Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Out there, the Denlanders were moving out from the swamps and forming into companies. She wondered how they had spent today, what oaths had been sworn, what hands clasped in friendship and farewell.

  The front lines, their ranks as broad as the entire camp, began moving forward in the gathering gloom, but stopping well out of range of the Lascanne guns. Emily strained her eyes, trying to make out individual figures in that mass of shadowy grey.

  ‘Are they into two ranks?’ she asked and then, before Mallen could reply, yelled, ‘Brace! Brace for a volley!’

  She ducked back behind the barricade, and the double rank of Denland guns opened up, almost in a single thunderclap of sound. She felt the wood of the barricade twitch under the impact, saw splinters and dust showering up and all around. There were one or two screams, shots punching through the wood into the flesh, but even with their magic guns the Denlanders could not destroy the barricade with just one round of fire – nor, Emily hoped, with many.

  ‘Stay down,’ she called. ‘They may try another.’ She peered out at the enemy again, despite her own best advice, and could barely distinguish them. Their uniforms blended in with the all-pervading dusk, the gunsmoke and the wood dust, until she could barely make out even the great mass of them.

  Beside her, Mallen let out a long breath. ‘Moving,’ he told her. ‘Moving in.’

  Emily nodded. ‘Caxton, send a runner to Pordevere and Mallarkey. Let’s get two rounds at them as they come in. Let Mallen’s scouts call the first round, as close to long range as they can.’

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

  Emily sat down, her back to the barricade. ‘Your call, Mallen.’

  The master scout leant on the crate in front of him, shielding his eyes from the lantern light behind him. ‘Taking it slow. They want us to fire too soon.’

  ‘Then don’t let us fire too soon,’ she told him. She imagined the great mass of Denlanders inching forward, the men at the front sweating and terrified, waiting for an eruption of firing from the fortifications. ‘How many, do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Still coming out of the woods.’

  ‘Still?’

  She felt Mallen tense beside her, put his musket butt to his shoulder. She scrambled up. The sun was fully eclipsed by the cliffs now, and she could see virtually nothing of the enemy. She could only trust that Mallen’s better eyes were good enough.

  ‘Ready,’ the scout said softly, more to himself than her, then took his whistle between his teeth. He peered into the falling night. ‘Ready . . .’

  She put her own musket up to the barricade, finger poised on the trigger, letting her entire being wait on Mallen’s signal.

  Which came, with a high, clear blast and, an instant later, all down the line his scouts were giving the call to fire. Her finger twitched on the trigger; aiming was immaterial. The entire north wall of the barricade became a fireworks display of musket fire, lighting up in a blaze of gunpowder and reeking smoke, as the soldiers of Lascanne riddled the night with lead balls.

  And hit. Invisible in the night came the screams of injured and dying Denlanders, and Emily could only imagine what damage that concerted fire had done to their careful lines. Now came the sporadic flashes and bangs of their return fire, and she knew that they would be running at speed across dark ground towards the camp, in a desperate gamble that they would get to the enemy in time.

  ‘Reload!’ Emily shouted, feeling her voice grate hoarsely. ‘Reload! I want a second round before they get here. Reload!’ Her own hands were already going through the drill: powder, ball, wadding, ramrod. How many times had she done this before, in practice or for real? Beside her, Mallen’s movements were as easy and automatic as her own.

  In amidst the occasional shot from the running Denlanders, she could hear the drumming of their boots upon the ground. Close, getting closer.

  She was now reloaded, and she had to assume that her men were as well. The Denlanders were just pale shadows in the camp’s lamplight. A musket shot splintered the crate beside her, as she brought her gun up.

  ‘Ready!’ she called, hearing other officers yelling the same order all along the line. ‘Fire!’

  At virtually point-blank range, the salvo of gunfire from the trench and the barricade stopped the Denlanders dead. Their entire front line was scythed down in a hail of shot and smoke, and in the aftermath they were fleeing, running away, desperate to get out of range before the Lascanne soldiers could reload again.

