Guns of the Dawn (32 page)

The same madness that brought me here, of course. We stand on a knife-edge. Even a single hand will do to defend Lascanne from the enemy.

Individual soldiers broke away from the parade ground to find their quarters, their comrades. Some were met by friends: tentatively clasping hands with a few awkward words exchanged. A few just
struggled off on their own; perhaps they no longer knew a single soul here. Perhaps they had been the lucky ones, out of all their comrades.

Captain Goss approached Stag Rampant slowly. After the company he had been keeping, the first thing Emily noticed about him was that he still had two arms and two legs.

He was not a young man, but his injury had changed his face in a way that made his exact age impossible to judge. The lines she saw there could have been drawn by hurt or by time. He was
broad-shouldered and as tall as Tubal, though: a heavy, powerful man now hollowed out, his uniform hanging loose on him. His hair was bronze streaked with grey, above an expression two shades short
of tragedy. Captain Goss surveyed his company with a look usually reserved by prisoners for their jailers.

‘Stag Rampant company all present and accounted for, Captain.’ Tubal saluted him with desperate pride, but for the moment the captain looked straight through him, past him, at the
ranks on ranks of soldiers drawn up there.

When he finally spoke, Emily was just close enough to hear his words.

‘I am not afraid.’

‘Sir?’ Tubal cast half a backwards glance at the company.

‘Don’t mind what you’ve heard, Lieutenant,’ Goss said.

‘No man here thinks it, Captain,’ Tubal assured him, slightly thrown.

Goss narrowed his eyes as though against a bright light. ‘What’s our fighting strength, Lieutenant?’

‘Eight hundred and thirty-eight soldiers-at-arms, seventeen ensigns, four sergeants, one master sergeant, me and you, sir.’

‘And what’s going on here, Lieutenant?’ Goss looked bleakly across the camp, to where the other two companies were unpacking supplies and ammunition, and checking their
guns.

Tubal swallowed. ‘We attack tomorrow, sir. The Big Push, they’re calling it. We’re going to drive them back, sir.’

Goss’s damaged gaze slid off him again, and pierced the ranks of his soldiers until it met the impenetrable wall of the swamp.

‘Tomorrow.’ The word dropped off his tongue like lead.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Goss repeated. Emily wanted to go to him in that moment, for all that she had never met him before. She remembered the colonel’s bland blather of
Give him a
chance to get his hand back in.
It was unfair; it was too unfair. His first day, his very first minute, and he had encountered the worst he could have imagined.

‘Sir,’ Tubal said, hushed. ‘No man will think the worse of you if—’

‘No,’ Goss cut him off sharply, even as Emily was thinking,
But they will. Oh, but they will.
‘I am not afraid, Lieutenant. I shall lead them out, as I have done
before.’ A shudder went through him. Perhaps most of the soldiers would not have noticed, but Emily was just close enough to see. ‘Just . . . give me a junior who knows what’s
going on. I will lead.’

She knew it was coming before Tubal craned back to send her a silent, imploring look. He would not force this on her, but he had nobody else.

Nobody would know, except him, if she declined this duty. It was over and above an ensign’s role. But she had made an oath to serve her country, not merely to do her duty to the letter.
And he was family, and he needed her. This time it was as Mary’s man that he asked, and as Mary’s sister that she gave a curt, reluctant nod.

‘Ensign Marshwic will junior for you,’ Tubal said, gesturing her forward. Goss stared blankly at her as she approached.

‘You must be new, Ensign. We’ve had reinforcements in, I take it, Lieutenant?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Tubal confirmed.

Goss frowned at her. ‘Ensign . . .’ In a tone of utter incomprehension: ‘You’re a woman.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

Goss looked from her to the ranks of his company, stopping at every third face, seeing the women past the mannish clothes, the shorn hair.

He said nothing. What could he say? The world had fallen crooked while he had been recovering from his wounds.

‘Ensign Marshwic, will you take the captain through the colonel’s plan?’

What little there is of it.
The image of that cluttered, useless little map was another weight adding to the stack of dread in her stomach. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘May I dismiss the men, sir, or would you like to address them?’

