Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘They’re on the advance, Lieutenant. That’s all you need to worry about,’ the colonel said. ‘Fresh troops coming in alongside the chain lakes. Got to stop them or
they’ll have the whole place sewn up, yes?’
‘A quick, solid slapping should teach them a lesson, sir,’ Pordevere suggested. ‘You know Denland: no stomach for a real man’s fight.’
‘Absolutely right, Captain. I’m mustering all companies. Scare the damned wretches away. Let them know that what we take, we keep, you hear?’
‘What’s the order of battle, sir?’ said Mallarkey, his voice nearly steady.
‘I’m giving Bear the centre again. You’re still under strength, Captain, so don’t get too far ahead.’
‘Tell the others to keep up, then. Your men are getting fat, Mallarkey.’ Pordevere grinned around the table. ‘Speed, gentlemen. A quick strike. Send them reeling. Like a punch
to the jaw at the start of a bout. Wins the battle then and there. No sense getting bogged down in it all.’
Emily caught Angelline’s expression, and it told her succinctly enough that she did not find her commanding officer’s opinions reassuring.
Brocky doesn’t need to worry
about any competition from that direction!
‘How many of them are there, Colonel?’ Scavian asked.
‘Well . . .’ The colonel tugged at his moustache. ‘Damned fellow didn’t get that out before he gave up, Mr Scavian. Kept giving different figures. We think perhaps a
company – or a company and a half.’
‘You
think
?’ Scavian asked.
‘Oh, hush now, Scavian,’ Lascari told him. ‘This is war. Uncertainty is all part of the game. You shouldn’t have accepted the King’s mark if you weren’t ready
for it.’
Scavian scowled at him resentfully, but said nothing.
‘What about their guns?’ Emily asked.
She received a decidedly frosty look from Lascari – from Pordevere and Mallarkey even – but the colonel just shook his head amiably.
‘I’m afraid there really aren’t any magic guns, Miss Marshwic.’
Sergeant
Marshwic to you. ‘But, Colonel—’
‘We even took a look at one,’ Mallarkey said. ‘We took it apart. Wasted time doing so, Miss Marshwic. They’re no different to our own.’
That’s not true.
She said nothing; what would be the use? She had already made sure that at least all of Stag Rampant knew that the Denlanders had a new trick.
‘Well, now, Captain Mallarkey,’ the colonel said. ‘As Leopard is the largest company, I’m using you as the other pincer of the . . . the other half of the pincer. Move in
on the west; keep a little behind the others. Once they engage, I want you to swing round like this . . .’
*
She found Tubal crouching low in a stand of reeds with some twenty or thirty soldiers about him. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ The crackle and bang of muskets sounded all around like green logs on a fire. ‘I’ve lost sight of Fat Squirrel altogether.’ He
looked around, biting at his lower lip. ‘I’m . . . going to need some scouts. We need to rejoin the others.’
A circle of grave faces met him. Nobody was volunteering.
Oh, damn it.
‘I’ll go,’ said Emily.
‘No—’
‘Then who, Tubal? I want one more with me.’
A soldier she vaguely recognized put her hand up then, shamed into it perhaps.
‘Then let’s go.’
As she stood up, the firing started, shot whipping past her and into the reed stand.
‘Back! Fall back!’ Tubal raised his gun and fired almost at random, and led them all in a retreat towards more solid cover. Even as they put tree trunks between them and the source
of the shooting, another four or five squads of Lascanne redjackets – almost a hundred in total – came into sight, pausing to aim and fire. Five or six dropped instantly, but the rest
discharged their guns, shredding the foliage and the ferns before them, then crouching to reload. Without hesitation Tubal led his band to join up with them.
‘Who’s got command?’ he shouted, as he recharged his gun.
‘Me, sir, but you’re welcome to it.’ A Bear Sejant ensign hopped down next to him. ‘I don’t know where the captain is. My whole division got separated. The
Denlanders are everywhere, sir.’
‘Hell, someone tell me which way’s east.’
There was a brief consensus, and directions were given.
‘We’ll head forward but slant eastaways, try to get ourselves back with the pack,’ Tubal announced. ‘Everyone loaded and ready?’
Nobody said otherwise, so they made their break: jogging through the swamp, the mud and water, keeping their guns trained on the Denlanders’ last position.
