Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘All right, ladies! Attention!’ Their feet snapped together even before they thought about it. A master sergeant from Locke – a matron with grey hair and a face like boot leather – glowered at them, striding past the unruly face of their formation. The morning sun cast her face in shadow beneath her gleaming helm. ‘Come on, ladies, remember the parade ground. Get yourselves into columns, will you? Come on, we’ve got a war to get you to. Officers front and right, soldiers line up!’

  Elise squeezed Emily’s arm and then got into place, as the enlisted women formed a dozen ragged rows. The master sergeant did not look impressed. ‘Pathetic,’ she snapped. ‘Bloody pathetic, pardon my Hellic, but it’ll have to do.’ She gave Emily and the other officers a once-over. There were only a half-dozen ensigns and a sergeant amongst them.

  ‘All right, get these soldiers moving, left and then right, remember? I want them in the central square on the double.’

  Somehow Emily and the other officers got the unwieldy body of women moving and marching into the circular patch of dirt that made up the centre of Locke. A series of low, irregular buildings ringed it, each commandeered by the army for one purpose or another. Emily saw messengers running their errands, or mounting up and riding at a gallop. There were quartermasters checking in supplies that had come on their train, soldiers in their shirtsleeves hauling crates of rations away. In the middle of the square was an ominous pile of boxes, all stamped ‘Lev’ in black.

  ‘Right, ladies, everyone to the stack there, and take a box. Anyone I see weighing them up to get a light one gets to carry two,’ the master sergeant announced cheerily. A protesting groan went up from the soldiers and she grinned broadly at them. ‘What’s that? What’s all the complaining? Downhill all the way to the camp, after all. Just hope your boots are waterproof. Come on, pack mules, we haven’t got all day!’

  Grumbling and moaning, the recruits shuffled forward to take boxes, heaving them up and clutching them awkwardly, until someone had the idea of hauling them on to one shoulder. Most were narrow ammunition boxes, heavy as hell with lead shot. Some were bigger crates marked ‘rations’ or simply ‘supplies’. A few were wrapped tents or half-dozen bundles of spare muskets. As the crowd began to thin, Emily moved forward to collect her load, but the master sergeant grabbed her arm.

  ‘Not for officers, the heavy stuff. Need you to keep them moving,’ she said. ‘Let them get their loads sorted, and then it’s a long, hard trek to camp, Ensign.’

  ‘Right, Sergeant.’ Emily stood back unhappily, watching Elise drag an ammunition crate from the pile, swearing at it with every step. Rather than watch the pile diminish crate by crate, Emily looked about at Locke instead. What a shabby little place, she had to think. What a fluke of geography had thrown this little trader town, this end-of-the-track prospector’s place, into such sharp relief. Some places were never meant to bear the weight of history.

  A sergeant – a man – approached them and conferred briefly with their own officer before turning to them.

  ‘All right, ladies, I’m going to make a count now, so’s we know how many we’re sending on. Everyone stay still and give a smile for the sergeant, now.’ He was a short, stocky man with a lined, humorous face and a jaunty step, but she would never have recognized him if he had not spoken. His voice brought it all back, that dark pre-morning that she had consigned to the bins of her memory. It brought it all back, and it hurt.

  She was a soldier, so she silently let him complete his count as the women around her lowered their burdens and waited patiently. She even waited until he had made his final tick on the sheet of paper he was carrying, and was just turning to go back to the little office he had emerged from. Then, as the women finished demolishing the pile of crates, she accosted him.

  ‘Sergeant,’ she began.

  He turned and eyed her. ‘Something I can do for you, Ensign?’

  ‘Sergeant Pallwide,’ she named him.

  There was no recognition in his eyes, but his face might have been lifted straight from her memory of that morning when he came with his band of recruits to take her brother Rodric to the war.

  ‘Emily Marshwic, Sergeant,’ she prompted, and still he did not know her until she added, ‘you came to Grammaine last autumn, for my brother.’

