Guns of the Dawn (2 page)

And he was gone.

In the blindness of the moment, she did not see his body pitch back into the water, the gun falling from his hands. Compared to the roar of her arc-lock musket, his death was a study in
silence.

The gun, smoking hot, was so loose in her hands it was nearly lost in the water. She took a tentative step forward, and then another, her world narrowing, and narrowing further, until there were
no overarching branches, no warped tree trunks, nothing but grey cloth stained with a darkness that could have been mud or blood, or anything really. He was there, half submerged, arms flung wide
as though seeking some final balance. He had fallen into the dark, though. He was dead.

There came half a dozen shots, hard on each other’s heels, but she did not look away or reload her gun or check for the enemy – all the things they had taught her to do. Her eyes
were hooked by the body of the Denlander. Head thrown back into the water, it was impossible to tell anything about him. Had he been old? Young? Handsome? Ugly? The roar and the smoke had erased
his face from her memory, and now there was just this thing: this meat.

She dragged her eyes away from him by main force but there was only the clogged, claustrophobic vista of the swamp to take them to. The brooding trees had seen death a hundred times before, and
the lapping water was greedy to receive the dead man’s blood. More shots, muffled, in the distance. A battle of the invisible; a war in the next room.

She bent over, reaching out to him as though he could be saved.

The whistle sounded again, Mallen’s whistle.

Retreat.

Emily straightened up instantly, but she thought she had misheard. Retreat? Surely not.
We’re winning, aren’t we?
Here, in this blighted square yard of the swamp, they were
winning. She was alive and the Denlander was dead. How could it be time to retreat?

‘Emily! Marshwic!’

She turned to see Elise ten yards away and closing.

‘Come on, we’re retreating. They’ve made a counterattack!’ the other woman shouted at her as she waded closer.

How do you know?
Emily pushed the thought aside and turned towards Elise, forcing her boots through water that seemed thicker than ever. Behind her, no doubt, the carrion eaters of the
swamp were already gathering.

‘We have to go!’ Elise insisted, gesturing frantically and nearly fumbling her gun.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Emily was out of breath, or breathing badly. A horror was now clutching at her, though she had not felt it arrive. There was a dead man on her
conscience, which had once been so clear.

However has it come to this?

‘I swear—’ Elise began, then something red flowered on her pale shirt, stopping her in her tracks. The sound of the shot was an afterthought, a nothing. Elise stared at Emily
with open mouth.

‘Oh . . .’

‘Elise!’

‘Oh, God, I . . .’ Her face white now, her blouse red, Elise was abruptly falling away. Emily ran to catch her, clutching for the woman’s hand. There was a dead weight on the
end of it and the dead weight was Elise.

‘Come on!’ she shouted at the stricken woman. ‘Come on!’ Their roles cruelly reversed.

The whistle to retreat sounded again, now closer and more urgent.

‘Elise, come on!’

The Denlander sniper must be reloading, in the quiet moments between reports.

The lifeless hand slipped from her fingers. Emily looked about herself, desperately seeking the enemy, but there was no one, nothing but the swamp.

‘Marshwic! Move your arse!’ Mallen bounded past, bent almost double, his tied-back hair streaming.

‘But Elise . . .’

He paused for a brief instant, but Master Sergeant Mallen had seen death before. ‘Just come on!’ He was gone then, but he had left her some of his energy, his speed. Her skin
crawled, and she went floundering after him, to get away from the two dead things in the swamp.

For some time later, Emily could set down nothing in her letter but
I killed my first man today.
Not because nothing else had registered, but because whenever she
remembered holding that hand in hers, or the astonished expression on Elise’s face as the woman’s words were murdered in her mouth, her fingers began shaking, and she could not hold the
pen.

The world had gone mad three years before, when revolution came to Denland. Casting off their loyalties, heedless of man’s law or God’s, a band of greedy,
power-hungry men had risen up against poor half-witted King Dietricht. The streets of the capital were soon thronged with agitators, criminals and looters. Half the city had burned, and what had
risen from the ashes called itself a parliament that needed no kings.

Denland had always played host to those philosophers, atheists and political dissidents who maintained that all men were fit to rule; and that, while the magic of the blood royal was undeniable,
still a king’s head held no greater privilege of leadership than that of any other. The Denlander crown had ever been tolerant of such rantings and pamphletings.
Let them talk
, had
been the policy.
Talk does no harm.

But in just one night, that talk had honed itself to a headsman’s edge. In one night, the howling pack of malcontents and anarchists had stormed the palace, let in by traitors from the
King’s own guard. Simple-minded Dietricht was shot down, his queen thrown from the highest window of the palace, his newborn son murdered in his cradle.

For the people of Lascanne, Denland’s southern neighbour, that bloody morning was like waking into a nightmare. For centuries the two nations had been siblings – sometimes rivals but
always allies against the world. Now Denland, formerly so solid and reliable and plodding, had become a rabid dog.

Emily remembered reading it all in the newspapers. There had been a cartoon depicting the Denlander Parliament as a convocation of ravening beasts squatting amidst ruined walls. She remembered
walking in Chalcaster, with everyone asking everyone else what would happen next. There had been no great patriotic bombast at the start. Nobody had quite believed it, as though an entire newspaper
full of regicide and revolution could be laid at the door of a typesetting error or a printer’s poor sense of humour. But eventually the murmur had coalesced into two questions.

What are we going to do?

What are
they
going to do?

Because word had come creeping in. It was never quite something directly written in the papers, never something tacked up in the market square or announced by the Mayor-Governor, yet everyone
became aware of it. Travellers muttered it on their way through town. Royal messengers let it slip as they paid for their inn rooms. Drinkers repeated it to each other over mugs of small beer.

