Guns of the Dawn
Page 37
As easy as that . . . to avoid the knife and the fire. ‘I am no traitor, Doctor,’ and only the tiniest flinch in her voice.
‘No doubt.’ He seated himself at the foot of her cane frame. ‘But what could you actually betray? The location of your camp? We know it. Your leader’s plans? After the battle we have had, they will all be thrown out of alignment. You cannot know them.’
‘So what do you want from me? Something worth . . .’ – no sense cushioning the blow – ‘torture?’
Doctor Lam sighed. ‘Personalities, Sergeant. Your thoughts on your leaders. How they act and react, what they are likely to do.’
‘Oh.’ She thought of what she could say to damn Mallarkey and Pordevere, the colonel, even Tubal. ‘Well, then, I am afraid I cannot oblige.’
‘National character even,’ the old man continued. ‘Let me into the Lascanne mind. Let me understand you.’
‘I thought you already did,’ she said, almost goading. ‘You know we’re all war-mad killers, don’t you? That we bring our children up on blood and bonemeal? Surely you’ve all heard that.’
She looked about her at the soldiers within earshot, and was a little shocked to recognize belief in some of their faces.
‘I cannot let myself acknowledge such stories. You are human beings, as we are. There must be some give in you, some compromise!’ Doctor Lam threw his hands in the air, startling her. His mildness fell away from him for a moment. ‘Sergeant, I am a man of peace – you may scoff, but it is so. I fight wars so that others, less able, less moderate, do not do so in my place. I need to find a way, Sergeant: a way to conclude this war that does not end in . . . genocide.’
She let the new word fall into place inside her head. ‘Geno . . . cide? The killing of– what? Of a family?’
‘Of a race, Sergeant. Of a nation. Of . . . everyone in it.’ He let his anger go, in one long sigh. ‘I cannot let Denland lose the Levant front. I cannot let my country lose this conflict with yours. The war must be won but . . . what will we destroy, of our way of life, in order to save it? Will we become cursed by history for all time, because of what we did to defeat the stubborn Lascans?’
‘You would . . . ?’
‘If Lascanne fights to the last man, the last woman, child even, what option do we have?’
It will not come to that. There will be a surrender. But when – and would it be in time? At what point would this genocide the old man spoke of gather such speed that it could not be stopped?
We will have to win this war, for this reason.
‘I must leave you, for now.’ He held a hand out, and one of the soldiers helped him to his feet.
‘Doctor Lam?’
‘Sergeant?’ He turned back to her with a raised eyebrow.
‘Doctor, you said this war is over for me.’
‘Quite over, no doubt of it.’ Again that suggestion that he considered her, for that reason, profoundly lucky.
‘I’ll be sent to Denland?’
‘There are camps there for such as are captured. A great many of the original Lascanne invasion force were cut off and taken to them, you understand. You will be one of few women there, I fear.’
‘There’s no harm in telling me then . . . what makes your guns so good?’
Doctor Lammegeier stared at her for a moment, and then cocked his head back and laughed, a scholarly, dry sound. ‘The spirit of Lascanne,’ he observed. ‘And you will teach the message to some bird you will send back to your camp, or you will carve it, unnoticed, on the bark of trees. No, Sergeant, I am a coward, as you say. I will not underestimate a warrior woman of Lascanne. If you have not puzzled out our secret, then I will not tell you. Instead, think on what I have said to you. Today and tonight, I organize my scouts and receive my reports. Tomorrow we will talk again. I am afraid I will discover what I need to know, Sergeant. I make no excuses. This is war.’
She thought long and hard on what he had said, but came to no further conclusion than: We will have to win this war.
Night grew on them, leaching the colour from the swamp in a few scant minutes, as the distant sun crested the Couchant mountains. She saw the Denlanders settle down, huddling on every piece of dry ground around her, roosting like birds. Still the camp was not settled: latecomers caught up with them and established their billets further and further out from the centre. Scouts returned with news, or set off on their errands. There was little talk, no music or laughter, no roll of dice, nothing but a dedication to what they were doing: the subtle, constant movement of determined men fading into the susurrus of the swamp.
And she could not sleep either, for sleep would bring the morrow that much quicker, and she was in no mood to meet it.
Can I lie to them? Would they believe me? I am no easy liar able to spin webs like . . . well, like Cristan, for one. He would not be at a loss, here. He would have talked his way out of it by now. He would have them at each other’s throats.
She tried to construct some falsehood that might satisfy Dr Lam. What could she tell him, though? A lie was that the men and women of Lascanne would fight to the last breath, since the truth was that they would not. Either way was damning for her.
We cannot yield the Levant. If the army was smashed by Denlander efficiency, the country would crumple. Who was left to defend it? Greybeards and old women and children, and a few public servants? Old Poldry with his outdated memories?
She tried not to think about his condemnation of her King. All lies, she knew, but she could tell that they were not his lies. He had been told them by his Parliament, and he believed them. In such a way must all these men believe that their cause was right, or from where would they draw the strength to prosecute it? And so, as we also are right, where is the give? Where will his middle ground come from; his future where we do not fight each other to the very death?
