Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Or a promotion for one of us,’ Pordevere said – meaning ‘me. ‘Until then, I think I can safely claim seniority and put myself in temporary command.’

  Tubal exchanged glances with Emily. With Tubal a mere tradesman with a purchased commission, it was Pordevere or Mallarkey, and neither were ideal custodians for the collective lives of the Levant army.

  Mallarkey was obviously not going to raise an objection, though, and so Tubal nodded tiredly.

  ‘What are your thoughts then, sir?’ he asked.

  Pordevere grinned his infectious grin. ‘Glad you asked me, Salander. As it happened, I rather had the idea of an attack: drive them back into the swamps, keep them away from the border here.’

  Tubal closed his eyes briefly, no doubt seeing in his mind the expanse of open ground between the camp and the treeline, and thinking what five squads of Denland sharpshooters could do to any number of red-coated men advancing against them.

  ‘I had a word with your man, the scout, before I came here,’ Pordevere said.

  ‘Master Sergeant Mallen.’

  ‘Right. I had him go with a few of his lads to see what the situation was.’ Pordevere’s grin slipped a little.

  ‘And?’ Mallarkey said, alarmed.

  ‘Four of them went out, and got into the trees unseen, but they couldn’t get more than ten yards further in. The place is crawling with Denlander soldiers, apparently. More of them are turning up all the time.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ whispered Mallarkey.

  ‘An attack,’ declared Tubal. ‘They’re going to bring the fight to us.’

  ‘It has to be,’ Pordevere agreed. ‘And your man Mallen says they’re not to be taken napping, either. They’ve got guns pointed at us and ready.’ He bared his teeth in frustration. ‘I want to take eight squads of good men in, and clear them out, gentlemen, but, as God is my witness, even I can’t see a way to it.’

  Tubal blinked at him, although Mallarkey only looked relieved.

  ‘So I’ve found the next best thing,’ Pordevere said. ‘They’re going to make their move on us; that much is for certain. We need to fend them off when they arrive, drive them back. Then we’ll attack. While they’re falling back in a rout, we’ll drive straight into them, scatter them and push them into the trees while they’re still disordered. They won’t have a chance to form up, and we’ll have them. Sound like a plan, gentlemen?’

  Tubal and Emily exchanged another yet glance. Emily shook her head slightly, remembering the exquisite discipline of the Denlanders. Any such pursuers would be running into covering fire from both sides.

  ‘We can’t just let ourselves be picked apart, bit by bit each night,’ Pordevere said, challenging anyone to speak against him.

  Tubal shrugged and held his peace. Pordevere nodded, reasonably happy. ‘What about the defence, then? Not my area, that. Mallarkey?’

  Captain Mallarkey jumped at his name. ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘How about you, Salander?’

  ‘Actually, sir, Lieutenant Marshwic and I have had a few ideas,’ Tubal explained. ‘Firstly, we’ll have lanterns spaced out, twenty yards from the camp perimeter, come nightfall, so at least we’ll see them coming if they plan a night attack.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And . . .’ Tubal glanced helplessly at Emily, who took the up baton.

  ‘The Denlanders have better guns than we do,’ she said flatly. ‘Is there anyone who still doesn’t believe that?’

  Mallarkey looked as though he would speak, but he glanced at Pordevere first. The Bear Sejant commander looked troubled. ‘To be honest,’ he confessed, ‘I’m far from convinced . . . but the evidence is mounting, Lieutenant. I think we will have to assume it is true.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Emily gratefully. This was a new side to Pordevere, and it surprised her. The death of the colonel, the one man who could overrule him if he went too far, had planted at least a seed of caution within him. ‘If we assume that, then all the Denlander army needs do is get within range and shoot at the camp until nobody’s left moving. They can fire accurately at a distance over which our best shot would have almost no chance of scoring a hit.’

  ‘Well, if that’s the case, Lieutenant, why the hell haven’t they killed us all already?’ Mallarkey shot back at her.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Emily, without the faintest trace of malice, ‘I think it’s because they are naturally cautious, cowardly even, and they don’t want to rush things or take unnecessary chances.’ It was perfectly true, but she looked into Mallarkey’s eyes as she said it, and he couldn’t hold her stare but dropped his gaze to the table.