  She heard herself give out a great whoop of triumph, and saw some of her men start to move forward to fire again. ‘No, no! Stay behind the barricade!’ she bellowed at them, even as shots started to fall amongst them, taking down half a dozen of the boldest.

  ‘Back! They’ll come again!’ she shouted. So much of war involved shouting at people.

  ‘They’re coming now,’ Mallen told her, squinting into the dark. ‘Skirmish order.’ Even as he said it, the shots started, scattered but regular, punching into the barricade four or five at a time, and encouraging the Lascanne soldiers to keep their heads down.

  ‘Everyone reload, if you haven’t already,’ she called out. ‘Ready for another round.’

  ‘Now,’ Mallen said. Her voice echoed his whistle, giving the order to fire again and feeling her throat ache with it. The Lascanne soldiers put their guns to the barricade and fired en masse, even as three or four of them were hit by the Denlander sharpshooters. She hoped these shots had done as much damage as the last, but the advancing Denlanders were coming in as a staggered, scattered body, and she knew many of her soldiers’ shots would have passed between them. Again she was shouting for the reload, desperate for that second shot.

  ‘Going to be tight,’ Mallen observed. She tried to concentrate on her musket, but she was holding her breath, watching her men out of the corner of her eye as they primed their own guns with shaking hands. The staccato rattle of the Denlander weapons was still sending splinters spraying all around and, even as she looked up, one incautious soldier was slammed back from the barricade, clutching his shoulder. Another man grabbed him beneath the armpits and hauled him roughly away, which made him scream far more than the shot had.

  Steady. And, as she glanced towards Mallen, men along the line started firing, not in unison but piecemeal. ‘Hold!’ she called, but her men had caught the disease and their shots speared into the Denlanders in twos and threes, killing individual men but letting the advance live. Emily cursed and fired her own shot as the ghostly shapes of the Denland men emerged out of the night. Even as she fired, she saw flickers amongst them, then the sudden flare of shuttered lanterns opened at half a dozen points.

  What in the world are they doing . . . ?

  ‘Get down!’ Mallen was shouting, but for once she did not heed him, for her attention was taken with the slow-spinning sparks that the Denlanders had hurled forward, whirling in tight loops as they coursed in long arcs towards the trench and the wall. The lamplight caught one and she had a brief glimpse of something metal with a trailing, burning cord.

  Then there was an explosion that she felt through her feet and something struck her an almighty blow, picked her up and lifted her off her feet, casting her to the ground behind Mallen. Her head rang and for a moment she was seeing double. There were further explosions down the line, shattering crates and boxes to splinters and ripping into the men beside them.

  ‘Get up!’ Mallen urged her. He fired over the barricade and then dropped to reload, his hands moving swift and sure. She wasn’t sure that she could, just then. There was a ragged cut across one arm, and her questing fingers found a dent in the side of her helm that must have been from a piece of one of those bombs.

  Grenades! she realized. But we never use them. She knew that they would never stay lit in the swamps. But, of course, we are not in the swamps.

  Mallen was aiming again, but something was terribly wrong now because his line of fire put his target inside the barricade. She hauled herself to her feet to see a ring of g
rey uniforms pouring through a jagged rift in the defences, spreading into a tight semicircle and firing outwards, even as new men came in to help expand their stolen ground. She reached for her musket and fired it from the ground, seeing the man she was aiming at pitch backwards, and two more take his place. She levered herself up, crying, ‘Hold them in! Hold them in!’ or trying to. The words came out as a feeble croak. A soldier stepped between her and the Denlanders, aiming down the length of his gun, but was shot down before he could even fire. She lurched forward, snatched his musket and loosed it herself, but such sporadic resistance was not keeping the Denlanders in. Their semicircle was expanding outwards as more of them flocked through the breach to fire and reload, fire and reload, like machines.

  ‘Sabres! Sabres and clubs!’ she heard a high voice calling out, Marie Angelline at her best. ‘Close with them. Drive them out!’