She thought further about Dr Lam’s words. Even if we win, who will till the fields? Who will trade and manufacture and labour? This war must end soon, either way.
Hanging there from her frame, beset by darkness and with the morrow’s sun promising only interrogation and torture, she found that she could see no hope, for herself or for Lascanne.
Emily was not a godly woman. She had gone to the church perhaps once in a tenday, often just once a month. She had relied on her own strengths to keep her and Grammaine going and not sought to lean on supernature.
Now she prayed, a soldier’s prayer as old as war itself: Give me a death with a musket in my hands. Not like this. This is no end for a soldier.
Something clamped about her mouth, stifling her instant cry, holding her mute in a vice-like grip. She pulled at the frame instantly, making it creak but getting nowhere. Some thing of the swamp, some serpent or nightmare had hold of her—
Some man.
‘Quiet,’ said the smallest possible voice, right in her ear. She felt his breath ruffle her hair. His hand still gripped her jaw, digging into the bruises. For a long while neither he nor she moved.
Then he released her, and she whispered, ‘Mallen?’
‘No more talk now.’ She could not see him. It was dark all around, but she could not sense him either, or hear any movement of him. He was not there – nowhere around her – yet she felt the chill of his knifeblade as it severed the rope about one wrist – a strange feeling of sacrilege to cut what had been tied and untied so dutifully.
One small victory over the Denlanders.
He sliced through the bindings about her other wrist, and she bit back a squeak as he nicked her with the keenness of the blade. For a second there was a pause, and then the hilt was pressed into her hand, and she bent forward to free her ankles.
She took this chance to feel all around, at arm’s length. He was nowhere. She was now ready to believe that he had gone native in some significant mystical way. What powers had been given to Mallen by unhuman gods?
Free now, and with a knife in her hand, she straightened up. Straight away, she felt his breath against her neck.
She risked a glance towards Mallen – or rather Mallen’s breath – and she saw nothing.
And then he moved. He was hanging upside down from the branches of the tree behind her frame. He was stripped to the waist, his chest and back and arms daubed with darkness, either paint or dirt, to mimic the patterns of his facial tattoos. Lost in the shadows of his face, his eyes met hers.
‘We cannot get out. They are everywhere,’ she said, her mouth to his ear, and all the while wondering: How did he get in?
He took a deep breath, and put his hands under her arms. A jerk of his chin made her look upwards.
But . . . There was no time. Abruptly he was lifting her, thrusting her upwards towards the twisted boughs above. She heard him grunt with the effort, his legs locked about a branch, and she reached up into the darkness desperately, terrified that whatever she caught hold of would snap off.
One sound is all it will take. There are hundreds of guns, hundreds of men.
Her hand latched about a branch and she flailed with the other one until that, too, found a secure place. The wood bent alarmingly as her weight dragged on it, but it held. In a moment, Mallen had jackknifed upwards, taken hold and ascended into the tree as bonelessly as a serpent. His hand caught hold of her arm as she struggled to raise herself further. Between their joint efforts, she gained the canopy.
It was cramped, and she lay at a crooked angle, trying to catch her breath. The splayed branches of the tree came out every which way, turning, writhing, seeking their way upwards through the maze of their brothers in their quest for light. The darkness was complete: not a spark made its way in from above or below. The sounds of the swamp, of the tree’s own myriad inhabitants, covered any from Mallen, so she had to take it on trust that he was still with her.
And where to go from here? Are we to wait until the Denlanders move on, and hope they do not guess where we have gone?
‘Rested?’ came Mallen’s soft-voiced query. ‘Ready?’
‘For what?’ she breathed. He must be very close, crouching spider-like amidst the boughs. She was beginning to wonder whether he was entirely human, whether he had not some indigene in his blood, to let him do the things he could.
‘To move, understand? Can’t stay here.’ She felt him shift slightly, the movement gently swaying all the branches of the tree.
It was an effort for her to keep her voice low. ‘Where?’ she demanded.
‘Follow.’ In the pitchy dark his hand found her wrist without trouble, and then he tugged her: upwards, upwards and away.
She had no more questions to usefully ask, so she went with him, feeling like a blind thing, like an insect fumbling through grass-blades, handhold to handhold, one foothold to the next. The first few movements made her weak, the beating and her time hanging on the frame bringing a weakness to each limb. She wanted to stop; to rest; to give up. She did not allow herself the luxury, pushing her body remorselessly, barking parade-ground orders at herself inside her head to keep herself moving. Every so often she would become convinced that Mallen had escaped her, in her snail’s progress, and then she would catch hold of his hand or his bare ankle, as she continued moving painstakingly between the branches.
But soon they must run out of tree, she guessed. Surely we cannot go like this, branch over branch, all the way to the edge of the swamps. I will go blind.
Light suddenly assailed her: a white lantern flooding her world with pale, washed-out illumination. She shielded her face, rocked backwards and nearly lost her grip. Not bright, but . . .
She stared at it for a long moment before she would admit to herself that it was the moon. The moon in a sky scudding with solitary and secret clouds, and freckled with the stars she had known forever. She found she could not move; she could not speak. The sight of it, after all she had been through, clutched at her heart.
