Emily gritted her teeth and strained furiously, ignoring the yell of pain. Another two soldiers joined her efforts by hauling on the stuck woman’s other arm, then grabbing the unfortunate by the armpits and pulling back by main force. With a vile sucking sound, the trapped soldier was released inch by inch from the rank mud, leaving her boots and the crate she had been carrying lost beyond all hope. The four of them collapsed back onto the path in a tangled heap, and Emily got the rescued woman’s elbow in her stomach for her pains. The master sergeant called out for anyone carrying a box marked ‘boots’ to step forward.
Around them the landscape was a nightmare of pocks and craters enlivened by vast bushy tufts of marsh grass with fronds as tall as a man. The rocks, which on the maps had seemed so picturesque and tiny, were like great jagged teeth thrust at random through the skin of the land, hairy with weeds that sprouted from every crevice. The path itself was made of stones piled on stones and then paved with earth, uneven and hard underfoot. Those that stumbled off it found the ground beyond, that looked so solid, had no more substance than the stagnant pools of water that lay all around. There were serpents, too: great eight-foot monsters that slid lazily out of the way of the soldiers’ marching feet, or raised themselves up to chest-height, watching with yellow, lidless eyes as the recruits straggled past. Before them, down a long, shallow incline undercut by a thousand small streams, was a misty expanse that must be the swamps proper, for it seemed all of this was but precursor.
On the maps, the swamps themselves had been enlivened by chains of blue lakes laid out like beads on a necklace, and thumbnails of light green that were fields of scree sloughed off the Couchant cliffs and turned into meadows by colonizing vegetation. The cartographer who created those maps had crossed the swamps in a balloon, and never had to set his foot upon them nor breathe their rank air.
Emily increased her pace to catch up with Elise, marching near the front of the column.
The girl gave her a tight-lipped smile and shifted her burden from one shoulder to the other. ‘See you lucked out then. I’m going to kill that bastard Demaine if I ever see him again,’ she grunted through gritted teeth. ‘Just think, one word from him and I’d be the one walking, and you’d be lugging this bloody crate.’
A little later, while trudging along a track that never seemed to bring them any closer to their destination, one woman broke into song. She must have been a brave soul, to break the grumbling silence like that, with her high, clear voice springing into the dank air. It was a familiar tune as well, although Emily could not immediately place it.
‘We crossed the sea at dawn of day
Blue-heron sails, the red and grey
An eastern wind from Gathern bay
We march to war with red and grey.
Oh, the grey is sharp and the red is brave
With a hey ho! the red and the grey
But the red rules high on land and waves
And the red will last to the end of the day.
The eagle legions marching nigh
With gold and green ’gainst red and grey
So bear the heron standard high
With blood of red and walls of grey.’
By that time those few familiar with the verses had begun chiming in, until even the master sergeant was roaring out the chorus, the garbled, overlapping mishmash of ‘Oh, the grey is sharp and the red is brave’ rolling out over the uneven terrain as they marched.
Emily was just starting her third ‘With a hey ho!’ when she suddenly remembered when she had heard this song, and why it was so inappropriate. Old Poldry had sung it sometimes, when he had been a little in his cups. He had sung it and talked about his own soldiering days, for it was a soldier’s song: a song from the Hellic wars. The red and the grey were the soldiers of Lascanne and Denland, fighting side by side against the empire overseas.
Where did it all go wrong? she asked herself, her mouth shaping the words automatically. The regicide, of course; the end of Denland’s royal line, when their whole nation had run mad.
But still she sang, off-key and hoarse, and they all did, and if not that song then the next: women