Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Finally, and this is the most serious part,’ the colonel continued, ‘if I hear of a man forcing himself on one of these women, on any woman, then it will be treated as the worst court-martial offence, and one I’ll have the fellow shot for, believe me. This must be understood. It will be seen as an assault on a fellow soldier, as well as an attack upon the King’s own writ. I will not have any of it in my army. From this point on, these women are not women. They are soldiers. They will be treated as such. Any man who steps across that line runs the risk of a firing squad. It will not be tolerated. Is that clear? Well, is it?’

  After a moment’s caught-out pause there was a harried ‘Yes, sir’ from the ranks of the men.

  ‘Right, then,’ said the colonel, seeming mollified. ‘If that is understood, then we may as well use what has been given us. Give them badges. Put them into companies, Mallarkey Then I want five squads from Stag Rampant ready for a sweep, day after tomorrow. We need to blood them, Captain. We need to blood them.’

  Ensigns passed down the ranks of women with sullen looks or smiles or just blank faces, depending on their nature. To each waiting pair of hands they gave a cloth badge, some stained, and most with loose stitching where they had been cut from other uniforms. Emily turned hers over to look at the device upon it: a black stag on its hind legs, antlers cocked back, forelimbs pawing the air. A Stag Rampant.

  Elise came to find her, to show her an identical badge, and they sat together that morning, sewing the patches onto their jacket shoulders, whilst all around them hundreds of women did likewise.

  ‘I thought we’d never get here,’ Elise said. ‘All that slogging yesterday, I thought my shoulder was going to fall off.’

  ‘It was a long way.’

  ‘You can say that? You were on the light shift, Ensign.’

  ‘A long way from home,’ Emily clarified. ‘From Grammaine.’

  ‘Oh, well, maybe.’ Elise shrugged. ‘I’ve not really done the “home” business for a long time. Gravenfield was the nearest I got to it for years. I reckon the army’s a home now. A career. Maybe I’ll even stay on after the war’s done. I’ll be at least a sergeant by then, I reckon. Got to be. And you’ll be a major-general or something.’

  Emily tried to imagine leaving this place, the war a finished thing; going home and hanging up the musket. Never again having to march or shoot or take orders. Her mind would not stretch to it. The road to the Levant was like sliding into a pit that was too steep to crawl back from.

  Above them, the flag of the Stag Rampant company snapped in the light breeze. They would spend that first day simply discovering the layout of the camp, and the next meeting their new company, under the dubious looks of the male soldiers that were now comrades-in-arms.

  The day after that, they would enter the swamps for the first time, and Elise and seven other women would not return. After that, Emily had to assume, they were well and truly blooded.

  12

  I killed my first man today.

  She came back to herself, slumped upon the ground just beyond the swamp, with the sprawling jumble of the camp in sight. There were others around her, she noticed. While most of the company were staggering on towards the tents, others had come out into the light and air, and just dropped: breathing freely and seeing clearly was suddenly all too much. One woman shook violently, retching. There was a deeper red staining the sleeve of her jacket.

  And, of course, some had not re-emerged at all. Some were still there, with the waters their final resting place.

  Elise.

  There was a numbing, gnawing hole within her. Emily hunched over it, fingers digging in through her shirt. She would tear it out, if she could, both the horror and the guilt. If she had only been faster; if she had only stood a yard either side; if only, if only, if only . . . Oh, Elise, this can’t have happened. Not so soon. Not so very soon, a mere handful of days after arriving here. Not after forty hard days at Gravenfield and eight sweet ones at Grammaine.

  Master Sergeant Mallen helped the injured girl up, caught her as she stumbled, and then led her away. One or two of the others had managed to lurch to their feet and were treading slowly into the camp, but Emily could not make herself move.

  There was a hole in her mind, and it was where the face of the dead Denlander would have been, could she but remember it. She was profoundly glad she could not. Two deaths on her conscience, and the guilt was real – friend or foe. I was never made for this. Too late to discover that now.

  She was still clutching her musket in the crook of her arm. Now she let it fall, stared at it: a lump of machined metal, the tool of her trade. She hated it. She wanted to smash it against a rock, and watch its jagged pieces spin madly away. She wanted to make it so that it killed nobody ever again. But it was hers, her musket. She was a soldier now.