They had another brief skirmish with a small band of Denlanders who fired and retreated before them, three rounds of musketry before they were driven away. Then they were out in a clearing,
where a battle was in full sway.
Must be the bulk of the Bear.
All Emily caught was the idea of a solid body of men that was punched full of holes, with individual squads in their own cover, firing defiantly into the
trees. She thought she heard the voice of Marie Angelline, but the woman’s words escaped her.
‘Sir, behind us!’ the Bear ensign called out.
‘They’re trying to flank. Every man take a firing position. We’ve run far enough.’ Tubal knelt and readied his gun. ‘Where the hell is the Leopard?’
A moment later the Denlanders were coming out of the trees and, for once, it was them walking into the ambush, as nearly two hundred guns of the army of Lascanne roared out simultaneously and
scythed through them, casting them down and strewing their bodies about in the pools, over the banks and the mounded roots.
‘Reload!’ Tubal ordered, but Emily heard the command of Captain Pordevere from behind them, exhorting his men to charge.
‘We’re about to lose our back,’ she warned. There were shots punching past them now, as the Denlander flanking party pulled itself back together. In the clearing there was a
fearful noise. She would never forget it: the sound of three hundred men and women running forward into the swift, accurate guns of Denland.
Oh, Marie. Be safe, Marie.
Her own division fired again, but their targets were now hidden and well spaced.
‘Ensign,’ Tubal ordered, ‘take your division. You’re going to have to clear them out. There can’t be more than forty still on their feet.’
The Bear Sejant ensign nodded. There was a stunned look on his face: the look of a man who had walked his way into hell and couldn’t find the way out.
‘Come on, Em.’ Tubal finished reloading and stood up in a half-crouch. ‘Pordevere needs support. He’ll wipe out the whole company if he has the chance.’
The Bear ensign visibly counted to three, and his squads ran forward to new firing positions. Three men were picked off even as they moved.
‘Now,’ decided Tubal. ‘Let’s spend as little time in the clearing as we can.’
And then he was up and running, and they all ran with him, even as new Denlander snipers started on them, shots whizzing out of the foliage without warning.
The harsh sun of the clearing dazzled her. Her feet pounded through the mud, vaulting the gnarled roots of the swamp giant whose rotting death had made this place, and vaulting the fallen
redjackets too. She kept moving, refused to look at them in case she recognized the faces.
The man ahead stumbled, a flower of darker red suddenly in the centre of his back. She jumped that body too, knowing that to hesitate would see her lost.
Then she was into the dense air, the blessed gloom and cover of the treeline. There were Bear Sejant soldiers ahead of them. She could hear Angelline giving the order to fire, hear the massed
discharge of the guns. And to her left there was a flare, a sudden flash of light and heat that must be from one of the Warlocks: Lascari or Scavian. No time to tell which.
In a brief moment she took it in: a retreating line of Denlanders stopping to fire, falling back, then stopping again to reload. More crouched in the trees: sharpshooters pot-shotting at the
advancing red.
If we’re advancing, does that mean we’re winning?
She had not heard Mallen’s whistle in a long time.
No sign of Mallarkey or the Leopard, either.
‘Forward!’ Captain Pordevere’s triumphant cry. ‘They’re on the run, men! Forward! For the King! For the King!’
And her legs responded, her hands too busy with the gun, her mind too numbed. Forward she went with the others of the Stag and the Bear. Ahead, the Denlanders began to retreat faster, no longer
firing. They were breaking, she realized.
Breaking! At last!
She picked up her pace, as the others did.
She saw a Denlander stop and fall, clutching his stomach, trying to keep up over the ragged ground. The insistent thought nagged her like a fly:
I’ve seen them break before and it was
not like this.
There was still order to the Denland line as it fell back into thicker cover. Tubal was ahead of her, sword catching stray light as he drew it from its scabbard. The air rang to
Pordevere’s insistent ‘For the King! For the King!’
Not breaking. Pulling us in.
‘Ambush!’ she shouted, wishing for all the world for a voice like Angelline’s. ‘Slow down! Pull back! Ambush!’
A few of the soldiers nearest looked her way, started to drop back. Tubal was still ahead of her and she desperately increased her stride, all the while yelling ludicrously, ‘Pull back!
