Nowhere near. There’s a colonel . . .’ What was the name? She had been told it, by Major Castwood or Sergeant Demaine or somebody. ‘Colonel Resnic, I think it is. He’s got charge of the Levant front.’
‘I’d have thought it’d be a general,’ Elise murmured. She slumped down in her seat with the obvious, though futile, intention of catching a little sleep. ‘I wonder if he’s married. Could be a good deal, being the colonel’s bit.’
‘Depends on the colonel.’ Sharing a dormitory with Elise had cauterized that part of Emily’s brain once shocked by such talk. ‘You might find you prefer the fighting.’
It was not the sight of Locke itself that silenced them, as they climbed down from the train. Locke was a cluster of mud-stone buildings, thirty or forty, with a hundred shacks and lean-tos and tents making a sea of temporary construction all around them. It was a town whose population was constantly on the move, either to the war or from it.
It was the thought of what lay beyond Locke that closed mouths and opened eyes. Soon the train’s entire complement of soldiers, from girls of seventeen to women of forty-five, were standing along the platform, looking beyond the roofs and dirt streets of the town towards the unknown.
To the west, the land rose sharply to become sheer, weathered cliffs towering in stone folds. A thread like a pencil line ran all the way up, over hill, up ramp and across bridge, and a train that seemed built by ants put its minuscule trail of smoke into the air as it hauled itself up the steep gradient with its string of carriages, its cargo of soldiers and munitions. Beyond the last rise, the plateaus and the ravines of the Couchant front could not be seen at all. All that came from that quarter was the rumble of distant thunder, dry and cloudless, far, far away. They had never heard the sound of massed artillery before.
‘All right, ladies! Attention!’ Their feet snapped together even before they thought about it. A master sergeant from Locke – a matron with grey hair and a face like boot leather – glowered at them, striding past the unruly face of their formation. The morning sun cast her face in shadow beneath her gleaming helm. ‘Come on, ladies, remember the parade ground. Get yourselves into columns, will you? Come on, we’ve got a war to get you to. Officers front and right, soldiers line up!’
Elise squeezed Emily’s arm and then got into place, as the enlisted women formed a dozen ragged rows. The master sergeant did not look impressed. ‘Pathetic,’ she snapped. ‘Bloody pathetic, pardon my Hellic, but it’ll have to do.’ She gave Emily and the other officers a once-over. There were only a half-dozen ensigns and a sergeant amongst them.
‘All right, get these soldiers moving, left and then right, remember? I want them in the central square on the double.’
Somehow Emily and the other officers got the unwieldy body of women moving and marching into the circular patch of dirt that made up the centre of Locke. A series of low, irregular buildings ringed it, each commandeered by the army for one purpose or another. Emily saw messengers running their errands, or mounting up and riding at a gallop. There were quartermasters checking in supplies that had come on their train, soldiers in their shirtsleeves hauling crates of rations away. In the middle of the square was an ominous pile of boxes, all stamped ‘Lev’ in black.
‘Right, ladies, everyone to the stack there, and take a box. Anyone I see weighing them up to get a light one gets to carry two,’ the master sergeant announced cheerily. A protesting groan went up from the soldiers and she grinned broadly at them. ‘What’s that? What’s all the complaining? Downhill all the way to the camp, after all. Just hope your boots are waterproof. Come on, pack mules, we haven’t got all day!’
Grumbling and moaning, the recruits shuffled forward to take boxes, heaving them up and clutching them awkwardly, until someone had the idea of hauling them on to one shoulder. Most were narrow ammunition boxes, heavy as hell with lead shot. Some were bigger crates marked ‘rations’ or simply ‘supplies’. A few were wrapped tents or half-dozen bundles of spare muskets. As the crowd began to thin, Emily moved forward to collect her load, but the master sergeant grabbed her arm.