ve invited her to stay until we receive our call-up papers.’ And then she named them all for Elise, although she could see that her companion recognized them already from Emily’s reminiscences.

  ‘They made you an ensign,’ Mary commented wonderingly, fingering the gold crown that Emily had stitched to her jacket sleeve herself. ‘Tubal will still outrank you, then.’ Emily recalled that lieutenantship which Tubal had purchased at such a high cost, which had been the cause of so many arguments before he had left for the front. Mary had mellowed to it since. It would put him out of the worst of it, she had decided.

  Emily looked from her sisters to Elise, who was beaming happily at all and sundry. Even as they went into the kitchen, where Cook was hurriedly heating up a pot of soup for them, she was aware of an odd distancing: between herself and her sisters; between her and the house. She and Elise stood shoulder to shoulder, and she felt almost as much a stranger to this place as was the girl she had brought as her guest. In the back of her mind was the roar of muskets on the target range, the bark of Bowler’s orders issued on the marching square, the gossip of the dormitory and the rumour of war. Coming back to Grammaine was like visiting a place only dimly remembered, some peacetime paradise from that unimaginably distant time before the fighting had started.

  She sat at the kitchen table and listened to Elise describe Gravenfield for Alice. Conversation moved briskly on to the merits of Sergeant Demaine, and Elise came close to convincing Alice that she should have gone off to arms instead of Emily, if only to flaunt herself before male company. Emily noticed that Demaine’s most visible attribute never entered the conversation.

  ‘You’re all right there, ma’am?’ It was Grant’s soft voice. She looked up at the big old man standing in the kitchen doorway, and smiled.

  ‘It’s just . . .’ she started.

  ‘I know how it is, ma’am. Ensign, I should say. I remember just how it was.’

  ‘I feel so different. I feel like a soldier, Grant. Will this ever go away?’

  ‘When you’re done soldiering, maybe it will, mostly. Still, after you come back from the fighting, you’ll never hear a gun go off quite the same, ma’am, or a shout or a sudden noise. Been twenty years for me, and still I sometimes wake, when the horses do, and reach for that old matchlock they gave me.’

  *

  To Emily’s surprise, Elise and Alice became instant bosom companions. The soldier-girl loved to gossip and somehow she managed to absorb society trivialities with an endless appetite. No matter how stale each morsel was for Alice herself, in Elise she had a perpetually eager audience, and the goings-on at Gravenfield were all intriguingly shocking, in return. The two of them spent hours in each other’s company, both at Grammaine and in Chalcaster.

  Emily herself had intended to spend her time chiefly with Mary, because she knew her days at Grammaine would be few, and she must make the most of them. But somehow she could never sit alongside Mary as she used to, never just read or work on her long-idle embroidery. There was a restlessness in her now that constantly called her to action. She had got out of the habit of being a lady of leisure, and could not recapture it. Instead, most days found her riding, with Grant or alone, across the grounds of Grammaine and the neighbouring land. She rode in her uniform most times, and with her sabre at her side, which she had been given as ensign. She met no bandits – nothing more villainous than a twelve-year-old child poaching pigeons – and she almost wished she had. She assured herself that a confrontation with the Ghyer would go differently now. She would never be so foolish or so helpless again. But the Ghyer was consigned to history, and she would not have the chance to show him she was now her father’s daughter.

  Mr Northway called for her once, or so Poldry told her. She did not regret being out. She could not say now what her reaction would be should she see him again. There was a glowing coal still within her that spoke of Rodric, poor Rodric, who had been so pale and brave in his own new uniform.

  When she was out on horseback, she could forget her dead brother, her dead father, the tangled future of the Levant front. She could lose herself in the wind, the pounding of the hooves, the simple fact of riding.

  Little Francis was bigger than before. He was teething, too, and making his discomfort known to all and sundry. Emily took her turn in holding him, swaying him from side to side to lull him. As he slept, she watched him for an hour or more at a time, listening to the sounds of the house around her: Cook in the kitchen, Jenna scrubbing the floors, Mary humming to herself in another room.

  These are the things I am fighting for. She had stepped out of this place – stepping backwards as one might from a painting, to better appreciate it. Perhaps Grant was right and she would never truly re-enter it, never quite get past the picture frame again, but it would be worth it. She would go to war to save Grammaine from the ravages of Denland; to save the future for Francis; to save the past for her family. Love of her country was a great storm that bellowed and fell silent, but this love of home was a breeze that blew steady and forever.

  So the days passed, one by one. She sat up in the evening along with Elise and a couple of glas
ses of wine, and they talked about other recruits and what they might be doing, how the Couchant front was advancing. Elise would tell her what she had seen in Chalcaster: the fashions, the people, the observations Alice had made. It was all so new to her, another world entirely, or perhaps the same world seen through a different lens. She wore clothes that were Mary’s cast-offs, the fashions and cuts all wholly strange to her, and she delighted in them. Yet Emily had not found any comfort in her own wardrobe. Instead, now she wore breeches, shirt and jerkin from Rodric’s room – and if Mary was shocked, she said nothing.

  *

  And of course the day came, the seventh or so, when it seemed that the call would not come, the papers would never arrive. Perhaps the army of the King could win this war without Emily Marshwic or Elise Hally. And, on that day, Emily went downstairs to find Penny Belchere in the kitchen with a solemn look on her that did not suit her at all, and in her hand two letters marked with the King’s seal.

  ‘Tomorrow, first thing,’ Emily announced, when she had read hers. Elise’s was still unopened in her hand, for the girl was no great reader. ‘They want us to report to Chalcaster station tomorrow, five in the morning. The train will take us to Locke, wherever that is.’ Even as she said it, the map unfurled in her mind’s eye. Locke, mustering point of the Levant front, last port of call for civilization, before the swamps began.

  ‘Hell,’ said Elise quietly. ‘I wish I’d been clever enough to run away.’

  Emily gave her a long look. ‘You still can. I won’t say.’

  Elise grinned at her. ‘That’s mighty generous, Ensign Marshwic. Any chance the offer’ll still be open after the fighting’s started?’ She clapped Emily on the shoulder: a familiar mannish gesture. ‘It’s a strange thing, you know? Now it’s come, now we’re off, I don’t care. It’s been great to visit here, to meet your family and all that, but I’m going home now. Tell me you don’t feel the same, just a little.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  By this time, the news had spread. Emily could hear Mary’s feet on the stairs. She turned to Penny Belchere and saluted as smartly as she could. ‘Thank you, Soldier Belchere. You’ve done your duty.’