Denlanders, till the dust had risen high and the ground had trembled. The Denlanders, from all accounts, had bunched themselves close, and they had looked frightened and ready to break.
But they had not broken. They fired and fired again, twin lines kneeling and standing, then letting the next pair of lines advance into place ahead of them. The hammer of rifle shot into the charging horsemen was almost continuous, whilst here and there, across the mass of galloping riders, the plumes of cannon shell burst and scattered the carcasses of men and horses alike.
The major could not tell for sure if the charge had slowed, or if it was just that the front ranks of riders were being scorched away so fast that it merely seemed so. For the Denlanders had held firm, and just fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded. They had gone on slaughtering men and slaughtering their mounts until dust was all that moved in the air, and not one man, not one mount of all the cream of the Lascanne army was left standing.
And through it all, the Denlanders had not paused in their advance, rank after rank, nor did they pause even when the riders had fallen, but still moved forward as inexorably as a press or a mill, as steadily as the rumbling traction-guns that crushed dead and wounded beneath their massive wheels while they lurched towards the soldiers of Lascanne.
There had been, the major said offhand, some other fighting that day. From his face Emily guessed at a hard-fought struggle, a desperate attempt to hold the foe at bay on open ground, before those withering guns. He dismissed it, though, and laughed off his own efforts, merely remarking that the day had been lost from the moment the last horse died.
And Emily knew in her heart that the Denlanders called it the Golden Minute, not in honour of the doomed splendour of the cavalry but for the discipline of their own advance into the teeth of Lascanne. They were celebrating the orderly firing advance of their shopkeepers and clerks and tradesmen, which had destroyed the finest professional soldiers of the age.
Towards dawn she encountered a navy man and listened to his story, too: his wild tales of Denlander ships clad in iron, of Denlander ships driven by engines against the wind. He was a sailor, though, and, knowing his type, she did not know whether to believe him.
*
And the time came when the station the train slowed for was Chalcaster, and at last she had come full circle. She had helped Tubal down, but it became obvious that he was in no position to walk to Grammaine, or even to his printer’s shop in town, and there was no cart or wagon to be had.
‘I’ll go to Grammaine and get Grant to fetch you,’ she decided, and then smiled despite herself, because it was the old Emily speaking, who she had thought was lost. ‘No, I’ll come and fetch you myself.’
The thought then came to her that she could far more easily seek out Mr Northway in his offices, and call on him for whatever aid she wished, but Scavian was still in her mind, like a bright fire. She did not want to have to lie to Cristan Northway, certainly not as her first action back home from the war front. And to stand before him now, and make no mention of ‘Giles Scavian’, would be a lie in all but name.
As she left the station, she looked back, and immediately wished she had not. The soldiers stepping off the train were so few compared to those who had set out from this same station. She suffered the sight of a great crowd of mothers, children, grandparents and sisters all pushing forward, past and around her, anxious for a glimpse of one familiar face amongst the new arrivals. All too often they did not find it, and she was prompted to think about Doctor Lammegeier’s words, his sadness concerning the future of both nations after the war’s close. So many had died, on both sides. Lascanne and Denland must lean on each other or fall, he had predicted.
When she had still been a lady of leisure, she would never have even thought of walking all the way to Chalcaster. The miles of rutted roads, the disdain of those riding past, why, no lady would ever consider such a demeaning practice.
When she had been fresh from Gravenfield, she and Elise had made this