She wanted to wait and wait for some golden opportunity, some great moment when all knots might be undone with just one pull of the string.
There will never be a good time for this. She clutched her musket closer to her. On three, she decided. She counted: one, two three. She still did not want to go in.
She went anyway, charging out into the open and collapsing before a toppled barrel that would protect her hardly at all, raising the gun to her shoulder. The trigger jerked, the arc-lock spun.
It misfired. No smoke, no sound, but the lack of it was swallowed up in the great thunder of her division’s guns, the choking pall of rank smoke once they found their places and fired. Ragged pot-shotting, nothing like the mechanical order of the Denlanders, but still, guns were guns. She saw twenty or more of the closest enemy punched off their feet, or slumping across their barricades, and she realized to her horror that if she wanted to press her advantage, she would need to close the range. We need to move forward again.
And if the Denlanders have more men concealed in the trees they can do to us what we have done to them.
Dragging her sabre from its scabbard, she pushed herself to her feet. ‘Go! Charge! Go!’ she screamed at the top of her voice, and dashed forward, sword first.
Denlanders were turning to confront her division now. Something plucked at the sleeve of her jacket and she felt a sting as that of an insect. The man beside her stopped dead, doubling over and falling out of her sight.
She screamed, eyes almost shut, sword held high. No words, but just a yell of rage and defiance and fear.
She was within the line of their barricade. Shots sang past her, heading both ways. The nearest Denlander dropped, blood spouting from his throat like a stage actor’s feigned expiry. The next was still facing out at Bear Sejant, about to make his shot. She rammed the sabre into his body, losing it between his ribs as he howled in agony. She pulled the doubtful pistol out and held it at arm’s length, looking for a target.
Her division began to overtake her. Stockton, or whoever she was, dropped to her knees beside Emily, aiming and firing with clenched teeth, eyes wide.
The Denlanders were breaking apart, backing off. Tubal and Captain Pordevere had led their men charging out, a great tide of red that spilled over the clearing into the final round of fire from the Denlander line. From within the Lascanne ranks a great sheet of fire swept over the barricades, setting Denlanders alight like torches as Justin Lascari made his presence known.
In her mind she heard Mallen’s voice: Into the trees! Don’t stop at the treeline. Don’t let them regroup.
‘After them! Follow them!’ she shouted, her voice hoarse and raw. She hauled once more at her sword, but the dead man held it securely, so with pistol only she charged. ‘Bad Rabbit! Bad Rabbit!’
Into the trees. The whole action so far had been a string of beads, alternating light space and dark swamp. There were Denlanders fleeing ahead of her, pelting and jumping over the treacherous ground. One fell, too close for her to strike, and she leapt over him, trusting to her soldiers to finish him off.
Into the mist, into the trees, splashing madly through the shifting waters, and always knowing that she was being followed, whilst the quarry was vanishing swiftly out of sight ahead. It was like some strange nightmare where she constantly pursued, but never caught. The pistol, a weight on her arm, lower and lower.
Where am I?
She stopped running. There was water before her. For a mad moment she thought she had reached the sea.
A lake? A vast lake that receded into the drifting fog. She stood at its very edge, on a finger of higher land that jutted out into it, gnarly with trees sprouting in single file.
Somewhere out there, cloaked in the murk, some great beast splashed and howled.
She turned numbly back the way she had come. None of her soldiers had followed her this far. It seemed they had the good sense to follow the enemy instead, as they were supposed to.
She sank back against a tree, feeling it give a little, its roots loose on the edge of the water. Her heart fluttered within her ribs and it was hard to catch her breath. She had a burning pain in her side, born of too much running and fighting.
Lost? She ignored the thought. She needed to catch her breath and get her mind back in order. She would be no more or less lost with that achieved.
She found herself shaking. The fierce determination that had brought her here was fast leaking out of her. How many men have I killed? How many nearly killed me? She collapsed to the ground, thrusting her pistol back into her belt on the third try. So this is war.
