Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘I need my letter back,’ she explained.
He spread his hands. ‘Can’t help you there, Marshwic. Your pretty little messenger girl turned up at lunchtime yesterday, and I handed it over just like you said. Got a return
message for you, as well.’
He pressed the sealed note into her hands, leaving her thinking numbly of what Mr Northway would think when he read what she had written: her last few words, last morning’s hurried
work.
He will worry.
The feeling it brought to her was strange, bittersweet. He would be worrying when, by the time he read the words, she would already have returned alive and safe. He would
worry.
It felt good to think that there would be someone back home who would know the truth, and worry. She could not put the weight of that on her sisters, but Northway could bear it.
I am become as strange as he
, she told herself.
‘Marshwic?’ Brocky queried dubiously.
She broke out of her reverie to collect replacements for all her missing kit, and was just bundling out of the hut when Tubal found her.
‘Em, got you! The colonel wants to see you right away.’
‘What?’ She grasped for calm as he bustled her away from the store.
‘No time for questions. Come on.’
‘Very well, Salander, that will do,’ Colonel Resnic said, with a dismissive gesture, almost the moment the two of them entered his headquarters. Tubal saluted
smartly, then was gone before Emily had quite worked out what was going on. There was no clue on the colonel’s face as he gestured for her to sit across from him. The map of the swamps was
still pinned to the table, though the coloured bricks had gone.
‘Sir, I don’t—’
‘Salander,’ the colonel mused, cutting her off. ‘Some sort of relation of yours? By marriage, obviously.’
‘Brother-in-law, sir.’
‘Must be hard for you, I suppose.’
‘I’m . . . not sure what you mean, sir.’ She watched impatiently as he signalled for Stapewood to light his pipe, and then took a few reflective puffs on it before
continuing.
‘Well, you know. Decent chap and all, but the fellow’s a tradesman, and his family have hardly been in Lascanne three generations, I hear. Can’t be easy, taking his
orders.’
Still utterly wrong-footed, with no sense of what was going on, Emily could only stammer, ‘I’ve . . . found him a very able officer, sir.’
‘Loyalty. Good show, Marshwic. First virtue of a soldier. Now look, heard a few stories, you know, about your actions yesterday. I’m sure you know what I mean.’
Her recollection of the previous day’s fighting was like a box of mirror shards cast across the floor: the rattle of muskets, the deep pools, Goss’s fall and Sharkey’s grin.
‘Sir,’ she said without inflection. It was a soldier’s trick Mallen had taught her.
‘Balance of opinion seems to be,’ the colonel continued, ‘you should have this.’
He passed to her, over the spread-out map, a cloth patch with a crown that perfectly matched the one already stitched on her sleeve.
‘Sir?’ She took it automatically, not quite understanding.
‘Keep up the good work, Sergeant,’ Resnic told her, rising to let her know the audience was over.
‘Your work, of course,’ she accused Tubal, when she met him outside.
‘I gave the recommendation to the colonel, yes. Sorry to bring you down, though, but it wasn’t just nepotism at work. While you were still missing, I had half a dozen soldiers come
to me to report what you did – how you took over when Goss got his wound.’
Emily stared down at the little patch in her hand and shrugged. ‘It seems to me that anyone else would have done about the same, if you’d put them where I was.’
‘They didn’t, though. Your lucky break.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Maybe not. You’re filling Sergeant Shalmer’s boots, after all. He didn’t make it back.’
Her fingers closed about the patch.
Bought with blood.
‘Does that mean we’re short of an ensign?’
‘You have someone in mind?’
‘Yes, it’s . . .’ In her mind was the young woman who had scouted for her, backed her and been her second in the assault, and to Emily’s horror she realized that she
still knew her only as ‘not Stockton’. Eventually she had to describe the woman to Tubal, and then go and actually find her and point her out. The subject of their deliberations
straightened awkwardly when she saw them coming, her boots half-shined before her. Her expression of unfocused guilt must have been the mirror of Emily’s before the colonel.
‘Caxton,’ Tubal named her effortlessly. ‘Congratulations, you’ve just had a pay rise – assuming we ever get paid.’
