This was his love, here in this place that he had made his own.
‘Why are we here, sir?’ she asked him.
‘Wait.’ He lowered himself down, his back against the stone, and Emily signalled that the squad should take a rest too. She deputized two to take look-out, and splashed back to join Mallen.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘Of?’
‘The squad, me included. Are we going to make it? Do we pass?’
‘You pass every day except your last,’ he said, and then his eyes flicked up and recognition crossed his face.
Emily looked about, expecting to see another squad, and for a moment she saw nothing. A ripple of panic had passed through the soldiers, though, and Mallen said, ‘Nobody raise a gun,’ in a voice that brooked no opposition.
What is it? Is it the Denlanders? For a mad moment she thought Mallen had betrayed them. Then she saw.
There were three of them come from between the trees, approaching the stone. Three little men in green, like something from a fairy story. Little men in green, with vast white eyes.
The more she saw, the less storybook they looked and the less she liked them. None was over four feet high, and they did not carry themselves quite like men, but a little hunched, a little long-armed, They wore suits of coarse fabric, green underlain with black . . .
She realized they wore nothing. They were hairy: an oily, short-furred pelt from head to toe. She had not wanted to acknowledge the fact but, as they got closer, she could see every hair on them. Beasts. But they had hands, and they had woven straps about them, belts and baldrics and bags. Men, then, but what men?
She made herself look at their faces, which were as furred as the rest of them. They possessed slightly pointed heads, with large ears flat alongside the skull. Long noses came almost down to the small, surprisingly delicate lips. The eyes that stared at her were as round and huge as the moon in a night sky, with a faint shadow moving within them, as though they kept their eyelids on the inside.
Their open mouths revealed thin, sharp teeth. Their hands, not webbed as she had half expected, had long fingers with hooked nails.
She recalled Lord Deerling then, and his strange companions. Not like these, not at all like these, but she had heard how the Levant front had its own natives: swamp-people. People?
They stood in a crescent before Mallen and the pillar, as though it was their god and he their priest. Emily and the other soldiers could only stare.
‘Indigenes,’ Mallen said softly. ‘Call them that, properly.’
‘What are they?’ Emily asked in a similar tone. ‘I mean natives, obviously, but . . . did they build the pillar?’
‘No stonework, no metalwork. No stone or metal to work. Not their doing, this.’ He turned his attention back to the creatures, and one padded forward quicker than any human, through the water and the mud, and took his hand. Emily shrank back, but Mallen held there a moment, quite still, before releasing and drawing away. The indigene bared its teeth nastily, but then she reassessed the sight and guessed it was pleased. A moment later, it spoke: hisses and clicks, but also sounds like something imitating the human. A gabble, a jumble, but clearly Mallen understood and he spoke right back at them in the same nonsense tongue, gargling and babbling conversationally. More teeth were bared. A ritual of greeting was exchanged.
‘What . . . what do they want?’
‘What do we want? This is their home, remember, not yours.’ Mallen shot her a sardonic look. ‘We want news. We want food. They fish, hunt, feed us what we can’t get from rations when we’re out here.’
‘And in return?’
‘We leave them alone. Everyone hear me? Nobody harms them. Nobody offends them.’
There was something of a grumble amongst the soldiers and Mallen rounded on them angrily. ‘Understood?’ he demanded. ‘War with Denland, one thing. War with the indigenes is war with the swamp.’
‘Do they track the Denlanders for you?’ Emily asked him.
No. No more do they track us for Denland.’
‘I don’t—’
‘We give them peace. Denland does the same. They feed us both, warn us both. Neutrals, Marshwic.’
‘But surely they—’
His very look stopped her. ‘Take sides? You’d better hope they don’t.’
He turned from her then, starting a conversation with the indigenes that batted back and forth for some time. She studied the little people as they spoke. They were most human when