Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Penny saluted back just as seriously. ‘Thank you, Ensign. Permission to go on my way?’

  ‘Granted.’

  Elise leant in the doorway, watching the messenger mount up and canter off, while Emily turned to her sisters. The opened letter in her hand told them all they needed to know.

  *

  The pack’s weight was a familiar burden, even a comforting one. She and Elise had walked all the way from Chalcaster with these. They were a soldier’s life contained in a single bag: clothes, utensils, tools, weapons, everything the King’s largesse supplied for new recruits to his army. Emily had made sure every last thing was there, and checked that the action of the musket still moved freely.

  Downstairs, Mary and Cook were preparing a cold spread. Emily already had a letter from her sister in her jacket pocket, exhorting Tubal to write more frequently. She wondered whether she herself would write, and how often.

  ‘Ma’am?’ The voice, in this room, was unfamiliar. It was Grant, of course, and, when she saw him in the doorway of her bedroom, Emily realized that to her knowledge he had never been above stairs before.

  ‘What is it, Grant?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, ma’am, maybe it isn’t my business to say it, but I reckon there’s something you should take with you.’

  As she frowned at him, he moved awkwardly into the room and she saw he was holding a flat, black-wood case with brass corners. A familiar case, for all that she had avoided the sight of it for many years. It had re-entered her life at the same time as the Ghyer had, and she had hoped never to see it again. Her father’s pistol case, of course. Within it nestled the exit he had chosen when his life became too harsh for him to handle.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said shortly, but Grant was resolute.

  ‘You shouldn’t turn it down just because of what it’s done. It’s just a thing, ma’am. Just a weapon. It’s a good one, though, better than any the army’ll give you. I reckon you might need this – need the extra. It’s a good piece, all right. Think about it, ma’am.’

  He placed the dead weight of the case into her unwilling hands, and she laid it on the bed beside her pack. Steeling herself, she undid the clasp and lifted the lid, and looked within. There it was, nestling in its velvet: sleek and deadly, a long-barrelled horse pistol of dark iron with gold inlaid in the grip. It must have cost her father a fortune in the happier days when he had ordered it made. He had not known then what use he would put it to at the last.

  Pistols were not standard issue for junior officers. The army would not find her a replacement if she left this lying here. War was an uncertain business, and sentiment had little part to play in who should live and who should die.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘I’d be a fool to leave it.’ I will give it a second chance to prove its loyalty. Perhaps a term in the army will erase the stain on it. ‘Thank you, Grant. You’re right, of course.’ She closed the case and found room for it in her pack.

  The morning came before that final day, the darkness outside misty with the last of the winter weather. Emily sat at the kitchen table with her empty porridge bowl in front of her, and thought about another dark morning years ago, or so it seemed. Then she had been nothing but a spectator, watching Rodric and his brave companions being led away by the recruiting sergeant.

  She glanced across the table at Elise, who managed a pale smile. She had drunk a lot of wine the previous night, making many boasts and toasts in a soldier’s fashion. It was not the hangover, though, that dragged her face down.

  Grant was making the buggy ready, so they could ride into town like ladies of leisure. Mary and Alice had wanted to come to Chalcaster to see them board, but Emily had told them they should not. They should say their farewells here, under Grammaine’s protective aegis. It would be a cold, uncomfortable ride. They would be jostled by the crowds at the station. Excuse after excuse just so that, when the time came for the final step aboard the train, her nerve would hold. She could not leave, she thought, if they were there to beg her to stay.

  ‘It’s been a good few days,’ Elise remarked.

  ‘It has,’ Emily agreed. ‘It really has.’

  She saw Grant approaching the door, dusting his hands off, and she stood, with a soldier’s proper resignation, hoisting her pack up on her shoulders. Mary and Alice bustled in just then, and she hugged them each in turn, tight as she could.

  ‘You will come back to us,’ Mary insisted. ‘I could not bear it if anything happened to you.’

  ‘I will. If God permits.’

  ‘And tell that wretched husband of mine to write to me.’

  ‘I’ll tell him. I’ll even force the pen into his hands.’

  ‘And you come back, too,’ Alice told Elise. ‘We want to see you here. Come back in the season and I’ll introduce you to all the best people.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Elise promised, ‘just you see. I’ll come back with a wound and a medal, like proper soldiers are supposed to.’

  Grant moved to help them up into the buggy, like ladies, but they climbed up themselves like fighting men, and thought nothing of it.

  There was a real mob around the station, what with the departing soldiers in their reds, and all their friends and relatives, their mothers and sisters and children, pressing them from all sides. As Grant reined in the horses, Emily could hear the train itself arriving, the great slow rhythm of its ponderous wheels, the hiss of steam as it slowed and ground to a halt alongside the station platform.

