Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The bulk of the camp’s defenders had halted at the ravaged barricade, but others kept following the Denlanders out into the night. Those were Pordevere’s men following his plan to chase the enemy back, to catch them in the trees before they could re-form. But they were so few, so few.

  Emily forced herself towards the barricade, because she had to stop them. The camp simply did not have the numbers or reserves of strength to carry out his plan. ‘Captain Pordevere!’ she was calling out, though he must be too far to hear her, even if he was able to hear at all.

  Marie! Marie Angelline was amongst those men and women running off into the night. And she knew how the Denlanders would react. She could see it in her mind: the fleeing men pouring past a battle line re-forming within the trees, the guns lifted to their shoulders . . .

  She heard a single explosion of gunfire, perfectly synchronized, and recognized it for the end. She did not even hear the cries of the men and women who had followed Pordevere, but felt them nonetheless. She found herself already outside the barricade, kneeling amongst grey-clad bodies and staring out at the night.

  ‘Marie!’ she called desperately, but the only voice capable of covering such a distance was Marie’s own.

  No sound now from the direction of the swamps. No sound of gunfire or of fighting, and she knew that Pordevere and his brave few were all dead.

  ‘Oh, Marie.’ She felt a shuddering grief overtake her. ‘God damn you, Marie!’ As sobs forced their way from within her battered ribs, she hugged herself to suppress them, recalling in her mind’s eye poor Marie Angelline’s face as she had last seen it: so full of courage and fire, so gallant, so proud.

  27

  I am picked apart.

  Each day, some new scrap of me is pecked out. I am losing those things that make me human.

  Take me away from this place before it devours me, piece by piece.

  But, of course, you cannot come here, and I cannot leave.

  ‘Here, Lieutenant.’ How faint the voice that finally answered her across the field. The cries of the other wounded nearly drowned it, as their comrades manhandled them back towards the barricade, but Emily caught it, like the voice of a ghost.

  ‘Marie?’

  ‘Emily . . . I’m here . . .’

  She crawled over the bodies – the red-jacketed ones, the soldiers who had died in Pordevere’s desperate flanking attack. ‘Marie, I can’t see you,’ she rasped, her voice raw from all the shouting. ‘Please, help me find you.’

  ‘Here,’ came a voice almost from beneath her, and she looked down upon Marie Angelline. The woman’s jacket and breeches were slick with blood. There was a shot wound below her collarbone, and the sweep of a hatchet had laid open her leg. Her left hand was crooked awkwardly about the hilt of a knife that was still buried deep in her side.

  ‘Emily . . .’ she said, her great voice shrunk to a shadow of itself. ‘Emily . . .’

  ‘I’ll get you back. We’ll get Doctor Carling’s wife to . . .’ To what? And how many of the wounded will there be?

  ‘I fought . . .’ Marie said. ‘You have never seen such fighting. The crowds would have loved it. Always . . . I was always good with a sword . . . but there are so few parts for a woman that allow you to . . .’

  ‘Please, Marie, save your strength.’ Emily braced herself for the effort and called to the nearest soldiers. ‘Hey, you over there! Stretcher here, now!’ The last word turned into a racking cough that set every tendon on fire.

  ‘Tell John . . .’

  ‘Tell him yourself. I swear to you, you’ll have the chance,’ Emily replied. Marie’s hand was weakly on her arm, her bloodied lips curving into a smile.

  ‘Tell him I was magnificent,’ she said. ‘Tell him I love him, please.’

  ‘You can tell him. He’d want to hear it from you,’ Emily insisted. Two soldiers reached her, still flinching from an imagined new attack from the darkness. Mallen’s scouts were out, keeping an eye on the treeline.

  ‘Get her up,’ Emily told the stretcher-bearers. ‘For God’s sake, be gentle.’ She saw that they were looking as battered and haggard as she felt.

  They lifted free the dead who were lying across Marie and put their hands upon her. With nothing more than their eyes, they counted three together and then lifted her, in one lurching movement, onto the stretcher. She gritted her teeth about a gasp of pain, but her hand was momentarily strong as a vice on Emily’s arm.

