Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
She jerked her head back towards the deadly slip-field, and he swore. Meeting his eyes, she saw her own question in them.
Someone tell me: what happens now?
Right.
She looked around at the soldiers again – her company – and names welled up in her mind, or at least some of them. ‘Wells, take two others and escort Sergeant .
. . escort the sergeant back to camp. Pick up any other wounded you find back in the field.’
And what if there are more wounded than three able bodies can take?
The question went
unasked. It was out of her hands.
She watched with detached amazement as Soldier Wells and the two nearest him helped the sergeant stand up. He gave her a look, before they left: it might have been wishing her luck or it might
have been expressing no confidence in her. She let the thought go.
What happens now?
‘You, Gallster and Pachleby, go back to the field. Fetch a dozen muskets. I can’t be the only one to have lost mine.’ And as if by magic, the two
named soldiers were already retreating back towards the slip-field. That was the easy part.
‘Where’s Mallen?’
‘Gone ahead, Ensign.’
‘Stockton,’ she said, addressing a young woman she thought looked sound. The girl’s expression suggested that she was not Stockton, but Emily ploughed on regardless. ‘And
you,’ she decided, letting her finger indicate the next. ‘Go scout ahead. I need to know where we are, and what’s going on.’
The woman who wasn’t Stockton stood up, looking pale and less sound than she had a moment before, but she saluted and she and her nameless companion stepped away into the mist and the
trees, and were lost and gone in ten paces. Emily was uncomfortably aware that she could have sent two soldiers to their deaths without knowing the name of either.
I will improve, if I get the
chance.
‘Someone make me a count,’ she instructed them. ‘How many of us are left?’
She used the meantime to lean back against a tree and work out what she would do next, what news she might expect to hear.
The count of two hundred and twenty-one came in, perhaps including Gallster and Pachleby, as they came back with their cargo of replacement guns.
Seventy-odd dead in the field.
So few moments to account for so many.
And now two hundred and twenty-one men and women looked at her and waited for her to tell them what to do.
The knot in her stomach, tight enough during all these days, clenched fully at last.
Don’t rely on me. I only got the rank because of family. I’m no real officer.
But she
couldn’t tell them that. They were relying on her. She was Lascanne, to them. She was all they had right now of the colonel, and the King.
There was a sudden scuffle at the fringe of the group as the woman who wasn’t Stockton was nearly shot three times while making a sudden reappearance. She kicked her way hurriedly through
the mob of soldiers to get to Emily.
‘Ensign!’
‘What is it? Where’s . . . ?’
Thankfully the soldier cut her off before she could stumble over the lack of name. ‘Ensign, we found the lieutenant’s party. They’re two, three hundred yards that direction. He
doesn’t know where the third division is, but . . .’ She paused to get her breath back. ‘As I was telling him where we were, we heard gunfire – lots of it. There was a big
fight up ahead. He didn’t know if it was Sergeant Shalmer’s men or the Bear. The lieutenant was moving out to assist, when I left. He’s kept Breedy in case he needed to send
another message.’
Thank God this woman can at least make half a report.
Emily stood up to let everyone see her, as far as the mist allowed. ‘We’re going now,’ she told them.
‘Everyone loaded?’ Even as she asked, she realized that she still had no musket, but the very next moment Gallster was pushing one into her hands. Everything was falling into place. She
had now started to slide, and she could not stop until she reached the bottom.
‘Everyone up!’ she called, and the division picked itself out of the mud, battered but determined. She elbowed her way to the front, because it was more than she could manage to lead
them from any other position.
‘Let’s go!’ And, like Captain Goss, she did not look back to see if they were following her.
She
knew
they were. It frightened her worse than the Denlanders, worse than Mr Northway She was carrying the weight of their trust on her shoulders now. Her feet sank heavier in the mud
because of it.
There was a distant sound of firing, no louder than pattering rain, as they reached the next slip-field. At the edge of the swamp, looking out at that bright-lit expanse ahead, Emily hesitated.
