I am as deadly as any man that runs on two legs – and so can you be. Practice is all.’ By the end of their first day of gunnery practice, Demaine had deputized Emily as an instructor. She had not realized it before, but she was the only gentlewoman in the whole of Gravenfield. The rest were tradeswomen, farm girls and domestics, and precious few of them had ever so much as touched a gun before. Demaine took her and a few who had been gamekeeper’s wives, and made them his people. Soon they were holding classes of their own, teaching the swift reload, the steady aim, the measured breathing that would make killers of them all, even the weakest and the slightest. Demaine did not believe, as the major did, that women had no place in war. For him the musket had broadened the field of combat to the whole of the human race.
It was hard for Emily, during those early days. She gave her full attention to the task in hand, and found herself alone, amongst the four hundred women of Gravenfield. When she entered the dormitory, they looked at her as though she had come to tell them what to do. They resented her, because she was well-born and they were not, and it marked her out.
Oh, they listened to her as she showed them how the lock of a musket worked, or how to clear a misfire. They were quite attentive. As soon as the class was over, though, they turned their backs on her. She was different to them, singled out by birth and by experience. She met such a wave of cold hostility that she could not imagine what could have happened to harden them against her in such a way. She could not know – until it was explained to her later – that the prevalent belief was that she would be spared, held back as an instructor as the rest marched off, or just held back because of who she was. Encountering their coldness, she met it with an aloofness of her own that only reinforced the gap between her and her fellow recruits. It was as much her failure as theirs. She should have seen it coming.
History was taught by Mrs Melchance, a grey-haired schoolmistress drafted in because no further soldiers could be spared for the business. Emily considered that she did not really need to know about the causes of the war. Surely the fact of it was enough. For a soldier fighting at the front, the inexorable tides of history were as unalterable as the weather.
Still, some bureaucrat had insisted that the recruits should be educated, and so she listened grimly as Mrs Melchance recounted the shock that had gripped the country when the war started. Denland and Lascanne had been the sibling states, politically united against a hostile world. Their royal families had been close cousins, had intermarried. Soldiers from Denland had fought alongside the heroes of Lascanne as recently as the Hellic wars.
And then came the regicide. As all there recalled, the cowardly assassination of Denland’s royal family had been news that cut through the heart of Lascanne’s people like a scythe. Without warning, a friendly neighbour had been gripped by madness, casting off the cautioning reins of monarchy and adopting a proletariat government that turned its hate-filled eyes on Lascanne. To justify its existence, Mrs Melchance explained, the Republic of Denland felt bound to destroy that which was not like itself. A flourishing and happy monarchy next door might give its newly enslaved subjects hope.
That was why they must fight, the old woman told them, with tears in her eyes. The whole Lascanne way of life hung in the balance. If the monsters of republicanism and their Denlandish slaves prevailed, then Lascanne’s centuries of history would be rewritten in a day.
And she showed them the pages of a geography text that had been repurposed as a map of the warfront. She showed them where the lines were drawn. Here was the broad expanse of the Couchant front, the high country that formed the borderlands between Denland and Lascanne. There the war was being prosecuted in lightning manoeuvres by the dashing royal cavalry sweeping across the plateaus, or in pitched skirmishes in the canyons. Over there the great bulk of both nations’ forces struggled, each reaching desperately to establish a new foothold on the native ground of the other.
Regarding the Levant front, its dark swamps and