She could not, in that instant, imagine what national insanity had brought Lascanne and Denland to a pass where this ordeal might be required of their citizens.
A king’s death? Is that all it takes to drive us to this?
She sagged back, and then scrambled for her feet, as she saw movement.
Red; a red jacket. Ours.
A shuddering sigh of relief tore itself out of her before she recognized the newcomer. It was Master Sergeant Sharkey of Bear Sejant.
He smiled at her unevenly. ‘Well, now,’ he called as he approached. ‘Look at the two of us.’
‘Sergeant?’ She felt weak still. Her knees might give way at any time.
Sharkey pushed his broad frame around the intervening trees. ‘Looks like it’s over,’ he told her, grinning still. She nodded wearily.
‘And look at the two of us,’ he added. ‘Isn’t this something?’
‘What, Sergeant?’ Wary now, for he was not stopping his approach.
‘Little Miss Marshwic all alone here,’ he pointed out. ‘All alone with just old Sharkey to look after her. Ain’t that nice.’
‘Sergeant—’ And then he moved, covering the last few yards to reach her in a sudden dash that put one hand about her throat, smashing her head back against the tree. Her world reeled and she felt his fingers tighten. ‘Now you be nice,’ his voice growled in her ear. ‘Be nice, you stuck-up bitch, and maybe you’ll enjoy it.’ She scrabbled at his clutching hand and he whipped it away, grasping one of her wrists and hauling her up by it onto tiptoe. His other hand was fumbling at her belt, prising at the man’s clothing, until eventually he yanked it hard enough to sprain her back, and it snapped in his grip.
She could not cry out; that was the worst thing. Even though nobody would hear – or, if anyone did, then Denlanders only – she could not cry out for help. The sheer physical fear of him, his brutal grip on her, had closed down her throat, forced silence on her as though he was making her voice his accomplice. He had locked her in his grasp. His heavy-jawed face loomed in her vision, teeth bared. She felt his hand tugging at her breeches.
He was stronger than she was, bigger, faster. He had done this before. What could a woman do to defend herself against such an assault?
Sergeant Demaine had said that in modern war it mattered not: man or woman, whole or cripple. Modern war was the leveller of all.
His hands stopped in that instant. He had felt the change come over her body, from woman to soldier. She saw the merest blink of uncertainty touch him, and she rammed her knee as hard as humanly possible between his legs.
He doubled up, fell back, both hands clutching his crotch as he roared with pain and fury. He came up fighting mad, killing mad, and within that time she had snatched her pistol from the ground and levelled it at him.
They stopped, both of them. Sharkey’s face was a picture of anger and fear, all of the vile things that mankind is inheritor of. Her own face, had she known, was expressionless.
‘A duel of weapons,’ she said, her voice wild, trembling and terrified. ‘I will pit mine against yours.’
He bared his teeth, but her gun was levelled at waist height and he dared not advance into it.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that we should now rejoin the company.’ Her voice, her every muscle, was steady as a rock now. The fierce fighting spirit was back in her.
He nodded and turned to
go, and she took a step forward.
With a crazed animal sound, Sharkey leapt back towards her with hands outstretched, and she pulled the trigger, remembering as she did so that she had no idea whether the gun would fire.
The butt, slamming back into her hip, felt as though she had shot herself. The pistol ball punched a bloody hole in Sharkey’s groin, and he somersaulted forward and tumbled into the waters of the lake.
Her legs gave way and she sat down heavily. The image in her mind was of Grant forcing the same pistol on her. He always did look after me.
Sharkey would have killed me anyway, she realized only afterwards. The simple act of rape was enough to get him shot. He would have throttled me, snapped my neck. He would have done it to others. Perhaps he has. Who would inform on a master sergeant?
Still, it was some minutes before she could muster the strength to stand up, to go and look for her company, to see who yet lived and who had died.
What will Brocky think? was the thought that occurred to her, imagining his incredulous mirth at her going to stores for replacement musket, sabre and a belt. What will he think?
17
I have told no one of this. I cannot speak to Mallen, nor even to Tubal, my own brother-in-law. They would not understand.
