Guns of the Dawn (23 page)

‘You’re going to meet up with this brother of yours, then?’ Elise asked, and Emily felt a stab of disorientation before she realized what the other woman meant.

‘Brother-in-law, yes. Tubal Salander. He’s a lieutenant.’

Elise whistled. ‘In with the brass, is it? Is he in charge, or what?’

Nowhere near. There’s a colonel . . .’ What was the name? She had been told it, by Major Castwood or Sergeant Demaine or somebody. ‘Colonel Resnic, I think it is. He’s
got charge of the Levant front.’

‘I’d have thought it’d be a general,’ Elise murmured. She slumped down in her seat with the obvious, though futile, intention of catching a little sleep. ‘I wonder
if he’s married. Could be a good deal, being the colonel’s bit.’

‘Depends on the colonel.’ Sharing a dormitory with Elise had cauterized that part of Emily’s brain once shocked by such talk. ‘You might find you prefer the
fighting.’

It was not the sight of Locke itself that silenced them, as they climbed down from the train. Locke was a cluster of mud-stone buildings, thirty or forty, with a hundred shacks
and lean-tos and tents making a sea of temporary construction all around them. It was a town whose population was constantly on the move, either to the war or from it.

It was the thought of what lay beyond Locke that closed mouths and opened eyes. Soon the train’s entire complement of soldiers, from girls of seventeen to women of forty-five, were
standing along the platform, looking beyond the roofs and dirt streets of the town towards the unknown.

To the west, the land rose sharply to become sheer, weathered cliffs towering in stone folds. A thread like a pencil line ran all the way up, over hill, up ramp and across bridge, and a train
that seemed built by ants put its minuscule trail of smoke into the air as it hauled itself up the steep gradient with its string of carriages, its cargo of soldiers and munitions. Beyond the last
rise, the plateaus and the ravines of the Couchant front could not be seen at all. All that came from that quarter was the rumble of distant thunder, dry and cloudless, far, far away. They had
never heard the sound of massed artillery before.

‘All right, ladies! Attention!’ Their feet snapped together even before they thought about it. A master sergeant from Locke – a matron with grey hair and a face like boot
leather – glowered at them, striding past the unruly face of their formation. The morning sun cast her face in shadow beneath her gleaming helm. ‘Come on, ladies, remember the parade
ground. Get yourselves into columns, will you? Come on, we’ve got a war to get you to. Officers front and right, soldiers line up!’

Elise squeezed Emily’s arm and then got into place, as the enlisted women formed a dozen ragged rows. The master sergeant did not look impressed. ‘Pathetic,’ she snapped.
‘Bloody pathetic, pardon my Hellic, but it’ll have to do.’ She gave Emily and the other officers a once-over. There were only a half-dozen ensigns and a sergeant amongst them.

‘All right, get these soldiers moving, left and then right, remember? I want them in the central square on the double.’

Somehow Emily and the other officers got the unwieldy body of women moving and marching into the circular patch of dirt that made up the centre of Locke. A series of low, irregular buildings
ringed it, each commandeered by the army for one purpose or another. Emily saw messengers running their errands, or mounting up and riding at a gallop. There were quartermasters checking in
supplies that had come on their train, soldiers in their shirtsleeves hauling crates of rations away. In the middle of the square was an ominous pile of boxes, all stamped ‘Lev’ in
black.

‘Right, ladies, everyone to the stack there, and take a box. Anyone I see weighing them up to get a light one gets to carry two,’ the master sergeant announced cheerily. A protesting
groan went up from the soldiers and she grinned broadly at them. ‘What’s that? What’s all the complaining? Downhill all the way to the camp, after all. Just hope your boots are
waterproof. Come on, pack mules, we haven’t got all day!’

Grumbling and moaning, the recruits shuffled forward to take boxes, heaving them up and clutching them awkwardly, until someone had the idea of hauling them on to one shoulder. Most were narrow
ammunition boxes, heavy as hell with lead shot. Some were bigger crates marked ‘rations’ or simply ‘supplies’. A few were wrapped tents or half-dozen bundles of spare
muskets. As the crowd began to thin, Emily moved forward to collect her load, but the master sergeant grabbed her arm.

