The master sergeant had found a good place to make a stand. One great tree had split near its base, and a dozen divided trunks fought upwards, and gave shelter to the besieged soldiers. Emily reloaded feverishly, hearing the crack and snap of musket fire all around.
‘How many are there?’ she called over the din.
‘I count twenty left at least,’ Angelline said. ‘A little fewer than us, perhaps, but they have us pinned down.’
‘Can we charge?’
‘We’d be running straight into their fire.’
‘They might break.’ God help us if they don’t break.
Angelline ground her teeth. ‘I don’t want to risk it.’ A shot hammered splinters from the trunk by her face, and she barely flinched. ‘Though we may have to,’ she allowed.
‘I can lead some men out to flank them.’ Emily sighted along her musket at the Denlanders. They were advancing from cover to cover, making use of everything the swamp could give them. Their greyness bled into the mist, where they shifted and flowed. She cursed, and fired anyway, ducking back to reload without seeing if she had hit home.
‘You’d not make it,’ Angelline warned her. ‘They’ve got too good a view of us. I’m sorry I brought us to this, Sergeant.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘My command, my fault . . .’ Angelline’s voice cut off so abruptly that Emily thought she had been shot. Instead she was staring out at the enemy, her mouth open.
‘Is that . . . ?’ she said, speechless for once.
Emily risked a glimpse out, and her finger twitched on the trigger, sending a wild and unaimed shot over the enemy’s heads.
John Brocky was up.
He had pulled himself to his feet, with a pistol in each hand. The Denlanders had been in a hurry to press forward and surround their stubborn foes, which left the quartermaster now behind the enemy. She could not see what kind of mad expression might be discovered on a man in his situation.
‘Everyone reload and be ready to move,’ Angelline said.
Even as her hands went through that familiar task, Emily could not but watch the resurrected John Brocky. For a moment he just stood there, knees bent and hunched forward for balance in the shifting mud. Then he seemed to come to a decision within himself, and his hands exploded with smoke and fire as the pistols discharged in unison, directly into the backs of the Denlanders.
The weapons fell from his hands instantly and he reached for the next pair. His mouth was open and he was yelling something – probably something obscene. The Denlanders were turning even as he fired again, and they must have believed an entire squad of Lascanne soldiers had come up behind them.
And then Angelline bellowed, ‘Charge!’ in a voice like thunder, and her surviving soldiers boiled out of cover with their muskets firing, with their knives and sabres bared.
Brocky stood still and fired his third set of pistols. His face was a study in panic, a man who has opened a door onto something he had never wanted to see. At a range of no more than five feet, he had not missed a shot.
Angelline and Emily, leading the charge, met the Denlanders head on. Emily’s sabre flashed and missed, but the Denlanders were falling back. She saw a man try to bring his musket to bear on Brocky, far too close for such elegant shooting. Brocky’s final pistols flashed, one firing, one not. The Denlander was punched from his feet, falling backwards over the bodies of his comrades.
And there was quiet for just a little while, as some twenty-three natives of Lascanne crouched amongst twice that many corpses of both nationalities.
‘Brocky,’ Emily challenged him, ‘you were faking! You pretended you’d been shot to fool them.’
He turned world-weary eyes on her. ‘Oh, I wish,’ he replied. He used one pistol butt to hook aside his jacket, and she saw a small patch of red across his shirt that in any other circumstances she would have taken for wine.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘There’s a stupid question.’
‘Sergeant, there are more of them out there,’ Caxton reported to her urgently. ‘Must be at least two more squads, judging from all the movement. What the hell are we going to do?’
‘The colonel must be told,’ Angelline stated flatly. ‘He must know that they’re back.’
‘Can you manage, Brocky?’ Emily asked him.
‘Going to have to.’ From inside his jacket he had pulled a metal flask, and was now opening it with his teeth. With a hiss of pain, he half-emptied it over the wound, pouring the rest down his throat.
‘Can you walk?’
