Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And it was not Mary or Alice she thought of, as she held the letter close. Instead, she saw a man in shabby black on the railway platform at Chalcaster, felt the coolness of his hand as it slipped out of hers. Return, please.

  She read the letter once more, and saw again words that she had taken for granted. He knew her, her fears and her wants. If she gave her imagination the freedom, she could know him in return: the cold office, the papers making demands in the name of the war effort, his slim-fingered hands pursuing their joyless work. Was that a heaviness about him, that no Marshwic could tear him from his duties with her demands? I would that I could have kept you safe.

  Write to me, Emily. Her name, unqualified. She was always Ensign Marshwic or Sir here. Her name sounded strange to her own ears; she had left it behind, in the keeping of Mr Northway.

  His words sidled into her mind, his imagined voice sly and mocking. She felt oddly awkward, exposed. He had read her mind. He had known her needs before she ever formed them. He was Mr Northway the villain, made to gloat, boast and threaten. His entreaty slid beneath her defences. She felt weak and angry with herself for it, but she could not put the letter down.

  I should expose him, tell the colonel of his treason, finish the man. He had put the blade in her hand.

  But Mary, Alice! This is what I want, after all, only what I want.

  And she smiled ruefully because that was not it. Her sisters had been forgotten, these last five minutes. Instead she knew only that a man she had once hated had gone to these lengths for her, risked all to give her what she needed. The man cared enough, despite his faults, to put this chance her way. His cool hand, she thought. His tight carefulness on the ballroom floor. And she saw again his expression as she left him for the train and the war. She relived his despair when he held the knowledge of Rodric’s death and yet, when he could have had her in his hands, he had told her the truth, as he always did. The idea of Mr Northway, the bitterly truthful Mr Northway, crept into her through her own treacherous memories and the words of his letter. She felt hot and unsteady suddenly. He was seducing her in ink, and she was being seduced. A wave of contradictory feelings threatened to overwhelm her. What could she do to escape Mr Northway, when his hooks were planted inside her by her own hands?

  She would write to Mary and Alice, yes, but what could she write to them that they would understand? The sudden death a musket shot could bring, the venomous oven of the swamp, the guilt of having a death hanging about her neck? How could she load these burdens onto her two sisters? They would not bear them. The colonel was right: the weight would break them. Tell them that she lived, yes; tell them that she fought for king and country, but how could she wound them with the truth?

  But she had never hidden a thing from Mr Northway, as he had not from her. Of all people, he would understand. He would not flinch. He had known grimmer things than this. She did not need a priest for her confession, but a devil.

  How strange that war has brought the two of us to this pass. She felt so close to him now, as she had never done when he was there right before her. How the war had remade her, remade them both, into two halves of a broken thing!

  She would write to him. She would write to her sisters, something true but, yes, shying from the whole truth, but she would write honestly to him. He would keep her heart for her, until the war was done and she had need of it again.

  That decision made, she folded the letter to slip into her jacket pocket, and one of the many weights she bore was gone from her. The bottled thoughts that sat so heavily on her stomach could now be poured out.

  She returned to Belchere and told her to wait, for there would be a reply.

  14

  We are not the things we think we are, when we are tested.

  We do not know how much we lean on others until those props are taken away. On our own feet at last, we are unsteady. I am grateful, therefore, that you have sent me this crutch, just as I began to fall.

  Your martial adversary,

  Emily.

  Tubal cast himself down beside her, heedless of the mud on his jacket. His helmet was pushed back off his head until it hung between his shoulders from its strap. There was dirt on his face, but his expression was calmer than she ever remembered from home.

  ‘So,’ he said, his voice a mere undertone, half lost amid the water-sound. ‘Settling in all right?’

  Emily, lying stretched along a moss bank with her feet in the water below, shifted slightly, trying for comfort. ‘It’s hard, Tubal,’ she said.

  ‘Hell, yes,’ he agreed. ‘So tell me about how it’s hard.’ Around them, the swamp covered a multitude of sins as eight squads of Stag Rampant, one hundred and sixty soldiers in all, eased into position, one by one.