  ‘Ensign.’ She looked up to see Mallen standing there.

  ‘I’m sorry, Master Sergeant . . .’ Emily started to rise but he put a hand out to stay her, and then dropped cross-legged onto the ground beside her. He was a strange man, Mallen: lean and hard. His thin face hosted two frighteningly intense eyes set within a tableau of abstract, irregular tattoos that blurred and smudged the natural outlines of his cheeks and forehead. His hair was long, but nobody ever told him to cut it, and there was something fierce and feral about him. He wore his uniform like a straitjacket. This was not a civilized man: when she had first set eyes on him, she had felt frightened of what he might be capable of. Now she had found out what she herself was capable of and he sat before her and began stripping off his jacket, with its insignia, as if to say that rank was being put aside for now.

  ‘How goes it, Ensign?’ he asked her, and she could not answer him. She was ashamed of losing Elise, ashamed of feeling pain for the Denlander she had killed. She was a poor soldier.

  ‘Get someone?’

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes.

  ‘A lot of them can’t, first time.’ His voice was soft, surprisingly well-spoken. ‘Thank God for it. Means we’ve still something worth fighting for. The day they send us a conscript company who can put a shot into a man without thinking, that’s the day I quit. But everyone has to learn how, and better sooner than later. How do you feel?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Bad, sir.’

  Without warning he reached out and pinched her chin, tugging her head around to look at him.

  ‘That’s right, you should,’ he told her. ‘Every time, understand?’

  She nodded wordlessly.

  ‘But we have to do it, understand? To protect Lascanne.’

  Another nod. He clapped her solidly on the shoulder, one soldier to another, and she burst out, ‘Elise. Elise is . . . she was . . .’ Then the words would not come. If she tried to say them again, she would weep, and she would not be seen weeping before the master sergeant of Stag Rampant company.

  Mallen studied her with the same intensity he turned on everything, and then stood up and backed off a pace. ‘It’s war, Ensign. A fool’s excuse for killing, but it’s a fool’s world. Makes fools of all of us. Come on now, Ensign, set a good example.’

  He put a hand out for her, and she took it, feeling the strength of him as he pulled her to her feet.

  ‘What happened, Master Sergeant?’ she said.

  ‘We surprised them.’

  ‘We surprised them?’

  He glanced off towards the swamps. ‘They were trying to get two hands of squads up the Dareline Channel, when they ran into our sweep. We turned them back. They won’t try it on for a few days, at least, but there were more of them than us, that’s all. Twice as many as we had, so we sent them away but they bit us bad as they went. Jungle war, Ensign. No clear winners.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘That’s good. Marshwic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Marshwic,’ as though committing her name to some deep ancestral memory. ‘Get them moving, Marshwic,’ he to
ld her briskly. ‘Show them how it’s done.’

  He padded off into the camp and she retrieved her musket and looked around at the few women still left at the swamp’s edge.

  ‘Come on, soldiers,’ she tried, but her voice failed her and she had to say it again, forcing volume into the words. ‘Come on, soldiers! On your feet! Food and beds all waiting for you. Let’s go!’

  There was a memorial service the next day. As the mourners lined up, Emily was surprised how few there were. Most of the soldiers, the men especially, simply glanced up and went somewhere else, so they did not have to watch.

  The burial plot itself was hard up against the cliffs, where the ground was firmest. The whole camp was set within one of the slip-fields: earth and rock that had collapsed down from the cliffs above. The landslide had formed a highland of dryness that had been colonized by grass rather than the voracious swamp vegetation. The swamp gnawed at it, though, creeping up on it like angry natives waiting for a chance to take back what was theirs. Emily was surprised at the small number of markers in the field, until she realized that few corpses would have made it out of the swamps. Most of the casualties of the Levant front remained where they fell, and the swamp consumed them. Three days, Mallen said: that was all it took for the busy mouths of the Levant to strip a corpse to bones, and another ten would see the bones buried and broken up as well. The swamps of the Levant were the last resting place of a thousand men of Lascanne and Denland both, who would never see home again, and now eight women had joined them.

