Guns of the Dawn (55 page)

Through the cordite air came the searing, savage beauty of Giles Scavian. Clad in burgeoning flame, he walked through the fray and his touch, his very look, scorched the enemy, boiled out their
eyes and blistered their skin and exploded their powder flasks and the breeches of their guns. He was an immortal. Their shots melted in leaden spray all about him.

Reaching the wall of the storehouse, she saw John Brocky appear at the window, fire off four pistols, one after the other, then retreat to reload whilst a soldier poked a musket barrel out to
take his place.

Her head was now clearing. She had no idea if she had skipped across minutes or hours of the battle, but the Denlanders seemed to have a solid wedge inside the camp, and everywhere she looked
there was utter chaos, women and men – men of both sides – shooting each other in the back or hacking each other down as they ran. She could not have said who was winning. Everywhere
she put her feet, there was a body.

‘Lieutenant!’ Even as rattled as she was, Emily reacted, turning smartly and coming back to herself enough to find her hands filled with pistol and sabre. Captain Pordevere came out
of the smoke, grabbed her roughly and shook her.

‘Listen to me, Lieutenant!’ he bellowed, and she thought he must have had a pistol discharge right next to his ear or something similar. His voice was at top volume, ringing in her
head like a bell, and he had blood all across one side of his head. ‘Can you hold here?’ he boomed.

‘I don’t know, sir!’ she tried to match him in volume, but she saw no immediate comprehension on his face.

‘Hold here, Lieutenant! That’s an order! I’m taking some squads, sabres and pikes! We’re going to flank them! Take them in the side. They’ll run, then! I hope
they’ll run!’

She nodded vigorously, which was enough to reawaken the pain in her head, and it made her feel weak. Pordevere was already off, with the best part of two hundred men and women following him.

‘Hold on, Emily!’ she heard and, amongst Pordevere’s picked fighters, she saw Marie Angelline, beautiful and bright as an angel, barely touched by blood or bruise but with her
sabre shining like fire in the lamplight.

‘Marie!’ Emily called after her. ‘Marie, be careful!’ And, even as she said it, she knew it was a fool’s thing to say. There was no being careful in this
battle.

Then the Denlanders were upon her, a line of them on the advance. She loosed her pistol at them, and it flashed in her hand, loaded this time. Then she found herself alone against them, with
only a sword between her and their guns.

But only for a moment. Then suddenly there were shots punching into the Denlanders from behind her, and a wave of redjackets caught her up and flung her at the enemy. She hacked with her sabre
mechanically, seeing the Denlanders give a little, then make a stand. They were frightened. She saw it in their faces. They were frightened but they were fighting with musket butt and knife and
hatchet. They would not be broken even as they fell before sword and makeshift club, and Lascanne soldiers were being felled too. From somewhere to her left came Scavian’s explosive fire as
he leapt forward to prevent the Denlanders enveloping the defending soldiers. She caught the flare of his magic from the corner of her eye twice, three times more and then it stopped, and she was
too engaged in her own survival to think any more of it.

The two masses of soldiers surged against each other, a forgotten form of war from a hundred years before, more suited to the relics hung on Lord Deerling’s walls than the weapons they had
to hand. In the midst of it, Emily had barely room to wield her sword, but her left hand found the Denlander knife thrust through her belt and she pulled that out and starting jabbing it into the
enemy without thought. A savagery had overtaken her, which wanted just one thing: escape from this dreadful, murdering crush of men. And, since it could not find such escape, it slashed and stabbed
and laid about itself in a mad panic. She was so frenzied that the nearest Denlanders were not fighting her at all, just trying to push away from her through the solid mass of their fellows.

Then a thunderous shock went through them, and she knew that Pordevere’s plan had worked. With no clear transition, the fighting of the Denlanders changed from men fighting to move
forward, to men fighting for their lives. Behind them, Pordevere’s picked combatants were driving into them, for how could the Denlanders have expected a counterattack to their own attack?
How could the Lascans possibly have the extra men? The Denlanders did not know that, beyond the few who stood alongside Emily, the Lascanne camp was almost emptied of the living.

