‘Oh . . .’
He hauled the cork from the bottle in a single violent motion. ‘Were we anywhere else, I would be overjoyed,’ he said, ‘but this is no place for . . .’
‘For anyone,’ she finished. ‘Mallen excepted, perhaps. But here you are, and here I am. I don’t think anyone would have chosen the way things have fallen out, Mr Scavian.’
‘No, in truth, they would not.’ He had a quartet of glasses ready there, and he added a fifth whilst pouring into the first.
‘How many members of this Survivors’ Club are there, anyway?’ she asked his back.
‘Four. Five now,’ he said, dipping the bottle from glass to glass expertly, not wasting a drop. ‘There were eleven founder members, I believe, but we had to expel some.’
‘Why . . . ?’ She stopped herself, because abruptly it seemed to her that there was only one way to be expelled from the Survivors’ Club.
Brocky’s voice bellowed from the other room. ‘Make sure she’s got fifty pounds to her name, Scavvers!’
‘Ask her yourself,’ Scavian replied mildly. ‘You mustn’t mind John, Miss Marshwic. He just loves to complain.’
‘Mr Scavian . . .’ He turned to her, a glass in each hand, and she took them from him, holding his eyes. ‘If he is John to you . . . you may call me Emily, if you will. I would not wish to bring too much ceremony here just because I’m a woman.’
His uncertain smile returned. ‘To each other’s faces we call each other by the family name, as soldiers do. Between ourselves, though – you and I – I would find no greater pleasure but to call you Emily, and have you call me Giles.’
They rejoined the others, and Emily found herself seated in an uneven chair as the brandy glasses were passed round. The drink smelled acrid to her: it was not a lady’s usual libation.
‘To the King, gentlemen,’ said Tubal, and they all raised their glasses and sampled the deep brown liquor. Emily made a face at it, despite herself. It was sharp on the back of her throat, fiery all the way down. The men were sipping appreciatively, though, and Brocky was taking compliments on his best find yet.
‘What’s this about fifty pounds?’ she asked them.
‘Well,’ Brocky shifted expansively in his chair, which had also presumably been crated in marked ‘medical supplies’, ‘each of us, all the members of the Survivors’ Club in fact, have put a note of promise in the kitty, you see. It’s a strict condition of membership, in case you were wondering.’
‘To what end?’ she asked, and Mallen gave her a dry look.
‘Last man gets it,’ he said. ‘Last man standing.’
‘You can cover the sum, I take it?’ Brocky insisted.
‘But . . . that’s cold,’ she said, and at the same time she was thinking that the accounts at Grammaine would surely suffice.
‘We’re at war, Em,’ said Tubal. ‘And it’s hard, and it hurts, and the only way to avoid the knife is not to take it seriously. Hell and fire, we’ve all buried friends here. We might as well play a game with it, show death we’re not so scared. We all know the next killing shot could be ours; we all want to leave something to help the friends that survive us.’ He laughed unexpectedly. ‘Except for one fellow, of course, who’s already earmarked the kitty as “the John Brocky benevolent fund”.’
‘The quartermaster knows where he’s safest,’ Brocky announced loftily. ‘Damned if you’ll get me out in the mud with a gun, when I don’t have to.’
‘You don’t fight?’ Emily asked him.
‘Far too valuable, not like you spear-carriers,’ Brocky replied, without rancour. ‘Your basic quartermaster’s a skilled professional, see? I was a dispenser back in civvies. I brew that muck they make you drink to ward off the bugs and the plagues. If I don’t want to get this blessed body of mine shot full of holes, neither the colonel nor the Ravens are going to make me.’
‘Is that . . . fair?’ she asked, and they were all grinning.
‘Anything within the rules, Marshwic,’ Mallen told her.
‘War isn’t a stickler for niceties,’ Scavian added. ‘Why should we be? If Brocky stays home, or I take off my coat and dress like a soldier, all’s fair.’
Eleven founding members, she thought. These four are the true survivors, worthy of the name. And now I have joined them.
