‘But what could you actually betray? The location of your camp? We know it. Your leader’s plans? After the battle we have had, they will all be thrown out of alignment. You cannot know them.’
‘So what do you want from me? Something worth . . .’ – no sense cushioning the blow – ‘torture?’
Doctor Lam sighed. ‘Personalities, Sergeant. Your thoughts on your leaders. How they act and react, what they are likely to do.’
‘Oh.’ She thought of what she could say to damn Mallarkey and Pordevere, the colonel, even Tubal. ‘Well, then, I am afraid I cannot oblige.’
‘National character even,’ the old man continued. ‘Let me into the Lascanne mind. Let me understand you.’
‘I thought you already did,’ she said, almost goading. ‘You know we’re all war-mad killers, don’t you? That we bring our children up on blood and bonemeal? Surely you’ve all heard that.’
She looked about her at the soldiers within earshot, and was a little shocked to recognize belief in some of their faces.
‘I cannot let myself acknowledge such stories. You are human beings, as we are. There must be some give in you, some compromise!’ Doctor Lam threw his hands in the air, startling her. His mildness fell away from him for a moment. ‘Sergeant, I am a man of peace – you may scoff, but it is so. I fight wars so that others, less able, less moderate, do not do so in my place. I need to find a way, Sergeant: a way to conclude this war that does not end in . . . genocide.’
She let the new word fall into place inside her head. ‘Geno . . . cide? The killing of– what? Of a family?’
‘Of a race, Sergeant. Of a nation. Of . . . everyone in it.’ He let his anger go, in one long sigh. ‘I cannot let Denland lose the Levant front. I cannot let my country lose this conflict with yours. The war must be won but . . . what will we destroy, of our way of life, in order to save it? Will we become cursed by history for all time, because of what we did to defeat the stubborn Lascans?’
‘You would . . . ?’
‘If Lascanne fights to the last man, the last woman, child even, what option do we have?’
It will not come to that. There will be a surrender. But when – and would it be in time? At what point would this genocide the old man spoke of gather such speed that it could not be stopped?
We will have to win this war, for this reason.
‘I must leave you, for now.’ He held a hand out, and one of the soldiers helped him to his feet.
‘Doctor Lam?’
‘Sergeant?’ He turned back to her with a raised eyebrow.
‘Doctor, you said this war is over for me.’
‘Quite over, no doubt of it.’ Again that suggestion that he considered her, for that reason, profoundly lucky.
‘I’ll be sent to Denland?’
‘There are camps there for such as are captured. A great many of the original Lascanne invasion force were cut off and taken to them, you understand. You will be one of few women there, I fear.’
‘There’s no harm in telling me then . . . what makes your guns so good?’
Doctor Lammegeier stared at her for a moment, and then cocked his head back and laughed, a scholarly, dry sound. ‘The spirit of Lascanne,’ he observed. ‘And you will teach the message to some bird you will send back to your camp, or you will carve it, unnoticed, on the bark of trees. No, Sergeant, I am a coward, as you say. I will not underestimate a warrior woman of Lascanne. If you have not puzzled out our secret, then I will not tell you. Instead, think on what I have said to you. Today and tonight, I organize my scouts and receive my reports. Tomorrow we will talk again. I am afraid I will discover what I need to know, Sergeant. I make no excuses. This is war.’
She thought long and hard on what he had said, but came to no further conclusion than: We will have to win this war.
Night grew on them, leaching the colour from the swamp in a few scant minutes, as the distant sun crested the Couchant mountains. She saw the Denlanders settle down, huddling on every piece of dry ground around her, roosting like birds. Still the camp was not settled: latecomers caught up with them and established their billets