Quicker if we go over it; quicker than fighting this confounded mud and root-tangle.
But another ambush and you’ll have nobody left to lead.
She had no idea where Mallen was, whether he was still scouting or had been caught up in the fighting.
‘Go round!’ she called. ‘Round the edge of it,’ and she battled her way off through the foliage, sensing the relief of the soldiers closest to her.
‘Good choice, sir,’ she heard at her shoulder, not looking back to see who it was. Instead she picked up the pace, heading as fast over the twisted terrain as she could, vaulting
over roots, splashing through pools and slogging through mud that wrenched at her boots. Then she took another great wall of root at a run, slung her feet over and went up to her waist in
water.
The shock of it made her gasp even as she pushed onwards, feeling the black slime of the bottom ooze beneath her. Musket held high, she waded forward, seeing the bulk of her soldiers overtaking
her, left and right, around the pool.
This I’ll never live down.
And then the Denlanders came through the trees ahead of them.
She felt the musket’s trigger click in her hands, realized that she had dragged it down to rest against her shoulder. There was the heartbeat of dreadful anticipation as the arc-lock
spun.
The Denlanders had been hurrying across the division’s path – falling back, she assumed. She would never know whether they had, in fact, been watching over the slip-field for their
enemy.
The musket bucked against her shoulder and, all around her, her troops were firing. She heard her shot go off, as a single distinct entity, before the roar of the massed fire that the others
belted out. The recoil of the gun made her heels skid in the mud, and she almost lost her balance and went under completely.
When the smoke cleared, there was a score of dead Denlanders splayed and scattered before them, while the living had fled.
‘Reload and then on!’ she called, and she waded out of the pool. Someone took her musket, whereupon she snatched her pistol from her belt. It was empty still from the previous
engagement, and she had no idea whether it would fire at all now. She dried it as best she could with her shirt and loaded it anyway. It was a good-quality, robust weapon. If the worst came to the
worst it would be worth the hazard, and she could always use it as a cudgel.
And they pushed forward, as the sound of gunfire, volley overlapping volley in a continuous thunder, grew ever louder.
The trees were thinning ahead of them, and she broke into a run.
For her first astounded second, it looked like some corner of a soldier’s vision of hell.
The ground was churned calf-deep in mud, and littered with bodies. It had been the site of a camp, a big one, but there was little enough left of that now. The tents were trampled, and
everything that stood over a foot tall provided cover for more soldiers than it could reasonably hide. Across the far side, she saw the Denlanders strung out in a long line behind cases and crates
and a few over-turned carts, firing and reloading with fearful determination, half and half, taking it in turns to peer over the barrier and let fly. Closer by, a few hundred yards along her side
of the clearing, there was a mass of men, tight-packed in a block of hundreds, ducking behind what cover they had, the front ranks returning fire on the Denlanders. These were Bear Sejant men, she
assumed at first, but then she caught a glimpse of Tubal’s dark face in the nearest lot and knew that he must have come to the Bear’s aid and was now as pinned down as they were.
What happens now?
‘Sir, look!’ She followed the pointing finger of the woman who was not Stockton, and saw a detachment of Denlanders, their grey uniforms smeared with mud and blood, making their way
around the clearing’s edge, as they tried to get into a position where they could flank the embattled Lascanne forces. Much further and they would secure an unobstructed line of fire into the
heart of Tubal’s men.
‘Follow me!’ she ordered without explanation, and charged forward into the trees, following the periphery of the clearing under the canopy.
Please, please, don’t let them
see us.
A ridiculous supposition. Two hundred men and women and more, all in red, with guns gleaming in the weak sunlight, how could they go unnoticed?
But the swamps and the trees, which had been her enemy since she came here, were with her now. Their roots gave her purchase as she charged her soldiers through them. They gave her mist to hide
her from the enemy. She passed through the water and the muck and mire like an indigene, like Mallen himself.