  ‘What do you suggest, Lieutenant?’ Pordevere asked.

  ‘Gather every single piece of moveable wood, sir: every crate, barrel and box, the doors from the huts, everything. We make a barricade across the north side of the camp. If the material and time allow, we’ll take in the east, too. We could even dig a trench, if we have time. When the Denlanders come, we’ll have assembled enough cover that they won’t be able to simply shoot us down. They’ll have to come to us. They’ll hate that. They prefer to kill from as much of a distance as possible, or from ambush. We’ll make them come to us face to face. We’ll have the advantage, sir.’

  Pordevere stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘You’ve obviously made good use of your time in the enemy’s hands, Lieutenant,’ he told her. ‘By God, but that’s a plan. Master Sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’ Angelline said.

  ‘Get some men started on it right away. The barricade and the trench. Double time, Master Sergeant.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Marie Angelline ran from the building, and moments later her clear tones could be heard shouting orders.

  ‘Today, do you think?’ Mallarkey asked, hands clasped together. Emily wondered why he had even joined the army. Just a family tradition? A fetish for parade grounds? His father buying his way in because there was nothing else fit for him? She found she could muster scant sympathy for the man. She still remembered the battle that had seen her captured, where Mallarkey’s company had not turned up at all.

  ‘Master Sergeant Mallen reckons tomorrow,’ Pordevere said. ‘If these Denlanders are as Marshwic says, they won’t be hurried into it.’

  ‘I’d say no later than tomorrow,’ said Tubal. ‘They can’t know for sure we won’t have reinforcements coming from Locke.’

  Pordevere sighed. ‘It’s a bad business, gentlemen, but it’s on all of our shoulders to bear it. We’ll see out their charge because we are the army, or at least all the army that Lascanne has in this place right now. And then we’ll drive them back and break them, because we must. Make sure your men know what’s at stake, and what the plan is. Does someone want to take an order to the quartermaster for me?’

  ‘I will,’ Emily volunteered.

  ‘Good.’ Pordevere’s grin had returned, ready for blood. ‘Tell him to break out every sabre we’ve got. And anything else that’ll take an edge, or that you can get a good swing with, for that matter. Pikes, standard-poles, wood-axes, mallets and picks . . . anything. Arm as many of our men as possible with something you can get in close with. It’ll come to that, before we’re done.’

  *

  They came the next day, at midday, with the trench still unfinished. One of the sentries started shouting bloody murder, and the labouring soldiers downed tools hurriedly and ran to get the guns that were stacked ready nearby. Emily bolted out of the Stag Rampant hut to take a look, and saw a line of grey-clad figures emerging from the tree-line and advancing cautiously forward.

  ‘We should have laid mines,’ Caxton declared from beside her.

  ‘They would have seen us digging from the trees.’ Emily advanced to the camp’s perimeter, as much to give the other soldiers heart as to see better. The Denlanders kept coming, a company’s strength at least, spreading in a great grey stain across the grass.

  ‘Everyone take cover behind the barricades,’ she shouted needlessly, for most of the soldiers we
re already down, either behind the stacked wood or just into the trench, their guns directed towards the enemy.

  The Denlanders advanced with care, a few steps at a time, but wonderfully disciplined. There was no milling, no straggling. They moved as a disciplined body but, despite that, Emily sensed an unwillingness in them.

  They were still beyond effective musket range when they stopped, and she saw the first rank drop to its knees, and then two ranks of guns were directed at the Lascanne camp. Emily crouched back behind what had once been the colonel’s old oak table, before necessity had cannibalized it. There was not a piece of wood left in the camp, and tents had been taken down to stuff empty crates with canvas. Pots and pans and any spare metal goods filled other boxes, so that they would stop a musket ball. There was no camp any more, in fact. This barricade and the trench and the huts were all.

