Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Doctor Carling?’ she whispered.
‘Ah, I am afraid not. My name is Doctor Craulen. I misheard you, for a moment.’
Seeing his pale clothes swim slowly into greater clarity, she mumbled, ‘Craulen? But that’s a . . .’
His grey clothes: not a doctor’s smock but a grey jacket, bisected by a baldric hung with a powder flask, just as hers was.
That’s a Denlander name . . .
A Denlander accent and a Denlander name.
Then she fought. She wrenched at the coarse ropes at her wrists and ankles, feeling every joint and muscle cry out, every bruise and cut awake into shrieking life. The interior of the lean-to
wheeled around her, and she felt whatever she was tied to creak and complain, but she had not the strength, not yet. She could not break it, or break free of it. Doctor Craulen had retreated from
her and was staring at her with concern.
‘Please,’ he insisted. ‘You will only injure yourself further. Your rib—’
‘Get me out of this!’ she rasped at him. ‘What are you going to do to me?’
It was a frame built of canes, splaying her out like a rat ready for dissection. They bent and groaned as she yanked at them, then snapped back straight, wrenching her shoulders. Doctor Craulen
left the lean-to hurriedly as she continued to strain furiously, then she sagged back, dizzy and exhausted.
In the aftermath of her striving, she realized that she was near-naked, and must have been completely so not long before. The shirt and undergarment she was wearing now must be Denlander issue,
ill-fitting and definitely not her own. Had they—
She froze with the horror of the mere thought.
Had they . . . ?
She felt no specific pain down there; no sense that she had been violated, but would she know?
A trembling started inside her, threatening to burst forth into outright panic. She fought it down. She had to remain in control, remain calm.
The flap of the lean-to was pushed open, revealing only darkness beyond, and then a pair of soldiers stepped in, remarkably cautiously for armed men confronting a bound woman. They regarded her
suspiciously, and she stared back at them with as much venom as she could muster. She saw Doctor Craulen bobbing behind them, a small man with a receding hairline. But, then, they were all small
men.
‘She’s ready to travel?’ one of the soldiers enquired.
‘She mustn’t be beaten any more,’ Craulen told them. ‘Don’t handle her roughly. You laid a heavy hand on her in the jungle.’
The soldier looked sour and muttered something that she translated a moment later as, ‘I didn’t realize she was a
she.
’
‘Bloody Lascans,’ the other man said. ‘We’d better get her out of here. Fetch her down, Doctor.’
Craulen obviously didn’t like the sound of that. ‘You bring her down. She was going mad just a moment ago.’
‘No real surprise, is it?’ said the first soldier, approaching her. For a moment, she was going to go for him, to bite him or something, but she got herself under control. He was
going to cut her loose. That would leave her in a better position. She could fight or run then. She could
do
something.
She expected him to take out a knife and just cut through the ropes, but instead he fiddled with the knots until they came loose about one of her wrists. The other soldier had moved in as well,
and was standing outside of arm’s reach. He had a musket slung across his back, a hatchet at his belt.
Maybe I could grab this one, hold him hostage.
He was on to her other wrist now.
Wait until you’ve got use of your limbs back. Be ready to make your move.
The cane frame was leaning at an angle, so that her weight had not been strung on her arms. She leant back in it, trying to look helpless, bruised and pliant, bringing her arms down to her sides
slowly, feeling the bruises. The soldier moved on to her ankle, briskly tugging and teasing at the knot until it came free. It was all she could do not to tense, not to tip the Denlanders off
before she struck.
The rope around her other ankle came loose, and she kicked the man in the face.
Or that was the plan. Her leg barely moved, merely tapping his shoulder limply. She heard him laugh wheezily. ‘She’s a real terror, Doctor. I can see why you keep your
distance.’
Doctor Craulen muttered something and the soldier stood up, looking her in the eyes. He was almost as tall as she was.
‘Now, you listen,’ he told her, without malice. ‘Two lessons. One is that I took you in the forest, and I can do it again, especially with you all beaten up. Right? No tricks,
Lascan.’
She glared at him and very deliberately pushed herself forward, out of the frame.
He caught her just as her legs buckled and, if she had been ready, perhaps that would have been her moment to strike at him. She was too shocked by her own weakness. Her legs felt loose, alien.