She stopped, letting the division form up around her. The Denlanders had almost crept into position. She had their backs. Shooting men in the back: no honour, no valour. The colonel would mutter
into his moustache:
This is not what war is about.
And she thought:
This is absolutely what war is about. The real war.
‘With me!’ She pulled the trigger, kneeling to reload as her comrades’ fire lashed through the flanking party, smashing bones, punching through lungs, killing men in all the
ways a swiftly hurtling ball of lead can. She came up to see the enemy survivors under fire from the front as well, and she mercilessly brought her gun to bear on a second target. This time she saw
the Denlander die, flung forward even as he was taking aim. She bent again to reload.
What happens now?
She had no plan. Each fresh idea came without ancestor or descendant. Every man and woman who had survived the slip-field was still with her, but that would not last
for long.
We will do to them what they would do to Tubal
, she decided. Why not let the Denlanders advise her on strategy? By all accounts they were good at it.
She managed another hundred yards about the edge of the enemy company before her nerve failed her and she knew they had to go in. The Denlander line was strung out: there would be no great
triumphant smashing of it. They had bought themselves one volley of surprise, and no more.
‘When I move,’ she told her soldiers, ‘get into range and take what cover you may, then fire at will.’
‘What then, sir?’ someone asked her.
She could not admit to them she did not know, so she told them nothing.
The Denlanders fired again, one half dropping down as their fellows stood to take another shot. Emily felt her insides squirm. When she stepped out to the trees’ edge, into good range of
them, it would be with two hundred and twenty-one soldiers, all of whose lives depended on her choices.
She wanted to wait and wait for some golden opportunity, some great moment when all knots might be undone with just one pull of the string.
There will never be a good time for this.
She clutched her musket closer to her.
On three
, she decided. She counted:
one, two three.
She still did not want to go
in.
She went anyway, charging out into the open and collapsing before a toppled barrel that would protect her hardly at all, raising the gun to her shoulder. The trigger jerked, the arc-lock
spun.
It misfired. No smoke, no sound, but the lack of it was swallowed up in the great thunder of her division’s guns, the choking pall of rank smoke once they found their places and fired.
Ragged pot-shotting, nothing like the mechanical order of the Denlanders, but still, guns were guns. She saw twenty or more of the closest enemy punched off their feet, or slumping across their
barricades, and she realized to her horror that if she wanted to press her advantage, she would need to close the range.
We need to move forward again.
And if the Denlanders have more men concealed in the trees they can do to us what we have done to them.
Dragging her sabre from its scabbard, she pushed herself to her feet. ‘Go! Charge! Go!’ she screamed at the top of her voice, and dashed forward, sword first.
Denlanders were turning to confront her division now. Something plucked at the sleeve of her jacket and she felt a sting as that of an insect. The man beside her stopped dead, doubling over and
falling out of her sight.
She screamed, eyes almost shut, sword held high. No words, but just a yell of rage and defiance and fear.
She was within the line of their barricade. Shots sang past her, heading both ways. The nearest Denlander dropped, blood spouting from his throat like a stage actor’s feigned expiry. The
next was still facing out at Bear Sejant, about to make his shot. She rammed the sabre into his body, losing it between his ribs as he howled in agony. She pulled the doubtful pistol out and held
it at arm’s length, looking for a target.
Her division began to overtake her. Stockton, or whoever she was, dropped to her knees beside Emily, aiming and firing with clenched teeth, eyes wide.
The Denlanders were breaking apart, backing off. Tubal and Captain Pordevere had led their men charging out, a great tide of red that spilled over the clearing into the final round of fire from
the Denlander line. From within the Lascanne ranks a great sheet of fire swept over the barricades, setting Denlanders alight like torches as Justin Lascari made his presence known.
In her mind she heard Mallen’s voice:
Into the trees! Don’t stop at the treeline. Don’t let them regroup.
‘After them! Follow them!’ she shouted, her voice hoarse and raw. She hauled once more at her sword, but the dead man held it securely, so with pistol only she charged. ‘Bad
Rabbit! Bad Rabbit!’