‘I don’t care!’ he was shouting to a nervous man hovering by his side, his voice hoarse and strangled. ‘If they can march then they go!’
‘But their gear is weather damaged,’ the nervous man told him. ‘All of it.’
‘I don’t care! Just do what you need to get them moving!’
Curl waited for him to take a breath before approaching. ‘Excuse me,’ she tried, then bent over the desk to be heard better, placing her hands carefully so as not to disturb the papers there, or the stylus and the jar of ink. ‘Excuse me,’ she said even louder.
The officer turned his rounded eyes on her. She watched them trace a figure of eight. ‘What is it now?’ he growled. ‘You want to kiss a sweetheart goodbye?’
On the desk, her hands screwed themselves into small, tight fists. ‘I’m here to enlist,’ she told him.
The man opened his mouth and kept it that way. Around him, the silence spread outwards until the room was wholly quiet and every man was looking at her.
‘Go home, girl,’ he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘We haven’t need for any more camp whores, believe me.’
Curl seized the inkwell in her hand without thinking. She flung it at the man and watched it bounce off his forehead even as she realized what she had done.
‘You little bitch!’ he screeched as he clutched his forehead in shock. She found herself picking up the jar for the stylus too, and swinging her arm back to finish the job.
But then a hand gripped her own from behind, and the jar was plucked from her grasp.
She spun around in a hot temper, looking up as she did so. A man towered there in black leather armour, heavily scarred about the face and neck.
‘Bad girl,’ he said from behind his thick beard. ‘You almost took the man’s eye out.’
‘I was trying to,’ she said in a pant.
He laughed, and then the men around him were chuckling too.
‘You’re serious, about wishing to enlist?’
‘This is the recruitment office, isn’t it?’
The man looked at the officer behind the desk, then studied Curl for a moment.
‘Can you stitch wounds?’
She thought of her father the physician; his scalp wound that had needed stitching once, how he had talked her through it while her fingers trembled.
‘Well enough,’ she told him. ‘I know some medicines too, home folk stuff. Herbs and ointments.’
‘Give your details to Hooch over there. Our medicos might make some use of you. I’m Major Bolt, by the way.’
She smiled, opened her mouth to thank him.
‘No, don’t thank me, girl,’ he said, holding up one of his large hands. ‘You can curse me in your own time – but just don’t bloody thank me.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Eyes
People seldom remembered what the old fort on the hill had originally been called. They simply knew it now as the ‘Eyes’, a name that referred to the dirty faces that could always be seen pressing against its thickly barred windows, their desperate glares staring out from their confinement at a world that was passing them by.
The Eyes had long since ceased to be a fort. It stood on a hill in the Fallow District of the city, a brooding presence that overlooked the eastern wall and the houses and workshops of the area. These days it was used solely to hold veterans of the war, those soldiers who were siege-shocked badly enough to have become a danger to themselves or even to others; the Specials in particular, those at least who fought in the tunnels beneath the walls.
At times, often when the mood in the city itself was tense, the inmates would call out to the Red Guards stationed atop the eastern wall with jokes or obscenities, or they would shout at the citizens of the district surrounding it, ordinary folk going about their business, too polite to look up at the lunatics on the hill.
That evening, Bahn couldn’t tell if anyone was calling out from the windows of the place, for a crowd of Red Guards was causing a din at the wrought-iron front gates of the institution, so that he could hear nothing else but their shouting. He pressed through to the front of the crowd and found that the gates were closed. On the other side of them stood an opposing group of jailers, clad in thick leather aprons and armed with cudgels. They were shouting back through the gates just as vehemently.