Abercrombie, Joe - The Heroes

Tunny stood fuming a moment longer, but fuming was going to do no good. ‘Yolk, Latherlister, Worth, get over here!’

Yolk stood up, wide-eyed. ‘Worth … Worth—’

‘Still squirting,’ said Lederlingen, busy rooting through his pack and hanging various sodden items up on branches to dry.

‘’Course he is. What else would he be doing? You wait for him, then. Yolk, follow me and try not to bloody die.’ He stalked off up the slope, sodden trousers chafing horribly, kicking bits of fallen wood out of his way.

‘Shouldn’t we be keeping quiet?’ whispered Yolk. ‘What if we run into the enemy?’

‘Enemy!’ snorted Tunny. ‘Probably we’ll run into the other bloody battalion, just trotted over the Old Bridge and up a path and got there ahead of us all nice and dry. That’ll make a fine bloody picture, won’t it?’

‘Couldn’t say, sir,’ muttered Yolk, dragging himself up the muddy slope almost on all fours.

‘Corporal Tunny! And I wasn’t soliciting an opinion. Some big bloody grins they’ll have when they see the state of us. Some laugh they’ll all have!’ They were coming to the edge of the trees. Beyond the branches he could see the faint outline of the distant hill, the stones sticking from the top. ‘At least we’re in the right bloody place,’ and then, under his breath, ‘to get wet, sore, hungry and poor, that is. General fucking Jalenhorm, I swear, a soldier expects to get shat on, but this …’

Beyond the trees the ground sloped down, studded with old stumps and new saplings where some woodcutters had once been busy, their slumping sheds abandoned and already rotting back to the earth. Beyond them a gentle river babbled, hardly more than a stream, really, flowing south to empty into the nightmare of swamp they’d just crossed. There was an earthy overhang on the far bank, then a grassy upslope on which some boundary-conscious farmer seemed to have built an irregular drystone wall. Above the wall Tunny saw movement. Spears, their tips glinting in the fading light. So he’d been right. The other battalion were there ahead of them. He just couldn’t work out why they were on the north side of the wall …

‘What is it, Corporal—’

‘Didn’t I tell you to stay bloody quiet?’ Tunny dragged Yolk down into the bushes and pulled out his eyeglass, a good three-part brass one he won in a game of squares with an officer from the Sixth. He edged forwards, finding a gap in the undergrowth. The ground rose sharply on the other side of the stream then dipped away, but there were spears behind the whole length of wall that he could see. He glimpsed helmets too. Some smoke, perhaps from a cook-fire. Then he saw a man wading out into the stream, waving a fishing rod made from a spear and some twine, wild-haired and stripped to the waist, and very definitely not a Union soldier. Perhaps only two hundred strides from where they were squatting in the brush.

‘Uh-oh,’ he breathed.

‘Are those Northmen?’ whispered Yolk.

‘Those are a lot of bloody Northmen. And we’re right on their flank.’ Tunny handed his eyeglass over, half-expecting the lad to look through the wrong end.

‘Where did they come from?’

‘I’d guess the North, wouldn’t you?’ He snatched back his eyeglass. ‘Someone’s going to have to go back. Let someone higher up the dunghill know the bother we’re in here.’

‘They must know already, though. They’ll have run into the Northmen themselves, won’t they?’ Yolk’s voice, never particularly calm, had taken on a slightly hysterical note. ‘I mean, they must’ve! They must know!’

‘Who knows what who knows, Yolk? It’s a battle.’ As he said the words, Tunny realised with mounting worry they were true. If there were Northmen behind that wall, there must have been fighting. It was a battle, all right. Maybe the start of a big one. The Northman in the river had landed something, a flashing sliver of a fish flapping on the end of his line. Some of his mates stood up on the wall, shouting and waving. All bloody smiles. If there had been fighting, it looked pretty damn clear they won.

‘Tunny!’ Forest was creeping up through the brush behind them, bent double. ‘There are Northmen on the other side of that stream!’

‘And fishing, would you believe. That wall’s crawling with the bastards.’

‘One of the lads shinned up a tree. Said he could see horsemen at the Old Bridge.’

‘They took the bridge?’ Tunny was starting to think that if he left this valley with no greater losses than eight bottles of brandy he might count himself lucky. ‘They cross it, we’ll be cut off!’

‘I’m aware of that, Tunny. I’m very bloody well aware of that. We need to take a message back to General Jalenhorm. Pick someone out. And stay out of bloody sight!’ And he crawled away through the undergrowth.

‘Someone’s got to go back through the bog?’ whispered Yolk.

‘Unless you can fly there.’

‘Me?’ The lad’s face was grey. ‘I can’t do it, Corporal Tunny, not after Klige … I just can’t do it!’

Tunny shrugged. ‘Someone has to go. You made it across, you can make it back. Just stick to the grassy bits.’