*
The days following the Big Push were oddly quiet. Mallen’s scouting parties pushed deeper than ever before into the swampland, but made no contact at all with the enemy.
The ground they had taken, the expanse of water and mud they had bled for, remained unsullied by any new Denlander feet. Colonel Resnic did his best to push the advantage, sending armed parties
deeper in, searching for other camps, but there was nothing. The enemy had fallen far back, or was simply one step ahead, giving ground only to retake it once the troops had gone.
Still trying to fight a land war
, Emily thought.
Instead of musket fire, the soldiers of the Levant front were treated to the distant thunder of cannon, but not from on high. Once the echoes had been sifted out of the sound, it could be heard
coming from the east – from the sea.
‘It happens,’ Scavian told her. ‘In truth I’m surprised we’ve not heard more. Our fleet is out across the bay and beyond, trying to pin down the Denlander ships,
just as we try with their infantry. They’ve obviously found each other at last. Whoever wins the sea battle can put their own men on enemy soil along the coast but, as yet, the admirals have
the same problem as our colonel: how to smash an enemy who won’t sit still for it?’
In the unexpected idleness resulting from Colonel Resnic’s bewilderment, they sat together with their backs to the cliff, looking out over the camp, the trees, the distant mist that
cloaked the sea from view.
‘What will you do when the war has ended, Giles?’ she asked him, resolutely not looking to see how the question impacted on his expression.
‘I have never thought too much about the future. I was destined to be the family layabout, you know. A spare heir if my brother met with misfortune.’ She felt a change in him at this
thought. She knew that his brother’s footsteps, the ones he followed in, had led no further than here. That was another shred of circumstance that bound them.
‘You will be a hero, though, when the war’s done,’ she pointed out. ‘Your father . . .’
‘Will be unimpressed. It would take more than winning a war to raise his eyebrows.’ She heard him snort at his own self-pity. ‘I suppose I shall stay in His Majesty’s
service. I hear it is easy enough, in peacetime. Lascari certainly seemed to do well out of it.’
‘I do not like Mr Lascari,’ said Emily, and Scavian nodded in quick agreement. Before he could pass further comment on his fellow Warlock, he stood up, pointing south. ‘Emily,
do I see soldiers there, or am I mad?’
‘I see them, too.’ For a moment she was convinced that the Denlanders had somehow circled them, perhaps even landed their troops by sea, as Scavian had suggested. Then the mist gave
up the red coats of the newcomers, and she cried out, ‘Reinforcements!’ loud enough to echo from the cliffs behind and roll across the camp.
*
In the letter he’d sent to her, Northway wrote of things going awry back home. It was not news she was glad to receive, yet she would not have wished to do without it.
There were rumours of a new draft, though no firm news had reached him, and he confessed he could not imagine how the King’s advisors could possibly intend to scrape away at the
barrel’s bottom any more. Worse, a fresh war tax had been levied again on a population bereft of much of its menfolk and many women as well, already denied the means to make a basic living.
She detected a familiar smug note in his writing when he explained that the Chalcaster area had yet to suffer any great hardship, ‘owing to the financial acumen of certain public servants
therein, but other boroughs were apparently baulking at the fresh taxation. He wrote of some protests, even a riot in Arbormouth.
We must win this war soon
, she decided. It would not be
won on the Levant front, though. That seemed plainer to her than ever, despite the colonel’s ambitions. The swamps of the Levant hosted a dreadful, costly battle of attrition, like two men
with hands tight about each other’s throats. The prime troops of Lascanne were funnelled into the level fields of the Couchant, where the nation’s pride – its cavalry –
could be put to best use.
There had been two hundred and twenty women in the reinforcing division, and eleven boys just over fifteen. The numbers were less than those lost by Bear Sejant alone, quite aside from the other
companies. Emily stood back and watched as the newcomers were given patches and assigned their places. How young they looked, most of them: the girls only sixteen, seventeen years, perhaps.
Daughters and granddaughters, with a few grey-haired matrons thrown in.
There will be few more now, after this.