‘Going to have to.’ He sat down beside her heavily. ‘Did I do all right?’
‘It was perhaps the most stupid thing I’ve yet seen someone do out here, if that’s what you mean,’ she said.
‘I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I felt like the world had written me off for dead, but forgotten to actually do it . . . Then they stepped over me, and I had this . . . mad idea.’
‘We all saw your mad idea,’ Angelline put in from behind him. ‘Sergeant, I want to split the squads. We’ll make our separate ways back to camp. It gives us a better chance of someone getting word back.’
Brocky had gone very quiet, and he set to reloading his last two pistols with great industry. Emily glanced around at the soldiers still with them. ‘Caxton, how many of our lot made it?’
‘Twenty-two, counting you and me,’ the ensign supplied. ‘Also twenty-nine of the Bears.’
‘Right.’ Fifty-one soldiers in a swampland crawling with Denlanders. Emily knew what Angelline was hoping for. One group, either group, would catch the notice of the enemy, and in the confusion the other might slip by. Might, for it was a risky business, but they were fast running short of options.
She glanced at Brocky, still reloading, and then back at the master sergeant. She felt she owed the man this, after his rising from the dead and saving the day. ‘Master Sergeant, you have more men. Will you escort Mr Brocky?’
‘Of course.’ There was a fair amount of knowledge in Angelline’s smile. ‘I’d be glad to.’ She put out a hand. ‘Good luck to you, Marshwic. Good luck to all of us.’
Her clasp was firm and brisk, the handshake of someone agreeing on some minutiae of business, not to a life-or-death gamble. Emily returned her grip as best she could.
Then she and Caxton got the Stag Rampant soldiers together, and moved them off cautiously into the mist, waiting for the next musket shot to find them.
19
In the swamps we can be sure of nothing. At any time, we can feel the eyes on us, and we never know whether some dumb beast stares, or the invisible indigenes, or the Denlanders. The place is full of ghosts.
The mist was thickening, which was the first piece of luck that had come their way. Somewhere to the east the tide was running in, flooding the pools and the shallows, climbing up along the arching tree roots. Bay fish and other sea beasts were nosing their way up with the rising water, and above the tide the curling mist rode in, spreading its tendrils between the trees as far as the battered squad of Stag Rampant troopers.
They had made a slow and careful progress so far. Emily was taking them on a curving course, as best she could judge, hoping to reach the camp by a roundabout way. She guessed the Denlanders would seek to ambush them by the most direct paths, assuming the enemy had the faintest idea where they were. She supposed that even Denlanders could get lost.
Strung out behind her was the score of soldiers-at-arms who had been fortunate enough to survive this far. She could feel the twanging tension in them, from never knowing when the next shot would come at them. She never had a sense that they were free and clear of the Denlander net, not since they parted from Angelline. Whenever she motioned for a halt, the character of the swamp gave the enemy away; there was movement and motion out there that was not native to the mud and the mist. The Denlanders were pacing them, never quite finding them in the fog but knowing that they were close.
At the end of the line was Caxton, a
nd Emily hoped she was bearing up. It was a hell of a first assignment as an officer. If the woman was an ounce less dependable than she had reckoned, Emily would discover it soon enough.
And meanwhile, she was lost.
Not a certainty yet: she might come across some stone landmark or running channel that would confirm or dispel her suspicions, but she was starting to believe that the Denlanders were managing to keep south of them, cutting them off from the camp.
She could not see them or hear them, but she knew for sure they were there. This was a sense she was developing that could not be accounted for in any normal way. Now she felt a noose drawing close.
She signalled them to pick up the pace, clambering faster over the rising root buttresses, heading for denser and denser vegetation. The enemy have new guns. She had reported it to the colonel, and he had not believed her, but she knew it. The Denlanders could fire over a distance with great accuracy, in a way that Sergeant Demaine at Gravenfield had never dreamt of. New guns or new training, but the Denlanders were changing.
