once through the window, as the train pulled away: a slump-shouldered shadow detached from its object, falling away into the night.
11
My leadership lasted only as far as Tarrent’s Wey, where I was able to surrender my authority to a sergeant – a man. The train was soon quite full of new recruits, as it thundered along the track with the dawn breaking all around us. The trip was to last two days and nights.
The first night was the strangest. The train made no concessions to darkness, and I slept fitfully. The rhythm of the engine and the tracks, which seemed to lull everyone else to sleep, did not work on me. I was continually catching oddments of sound and waking to see a carriage full of sleeping women in, or half in, military uniform. It seemed to me like the dressing room of a theatre where the chorus have all overslept their cue.
I would look out of the window and see the darkness looking back at me. I would walk the swaying length of the train and see perhaps two or three other women still awake. Near midnight we got a four together and played a few hands of Fly-away. We became the night watch, I suppose.
I find myself looking back on that night, and the strangest idea comes to me. This place I am in, the swamps and the insects and the death, cannot, surely, exist in the same land as my Grammaine, as Alice and Mary, as the quiet fields and woods of Chalcaster. It seems to me that we surely must have done more than simply travel to reach this place. We must have undertaken some more fundamental journey to some dreadful spirit world.
If all that separates this terrible place from home is mere distance, then we are lost. If the Denlanders do not creep past us and into the green land of my memories, then the swamps of the Levant will do so, with their death and mud and leeches.
When the train pulled into Locke it was night again, after a long day’s journey through an ever more sparsely populated landscape. The sweeping Wolds of Chalcaster, the hills and the dales and the tall plantation woods had given way, hour by hour, to flat agriculture and small white-painted farmhouses, the breadbasket of Lascanne. It was mostly reclaimed marsh, Emily recalled from her lessons. The ancient empires of a bygone day had drained it to sow their seeds and mine their gold, and modern Lascanne reaped the benefit.
But on the next day there was less of the agriculture and more of the wilds. Heath and scrub and desolate moorland stretched either side of the tracks, where the odd crofter or peat cutter was the height of civilization. The towns they passed through had a tough, knuckled-down look: trader towns, through towns, towns that made a living by taking in and passing on.
As the sun set on the second day, it lit up red on standing water amidst the moors, bogs and pools set deep beside the raised track. No hand had ever drained this land, and in her naivety Emily imagined these were the swamps of the Levant front, and that this was the worst nature had to offer.
They saw little enough of Locke when the train pulled in, past midnight: a few lanterns and the bulky shapes of ugly buildings. A sergeant passed down the train, saying, ‘Stay on for now. Sleep more if you can. Come dawn and we’ll be marching, so rest while you can.’ He fought a losing battle. Everyone had been cooped up on the cramped train for far too long and nobody was in the mood to rest. All around Emily there was a buzz of speculation as to what they would meet on the morrow. She offered nothing herself but heard a score of contradictory suggestions, each delivered as fact. Nobody there had the faintest idea, really, what the battlefield of the Levant front would be like. They were all as far from home as she was. They were maids, cooks, skivvies, seamstresses and market-stall girls, and they talked and talked simply to keep the fear at bay, while the unknown quantity that was Locke lurked beyond the shuttered windows of the train.
‘You’re going to meet up with this brother of yours, then?’ Elise asked, and Emily felt a stab of disorientation before she realized what the other woman meant.
‘Brother-in-law, yes. Tubal Salander. He’s a lieutenant.’