The Denlanders were not content with remaking their own nation. The Denlanders would not stop until they had reworked the entire world in their own republican image.

There was a constant flow of news from across the border. Noble families were being disenfranchised or forced to swear allegiance to that hellish parliament of murderers. Every common man of
Denland considered himself a king now. They had abandoned all their trades and labour, and were clamouring for more blood and more rebellion. They were joining the army, or else being drafted.
Reports were contradictory, frightening, impossible, save that it was all happening just over the border.

And then everyone knew, almost on the same day, that the Denlanders were coming. Their Parliament, having cast off the God-given guidance of kings, knew that its artificial and tenuous rule
could not last so long as Lascanne continued to hold out the example of a benevolent monarchy. For this new, cruel Denland to survive, they must shutter the lanterns of monarchy among their
neighbours, lest that light show them the blood on their own hands. So said the papers.

Lascanne’s only possible response was to meet them at the broken ground of the border, and throw them back.

And then there had been the day when the army marched through. Emily remembered it well: all those gallant men in their red coats heading north for the border, to meet the rabble of the
Denlanders. Who could not have believed that a few clashes would have finished it? Lascanne’s army had never been large, but they were brave, and they had right on their side. Emily could see
even now the gleaming helms, the long column of cavalry, horses as proud as the men themselves. She could see the great dark lengths of the cannon, the marching pride of Lascanne’s infantry.
Some had been local men, whose families had cheered and waved. Others had simply been youthful and courageous and smiling, and young girls had put garlands around them and embraced them. Alice
– Emily’s younger sister and a constant trial to propriety – had even kissed one.

Emily had remonstrated with her, but not too hard. It was all patriotism, after all. So she had watched, along with her sisters Alice and Mary – and Mary already growing large with child
then. She had watched with Mary’s husband Tubal, and with young Rodric who had talked so excitedly about one day himself taking the Gold and the Red: the King’s coin and the
King’s uniform.

And that gallant host had marched away and gone north to win the war. And the papers had reported their brave deeds, the battles and the heroics. They had carried the war deep into Denland,
during those early months, and everyone had assumed that would be it. When the wounded came home – when the increasing numbers of wounded came home – they were still predicting it would
be over by the end of the year.

And the year came and went, and the papers grew less specific regarding precisely where the fight had been taken to, and the wounded grew more numerous, until there were new hospitals being
built to take them – in isolated places where people wouldn’t have to see. And the following spring the recruiting sergeants were passing from town to town, talking of the joys of a
life in the army, and how the war was almost won anyway. They had gone amongst the men of Chalcaster and everywhere else. They had commissions to sell for those with money, and honest
soldiers’ uniforms for those without. They were not short of volunteers in those early days, and again the family had turned out to cheer, waving a flag or two for the lads who were bold
enough to carry a gun in service of the King.

Mary had borne her child by then, and she had held little Francis to her breast as they cheered heartily away, secure in the knowledge that none of
their
family was going.

But soon enough after that had come a proclamation. It seemed that the patriotic goodwill evidenced in Chalcaster could not have been shared across the nation because, despite the best efforts
of the recruiting sergeants, the tally had come up short. The King was deeply sorry to ask more from his beleaguered people, but the war had reached a critical stage. They could not give the world
over to the murderers of Denland simply for want of a few more muskets. Regretfully, the King’s writ therefore demanded each household give up one of its menfolk to swell the ranks of the
Red.

That was when the arguments started between Mary and Tubal.

Emily could barely remember the details now of what had been said. Looking back, all those words seemed just to have been grease on the wheels that had taken Tubal away from them. She had never
thought of him as a grand patriot: a religious man, yes, and an industrious worker at his printer’s business in town. A soldier, though? Dark, wry Tubal Salander? Surely some mistake. And
indeed, he had not seemed possessed of that fire to sign up that young Rodric had shown, who had tried twice to take the King’s coin despite being a year too young.

There had been something else eating Tubal right then. He had always been the man who seemed to know what was coming: when the weather would change, when prices would rise and fall. He heard
things; he spoke to travellers and had odd sources of information.

And so Tubal took much of the money he had so diligently saved, and he sank it into a lieutenant’s badge. And he wept when the time came to leave his wife and son, but he marched off
anyway. And everyone cheered as the new recruits and their bought-and-sold officers marched away to the training camps. Alice cheered, and Rodric cheered, though he complained bitterly that the war
would be over before he was old enough to join up. But Emily and Mary did not cheer, and little Francis cried in Mary’s arms, a thin, high wail that cut across all the jubilation and
enthusiasm of the rest.

Never mind
, people had said to the hollow-eyed Mary.
The war will be done soon.
For all the rumour that the Lascanne army had been pushed back to near the border, these new
recruits would tip the balance. How could those opportunistic brigands of Denland stand against the true men of Lascanne?

In the year after that there was a host of men’s jobs and tasks which went undone unless the women and the boys set to them. There were shortages, because the sea had become a hunting
ground of warships, and the merchantmen could not get through. There were panics about spies and revolutionaries. In the capital, men were executed for plotting against the King. At the border
itself, the war dug in, with neither side able to break the other’s lines, but both constantly trying.

And towards the end of summer the notices had gone up in Chalcaster market square, and all across the land. They were couched in many comforting words: yes, the war was being won; yes, victory
was on the very horizon, only just out of reach. And, because of that, the King needed more from his loyal subjects. The King reluctantly, and because the Denlanders must be defeated if anyone was
to sleep safely, required
all
men to give themselves into his service. Boys from the age of fifteen, men to the age of fifty, they were all required to present themselves to do the
King’s will. Those with valuable skills would work and craft, forge and fit, to furnish materiel for the war. But most would simply march, because the Denlanders fought with the desperation
of cornered animals and the weeds of their revolution must be uprooted entirely, lest they sprout anew.