‘Sergeant!’ Caxton shouted out and, for her to break silence, Emily knew the new ensign must have spotted the enemy. All of a sudden Emily was running as fast as she could over the awkward ground.
‘Go! Go!’ she was shouting, feeling rather than hearing the squad take to its heels after her. There were four discrete snaps, from muskets barking out, but she could not take the time even to glance back to see how many still followed her.
She hurled herself onwards, running along roots with desperately uncertain balance, rebounding from tree trunks, forcing her way into the densest foliage she could find, anything to obstruct the Denlanders’ line of sight. There were more shots behind, but none close to her. She hoped to God none of her squad had stopped to return fire, or they would be lost.
She sank up to one knee in mud, cursing like a real soldier. Two or three of her squad ran past her before someone stopped to help her out. A shot struck the water near her, throwing up a fan of spray.
Suddenly the woman next to her was Caxton, and Emily had to assume the ensign was still last in line, so that she herself was now at the rear, lumbering and scrabbling between the trees with the Denlanders closing in. There were twisted boughs on every side now: a maze of tortured limbs clawing at one another in their slow fight over the sunlight. Emily concentrated on keeping the backs of the fleeing soldiers before her in sight, feeling her sides ache from all the running, from the weight of her pack and weapons dragging at her. That extra sense told her that pursuit was not so close now. The Denlanders had turned wary at her choice of battlefield. Their new guns would be less use within a sabre’s reach.
Beside her, Caxton was white as a sheet, wide-eyed, gasping for breath. It made Emily feel better to see someone suffering as much as she was.
Her eyes on the ensign, her feet hit uneven ground and she tripped, virtually dragging Caxton down on top of her.
She had braced herself to hit the ground, but the impact came late, she and Caxton tripping down a shallow slope, jarring every joint and bone before separating at the foot, each clawing for their own musket.
There had been enough stones and shards to leave her black and blue all over and she cursed aloud, unable to stop herself. Caxton was sitting up, staring with a slack jaw at the vista all around them.
‘What? Is it the . . . ?’ And Emily stopped, for she too had seen.
She recalled the stone monument and the oddments of ancient masonry that the swamp still displayed. Well, here was the mother-lode.
It was impossible to know how much of it there was, but she guessed the slope she had fallen down must be built on it, stone on stone beneath the green, beneath the mud. All around them the ground bulked out and away in great lumpy mounds. There could be a town here, even a city stretching all around them, and none would have guessed it from any vantage point but here. Here alone the mud had given up its treasures to the air.
They were surrounded by great stones, pale beneath the filth, their age-weathered carving still half visible despite the ravages of the ages. Here was a pedestal, broken and rough, where a statue might have stood. There a doorway still perilously standing, though the wall it had pierced was long fallen. Here she made out three tumbled sides of a house as large as Grammaine, or perhaps one huge room of a mansion fit to shame even Deerlings.
Sixteen of her soldiers were there with them, sitting or standing and clustered close.
‘Sergeant . . .’ Caxton began in a whisper. By her feet a monstrous stone head glared up, half buried. Its blank white eyes were huge, its mouth a lattice of fangs.
‘I know, Ensign. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not on any of the maps.’ Some of the half-demolished walls were still twelve feet high at their jagged crests.
‘Not the place, Sergeant . . . Them.’
Emily followed the other woman’s gaze, and the greenery of moss and weed became, in a blink, a crouching indigene, staring back at her with great featureless eyes that a moment before had seemed mere blemishes, two round fruits or leaves.
After that first surprise she was reminded, of all things, of picnics up on the meadows of the Wolds; how the grass there would seem clean and clear, until she had spotted just one ant. And then, the more she looked, the more of them she saw, until there was not a patch of ground all around that was not crawling with them.
