Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  With infinite patience and majesty, the dawn was breaking. The western sky was still in darkness, indistinguishable from the soaring cliffs of the Couchant, but over in the east . . . The grey light mellowed, waxing paler and paler and then burning, the edge of the sea catching fire in all the colours that gold and red could allow, boiling and gleaming as the sun made its way through the dawn mists and into its rightful realm.

  All around them, the forest was struck with a riot of colour: the shaded greens of the leaves and the shocking violets and scarlets of the flowers that dotted them. The earth itself was waking, and it seemed to Emily that it was not just mere light that revealed the colours, but that the colours roused themselves for day, glowing out through the greys and blacks and browns to shine in their own right. Never had she seen anything as magical, or as beautiful.

  ‘Thank you for showing me this,’ she said to Mallen. And then, when he made no response, ‘Thank you for rescuing me, for coming after me.’

  The grin edged back then. ‘Pay my debts, understand? Be sure you do, too, when it’s your turn.’

  24

  I have walked closer than anyone would wish to come to death. I have spoken with the devils of Denland, and found them human, and I have owed my life to those that are not.

  I do not know how I should face Mary and Alice again after seeing what I have seen. I am not sure that I could go home, or that I am even fit to do so. Perhaps it is as well that such a return seems increasingly unlikely.

  Doctor Carling’s wife changed the dressings on her face and nodded in appreciation. ‘You are practically as new, Sergeant,’ she remarked. ‘You heal as fast as any I’ve known. Youth, I suppose.’

  Emily did not feel young. She had last felt young eight days ago with the arrival of dawn. That night, that impossible night, the escape across the canopy. It had seemed that she could never tire, never die or grow old.

  Now she felt about ninety, which was a good thirty years better than how she had felt the day before. It had all come home to roost, of course. As soon as she had stopped, with the camp in sight, she had found herself barely able to walk.

  Doctor Carling’s wife had told her, with some satisfaction, that she had counted some forty-seven separate wounds, bruises or strained joints on Emily’s body. Any other soldier would still have been out on sentry duty within a day, she bitterly suspected, but no other soldier had come back so miraculously from the dead. No other soldier was being talked about by half the camp. She had become the colonel’s darling, and he was determined that she would be given the best of care, whether she wanted it or whether she most emphatically did not. So it was that Sergeant Marshwic was confined to the infirmary, and would be there until, at the very least, tomorrow.

  She had told the doctor’s wife about Doctor Craulen and his medicine, and the woman had shrugged. It had meant nothing to her. She was not a doctor, after all.

  ‘I should be able to get up today,’ Emily argued. ‘I need to go back to my company.’

  ‘Your entire company has been here to see you almost every day,’ the doctor’s wife remarked drily. It was true enough; Emily was a hero, apparently, although she had thought simply escaping was something short of a hero’s traditional trials and deeds. The attention had been tiring mostly. Men and women she barely recognized had come bustling in to offer their congratulations. How do they all know me? she had wondered, as her hand had been shaken, as admiring girls of seventeen told her they wanted to be like her. Two men had even proposed marriage, and she had been forced to have Doctor Carling’s wife evict them.

  And the colonel had come, of course – he had come to her the first day she was awake. He had tired her out just by his being there, filling the infirmary with his chatter, the one well-wisher the doctor’s wife could not send away.

  And he had come with questions, dozens of questions about the Denlanders, their camp, their kit, their leader. She had answered them as truthfully as she could, and watched Captain Mallarkey write it all down. From the first few words, she had been able to tell that the colonel did not quite believe her. In his opinion she was a woman recovering from a terrible ordeal, her mind not quite right, that sort of thing. The Denlanders she described did not fit with those in his imagination, and so he had reworked her answers to fit his preconceptions.

  ‘Jolly well done, though,’ he had told her. ‘Splendid boost for the men, Marshwic. Couldn’t have asked for better. A real war-hero. There’ll be a medal for you, I shouldn’t wonder, back home. The King himself’ll put it on you.’

