Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The light blazed forth as before, but she was ready for it now: the second slip-field. All around her, Stag Rampant company were breaking out from the bog, picking up their pace. Goss looked back then at last, waving angrily to her. Or, at least, she registered his taut expression as anger. Any number of emotions could be sheltering under that mask.

  ‘Sir, look!’ She followed one soldier’s pointing arm and her stomach clenched. It was Mallen, with a half-dozen scouts, running back towards them at a full charge.

  ‘Captain! Scouts!’ she called out, but said no more, for there was movement beyond the fleeing Mallen. A line of grey coats was pushing out of the treeline at the far end of the slip-field. At this distance she could see no details, pick out no single target, but Mallen was still fleeing at top speed. The Denlanders made a movement almost in unison, half of them falling to one knee, and all of them bringing their muskets to their shoulders.

  ‘Get down!’ Mallen’s voice came to them. ‘Everybody, down! Down!’ Then he took his own advice, hurling himself into the long grass, and Emily dropped to her knees, aiming her useless weapon towards the distant enemy.

  Goss grimaced madly, his empty fists clenched. ‘Get up!’ he roared, glaring around at his company. ‘Get up, you fools! They can’t touch us at this—’

  First she saw the smoke, an almost solid curtain of white that flowered before that grey firing line, and Captain Goss and two dozen others simply collapsed as though their strings had been cut.

  She heard the shots immediately afterwards, the insignificant rattle of gunfire far off, as if in another place entirely. Aside from that, the world seemed to have lost all depth for her, all sound.

  ‘Up! Up!’ a voice was shouting. ‘Up and charge them before they reload!’ Preposterous! They have time enough twice over. But she was on her feet and running forward, heedless of the rest, and only then did she realize that the voice had been her own.

  Mallen rose up before her without warning, spun on his heel and ran alongside her with easy loping strides. Ahead, the Denlanders were reloading, as she knew they would, with careful, practised motions. She could see details now: small men with dark hair or wearing leather caps, their grey clothes not quite uniform. They were noticeably ragged, bringing their muskets up. The onrush of their enemy had thrown them. When they fired, it was piecemeal, while the Lascanne line was now scattered and straggling, so that there was plenty of open space to swallow stray Denlander shot. Emily heard cries and screams behind her from plenty of those less fortunate, but she still kept pounding forward for God and the King, with Mallen beside her.

  Now there was feverish activity all along the Denlander line, as they tried to ready a third volley that would butcher their enemies at close range. Their legendary efficiency seemed to be lacking, however. Surely we would have given three rounds of fire before now? And she was closer and closer, and she could not say whether they would manage it. She heard the shouts of their officers; some of the greycoats were already beginning to lift their guns.

  In the teeth of the enemy, the only thing she could think to say to Mallen was, ‘Is anybody following us?’

  And still the bulk of the enemy were feverishly recharging their muskets – their officers calling shrilly for a massed volley and not individual shots – and she saw more than a few pale faces looking up in alarm as she neared. ‘Firing line here!’ she called out, because it suddenly came to her that her own people were still loaded and ready to shoot.

  Suddenly there was a massive crowd of Bad Rabbit soldiers on either side of her, and she put the musket to her shoulder – even as the Denlanders were starting to bring their pieces up – and yelled, ‘Fire!’

  The air was briefly choked with smoke as a good seventy guns on either side of her spoke in unison with hers. With no idea if she had hit anything, she let the musket fall away and dragged out her father’s pistol with her left hand, unsheathing her stubborn sabre with her right. Denlander guns were going off all down the line in individual flashes of fire, but not the devastating mass of gunfire she had feared. A voice, high and shrill, was crying out in threat or fear, and it was hers.

  Then she was out of the smoke, just a short distance from the Denlander line, and her voice was magnified a hundredfold as the soldiers of Lascanne took up her shout. It had words now: a battle cry to shake the hearts of the mighty. ‘Stag Rampant! Stag Rampant! Stag Rampant!’ Or perhaps it was ‘Bad Rabbit!’ It was impossible to tell.

