Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
She saw then that this was a larger proportion of the Levant army of Denland than she had realized. Parties had surely arrived here during the night. Others were already setting off. This was
their headquarters, but it was mobile. Every few nights, Doctor Lammegeier must find some new spot for his soldiers to billet in, to make the Lascanne task that much harder. He had learned some
lessons from Colonel Resnic’s Big Push.
And what would today hold for herself? One thought stayed with her from Doctor Lam’s lies the previous night. In the midst of his story had been a solitary nugget of truth, but she would
take no comfort from it. The assassin’s master, he had said, had been made to tell of his employer. How so? By sitting down at a low table and offering him tea? Emily did not think so. For
all their civilized talk, the Denlanders were a people at war. She dreaded to think of that care and attention to detail being applied to the business of forcing knowledge from her. They would not
be malicious, perhaps. They might not enjoy the cruelty, as Lascari had done. They would do it, though. They were a practical people. They would not let mere scruples stand between them and the
things they needed to know.
The next time they came for her, they would probably not even remove her from the frame.
But they did, half a dozen of them taking her down with practised precision, and she realized the whole camp was on the move. There was nothing, even Doctor Lam’s table,
that could not be disassembled, packed up and made ready to move. Squads and detachments of men were already moving out on their own, providing an advance screen against any enemy they might
encounter.
The provost she had spoken with before had obviously been given long-term charge over her. He ensured that her hands were tied behind her, and a noose put about her neck, and he held her on a
lead, like an animal. She realized she had better watch her footing. One slip and she could hang herself, and these Denlanders seemed to set a fearful pace.
‘What’s the hurry?’ she asked.
‘No questions,’ the provost replied. ‘Just move.’
She fell into step with them as they headed deeper into the swamp. The entire camp had broken into squads, each squad keeping sight of the next, the company of several hundred thus moving like a
swarm. Ants, that was what they reminded her of. She remembered Mallen showing her a breed of ant out here in the swamp that lived like this: camping by night, then moving by day in a great loose
carpet of insects.
And she recalled her dream: the Denlanders as a devouring swarm.
They kept moving, too, determined and careful, not slowed by pools or high banks. Even when clambering and splashing, they were surprisingly quiet. She had to keep craning around to remind
herself how many of them there were.
If I could make a noise, attract someone’s attention, let our people know they’re here . . .
Anyone investigating, however, would get themselves shot or stabbed and, like every other hopeless plan, she needed to wait her moment out. No sense shouting into the wilderness and having them
gag her.
She nearly drowned mid-morning, skidding over on a bank and knocking two soldiers down with her into a pool that was far deeper than it seemed. The rope skidded through the
provost’s unsuspecting hands, and then he tried to pull her out with it and came close to strangling her before she was righted. When she had been dragged, coughing and choking, to the
pool’s side, she kicked out at him as he approached.
‘For God’s sake, give me my hands!’ she snapped. ‘Keep me on a leash if you have to, but I’ve no wish to die because I can’t catch myself.’
He grimaced and then, to her surprise, undid the knots about her wrists. ‘Everyone keep a knife out,’ he told the men around them. ‘Don’t hesitate to use it. Kill her if
she tries to escape, or if she goes for you.’
She stood, clenching and unclenching her fists, and saw them back off a little.
Cowards.
She remembered all that Doctor Lam had said. They were frightened of her. She was taller than
most, even broader at the shoulder than some, and she was a savage Lascanne warrior woman. They had no idea what to do with her.
Only the provost looked unimpressed. He had his hatchet in his hand, and she guessed he would have no qualms about using it.
Give me an opportunity and I will take that from you
, she
vowed. ‘Thank you, Provost,’ she said instead.
‘Move on,’ he told her, and then to his men: ‘Come on, catch up! We’ve wasted enough time.’
For an hour and more he was right behind her, but just out of reach, and he was weathering this forced march better than she was. He had not been beaten half to death and strapped to a frame all
night, after all. She was sure her moment would come, but not so far.
‘So,’ she asked him, ‘am I a special enemy of yours, or is it just because I’m a Lascan that you hate me?’
‘I don’t hate,’ he said. ‘I don’t hate Lascans or you. You’re enemies, that’s all.’
