Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
On Emily’s watch, there was something else. She had been sitting with her jacket off and her shirt half open, marvelling that not even the forces of night could lessen the heat by much,
when she saw a fire spark up, off between the trees.
Denlanders!
was her first thought, and she reached for Mallen to shake him awake. Her hand never made it to him, stilled by what she
witnessed next. The fire was a ghastly green-white, a corpse-light flare, and it was moving. She saw its reflection as it drifted aimlessly over a broad pool, saw the dancing pinprick lights of
insects skip around it and scatter. The sight of it filled her full of awe and fear. Trees and pools and insects she had at home, in civilized measure. This was from a world beyond her world: this
unfuelled, untethered flame; this spirit.
She stared into its pallid depths, half expecting to see some face or figure deep within it.
‘Ensign?’ Mallen had woken, though she had not touched him.
‘What is that, Sergeant?’ she asked him.
She heard him sit up, imagined him stripped to the waist, lean muscles and no wasted flesh. There was nothing for her there, of course, but Jenny was not alone in her interest. Emily had seen
the way several of the other girls looked at the master sergeant.
‘You know it, Marshwic, surely?’ His voice, closer to her than she had thought, was amused.
‘Sergeant, tell me. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
There was an odd little cough beside her, and she realized that he was chuckling. ‘It’s you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It’s a marsh-wick. Swamp light. Understand?’
‘But . . . what is it? Is it an animal? Or dangerous?’
‘Gas, Ensign. Harmless.’
She watched the eerie light bob over the water, flare up and dwindle down. ‘Is there anything you
don’t
know about this place, sir?’
‘Many things.’
‘But you must have come here right at the start. You must have been here for years.’
Again that cough of a laugh. ‘Since long before the war,’ he told her.
When dawn thrust its way upon them through the leaves, they woke along with it, scratching at the new bites that the night had left on them.
‘I thought the quartermaster said we were – what was it? – “unattractive” to insects after we took his disgusting medicine,’ Emily complained, on finding a
new raised weal by her armpit and slapping at it with unladylike rancour.
‘Try coming here without,’ said Mallen. He seemed to be taking his bearings, standing straight and turning slowly. Perhaps he was looking for signs of the enemy. He had tried to tell
Emily how a compass needle was thrown off kilter by something in the water or the mud, but that compass points in the swamp could still be reckoned by the ubiquitous slow seepage of the
swamp’s waters, always leaching east towards the sea. Emily herself could see no such movement. To her eyes, the waters just sat and turned rancid, and ran nowhere. She would never make
Mallen’s elite band of scouts and trackers, and she decided she didn’t want to. The swamp was bad enough in company, but far, far worse alone.
That morning he led them differently. The day before they had moved slowly and cautiously, a steady sweep to feel for the hand of Denland on the surrounding marshland. Today he moved with more
purpose. Had they been anywhere else, Emily would have said he stepped along like a man wanting to keep an appointment. The rest of them did their best to match his brisk pace, and those who
slipped or fell – and they all did from time to time – had to hurry to regain the rest before the drifting mist enveloped them.
‘Where are we going, sir?’ Emily asked, slightly out of breath after she had forced her way to the head of the column. ‘I mean, where is there to go?’
‘No landmarks, right?’ Mallen flashed her a featureless glance. ‘Near right, but not quite. Almost all the swamp shifts, day to day. Trees, even – not quite where you
left them each time. Not quite all, though. Understand?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You will.’
And she did. They endured two hours of swamp-marching, at a pace as rapid as was practical over the mounded roots, the boggy banks and clouded pools. A townsman strolling down the streets of
Chalcaster would have counted it leisurely, but then his road would have been flatter and less riddled with venomous monsters. Emily reckoned them all lucky that so far nobody had been stung or
bitten by anything deadly, for to her eyes there was little that lived in this godforsaken place that was not inimical to mankind.
At last Mallen signalled the halt, though, and the column straggled in, gasping, sweat-stained and red from the effort. Only then did she notice that they had reached one of his landmarks.
