Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tubal hesitated before speaking, and Emily knew it was because he was taking the lives of them all – of every soldier in the camp – in his hands. ‘Hold out,’ he said at
last.
‘Hold out? My God, man, is that it?’
‘I don’t see there’s anything else left to us.’
Mallarkey stood up suddenly. ‘Now, you listen to me, you
tradesman.
I have seniority here. My God, I was an officer before you were ever drafted, Salander. I’ve
told
you
what else is left to us. There’s no dishonour in leaving. It’s a military necessity.’
‘Dishonour?’ Scavian said. ‘We would have failed the King. We would have lost the war. If we, here in this room, make a decision to abandon this camp, we would be betraying
Lascanne. We would be betraying His Majesty. Our names would go down in every history book as the greatest villains of the age.’
Mallarkey bared his teeth unhappily. ‘Well, yes, but . . .’ He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Emily recalled that Scavian, as a Warlock, might be said to outrank him.
‘Captain,’ Tubal said, ‘do you want to return to Locke?’ It was something he had discussed with the other Survivors, and they all watched Mallarkey for his response.
‘I . . . You’ve already heard what I have to say,’ Mallarkey replied uncertainly.
‘No, not us.
You
,’ Tubal said. ‘Do
you
want to go back to Locke.’ He took a breath before reciting the words that they had hammered out, that he had
rehearsed like an actor. ‘It would be useful to have someone with authority to go and explain our situation to them, there. They need to know how badly we need the reinforcements. You could
go and get us resupplied.’
Mallarkey’s eyes dodged between them, from Tubal to Emily, Emily to Scavian. They had put only the thinnest varnish of pretence on this offer. He was being given the chance to run away and
he knew it, and knew that they knew.
He drew himself up, and for a moment they thought he would rise to the occasion and decide to stay, but then he said, ‘I . . . think that would be . . . a wise course of action. Yes,
I’ll go today . . . No sense in waiting. After all,’ he gave them a smile that was a ghastly rictus of self-knowledge, ‘we need those reinforcements as quickly as
possible.’
After he had gone off to pack his meagre possessions, Mallen came to join them at the table.
‘Good work,’ he said. ‘One less thing to worry about.’ His voice had been the most vehement in speaking for the plan. ‘That makes you the colonel,
Salander.’
Tubal shrugged. ‘I’m open to suggestions. I wonder how many more grenades the Denlanders have.’
‘Enough, I’m sure,’ Scavian said. ‘Who knew they would use them?’
‘They must have been husbanding them all the way through the swamps just for this,’ Emily guessed.
‘We’re lucky they didn’t think to bring a cannon,’ Mallen said gloomily.
*
She found the quartermaster sitting at one edge of the barricade, beside a sharp-toothed hole the Denland grenades had made, picking at splinters and staring out at the swamps.
The sun was crawling behind the cliffs to the west, the dusk creeping in by stages along with the swamp-exhaled mist.
‘Brocky,’ she said. He looked up, and she saw his face was blotchy with tears.
‘Marshwic.’ He shuffled sideways along the wood to give her a place to sit, and she joined him.
‘I’m sorry about Marie.’
He sniffed. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘To be . . . so full of life, to shine so bright. You’d never have thought . . .’ He choked, then continued as best
he could. ‘She never thought she’d be hurt. She thought she was immortal.’
‘Or she acted it, for the others,’ Emily agreed. ‘She was right in the thick of it, they said. She was right beside Pordevere when he led them in. There were so many wounded
then, and she was . . .’
His shoulders began shaking and she trailed off, not sure of what else to say.
‘I . . . never had luck with women,’ he got out. ‘They never looked twice at me. Who would? That one I told you about, when I was engaged . . . she robbed me blind when she
left. Just after the money – and precious little I had of it. More than that . . . beyond that . . . my whole life with no female company but the whores my purse would stretch to. I had no
hope. Bachelor-born, that was me. Then . . . her. She was my sun, Marshwic. She was my bloody sun from the moment I set eyes on her. She lit up my whole bloody world. How did I come to find her?