She sipped her brandy again. Somehow it wasn’t so bad now. It tasted like inclusion, like being part of something. Mallen was shuffling a deck of cards, his pipe jammed between his teeth.
‘Serg— Mallen, you . . . seem comfortable with civilized niceties,’ she noted.
He shot her a humorous look. ‘Just a jungle savage, me. You want to play a hand, rob me blind?’
The other men hooted with laughter at that. ‘You didn’t fall for that native-guide act of his, did you?’ Tubal asked her.
She frowned. ‘But he said – you said you were here before the war came,’ she accused Mallen.
‘I was.’
Brocky snorted on his brandy. ‘Oh, he was here all right. But only because the University of Colemansworth gave him a stipend.’
‘University . . . ?’
‘Our friend Mr Mallen is a scholar,’ Scavian clarified. ‘I suppose the pre-eminent scholar on the swamps here. In truth, there wasn’t much competition. We’re lucky to have him. Things would be a lot worse otherwise.’
‘Enough of the compliments.’ Mallen dealt five hands with the air of long practice. He caught her stare, still accusing, and shrugged. ‘So what? My father, his father, they came here and met the indigenes. Family trade, you understand? Nothing wrong with an education.’
‘He’s written books,’ Brocky chuckled. ‘Papers, lectures, you name it! You’re right, though, at heart he’s just a dumb swamp-boy brought up by the dingies, aren’t you, Mallen?’
‘That’s me.’ He put on a surly and savage expression, then proceeded to win three out of four hands of cards. Emily was quietly pleased to win the fourth, to Brocky’s curses.
After the cards, they emptied a second bottle of the brandy between them, and the men sat back and filled the air with the sweet scent of pipe smoke. She imagined her past self, the woman who had not known Gravenfield or the swamp or the rattle of muskets. That other Emily could have imagined nothing stranger than this: sitting with the menfolk in a man’s ill-fitting clothes, talking to them as one of them. But, then, how innocent that lost Emily had been. The brandy put a pleasant fogginess into her head.
‘The King and his Ravens,’ toasted Brocky which seemed to annoy Scavian.
‘Herons, surely.’ Emily was thinking of the royal coat of arms. ‘I didn’t know he had ravens.’
‘Denlanders call our wizards that,’ Mallen explained. ‘When they aren’t running away from them.’
‘What do we call theirs?’
‘We’ve never needed to decide. They don’t have any.’ Tubal made an expansive gesture with his brandy glass that somehow managed to spill nothing. ‘Their king is dead, his royal line vanished, so who’s to make wizards in Denland now? Those they had, they became naught but normal men the moment their king was murdered.’
‘That’s why they take such exception to us Warlocks,’ Scavian noted. ‘Though Justin gives them other reasons, in truth.’ He stared down into his liquor and then drained the cup in one. ‘I have been with the colonel today, gentlemen. Counting Miss Marshwic as an honorary gentleman, of course.’
‘Of course,’ she allowed.
‘What’s he come up with now?’ Tubal asked.
‘Only if you absolve me from putting shillings in the jar. This would bankrupt me, else.’ He maintained his smile with some effort. The shillings, Emily had gathered, were the penalty for ‘serious talk’.
There was a moment’s hesitation before Brocky nodded, wordlessly indicating that Scavian should continue. The Warlock toyed with his emptied glass, the cheer sloughing off him. He had no rank, formally, but the touch of the King meant he was the King’s own presence out here. Emily understood t
hat he was as good a man as a company captain, whilst the senior Justin Lascari was on a par with Colonel Resnic himself.
‘The colonel intends,’ Scavian said at last, ‘for there to be what he calls a “Big Push”.’
‘A Big Push,’ Brocky murmured uneasily. ‘Sounds positively obscene, Scavvers, old chap.’
‘You know . . . we all know, I hope, that this war is not like any other,’ Scavian went on. ‘This is no land war, aiming to seize and hold an acre at a time, until the enemy are forced away. No man, saving yourself, Mallen, could stay so long in the swamps and hold a position. If anything it’s more like a naval action, with rival fleets trying to find each other in a sea fog.’
‘They would have done well to send us an admiral,’ Tubal agreed.