  When they carried her back towards the camp, while the rest of the wounded were found and fetched, Emily stayed slumped on the ground amongst the dead, trying to find the strength to follow them.

  *

  The headquarters hut seemed so empty now, and those that survived were not the people they had once been. Emily had looked at her own face in Tubal’s shaving mirror that morning, and seen it colourful with bruises that rivalled Mallen’s tattoos. Her hair had been matted with blood where the grenade shrapnel had dented her helm, and blood from her cut lip had smeared her chin with a red beard. Even after she had washed it and washed and washed it again, the face in the mirror looked more like the faces of those lying cold and still out on the battlefield than that of any living thing. She walked stiffly every muscle aching, and her right palm was raw where the hilts of a succession of sabres had rubbed the skin off it.

  Looking around the table, she could only think that she had got off lightly. Last night she had seen the Denlanders blow gaps in their defences, and now those gaps were mirrored among the commanding officers of the army. The colonel, dead. Justin Lascari, dead. Captain Pordevere, for his sins, dead. Lieutenant Gallien, Mallarkey’s aide, was wounded, unconscious and not expected to recover. Master Sergeant Marie Angelline was clinging still at the border of life and death, with John Brocky weeping silently beside her in the infirmary.

  And here was Tubal, one leg gone and a bandage about his head where a Denlander musket butt had knocked him off his perch. Here was Giles Scavian with his hand stuffed into his shirt to hide the loss of two fingers that a sharpshooter had taken from him during the height of the fighting. Here was Captain Mallarkey, miraculously unharmed. No man would testify that he had hidden himself away in the Leopard Passant hut, but there was none who were able to say that they had seen him amidst the fighting last night. His hands twitched on the tabletop, clutching at one another, and his lip trembled. He would not meet the gaze of his peers.

  Mallen came in just then, fresh from scouting, and gave the assembled a lazy salute. Save for minor scrapes and powder burns, he too had come through the fighting unscathed, though in his case not for want of the enemy trying.

  ‘Well, man, what’s the situation? Report!’ Mallarkey ordered him.

  ‘Soon as we pulled back with our wounded, they set a cordon just within the trees,’ Mallen said. ‘Plenty of men and plenty of wounded. They’re acting like men waiting for reinforcements.’

  ‘Reinforcements,’ Mallarkey echoed. ‘God help us.’

  ‘Don’t think they’ll come through today, but soon enough,’ Mallen finished. ‘More than that, couldn’t get close enough to see.’ He stood back to lean against the doorframe. It was his first concession to how tired he must feel.

  ‘Well . . .’ Mallarkey glanced around for Tubal, and then flinched under the man’s stare. ‘Look, it seems clear enough what the lay of the land is.’

  ‘Does it, Captain?’ Tubal replied.

  ‘Well, look, you’re new to a captain’s rank, Salander, but, let me tell you, we’re in a bad spot here.’ Mallarkey was working his way towards where he wanted to go. ‘It seems to me . . . it seems very much that in this situation there would be no dishonour in a . . . strategic withdrawal. To Locke, for example. We could reinforce there and then take stock, so to speak. I’m sure you can see what I mean.’

  Tubal exchanged glances with Emily. ‘Captain, this is the choke point. At this camp we control the entire Levant front. They could get some scouts past us, but no substantial body of men. Hell, that’s why w
e’re here.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘There are a hundred ways around Locke, even if we could find reinforcements there. They could have two companies of men up behind the Couchant army before we could do anything about it.’

  ‘If we retreat from here, we’re not just conceding them the Levant, Captain,’ Scavian added. ‘We’re giving them the war.’

  Mallarkey again clenched his fists on the table. ‘Well, what . . . I ask you, what in God’s name do you expect us to do?’

  Tubal hesitated before speaking, and Emily knew it was because he was taking the lives of them all – of every soldier in the camp – in his hands. ‘Hold out,’ he said at last.

  ‘Hold out? My God, man, is that it?’

  ‘I don’t see there’s anything else left to us.’

  Mallarkey stood up suddenly. ‘Now, you listen to me, you tradesman. I have seniority here. My God, I was an officer before you were ever drafted, Salander. I’ve told you what else is left to us. There’s no dishonour in leaving. It’s a military necessity.’