  Then something came to him, but she never knew for sure whether he had placed her as a person, or just placed her in a class, in a category of women. ‘What of it?’ he asked defensively.

  ‘You took my brother to the war, Sergeant, and you told me you would look after him. You said he would be serving in your company. What is your company, Sergeant?’

  ‘Administration corps,’ he almost mumbled.

  ‘You lied to me,’ she said flatly. ‘You lied to me, and you threw him to the wolves.’ She knew she was going too far, getting too emotional, but she could not stop herself.

  ‘It’s war,’ he said flatly. For a moment she had him: she was the lady of a great house, and he was a dirty, embarrassed soldier not knowing what to do with himself. At the last he remembered, though, what their positions were.

  ‘People die in war, that’s the point,’ he told her, with a look that said that he himself would be staying to file papers while she went off to the front. ‘I tell everyone I’m going to look after their sons and brothers and husbands. It’s good business, but I can’t watch over everyone, can I, Ensign?’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘I said “Can I, Ensign?”’ He stepped in close to her, staring up at her, daring a challenge.

  ‘No, Sergeant,’ she said resignedly.

  ‘That’s right, Ensign. Now you go off, and you can die yourself for all I care. Your company’s waiting for you.’

  He strutted away, leaving her to turn and face an accusing look from the master sergeant. But perhaps the woman had understood some of what had gone on, for she said nothing, only gestured for Emily to catch up as the great train of soldiers began to move off, staggering under its collective load.

  Back in Mrs Melchance’s classroom, Emily had studied the maps of the Levant front with an almost morbid interest. She had marked out in her memory the swathes of green where the artist had drawn sketchy trees or ripples to indicate swampland. She recalled the careful shading of tans to browns, then to greens; the little rocks and pools that marked the approach from Locke to the Levant. On the maps, the trails had been dotted lines winding their way from point to point. They had seemed the sort of trail one might follow into the Wolds, for a picnic on a sunny afternoon.

  From the ground, in the mud, it looked quite different.

  Emily gritted her teeth and strained furiously, ignoring the yell of pain. Another two soldiers joined her efforts by hauling on the stuck woman’s other arm, then grabbing the unfortunate by the armpits and pulling back by main force. With a vile sucking sound, the trapped soldier was released inch by inch from the rank mud, leaving her boots and the crate she had been carrying lost beyond all hope. The four of them collapsed back onto the path in a tangled heap, and Emily got the rescued woman’s elbow in her stomach for her pains. The master sergeant called out for anyone carrying a box marked ‘boots’ to step forward.

  Around them the landscape was a nightmare of pocks and craters enlivened by vast bushy tufts of marsh grass with fronds as tall as a man. The rocks, which on the maps had seemed so picturesque and tiny, were like great jagged teeth thrust at random through the skin of the land, hairy with weeds that sprouted from every crevice. The path itself was made of stones piled on stones and then paved with earth, uneven and hard underfoot. Those that stumbled off it found the ground beyond, that looked so solid, had no more substance than the stagnant pools of water that lay all around. There were serpents, too: great eight-foot monsters that slid lazily out of the way of the soldiers’ marching feet, or raised themselves up to chest-height, watching with yellow, lidless eyes as the recruits straggled past. Before them, down a long, shallow incline undercut by a thousand small streams, was a misty expanse tha
t must be the swamps proper, for it seemed all of this was but precursor.

  On the maps, the swamps themselves had been enlivened by chains of blue lakes laid out like beads on a necklace, and thumbnails of light green that were fields of scree sloughed off the Couchant cliffs and turned into meadows by colonizing vegetation. The cartographer who created those maps had crossed the swamps in a balloon, and never had to set his foot upon them nor breathe their rank air.

  Emily increased her pace to catch up with Elise, marching near the front of the column.

  The girl gave her a tight-lipped smile and shifted her burden from one shoulder to the other. ‘See you lucked out then. I’m going to kill that bastard Demaine if I ever see him again,’ she grunted through gritted teeth. ‘Just think, one word from him and I’d be the one walking, and you’d be lugging this bloody crate.’