  The Denlander line broke.

  Some were still reloading, desperate to take another shot, but she saw a tide of fear flash across the faces of them all. Terror sparked through them like a fuse as the soldiers of the Stag Rampant bore down on them. Even though a complete volley this close would have shattered their enemies, the Denlanders began falling back. Some retreated in good order; others scattered in panic. Directly in front of Emily, one of the braver souls had charged his musket, and was dragging the muzzle up towards her. The movement seemed strangely sluggish and dreamlike. Locked in the silence inside her head, she thrust the pistol towards him, watched the arc-lock spin, and a jet of smoke gout from the muzzle. The gun kicked in her hand, and the Denlander arched backwards, his musket discharging in his grasp. His shot – or another shot – whipped past her ear like the buzz of an insect. Then she had reached their lines, swinging the heavy blade of her sabre down to bite into the upraised arm of a man; still dragging madly on her pistol’s trigger, empty as it was. A soldier in grey went scrambling back before her, musket forgotten, and she lunged for him with her blade, ripping it out of its first victim. Even as she overextended, she saw a patch of grey cloth explode into red over his breast, so that what she fell over was a dead man. Beside her, Mallen leapt atop the man with the wounded arm and buried a knife beside his collarbone, before looking up and about him.

  ‘Into the trees!’ he bellowed. ‘Don’t stop at the treeline! Get into the trees! Into cover!’

  Emily staggered up and onto her feet, her body obeying his order automatically. The sledgehammer of the heat, she now hardly noticed. Instead she was looking for more Denlanders to menace with her blade.

  Moments later she was crouching alongside a jumbled assortment of Stag Rampant soldiers, the mist showing her perhaps a hundred of them. Of the Denlanders there was no sign, and she could only hope that they were still in flight. There were a few staggered shots, she could not judge from where, and then the only sounds around them were from the swamp, its eternal round of animal life and death.

  She watched a thumb-length fly settle on her arm and pad the jacket sleeve with its feet. Looking up, she saw the wide frightened stares of her comrades-in-arms. What happens now?

  ‘Is there a sergeant here?’ she asked.

  ‘Here.’ The answering voice sounded hoarse and rusty. When she scrambled over the roots and men and women to reach him, she found a man with his right sleeve dark with blood, another soldier tying an inexpert bandage about it.

  ‘Sergeant . . .’ What happens now? ‘Are you . . . can you go on?’

  He looked up at her with a faced creased in pain. ‘Don’t think so. Sorry, Ensign. Where’s the captain?’

  She jerked her head back towards the deadly slip-field, and he swore. Meeting his eyes, she saw her own question in them. Someone tell me: what happens now?

  Right. She looked around at the soldiers again – her company – and names welled up in her mind, or at least some of them. ‘Wells, take two others and escort Sergeant . . . escort the sergeant back to camp. Pick up any other wounded you find back in the field.’ And what if there are more wounded than three able bodies can take? The question went unasked. It was out of her hands.

  She watched with detached amazement as Soldier Wells and the two nearest him helped the sergeant stand up. He gave her a look, before they left: it might have been wishing her luck or it might have been expressing no confidence in her. She let the thought go.

  What happens now? ‘You, Gallster and Pachleby, go back to
the field. Fetch a dozen muskets. I can’t be the only one to have lost mine.’ And as if by magic, the two named soldiers were already retreating back towards the slip-field. That was the easy part.

  ‘Where’s Mallen?’

  ‘Gone ahead, Ensign.’

  ‘Stockton,’ she said, addressing a young woman she thought looked sound. The girl’s expression suggested that she was not Stockton, but Emily ploughed on regardless. ‘And you,’ she decided, letting her finger indicate the next. ‘Go scout ahead. I need to know where we are, and what’s going on.’

  The woman who wasn’t Stockton stood up, looking pale and less sound than she had a moment before, but she saluted and she and her nameless companion stepped away into the mist and the trees, and were lost and gone in ten paces. Emily was uncomfortably aware that she could have sent two soldiers to their deaths without knowing the name of either. I will improve, if I get the chance. ‘Someone make me a count,’ she instructed them. ‘How many of us are left?’