They clung on for another desperate minute of brutal, hate-filled slaughter on both sides, then something finally snapped within them, and the Denlanders began moving back, trying for an orderly
withdrawal.

Most of those around Emily followed up, intent on driving the Denlanders wholesale from the camp, but she herself just slumped to her knees, feeling as though she had been racked. Every joint
seemed on fire, and her head still resounded and pulsed with pain. She dropped her sabre, conscious of the rawness of the hand that had held it so long. She did not think she could ever fight
again.

She prayed to God she would never have to, but the prayer was burdened by the knowledge that, today or tomorrow, the war would demand her presence again.

There was shouting, now, and orders. She somehow regained her feet, and found that the camp was almost cleared and the Denlanders were in full retreat back towards the swamps.

The bulk of the camp’s defenders had halted at the ravaged barricade, but others kept following the Denlanders out into the night. Those were Pordevere’s men following his plan to
chase the enemy back, to catch them in the trees before they could re-form. But they were so few, so few.

Emily forced herself towards the barricade, because she had to stop them. The camp simply did not have the numbers or reserves of strength to carry out his plan. ‘Captain Pordevere!’
she was calling out, though he must be too far to hear her, even if he was
able
to hear at all.

Marie!
Marie Angelline was amongst those men and women running off into the night. And she knew how the Denlanders would react. She could see it in her mind: the fleeing men pouring
past a battle line re-forming within the trees, the guns lifted to their shoulders . . .

She heard a single explosion of gunfire, perfectly synchronized, and recognized it for the end. She did not even hear the cries of the men and women who had followed Pordevere, but felt them
nonetheless. She found herself already outside the barricade, kneeling amongst grey-clad bodies and staring out at the night.

‘Marie!’ she called desperately, but the only voice capable of covering such a distance was Marie’s own.

No sound now from the direction of the swamps. No sound of gunfire or of fighting, and she knew that Pordevere and his brave few were all dead.

‘Oh, Marie.’ She felt a shuddering grief overtake her. ‘God damn you, Marie!’ As sobs forced their way from within her battered ribs, she hugged herself to suppress them,
recalling in her mind’s eye poor Marie Angelline’s face as she had last seen it: so full of courage and fire, so gallant, so proud.

‘Here, Lieutenant.’ How faint the voice that finally answered her across the field. The cries of the other wounded nearly drowned it, as their comrades manhandled
them back towards the barricade, but Emily caught it, like the voice of a ghost.

‘Marie?’

‘Emily . . . I’m here . . .’

She crawled over the bodies – the red-jacketed ones, the soldiers who had died in Pordevere’s desperate flanking attack. ‘Marie, I can’t see you,’ she rasped, her
voice raw from all the shouting. ‘Please, help me find you.’

‘Here,’ came a voice almost from beneath her, and she looked down upon Marie Angelline. The woman’s jacket and breeches were slick with blood. There was a shot wound below her
collarbone, and the sweep of a hatchet had laid open her leg. Her left hand was crooked awkwardly about the hilt of a knife that was still buried deep in her side.

‘Emily . . .’ she said, her great voice shrunk to a shadow of itself. ‘Emily . . .’

‘I’ll get you back. We’ll get Doctor Carling’s wife to . . .’
To what? And how many of the wounded will there be?

‘I fought . . .’ Marie said. ‘You have never seen such fighting. The crowds would have loved it. Always . . . I was always good with a sword . . . but there are so few parts
for a woman that allow you to . . .’

‘Please, Marie, save your strength.’ Emily braced herself for the effort and called to the nearest soldiers. ‘Hey, you over there! Stretcher here, now!’ The last word
turned into a racking cough that set every tendon on fire.

‘Tell John . . .’

‘Tell him yourself. I swear to you, you’ll have the chance,’ Emily replied. Marie’s hand was weakly on her arm, her bloodied lips curving into a smile.

‘Tell him I was magnificent,’ she said. ‘Tell him I love him, please.’

‘You can tell him. He’d want to hear it from you,’ Emily insisted. Two soldiers reached her, still flinching from an imagined new attack from the darkness. Mallen’s
scouts were out, keeping an eye on the treeline.