She had not been expecting an answer at all, and she was thrown for a moment. ‘You seem to have some grievance, Provost. More than you did last night, even. You were almost civilized last
night.’
‘Civilized,’ he said. ‘Last night I was living in hope, Sergeant. I had a brother fighting in the battle. We were hoping he’d come in with the stragglers. I have not had
that luck.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Emily. He picked up his pace a little until he was alongside her; until she could see the anger on his face, as painful as the bruises on hers.
‘What do you have to be sorry about? One less Denlander to worry about, isn’t it?’
‘I had a brother, Provost,’ she said simply. ‘He died here before I even arrived. I had a brother-in-law who may be dead now, for all I know. Do you think that only Denlanders
have families?’
She saw her words strike home, freezing his features. After a moment he spat into the waters.
‘Brother-in-law,’ he said. ‘God and Heaven. What sort of a country lets its women fight? What sort of a woman wants to?’
She bit back the words that came first to her.
They do not know about the draft.
She had suspected as much previously. The Denlanders thought the women soldiers of Lascanne were
volunteers.
‘Are we not allowed to defend what is ours?’ she asked.
He cursed wearily. ‘It’s going to be a long war,’ he said, and she knew he was thinking of some hypothetical future when the Levant and Couchant fronts were broken, and the
armies of Denland went on to take Lascanne itself. A future where they were opposed by every man, woman and child left in that country, all fighting like maniacs to the very last. The weight of it,
the thought of that fight, lay heavy on him.
So much the better. Let them think it is so.
She had no sympathy. It was her home that they wanted to invade, and she knew that if either front
broke, then Denland would find no opposition beyond.
There was an all-too-brief pause for a mouthful of hard biscuit and a few swallows of water, and it heartened her, it strengthened her to see that they were reduced to that.
Supplies must be hard to come by, she supposed, if they moved about so much.
Time was a slippery thing to judge, here under the canopy, but she guessed it was two hours after noon when they stopped for good and made camp again. Surrounded by her ring of armed guards, she
watched as bands of Denlanders melted in and out of the shadows. The actual camp was a loose network of squads that must extend for some distance all around. She seemed to be in the very
centre.
They reassembled the frame in front of her, not out of cruelty but practicality leaning it up against a knotted tree broad enough to support it.
‘Is there no other option?’ she asked the provost.
‘If we left you a muscle to move, would you not use it to escape?’ he asked.
‘I can’t fly. I can’t work miracles. I’m surrounded by your soldiers.’
‘And all Lascans are mad, blood-mad. Who is to say that you would not free yourself and kill Doctor Lammegeier, or spoil our provisions? I cannot trust you in anything. You are my enemy.
You are duty bound to escape and to oppose us, just as I would be if I were your prisoner.’
She had no answer to that, and there were enough of them laying hands on her that she did not struggle when they roped her back into the frame. She felt as though she was getting to know the
ropes that they knotted and unknotted.
They waste nothing. It means they have little. But they use it well.
‘How are things back home, Provost?’ she asked.
‘War drains a country,’ he said. ‘Three years so far, and I’m sure both our nations run short. Food, materials, people.’ He shrugged.
‘Well said, Provost.’ She recognized Doctor Lam’s genial tones as the old man stepped up alongside. To her surprise, he had kept up with them through all the swamp-slogging.
They had not carried him, or even helped him along. The old man was clearly tougher than she had guessed.
Perhaps I could not have managed to kill him, had I even got my hands on him.
She looked into his slightly smiling, slightly melancholy face and asked herself if she
would
kill him, given the chance. He was the enemy, after all. He was the infamous Doctor Lam,
but he was an old man, a philosophical, humorous creature full of odd talk. Someone’s father, someone’s grandfather even.
Let him torture me, then I shall have no qualms.
With that thought, she shrank back as he approached.
‘What now?’ she asked him. ‘Will the doctor operate?’
‘As I explained to you, Sergeant, I am an engineer, not a physician, but if it becomes necessary, then I have those who will make the cut on my behalf.’ There was only sadness in his
voice as he spoke, no threat at all. It was all the more intimidating for that. ‘Perhaps we should speak a little first. Perhaps you will tell me what little you can.’