And how did she come to like me? Not that mummery in the swamps, acting the fool and getting shot, she saw right through that. She saw . . . God only knows what she bloody saw in me.’ He sat
hunched over his balled hands, pressing his grief into his belly. ‘And I will never ever have another woman like her. How could I? There’ll never
be
another like
her.’
She wanted to put her arms around him, to comfort him in some way that did not involve the painful business of putting words to it, but his pain was so intense and private that she did not dare
touch him.
‘She . . . she might still recover, Brocky She’s strong. She’s stronger than any of us. If anyone can pull through, it’s her.’
He looked at her then, and she could not at first identify the precise emotion that twisted his expression, but he put a hand out and covered hers with it. She realized then that it was
compassion – for her – that moved him.
‘I thought you knew,’ he said. ‘I thought you must have known. She’s dead, Marshwic . . . Emily. She’s dead this hour gone.’
She stared into his tortured face and then she put her arms around him and buried her face in his grimy shirt, the tide of her fought-down feelings rising at last, and for a long time they held
each other in remembrance of her dead friend and his dead lover.
*
They buried her where all the other dead were buried, though, at Brocky’s intractable insistence, they gave her a grave all to herself. Shortage of ground had meant that
most of the fallen had been piled in four to a hole, and Father Burnloft had not even attempted to climb the vast mountain of dead names that they had walked away from. The dead Denlanders they
buried too, in a mass gravepit, all tumbled together, officers and men, a great hole full of broken dreams, sundered families and wasted lives. It gave Emily no heart, nor any of them, to see that
there were twice as many dead men in grey than there were dead men and women in red.
*
It took them all by surprise, eight days later, when the reinforcements actually arrived. That, relieved of the stresses of the front, Captain Mallarkey would actually carry out
his duty, had not occurred to anyone.
They approached slowly from the south, mud-caked and exhausted from the trek. Mallen and Emily went out to take a closer look, and counted one hundred and thirty-one of them.
‘Green,’ Mallen observed. ‘Boys and camp followers.’
He was right. These were spare staff from the Locke support detachment: military clerks, cooks and broom-pushers pressed into service. About half had seen uniform before; the rest had to be
shown which end of a musket was pointed at the enemy. They did not even have the benefit of the truncated training Emily herself had received. She found herself feeling keenly sorry for them that,
in their inexperience, their first taste of war would be here where the hammer would fall hardest.
Not that the hammer hadn’t fallen close by a few times already. Since their savage and costly assault on the camp, only turned away by the courage and sacrifice of Pordevere and Marie
Angelline, the Denlanders had made two further forays against the Lascanne defences.
The first time they had come out at dusk once more, and fired five or six rounds into the camp from beyond the useful range of the Lascanne guns, and everyone had been ranged at the patched
barricades, waiting for them to charge. They had not, though. They had merely stood there until nightfall made them invisible, and then melted back into the trees. Emily had no idea whether it was
some ploy to catch the defenders off guard, or whether the enemy’s nerve had simply failed. She knew that, after all the fathers, sons and brothers cast away in the first assault, she would
not want to be in their position now. Still less did she want to be in her own position. Given a choice, she would rather be anywhere else.
The second attack, only a day before the reinforcements arrived, had been a different affair entirely. They had tried loosing a few rounds at their customary range, but then had come right in,
firing all the while, determined to make another fight of it. The Lascanne line had held together under the direction of Emily and Mallen, two of the most unlikely battlefield officers imaginable.
The Denlanders had taken serious losses on their way in, and then discovered further ill news. John Brocky had spent days decanting sharp stones and shaved metal into glass jars, which he then
stocked with gunpowder and stopped with wax and oiled fuses. Now Lascanne, too, had its makeshift grenades, and it was these that met the charging Denlanders, before they could use their own. Emily
remembered watching the flashes and the ground-churning explosions as the Denlander grenadiers had their own weapons set off in their hands and inside their packs.
That attack had not reached the barricade. The Denlanders had fled, leaving yet more of their mystically superior guns for the Lascanne forces. They had been seized on, those guns, by men who
thought to exploit their magic, but each man who tried one found only that the little leather-sewn lead balls that were Denlander ammunition took longer to ram down the guns’ muzzles.