  ‘Dishonour?’ Scavian said. ‘We would have failed the King. We would have lost the war. If we, here in this room, make a decision to abandon this camp, we would be betraying Lascanne. We would be betraying His Majesty. Our names would go down in every history book as the greatest villains of the age.’

  Mallarkey bared his teeth unhappily. ‘Well, yes, but . . .’ He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Emily recalled that Scavian, as a Warlock, might be said to outrank him.

  ‘Captain,’ Tubal said, ‘do you want to return to Locke?’ It was something he had discussed with the other Survivors, and they all watched Mallarkey for his response.

  ‘I . . . You’ve already heard what I have to say,’ Mallarkey replied uncertainly.

  ‘No, not us. You,’ Tubal said. ‘Do you want to go back to Locke.’ He took a breath before reciting the words that they had hammered out, that he had rehearsed like an actor. ‘It would be useful to have someone with authority to go and explain our situation to them, there. They need to know how badly we need the reinforcements. You could go and get us resupplied.’

  Mallarkey’s eyes dodged between them, from Tubal to Emily, Emily to Scavian. They had put only the thinnest varnish of pretence on this offer. He was being given the chance to run away and he knew it, and knew that they knew.

  He drew himself up, and for a moment they thought he would rise to the occasion and decide to stay, but then he said, ‘I . . . think that would be . . . a wise course of action. Yes, I’ll go today . . . No sense in waiting. After all,’ he gave them a smile that was a ghastly rictus of self-knowledge, ‘we need those reinforcements as quickly as possible.’

  After he had gone off to pack his meagre possessions, Mallen came to join them at the table.

  ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘One less thing to worry about.’ His voice had been the most vehement in speaking for the plan. ‘That makes you the colonel, Salander.’

  Tubal shrugged. ‘I’m open to suggestions. I wonder how many more grenades the Denlanders have.’

  ‘Enough, I’m sure,’ Scavian said. ‘Who knew they would use them?’

  ‘They must have been husbanding them all the way through the swamps just for this,’ Emily guessed.

  ‘We’re lucky they didn’t think to bring a cannon,’ Mallen said gloomily.

  *

  She found the quartermaster sitting at one edge of the barricade, beside a sharp-toothed hole the Denland grenades had made, picking at splinters and staring out at the swamps. The sun was crawling behind the cliffs to the west, the dusk creeping in by stages along with the swamp-exhaled mist.

  ‘Brocky,’ she said. He looked up, and she saw his face was blotchy with tears.

  ‘Marshwic.’ He shuffled sideways along the wood to give her a place to sit, and she joined him.

  ‘I’m sorry about Marie.’

  He sniffed. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘To be . . . so full of life, to shine so bright. You’d never have thought . . .’ He choked, then continued as best he could. ‘She never thought she’d be hurt. She thought she was immortal.’

  ‘Or she acted it, for the others,’ Emily agreed. ‘She was right in the thick of it, they said. She was right beside Pordevere when he led them in. There were so many wounded then, and she was . . .’

  His shoulders began shaking and she trailed off, not sure of what else to say.

  ‘I . . . never had luck with women,’ he got out. ‘They never looked twice at me. Who would? That one I told you about, when I was engaged . . . she robbed me blind when she left. Just after the money – and precious little I had of it. More than that . . . beyond that . . . my whole life with no female company but the whores my purse would stretch to. I had no hope. Bachelor-born, that was me. Then . . . her. She was my sun, Marshwic. She was my bloody sun from the moment I set eyes on her. She lit up my whole bloody world. How did I come to find her? And how did she come to like me? Not that mummery in the swamps, acting the fool and getting shot, she saw right through that. She saw . . . God only knows what she bloody saw in me.’ He sat hunched over his balled hands, pressing his grief into his belly. ‘And I will never ever have another woman like her. How could I? There’ll never be another like her.’

  She wanted to put her arms around him, to comfort him in some way that did not involve the painful business of putting words to it, but his pain was so intense and private that she did not dare touch him.