‘Corporal!’ Yolk had grabbed Tunny’s dirty sleeve and come close, freckled face uncomfortably near. He let his voice drop down quiet. That intimate, urgent little tone that Tunny always liked to hear. The tone in which deals were made. ‘You told me, if I ever needed anything …’ His wet eyes darted left and right, checking they were unobserved. He reached into his jacket and slid out a pewter flask, pressed it into Tunny’s hand. Tunny raised a brow, unscrewed the cap, took a sniff, replaced the cap and slipped it into his own jacket. Then he nodded. Hardly made a dent in what he’d lost in the bog, but it was something.

‘Leatherlicker!’ he hissed as he crept back through the brush. ‘I need a volunteer!’

The Day’s Work

‘By the dead,’ grunted Craw, and there were enough of ’em.

They were scattered up the north slope of the hill as he limped past, a fair few wounded too, howling and whimpering as the wounded do, a sound that set Craw’s teeth on edge more with every passing year. Made him want to scream at the poor bastards to shut up, then made him guilty that he wanted to, knowing he’d done plenty of his own squealing one time or another, and probably wasn’t done with it yet.

Lots more dead around the drystone wall. Enough almost to climb the bloody hill without once stepping on the mangled grass. Ended men from both sides, all on the same side now – the pale and gaping, cold far side of the great divide. One young Union lad seemed to have died on his face, arse in the air, staring sideways at Craw with a look of baffled upset, like he was about to ask if someone could lay him out in a fashion more dignified.

Craw didn’t bother. Dignity ain’t much use to the living, it’s none to the dead.

The slopes were just a build-up to the carnage inside the Heroes, though. The Great Leveller was a joker today, wending his long way up to the punchline. Craw wasn’t sure he ever saw so many dead men all squeezed into one space. Heaps of ’em, all tangled up in the old grave-pit embrace. Hungry birds danced over the stones, waiting their chance. Flies already busy at the open mouths, open eyes, open wounds. Where do all the flies come from, on a sudden? The place had that hero’s smell already. All those bodies bloating in the evening sun, emptying out their innards.

Should’ve been a sight to get anyone pondering his own mortality, but the dozens of Thralls picking over the wreckage seemed no more concerned than if they’d been picking daisies. Stripping off clothes and armour, stacking up weapons and shields good enough to be used. If they were upset it was ’cause the Carls who’d led the charge had snaffled the best booty.

‘Too old for this shit,’ muttered Craw, leaning down to grip at his sore knee, a cold cord of pain running through it from ankle to hip.

‘If it ain’t Curnden Craw, at last!’ Whirrun had been sitting against one of the Heroes and now he stood, brushing dirt from his arse. ‘I’d almost given up on waiting.’ He swung the Father of Swords up onto one shoulder, sheathed again, and pointed into the valley with it, the way they’d come. ‘Thought maybe you’d decided to settle down in one of those farms on the way over here.’

‘I wish I had.’

‘Aw, but then who’d show me my destiny?’

‘Did you fight?’

‘I did, yes, as it happens. Stuck into the midst of it. I’m quite a one for fighting, according to the songs. Lots of fighting here.’ Not that he had a scratch on him. Craw had never seen Whirrun come out of a fight with a single mark. He frowned around the circle of butchery, scrubbing at his hair, and the wind chose that moment to freshen, stirring the tattered clothes of the corpses. ‘Lot of dead men, ain’t there.’

‘Aye,’ said Craw.

‘Heaps and heaps.’

‘Aye.’

‘Union mostly, though.’

‘Aye.’

Whirrun shrugged his sword off his shoulder and stood it on its tip, hilt in both hands, leaning forward so his chin rested on the pommel. ‘Still, even when it’s enemies, a sight like this, well … makes you wonder whether war’s really such a good thing after all.’

‘You joking?’

Whirrun paused, turning the hilt round and round so the end of the stained scabbard twisted into the stained grass. ‘I don’t really know any more. Agrick’s dead.’ Craw looked up, mouth open. ‘He charged off right at the head. Got killed in the circle. Stabbed, I think, with a sword, just about here,’ and he poked at his side, ‘under the ribs and went right through, probably—’

‘Don’t matter exactly how, does it?’ snapped Craw.

‘I guess not. Mud is mud. He had the shadow over him since his brother died, though. You could see it on him. I could, anyway. The boy wasn’t going to last.’

Some consolation, that. ‘The rest?’

‘Jolly Yon got a nick or two. Brack’s leg’s still bothering him, though he won’t say so. Other than that, they’re all good. Good as before, leastways. Wonderful thought we could try and bury Agrick next to his brother.’

‘Aye.’

‘Let’s get a hole dug, then, shall we, ’fore someone else digs there?’

Craw took a long breath as he looked around them. ‘If you can find a spare shovel. I’ll come say the words.’ A fitting end to the day that’d be. Before he got more’n a couple of steps, though, he found Caul Shivers in his way.