She remembered the marsh-wick last night, and the feelings of dissociation it had inspired in her. This was the same: her life was never meant to hold such things.
From the mire, from an island of driftwood and weed and mud that had bulked about it, thrust a squared pillar. Moss grew on it, and lichens in discolouring stains, but less than she would
expect, given the age it so obviously bore in every line. It had been cleaned from time to time.
Those parts of it that were not lost beneath the blooms of the swamp showed intricate work, human work. She noted symbols and lines, and tangles that might have been pictures, but which her eyes
could not make out. Heedless for a moment of the danger, she approached it, splashing through the shallow water and the inches-deep mud. The characters might have been anything, the children of no
alphabet she ever knew. The pictures . . . As she gazed on them, they brought strange thoughts to her mind: this one made her feel dread, this one gave hope, this other one spoke of movement and
action. They were faint and weathered, with only the dirt ingrained in them making them visible at all.
She looked back at Mallen, who was watching her keenly.
‘Who . . . ?’ she asked, and when he smiled it was a civilized thing, not his feral grin, the tattooed-savage leer he usually made.
‘Nobody knows,’ he said softly, coming over to join her. ‘Here and there, throughout the swamp, you find them. What race raised them was gone before we arrived, long
before.’ He reached out and traced the design gently, almost lovingly.
She was taken by his face, its utter transformation. Had he been standing in a schoolroom, speaking thus, how appropriate his expression would have been. Here, beneath the tattoos and in these
surroundings, how
out
of place.
‘You’re a complex man,’ she said, without meaning to speak aloud. He glanced at her, the hunter’s grin returning. She saw then, without partaking, exactly what Jenny and
the other girls saw in him: his energy, his sureness and capability. She saw, too, why he did not look at them.
This
was his love, here in this place that he had made his own.
‘Why are we here, sir?’ she asked him.
‘Wait.’ He lowered himself down, his back against the stone, and Emily signalled that the squad should take a rest too. She deputized two to take look-out, and splashed back to join
Mallen.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘Of?’
‘The squad, me included. Are we going to make it? Do we pass?’
‘You pass every day except your last,’ he said, and then his eyes flicked up and recognition crossed his face.
Emily looked about, expecting to see another squad, and for a moment she saw nothing. A ripple of panic had passed through the soldiers, though, and Mallen said, ‘Nobody raise a
gun,’ in a voice that brooked no opposition.
What is it? Is it the Denlanders?
For a mad moment she thought Mallen had betrayed them. Then she saw.
There were three of them come from between the trees, approaching the stone. Three little men in green, like something from a fairy story. Little men in green, with vast white eyes.
The more she saw, the less storybook they looked and the less she liked them. None was over four feet high, and they did not carry themselves quite like men, but a little hunched, a little
long-armed, They wore suits of coarse fabric, green underlain with black . . .
She realized they wore nothing. They were
hairy:
an oily, short-furred pelt from head to toe. She had not wanted to acknowledge the fact but, as they got closer, she could see every
hair on them.
Beasts.
But they had hands, and they had woven straps about them, belts and baldrics and bags. Men, then, but what men?
She made herself look at their faces, which were as furred as the rest of them. They possessed slightly pointed heads, with large ears flat alongside the skull. Long noses came almost down to
the small, surprisingly delicate lips. The eyes that stared at her were as round and huge as the moon in a night sky, with a faint shadow moving within them, as though they kept their eyelids on
the inside.
Their open mouths revealed thin, sharp teeth. Their hands, not webbed as she had half expected, had long fingers with hooked nails.
She recalled Lord Deerling then, and his strange companions. Not like these, not at all like these, but she had heard how the Levant front had its own natives: swamp-people.
People?
They stood in a crescent before Mallen and the pillar, as though it was their god and he their priest. Emily and the other soldiers could only stare.
‘Indigenes,’ Mallen said softly. ‘Call them that, properly.’
‘What are they?’ Emily asked in a similar tone. ‘I mean natives, obviously, but . . . did they build the pillar?’
