was looking for signs of the enemy. He had tried to tell Emily how a compass needle was thrown off kilter by something in the water or the mud, but that compass points in the swamp could still be reckoned by the ubiquitous slow seepage of the swamp’s waters, always leaching east towards the sea. Emily herself could see no such movement. To her eyes, the waters just sat and turned rancid, and ran nowhere. She would never make Mallen’s elite band of scouts and trackers, and she decided she didn’t want to. The swamp was bad enough in company, but far, far worse alone.
That morning he led them differently. The day before they had moved slowly and cautiously, a steady sweep to feel for the hand of Denland on the surrounding marshland. Today he moved with more purpose. Had they been anywhere else, Emily would have said he stepped along like a man wanting to keep an appointment. The rest of them did their best to match his brisk pace, and those who slipped or fell – and they all did from time to time – had to hurry to regain the rest before the drifting mist enveloped them.
‘Where are we going, sir?’ Emily asked, slightly out of breath after she had forced her way to the head of the column. ‘I mean, where is there to go?’
‘No landmarks, right?’ Mallen flashed her a featureless glance. ‘Near right, but not quite. Almost all the swamp shifts, day to day. Trees, even – not quite where you left them each time. Not quite all, though. Understand?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You will.’
And she did. They endured two hours of swamp-marching, at a pace as rapid as was practical over the mounded roots, the boggy banks and clouded pools. A townsman strolling down the streets of Chalcaster would have counted it leisurely, but then his road would have been flatter and less riddled with venomous monsters. Emily reckoned them all lucky that so far nobody had been stung or bitten by anything deadly, for to her eyes there was little that lived in this godforsaken place that was not inimical to mankind.
At last Mallen signalled the halt, though, and the column straggled in, gasping, sweat-stained and red from the effort. Only then did she notice that they had reached one of his landmarks.
She remembered the marsh-wick last night, and the feelings of dissociation it had inspired in her. This was the same: her life was never meant to hold such things.
From the mire, from an island of driftwood and weed and mud that had bulked about it, thrust a squared pillar. Moss grew on it, and lichens in discolouring stains, but less than she would expect, given the age it so obviously bore in every line. It had been cleaned from time to time.
Those parts of it that were not lost beneath the blooms of the swamp showed intricate work, human work. She noted symbols and lines, and tangles that might have been pictures, but which her eyes could not make out. Heedless for a moment of the danger, she approached it, splashing through the shallow water and the inches-deep mud. The characters might have been anything, the children of no alphabet she ever knew. The pictures . . . As she gazed on them, they brought strange thoughts to her mind: this one made her feel dread, this one gave hope, this other one spoke of movement and action. They were faint and weathered, with only the dirt ingrained in them making them visible at all.
She looked back at Mallen, who was watching her keenly.
‘Who . . . ?’ she asked, and when he smiled it was a civilized thing, not his feral grin, the tattooed-savage leer he usually made.
‘Nobody knows,’ he said softly, coming over to join her. ‘Here and there, throughout the swamp, you find them. What race raised them was gone before we arrived, long before.’ He reached out and traced the design gently, almost lovingly.
She was taken by his face, its utter transformation. Had he been standing in a schoolroom, speaking thus, how appropriate his expression would have been. Here, beneath the tattoos and in these surroundings, how out of place.
‘You’re a complex man,’ she said, without meaning to speak aloud. He glanced at her, the hunter’s grin returning. She saw then, without partaking, exactly what Jenny and the other girls saw in him: his energy, his sureness and capability. She saw, too, why he did not look at them.