  ‘That would be . . . nice, sir.’ Her reply had been a weak one. He had worn her out more than the Denlanders during their forced march, not with his interrogation but his constant praise. The bonhomie of Colonel Resnic was not what she had wanted to wake to, her first day back to life.

  ‘Can’t have you just a sergeant, of course,’ he had gone on to muse. ‘Dashed shame that Mallen chap won’t be promoted. Irregular, but he’s a useful sort. Have to keep him around, I suppose. Even though he looks like such a fearful creature.’

  A very useful man, Colonel,’ she had said, with feeling.

  ‘What? I suppose so, suppose you would say that. Still, what I’m trying to say, Marshwic, hero and all, going to have to make you lieutenant. Can’t have more than one master sergeant in a company, you see.’

  He beamed at her, but the breath had gone out of her. She had felt as though she had been shot, after all, in the swamp, and not known until now. ‘Sir . . .’ had come her croak, but she had been unable to get the sentence out.

  ‘My dear girl, what’s the matter?’ The colonel was all bluff frowns and incomprehension. ‘Can’t turn down a promotion, surely?’

  ‘Colonel . . . my . . . Lieutenant Salander, Colonel? He’s lieutenant of Stag Rampant. You . . . can’t have more than one lieutenant in a company either.’

  The colonel had looked at her blankly for a moment, before understanding dawned at last. ‘Oh, yes, your cousin or something . . . ?’

  ‘My brother-in-law, Colonel.’

  ‘Ah, well, bad business that,’ he had said awkwardly, then, at her horrified face, he had hurriedly added, ‘Not dead, Marshwic. Not dead. Thinking of making him up to full captain, now that Goss isn’t coming back. Just won’t be doing any real commanding outside camp. You’ve got the company on the field.’ He was human enough that he could not look her in the face, but when he had tried to busy her with other topics she would have none of it, and had just stared at him until he found a pair of soldiers to take her to visit Tubal.

  Tubal had been moved from the doctor’s hut to the clubhouse, lying up there in a bed Brocky had set for him. It had been his face she saw first: the same face that she knew, undamaged, with two eyes and a grin – full of joy at seeing her. Only afterwards had she noticed the crutch propped up at his bedside, and only then the leg he had lost from just above the knee.

  ‘Oh, Tubal . . .’

  ‘Hell, could have been worse,’ he had pointed out. ‘You got me out of there, remember? I’d never have had the pleasure of the amputation if you hadn’t.’

  She had wanted to make some brave, clever remark to match his, to show that she was a soldier and a woman of the world. Then everything had caught up with her: the horrors and confusion of the battle; her capture; Doctor Lam’s insinuations about the King. Her eyes had filled with tears and she had knelt beside the bed and hugged Tubal close, despite her bruises, and wept into his chest for all the blood and innocence that had been lost.

  In the midst of the busy throng who came to visit her at the doctor’s hut, there had been at least a few moments with friends. First of all, Giles Scavian, who had somehow survived the shots of the Denlanders, and who had then screened the Lascanne retreat with fire until his eyes had bled burning tears. While she was lashed to a frame in the Denlander camp, he had lain collapsed on a bed right here in the infirmary, drained almost to death. She was more glad than she could say to see Giles Scavian again.
/>   And yet, as he sat by her, her hand resting in his, something stood between them. She had a world of things she wanted to say, and she could not say them to him. She could not tell him about the Denlanders, how they had really been. She could not tell him that the dreaded Doctor Lam was just an overwrought engineer with a moral dilemma. She could not tell him the lies of Denland against his beloved King. He would rage, he would go mad. He was a King’s wizard, and she did not want to see that anger. The silences between them were calming, healing, but her words were bottled up inside her, and she could not let them out.

  Later there was Sergeant Caxton, the female man’s tailor with her new crown patch sewn crooked on her shoulder. It had not made her any less pale, any less worried. The added responsibility weighed hard on her, and she obviously wished that, with Emily returned, she might return to obscurity herself. Emily had laughed at her for that, mocking her, asked her what sort of a soldier was she, that she could turn down extra pay.