‘Get her up,’ Emily told the stretcher-bearers. ‘For God’s sake, be gentle.’ She saw that they were looking as battered and haggard as she felt.

They lifted free the dead who were lying across Marie and put their hands upon her. With nothing more than their eyes, they counted three together and then lifted her, in one lurching movement,
onto the stretcher. She gritted her teeth about a gasp of pain, but her hand was momentarily strong as a vice on Emily’s arm.

When they carried her back towards the camp, while the rest of the wounded were found and fetched, Emily stayed slumped on the ground amongst the dead, trying to find the strength to follow
them.

*

The headquarters hut seemed so empty now, and those that survived were not the people they had once been. Emily had looked at her own face in Tubal’s shaving mirror that morning,
and seen it colourful with bruises that rivalled Mallen’s tattoos. Her hair had been matted with blood where the grenade shrapnel had dented her helm, and blood from her cut lip had smeared
her chin with a red beard. Even after she had washed it and washed and washed it again, the face in the mirror looked more like the faces of those lying cold and still out on the battlefield than
that of any living thing. She walked stiffly every muscle aching, and her right palm was raw where the hilts of a succession of sabres had rubbed the skin off it.

Looking around the table, she could only think that she had got off lightly. Last night she had seen the Denlanders blow gaps in their defences, and now those gaps were mirrored among the
commanding officers of the army. The colonel, dead. Justin Lascari, dead. Captain Pordevere, for his sins, dead. Lieutenant Gallien, Mallarkey’s aide, was wounded, unconscious and not
expected to recover. Master Sergeant Marie Angelline was clinging still at the border of life and death, with John Brocky weeping silently beside her in the infirmary.

And here was Tubal, one leg gone and a bandage about his head where a Denlander musket butt had knocked him off his perch. Here was Giles Scavian with his hand stuffed into his shirt to hide the
loss of two fingers that a sharpshooter had taken from him during the height of the fighting. Here was Captain Mallarkey, miraculously unharmed. No man would testify that he had hidden himself away
in the Leopard Passant hut, but there was none who were able to say that they had seen him amidst the fighting last night. His hands twitched on the tabletop, clutching at one another, and his lip
trembled. He would not meet the gaze of his peers.

Mallen came in just then, fresh from scouting, and gave the assembled a lazy salute. Save for minor scrapes and powder burns, he too had come through the fighting unscathed, though in his case
not for want of the enemy trying.

‘Well, man, what’s the situation? Report!’ Mallarkey ordered him.

‘Soon as we pulled back with our wounded, they set a cordon just within the trees,’ Mallen said. ‘Plenty of men and plenty of wounded. They’re acting like men waiting for
reinforcements.’

‘Reinforcements,’ Mallarkey echoed. ‘God help us.’

‘Don’t think they’ll come through today, but soon enough,’ Mallen finished. ‘More than that, couldn’t get close enough to see.’ He stood back to lean
against the doorframe. It was his first concession to how tired he must feel.

‘Well . . .’ Mallarkey glanced around for Tubal, and then flinched under the man’s stare. ‘Look, it seems clear enough what the lay of the land is.’

‘Does it, Captain?’ Tubal replied.

‘Well, look, you’re new to a captain’s rank, Salander, but, let me tell you, we’re in a bad spot here.’ Mallarkey was working his way towards where he wanted to go.
‘It seems to me . . . it seems very much that in this situation there would be no dishonour in a . . . strategic withdrawal. To Locke, for example. We could reinforce there and then take
stock, so to speak. I’m sure you can see what I mean.’

Tubal exchanged glances with Emily. ‘Captain, this is the choke point. At this camp we control the entire Levant front. They could get some scouts past us, but no substantial body of men.
Hell, that’s why we’re here.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘There are a hundred ways around Locke, even if we could find reinforcements there. They could have two companies of men up behind the Couchant army before we could do anything about
it.’

‘If we retreat from here, we’re not just conceding them the Levant, Captain,’ Scavian added. ‘We’re giving them the war.’

Mallarkey again clenched his fists on the table. ‘Well, what . . . I ask you, what in God’s name do you expect us to do?’