  ‘Looks like a mess,’ Elise said. ‘Hey, if we just start shovelling everyone onto the train, we’ll get double the recruits we had to start with. They’ll give you a bonus for that.’

  Emily jumped down from the buggy and reshouldered her pack. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ she shouted, and then had to shout it twice more before the closest soldier noticed her.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Who’s the ranking officer here?’ Emily asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’ve got no officer here,’ said the soldier, a frail-looking girl Alice’s age. Then she jumped visibly and said, ‘Sir! Ensign, I mean,’ and saluted, jogging the next woman with her elbow.

  ‘There must be someone outranking me here,’ Emily said, but Elise was busy looking at sleeve after sleeve.

  ‘I don’t see one. Looks like you’ve got command, Ensign.’ She grinned with the easy grin of a woman who doesn’t have to be responsible for what is happening.

  Emily looked at the great mess of soldiers, and of their relatives who would not willingly allow a minute here to be wasted. They would be forever taking their leave, yet the train was here now.

  She had a duty. Major Castwood had placed this burden on her when he gave her the promotion. It would be a harsh baptism for her, her first task as an officer.

  She could shout, like Bowler; she could bellow and swear at them. What would it accomplish? She looked around from face to face, and saw some streaked with tears or red-eyed from weeping. Some hugged their loved ones close to them, and others sat on the ground beside their packs, clutching their muskets and looking ill. This would have to be done firmly and gently.

  ‘All right now,’ she said to the frail girl nearest. ‘Say your last goodbye and get aboard. You, too,’ she said to the next. ‘Come on, soldiers. Kiss them goodbye and everyone get on the train. We’ve got to be somewhere else tomorrow morning.’ She moved through the crowd, laying her hand on arms and clapping shoulders. She avoided the fake joviality that some sergeants seemed to prefer, and instead adopted a manner of mere efficiency. A quiet word, a touch, then she moved on. Behind her, the crowd began to unbutton itself like a shirt. Soldiers gave their families a final hug, a last fond word. Women began to embark onto the train in a steady flow, and still Emily passed amongst them, saying, ‘All right, now, say a last goodbye. You all knew this was coming. We can’t keep them waiting up at the front. Come on, soldiers, time we were going.’

  At the far end of the platform, s
he turned to survey her handiwork. The crowd was disintegrating, the soldiers – her troops – were vanishing into the train, raising the shutters on the windows for a last look at their loved ones. She saw Elise hop aboard, calling out that she would save Emily a seat.

  Emily sighed, knowing that the people of Chalcaster, those they would leave behind, were watching her. Knowing that to them she was the enemy in that moment, because she was the one taking their mothers and sisters and children away to war. This was what it was like to have responsibility for the lives of others. There was no greater burden.

  She began to walk slowly back along the platform, looking for any last red jacket that might still be dawdling. She could hear the train’s engine gradually building a head of steam, blowing out smoke to be lost in a dark sky.

  ‘Miss Marshwic, I presume.’

  She stopped, did not turn yet. The voice needed no introduction.

  ‘You presume?’

  ‘Your new wardrobe makes it hard to tell.’

  At last she turned, and it was as though nothing had changed, as though she had never signed up, just for a moment. He was standing there, in the same tatty black, and she felt a wave of complex, angry emotions at the sight of him. She could have been back at his office, hearing the news of Rodric’s death.

  ‘Mr Northway,’ she said.

  ‘You make a fine soldier, Miss Marshwic. Ensign Marshwic, I beg your pardon.’ His face was oddly naked, and only later did she realize that it was without its customary defensive smile.

  ‘Are you here to count heads, Mr Northway?’ In saying his name, his title, she felt a strange power over him. He was a civilian and she a soldier.

  ‘As it happens, I am. The King may not have sent sergeants to round you all up, but he nonetheless wishes to ensure that none of his new darlings of war has second thoughts.’ A pause hung between them, and then he forced himself to say, ‘I am here to see you, though, one last time. Speak with you as well, if you will. But see you, at any rate. Which I have now done.’

  The noise of the train was building behind her, and she felt unjustly put upon that he should beard her here. What did he want with her, after all that had been said the last time – or left unsaid?

  ‘I must go to my command, Mr Northway,’ she said, feeling strangely important.

  ‘I . . . have great hopes of your return, Ensign. Emily,’ he said, and when she moved to correct him, something in his face held her back.