  The colonel was out of his hut, with Captain Mallarkey dancing his usual meek attendance one step behind, but as yet there was no sign of a priest. Eventually, Mallarkey was forced to enter a nearby tent and haul the man out. He was a sway-bellied creature, short and dishevelled, with an uncombed beard and a face blotched with red. His robes of black velvet were open halfway to his navel, stained and torn, and he looked at the colonel with obvious incomprehension. Belatedly, Emily realized that he was drunk.

  ‘Father Burnloft,’ the colonel said. ‘The service, if you please.’

  The priest mumbled something, and turned to face the meagre gathering. ‘List,’ he muttered. ‘Got the list?’

  Mallarkey handed him a piece of paper and he nodded myopically at it before focusing on the mourners.

  ‘Here we gather,’ he intoned, slurring the familiar words only slightly. ‘Here we gather to honour the names of those gone before. Gone before to their judgement. May God look upon them for their deeds here. They died defending their country. No death is sweeter in the eyes of the Lord. They died defending their land and their divinely appointed sovereign. No death better assures them of happiness and content in their new home. They shall not fear harm or tyranny; they shall not know pain or weariness. They shall live the life of the blessed until the last days, when all the world shall be restored unto the paradise once it was.’ This had come out almost as one rambling breath and now he paused. His podgy hands, clutching the list, shook slightly, and Emily could hear his breath wheeze. A single fat tear ran unnoticed down his hairy cheek.

  Now we honour those who fell in righteous battle yesterday, and commit them unto the mercy of God that he may know them. Now we honour Geraldine Braedy and Julia Samphor; Elise Hally and Dina Garton . . .’ As Elise’s name struggled through the man’s lips, Emily hugged herself hard, just keeping it all in. Elise, poor Elise, why her? Of Grammaine’s daughters, only Mary had ever been anything other than an indifferent churchgoer, and on this morning Emily’s faith was evaporating like the mist off the swamps.

  The priest’s voice had now slowed, and he blinked at the list in his hands. In an aside to the colonel, loud enough for everyone to hear, he said, ‘Must be some mistake. They’re all girls’ names.’

  There was a tortured silence then, and Emily felt the grief surge up inside her, ravening through her until her shoulders shook, and each sob battled its way from her by main force. Dear God, dear God, please look after her! Racked with grief she swayed and nearly fell to her knees, as the idiot drunken priest stared at the names, and the colonel ground his teeth and told him to finish it.

  ‘Marta Sands,’ the priest intoned. ‘Freya Lincaster, Olive Swach, Lindsey Pailler. We ask you, O God, to take them to you and protect them, and reward them for their bravery. This we ask.’

  Emily could not bring herself to join in the scattered chorus: ‘We ask, O God.’ She simply hunched over her despair as the priest shambled away, and the mourners drifted apart, each swathed in her own bleak thoughts.

  ‘Hey, you,’ she heard, but did not look up until a finger prodded her shoulder. The first thing she saw was the rank, the blue and gold wings of a lieutenant on his shoulders. Mopping angrily at her face she struggled to recover her composure and hash out a salute.

  ‘Sir,’ she choked, still dabbing at her cheeks.

  ‘Hell, Em, have I changed so much?’

  ‘Sir?’ She stared at him stupidly, not seeing beyond the decorations on his sleeves – until he smiled at her and then she knew him.

  ‘Tubal!’

  ‘In the flesh,’ he said, but that was less true than it had been. He had always been a little round at the waist, a little soft. Now there was nothing of that. He was as lean and honed as Mallen, his long dark face turned gaunt, brown locks shaved almost to his skull. He looked a soldier first and Tubal Salander second.

  ‘Mallen told me you were here,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve been out on patrol or I’d have found you sooner.’ He reached out to tug at her company patch. ‘Thank God,’ he said, and showed her the rearing stag on his own.

  ‘Was Rodric . . . ?’

  ‘They put him in Dead . . . in the Leopard Passant,’ he whispered. ‘I couldn’t get him moved. I couldn’t help him. Emily, I’m so sorry.’

