Half a King

by Joe Abercrombie

  But his mother had always said, never worry about what has been done. Only about what will be.

  There was no changing it, and guilt over the past and worry about the future began both to fade, leaving only taunting memories of food. The four dozen pigs roasted for the visit of the High King, so much for such a little, gray-haired man and his hard-eyed minister. The feast when Yarvi’s brother passed his warrior’s test that Yarvi had done no more than pick at, knowing he could never pass himself. The beach before his ill-fated raid, men cooking the meal that might be their last, meat turning above a hundred fires, heat like a hand on your face, a ring of hungry grins lit by flame, fat sizzling and the crackling blackened—

  “Freedom!” roared Rulf, opening his arms wide to hold the vast expanse of empty white. “Freedom to freeze where you please! Freedom to starve where you like! Freedom to walk ’til you drop!”

  His voice died quickly in that thin sharp air.

  “Finished?” asked Nothing.

  Rulf let his arms flop down. “Yes.” And they slogged on.

  It was not the thought of his mother that kept Yarvi going, step after floundering step, stride after aching stride, fall after chilling fall, dogged in the tracks of the others. It was not the thought of his betrothed, or his dead father, or even his stool beside Mother Gundring’s fire. It was the thought of Odem, smiling with his hand on Yarvi’s shoulder. Of Odem, promising to be his shoulder-man. Of Odem, asking gently as the spring rain if a cripple should be King of Gettland.

  “I think not,” Yarvi snarled in smoke through his cracked lips. “I think not … I think not.”

  And step after torturous step, Gettland edged ever closer.

  The fifth day was clear and icy crisp, the sky blinding blue, so that it seemed Yarvi could see almost all the way to the sea, a strip of black and white on the far horizon of a land of black and white.

  “We’ve done well,” he said. “You have to admit.”

  Sumael, shading her eyes from the brightness as she frowned westward, had to do no such thing. “We’ve had good weatherluck.”

  “I don’t feel lucky,” muttered Rulf, hugging himself. “Do you feel lucky, Jaud?”

  “I feel cold,” said Jaud, rubbing at the pinked tips of his ears.

  Sumael shook her head at the sky, which aside from a distant bruise far off to the north looked unusually clear. “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, you’ll learn what bad weatherluck looks like. There’s a storm coming.”

  Rulf squinted up. “You’re sure?”

  “I don’t tell you how to snore, do I? Don’t tell me how to navigate.”

  Rulf looked at Yarvi, and shrugged. But before dark, as usual, she was proved right. That bruise on the sky grew, and swelled, and darkened, and turned odd colors.

  “The gods are angry,” muttered Nothing, frowning up.

  “When aren’t they?” said Yarvi.

  The snow began to fall in giant flakes, in curtains and eddies. The wind blew up in shrieking gusts, bludgeoning from every way at once, barging them left and right. Yarvi took a fall and, when he clambered up, couldn’t see any of the others. He blundered on in a panic and ran straight into Jaud’s back.

  “We have to get out of this!” he screeched, hardly able even to hear his own voice over the wind.

  “I will not argue!” Jaud bellowed back.

  “We need deep snow!”

  “Snow we have!” roared Ankran.

  They floundered to the bottom of a narrow gully, the most promising slope Yarvi could hope to find with the snow coming in such flurries that the others were little more than ghosts. He dug like a rabbit, scooping snow between his legs, burrowing desperately inwards then, when he’d tunnelled a body’s length, up. His hands burned with the cold inside their wrappings of wet sailcloth, his muscles burned with the effort but he forced himself on. He dug as if his life depended on it.

  It did.

  Sumael wormed her way after him, growling through her gritted teeth and using her hatchet like a trowel. They dug out first a shelf, then a hollow, then a tiny chamber. Ankran wriggled in behind, tongue wedged into the gap in his front teeth as he scooped the snow back. Rulf came next into the cold dimness, then Jaud worked his great shoulders up into the growing cave, and finally Nothing poked his head in.

  “Neat,” he said.

  “Keep the entrance clear,” Yarvi muttered, “or we’ll be buried in the night,” and he hunched against the packed snow, unwound the soaked wrappings and blew into his cupped hands. He had few enough fingers already: he could afford to lose no more.

  “Where did you learn this?” asked Sumael, sitting back beside him.

  “My father taught me.”

  “I think he has saved our lives.”

  “You must thank him, when you see him.” Ankran wriggled his shoulders into place. They were tightly squeezed, but they had been for days. There was no room for pride, or distaste, or enmity out here in the wastes.

  Yarvi closed his eyes, then, and thought of his father, laid out pale and cold on the slab. “My father’s dead.”

  “I am sorry,” came Jaud’s deep voice.

  “It’s good that one of us is.”

  Yarvi let his hand drop, and realized a moment later it had fallen against Sumael’s, her upturned fingers pressed into his palm. It felt good there, warm where her skin touched his. He did not move it. Nor did she.