‘No stonework, no metalwork. No stone or metal
to
work. Not their doing, this.’ He turned his attention back to the creatures, and one padded forward quicker than any human,
through the water and the mud, and took his hand. Emily shrank back, but Mallen held there a moment, quite still, before releasing and drawing away. The indigene bared its teeth nastily, but then
she reassessed the sight and guessed it was pleased. A moment later, it spoke: hisses and clicks, but also sounds like something imitating the human. A gabble, a jumble, but clearly Mallen
understood and he spoke right back at them in the same nonsense tongue, gargling and babbling conversationally. More teeth were bared. A ritual of greeting was exchanged.
‘What . . . what do they want?’
‘What do
we
want? This is
their
home, remember, not yours.’ Mallen shot her a sardonic look. ‘We want news. We want food. They fish, hunt, feed us what we
can’t get from rations when we’re out here.’
‘And in return?’
‘We leave them alone. Everyone hear me? Nobody harms them. Nobody offends them.’
There was something of a grumble amongst the soldiers and Mallen rounded on them angrily. ‘Understood?’ he demanded. ‘War with Denland, one thing. War with the indigenes is war
with the swamp.’
‘Do they track the Denlanders for you?’ Emily asked him.
No. No more do they track us for Denland.’
‘I don’t—’
‘We give them peace. Denland does the same. They feed us both, warn us both. Neutrals, Marshwic.’
‘But surely they—’
His very look stopped her. ‘Take sides? You’d better hope they don’t.’
He turned from her then, starting a conversation with the indigenes that batted back and forth for some time. She studied the little people as they spoke. They were most human when they were
still, she decided. Despite the eyes, the face, the hair, they could almost be children standing there. When they moved or spoke, the humanity fled from them. Every gesture or expression bespoke an
ancestry utterly at odds with her own.
Mallen bridged the communication gap, though. He must have been here a long, long time. She wondered how they looked to him, whether he could tell them apart, read nuances of feeling in those
vast eyes.
*
Not a sign, not a glimpse of a Denlander, after that three-day expedition into the swamps. She was relieved. She was also frustrated. Elise was unavenged, in some strange way.
Emily herself was untested. She did not know if she could do what a soldier must, now that Elise had died on her. She could not talk to Mallen about it, for he had no small talk. She did not want
to take it to Tubal either. He was her brother-in-law, but he was her superior officer. He was also her commanding officer until Captain Goss returned to lead the Stag Rampant. So she kept it
inside, instead, and it sat there uneasily.
The camp provided a welcome chill, after the suffocating heat of the swamps – a heat that owed nothing to latitude or altitude, and everything to the furnaces of rot that underlay all
things. Up above them all, two hundred feet of sheer rock away, she heard the distant pounding of the big guns. The Couchant front was seeing a busy day. A thunderhead of cloud in the east was
lumbering slowly towards its precipitous demise against the cliffs and crags. More rain being delivered, regular as the gunfire.
She sat heavily at a trestle table before the cooking fires and called out for something to eat.
Privilege of rank. Let someone run after me, for a change.
The stocky woman stirring the
pot gave her a sour look as if to say she had snubbed higher ranks than ensigns today, and Emily was about to lever herself up again when she sensed someone approach from behind.
When she turned, more quickly than she had intended, she found her hand had gone instinctively to her father’s black pistol, which was loaded and thrust through her belt.
For a second, lost from context, she did not recognize the girl, and she was not quite recognized in turn: two familiar women cut apart by a change of scenery.
And then: ‘Who . . . Is that Penny Belchere?’ Emily stood up, making connections.
‘It
is
you!’ Belchere exclaimed, sounding as much angry as glad. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘In the swamps,’ Emily replied simply, and then, with a little justifiable exaggeration, ‘Fighting the war.’
‘I’ve been here almost a day,’ Belchere complained.
Emily looked at her blankly. ‘Count yourself lucky. I’m here for the duration. Have you been drafted?’
‘No!’ Belchere exclaimed. ‘Though everyone round here seems to think I have. I’m messenger corps, remember? Why do you
think
I’m here? If I’d known
I’d get sent
here
, I’d never have joined—’