  Emily leant heavily against the barricade, feeling splinters jabbing through her jacket, making an effort of getting her sword from its scabbard. Somewhere down the line came a sustained explosion that was of no Denlander’s making, but was the sorcery of Giles Scavian washing over the Denlanders even as they hazarded another breach. She would have prayed for him, except resisting the advancing Denlanders now monopolized her prayers.

  A handful of squads from Bear Sejant ran into the fire of the Denlanders and vaulted over their own casualties, swords and pikes and table legs upraised for the assault. The orderly formation of Denlanders disintegrated, men ducking out of the way of the onslaught, and yet others moving in to confront it. Suddenly there were men in grey running towards Emily, and she got her sabre clear with one final effort. She only hoped she had the strength to swing it.

  The closest attacker went down before some anonymous Lascanne gunner. She lurched into the path of the next with a clumsy sweep of her blade that flashed past his face, bringing him up short in shock. He fumbled for a knife, and she slapped him across the face with the flat of her sword on the backswing, and managed to punch him in the head with the hand-guard. He reeled back, clutching at the wound, and she put all her strength into a thrust that took him in the stomach. His convulsing weight ripped the sword from her hands, but she grabbed his musket out of the air and fired it. Magic? It felt like any other gun she had ever held.

  She reclaimed her sabre, messily, and another man was upon her in that instant, lashing out at her with his hatchet. He missed, and her parry went wild, and for a moment they traded blows with the air before she stepped in, trying to use the sabre’s leaden weight to split his head on a down stroke.

  He caught her wrist with his free hand, and she fell against him, almost mouth to mouth. His wide, panicking eyes were all she could see, as he brought the axe clumsily down across the back of her helmet. Her world exploded in a shattering kaleidoscope of light and darkness and she fell to her knees, clutching her head, even as Mallen knifed her assailant, three stabs in and out, delivered faster than she could follow.

  It had been the weighted back of the enemy’s hatchet, not the blade, or she would be dead, but she staggered as she got to her feet, her concentration fragmented. The entire battleground reeled and swam before her.

  Time separated out into distinct slices, into distinct images. She lost the power to string them together into any coherent story.

  She saw a Denlander soldier putting his gun to a Lascanne woman’s back and then firing, even as the same woman was triggering her own weapon at one of his comrades. Emily tried to run at him, waving her sabre, but he was already gone so she swept up the dead woman’s musket and fired after him. The trigger clicked uselessly, the weapon already empty.

  A Bear Sejant trooper swung a pike in great red-slinging arcs all about him, hacking down any Denlander within his reach. His face was splashed with blood, his mouth open in a scream that was silent beneath the roar of shot and the howling of the injured. She saw the front of his jacket jerk as a musket ball ploughed into it, but he swung on, blind and raging.

  She caught sight of Tubal sitting on a box beside the ruined barricade, sighting up on a Denlander like some country gentleman on his veranda, pot-shotting at birds over breakfast. She tried to make her way over to him but a grey-coated soldier collided with her, falling over her in a tangle of limbs and spinning her sabre from her grasp. She felt his hand scrabble for her throat, but hers found the hilt of his knife and she yanked it from its sheath and buried it in him. Tubal did not even notice her.

  She was surrounded by musket smoke. Shots zipped past her as she lurched towards the wall of the Stag Rampant hut. She had her pistol in her hand and levelled it at the first grey uniform she saw, but it clicked hollowly. When had she fired it?

  Through the cordite air came the searing, savage beauty of Giles Scavian. Clad in burgeoning flame, he walked through the fray and his touch, his very look, scorched the enemy, boiled out their eyes and blistered their skin and exploded their powder flasks and the breeches of their guns. He was an immortal. Their shots melted in leaden spray all about him.

  Reaching the wall of the storehouse, she saw John Brocky appear at the window, fire off four pistols, one after the other, then retreat to reload whilst a soldier poked a musket barrel out to take his place.

  Her head was now clearing. She had no idea if she had skipped across minutes or hours of the battle, but the Denlanders seemed to have a solid wedge inside the camp, and everywhere she looked there was utter chaos, women and men – men of both sides – shooting each other in the back or hacking each other down as they ran. She could not have said who was winning. Everywhere she put her feet, there was a body.