Goss’s stare had been drawn inexorably back to the swamps, both in actuality and in his mind’s eye. He had nothing useful to say to help his men. His lips shaped the words:
‘I’m not afraid . . .’

‘Sir?’

‘Dismiss them, Lieutenant. Ensign, you’re with me.’

That night, the Survivors’ Club met late, after Emily had left Captain Goss with Pordevere and Mallarkey, and some port, in the Bear Sejant hut.

Despite the rules of the Club, there was a solemnity they could not shake off. Not pipe nor cards nor brandy could lift their spirits, and by unspoken consent nobody placed shillings in the jar,
lest it overflow. Brocky the non-combatant’s face was raddled with misery, as though he was the one condemned and not they. That sour nature, his normal defence against the world, was showing
its cracks.

He drank immoderately, but the others little. Tomorrow, a clear head could separate life and death. Scavian looked pale, holding his glass with both hands. Tubal grinned emptily, laughing too
hard at any joke the others could dredge up, and at his own. Mallen’s painted face was darkly unreadable. She wondered what they saw in her own.

A silence descended on them, Tubal’s laugh fading away into it. Their eyes sought each other’s around the room. It seemed fragile words had been extinguished, until, ‘I had a
girl, once,’ Brocky announced.

‘You surprise and appal me,’ jibed Tubal quickly.

Brocky swilled the liquid in his glass, a curious smile on his face. ‘Even I, dear fellow. I once had a girl. Damn, I’ve not thought of her for many a year. We were close, so close .
. . A lithe and bonny lass she was.’ His head came up angrily, daring them to challenge him. ‘We were engaged, you know.’

‘You, Brocky, tying the knot?’ Scavian asked doubtfully.

‘Oh, I cut a better figure back then, I grant you, but not that much.’ The fat man slouched further into his chair. ‘Broke my heart, she did. Poor old Brocky, eh? Went off with
some fellow of a lawyer, she did, some wordy weasel from the courts. She always did love a professional man, and I was only a dispenser. I could brew a poison or cure the plague, but he could argue
the toss before a judge, and so they showered gold upon him. I ask you, what kind of a world is it where men of such slight merit . . . ah, well . . .’ A monstrous sigh welled up inside him.
‘But I had a girl once, in case you ever wondered. Hurt me worse than the Hellic pox, losing her.’

He blinked at them, looking sober as anything, nothing of the brandy touching him now.
From one kind of loss to another
, Emily understood. He could not open his heart – perhaps
such men never could – but he had let them know, nonetheless.

‘We are a sorry pack of fools, are we not, my friends?’ Scavian said sadly. ‘In truth, what are we? A printer, a chemist, a scholar, one lady of leisure and an idle second son.
No man’s heroes, surely. Is it not ridiculous, all this? We should complain to someone.’

‘So we should,’ Mallen echoed. It was the first thing he had said all evening.

‘I want to go back to my dispensary,’ Brocky mumbled. ‘I wasn’t happy there, but so what?’

‘I want to see my wife and son,’ whispered Tubal. His mouth twitched, holding back a tide.

‘I want you lot all to bugger off out of my swamps and take your stinking war with you,’ Mallen said, sparking a few smiles at least.

‘God protect us, all of us,’ Emily said.

Brocky cocked a beetling eyebrow. ‘God? He doesn’t visit here.’

‘Do the indigenes have gods, Mallen?’

The master sergeant nodded, regarding her curiously.

‘Let them protect us, then. Let us be protected,’ Emily decided. ‘Is there a thing you can do? Can you give us their blessing? Say some words or paint our faces?’

‘Em, this isn’t really . . .’ said Tubal, the churchgoer.

‘Doesn’t work like that,’ Mallen told them all stubbornly. ‘They’re not like us. Their gods aren’t like your God.’ And then a pause while his eyes
switched shiftily from one face to the next. ‘But I’ll ask – inside here.’ A fist went to his chest. ‘I’ll ask.’

‘Well, then,’ Emily managed brightly, ‘let us meet here, tomorrow evening, when it’s done. All of us – let’s say we will.’

They regarded her cautiously.