Northway had sent her a second missive: a page torn from some ledger, scrawled in crabbed writing and couched in such scholarly tones that it was near impossible to decipher. The last paragraph
alone offered much sense for her, discussing her new home in layman’s terms:
CONCLUSION
: there is no future, alas, in the plan. These swamps will never be satisfactorily drained, reinforced as they are by the sea. The
vegetation herein growing will not give way easily to any crop considered useful to man. The animals are not to be farmed, seldom edible, often venomous. Even the airs are heavy and inimical
to human labour. What minerals there are would not repay any industry set to sieve or mine or distil them. Moreover, the native folk are slight and unfit even for the labours one might
entrust to a child, let alone a man’s work. In short: expend your efforts on the rail and road of the western passes. This place will not serve.
She thought at first it was his dark jest, to show her what she knew already regarding what a hellish place she had found herself in. Only on a second reading did she unlock the
final scribble:
‘Jakob Mallen, Surveyor by Royal Appointment, 43rd Day of Summer, Year of the King 1727’.
She had made mention of Master Sergeant Mallen in a previous letter; now Mr Northway had repaid her confidence. The present Mallen’s grandfather, she guessed from the date. The family had
been the guardians of this place for so long, at least. What would old Jakob think of his descendant doing a soldier’s work sixty years down the line?
*
The infirmary door hung lopsided on its hinges, and gave way only after some persuasion. Emily peered into the lamplit interior, asking, ‘Doctor Carlingswife?’
‘Go on in,’ she heard Tubal, from behind her. ‘Let’s get out of the rain at least.’
She ducked inside the doctor’s hut, whose interior resounded to the drumming of the weather on its roof. Eighteen men lay there on raised pallets, with room for six more. There was
precious little space to walk between them. These were the worst of the wounded, after the rest had been discharged to their units or sent limping off to Locke. Many were sleeping, and two lay so
pale and still that Emily wondered if they were already dead. One or two propped themselves up, on her approach. One man even managed a salute with his remaining arm. Soon enough there would be a
detail to get them to one of the hospitals further back, probably once the weather cleared. Until then they would lie here, as they had done since the Big Push. Most likely some would move no
further than the burial field in the shadow of the cliffs.
Tubal closed the door behind them, as Emily saw a stern-faced woman appear amongst the racks of medication hanging at the far end of the building.
‘What is it, Sergeant?’ this apparition asked, eyes narrowing to pick the new rank from Emily’s sleeve.
‘Is Doctor Carlingswife here, Miss . . . ?’ Emily asked, for a moment feeling uncertain of her position in relation to this woman. Tubal coughed discreetly behind her, and she
realized the error that she, of all people, should not have made. ‘Doctor . . . Doctor?’
‘No doctor,’ said the woman, weaving her way between the palettes with a skill honed by long practice. ‘Merely his wife.’
‘Doctor Carling . . . ?’
‘Left us.’ Her voice gave no indication of how this should be taken. Seeing Emily’s confusion, Doctor Carling’s wife sighed. ‘Infection. An insect’s bite that
suppurated. The irony was not lost on him.’ She wore austere, dark clothes, with a leather apron atop them that was stained by marks no amount of cleaning would clear. ‘Lieutenant,
there has been no change. You waste your labour coming here.’
‘I know, ma’am,’ Tubal said politely. ‘With respect, it’s not as though I’ve anything better to do.’
Doctor Carling’s wife gave him a disapproving look, and stepped back from the motionless form lying in the bed closest to her. With a start, Emily recognized the pale, closed features of
Captain Goss.
‘I can’t believe he’s still alive,’ she whispered.
‘He has not regained consciousness since this latest wound,’ Doctor Carling’s wife told her crisply. ‘He will not die, it seems, nor return to life.’
His courage has failed him at last.
It was an unworthy thought but Emily, looking at the captain’s face, could not blame the man. At the edge of the abyss, clinging by his
fingernails, what man would want to haul himself up only to be pushed back again?
‘This is the third time I have had him under my care, and I do not think there will be a fourth.’ The old woman’s hands brushed Goss’s brow for his temperature, then
folded themselves back at her waist. ‘He’s to go to Locke to recover.’ The strain she placed on that last word revealed all they needed to know of her prognosis.
‘Does this make you captain now?’ Emily asked Tubal, after they had stepped back out into the rain.