  ‘When they ever get round to paying us,’ Caxton had grumbled. ‘Besides, Lieutenant, you don’t look so happy with yours. You haven’t even sewn it on.’

  Lieutenant Marshwic. It did not sound quite real to her. What fool would make her a lieutenant? The colonel would take it back before she left her sickbed, surely.

  And at last, after it seemed that everyone from all three companies had come to tell her what a hero she was, there came John Brocky and, on his arm, Marie Angelline.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, trying a smile. ‘Look at this treatment. I never got this treatment when I was laid up here.’

  ‘The quality of the treatment is inversely proportional to the quantity of the complaints, Mr Brocky,’ came the sharp voice of Doctor Carling’s wife.

  ‘Listen, Doc—’

  ‘I am not a doctor, Mr Brocky. Carry on endearing yourself to me like this and you’d better hope you never end up here again.’

  ‘I have a bottle of whisky here that’s asking for you to go into the next room and not eavesdrop on us,’ Brocky suggested, dangling the contraband at his fingertips.

  Doctor Carling’s wife approached him suspiciously, then pecked the bottle from his hand and left without another word.

  ‘God-awful woman,’ Brocky remarked, sitting. He still looked thinner than he had been when Emily had first met him. The loss of a layer of flab left him looking somehow more vulnerable than before.

  ‘I hear congratulations are in order,’ said Angelline. ‘Marshwic, you should count yourself lucky. Fat Squirrel’s second spot is empty, but they won’t give it to me. Pordevere won’t have a woman as his second, and I’ve not the clout to catch the colonel’s eye.’ She caught herself hurriedly. ‘Not that you don’t deserve it, but . . .’

  ‘I know. The name, the family. It helps,’ Emily acknowledged. She had no wish to be a lieutenant – to be in charge, for heaven’s sake – when the next assault came. She would gladly have shed her name, to dodge it.

  Brocky wrung his hands anxiously. ‘Marie, could you . . . ? There’s something I need to run by Marshwic, a private something.’

  Angelline clasped Emily’s hand. ‘See you on the line, Marshwic.’ And then she was gone.

  ‘What is it, Brocky?’

  The big man grimaced. ‘Right, well . . . I reckon I’m probably not supposed to show you this, but I don’t know the man, so it doesn’t make a pox of difference to me. I thought you’d want it, anyway.’

  He handed her a folded letter, the wax seal on it broken. She recognized the handwriting immediately and looked up at him in surprise.

  ‘Oh, we’ve had quite a correspondence on, your Mr Northway and I,’ Brocky confirmed. ‘That messenger girl of his’s been running herself ragged up and down the line from Chalcaster to Locke.’

  She opened out the letter and read it carefully, and then again.

  If I were a hero, I would set off myself, he had written. If I were a soldier . . . ‘Oh,’ she said.

  Brocky shrugged. ‘You, er . . . Your man, is he, this Northway fellow . . . ?’ and she knew he was thinking about her and Scavian.

  ‘I don’t know, Brocky. He and I used to . . . I used to hate Cristan Northway more than anyone alive: history, family history. But since the war, things have been different.’

  ‘War does that,’ observed Brocky sagely.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ she said.

  ‘Your life, your choices,’ he said. ‘Besides, all bets are off in wartime. After all, there’s no guarantee you’re going to see this Northway again, and all the letters in the world aren’t going to change that.’ At least Scavians here, followed the unspoken words.

  ‘You and Angelline seem to be . . .’

  A broad, lewd and automatic leer split his face. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes indeed. I’ve no complaints there; her neither, for that matter.’ The leer stayed put, most of it, but something retreated behind it. ‘I’ve my eye on a little practice in the capital, if it all works out. Or maybe I’ll go travelling with her players. You make plans, you know . . . despite everything.’

  ‘You’ll be well set up for whatever you do, you and Mallen both,’ she observed. ‘Cristan – Mr Northway is good, I think, for his promise.’

  ‘Not that Mallen would know what to do with the money. He’d probably try and eat it or something, damned savage.’ Brocky stood up at last, stretching, then wincing as he felt his scar pull. ‘You get some rest now. Your country’ll be calling on you soon enough.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘I won’t say anything about the letter to . . . well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m obliged, Brocky.’