To you alone can I communicate these events. I believe you will understand, whereas they may not. Your world has plenty of shades between the colours. In this world we cannot but compromise.
She left the lakeside behind her, hoping to retrace her own or Sharkey’s tracks, some path to take her home.
The impenetrable, unmastered jungle confronted her: the tangle of greens, the shifting footing. She was out of sync with it once more. That golden moment where she and it had moved as one was now over.
What a figure she made: a lone soldier with but a pistol to defend herself, a cannibalized baldric holding her britches up. A joke, a clown soldier, a badly cast mummer.
She put one foot in front of the other and set off under the forest canopy, because what else was there to do? She had no idea where she was. The lake at her back was to be found on no map she had seen, or else she was miles adrift. Perhaps she would come up against the sea, perhaps she would even set foot on Denland soil.
Perhaps she would wander, lost and maddened, until the swamps claimed her.
She did not call out for assistance. Dying in the swamps was one thing. It was a death she had almost made her peace with. Being captured by the Denlanders, being taken before their diabolical Doctor Lam, was another matter entirely. She knew little enough, but no doubt the Denlanders would find it a worthwhile story when they had cut and prised it from her.
She tried to use Mallen’s trick of finding east by noting the gradual movement of the water, but she could discern no such movement. It was standing, brackish, undisturbed by all but the amphibians. She crouched over pool after pool, plagued by insects, and saw in the mire not even her own reflection.
It took an hour of roaming, of oppressive heat and slimy water, before she spotted the indigene.
She saw it only when it moved. It was crouching in the fork of a tree, staring down at her with its vast, blank eyes. They caught all the dim light that penetrated through the overreaching canopy; they almost seemed to glow with it. It had a bundle of long, slender javelins in one hand, tipped with bone, and Emily nervously put a hand to her pistol butt.
‘Well now, hello there,’ she said to it carefully, wondering how many friends it had nearby that she could not see.
With a sinuous motion, the hairy creature dropped onto the roots below and bared its narrow teeth at her with a brief chattering and jabbering. As alien to her as her own tongue surely was to it, she let the sounds wash over her.
‘I don’t understand,’ she tried, as loud and clear as she dared. ‘Sorry. Not understand you. No good.’
‘Mar’n,’ it said emphatically, jabbing its weapons at her chest.
I must be somewhere they don’t want me to be, she thought. Well, I’ve no great wish to be here either. Feeling tired and frustrated, she sat down on the nearest tree root, which seemed to agitate the indigene even more.
‘Mar’n!’ it said. ‘Mar’n!’ Then kept saying it, hopping from foot to foot. She just stared blankly at the creature until finally it lunged at her, swift as blinking, taking her utterly by surprise. She went for her pistol, but got it tangled between her shirt and the improvised belt, and then the indigene was right in her face. It had a strange smell, something of the swamp but with an acrid musk overlying it, and it was tugging fiercely at the red of her jacket with its free hand.
‘Mar’n!’ it yapped, and there was something human in its tone: it thought she was an idiot.
‘Mallen?’ She gaped at it.
‘Mar’n! Mar’n!’ it repeated, and there was no mistaking the exasperated confirmation. With the linguistics cleared up, it scuttled off a dozen paces, wiping its hand on the greenery to rid it of her touch, then turned back to watch her. There was no beckoning, no human gesture to explain it, but she understood. She heaved herself onto her feet, and stumbled after the indigene as it led her further into the swamps.
An hour later she was in sight of the camp. She looked around to thank her guide, but it had vanished without her ever seeing it go.
Step after dragging step, she walked out into full view of the tents, and the sentries spotted her and raised a shout. Moments later, Tubal came running from the camp’s edge towards her, with an expression of amazed joy on his face.
‘Hell and damnation, Em!’ he shouted. ‘Where the hell did you get to?’ He clasped her to him fiercely. ‘God, but it’s good to see you! I thought . . . Well you can guess what I thought!’
