Emily, deciding that it was neither the time nor the place to go into this. She could see Mallen returning, and so she signalled her readiness to march. He moved down the line of gleaming helms with his head uncovered, long hair tied back and a band of cloth keeping the sweat from his eyes. Jenny was meanwhile ramming powder down her musket barrel furiously, and Emily had to intervene and push her face further from the muzzle, in case another accident happened.
Once Mallen gave the signal, they moved off into the hazy air again, slow and cautious. They might as well have been the only people in the world.
They had spent the night in the swamps. For all but Mallen and one other, it had been the first time.
Darkness had come without warning. No gradual fading skies here, from blue to a darker blue, then all the way to black. No, once the sun had passed the line of the western cliffs its fires were eclipsed in an instant, and night rode fast on its heels. In the swamps, the green air died like a fire guttering out. Then the night-shift of beasts and monsters took up where the day creatures had left off, calling and croaking at each other twice as loud to make up for the darkness. Mallen had guided them to an island formed where a succession of mosses and fungi had accumulated over a downed tree, and they had slept there in shifts. No fire, because nothing would burn, and the Denlanders might see it anyway. The darkness was not absolute, though. Certain parts of the swamp – slimes, mushrooms, the bulbous leaves of some trees – gave out a faint and weird phosphorescence. They lit up little but themselves, but they gave a reference, a point to watch. The larger beasts of the night showed up as mobile shadows across these greenish constellations, as would enemy soldiers if they were moving in the dark.
On Emily’s watch, there was something else. She had been sitting with her jacket off and her shirt half open, marvelling that not even the forces of night could lessen the heat by much, when she saw a fire spark up, off between the trees. Denlanders! was her first thought, and she reached for Mallen to shake him awake. Her hand never made it to him, stilled by what she witnessed next. The fire was a ghastly green-white, a corpse-light flare, and it was moving. She saw its reflection as it drifted aimlessly over a broad pool, saw the dancing pinprick lights of insects skip around it and scatter. The sight of it filled her full of awe and fear. Trees and pools and insects she had at home, in civilized measure. This was from a world beyond her world: this unfuelled, untethered flame; this spirit.
She stared into its pallid depths, half expecting to see some face or figure deep within it.
‘Ensign?’ Mallen had woken, though she had not touched him.
‘What is that, Sergeant?’ she asked him.
She heard him sit up, imagined him stripped to the waist, lean muscles and no wasted flesh. There was nothing for her there, of course, but Jenny was not alone in her interest. Emily had seen the way several of the other girls looked at the master sergeant.
‘You know it, Marshwic, surely?’ His voice, closer to her than she had thought, was amused.
‘Sergeant, tell me. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
There was an odd little cough beside her, and she realized that he was chuckling. ‘It’s you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It’s a marsh-wick. Swamp light. Understand?’
‘But . . . what is it? Is it an animal? Or dangerous?’
‘Gas, Ensign. Harmless.’
She watched the eerie light bob over the water, flare up and dwindle down. ‘Is there anything you don’t know about this place, sir?’
‘Many things.’
‘But you must have come here right at the start. You must have been here for years.’
Again that cough of a laugh. ‘Since long before the war,’ he told her.
When dawn thrust its way upon them through the leaves, they woke along with it, scratching at the new bites that the night had left on them.
‘I thought the quartermaster said we were – what was it? – “unattractive” to insects after we took his disgusting medicine,’ Emily complained, on finding a new raised weal by her armpit and slapping at it with unladylike rancour.
‘Try coming here without,’ said Mallen. He seemed to be taking his bearings, standing straight and turning slowly. Perhaps he