They were still beyond effective musket range when they stopped, and she saw the first rank drop to its knees, and then two ranks of guns were directed at the Lascanne camp. Emily crouched back behind what had once been the colonel’s old oak table, before necessity had cannibalized it. There was not a piece of wood left in the camp, and tents had been taken down to stuff empty crates with canvas. Pots and pans and any spare metal goods filled other boxes, so that they would stop a musket ball. There was no camp any more, in fact. This barricade and the trench and the huts were all.
‘What are they waiting for?’ Caxton asked. Emily risked poking her head around one of the gaps they had left in the wall for the trench party. The Denlanders were standing exactly as before, waiting. She saw several figures forward of their lines, watching the enemy, and caught the glint of what might have been a telescope lens in the wan sunlight.
‘I think we’ve surprised them,’ she announced. ‘I think they made a mistake attacking us, night before last. That gave us a chance to prepare.’
She wondered how things would have turned out with the colonel still in charge. Would they be where they were now, or would they be out in the swamps again, trying to fight a conventional war, and dying for it? How surprising that Pordevere in charge was so much more moderate than Pordevere the dashing subordinate.
She could see a few men she took for officers having a hurried consultation in front of the Denlander army. The Denlander soldiers had stood down their guns, and were waiting patiently. Did she detect some agitation amongst their ranks at the idea of charging the enemy lines? She was sure it was there. She had begun to be grateful for that quirk of fate that had put her into Doctor Lam’s hands. It had given her an insight: they were a nation of clerks, and not easily moved to action.
And, despite all that, they have us caught here in our own camp.
She hoped Locke would send reinforcements soon. She hoped there were any troops to send.
Surely the King’s generals must see that if the Levant falls, the Couchant will be flanked and must fall too.
‘Sir!’ Caxton exclaimed. ‘They’re going!’
Emily looked again, and saw the grey uniforms filing back into the swamps in an orderly fashion, without ever a shot having been fired. A ragged cheer went up along the barricades.
‘Trench party, get back to work!’ she yelled. ‘I want it finished before nightfall.’ Her words struck them cold, and the cheers died. We have won nothing yet.
‘They’re having to deal with a reversed world,’ Emily said thoughtfully. ‘If they were in our position, we’d never take them. Their guns would slice us down without mercy. But they’re out there and we’re in here, so they have to deal with the problem they usually throw at us. They have to get close enough to winkle us out. Darkness is the best way of achieving that.’ She leant back against the barricade, exhausted from lost sleep. ‘If we had the chance then, yes, mines, pits, anything . . . but this is all we have.’
‘Right, sir.’ Caxton gripped her gun tightly and Emily realized the girl was scared, and did not blame her. If she let herself pause for a moment, then fear would grip her too.
‘I want you to make sure all our perimeter lanterns get lit. We want to allow ourselves as much warning as possible,’ she said, to give the other woman something to think about.
‘Yes, Lieutenant . . . Lieutenant?’
‘Yes, Sergeant?’
‘You’ve been a good officer, Lieutenant.’
Emily stared at her, and the sergeant looked down at her boots.
‘When you were promoted to sergeant, a lot of the others didn’t like having a woman over them – even some of us women didn’t. They said it was just because you were Lieutenant Salander’s sister, or something. But I wanted to say, I think you do a really good job, sir. Everyone says you’re the best thing that’s happened to this company for a long time.’
Emily felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She wanted to shake Caxton, to shout at her, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Instead, she said, ‘All I ever did was what I had to do. Or what someone had to do, and I