‘It’s good to see you, too, Tubal.’ She slumped against him a moment, feeling utterly drained. Out of the swamps at last, the air was chilly, the sunlight too bright.
‘You must be the last of us,’ he said. ‘There can’t be anyone else, now.’
She caught his eye. ‘How many? How many dead?’
He sighed. ‘Well, nobody ever said it was going to be easy.’
‘Tubal, how many?’
‘Our current strength is six hundred and thirty-six soldiers-at-arms, Em, besides thirteen assorted officers.’
Two hundred dead and more. She shivered.
‘Between your lot getting caught in the field, and Sergeant Shalmer’s boys getting pinned down early on, not to mention me getting cut up going in to help Pordevere,’ he said. ‘On which subject, Fat Squirrel lost well over one man in three.’
‘One in . . .’ She could not quite imagine it. There had been a thousand souls under the Bear Sejant banner only this morning.
And one of those dead men is my doing. Amongst such a welter of the dead, she found that she could muster no remorse for Master Sergeant Sharkey.
‘Pordevere put them in too fast and too soon. They were taking the Denlanders’ full fire for a long time before we turned up. Dead Cat got off lightly, no more than twenty or thirty down.’
Because they were late, she thought. And, because they came late, we suffered.
‘The enemy?’ she asked.
Tubal’s smile was small and pained. ‘Oh, we won, no question. We broke up their entire camp. Wherever they’ve retreated to, it’s a damn sight further back. Hooray for our side, right?’
‘Hooray,’ she echoed hollowly. ‘I need to sit down, Tubal. I need to eat.’ A sudden thought, and with it, guilt that it had not occurred sooner. ‘Tubal, is Mr Scavian . . . ?’
‘Perfectly alive and well, despite a few near misses,’ he assured her, with a smile a touch too knowing for her comfort. ‘He gave them good service, I hear. For all he hates the fight, our Giles does seem to be particularly good at it.’
*
She slept through from before dusk until just after dawn, a blessedly dreamless rest. Only in the morning did she think to go and see John Brocky.
He had made the storehouse his own special sanctum, a labyrinth of
skewed crates and boxes without labels. He was clearly doing his best to make himself irreplaceable. She found him poking around under some shelves with a broom handle, an expression of intense concentration on his face.
‘Rats?’ she asked.
‘Snakes,’ he explained. ‘Our good friend Mallen, out of the kindness of his little heart, decided I should have some snakes to keep the rats down. Now the rats won’t come near this place, and I can quite understand them.’ He straightened up mournfully. ‘Once again, outwitted by a reptile.’ His tone could have meant either the snakes or Mallen. ‘What can I do for you, Ensign? Good to see you well.’
‘I need my letter back,’ she explained.
He spread his hands. ‘Can’t help you there, Marshwic. Your pretty little messenger girl turned up at lunchtime yesterday, and I handed it over just like you said. Got a return message for you, as well.’
He pressed the sealed note into her hands, leaving her thinking numbly of what Mr Northway would think when he read what she had written: her last few words, last morning’s hurried work.
He will worry. The feeling it brought to her was strange, bittersweet. He would be worrying when, by the time he read the words, she would already have returned alive and safe. He would worry.
It felt good to think that there would be someone back home who would know the truth, and worry. She could not put the weight of that on her sisters, but Northway could bear it.
I am become as strange as he, she told herself.
‘Marshwic?’ Brocky queried dubiously.
She broke out of her reverie to collect replacements for all her missing kit, and was just bundling out of the hut when Tubal found her.
‘Em, got you! The colonel wants to see you right away.’
‘What?’ She grasped for calm as he bustled her away from the store.
‘No time for questions. Come on.’
‘Very well, Salander, that will do,’ Colonel Resnic said, with a dismissive gesture, almost the moment the two of them entered his headquarters. Tubal saluted smartly, then was gone before Emily had quite worked out what was going on. There was no clue on the colonel’s face as he gestured for her to sit across from him. The map of the swamps was still pinned to the table, though the coloured bricks had gone.
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