  Slowly he closed his fingers around hers.

  There was a long silence then, the wind whining soft outside their shelter and the breath coming heavy inside, and Yarvi began to feel about as close to comfortable, packed under strides of frozen snow, as he had since they left Ankran’s fire.

  “Here.” He felt the breath of the word on his face, felt Sumael gently take him by the wrist. His eyes flicked open but he could not guess at her expression in the darkness.

  She turned his hand over and pressed something into his palm. Stale, and sour, and halfway between soggy and frozen, but it was bread, and by the gods he was glad to get it.

  They sat pressed together, all eking out their shares, all chewing with something like contentment, or at least relief, and one by one swallowing, and falling silent, and leaving Yarvi wondering whether he dared take Sumael’s hand again.

  Then she said, “that’s the last food.”

  Another silence, but this one far less comfortable.

  Rulf’s voice came muffled in the darkness. “How far to Vansterland?”

  No one answered.

  21.

  THE BETTER MEN

  “Gettlanders are the better men,” came Nothing’s breathy croak. “They fight as one. Each guarded by the shield of his shoulder-man.”

  “Gettlanders? Hah!” Rulf snorted smoke as he struggled on up the snowy slope after Sumael. “A herd of bloody sheep driven bleating to the butcher! When the shoulder-man falls, what then? Throvenmen have fire in them!”

  They’d been arguing all day. Whether sword or bow was superior. Whether Hemenholm was south of Grenmer Island. Whether painted wood or oiled were more loved by Mother Sea and hence made for a more favoured vessel. Yarvi could not imagine where they found the breath. He hardly had enough for breathing with.

  “Throvenmen?” croaked Nothing. “Hah! When the fires burn out what then?” First they would argue their case, then settle to stating their position with ever more certainty, and finally to a contest of scornful grunting. In Yarvi’s hearing neither had conceded a hair’s breadth since they left the South Wind sinking.

  It was three days since the food ran out, and Yarvi’s hunger was an aching void inside him that swallowed every hope. When he had unwrapped the sailcloth from his hands that morning he had hardly recognized them: they were shrivelled and bloated at once. The skin on his fingertips had a waxy look, prickly-numb to the touch. Even Jaud was hollow about the cheeks. Ankran had a limp he was trying and failing to hide. Rulf’s breath came with a wheeze that made Yarvi wince. Nothing had frost in his straggling eyebrows. Sum
ael’s scarred lips were thinner and greyer and tighter pressed with every mile they trudged.

  All Yarvi could think about, as this debate of the damned droned on, was which of them would die first.

  “Gettlanders know discipline,” droned Nothing. “Gettlanders are—”

  “What kind of fool even gives a damn?” snarled Yarvi, rounding on the two old men and stabbing his stub of a finger in their faces, suddenly furious. “Men are just men, good or bad depending on their luck! Now save your breath for walking!” And he wedged his hands back under his armpits and forced himself on up the slope.

  “He’s a cook’s boy and a philosopher,” he heard Rulf wheeze.

  “I can hardly decide which is the more useless out here,” muttered Nothing. “I should have let Trigg kill him. Gettlanders are clearly …”

  He fell silent as he crested the ridge. They all did. A forest lay before them, stretching away in every direction until it was lost in the gray veil of the falling snow.

  “Trees?” whispered Sumael, as though she hardly dared believe her own senses.

  “Trees could mean food,” said Yarvi.

  “Trees could mean fire,” said Ankran.

  Suddenly they were all plunging down the hillside, whooping like children freed from their chores. Yarvi fell, tumbled in a shower of snow and was up again. They floundered eagerly between the stunted outliers, then in amongst towering firs with trunks so thick Yarvi could scarcely have linked his hands around them. Mighty pillars as in some sacred place and they unwelcome trespassers.

  They slowed from run to jog, from jog to cautious shuffle. No fruit fell from the sparse branches. No deer flung themselves onto Nothing’s sword. Such fallen wood as they found was soaked and rotted. Beneath the snow the ground was treacherous with tangled roots and countless years of rotted needles.

  Their laughter guttered out and the wood was perfectly quiet, not so much as a bird’s chirrup to scratch the heavy silence.

  “Gods,” whispered Ankran. “We’re no better here than out there.”

  Yarvi scrambled to a tree trunk, breaking off a piece of half-frozen fungus with a trembling hand.

  “Have you found something?” asked Jaud, squeaky with hope.

  “No.” Yarvi tossed it aside. “This kind can’t be eaten.” And despair began to float down with the snow and settle on Yarvi even more heavily than before.

  “Fire is what we need,” he said, trying to keep the flickering of hope alive. Fire would warm them, and raise their spirits, and bring them together, and keep them going a little longer. Where that might bring them he could not afford to think about. One stroke at a time, as Jaud had always told him.

  “For a fire we need dry wood,” said Ankran. “Might the cook’s boy know where to find some?”

