ready for a sweep, day after tomorrow. We need to blood them, Captain. We need to blood them.’
Ensigns passed down the ranks of women with sullen looks or smiles or just blank faces, depending on their nature. To each waiting pair of hands they gave a cloth badge, some stained, and most with loose stitching where they had been cut from other uniforms. Emily turned hers over to look at the device upon it: a black stag on its hind legs, antlers cocked back, forelimbs pawing the air. A Stag Rampant.
Elise came to find her, to show her an identical badge, and they sat together that morning, sewing the patches onto their jacket shoulders, whilst all around them hundreds of women did likewise.
‘I thought we’d never get here,’ Elise said. ‘All that slogging yesterday, I thought my shoulder was going to fall off.’
‘It was a long way.’
‘You can say that? You were on the light shift, Ensign.’
‘A long way from home,’ Emily clarified. ‘From Grammaine.’
‘Oh, well, maybe.’ Elise shrugged. ‘I’ve not really done the “home” business for a long time. Gravenfield was the nearest I got to it for years. I reckon the army’s a home now. A career. Maybe I’ll even stay on after the war’s done. I’ll be at least a sergeant by then, I reckon. Got to be. And you’ll be a major-general or something.’
Emily tried to imagine leaving this place, the war a finished thing; going home and hanging up the musket. Never again having to march or shoot or take orders. Her mind would not stretch to it. The road to the Levant was like sliding into a pit that was too steep to crawl back from.
Above them, the flag of the Stag Rampant company snapped in the light breeze. They would spend that first day simply discovering the layout of the camp, and the next meeting their new company, under the dubious looks of the male soldiers that were now comrades-in-arms.
The day after that, they would enter the swamps for the first time, and Elise and seven other women would not return. After that, Emily had to assume, they were well and truly blooded.
12
I killed my first man today.
She came back to herself, slumped upon the ground just beyond the swamp, with the sprawling jumble of the camp in sight. There were others around her, she noticed. While most of the company were staggering on towards the tents, others had come out into the light and air, and just dropped: breathing freely and seeing clearly was suddenly all too much. One woman shook violently, retching. There was a deeper red staining the sleeve of her jacket.
And, of course, some had not re-emerged at all. Some were still there, with the waters their final resting place.
Elise.
There was a numbing, gnawing hole within her. Emily hunched over it, fingers digging in through her shirt. She would tear it out, if she could, both the horror and the guilt. If she had only been faster; if she had only stood a yard either side; if only, if only, if only . . . Oh, Elise, this can’t have happened. Not so soon. Not so very soon, a mere handful of days after arriving here. Not after forty hard days at Gravenfield and eight sweet ones at Grammaine.
Master Sergeant Mallen helped the injured girl up, caught her as she stumbled, and then led her away. One or two of the others had managed to lurch to their feet and were treading slowly into the camp, but Emily could not make herself move.
There was a hole in her mind, and it was where the face of the dead Denlander would have been, could she but remember it. She was profoundly glad she could not. Two deaths on her conscience, and the guilt was real – friend or foe. I was never made for this. Too late to discover that now.
She was still clutching her musket in the crook of her arm. Now she let it fall, stared at it: a lump of machined metal, the tool of her trade. She hated it. She wanted to smash it against a rock, and watch its jagged pieces spin madly away. She wanted to make it so that it killed nobody ever again. But it was hers, her musket. She was a soldier now.
‘Ensign.’ She looked up to see Mallen standing there.
‘I’m sorry, Master Sergeant . . .’ Emily started to rise but he put a hand out to stay her, and