As easy as that . . . to avoid the knife and the fire.
‘I am no traitor, Doctor,’ and only the tiniest flinch in her voice.
‘No doubt.’ He seated himself at the foot of her cane frame. ‘But what could you actually betray? The location of your camp? We know it. Your leader’s plans? After the
battle we have had, they will all be thrown out of alignment. You cannot know them.’
‘So what do you want from me? Something worth . . .’ –
no sense cushioning the blow –
‘torture?’
Doctor Lam sighed. ‘Personalities, Sergeant. Your thoughts on your leaders. How they act and react, what they are likely to do.’
‘Oh.’ She thought of what she could say to damn Mallarkey and Pordevere, the colonel, even Tubal. ‘Well, then, I am afraid I cannot oblige.’
‘National character even,’ the old man continued. ‘Let me into the Lascanne mind. Let me understand you.’
‘I thought you already did,’ she said, almost goading. ‘You know we’re all war-mad killers, don’t you? That we bring our children up on blood and bonemeal? Surely
you’ve all heard that.’
She looked about her at the soldiers within earshot, and was a little shocked to recognize belief in some of their faces.
‘I cannot let myself acknowledge such stories. You are human beings, as we are. There must be some give in you, some compromise!’ Doctor Lam threw his hands in the air, startling
her. His mildness fell away from him for a moment. ‘Sergeant, I am a man of peace – you may scoff, but it is so. I fight wars so that others, less able, less moderate, do not do so in
my place. I need to find a way, Sergeant: a way to conclude this war that does not end in . . . genocide.’
She let the new word fall into place inside her head. ‘Geno . . . cide? The killing of– what? Of a family?’
‘Of a race, Sergeant. Of a nation. Of . . . everyone in it.’ He let his anger go, in one long sigh. ‘I cannot let Denland lose the Levant front. I cannot let my country lose
this conflict with yours. The war must be won but . . . what will we destroy, of our way of life, in order to save it? Will we become cursed by history for all time, because of what we did to
defeat the stubborn Lascans?’
‘You would . . . ?’
‘If Lascanne fights to the last man, the last woman, child even, what option do we have?’
It will not come to that. There will be a surrender.
But when – and would it be in time? At what point would this genocide the old man spoke of gather such speed that it could not
be stopped?
We will have to win this war, for this reason.
‘I must leave you, for now.’ He held a hand out, and one of the soldiers helped him to his feet.
‘Doctor Lam?’
‘Sergeant?’ He turned back to her with a raised eyebrow.
‘Doctor, you said this war is over for me.’
‘Quite over, no doubt of it.’ Again that suggestion that he considered her, for that reason, profoundly lucky.
‘I’ll be sent to Denland?’
‘There are camps there for such as are captured. A great many of the original Lascanne invasion force were cut off and taken to them, you understand. You will be one of few women there, I
fear.’
‘There’s no harm in telling me then . . . what makes your guns so good?’
Doctor Lammegeier stared at her for a moment, and then cocked his head back and laughed, a scholarly, dry sound. ‘The spirit of Lascanne,’ he observed. ‘And you will teach the
message to some bird you will send back to your camp, or you will carve it, unnoticed, on the bark of trees. No, Sergeant, I am a coward, as you say. I will not underestimate a warrior woman of
Lascanne. If you have not puzzled out our secret, then I will not tell you. Instead, think on what I have said to you. Today and tonight, I organize my scouts and receive my reports. Tomorrow we
will talk again. I am afraid I will discover what I need to know, Sergeant. I make no excuses. This is war.’
She thought long and hard on what he had said, but came to no further conclusion than:
We will have to win this war.
Night grew on them, leaching the colour from the swamp in a few scant minutes, as the distant sun crested the Couchant mountains. She saw the Denlanders settle down, huddling on every piece of
dry ground around her, roosting like birds. Still the camp was not settled: latecomers caught up with them and established their billets further and further out from the centre. Scouts returned
with news, or set off on their errands. There was little talk, no music or laughter, no roll of dice, nothing but a dedication to what they were doing: the subtle, constant movement of determined
men fading into the susurrus of the swamp.