heat, a dry heat. Bear and Stag were all assembled, with Leopard still falling into place. She had seen Captain Mallarkey and his lieutenant come out from the colonel’s headquarters, with Mallarkey looking worried and unhappy, a peacetime career officer caught out by the war.
Mallarkey stopped for a few words with Pordevere, the younger man making some jest, laughing out loud. Beside him, Marie Angelline cast a look over Emily’s way, saluting wryly.
‘Morning, Em.’ Tubal had greeted her with a smile on his face. ‘Ready to face the music?’
‘I should be,’ she said to him. ‘I’ve done this before. Why do I feel like this still, Tubal? Shouldn’t I be . . . numb to it by now?’
His shrug. ‘Useless bloody business, really. Hell, it all still makes me want to wet myself, Em, every time. Morning, Mallen!’
The master sergeant loped over towards them through the camp, with two dozen or so following in his wake: his picked men. ‘Don’t like this, Salander. Denlander scouts are getting good. Better woodsmen than this lot. Going to be a heavy day.’
‘Every day is,’ Tubal had told him. ‘Neither you nor I can change the colonel’s mind when he’s set on something, you know that.’
Mallen spat, shaking his head, and said to his scouts: ‘Let’s go earn a living.’
Emily looked at Leopard Passant, now almost in place. Her thought then was: Not long to go now. Her thought in retrospect would be: What was I in such a hurry for? From the inside pocket of her jacket, she took out the letter that had come to her only half an hour before. She had been given no chance to answer it. Glancing backwards, she could have seen Penny Belchere still standing with Brocky beside the store.
‘Remember that. Make a note that you must not die.’
I will do my best, Mr Northway . . . Cristan. For the first time, in her mind she was Emily and he was Cristan, without qualification or equivocation. Unbarred emotion, at last, from Cristan Northway? From herself?
She had felt the weight inside her rise up, as if to choke her, her shirt too tight, her jacket restricting, the helmet clenched around her head.
And she wanted to weep. But she was a sergeant and her men were watching.
If I die, he will weep for me.
If I die, I will die loved.
She heard the shout come from Mallarkey’s master sergeant, calling out their readiness.
‘Time to put on a good face, Em.’ Tubal’s hand was light on her shoulder.
Together they had marched to the head of the company.
*
She crawled her way over to him through the mud, her musket forgotten behind her.
Be alive, Tubal! What will I say to Mary if you are not?
There were two soldiers crouching just ahead, each one firing as the other reloaded, their minds gone to that soldier’s place that revolved only around the present moment. Then Tubal was before her, not stretched out and lifeless as she had feared, but clutching weakly at his leg, breath emerging raggedly through his teeth.
‘Tubal!’
‘God, Em . . . I . . .’ His eyes were closed, face screwed up in pain. ‘How is it?’
She choked when she looked at the wound, a hole punched bloodily through his knee. But not fatal – not yet. ‘We need to get you out of here!’
He tried to say something, tried to smile, but the effort was too much. He looked whiter than she had ever seen a living man.
‘Stay with me,’ she told him. ‘Can you . . . ?’ She saw he could not walk or even stand. She needed more men, men to delegate to get him away from here and back to the camp somehow.
All around them the battle raged, with the Lascanne forces desperately returning fire into the Denlanders’ double line. The air was smogged with gunsmoke, flecked with flying shreds of leaf and branch.
She got a hand under Tubal’s shoulders, another tugging at his belt, and dragged him a few paces, but it was more than she could do to haul him any distance like that. She did not have the strength.
‘Tubal . . .’ He could not hear her. His face was locked in an agonized grimace, his fists shaking.
The crackle of musket fire was almost constant now but she heard, through the roar of it, one of the soldiers say, ‘Sir, they’re coming.’
She risked a look. The Denlanders were advancing, their rear line moving through the fore, taking up new positions, the front line