Thus it was here: everywhere her gaze fell amongst the stones, she met the pale eyes of an indigene. They were crouching like gargoyles on the stones, or froglike out on the ground, or like apes in the branches of trees. Tens of them, hundreds. She began to feel a new fear well up in her, because there were just too many. So very many of the beastly little creatures could never bode well. Their colossally multiplied attention intimidated her, for every single one of the creatures was staring at the men and women from Lascanne, and there was real feeling in that massed gaze: hatred, fear, loathing. Emily felt pinned by their inexplicable regard, like a moth under glass.
Details continued dropping into her mind, one by one. It was only gradually that she registered the canes lashed with vines, the woven reeds; the way every standing stone wall had some kind of hovel leaning against it; the shelters and the intricately woven roofs. Eventually she could hold off the thought no longer, and the balance tipped in her mind from ‘city of the ancients’ to ‘indigene village’.
‘Oh, damn,’ she whispered. For of course these folk were under treaty, technically. She doubted whether the colonel would care much if they upset the natives, but Mallen certainly would. They had managed to bring the war right to the indigenes’ doorsteps.
‘Ensign, I think we should leave here,’ she decided but, even as the words left her mouth, one of her soldiers called out, ‘Sergeant! They’re coming.’
‘Cover!’ she snapped automatically. ‘Use the stones as cover. Ready to return fire!’
She found a line of jagged stones where a monstrous carved column had fallen, and put herself behind it, watching the rim of the depression – waiting for the Denlanders to show themselves. Caxton staggered down to settle beside her, breathing harshly.
‘This is really bad,’ the ensign wheezed. ‘This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.’ Her hands were shaking as she readied her musket.
‘I don’t think anyone really planned this.’ The continued attention of the indigenes was getting on Emily’s nerves. She could not shake it. They were behind her and all around her. They had spears, bows and knives. If they turned nasty there would be no chance at all, and surely better to be shot cleanly by Denlanders than cut apart by savages?
There was a disturbance in the trees up above, and one of her soldiers fired instantly. They heard a shout of pain, and a ripple of jubilation went through the Lascanne forces, such as they were. At this stage, any victory was better than none.
For a long moment nothing moved, save for that same red-coated soldier reloading his gun.
Emily glanced at Caxton, who was clutching her musket to
o tightly. She gave her sergeant a sideways look and said, ‘Is it too late to resign my commission?’
‘Nonsense, we’ll make a major of you before we’re done,’ Emily told her, her voice cracking with the words. She could not manage mere banter with the enemy so close. ‘Tell me, Caxton, what did you do before all this?’
The ensign gave a weak smile at that. ‘A man’s tailor, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘Only one to take over the family business, so I’m used to doing a man’s work.’ And her expression was such that Emily could not help but return the grin.
‘There’s no trade that could prepare you for this,’ she told the other woman, and then fresh movement dragged her eyes back up. She could see from brief glimpses that the Denlanders were spreading out along the edge of the slope in a loose semicircle. ‘How many, do you think?’
‘Two full squads at the least. At least twice our number,’ Caxton replied, eyes narrowing. She settled herself into a more comfortable position, finger poised on the trigger.
‘They’ve got to come down,’ Emily decided. Because we’re sure as hell not going up. Against her will, she found her head pulled round to stare at the indigenes as they lurked against the stones, clutching one another. Their eyes spoke mute accusation at her.
Any moment now, this place will become sheer speeding death. Every missed shot could kill one of them. Why didn’t they run?
This is their place, their home. She remembered Mallen warning the indigenes to flee the Denland camp, before the attack. How bitter he had seemed that Denland and Lascanne had brought their human war into the very homes of these natives.
There will be a lot of dead indigenes before the day is out. He may never speak to me again.
‘Why don’t they come?’ Caxton hissed. There was surely enough cover down the slope to cloak a Denlander assault. Brave one volley to get to us, and then we’d stand no chance. Two squads of them, perhaps more, and only eighteen of us. Which left Caxton’s question: Why didn’t they come? What kept them holding back to the edge of the slope? Sheer craven fear?
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