  ‘I don’t mean this.’ Emily took a chance to look at him, rather than at their objective. ‘This is hard, but I expected it. I knew fighting, warring, was going to be like this, but . . .’

  ‘It’s the gaps in between,’ he finished for her, elbowing his way up the bank a little, keeping his musket just clear of the mud.

  Emily thought of her letter, winging its way to Mr Northway even now: her kindred spirit, her adversary. Locked in conflict for so long, they shared some place between them that no other could touch. But he was not here. It could be tens of days before she heard from him, if at all. It was a dangerous game he was playing, after all, by flouting the King’s law.

  ‘It’s . . . I had a good friend when I first came. Now she’s gone and . . . I’m an ensign and so the soldiers hold me at a distance.’ Her birth worked against her, too. Just as at Gravenfield, she was the only gentlewoman in camp. It seemed all the other houses and families of Lascanne had sent servants to do their dirty work.

  Down the line, Stag Rampant troopers were falling into place like game pieces being advanced. Mallen was out there somewhere, invisible, with a whistle to his lips.

  ‘I bought myself a lieutenancy when they were going cheap for volunteers,’ Tubal recalled. ‘Hell, if I’d known it would put me in the firing line so much, I’d have saved my money.’

  ‘Tubal . . .’ How unlike a soldier she would sound. She did not want to embarrass herself before Mary’s man, did not want to become just his sister-in-law and not his junior officer, but it hurt her. Each night, each empty day, weighed on her more and more. When the orders arrived, it had been a relief to descend into the boiling purgatory of the swamps, to take up the musket once again. At least there she had a place and a purpose. ‘Tubal . . . I’m lonely.’

  When she said the words, they sounded so poor that she wanted to take them back, but Tubal’s expression was nothing but sympathy.

  ‘You’re right, it is hard,’ he agreed. The last few soldiers were just moving into place now, and Emily felt the almost welcome knot of tension form inside her. Any moment, any moment . . .

  ‘You know,’ said Tubal, tensing too, ‘if we’re both alive at the end of today, I’ve a mind to invite you to become a member of my club.’

  ‘Your club?’ As if he was a man of means in Chalcaster again and could spend his evenings as he chose, in the company of his peers.

  ‘Why not? We never said “no women” when we made the rules. It didn’t come up.’ He flashed her a quick grin, and then Mallen’s whistle sounded and they were both scrambling to their feet, along with tens of other soldiers, to go charging down a root-studded slope into the mist and the trees.

  Down the line, Justin Lascari, resplendent in his night-blue robes, thrust forth his hands at the unseen enemy and gave out a harsh shout. Fire leapt from his palms, from his fingertips, in a screaming explosion that seared its way with withering force into the trees and plants before him, shrivelling them and blasting a tract of water into scalding steam. There were screams then, and Denlander soldiers bolted out in all directions, some on fire, some clutching their faces, their eyes. Shots from the advancing Lascanne line picked at them as the ambushers skittered down the slope towards their targets.

  In
those first few seconds, it was all Emily could do just to keep on her feet. Tubal was skidding and sliding beside her, holding his musket high for balance. A tree sped past between them, and she burst through a spiderweb of vast proportions; then there was movement ahead.

  She saw a glimpse of recognizable motion, a human form in drab clothes bolting away, and she tried to bring her musket to bear on it, but the shape was gone too fast into the mist between the trees. Elsewhere, down the line, she heard shots and cries, all muffled in the dank air.

  She did not stop to think, not for one moment. Concentration took up the whole of her mind.

  At the foot of the slope, with a tree to one side for cover, she swept the barrel of the musket about, looking for targets. Along the line on either side of her there were brief rattling volleys, but she and Tubal seemed to be in an oasis of calm. Mallen’s second whistle came, issuing belated orders to push forward, engage at will. She thrust herself away from the tree and shouldered her way through the dense foliage, the vast overarching ferns, the ankle-deep moss.

  Something passed before her face, without being seen, and punched a perfectly round hole through a fern frond beside her. She had a instant’s shock, despite herself, and then she had pulled the trigger, punching her own borehole through the greenery and hitting nothing. Cursing herself, she dropped into the shadow of the plants and reloaded as fast as her shaking hands would permit. Tubal went down on one knee beside her, gun to his shoulder and waiting for his moment.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked her. She nodded, breathlessly. The Denlander would have reloaded, too. He would be just as ready as them.

