She was, in effect, an officer’s wife. Her man was Captain Ban Daur, commander of G Company. Like many of the regiment, he was from the industrial world Verghast. He was a good man. Elodie quickly found that her impression of him was one shared by most: Daur was a genuinely good man. He was handsome, intelligent and principled. He wasn’t loved by the men, but he was admired for his fairness and determination. He was honourable, and he could be relied upon. He had prospects for advancement, and they weren’t at all hurt by the fact that, unlike most of the Verghastites serving in the regiment, he was from a good, mid-hive family. He came from breeding. He was not some lowly miner or labourman. Juniper said he was a good catch.
None of which was why Elodie was with him. She was with him because he was the one, and she’d known that since the moment she’d first seen him that day in Zolunder’s Club on Selwire Street.
They had not formally married. The matter hadn’t really been discussed. Marriage was permitted, and simply required certain documents and certificates to be signed by the commanding officer. There was no reason to believe that Daur’s commander would refuse his request.
But they had not got around to it. Just a few weeks spent with the regimental train had shown Elodie that formal bonds were unnecessary. Soldiers understood loyalty, and loyalty was the glue that held everything together. She was Ban’s woman, and everyone respected that. They didn’t need a piece of paper to prove it.
As an officer’s woman, Elodie entered entourage society at a comparatively high level. She had certain automatic privileges. Her status earned her respect from the other women. She got to decorate Daur’s arm at certain regimental suppers. Officers were courteous to her. Daur’s rank often secured him his own quarters rather than a shared billet, and she got to share that. She was, she knew, envied by some. There was nothing she could do about that. Juniper called her a trophy, whatever that meant.
The entourage train was a curious community. At the uppermost level were the wives and the women, the wet nurses and the children. A regiment always bred offspring. There were the pleasure girls and the camp followers, the women who were not attached to the regiment by way of blood like a wife or a mother, but by way of reliance. Their living came from the regiment, so they had to follow the regiment wherever it went. And just as their living came from the regiment, so did the livings of the seamsters, the button-makers, the dentists, the potion-grinders, the launderers, the entertainers, the musicians, the portraitists, the cooks, the bottlemen, the victuallers, the errand boys, the knife-sharps, the menders and fixers, the polishers, the cobblers and all the rest, most of whom brought along families of their own. It was an ungainly, parasitic entity that lived so that its host could live, and went with it everywhere, the two dependent on one another for survival.
She spent most days in the entourage camp, talking to the other women. A few, like Juniper, had become her friends and confidantes. They had helped her to find her feet. Juniper had taught her to take certain duties away from Daur’s adjutant. Uniform work was a good one. She could get them cleaned and mended, get the correct one laid out ready for him. She could learn where to go to get the right replacement button or piece of braid, who to ask for the right brass paste, where to take a pair of boots for resoling. Daur had objected at first, saying that it wasn’t her place to wash his clothes. He hadn’t brought her along to shine his boots. She insisted she wanted to. She needed a greater purpose than to look well on his arm by the light of chandeliers. An officer’s woman and his adjutant often developed an elegant partnership. Daur’s adjutant was a man named Mohr. He would advise her, quietly, on expected dress regulations, or send her a note if something was needed from Daur’s quarters. In return, Elodie left service business to Mohr and made sure she wasn’t around or, worse, undressed, in Daur’s quarters when the adjutant took the daily brief. Sometimes, she even advised Mohr of Daur’s mood at the start of a day, a courtesy Mohr often reciprocated at day’s end.
That morning, there was no question what kind of day it was going to be. Before dawn, the cookfires had lit and the musicians had begun turning up. The Makeshift Revels were a festival, a carnival that marked the departure of a regiment from its station. As soon as rumours began to circulate that a regiment was about to make shift, the revels began. All manner of traders and peddlers came to the shore and set up shop, bringing street entertainers, beggars, whores and, inevitably, thieves. It was the last chance for the soldiers to indulge before departure, the last chance for the entourage to acquire items before the next halt, the last chance for the host town to earn coin from the visiting troops.
It felt to Elodie like the heady holiday fairs that led up to a major feast day back on Balhaut. It was noisy and brash and cheerful, and there were treats and temptations to savour. But there was a gaudy, apocalyptic air about it too. The regiment was going to war. No one yet knew where, or what kind of war, and no one even knew the exact hour they would make shift. Such things were classified. Certainly, though, they were not leaving Menazoid Sigma the way they had left Balhaut. They were not heading for a dispersal point or a holding station. This was the real thing, and some of those leaving would never come back, not to here or anywhere.
She rose early. There were things to do. Daur hadn’t told her specifically, but it was probably the last day on shore. She had kissed him while he was still shaving at the mirror, and left their quarters. He was going to need his number one jacket by lunchtime. There was some kind of reception. She’d left the jacket with a tailor on the fifth row the night before and she needed to collect it.
It was early still, the suns just rising in the smog, but it was busy already. The shore bustled around her. Because the Guard camp at Anzimar was literally on the shore, Elodie had assumed that was what ‘the shore’ meant. The camp was a large town of prefab and rockcrete barrack buildings and halls housing, at present, six different regiments including the Tanith. It was flanked on one side by the sprawl of the city, and on the other by vast rockcrete skirts, the huge soot-scorched platforms where the bulk landers waited, cargo doors open, to swallow up the regiment and carry them up to the ships in high anchor orbit. The landers were huge, monolithic craft. The landing skirts met the shoreline and, with their hold jaws open and the waters of the bay behind them, they looked like oceanic monsters that had come ashore to bask and eat.
Elodie had learned that ‘the shore’ was simply Guard slang for any camp they occupied before shipping out. The shore was a lasman’s temporary connection to one world before he marched on to the next. Sometimes a shore was a real shore, like it was on Menazoid Sigma. Sometimes it was a hive top, or a desert platform, a forest town or an island base. Sometimes it was an orbital station, sometimes it was a dizzying metropolis.
One more thing to learn. There was always one more thing to learn.
She was wearing a simple dress and a shawl and an old pair of combat-issue boots. It was cool, but the temperature would increase as the suns came up, and the cold stink of chemicals would acquire a burning tang. Plumes of brown filth trailed from the peaks of the galvanic reactors across the bay. There was fog out on the water.
The revel camp was a temporary fair of stalls and traders that had grown up between the barrack buildings at the landing skirts. Bright, hand-painted signs numbered the rows and thoroughfares to guide people around. Crowds were already growing. There were acrobats and tumblers, men hawking song sheets and hymnals, barrows selling hot slab fritters and fried biscuits, a smell of caffeine and sacra and lho-stick smoke, the tapping of tinkers and cobblers at work.