“I am no physician,” she continued, “but I have had to do a great deal of nursing in my life; and I have seen illness and injury alter a man’s character or a woman’s to no little extent. But not in such a wise that you would appear yourself in every other respect, act according to your former character at all times, and remain competent, save in this one particular instance. That, I must find too remarkable to believe—I am sorry if that opinion should distress you, in this circumstance, more than please you.”
He was silent; she was not wrong, that was the heart of it. He would willingly have heard himself called a lunatic to find his fears unfounded. “I must always value your honest opinion,” Laurence said, “whatever its conclusions; I thank you, sincerely, and for imposing on you in such a manner.”
“There is no imposition felt, Captain Laurence, I assure you,” she said, and looked up as footsteps came: a moment later, Emily had put her head around the corner of the folding-screen to see them sitting outside the tent, before the fire.
“Oh,” she said, “Captain, I didn’t know you were here; did you want me for something? I have just been over at the next fire over those rocks: and you needn’t frown, Alice, they are all girls there.”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pemberton said, with a sigh.
“Not that sort!” Emily said. “I mean soldiers: more than half of them on the dragons are girls. Not just the captains, though some of them, too; but nearly all those fellows who manage the baggage. I dare say we ought to just bunk in with them instead of perching out here away from everything.”
For safety, their campfire had been established at the very edge of camp; their tent was of double thickness and sheltered further by the folding-screen: Laurence had solicited a pair of pistols, from the aviators, for Mrs. Pemberton, and had shown her how to send up a flare, if need be.
Laurence stared at Emily. “Do you mean to tell me half their army is women?” he demanded, to his dismay recalling he had without the least consciousness stripped and bathed at several of their previous nightly halts, in full view of Chinese companies. “Are the dragons so insistent upon it?”
“It’s not the beasts at all,” Emily said. “They tell me they can come instead of their brothers, if their families like, so they don’t have to spare the boys from the fields.”
“Well,” Laurence said, helplessly. He found it difficult to accept, and yet he was no pot to be calling names for kettles: if not his daughter, then a young woman under his tutelage was in the service; he could scarcely condemn those families, if it were the accepted mode. But he should have to tell Forthing and also his fellow-captains at once: if the men should work out they were surrounded by an encampment full of young women, they would surely run riot and make nuisances of themselves, given half an opportunity.
“Are they willing,” he began to ask, and then Emily leapt at him, in one straight bound across the small campfire, and knocked him to the ground as a sharp blade thrust down through the air towards him.
Emily rolled away from him, and came up drawing her sword; Mrs. Pemberton with a cry had fallen back upon the tent. Laurence drew his own sword: five men were descending upon them, drawn metal gleaming in firelight. Their sabers were peculiarly workmanlike: a wide blade at the tip and tapering to the hilt, and they wore black that made them almost invisible against the dark; one scattered the fire with the end of his sword, stamping out embers. Laurence swung a wide circle leaping forward to press them back, and seized one still-burning branch; he thrust it towards the nearest man’s eyes and then fell back with Emily, putting the tent at their backs before the men closed in.
The steady rhythm of sword-strokes occupied his next moments to the exclusion of thought: no room for anything but answering to one strike and another. He and Emily had the reach of them, their own blades the longer and the better, but they were outnumbered. She fought well at his side, matching his pace. There was a brief opening; he shouted, “Ho, the camp!” at the top of his lungs, “Murder!” and they were fighting again.
Laurence bent to parry low, and only just in time brought his sword back up to catch a slash meant for his throat. Another did catch him in the shoulder, but he wrested himself away before he felt more than the tip scoring his flesh; he heard the thick wool ripping away around the blade, and dropping the burning brand managed to reach up and wrench the blade away from the man’s grip.
But he was forced to pay for it: the third man, on his left flank, lunged for Laurence’s exposed side with two knives in his hands, feinting one at his eyes. Laurence turned to slash back, but Emily was there, her sword flying upwards, and she sheared away the man’s hand halfway to the elbow, blood spurting from the stump; she reversed her grip on the blade and jammed it brutally through his chest, and booted his corpse off with a shove of her foot into the other standing beside him.