  A little later, while trudging along a track that never seemed to bring them any closer to their destination, one woman broke into song. She must have been a brave soul, to break the grumbling silence like that, with her high, clear voice springing into the dank air. It was a familiar tune as well, although Emily could not immediately place it.

  ‘We crossed the sea at dawn of day

  Blue-heron sails, the red and grey

  An eastern wind from Gathern bay

  We march to war with red and grey.

  Oh, the grey is sharp and the red is brave

  With a hey ho! the red and the grey

  But the red rules high on land and waves

  And the red will last to the end of the day.

  The eagle legions marching nigh

  With gold and green ’gainst red and grey

  So bear the heron standard high

  With blood of red and walls of grey.’

  By that time those few familiar with the verses had begun chiming in, until even the master sergeant was roaring out the chorus, the garbled, overlapping mishmash of ‘Oh, the grey is sharp and the red is brave’ rolling out over the uneven terrain as they marched.

  Emily was just starting her third ‘With a hey ho!’ when she suddenly remembered when she had heard this song, and why it was so inappropriate. Old Poldry had sung it sometimes, when he had been a little in his cups. He had sung it and talked about his own soldiering days, for it was a soldier’s song: a song from the Hellic wars. The red and the grey were the soldiers of Lascanne and Denland, fighting side by side against the empire overseas.

  Where did it all go wrong? she asked herself, her mouth shaping the words automatically. The regicide, of course; the end of Denland’s royal line, when their whole nation had run mad.

  But still she sang, off-key and hoarse, and they all did, and if not that song then the next: women singing men’s songs on their way to war.

  *

  The soldiers of the Levant front had heard them coming, and sent scouts out to investigate, who had run back with the news. Consequently, the new recruits came in sight of the camp to see a whole wall of incredulous men staring at them. That was to be their first impression of the front: not the swamps; not the ranks of tents on pole frames, raised off the ground to keep them dry; not the towering cliffs that formed the western extent of their sodden world; but a wall of gawping men, an expanse of staring eyes.

  Some were shocked, and could not take it in. Others were angry: there were frowns and clenched fists at these girls playing at soldiering, making a mockery of the uniform. There were a few who searched each newcomer for the sight of a familiar face: a wife, a daughter, a sweetheart. News from home had been scarce.

  Many were grinning openly. Women, they thought. No doubt they had heard news of the Women’s Draft along the way. They had surely had time to concoct their own little imaginings. Now here was the proof: several hundred of Lascanne’s female finest marching into their camp, two hours before sunset. They passed comments to their fellows, eyeing up particularly choice specimens, and grinned like dogs.

  ‘Set down!’ the master sergeant called, and the exhausted recruits let their burdens fall. Some, testing their luck, sat down on the grass or on the crates, and when the master sergeant made no comment, they all did, finding a dryish patch where they could take the weight off their aching feet.

  ‘Someone get me an officer,’ the master sergeant called out and, when nobody moved, she singled a man out. ‘You, baboon, go get me an officer, or you’re on a charge.’

  In this case, the military overruled the masculine, and the chastened soldier pushed off through his fellows, whom the master sergeant rounded on sternly. ‘As for the rest of you, if this is your war effort I’m amazed Denland isn’t in the capital by now. Haven’t you got something better to be doing with your time than drooling?’

  Some of the male ensigns and sergeants began to round their charges up and move them on, to cooking, to cleaning, to sentry duty. There was a fair crowd still goggling at the women when the colonel arrived.

  He was close to Lord Deerling’s age, she judged, but shorter and broader, with a small moustache and beard seemingly tacked to a round face. His hair was little more than a white fringe above his ears, giving him the look of everyone’s favourite uncle. His uniform was well decorated, though, with mementos of the Hellic wars, and the soldiers instantly made way for him, lining up to see what he would do.