  ‘Mr Northway . . .’ She wanted to turn away angrily from him, to board the train and never see him again, but she did not. Instead, she recalled dancing with him when nobody else would ask her. She saw the dreadful storm of emotions that had unmanned him when he had won her and lost her over Rodric’s dead body. She saw him shooting the Ghyer, a villain turning on a villain, and all for her.

  Her father’s ghost clamoured at her, but it was a spectre that had lost its substance this last year, as she had finally faced up to whose finger had been on that trigger. What a knowledge for a daughter to bear that, when the accounts were drawn up and the auditors in, he would rather spare himself the hurt than spare his daughters. No wonder they had all loaded their hate onto Northway, for where else could they direct it?

  And Cristan Northway was no saint: a villain through and through, but one freely condemned out of his own mouth. In the end, save for that one omission, he truly had never lied to her. How many other people could say as much?

  She looked at his face again, and saw that he was frightened for her, and had no way to say it, but his eyes spoke it clearly enough.

  The train made a deep, solid sound, and she knew it was about to get underway.

  ‘We will continue this conversation when I return,’ she told him and, before she could think about it, she had taken his cold hand in a brief clasp with both of hers and let it go. Behind her, the train began, ever so slowly, to move, lumbering along the length of the platform at a slow walking pace that was increasing speed every second.

  ‘Return,’ he told her, ‘please.’

  And she turned and caught at an open doorway and swung herself in, pack and all. She glimpsed him just the once through the window, as the train pulled away: a slump-shouldered shadow detached from its object, falling away into the night.

  11

  My leadership lasted only as far as Tarrent’s Wey, where I was able to surrender my authority to a sergeant – a man. The train was soon quite full of new recruits, as it thundered along the track with the dawn breaking all around us. The trip was to last two days and nights.

  The first night was the strangest. The train made no concessions to darkness, and I slept fitfully. The rhythm of the engine and the tracks, which seemed to lull everyone else to sleep, did not work on me. I was continually catching oddments of sound and waking to see a carriage full of sleeping women in, or half in, military uniform. It seemed to me like the dressing room of a theatre where the chorus have all overslept their cue.

  I would look out of the window and see the darkness looking back at me. I would walk the swaying length of the train and see perhaps two or three other women still awake. Near midnight we got a four together and played a few hands of Fly-away. We became the night watch, I suppose.

  I find myself looking back on that night, and the strangest idea comes to me. This place I am in, the swamps and the insects and the death, cannot, surely, exist in the same land as my Grammaine, as Alice and Mary, as the quiet fields and woods of Chalcaster. It seems to me that we surely must have done more than simply travel to reach this place. We must have undertaken some more fundamental journey to some dreadful spirit world.

  If all that separates this terrible place from home is mere distance, then we are lost. If the Denlanders do not creep past us and into the green land of my memories, then the swamps of the Levant will do so, with their death and mud and leeches.

  When the train pulled into Locke it was night again, after a long day’s journey through an ever more sparsely populated landscape. The sweeping Wolds of Chalcaster, the hills and the dales and the tall plantation woods had given way, hour by hour, to flat agriculture and small white-painted farmhouses, the breadbasket of Lascanne. It was mostly reclaimed marsh, Emily recalled from her lessons. The ancient empires of a bygone day had drained it to sow their seeds and mine their gold, and modern Lascanne reaped the benefit.

  But on the next day there was less of the agriculture and more of the wilds. Heath and scrub and desolate moorland stretched either side of the tracks, where the odd crofter or peat cutter was the height of civilization. The towns they passed through had a tough, knuckled-down look: trader towns, through towns, towns that made a living by taking in and passing on.

  As the sun set on the second day, it lit up red on standing water amidst the moors, bogs and pools set deep beside the raised track. No hand had ever drained this land, and in her naivety Emily imagined these were the swamps of the Levant front, and that this was the worst nature had to offer.

  They saw little enough of Locke when the train pulled in, past midnight: a few lanterns and the bulky shapes of ugly buildings. A sergeant passed down the train, saying, ‘Stay on for now. Sleep more if you can. Come dawn and we’ll be marching, so rest while you can.’ He fought a losing battle. Everyone had been cooped up on the cramped train for far too long and nobody was in the mood to rest. All around Emily there was a buzz of speculation as to what they would meet on the morrow. She offered nothing herself but heard a score of contradictory suggestions, each delivered as fact. Nobody there had the faintest idea, really, what the battlefield of the Levant front would be like. They were all as far from home as she was. They were maids, cooks, skivvies, seamstresses and market-stall girls, and they talked and talked simply to keep the fear at bay, while the unknown quantity that was Locke lurked beyond the shuttered windows of the train.

  ‘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 othe
r 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.