  ‘On three,’ he said. ‘One . . . two . . .’ His knuckles whitened on his gun.

  There was a brace of shots from up ahead, and then a third loud enough to have come from straight in front of them.

  ‘Three!’ Tubal hurled himself up, gun first, and Emily was right behind him. They smashed through the cycad stand they reckoned the Denlander was in, and caught him frantically dropping another ball into his gun. The small man, his grey uniform as mud-streaked as their own, dropped his musket and tried to hurl himself away, but they fired at once. They never knew which of them had hit him, but he dropped, clutching at a dark mark in his chest. All around them there were sporadic exchanges of fire. It was impossible to tell where the lines had been drawn.

  They reloaded, standing back to back, watchful eyes on their surroundings. The firing was growing steadily less.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked again and, at her nod, they pressed forward and left, hoping to recover the end of the line. Almost immediately the entire swamp around them seemed to explode with gunfire. Two or three shots passed between them, and Emily hurled herself into the muddy water at her feet, with Tubal following. For a moment, she thought he had been shot, like Elise. It could be as sudden, as unremarked, as that. Instead he lifted his face from the mire and grimaced at the world in general.

  ‘What the hell?’ he asked.

  Someone bolted past them, almost over them: a Denlander unarmed and fleeing. He was gone before either of them could get their guns up, dashing off between the trees.

  ‘We are way off course,’ Tubal observed. Emily hushed him and then they could both hear more coming, at a walk this time, a cautious walk. She took up her gun and found it clogged with mud.

  ‘Tubal . . . Sir . . .’ she gestured. His own gun was ready for the newcomers and, after a second, she slid her sabre from its scabbard, aware of the awkward, wrist-twisting weight of it.

  Three men broke cover suddenly, and Tubal came within a hair’s breadth of firing at them, but the red of their jackets warned him off just in time. He put a hand up and stood, Emily along with him.

  ‘Dead Cats.’ He noted the company badges.

  ‘Bad Rabbits, is it?’ said his opposite number, a sergeant managing half a salute. ‘Guess that means there’s no more of them.’

  ‘Someone might have told me it was a pincer movement,’ Tubal complained. The Leopard Passant sergeant merely shrugged.

  High and clear through the trees came Mallen’s whistle calling: Regroup. It was over. Seven Lascanne soldiers had been killed, and a rough count reckoned up some fifteen fallen Denlander scouts, whose position Mallen’s people had pinned down the day before.

  By the standards of the Levant front, it was a great victory. That was the terrible thing about it.

  *

  ‘So,’ Tubal said, ‘here we are. I invite you to look upon the fashionable address of my new club. Splendid, isn’t it?’

  It was the headquarters shed of the Stag Rampant. The yellow flag, with its deformed animal in black, sagged limply above. She glanced at Tubal to see if he was making fun of her. He had always possessed a quietly wicked sense of humour.

  ‘No lie,’ he assured her. ‘I hereby formally invite you into the town address of the Survivors’ Club, positively the most elegant resort for any gentleman of leisure on the Levant front. Or lady, either.’ He stepped forward and pushed the rickety door open, and a surprising wave of warmth washed over them from inside, the play of firelight and the smell of pipe smoke. Emily recoiled before it, momentarily bewildered. It was as if the door led somewhere else, somewhere like home. It had no right to open where it did.

  Another glance restored her sense of reality. They had done their best to commandeer the place in the name of civilization, but the board walls, the two narrow rooms it was divided into, had defeated them. It would have made a better prison cell than a club lounge, no matter how hard they had tried.

  There were two men in the room already. One was Mallen, to her surprise. He sat at a table on a rickety stool, with a pipe in one hand, caught in the act of lighting up. With his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open halfway down his chest, he looked no less fierce and strange than he did out in the swamps. It was as though someone had dressed up a savage as a civilized man.