  He surveyed the newcomers, and Emily thought she detected in his eyes a certain weariness at it all. He had been given an unwanted gift, however much needed. Like Master Sergeant Bowler at Gravenfield, he did not know what to do with a company of women soldiers.

  ‘Master Sergeant,’ he called, ‘before you return to Locke, do me the favour of sending them to join their companies.’

  ‘Sir? I was informed that they would remain under their own officers,’ the master sergeant replied.

  ‘No, no, no. We have three understrength companies here already. There’s no sense shipping in another one that’s all comprised of women, by God. No, we’ll sort out the divisions later, then. Where’s Captain Mallarkey?’

  A clean-shaven man not much younger than the colonel made himself known.

  ‘Get them billets, Captain. Get their gear stowed. Then get everyone lined up first thing tomorrow morning. I need to have a word. And, in the interim, give every officer the word that I’ll have no unsoldierly business, despite this . . . this. And make it understood.’

  They had their tents allotted them, while men hefted the burdens they had carried so far. They were allowed to put down the packs that had travelled with them from all the way up the rail track, and before that from their homes. Outside, the sky was a deepening blue, resolving itself to black in the east. There were no sunsets in the Levant. The sun swept behind the monolithic cliffs to light that other war that was being fought up there, in the canyons and the valleys and the great open wastes of the plateaus. The nights were sudden here, in the Levant, and the sunrises drawn-out and bloody.

  Emily fell onto her bunk and slept, without dreaming, for as long as she was able, worn ragged from the long march. None of the training, the sedate trots around the Gravenfield grounds, had prepared them for this. Soldiering was too much to teach anyone from scratch in forty days, and none of them had taken it seriously enough.

  The next morning, she opened her eyes to light as scarlet as her jacket, summoned from her chill and clammy bed by the sound of a horn. Without ever quite waking up, she found herself lined up with all the other soldiers, men to the left, women to the right. She looked across the faces of the existing garrison, hoping to catch sight of Tubal, but she recognized none of them, all pale strangers. Many were wounded, she saw. There were bandaged heads and arms in slings, scars and livid pockmarks she would soon know to be the work of the local insects. These men looked solid, resolute, unhappy. She wondered what her company looked like to them.

  Women, of course.

  The colonel came out of the shack from which he commanded the war effort. He looked no happier with his new charges in the light of dawn than he had the
evening before.

  He stood for a moment, looking left and then right with a grim expression. Two captains flanked him: the older Mallarkey and a younger man with his long face made lopsided by a jagged scar.

  ‘All right, you’ve heard the news,’ the colonel said. ‘And now you’ve seen it for yourselves. Women, in the army.’ He shook his head. ‘You all know. We need the extra guns. If we’re to drive the Denlanders from this place, we need the manpower. Even if it’s woman-power.’ He stopped a moment, and Emily wondered how well he had thought his speech through.

  ‘This is going to work,’ he declared. ‘Now, I have never fought alongside a woman before. My orders are that these women are properly trained and ready to fight.’ His little runs of words each came out quite separately, like prophecies on slips of paper drawn by a fortune-teller. He thought quite a lot between them. ‘That is the situation. You will all accept it. They will obey your officers’ orders. You will obey their officers’ orders. A sergeant is a sergeant. I don’t care about the man or the woman of it. Any insubordination will be treated just like insubordination. It’s no excuse.’ He glowered hawkishly at the lot of them.

  ‘Now, the other thing you must remember is that this is the army of Lascanne. The army of the King. We are civilized. Decent people. Not like those animals from Denland. We have rules. Now, I know a lot of you will have thought about this, having heard the news. Women in the camp and all. Quite un-military. Let me tell you, there will be no fraternizing.’ He paused to consider the word. ‘No involvement between the men and the women of my army. None. If any of it comes to my attention, there will be severe punishments for all involved.’ He paused to glare at the men and the women equally. ‘You are here to fight, not anything else. It takes away from the war effort, yes?’

  There were black looks amongst the men then, frustration and disappointment. Some of the women, too, Emily noted. She wondered just how enforceable the colonel’s demands would be.