A moment later she was suspended between both soldiers while the doctor looked on with a worried frown.
‘Should she be able to walk, Doctor?’ the first soldier asked.
‘She’s just been off her feet a while,’ Craulen said. ‘Give her a moment.’
‘How long?’ Emily whispered.
‘We really went to town on her, didn’t we?’ said the second soldier.
‘Wasn’t all one way.’
‘How long?’ she said, louder.
‘How long since the fight?’ Out of her vision, the soldier obviously looked between his companions before answering. ‘Three days . . . Three days since the fighting.’
They tried to move her, but she refused to cooperate, and in the end they just supported her while she got her legs back under her, felt her strength seeping back in individual drops.
At last she left the lean-to, on her own feet but with her arms draped over the two soldiers in an unwanted parody of camaraderie.
‘Lesson two,’ the first soldier told her.
There were Denlanders all over, a whole camp full of them. She guessed at sixty, then a hundred, perhaps two. A division at least, making temporary camp here by a lake-shore, tucked in and out
of the trees.
‘You start any trouble, there are more than enough lads here to give you trouble back,’ the soldier explained.
‘Provost, please . . .’ started Doctor Craulen but the provost cut him off.
‘She’s a soldier, Doctor. She understands me. You understand me, don’t you?’
She nodded wearily. The sight of so many enemies all around her had drained the fight from her. She had hoped for a handful, at the worst a squad. They were so
quiet
, though, sitting at
small fires, boiling water or stew, talking in low, murmuring voices. So many little dark-haired men in grey with their muskets close to hand, those extraordinary muskets.
The heat of the swamps was pressing on them all, but she felt chilled by the sweat sticking the thin shirt to her back. The soldiers helped her forward insistently, herding her slowly through
the camp. The fighting men looked up at her with mixed expressions: hatred from a few; fear; curiosity. None seemed to gloat or particularly enjoy her captivity. They were of all ages, she saw,
from barely more than boys to men of Grant’s age, grey and lined.
They were the Denlander army of the Levant front; the enemy.
She was being shepherded towards a tent that was the only free-standing structure she could see. It was perhaps twice the size of the one she herself usually slept in. ‘What’s in
there?’ she asked. Surrounded by all the little grey devils, the darkness inside it was becoming sinister for her.
The soldiers did not answer, but simply pushed her in and then ducked in to join her. She went down on her hands and raw knees, and put some space between herself and them, in case something
nasty was about to happen. The inside was mostly bare save for a very low table, no more than a foot off the ground, and a lamp that one of the soldiers lit. His hands manipulated the flint and
steel, using the same patient care as he had undoing her bonds, that same concentration with which these Denlanders seemed to live all their lives.
‘So who won?’ she asked them. ‘You can tell me that. Who won?’
Keep them talking. They can’t do anything worse if they’re talking to you.
The lamplight swelled out as the flame caught, and the soldier’s face looked surreal, floating in the near-dark. ‘Hard to tell, isn’t it?’ he said tonelessly.
‘Do you know a . . .’ For a moment the name escaped her. ‘Provost Dragan Stedter?’
His expression was suspicious. ‘Why?’
‘Because . . . I met him.’ She wondered how much Stedter had actually told his superiors about their meeting.
‘He’s dead,’ the soldier said shortly.
‘Dead? But . . .’
Did they execute him because he let me go?
‘Did you kill him?’ she blurted out before she could stop herself.
‘No, you did, you silly bitch. You and yours.’ For the first time real anger established itself on his face and she thought he would lunge forward and strike her, but then a new man
had ducked into the tent, and the soldiers snapped into a kind of crouching attention.
‘What’s this then?’ said the newcomer, still lost in the shadow cast by the two soldiers.
‘Prisoner for you, sir.’
There was an exasperated hiss of breath, and the newcomer’s voice said, ‘For Heaven’s sake, get her some clothes, soldier. What do you think this is, a bordello?’
As the junior soldier ducked out of the tent, the man had room to come forward, kneeling down with the low table between them. An old man, she saw. His hair was almost gone, just a silvery
fringe about his ears, and his face was creased into dozens of lines. He must have been as old as Poldry at least: far too old to be in the uniform he wore; to be out here in the swamps fighting
battles. He had a wide mouth, quirking itself into a smile even as she watched, and his eyes seemed avuncular, even kind.
