‘We can’t surrender, sir,’ the ensign insisted. ‘You know . . . Doctor Lam, he does terrible things to our soldiers if he can catch them.’
‘I’m not surrendering, Caxton. I’m going to parley.’
‘They’ll shoot you dead the moment you step out.’
‘They may well do,’ she admitted. Either through malice or sheer over-enthusiasm on their part, the Denlanders could end this ploy of hers within seconds of its start.
She took a deep breath, but her courage failed and she could not bring herself to stand up. ‘If this fails, Caxton . . .’ Then what? Make a run for it? Holdfast? Die in a blaze of musket fire? ‘If this fails, you have command.’ What a pathetic failure, what a dodging of responsibility, she reproached herself. But if I knew what she should do, I would be doing it instead of this.
She stood up, not allowing herself to think about it further. There was a single shot.
It took all of three heartbeats to convince her she was still alive, clasping the musket to her chest, with her eyes closed like a child scared of the monster. Above her, the flag drooped limply, such as it was.
For a second her voice would do nothing but utter a croak, but she finally forced out: ‘Parley! Parley!’
Her words dropped into the great well of silence that the indigenes had made out of their interlinked gazes. Every one of the damned creatures was looking at her.
‘Step forwards,’ came a voice from the greenery above, and she did so, holding her musket at her shoulder, as though she was drilling at Gravenfield for Master Sergeant Bowler again. She stopped a good five paces from the foot of the slope, squinting upwards. She could make out perhaps half a dozen forms amongst the trees, knowing that there were far more on either side.
‘Parley!’ she yelled again. ‘Someone come down here to talk. I’m not going up there.’
All of which assumed they had any interest in talking but, if they hadn’t, then this had been doomed from the start.
For such a long time, nothing stirred above. She could feel the tension among her soldiers behind her, sighting along their muskets; and the tension of the Denlanders above.
Most of all, she could sense the indigenes and their communal attention.
The branches parted above, and a man stepped out. He had a musket in one hand, and looked anything but happy, but nonetheless he made his way down the slope to her. He was the first live Denlander she had had the opportunity to study for more than a handful of seconds.
He was shorter than she was, a little man of no more than four inches past five foot tall. Short dark hair, she saw, and a pale face, though that could be fear. Now that she had time to examine it, his grey uniform did not look military at all, more like any outdoorsman’s gear: a tough coat down to the knee, with high boots and leather breeches. His collar was turned up against the mist. He had no pistol, no sabre, but there was a short-hafted wood-axe in his belt.
On his way down, he seemed to be studying her with just as much intensity, until finally he stood before her and she was able to look down at him.
His round face was set in a grim expression. His every muscle was clearly waiting for the shot from behind her that would end him. She supposed that, for a man in his position with superior forces at his beck and call, it must have taken some courage to meet her here in the open, before the guns.
‘Sergeant Emily Marshwic,’ she told him. ‘Stag Rampant company, Royal Army of Lascanne.’
He nodded. ‘Provost Dragan Stedter, army of the Republic of Denland.’ She had no idea whether this made him more important than her, or less so, or even whether ‘Dragan’ was his name or part of his rank.
‘I see it’s true,’ he added. His voice had an odd accent, a little like Marie Angelline’s, clipping the consonants and sharpening the vowels. ‘Women fighting for Lascanne.’
She frowned. ‘And so?’
‘So nothing. It was just something I’d heard.’ It was obviously something he had not believed, until now.
She found herself wondering what this man had done before the war. They couldn’t all be career killers in Denland. Perhaps he was a tailor, too, or a printer. Now that she saw him close up, he certainly did not have the