  *

  And now here she was, one day away from enjoying the freedom of the camp again; just one day standing between her and the war.

  She took out Mr Northway’s letter and read it again; she had lost count of how many times she had done so.

  Too long, too late, too far. It was all wrong, she knew. There must have been a point where she could have relaxed into the idea of his love. Perhaps that point had occurred before she left for Gravenfield. Certainly it was before she had left for the front. All that time, slowly stripping herself of her hostility; all that time under his careful, sardonic wooing, and he had come close, so close. She had overshot his love, somehow. She looked back on it from her current vantage point, looked back into her past. What I might have had.

  Perhaps that moment had come and gone while she was Doctor Lam’s prisoner. Perhaps if she had returned with the others, been present at camp for it, she would have met the moment and embraced it. But now . . .

  Mortality was at her shoulder now. Her brush with the enemy had brought it into focus, where before had been just a blur. She stared down at his neat handwriting, seeing in it a tremor, a hurry, that had not been there in his earlier communications.

  What would he have done, had I not returned? Such a calm man, such a clever man. Had she not seen this letter she might have believed he would turn his affections elsewhere, and gone on with the cold precision of his life. Now . . .

  There was a fire inside him. He was not master of it, or of himself, any more.

  If I die . . .

  If she wrote back now, acknowledged his love, accepted his love, and then some Denland sharpshooter made an end of her the next day . . . She would have given him the world and then snatched it back in one swoop. She recalled – so vividly! – his face when she had gone to him, and her brother’s death had stood between them. How much worse for him to have her and to lose her forever, all at once. She herself would not place such a value on her own person, but every line of his letter, every character that he sketched out, spoke of his mind.

  Previously, the thought that he might mourn for her had comforted her. Now it distressed her. The man she would once have gladly killed was now someone whose throat she unwillingly held a knife to. The world was upside down and it had all gone wrong.

  Perhaps I should not write again.

  Perhaps I should disabuse him of his af
fection, just to save him when the . . . end comes.

  *

  She had expected to be moved out of the infirmary by now, but there were no fresh wounded to take her place, and the colonel had impressed on Doctor Carling’s wife the importance of Emily’s well-being enough that she had yet to be discharged. The walking wounded had been returned to duty, the most hopeless cases sent to Locke, to come back when the surgeons decreed. Or not, like Captain Goss, who had finally let go, accepting death as the lesser evil. So it was that she found herself spending another night there with the sickbeds all to herself, as though she was royalty who could demand a seclusion not granted to lesser mortals.

  If there had been others there recuperating with her, it might never have happened.

  Doctor Carling’s wife bedded down in the back room, while Emily slept surrounded by the emptied beds of the dead, the ghosts of old wounds. For a long while now she had not dreamt. The havoc of the days, her fearful imaginings, had quite drained that part of her that looked into the future or examined the past. Now, though, some little part of it was again set free.

  In her dream she was at Grammaine, and it was a good dream for once. She came downstairs to speak to Cook, talked of all the usual things with Alice, watched Mary feed little Francis. There was no war in that dream. Not even the spectre of it hung about them and when Tubal came indoors to embrace his wife, he had two feet to carry him.

  But she knew. Watching them, she knew, and she was waiting for the stain of the swamp to discolour the walls, the heat to begin wilting her, the crack of muskets to break the peace.

  And on and on trudged the dream, the happy little scenes. Shopping at Chalcaster, evenings by the fire, visits to friends, and always in the back of her mind she was looking for the greycoats of Denland to come creeping in, as she knew they must.

  And then there was a dance, held not at Deerlings but at some friend’s townhouse in Chalcaster, and the band struck up a merry tune and she looked around for a dance partner. But of course, there was one man cutting through the crowd towards her, and she could dance with no other because he was her mate, her lawful husband. She knew, if she but looked up a little, she could see his face clearly, resolve him as one or the other of them, but in the dream she did not dare.