  ‘What are they waiting for?’ Caxton asked. Emily risked poking her head around one of the gaps they had left in the wall for the trench party. The Denlanders were standing exactly as before, waiting. She saw several figures forward of their lines, watching the enemy, and caught the glint of what might have been a telescope lens in the wan sunlight.

  ‘I think we’ve surprised them,’ she announced. ‘I think they made a mistake attacking us, night before last. That gave us a chance to prepare.’

  She wondered how things would have turned out with the colonel still in charge. Would they be where they were now, or would they be out in the swamps again, trying to fight a conventional war, and dying for it? How surprising that Pordevere in charge was so much more moderate than Pordevere the dashing subordinate.

  She could see a few men she took for officers having a hurried consultation in front of the Denlander army. The Denlander soldiers had stood down their guns, and were waiting patiently. Did she detect some agitation amongst their ranks at the idea of charging the enemy lines? She was sure it was there. She had begun to be grateful for that quirk of fate that had put her into Doctor Lam’s hands. It had given her an insight: they were a nation of clerks, and not easily moved to action.

  And, despite all that, they have us caught here in our own camp.

  She hoped Locke would send reinforcements soon. She hoped there were any troops to send.

  Surely the King’s generals must see that if the Levant falls, the Couchant will be flanked and must fall too.

  ‘Sir!’ Caxton exclaimed. ‘They’re going!’

  Emily looked again, and saw the grey uniforms filing back into the swamps in an orderly fashion, without ever a shot having been fired. A ragged cheer went up along the barricades.

  ‘Trench party, get back to work!’ she yelled. ‘I want it finished before nightfall.’ Her words struck them cold, and the cheers died. We have won nothing yet.

  ‘Nightfall?’ Caxton echoed. ‘You think they’ll attack then?’

  ‘They’re having to deal with a reversed world,’ Emily said thoughtfully. ‘If they were in our position, we’d never take them. Their guns would slice us down without mercy. But they’re out there and we’re in here, so they have to deal with the problem they usually throw at us. They have to get close enough to winkle us out. Darkness is the best way of achieving that.’ She leant back against the barricade, exhausted from lost sleep. ‘If we had the chance then, yes, mines, pits, anything . . . but this is all we have.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ Caxton gripped her gun tightly and Emily realized the girl was scared, and did not blame her. If she let herself pause for a moment, then fear would grip her too.

  ‘I want you to make sure all our perimeter lanterns get lit. We want to allow ourselves as much warning as possible,’ she said, to give the other woman something to think about.

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant . . . Lieutenant?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant?’

  ‘You’ve been a good officer, Lieutenant.’

  Emily stared at her, and the sergeant looked down at her boots.

  ‘When you were promoted to sergeant, a lot of the others didn’t like having a woman over them – even some of us women didn’t. They said it was just because you were Lieutenant Salander’s sister, or something. But I wanted to say, I think you do a really good job, sir. Everyone says you’re the best thing that’s happened to this company for a long time.’

  Emily felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She wanted to shake Caxton, to shout at her, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Instead, she said, ‘All I ever did was what I had to do. Or what someone had to do, and I was closest.’

  ‘If anyone can get us through this, you can,’ added Caxton loyally.

  Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. I don’t want the responsibility. ‘Thank you, Sergeant. That’s kind of you.’ The old reflexes of politeness kicked in without being looked for. She clapped the slender woman on the shoulder and went on her way.

  *

  The sun was sinking behind the Couchant cliffs now. Emily took a look at it from the window of the Survivors’ Club clubhouse, before returning to the table. Her musket rested in a corner, along with those of the other soldiers, and John Brocky had two pistols thrust alarmingly into the waistband of his trousers, hooked around his braces. ‘You can’t keep the sun up just by wishing,’ Scavian said to her with a slight smile. He was completely healed now: save for the handprint over his heart, one would never know he had been burned.

  ‘I should go and walk the perimeter again,’ she suggested, hovering about her chair.

  ‘Sit,’ Mallen said. ‘Time for that when they attack. We’ll all be sick of it before dawn. Also, a shilling in the jar.’ He seemed of them all the calmest, but then Mallen’s emotions never did show much.