‘Not for officers, the heavy stuff. Need you to keep them moving,’ she said. ‘Let them get their loads sorted, and then it’s a long, hard trek to camp, Ensign.’

‘Right, Sergeant.’ Emily stood back unhappily, watching Elise drag an ammunition crate from the pile, swearing at it with every step. Rather than watch the pile diminish crate by
crate, Emily looked about at Locke instead.
What a shabby little place
, she had to think. What a fluke of geography had thrown this little trader town, this end-of-the-track
prospector’s place, into such sharp relief. Some places were never meant to bear the weight of history.

A sergeant – a man – approached them and conferred briefly with their own officer before turning to them.

‘All right, ladies, I’m going to make a count now, so’s we know how many we’re sending on. Everyone stay still and give a smile for the sergeant, now.’ He was a
short, stocky man with a lined, humorous face and a jaunty step, but she would never have recognized him if he had not spoken. His voice brought it all back, that dark pre-morning that she had
consigned to the bins of her memory. It brought it all back, and it hurt.

She was a soldier, so she silently let him complete his count as the women around her lowered their burdens and waited patiently. She even waited until he had made his final tick on the sheet of
paper he was carrying, and was just turning to go back to the little office he had emerged from. Then, as the women finished demolishing the pile of crates, she accosted him.

‘Sergeant,’ she began.

He turned and eyed her. ‘Something I can do for you, Ensign?’

‘Sergeant Pallwide,’ she named him.

There was no recognition in his eyes, but his face might have been lifted straight from her memory of that morning when he came with his band of recruits to take her brother Rodric to the
war.

‘Emily Marshwic, Sergeant,’ she prompted, and still he did not know her until she added, ‘you came to Grammaine last autumn, for my brother.’

Then something came to him, but she never knew for sure whether he had placed her as a person, or just placed her in a class, in a category of women. ‘What of it?’ he asked
defensively.

‘You took my brother to the war, Sergeant, and you told me you would look after him. You said he would be serving in your company. What is your company, Sergeant?’

‘Administration corps,’ he almost mumbled.

‘You lied to me,’ she said flatly. ‘You lied to me, and you threw him to the wolves.’ She knew she was going too far, getting too emotional, but she could not stop
herself.

‘It’s war,’ he said flatly. For a moment she had him: she was the lady of a great house, and he was a dirty, embarrassed soldier not knowing what to do with himself. At the
last he remembered, though, what their positions were.

‘People die in war, that’s the point,’ he told her, with a look that said that he himself would be staying to file papers while she went off to the front. ‘I tell
everyone I’m going to look after their sons and brothers and husbands. It’s good business, but I can’t watch over everyone, can I, Ensign?’

‘But you said—’

‘I said “Can I,
Ensign
?”’ He stepped in close to her, staring up at her, daring a challenge.

‘No, Sergeant,’ she said resignedly.

‘That’s right, Ensign. Now you go off, and you can die yourself for all I care. Your company’s waiting for you.’

He strutted away, leaving her to turn and face an accusing look from the master sergeant. But perhaps the woman had understood some of what had gone on, for she said nothing, only gestured for
Emily to catch up as the great train of soldiers began to move off, staggering under its collective load.

Back in Mrs Melchance’s classroom, Emily had studied the maps of the Levant front with an almost morbid interest. She had marked out in her memory the swathes of green
where the artist had drawn sketchy trees or ripples to indicate swampland. She recalled the careful shading of tans to browns, then to greens; the little rocks and pools that marked the approach
from Locke to the Levant. On the maps, the trails had been dotted lines winding their way from point to point. They had seemed the sort of trail one might follow into the Wolds, for a picnic on a
sunny afternoon.

From the ground, in the mud, it looked quite different.