‘Dow wants you,’ he said, and with his whisper, and his scar, and his careless frown, he might’ve been the Great Leveller his self.

‘Right.’ Craw fought the urge to start chewing his nails again. ‘Tell ’em I’ll be back soon. I’ll be back soon, will I?’

Shivers shrugged.

Craw might not much have cared for what they’d done with the place, but Black Dow looked happy enough with the day’s work, leaning against one of the stones with a mostly eaten apple in one hand. ‘Craw, you old bastard!’ As he turned, Craw saw one side of his grinning face was all dashed and speckled with blood. ‘Where the hell did you get to?’

‘All honesty, limping along at the back.’ Splitfoot and a few of his Carls were scattered about, swords drawn and eyes peeled. A lot of bare steel, considering they’d won a victory.

‘Thought maybe you got yourself killed,’ said Dow.

Craw winced as he worked his burning foot around, thinking there was still time. ‘I wish I could run fast enough to get myself killed. I’ll stand wherever you tell me, but this charging business is a young man’s game.’

‘I managed to keep up.’

‘Don’t all have your taste for blood, Chief.’

‘It’s been the making of me. Don’t reckon I’ve done a better day’s work than this, though.’ Dow put a hand on Craw’s shoulder and drew him out between the stones, out to the edge of the hill where they could get a look south across the valley. The very spot Craw had stood when they first saw the Union come. Things had changed a lot in a few hours.

The tumbledown wall bristled with weapons, shining dully in the fading light. Men on the slope below as well, digging pits, whittling stakes, making the Heroes a fortress. Below them the south side of the hill was littered with bodies, all the way down to the orchards. Scavengers flitted from one to another, first men then crows, feathered undertakers croaking a happy chorus. Thralls were starting to drag the stripped shapes into heaps for burying. Strange constructions in which one corpse couldn’t be told from another. When a man dies in peacetime it’s all tears and processions, friends and neighbours offering each other comfort. A man dies in war and he’s lucky to get enough mud on top to stop him stinking.

Dow crooked a finger. ‘Shivers.’

‘Chief.’

‘I hear tell they got a choice prisoner down in Osrung. A Union officer or some such. Why don’t you bring him up here, see if we can prick anything out of him worth hearing?’

Shivers’ eye twinkled orange with the setting sun each time he nodded. ‘Right.’ And he strode off, stepping over corpses as careless as autumn leaves.

Dow frowned after him. ‘Some men you have to keep busy, eh, Craw?’

‘I guess.’ Wondering what the hell Dow planned to keep him busy with.

‘Quite the day’s work.’ He tossed his apple core away and patted his stomach like a man who’d had the best meal of his life and a few hundred dead men were the leftovers.

‘Aye,’ muttered Craw. Probably he should’ve been celebrating himself. Doing a little jig. A one-legged one, anyway. Singing and clashing ale cups and all the rest. But he just felt sore. Sore and he wanted to go to sleep, and wake up in that house of his by the water, and never see another battlefield. Then he wouldn’t have to say the lies over Agrick’s mud.

‘Pushed ’em back to the river. All across the line.’ Dow waved at the valley, blood dried black into the skin around his fingernails. ‘Reachey got over the fence and kicked the Union out of Osrung. Scale got a hold o’ the Old Bridge. Golden drove this lot clean across the shallows. He got stopped there but … I’d worry if I started getting everything my way.’ Black Dow winked at him, and Craw wondered if he was about to get stabbed in the back. ‘Guess folk won’t be carping that I ain’t the fighter they thought I was, eh?’

‘Guess not.’ As if that was all that mattered. ‘Shivers said you needed me for something.’

‘Can’t a pair of old fighters have a chat after a battle?’

That gave Craw a much bigger surprise than the blade in the back might’ve. ‘I reckon they can. Just didn’t reckon you’d be one of ’em.’

Dow seemed to think about that for a moment. ‘Neither did I. Guess we’re both surprised.’

‘Aye,’ said Craw, no idea what else to say.

‘We can let the Union come to us tomorrow,’ said Dow. ‘Spare your old legs.’

‘You reckon they’ll come on? After this?’

Dow’s grin was wider’n ever. ‘We gave Jalenhorm a hell of a beating, but half his men never even got across the river. And that’s only one division out of three.’ He pointed over towards Adwein, lights starting to twinkle in the dusk, bright dots marking the path of the road as marching men got torches lit. ‘And Mitterick’s just bringing his men up over there. Fresh and ready. Meed on the other side, I hear.’ And his finger moved over to the left, towards the Ollensand Road. Craw picked out lights there too, further back, his heart sinking all the time. ‘There’s still heaps more work here, don’t worry about that.’ Dow leaned close, fingers squeezing at Craw’s shoulder. ‘We’re just getting started.’