  Brocky stood up, dug into his pockets and dumped two entire fistfuls of silver coins into the jar and its immediate environs. ‘Consider I’m covering everyone’s bloody tabs for tonight. Anyone want to join me in another toast?’

  ‘Don’t get too reeling,’ Tubal warned him. ‘When I go out there, I don’t want you shooting me by mistake.’

  ‘You can’t go out there,’ Emily said, shocked. ‘How could you fight?’

  ‘Just prop me up and I can shoot Denlanders as well as the next man,’ he replied, as if chair-bound Sergeant Demaine was with them for a moment. ‘And you’ve provided me with a hefty barricade for propping purposes.’

  ‘And when the barricade is overrun?’

  He smiled. ‘Hell, then it’s all a little academic, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wish they’d get on with it,’ said Scavian.

  ‘We all do,’ Tubal assured him. ‘Or, actually, I wish they’d just go home for good. That would get my vote. However did things come to this pass? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Bit late for that question,’ remarked Mallen.

  ‘Oh, I know, but still . . . Three years ago I was just a halfway successful printer who’d never held a gun in his life.’ His smile was rueful, now. ‘And now I have much gun-related experience here in my second career, and one foot less than when I started. And . . . why? What was it all for? What did the King of Denland and I ever have in common that his death has stuck me here? Where was my foot mentioned when they drew up the requisition lists for this business?’

  In Emily’s mind arose the treasonous assertions of Doctor Lam, and she fought them down. She could not even think them to herself, let alone voice them here.

  ‘Dietricht was a bookish type, I hear,’ said Brocky with studied carelessness. ‘Maybe you killed him with a typesetting error. Maybe I brewed something up that poisoned the poor bastard. Maybe he disagreed with Mallen’s research, or saw one of Angelline’s plays on a bad night. Maybe young Marshwic here broke his heart at a gala reception. History, my friends, is vast and unfriendly. It—’

  There was a shout of surprise from outside, and then someone was banging on the doorless entrance, shouting for Tubal, for Emily, for someone to come and take charge.

  ‘It’s started.’ How needless were the words, Emily reflected, even as she said
them. She snatched up the guns from their stack in the corner, passed them out to the others. Mallen was first out of the door, Marie pausing only to kiss Brocky’s unshaven cheek before following.

  ‘Brocky, give me a hand,’ Tubal said. ‘Em, you go ahead, take charge.’

  ‘Good luck,’ she wished him desperately, clutching his hand for a moment before taking her leave.

  She heard a single shot as she came out into the dusk air, and went running for the barricade, expecting any moment for the line to explode in gunfire. Instead a second lonely shot ran out, and still no great assault.

  ‘Caxton! What’s happening?’ She hit the barricade at a run, virtually bouncing off it. Caxton merely gestured out into the gathering darkness. There were a few shadows visible out there that might be men and, as she watched, she caught a muzzle-flash from one, and one of the perimeter lanterns exploded even as the sound of the shot reached her ears. Then she saw the gaps already evident in the lit perimeter, like missing teeth.

  ‘Oh, clever,’ she acknowledged. The Denlander snipers were well outside of the defenders’ range. There was nothing for it but to wait and watch each light being snuffed violently out by well-placed gunfire.

  ‘So much for that idea,’ she murmured to herself, and then, at the top of her lungs, ‘Everyone into positions: trench and wall! Stay in cover as much as you can but make sure you can see to fire!’ All around her, men and women squatted down behind the barricade, resting their muskets atop it or poking them through holes between its sections. Before the barricade, the trench party would similarly be hunkering down, taking aim. They had drawn the short straw: the first to take the brunt when the Denlanders finally plucked up the courage to attack.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ Mallen sloped up beside her. ‘Volleys at their range, or will they try and sneak up as close as they can?’

  ‘Or both. They’re probably asking themselves the same question.’ She glanced at him. ‘Your night vision must be good; your scouts’ too?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Get your people spread along the line. The sun’s almost down past the cliffs, and once it’s dark we’ll need all eyes to tell us when the enemy’s coming.’