and bloody.
Emily fell onto her bunk and slept, without dreaming, for as long as she was able, worn ragged from the long march. None of the training, the sedate trots around the Gravenfield grounds, had prepared them for this. Soldiering was too much to teach anyone from scratch in forty days, and none of them had taken it seriously enough.
The next morning, she opened her eyes to light as scarlet as her jacket, summoned from her chill and clammy bed by the sound of a horn. Without ever quite waking up, she found herself lined up with all the other soldiers, men to the left, women to the right. She looked across the faces of the existing garrison, hoping to catch sight of Tubal, but she recognized none of them, all pale strangers. Many were wounded, she saw. There were bandaged heads and arms in slings, scars and livid pockmarks she would soon know to be the work of the local insects. These men looked solid, resolute, unhappy. She wondered what her company looked like to them.
Women, of course.
The colonel came out of the shack from which he commanded the war effort. He looked no happier with his new charges in the light of dawn than he had the evening before.
He stood for a moment, looking left and then right with a grim expression. Two captains flanked him: the older Mallarkey and a younger man with his long face made lopsided by a jagged scar.
‘All right, you’ve heard the news,’ the colonel said. ‘And now you’ve seen it for yourselves. Women, in the army.’ He shook his head. ‘You all know. We need the extra guns. If we’re to drive the Denlanders from this place, we need the manpower. Even if it’s woman-power.’ He stopped a moment, and Emily wondered how well he had thought his speech through.
‘This is going to work,’ he declared. ‘Now, I have never fought alongside a woman before. My orders are that these women are properly trained and ready to fight.’ His little runs of words each came out quite separately, like prophecies on slips of paper drawn by a fortune-teller. He thought quite a lot between them. ‘That is the situation. You will all accept it. They will obey your officers’ orders. You will obey their officers’ orders. A sergeant is a sergeant. I don’t care about the man or the woman of it. Any insubordination will be treated just like insubordination. It’s no excuse.’ He glowered hawkishly at the lot of them.
‘Now, the other thing you must remember is that this is the army of Lascanne. The army of the King. We are civilized. Decent people. Not like those animals from Denland. We have rules. Now, I know a lot of you will have thought about this, having heard the news. Women in the camp and all. Quite un-military. Let me tell you, there will be no fraternizing.’ He paused to consider the word. ‘No involvement between the men and the women of my army. None. If any of it comes to my attention, there will be severe punishments for all involved.’ He paused to glare at the men and the women equally. ‘You are here to fight, not anything else. It takes away from the war effort, yes?’
There were black looks amongst the men then, frustration and disappointment. Some of the women, too, Emily noted. She wondered just how enforceable the colonel’s demands would be.
‘Finally, and this is the most serious part,’ the colonel continued, ‘if I hear of a man forcing himself on one of these women, on any woman, then it will be treated as the worst court-martial offence, and one I’ll have the fellow shot for, believe me. This must be understood. It will be seen as an assault on a fellow soldier, as well as an attack upon the King’s own writ. I will not have any of it in my army. From this point on, these women are not women. They are soldiers. They will be treated as such. Any man who steps across that line runs the risk of a firing squad. It will not be tolerated. Is that clear? Well, is it?’
After a moment’s caught-out pause there was a harried ‘Yes, sir’ from the ranks of the men.
‘Right, then,’ said the colonel, seeming mollified. ‘If that is understood, then we may as well use what has been given us. Give them badges. Put them into companies, Mallarkey Then I want five squads from Stag Rampant