then dropped cross-legged onto the ground beside her. He was a strange man, Mallen: lean and hard. His thin face hosted two frighteningly intense eyes set within a tableau of abstract, irregular tattoos that blurred and smudged the natural outlines of his cheeks and forehead. His hair was long, but nobody ever told him to cut it, and there was something fierce and feral about him. He wore his uniform like a straitjacket. This was not a civilized man: when she had first set eyes on him, she had felt frightened of what he might be capable of. Now she had found out what she herself was capable of and he sat before her and began stripping off his jacket, with its insignia, as if to say that rank was being put aside for now.
‘How goes it, Ensign?’ he asked her, and she could not answer him. She was ashamed of losing Elise, ashamed of feeling pain for the Denlander she had killed. She was a poor soldier.
‘Get someone?’
She nodded, avoiding his eyes.
‘A lot of them can’t, first time.’ His voice was soft, surprisingly well-spoken. ‘Thank God for it. Means we’ve still something worth fighting for. The day they send us a conscript company who can put a shot into a man without thinking, that’s the day I quit. But everyone has to learn how, and better sooner than later. How do you feel?’
‘Sir?’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Bad, sir.’
Without warning he reached out and pinched her chin, tugging her head around to look at him.
‘That’s right, you should,’ he told her. ‘Every time, understand?’
She nodded wordlessly.
‘But we have to do it, understand? To protect Lascanne.’
Another nod. He clapped her solidly on the shoulder, one soldier to another, and she burst out, ‘Elise. Elise is . . . she was . . .’ Then the words would not come. If she tried to say them again, she would weep, and she would not be seen weeping before the master sergeant of Stag Rampant company.
Mallen studied her with the same intensity he turned on everything, and then stood up and backed off a pace. ‘It’s war, Ensign. A fool’s excuse for killing, but it’s a fool’s world. Makes fools of all of us. Come on now, Ensign, set a good example.’
He put a hand out for her, and she took it, feeling the strength of him as he pulled her to her feet.
‘What happened, Master Sergeant?’ she said.
‘We surprised them.’
‘We surprised them?’
He glanced off towards the swamps. ‘They were trying to get two hands of squads up the Dareline Channel, when they ran into our sweep. We turned them back. They won’t try it on for a few days, at least, but there were more of them than us, that’s all. Twice as many as we had, so we sent them away but they bit us bad as they went. Jungle war, Ensign. No clear winners.’
‘I understand.’
‘That’s good. Marshwic, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Marshwic,’ as though committing her name to some deep ancestral memory. ‘Get them moving, Marshwic,’ he told her briskly. ‘Show them how it’s done.’
He padded off into the camp and she retrieved her musket and looked around at the few women still left at the swamp’s edge.
‘Come on, soldiers,’ she tried, but her voice failed her and she had to say it again, forcing volume into the words. ‘Come on, soldiers! On your feet! Food and beds all waiting for you. Let’s go!’
There was a memorial service the next day. As the mourners lined up, Emily was surprised how few there were. Most of the soldiers, the men especially, simply glanced up and went somewhere else, so they did not have to watch.
The burial plot itself was hard up against the cliffs, where the ground was firmest. The whole camp was set within one of the slip-fields: earth and rock that had collapsed down from the cliffs above. The landslide had formed a highland of dryness that had been colonized by grass rather than the voracious swamp vegetation. The swamp gnawed at it, though, creeping up on it like angry natives waiting for a chance to take back what was theirs. Emily was surprised at the small number of markers in the field, until she realized that few corpses would have made it out of the swamps. Most of the casualties of the Levant front remained where they fell, and the swamp consumed them. Three days, Mallen said: that was all it took for the busy mouths of the Levant to strip