‘Just say it,’ she insisted, louder, and heard her voice tremble. ‘Brocky, lay in some supplies: something to smoke, something to drink. Let us all meet here tomorrow
evening.’ By now the trembling was worse. She was holding on to her voice like the reins of a panicked horse. ‘And . . . and . . . and if we do not . . .’

‘Then those that live will remember,’ Scavian finished for her, once it was apparent that she could not.

Emily nodded, dug into her inside pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper. ‘My note. Fifty pounds, was it?’

Brocky took it from her reverently. ‘If . . . God above! If I . . . I’ll look after your son, Salander, I swear.’

‘It’s yours. If it’s yours, it’s yours,’ Tubal said.

Oh, Mary.
What a weight, on this cast of the dice, for the Marshwic family. What a weight for Lascanne.

They were late to bed, all five of them. They knew they would not sleep long, and that dawn’s pale fingers in the eastern sky would find them awake and ready.

The companies were assembling before the black rim of the swamp even as the sun cast its first light over the sea. Emily bolted from her tent towards the storehouse and banged
furiously on the door until its latch jumped from its mounting, leaving the portal gaping wide. She found John Brocky inside and roused him from his hammock by way of tipping him onto the
floor.

‘Time, is it?’ he croaked, clutching his head.

‘Brocky, you must do something for me,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I have a letter here, and a messenger called Penny Belchere may come asking for me. Give this to her if I am not
here to do so myself.’

He blinked at her. ‘What?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, yes I do.’ She left him sitting on the storehouse floor and went to join her company.

They were all falling into place, eight-hundred-odd soldiers of the Stag Rampant, and as many for each of the other two companies. It was a vast force of armed men and women,
the whole strength of the Levant; for all she knew it was only a fraction of Lascanne’s force in the grander war being fought on the Couchant front up west. Were those soldiers also mustering
at this daybreak hour? Were they also embarking on their own Big Push? Perhaps the fate of Lascanne would hang in the balance of a single coin toss today.

‘Emily! Ensign!’ Tubal hurried up to her. ‘Have you seen Mallen?’

She shook her head and he gave her a frustrated look. ‘His scouts are taking point. We need him here now. Go find him, will you?’

Behind him, Captain Goss was walking slowly along the front rank of soldiers, saying nothing, his eyes heavy with emotion.

She found Mallen quickly enough, tucked in behind the company shack. He was squatting on his haunches, and it was a moment before she spotted the two indigenes crouching with him. They spoke
softly in the creatures’ own garbled language, and she wondered whether she should wait, to see what would come of it. Instead, she coughed pointedly to announce herself, and Mallen jumped to
his feet.

‘They need you, Master Sergeant,’ she told him.

He gave her another of his unreadable looks, of which he seemed to have an endless store, and muttered a few more foreign words to the indigenes. Straight away they were off, scurrying low,
towards the swamps. She had lost sight of them long before they reached the trees.

‘What was that about?’ she asked Mallen, and at first he simply looked at her and muttered something about it not being an ensign’s place to question him.

‘Tubal’s going to want to know,’ she pointed out, as they both jogged back towards the company.

He hissed through his teeth. ‘They must not be near the Denlanders when we attack. They had to know that.’

She stopped abruptly. ‘You told them to get away from the Denland camp?’

A nod from him, no more.

‘But . . . if the enemy realize . . .’ She gaped at him. ‘Mallen, they’ll know we’re coming!’

He stared back at her. Scholar or not he had the close-faced pride and dignity of a savage prince. ‘So what, then?’ he said. ‘They will die caught between the lines, else. This
is their home – my home. Before we turned it into our battleground.’

‘But—’

‘Will they notice when the indigenes leave? No. But if they do? We come here to die, Marshwic. This is their place to live, and they have no other. I will not betray them.’

‘Tubal . . .’

‘Will understand.’ And he was off again, leaving her to catch up. By the time she had found her place in line, Mallen had his two score scouts away from the main force, giving them
their briefing.

She spilled out to Tubal all her worries, even as Captain Goss approached down the line. There was a grimace on the face of the lieutenant, but in the end he merely shrugged.