And, eventually, she turned to look at Mallen hunched in the treetops beside her, as savage a creature as ever claimed Lascanne as its home. The wan moonlight danced unevenly across the painting of his chest, the markings on his face, so that he swam in and out of sight even as she gazed at him. His eyes remained hooded but, when he smiled, the moon caught the gleam of his teeth.
‘I’ve not shown this way to many,’ he said. ‘A few of the scouts, no others. Count yourself lucky.’
‘I do, but . . . we cannot go over the treetops all the way home, surely.’
‘The sky road, they call it,’ he said, and she knew they must be the indigenes. ‘Can’t move an army by it. Can’t move a squad by it. One man, though. One man, one woman. Get us clear of the Denlanders at least.’
‘They have scouts out. They must range quite far,’ she warned him, but his unconcerned nod said that he already knew this.
He unfolded his limbs. ‘Go where I go,’ he said, and then looked her over. ‘You hurt?’ It was impossible to tell whether concern touched his expression or not, but it touched his voice. ‘Not easy, the sky road, understand?’
All around them, she was seeing the swamp from above, the great undulating plain of the canopy, broken here and there by the ragged gaps of lakes or clearings. It was silver in the moonlight, like a field of waving grass perhaps, or a meadow below the Wolds.
‘I will manage,’ she told him.
He did not doubt her, but was moving right away, using hands and bare feet, branch to branch, spidering sideways, following the sturdiest boughs with such ease that it really did seem like a road to him. Determinedly, she took off the boots and stockings the Denlanders had given her, stowed them in the fork of two branches, and followed Mallen across the indigenes’ sky road.
‘They found you,’ she addressed his retreating heels. ‘They told you, the indigenes.’
‘Right.’ He looked back to check, but she was following, unsteadily but gaining confidence, and he grinned again. ‘Remember, we owe you.’
‘I thought they didn’t . . . take sides.’
He made that little sound that passed for laughter with him. ‘They’re only human,’ he said.
What surprised her was how easily this came to her, who had not climbed a tree since she was a girl. Bruised and battered, tired and aching, barefoot with a day of walking behind her, she felt almost half-indigene herself. Her hands and feet seemed guided by spirits, here in the moonlight. Each branch she clutched bowed under her weight but bore her; each time Mallen looked back, she had gained a little on him, until she had to slow down to dodge his feet.
‘Is it . . . ?’ She did not quite voice the question. Mallen’s glance at her was shadowed, secret. More magic in this world than the Kings, it seemed to say, but she never did quite ask outright, and he would never say.
All around them, like a cloud-castle city from a storybook, the magical silver landscape slumbered and murmured with life, and she began to finally understand Daffed Mallen. Who could not love this, and want to stay with it always? She had never seen the like, and knew with a deep sadness that she never would again. She would not become one of Mallen’s scouts. She would not inherit this world as her own. She was gifted this one night, to walk across the roof of the world and see what so few human eyes had ever seen.
*
Later, much later, Mallen signalled a halt, just when her weariness was catching up with her, at last. Her grip was no less sure, but her arms ached fiercely, and she had splinters in her hands and feet. It made her feel a little better to see Mallen now settle back, obviously glad of the chance to rest as well.
‘Are we clear of them?’ she asked him. ‘The Denlanders?’ He nodded. ‘We’ll drop down soon. Did you a favour, giving you some of their cloth
es. Grey’s better than red for hiding.’
Settling back in the crook of a tree, half submerged in foliage, she found herself looking at him as a man rather than a near-mythical rescuer. Some pinch of her old propriety awakened at the sight. Really, he was no company for a civilized woman! She giggled at the thought: bare-chested, painted and savage. What would Alice say about her choice of companion these days?
‘Mr Mallen, you are a disgrace to the uniform,’ she said.
His vulpine grin came back. ‘Master Sergeant to you, Marshwic.’
‘You know, the girls in the company all hold a candle for you, Master Sergeant.’
‘Only natural.’ His eyes tracked the ghostly white of an owl questing over the treetops.
‘You don’t hold them one back, as far as I’ve noticed.’
‘Propositioning, Marshwic? Scavian’ll not be pleased.’
‘Well, no,’ she said, briefly flustered before she cut through his mockery. ‘I’m just wondering – the mysterious Mallen, after all. Is there . . . ?’
‘There was, once.’ The grin faded into the darkness of his face. ‘Before the war. She left me, though. No choice, really. Beautiful, she was. Knew her business. First-class scholar. Near to a wife as I’ll ever have. Had to go, though.’
‘What happened? Did you . . . fall out?’
He let out a long, slow breath before he answered. ‘Denlander, you see,’ he said.
‘Oh . . . Oh, I see.’
‘Don’t have any women soldiers, the Denlanders. Yet. Any day, though. Things are near as bad over there as they are for us. Then, when I’m out killing their scouts in the dark, won’t I be thinking: What if the next one’s her?’
Neither of them spoke then. The moon was sinking by that point, but the light was still gathering on the eastern horizon. When she made to speak, Mallen held a hand up for quiet.