  ‘Lieutenant!’ Even as rattled as she was, Emily reacted, turning smartly and coming back to herself enough to find her hands filled with pistol and sabre. Captain Pordevere came out of the smoke, grabbed her roughly and shook her.

  ‘Listen to me, Lieutenant!’ he bellowed, and she thought he must have had a pistol discharge right next to his ear or something similar. His voice was at top volume, ringing in her head like a bell, and he had blood all across one side of his head. ‘Can you hold here?’ he boomed.

  ‘I don’t know, sir!’ she tried to match him in volume, but she saw no immediate comprehension on his face.

  ‘Hold here, Lieutenant! That’s an order! I’m taking some squads, sabres and pikes! We’re going to flank them! Take them in the side. They’ll run, then! I hope they’ll run!’

  She nodded vigorously, which was enough to reawaken the pain in her head, and it made her feel weak. Pordevere was already off, with the best part of two hundred men and women following him.

  ‘Hold on, Emily!’ she heard and, amongst Pordevere’s picked fighters, she saw Marie Angelline, beautiful and bright as an angel, barely touched by blood or bruise but with her sabre shining like fire in the lamplight.

  ‘Marie!’ Emily called after her. ‘Marie, be careful!’ And, even as she said it, she knew it was a fool’s thing to say. There was no being careful in this battle.

  Then the Denlanders were upon her, a line of them on the advance. She loosed her pistol at them, and it flashed in her hand, loaded this time. Then she found herself alone against them, with only a sword between her and their guns.

  But only for a moment. Then suddenly there were shots punching into the Denlanders from behind her, and a wave of redjackets caught her up and flung her at the enemy. She hacked with her sabre mechanically, seeing the Denlanders give a little, then make a stand. They were frightened. She saw it in their faces. They were frightened but they were fighting with musket butt and knife and hatchet. They would not be broken even as they fell before sword and makeshift club, and Lascanne soldiers were being felled too. From somewhere to her left came Scavian’s explosive fire as he leapt forward to prevent the Denlanders enveloping the defending soldiers. She caught the flare of his magic from the corner of her eye twice, three times more and then it stopped, and she was too engaged in her own survival to think any more of it.

  The two masses of soldi
ers surged against each other, a forgotten form of war from a hundred years before, more suited to the relics hung on Lord Deerling’s walls than the weapons they had to hand. In the midst of it, Emily had barely room to wield her sword, but her left hand found the Denlander knife thrust through her belt and she pulled that out and starting jabbing it into the enemy without thought. A savagery had overtaken her, which wanted just one thing: escape from this dreadful, murdering crush of men. And, since it could not find such escape, it slashed and stabbed and laid about itself in a mad panic. She was so frenzied that the nearest Denlanders were not fighting her at all, just trying to push away from her through the solid mass of their fellows.

  Then a thunderous shock went through them, and she knew that Pordevere’s plan had worked. With no clear transition, the fighting of the Denlanders changed from men fighting to move forward, to men fighting for their lives. Behind them, Pordevere’s picked combatants were driving into them, for how could the Denlanders have expected a counterattack to their own attack? How could the Lascans possibly have the extra men? The Denlanders did not know that, beyond the few who stood alongside Emily, the Lascanne camp was almost emptied of the living.

  They clung on for another desperate minute of brutal, hate-filled slaughter on both sides, then something finally snapped within them, and the Denlanders began moving back, trying for an orderly withdrawal.

  Most of those around Emily followed up, intent on driving the Denlanders wholesale from the camp, but she herself just slumped to her knees, feeling as though she had been racked. Every joint seemed on fire, and her head still resounded and pulsed with pain. She dropped her sabre, conscious of the rawness of the hand that had held it so long. She did not think she could ever fight again.

  She prayed to God she would never have to, but the prayer was burdened by the knowledge that, today or tomorrow, the war would demand her presence again.

  There was shouting, now, and orders. She somehow regained her feet, and found that the camp was almost cleared and the Denlanders were in full retreat back towards the swamps.