  She read in his face the pain of seeing his little brother-in-law come fresh from training. Poor Rodric, lost out in the swamps, food for the leeches, graveless and alone. Had Father Burnloft dragged his way through a meaningless ceremony then, too, with ‘Rodric Marshwic’ dropped in amongst the names of strangers?

  She wanted to say something, to tell Tubal it was not his fault, but she still carried the grief like a weight in the pit of her stomach, and it hurt. It hurt her and she could do nothing. When she collapsed into Tubal’s arms, she did not know whether it was because of Elise, or Rodric, or all the dead, the unnumbered dead of the war, or for herself.

  He held her close for a long time, let her tears stain his uniform, and she felt a tremor in him, telling of his own losses and pain.

  ‘It’s all gone wrong, hasn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘It’s not how I’d have planned it.’

  ‘Tubal, what are we going to do?’

  He held her at arm’s length. Mary’s cheery, harmless husband looked so stern now, so hard-edged.

  ‘We’re going to survive,’ he told her. ‘Don’t let them tell you different.’ And then he grinned, with the desperate, carefree expression of a man who has already lost, and has more to lose. ‘Welcome to Bad Rabbit,’ he told her.

  ‘Bad . . . what?’

  He tapped her on her sleeve, meaning the company badge. ‘Look at it.’

  She craned down to peer at the little heraldic design, then up at the company flags that flew above the camp. The black stag reared there, antlers high. ‘Stag Rampant,’ she said slowly, closed her eyes and then reopened them.

  ‘Do you see?’ he asked. And she did. It was a terrible thing, with death so close, but she started to laugh. The pompous-looking deer with its malformed antlers could just as easily have been a rabbit, a very badly made rabbit.

  ‘Oh, that’s funny . . . no, it shouldn’t be funny.’ But, all the same, she was laughing now. It felt so good to have something to laugh at, no matter how little. ‘What are the others then?’

  ‘The Leopard is Dead Cat,’ he explained, and she recalled she had seen most of the Leopard Passant troopers with their company badges sewn upside down, the stru
tting animal’s legs stiff in the air.

  ‘And the bear?’ The brown beast sitting on its thick haunches, one forepaw raised as though objecting to something at council.

  ‘Fat Squirrel,’ said Tubal, and she laughed until she cried.

  Later, they sipped warm soup fetched from the kitchens, and she told him about home. Her words conjured up for him the Ghyer, Alice, the ball at Deerlings House, the Draft and, of course, Gravenfield. Not Mr Northway, never Mr Northway, but Tubal must have sensed the unseen worm that tunnelled through her narrative. He did not interrupt, though. He let her words tumble out at their own pace and in their own order. Outside, rain that had been a drizzle just after the funeral was a solid downpour now, and showing no signs of stopping.

  ‘Back home they keep saying it’s all going so well,’ she said. ‘It’s not, is it?’

  Not that I’ve noticed,’ he admitted. ‘God, I wish I could see Mary again. I don’t like the fighting and dying part much, but it’s missing her I really object to.’

  ‘She’s very cross with you. She says you should write.’

  A tight look came across his face. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then I will,’ she said. ‘I need to tell them. I need to tell them about Elise, poor Elise.’

  ‘Emily . . .’

  ‘I will write a letter,’ she decided. ‘How do I get it out of here? Do people go to Locke ever? To the trains?’

  ‘Emily, you can’t . . . Look, every letter has to go through the colonel. He reads them all. Why do you think I never wrote? I’m a printer. I deal in the truth of the written word. The only stuff that you can write is that drivel Rodric sent you that one time.’

  ‘But that’s . . . wrong!’

  ‘Isn’t it? But it’s all there is. I’ve tried, believe me. The colonel’s gotten sick of me badgering him about it.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ll go and badger him myself,’ she decided.

  Tubal weighed her up with a glance, then shrugged. ‘Try,’ he said. ‘Why not? After all, I’m just a Salander that married into money, but you’re a Marshwic. The colonel’s a Resnic, old family. Hell, maybe he’ll listen to you, when he won’t to me. That sort of thing counts with him.’