‘But they sent us Resnic, who has thirty years’ experience of textbook war,’ Scavian acknowledged. ‘He does not know how to fight Dr Lam’s forces. So, now that the women are here, now they are tested a little, he has conceived his idea of a Big Push.’ He stopped, glancing from face to face. ‘Is nobody going to stop me, under the rules of the club? ‘Am I not too serious for you?’
‘I think we’re all listening to you, Scavvers,’ Brocky admitted.
Scavian put on his small, sad smile for them. ‘He will throw us all into the mix, gentlemen – saving yourself, Brocky. He will take up all his forces in two hands and cast us in the direction of the enemy. I hear Captain Goss is returning to retake command of your company, Salander, and that will be the trigger of this plan pulled.’
They sat in silence after that. Emily looked from face to face: Mallen tattooed and unreadable; Brocky’s scowl, and Tubal’s philosophic half-smile. Scavian met her gaze and then lowered his eyes, relighting his pipe with just a touch of his finger.
Late on, when Tubal declared the meeting of the Survivors’ Club over, it was Scavian who approached her to say, ‘Miss Marshwic, I wonder if I may escort you to your . . . to your tent.’ She read his dissatisfaction with the word and smiled at him.
‘Why, Mr Scavian, I would be delighted.’
It was quite dark without, the camp’s lanterns and candles looking like nothing so much as the marsh-wick she had witnessed with Mallen. She found the ground unaccountably treacherous with all the guy-ropes, as she and Scavian made a tentative progress towards where she was barracked.
So here we are at last. ‘Do you remember Deerlings House?’ she asked him.
‘It has never been far from my mind,’ he said. And then, with understated gallantry, ‘A man going to war could wish for a worse send-off than an evening of your company, Emily.’
A shiver went through her, from the cold, the company, the words. What a place is this! Out here on the edge of civilization, death and his harvest every other day, and I feel as though I have left a host of fetters behind me. Surely Miss Emily Marshwic of Grammaine would not have been seen thus, dressed as a soldier and leaning on a young gentleman, with three glasses of brandy inside her. How Alice would talk!
‘I have a great deal to thank you for, Emily,’ Scavian continued. She leant a little further into him, and his arm found its way around her shoulders to steady her. ‘It is because of you that I sought out Tubal when first I arrived here. Without you, I would not have found my club, my friends. I would have had no company but Lascari. I think you must have saved my life ten times over by now, just for pointing me in that direction.’
She could see, out at the edge of the camp, the dancing dots of fireflies, the swamp’s own torch-bearers. She stopped, seeing now for a second what Mallen could find to love in such a place.
‘God knows, this can be a lonely place,’ Scavian remarked in hushed tones. Around them the camp made subdued noises, everyone asleep now bar them and the sentries. ‘A man needs good company here.’
He felt warm against her in the dark, even through her jacket. She thought of the King’s mark on his chest, and what it would feel like to put her hand on that imprint. It seemed utterly incredible that she was here beside a King’s Warlock, with his arm about her. She was only Emily Marshwic, after all. How daring this should be. And yet how natural.
‘I’m glad I found you, Giles. I had thought . . .’ But she could not say what she had thought, for the words choked in her throat. A moment later she had her arms tight around him, her head on his shoulder, and he held her just as close. His arms were not iron hard and lean, as she might imagine Mallen’s to be, but they had a power in them, like the King’s own power. He was warm as a fire, hot as the swamp air. She felt his lips touch gently on her cut-short hair. What a spectacle we must make. Thank God for the darkness.
The brandy, the place, the strangeness; what else could she blame? This was a new world, here, with new rules. She knew, though it would have shocked and horrified that previous Emily Marshwic of Grammaine, that she could ask him to lie with her now. She need not even ask: such things could be communicated without a word being said. His warmth infused her, awoke the brandy and made her bold. He would not agree if she asked outright. He was a gentleman still, and not one to take advantage. He would not agree but she knew, ahead of time, that he would want to, and if she made an overture in just the right way, perhaps he would . . . The thought made her dizzy. What am I thinking? She knew that a gentlewoman did not think this way. But I am a soldier now. They have taken the gentleness away. The thought of it quickened her breathing, tightening her grip on him, infinitely attractive to her for a myriad of reasons. She wanted him because he held her, because of the warmth that boiled off him from his magic. She wanted him because of what he represented: all the King’s power in one man. She wanted him because death could ride in with the tide to fetch her, any day, and she would die without ever having known him. She wanted him because he was Giles Scavian and he looked on her as though he loved her, and that was enough.