  She used the meantime to lean back against a tree and work out what she would do next, what news she might expect to hear.

  The count of two hundred and twenty-one came in, perhaps including Gallster and Pachleby, as they came back with their cargo of replacement guns.

  Seventy-odd dead in the field. So few moments to account for so many.

  And now two hundred and twenty-one men and women looked at her and waited for her to tell them what to do.

  The knot in her stomach, tight enough during all these days, clenched fully at last. Don’t rely on me. I only got the rank because of family. I’m no real officer. But she couldn’t tell them that. They were relying on her. She was Lascanne, to them. She was all they had right now of the colonel, and the King.

  There was a sudden scuffle at the fringe of the group as the woman who wasn’t Stockton was nearly shot three times while making a sudden reappearance. She kicked her way hurriedly through the mob of soldiers to get to Emily.

  ‘Ensign!’

  ‘What is it? Where’s . . . ?’

  Thankfully the soldier cut her off before she could stumble over the lack of name. ‘Ensign, we found the lieutenant’s party. They’re two, three hundred yards that direction. He doesn’t know where the third division is, but . . .’ She paused to get her breath back. ‘As I was telling him where we were, we heard gunfire – lots of it. There was a big fight up ahead. He didn’t know if it was Sergeant Shalmer’s men or the Bear. The lieutenant was moving out to assist, when I left. He’s kept Breedy in case he needed to send another message.’

  Thank God this woman can at least make half a report. Emily stood up to let everyone see her, as far as the mist allowed. ‘We’re going now,’ she told them. ‘Everyone loaded?’ Even as she asked, she realized that she still had no musket, but the very next moment Gallster was pushing one into her hands. Everything was falling into place. She had now started to slide, and she could not stop until she reached the bottom.

  ‘Everyone up!’ she called, and the division picked itself out of the mud, battered but determined. She elbowed her way to the front, because it was more than she could manage to lead them from any other position.

  ‘Let’s go!’ And, like Captain Goss, she did not look back to see if they were following her.

  She knew they were. It frightened her worse than the Denlanders, worse than Mr Northway She was carrying the weight of their trust on her shoulders now. Her feet sank heavier in the mud because of it.

  There was a distant sound of firing, no louder than pattering rain, as they reached the next slip-field. At the edge of the swamp, looking out at that bright-lit expanse ahead, Emily hesitated. Quicker if we go over it; quicker than fighting this confounded mud and root-tangle.

  But another ambush and you’ll have nobody left to lead. She had no idea where Mallen was, whether he was still scouting or had been caught up in the fighting.

  ‘Go round!’ she called. ‘Round the edge of it,’ and she battled her way off through the foliage, sensing the relief of the soldiers closest to her.

  ‘Good choice, sir,’ she heard at her shoulder, not looking back to see who it was. Instead she picked up the pace, heading as fast over the twisted terrain as she could, vaulting over roots, splashing through pools and slogging through mud that wrenched at her boots. Then she took another great wall of root at a run, slung her feet over and went up to her waist in water.

  The shock of it made her gasp even as she pushed onwards, feeling the black slime of the bottom ooze beneath her. Musket held high, she waded forward, seeing the bulk of her soldiers overtaking her, left and right, around the pool.

  This I’ll never live down.

  And then the Denlanders came through the trees ahead of them.

  She felt the musket’s trigger click in her hands, realized that she had dragged it down to rest against her shoulder. There was the heartbeat of dreadful anticipation as the arc-lock spun.

  The Denlanders had been hurrying across the division’s path – falling back, she assumed. She would never know whether they had, in fact, been watching over the slip-field for their enemy.

  The musket bucked against her shoulder and, all around her, her troops were firing. She heard her shot go off, as a single distinct entity, before the roar of the massed fire that the others belted out. The recoil of the gun made her heels skid in the mud, and she almost lost her balance and went under completely.