  ‘She . . . she might still recover, Brocky She’s strong. She’s stronger than any of us. If anyone can pull through, it’s her.’

  He looked at her then, and she could not at first identify the precise emotion that twisted his expression, but he put a hand out and covered hers with it. She realized then that it was compassion – for her – that moved him.

  ‘I thought you knew,’ he said. ‘I thought you must have known. She’s dead, Marshwic . . . Emily. She’s dead this hour gone.’

  She stared into his tortured face and then she put her arms around him and buried her face in his grimy shirt, the tide of her fought-down feelings rising at last, and for a long time they held each other in remembrance of her dead friend and his dead lover.

  *

  They buried her where all the other dead were buried, though, at Brocky’s intractable insistence, they gave her a grave all to herself. Shortage of ground had meant that most of the fallen had been piled in four to a hole, and Father Burnloft had not even attempted to climb the vast mountain of dead names that they had walked away from. The dead Denlanders they buried too, in a mass gravepit, all tumbled together, officers and men, a great hole full of broken dreams, sundered families and wasted lives. It gave Emily no heart, nor any of them, to see that there were twice as many dead men in grey than there were dead men and women in red.

  *

  It took them all by surprise, eight days later, when the reinforcements actually arrived. That, relieved of the stresses of the front, Captain Mallarkey would actually carry out his duty, had not occurred to anyone.

  They approached slowly from the south, mud-caked and exhausted from the trek. Mallen and Emily went out to take a closer look, and counted one hundred and thirty-one of them.

  ‘Green,’ Mallen observed. ‘Boys and camp followers.’

  He was right. These were spare staff from the Locke support detachment: military clerks, cooks and broom-pushers pressed into service. About half had seen uniform before; the rest had to be shown which end of a musket was pointed at the enemy. They did not even have the benefit of the truncated training Emily herself had received. She found herself feeling keenly sorry for them that, in their inexperience, their first taste of war would be here where the hammer would fall hardest.

  Not that the hammer hadn’t fallen close by a few times already. Since their savage and costly assault on the camp, only turned away by the courage and sacrifice of Pordevere and Marie Angelline, the Denlanders had made two further forays against the Lascanne d
efences.

  The first time they had come out at dusk once more, and fired five or six rounds into the camp from beyond the useful range of the Lascanne guns, and everyone had been ranged at the patched barricades, waiting for them to charge. They had not, though. They had merely stood there until nightfall made them invisible, and then melted back into the trees. Emily had no idea whether it was some ploy to catch the defenders off guard, or whether the enemy’s nerve had simply failed. She knew that, after all the fathers, sons and brothers cast away in the first assault, she would not want to be in their position now. Still less did she want to be in her own position. Given a choice, she would rather be anywhere else.

  The second attack, only a day before the reinforcements arrived, had been a different affair entirely. They had tried loosing a few rounds at their customary range, but then had come right in, firing all the while, determined to make another fight of it. The Lascanne line had held together under the direction of Emily and Mallen, two of the most unlikely battlefield officers imaginable. The Denlanders had taken serious losses on their way in, and then discovered further ill news. John Brocky had spent days decanting sharp stones and shaved metal into glass jars, which he then stocked with gunpowder and stopped with wax and oiled fuses. Now Lascanne, too, had its makeshift grenades, and it was these that met the charging Denlanders, before they could use their own. Emily remembered watching the flashes and the ground-churning explosions as the Denlander grenadiers had their own weapons set off in their hands and inside their packs.

  That attack had not reached the barricade. The Denlanders had fled, leaving yet more of their mystically superior guns for the Lascanne forces. They had been seized on, those guns, by men who thought to exploit their magic, but each man who tried one found only that the little leather-sewn lead balls that were Denlander ammunition took longer to ram down the guns’ muzzles.

  How strange and silent the night had seemed, after the Denlanders had fled and the wounded were taken to the infirmary. Emily had stood at the barricade, and the knowledge that she would likely meet another dawn had broken on her like the dawn itself. Am I alive? I am alive! It was as though the hour of her death had come and gone, and the grim spectre himself was overdue. In such moments, when the world held its breath, anything might happen.