Slow down!’
He glanced back, and she pointed past him. ‘Ambush, Tubal! God’s sake! Ambush!’
Realization dawned on his face, a look of utter horror. He skidded in the mud, trying to stop.
She saw the Denlander line ahead stop running, turn and kneel. Behind them, more guns glinted in the shadows between the trees.
‘Down!’ she shouted, and at last let herself fall forward, knocking her knee on a root but bringing her gun up to fire.
She must have pulled her trigger at the exact same time as the Denlanders, because they fired together, she and they. Of her shot, she could not say, but their combined fire was blow enough to
stop the Lascanne advance dead, ripping through flesh and bone, hurling soldiers back, doubling them over, casting them to the ground.
She saw Tubal hit, his legs swept from under him, the musket flying from his hands.
*
That morning before the attack, she was watching the troops assemble in their companies, fewer now than for the Big Push of recent memory. There she was, watching the redcoats
muster, searching for her courage and finding little enough of it.
The day had been a bright one, the summer sun no more than a shadow of the heat under the trees, but a healthy heat, a dry heat. Bear and Stag were all assembled, with Leopard still falling into
place. She had seen Captain Mallarkey and his lieutenant come out from the colonel’s headquarters, with Mallarkey looking worried and unhappy, a peacetime career officer caught out by the
war.
Mallarkey stopped for a few words with Pordevere, the younger man making some jest, laughing out loud. Beside him, Marie Angelline cast a look over Emily’s way, saluting wryly.
‘Morning, Em.’ Tubal had greeted her with a smile on his face. ‘Ready to face the music?’
‘I should be,’ she said to him. ‘I’ve done this before. Why do I feel like this still, Tubal? Shouldn’t I be . . . numb to it by now?’
His shrug. ‘Useless bloody business, really. Hell, it all still makes me want to wet myself, Em, every time. Morning, Mallen!’
The master sergeant loped over towards them through the camp, with two dozen or so following in his wake: his picked men. ‘Don’t like this, Salander. Denlander scouts are getting
good. Better woodsmen than this lot. Going to be a heavy day.’
‘Every day is,’ Tubal had told him. ‘Neither you nor I can change the colonel’s mind when he’s set on something, you know that.’
Mallen spat, shaking his head, and said to his scouts: ‘Let’s go earn a living.’
Emily looked at Leopard Passant, now almost in place. Her thought then was:
Not long to go now.
Her thought in retrospect would be:
What was I in such a hurry for?
From the
inside pocket of her jacket, she took out the letter that had come to her only half an hour before. She had been given no chance to answer it. Glancing backwards, she could have seen Penny Belchere
still standing with Brocky beside the store.
‘Remember that. Make a note that you must not die.’
I will do my best, Mr Northway . . . Cristan.
For the first time, in her mind she was Emily and he was Cristan, without qualification or equivocation. Unbarred emotion, at last, from
Cristan Northway? From herself?
She had felt the weight inside her rise up, as if to choke her, her shirt too tight, her jacket restricting, the helmet clenched around her head.
And she wanted to weep. But she was a sergeant and her men were watching.
If I die, he will weep for me.
If I die, I will die loved.
She heard the shout come from Mallarkey’s master sergeant, calling out their readiness.
‘Time to put on a good face, Em.’ Tubal’s hand was light on her shoulder.
Together they had marched to the head of the company.
*
She crawled her way over to him through the mud, her musket forgotten behind her.
Be alive, Tubal! What will I say to Mary if you are not?
There were two soldiers crouching just ahead, each one firing as the other reloaded, their minds gone to that soldier’s place that revolved only around the present moment. Then Tubal was
before her, not stretched out and lifeless as she had feared, but clutching weakly at his leg, breath emerging raggedly through his teeth.
‘Tubal!’
‘God, Em . . . I . . .’ His eyes were closed, face screwed up in pain. ‘How is it?’
She choked when she looked at the wound, a hole punched bloodily through his knee. But not fatal – not yet. ‘We need to get you out of here!’
He tried to say something, tried to smile, but the effort was too much. He looked whiter than she had ever seen a living man.
‘Stay with me,’ she told him. ‘Can you . . . ?’ She saw he could not walk or even stand. She needed more men, men to delegate to get him away from here and back to the
camp somehow.