  When the smoke cleared, there was a score of dead Denlanders splayed and scattered before them, while the living had fled.

  ‘Reload and then on!’ she called, and she waded out of the pool. Someone took her musket, whereupon she snatched her pistol from her belt. It was empty still from the previous engagement, and she had no idea whether it would fire at all now. She dried it as best she could with her shirt and loaded it anyway. It was a good-quality, robust weapon. If the worst came to the worst it would be worth the hazard, and she could always use it as a cudgel.

  And they pushed forward, as the sound of gunfire, volley overlapping volley in a continuous thunder, grew ever louder.

  The trees were thinning ahead of them, and she broke into a run.

  For her first astounded second, it looked like some corner of a soldier’s vision of hell.

  The ground was churned calf-deep in mud, and littered with bodies. It had been the site of a camp, a big one, but there was little enough left of that now. The tents were trampled, and everything that stood over a foot tall provided cover for more soldiers than it could reasonably hide. Across the far side, she saw the Denlanders strung out in a long line behind cases and crates and a few over-turned carts, firing and reloading with fearful determination, half and half, taking it in turns to peer over the barrier and let fly. Closer by, a few hundred yards along her side of the clearing, there was a mass of men, tight-packed in a block of hundreds, ducking behind what cover they had, the front ranks returning fire on the Denlanders. These were Bear Sejant men, she assumed at first, but then she caught a glimpse of Tubal’s dark face in the nearest lot and knew that he must have come to the Bear’s aid and was now as pinned down as they were.

  What happens now?

  ‘Sir, look!’ She followed the pointing finger of the woman who was not Stockton, and saw a detachment of Denlanders, their grey uniforms smeared with mud and blood, making their way around the clearing’s edge, as they tried to get into a position where they could flank the embattled Lascanne forces. Much further and they would secure an unobstructed line of fire into the heart of Tubal’s men.

  ‘Follow me!’ she ordered without explanation, and charged forward into the trees, following the periphery of the clearing under the canopy. Please, please, don’t let them see us. A ridiculous supposition. Two hundred men and women and more, all in red, with guns gleaming in the weak sunlight, how could they go unnoticed?

  But the swamps and the trees, which had been her enemy since she came here, were with her now. Their roots gave her purchase as she charged her soldiers th
rough them. They gave her mist to hide her from the enemy. She passed through the water and the muck and mire like an indigene, like Mallen himself.

  She stopped, letting the division form up around her. The Denlanders had almost crept into position. She had their backs. Shooting men in the back: no honour, no valour. The colonel would mutter into his moustache: This is not what war is about.

  And she thought: This is absolutely what war is about. The real war.

  ‘With me!’ She pulled the trigger, kneeling to reload as her comrades’ fire lashed through the flanking party, smashing bones, punching through lungs, killing men in all the ways a swiftly hurtling ball of lead can. She came up to see the enemy survivors under fire from the front as well, and she mercilessly brought her gun to bear on a second target. This time she saw the Denlander die, flung forward even as he was taking aim. She bent again to reload.

  What happens now? She had no plan. Each fresh idea came without ancestor or descendant. Every man and woman who had survived the slip-field was still with her, but that would not last for long.

  We will do to them what they would do to Tubal, she decided. Why not let the Denlanders advise her on strategy? By all accounts they were good at it.

  She managed another hundred yards about the edge of the enemy company before her nerve failed her and she knew they had to go in. The Denlander line was strung out: there would be no great triumphant smashing of it. They had bought themselves one volley of surprise, and no more.

  ‘When I move,’ she told her soldiers, ‘get into range and take what cover you may, then fire at will.’

  ‘What then, sir?’ someone asked her.

  She could not admit to them she did not know, so she told them nothing.

  The Denlanders fired again, one half dropping down as their fellows stood to take another shot. Emily felt her insides squirm. When she stepped out to the trees’ edge, into good range of them, it would be with two hundred and twenty-one soldiers, all of whose lives depended on her choices.