Another glass of brandy, perhaps, or a greater understanding of the action the colonel was planning for so soon, and she would have taken his hand and led him off to find a place to lay her down, and perhaps he would have gone along with her. He must feel it too, that closeness that comes only in the shadow of death.
Instead she held him to her, and let his arms take her, and when she finally allowed her grip to loosen, he took her by the shoulders to examine her. He kindled a fire in one palm, with no more than an idle thought, and it showed them each other’s faces for a second. Lit by the flame of the King’s magic, he looked so young, so brave and handsome. There were tears glinting in his eyes.
When the fire died, she closed her eyes, locking in the memory of him. Her hands slipped to either side of his face, and she pulled him forward until their lips met. The shock that went through her was like burning. It made her tremble with fear and wonder.
‘Don’t die,’ she told him, when she could speak. ‘I will never forgive you if you die.’
‘Let them try a dozen times over; I won’t let them keep me from you.’ It was a boy’s callow boasting, but right then it sounded right to her.
It was so hard now, to part from him, to return to her damp and lonely tent. It would have been so easy not to let him go. What was growing between them, though, she did not want to harvest in a single night. It had more life in it than that.
Still she ached for him after he let her go.
15
The camp abounds with the news of Colonel Resnic’s ‘Big Push’. We talk of it jokingly, as though it is a bowel disorder. We are all aware of the truth of it, though. The colonel has lost patience with the enemy, who will not do what he wants. It seems that this is some military version, vast in scale, of a child throwing a tantrum upon the floor.
‘Hoi, Ensign!’
Emily looked up from her bowl of gruel to see a big, bald-headed man approaching her, his uniform jacket opened to the late spring heat.
‘What is it?’ she asked, tacking on, ‘Master Sergeant,’ as soon as she recognized the three crowns on his sleeve. Now she knew him: Sharkey, from Bear Sejant company. She had
seen him around the camp before but heard little about him.
He stopped before her, looking her up and down. ‘Morning, Ensign.’ He was a massive-shouldered man, a real bull of a master sergeant. His uncovered, shaven head gleamed in the sun.
‘Good morning, Sergeant. How can I help you?’ She did not like the leery rictus of his grin.
‘“Good” morning? I like that. That’s a proper greeting for you,’ he observed. ‘Though I don’t see what’s so good about it. No bloody morning round here’s ever good, wouldn’t you say, Ensign?’
‘Sergeant, is there something I can do for you?’
His grin widened. ‘It’s true, ain’t it, you can tell just from how you speak. You’re a real nob. Bloody hell.’
She regarded him narrowly.
‘Must be a real come-down for you, ending up here. Must be hell finding you’re inferior to types like me. See, I earned these crowns, here, Ensign.’
‘I’m sure you did, Sergeant.’
‘Didn’t get them because I was some brass’s daddy’s pal. Must’ve been a real shock to find you weren’t posh enough to be made general right out.’
‘Sergeant, if you’ve got orders for me, or a message for Stag Rampant, I’ll have it now. Otherwise this is no conversation for two officers to be having,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘Wondered what it’d take to get her mad,’ he said to himself. ‘See, what it is, Ensign, is this. I hear that ladies of a certain class get so bored sitting around in their big houses that they get . . . what was it? Jaded, right. They get jaded.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said and made as if to go, but a huge hand clamped down on her shoulder and she was abruptly looking straight into his cold blue eyes.
‘Jaded,’ he repeated. ‘I heard, and correct me if I’m wrong, m’lady, that they just do all sort of things because they’re so awful jaded. With servants and that.’
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