Emily gritted her teeth and strained furiously, ignoring the yell of pain. Another two soldiers joined her efforts by hauling on the stuck woman’s other arm, then grabbing the unfortunate
by the armpits and pulling back by main force. With a vile sucking sound, the trapped soldier was released inch by inch from the rank mud, leaving her boots and the crate she had been carrying lost
beyond all hope. The four of them collapsed back onto the path in a tangled heap, and Emily got the rescued woman’s elbow in her stomach for her pains. The master sergeant called out for
anyone carrying a box marked ‘boots’ to step forward.

Around them the landscape was a nightmare of pocks and craters enlivened by vast bushy tufts of marsh grass with fronds as tall as a man. The rocks, which on the maps had seemed so picturesque
and tiny, were like great jagged teeth thrust at random through the skin of the land, hairy with weeds that sprouted from every crevice. The path itself was made of stones piled on stones and then
paved with earth, uneven and hard underfoot. Those that stumbled off it found the ground beyond, that looked so solid, had no more substance than the stagnant pools of water that lay all around.
There were serpents, too: great eight-foot monsters that slid lazily out of the way of the soldiers’ marching feet, or raised themselves up to chest-height, watching with yellow, lidless eyes
as the recruits straggled past. Before them, down a long, shallow incline undercut by a thousand small streams, was a misty expanse that must be the swamps proper, for it seemed all of this was but
precursor.

On the maps, the swamps themselves had been enlivened by chains of blue lakes laid out like beads on a necklace, and thumbnails of light green that were fields of scree sloughed off the Couchant
cliffs and turned into meadows by colonizing vegetation. The cartographer who created those maps had crossed the swamps in a balloon, and never had to set his foot upon them nor breathe their rank
air.

Emily increased her pace to catch up with Elise, marching near the front of the column.

The girl gave her a tight-lipped smile and shifted her burden from one shoulder to the other. ‘See you lucked out then. I’m going to kill that bastard Demaine if I ever see him
again,’ she grunted through gritted teeth. ‘Just think, one word from him and I’d be the one walking, and you’d be lugging this bloody crate.’

A little later, while trudging along a track that never seemed to bring them any closer to their destination, one woman broke into song. She must have been a brave soul, to
break the grumbling silence like that, with her high, clear voice springing into the dank air. It was a familiar tune as well, although Emily could not immediately place it.

By that time those few familiar with the verses had begun chiming in, until even the master sergeant was roaring out the chorus, the garbled, overlapping mishmash of ‘Oh,
the grey is sharp and the red is brave’ rolling out over the uneven terrain as they marched.

Emily was just starting her third ‘With a hey ho!’ when she suddenly remembered when she had heard this song, and why it was so inappropriate. Old Poldry had sung it sometimes, when
he had been a little in his cups. He had sung it and talked about his own soldiering days, for it was a soldier’s song: a song from the Hellic wars. The red and the grey were the soldiers of
Lascanne and Denland, fighting side by side against the empire overseas.

Where did it all go wrong?
she asked herself, her mouth shaping the words automatically. The regicide, of course; the end of Denland’s royal line, when their whole nation had run
mad.

But still she sang, off-key and hoarse, and they all did, and if not that song then the next: women singing men’s songs on their way to war.

*

The soldiers of the Levant front had heard them coming, and sent scouts out to investigate, who had run back with the news. Consequently, the new recruits came in sight of the
camp to see a whole wall of incredulous men staring at them. That was to be their first impression of the front: not the swamps; not the ranks of tents on pole frames, raised off the ground to keep
them dry; not the towering cliffs that formed the western extent of their sodden world; but a wall of gawping men, an expanse of staring eyes.

Some were shocked, and could not take it in. Others were angry: there were frowns and clenched fists at these girls playing at soldiering, making a mockery of the uniform. There were a few who
searched each newcomer for the sight of a familiar face: a wife, a daughter, a sweetheart. News from home had been scarce.

Many were grinning openly.
Women
, they thought. No doubt they had heard news of the Women’s Draft along the way. They had surely had time to concoct their own little imaginings.
Now here was the proof: several hundred of Lascanne’s female finest marching into their camp, two hours before sunset. They passed comments to their fellows, eyeing up particularly choice
specimens, and grinned like dogs.