‘I would never have thought it,’ he said. ‘One of the fabled fighting women of Lascanne. It took us so long to believe women like you even existed. We didn’t quite credit
Lascanne with such madness. If I might ask, are there more of you? Many more?’
‘Hundreds,’ said Emily, and then wished she had said ‘thousands’.
‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said the old man. The prospect seemed to depress him, and she could not tell whether he believed her or not. ‘Would you fetch us some tea and a little to
eat, soldier?’ he asked the remaining man.
‘You shouldn’t be left alone with the prisoner, sir.’
‘Oh, we’re hardly alone. There are “hundreds” of soldiers in earshot, as she well knows.’ The old man regarded her, not without sympathy. ‘And besides, she
seems hardly in a condition to do much real harm, even if the spirit is willing.’
‘If you’re sure, sir.’
‘I am, thank you, soldier.’
And then she was alone with him, with just the low table between them. The short walk from the doctor’s lean-to had taken so much out of her that she found in herself no desire to attack
him. Not yet. Whilst she had her life and her hands free, she could wait for some ideal moment in the future, and thus spare herself the toil of acting now.
‘Might I know your name, young lady?’ he asked her.
That
bit at her. ‘Sergeant Marshwic, Stag Rampant Company. Sergeant, if you please,’ she got out.
‘Of course, of course. Believe it or not, I am pleased to meet you. I seldom have the opportunity to talk to Lascans of either gender. While I am told we hold great numbers under guard
behind the lines of the Couchant, you may have noticed that this is not a war that sees many prisoners, here in the Levant.’
A day and two nights of screaming, with the cutting fires of Justin Lascari ripping information away a piece at a time.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
‘The swamp takes all,’ the old man said, in the manner of a proverb. ‘Forgive me. I am Doctor Nathanial Lammegeier.’
Again she nodded. ‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked.
‘Oh, you’ll be sent to Denland as soon as we can arrange the journey,’ he said, almost as though this was a good thing. ‘I’m afraid there will be a little
questioning here, but they’ll do the real work there. Yes, no more war for you, Sergeant.’ He genuinely seemed to believe that this was a thing to be celebrated, a prize that he himself
could only dream of. She found herself thinking,
Poor old man forced out to fight at his age
, and then:
Doctor Nathanial Lammegeier.
And it struck her at last, and she said, ‘You’re Doctor Lam.’
The silence stretched between them in the tent, and finally snapped.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, I am.’
If she was going to attack him, then that was her moment, but a crawling fear had seized her by the throat. Doctor Lam, who led the Levant army of Denland; Doctor Lam the torturer, the severer
of tendons, the peeler of flesh. The screams of the captured scout were still bright in her mind and she thought,
a little questioning
, and knew that there was no reason she too should not
be put under the knife. They had the drawn-out death of one of their own to avenge, if no other motive presented itself.
‘I see you’ve heard of me,’ he said drily, as she huddled back towards the far end of the tent.
‘You’re a butcher,’ she said. ‘A vivisector. Is that it? Is that what’s to become of me?’
He sighed, and the tent flapped open behind him, the soldier reappearing with a grey bundle.
‘Clothes, sir.’
Doctor Lam nodded towards her, and the soldier threw her what turned out to be a Denlander uniform of jacket and long britches.
‘You may go,’ said Doctor Lam, and dismissed first the man’s protestations and then the man himself. He watched silently as she dressed herself, as she paused to hiss in pain
over each wrenched joint and bruise. There was nothing but a faint sadness evident on his face.
The jacket was too broad across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. She felt like a child playing dress-up games, a ridiculous but oddly familiar feeling. She recalled it as she turned to
him again: trying on the King’s uniform for the first time, in Gravenfield.
‘You give me a great and personal reason to win this war for Denland, Sergeant,’ Doctor Lam told her, and for a moment she thought it was an observation on her recent near-nakedness.
He had been taken up with his own thoughts, though, for he went on: ‘If we lose, that is how history will know me. Doctor Lam, the terror of the Levant, torturer of innocents and eater of
children. The truth is I’m not even a doctor of medicine. I’m an engineer.’