How strange and silent the night had seemed, after the Denlanders had fled and the wounded were taken to the infirmary. Emily had stood at the barricade, and the knowledge that
she would likely meet another dawn had broken on her like the dawn itself.
Am I alive? I am alive!
It was as though the hour of her death had come and gone, and the grim spectre himself
was overdue. In such moments, when the world held its breath, anything might happen.
He had come to her at her tent: Giles Scavian, Survivor and King’s wizard, his ripped shirt hanging loose from him. They had both been weary from the fighting and the waiting, dirt-smudged
and worn, but she had taken his damaged hand in hers and kissed the cauterized ridge of his missing fingers. In turn, he had put his lips to the bruises across her face. She was a gentlewoman of
Lascanne, and he was a gentleman, polite and proper in all things. Death made a third, though, in that tent, and in that presence their social niceties finally seemed as distant and unreachable as
Deerlings House.
She had lain down, and pulled him down beside her, and they had unbuttoned each other’s shirts without hurry. They had at least until the dawn before matters of either Denland or Lascanne
came back to trouble them.
He must have known that it was her first time. She guessed that it was his.
Once only. Afterwards, the Denlanders still stayed away and stayed away, and she and Scavian touched hands and exchanged looks, but somehow each felt it would tempt fate too much to seek a
second union. Their one moment of grace had been all they had, all they would have. Emily would not have exchanged it for any other.
*
Now they had reinforcements. Were matters looking up? Emily watched as the master sergeant from Leopard Passant drilled the shabby newcomers in the use of the rifle, and knew
that it would make no difference.
Mallen was the great killer of Denlanders these days. On odd nights he went out with his scouts, and they hunted down their opposite numbers and taught them how to fear. They used knives, to be
silent and secret at night and, with Mallen to lead them, they killed far more than they lost. What they discovered was news worse and worse with each expedition. The Denlanders, too, were being
reinforced. They had new men come in every other day, a few squads at a time. He estimated that they now outnumbered the besieged garrison by more than five to one, even after all their recent
casualties.
And even Mallen could not kill them all. As his supply of scouts diminished, one by one, the Denlanders’ numbers only grew. There must be many enemy agents plotting out the road to Locke
now, for when they would have the liberty to walk it in force.
And still the enemy sat and waited, and Emily knew why. Her insight into the Denlander character now became a curse. She knew that they were careful, meticulous and pragmatic men, and they did
not much value qualities such as honour, courage or luck. They valued instead solid plans and favourable numbers. They were waiting until a victory on their part was certain before essaying towards
the camp again.
And so both sides wait for the same thing.
One day the Denlanders would come back, and this time it would be when they would be sure to win. Without a doubt, the Lascans would exact a
heavy toll from them, but there was a limit to how much damage the defenders could do before they were all shot down.
She had in her hand her incomplete and undeliverable message to Mr Northway, her suicide note, as she thought of it. She wondered, if Penny Belchere were to appear before her, whether she would
give it to the girl, or hide it. The question seemed academic.
The Survivors’ Club was all that was left to her now. Its members kept each other sane.
Whatever the Denlanders may value, we have courage, friendship and honour here
, which
translated into evenings of joking and drinking, gambling and arguing. She was more a soldier than she knew, now. Would Mary or Alice even recognize her? She was shocked to think how long it had
been since she had thought of either of them.
How long since they have thought of me?
Grammaine was just a distant memory; like some place they had gone to when she was a very young child, half remembered and half imagined. It was like a place she had seen in a painting
somewhere. She had no belief in it. It was not possible that she could ever return there.
*
She leant on the barricade, looking out at the shadowed swamps. There was a little movement there, but not much: not an attack, not yet. The sun overhead had them boiling in
their jackets, but the Denlanders were confined in the damp and constant heat of the swamps. Did that wear them down? Did they lose their will to win? It seemed they did not. She remembered their
quiet determination to endure
anything
for their country. They had made themselves at home in the swamps, like fish in water, whilst the Lascanne soldiers could only hold their breath and
count the moments until they emerged.