  The other was the camp quartermaster, a man she knew by sight. Heavy-built, unshaven and jowly, he slumped within the confines of a vastly moth-eaten, stuffed-leather chair that had seen many and varied better days. She had always seen him before in scruffy civilian attire, the tail of his shirt hanging out, the top button of his breeches unbuttoned beneath his swelling belly. Here, though, he appeared a true man of means in his club, with a blue-and-gold checked waistcoat complete with watch-chain.

  ‘Emily, you know Daffed Mallen, of course,’ Tubal said, indicating Mallen. It was her first indication that the man even had a first name. ‘And this reprobate and general no-good individual is our quartermaster, Mr John Brocky. Gentlemen, I would like to introduce my sister-in-law, Emily Marshwic.’

  ‘To what end?’ Brocky asked suspiciously. ‘Are you pimping her?’

  Before Emily could retort, Tubal got in. ‘I am proposing her for membership.’

  ‘A new member?’ Brocky laughed. ‘A little late for that, no? And a woman? Can’t be done.’

  ‘Rules say nothing about it,’ Mallen noted quietly.

  Brocky squinted at him. ‘I’d have thought you’d be with me on this, Mallen.’

  Mallen looked from Emily to the fat quartermaster, and back. ‘I know Miss Marshwic. Knows her business, she does. She gets my vote.’

  Tubal gave him a nod of thanks, but Emily was too surprised to stay silent. ‘Master Sergeant—’

  Mallen raised a finger. ‘Club rules, no ranks.’

  ‘Where’s his lordship?’ Tubal asked.

  ‘In the next room, opening a bottle or two,’ Brocky told him. ‘Let’s call him in, get a second opinion. I’ll wager he’ll back me. Sorry, Miss Marshwic, but, really . . .’

  A third man had appeared at the narrow doorway leading to the next room, a corked bottle in one hand and a blankly surprised look on his face. ‘What . . . ?’ he began.

  She did not recognize him at her first glance. Out of context, out of uniform, it took a second look to match his face and the sheared-copper colour of his hair to her distant memories.

  ‘Mr S
cavian,’ she said, and feared that he would still not know her. Two brief conversations, one crowded evening, a lifetime ago and a country away. How could he be expected to recall? But a faint smile was coming to his lips, although his eyes were bewildered, still, and unsure. ‘Upon my soul,’ he said, ‘Miss Marshwic. What . . . what brings you to this place?’

  How far we have travelled, she thought, but this was the same man she remembered so clearly.

  ‘You can’t know each other,’ Brocky complained, somewhere in the background. ‘It isn’t fair.’

  ‘Looks like you’re in, Em,’ Tubal told her, but she barely heard him, approaching Giles Scavian as though he might vanish at any moment.

  ‘I looked for you,’ she told him. ‘I remembered, but you weren’t there. The only Warlock was—’

  ‘Lascari,’ he finished. The scowl he gave did not suit him. ‘I learned soon enough not to wear the blue. Nineteen Warlocks have been sent to the Levant. Only two yet live, myself included. The Denlanders learned to aim at our robes. They know to fear us.’

  ‘Excuse me, club rules, or do you put a shilling in the jar?’ Brocky objected. ‘All too serious, no?’

  ‘Brocky, this is not club business. This is my renewing an old acquaintanceship, in truth,’ Scavian told him with dignity.

  ‘Then you’re agreed that Emily can be a member,’ Tubal said to the quartermaster in triumph.

  ‘Shall we say I’m resigned to it,’ Brocky grumbled sourly. ‘Look, Scavvers, if you’re going to sweet-talk the lady, can you at least finish fetching the brandy as you do it?’

  Scavian coloured a little, and backed off into the next room. Emily followed him in, expecting a map room, a war room. Instead, she discovered something of a secret larder. Bottles, she saw; bales of pipe tobacco; dried meat hanging from hooks in the ceiling. ‘What is all this?’ she asked. ‘There’s nothing like this stuff in the stores.’

  ‘Our quartermaster has a multitude of contacts,’ Scavian explained. ‘In every shipment from Locke there’s something of his crated up and marked “medical supplies”. Miss Marshwic . . . I do not know whether I am glad to see you or not.’