her pack and weapons dragging at her. That extra sense told her that pursuit was not so close now. The Denlanders had turned wary at her choice of battlefield. Their new guns would be less use within a sabre’s reach.
Beside her, Caxton was white as a sheet, wide-eyed, gasping for breath. It made Emily feel better to see someone suffering as much as she was.
Her eyes on the ensign, her feet hit uneven ground and she tripped, virtually dragging Caxton down on top of her.
She had braced herself to hit the ground, but the impact came late, she and Caxton tripping down a shallow slope, jarring every joint and bone before separating at the foot, each clawing for their own musket.
There had been enough stones and shards to leave her black and blue all over and she cursed aloud, unable to stop herself. Caxton was sitting up, staring with a slack jaw at the vista all around them.
‘What? Is it the . . . ?’ And Emily stopped, for she too had seen.
She recalled the stone monument and the oddments of ancient masonry that the swamp still displayed. Well, here was the mother-lode.
It was impossible to know how much of it there was, but she guessed the slope she had fallen down must be built on it, stone on stone beneath the green, beneath the mud. All around them the ground bulked out and away in great lumpy mounds. There could be a town here, even a city stretching all around them, and none would have guessed it from any vantage point but here. Here alone the mud had given up its treasures to the air.
They were surrounded by great stones, pale beneath the filth, their age-weathered carving still half visible despite the ravages of the ages. Here was a pedestal, broken and rough, where a statue might have stood. There a doorway still perilously standing, though the wall it had pierced was long fallen. Here she made out three tumbled sides of a house as large as Grammaine, or perhaps one huge room of a mansion fit to shame even Deerlings.
Sixteen of her soldiers were there with them, sitting or standing and clustered close.
‘Sergeant . . .’ Caxton began in a whisper. By her feet a monstrous stone head glared up, half buried. Its blank white eyes were huge, its mouth a lattice of fangs.
‘I know, Ensign. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not on any of the maps.’ Some of the half-demolished walls were still twelve feet high at their jagged crests.
‘Not the place, Sergeant . . . Them.’
Emily followed the other woman’s gaze, and the greenery of moss and weed became, in a blink, a crouching indigene, staring back at her with great featureless eyes that a moment before had seemed mere blemishes, two round fruits or leaves.
After that first surprise she was reminded, of all things, of picnics up on the meadows of the Wolds; how the grass there would seem clean and clear, until she had spotted just one ant. And then, the more she looked, the more of them she saw, until there was not a patch of ground all around that was not crawling with them.
Thus it was here: everywhere her gaze fell amongst the stones, she met the pale eyes of an indigene. They were crouching like gargoyles on the stones, or froglike out on the ground, or like apes in the branches of trees. Tens of them, hundreds. She began to feel a new fear well up in her, because there were just too many. So very many of the beastly little creatures could never bode well. Their colossally multiplied attention intimidated her, for every single one of the creatures was staring at the men and women from Lascanne, and there was real feeling in that massed gaze: hatred, fear, loathing. Emily felt pinned by their inexplicable regard, like a moth under glass.
Details continued dropping into her mind, one by one. It was only gradually that she registered the canes lashed with vines, the woven reeds; the way every standing stone wall had some kind of hovel leaning against it; the shelters and the intricately woven roofs. Eventually she could hold off the thought no longer, and the balance tipped in her mind from ‘city of the ancients’ to ‘indigene village’.
‘Oh, damn,’ she whispered. For of course these folk were under treaty, technically. She doubted whether the colonel would care much if they upset the natives, but Mallen certainly would.