  “I’d know where to buy it in Thorlby,” Yarvi snapped back. In truth, he probably wouldn’t have. There had been slaves for that.

  “Higher ground should be drier ground.” Sumael set off at a jog and Yarvi struggled after, sliding down a slope and into a treeless dip, covered in clean white snow. “Maybe up here …”

  She hurried out into that scar in the forest and Yarvi followed the trail of her quick footprints. Gods he was tired. He could scarcely feel his feet. There was something strange about the ground here, flat and hard under a thin blanket of snow, black patches scattered. At Sumael’s next step there came a strange creaking.

  She froze, frowning down.

  “Wait!” Nothing stood on the slope behind them, clutching a tree with one hand and his sword with the other. “It’s a river!”

  Yarvi stared at his feet, every hair on him prickling with horror. The ice pinged, clicked, shifted under his boots. It gave a long groan as Sumael turned towards him, her wide eyes flicking up to his. There was no more than a stride or two between them.

  Yarvi swallowed, hardly daring even to breathe, and held out his hand to her.

  “Tread softly,” he whispered.

  She took a step and, without so much as a gasp, vanished through the ice.

  First he stood frozen.

  Then his whole body twitched as if to dash forward.

  He stopped himself with a moan, floundered down onto all fours and wriggled to where she had disappeared. Black water, and splinters of ice floating, and not the slightest sign of her. He stared over his shoulder to see Jaud bounding down the bank in a shower of snow.

  “Stay!” shrieked Yarvi. “You’re too heavy!”

  He thought he saw movement under the ice, dragged himself to it sprawled out on his face, scrubbed away snow, could see nothing down there but blackness, lonely bubbles shifting.

  Ankran teetered out onto the river, arms spread wide, skittered to a halt as the frozen surface groaned. Nothing was floundering through the snow downstream, towards a patch of bare ice where jagged rocks poked through.

  Awful silence stretched out.

  “Where is she?” screamed Yarvi. Rulf only stared from the bank, mouth hanging helplessly.

  How long could someone hold their breath? Not this long, surely.

  He saw Nothing hop a few steps from the bank and raise his sword high, point downwards.

  “Are you mad?” Yarvi screeched, before he realized.

  Of course he was.

  The sword darted down, spray fountained up, and Nothing dropped on the ice and thrust his other arm into the water.

  “I have her!” He hauled Sumael from the river, limp as rags and streaming freezing water, dragged her towards the bank where Jaud and Rulf were waiting.

  “Is she breathing?” screamed Yarvi, crawling on hands and knees for fear of going through himself.

  “How do I tell?” asked Jaud, kneeling beside her.

  “Put your cheek to her mouth!”

  “I don’t think so!”

  “Lift her feet!” Yarvi scrambled from the frozen river and forced his leaden legs along the snow-covered bank.

  “What?”

  “Get her upside-down!”

  Jaud dumbly lifted her by her ankles, her loose head dragging in the snow, and Yarvi struggled up and forced two fingers into her mouth, hooked them round and down her throat.

  “Come on!” he growled, spitting, and straining. “Come on!” He had seen Mother Gundring do it once, to a boy who fell in a mill-pond.

  The boy had died.

  Sumael didn’t move. She was clammy-cold, like a dead thing already, and Yarvi snarled a mess of prayers through his clenched teeth, he hardly even knew who to.

  He felt Nothing’s hand on his shoulder. “Death waits for us all.”

  Yarvi shrugged him off and pushed harder. “Come on!”

  And as suddenly as a child pinched awake Sumael jerked and coughed out water, rasped in half a breath and coughed out more.

  “Gods!” said Rulf, taking a dumbstruck step back.

  Yarvi was almost as surprised as he was, and certainly had never been so glad to have a handful of cold puke.

  “You going to put me down?” croaked Sumael, eyes swivelling to the corners. Jaud let her drop and she hunched on the snow, plucking at her thrall-collar, and coughing and spitting, and starting to shiver hard.

  Rulf was staring as if he had witnessed seen a miracle. “You’re a sorcerer!”

  “Or a minister,” murmured Ankran.

  Yarvi had no wish to let anyone pick at that scab. “We need to get her warm.”

  They struggled to coax a fire with Ankran’s little flint, tearing sheets of moss from the trees for kindling, but everything was wet and the few sparks would not take. One after another they tried while Sumael stared, eyes fever-bright, shivering harder and harder until they could hear her clothes flapping against her.

  Jaud who had once lit the ovens in a bakery every morning could do nothing, and Rulf who had set fires on beaches windswept and rain-lashed all about the Shattered Sea could do nothing, and even Yarvi made a futile effort, fumbling the flint in his useless stub of a hand until his fingers were cut while all th
e while Ankran muttered a prayer to He Who Makes the Flame.

  But the gods were working no more miracles that day.

  “Can we dig a shelter?” Jaud rocked back on his heels. “Like we did in the blizzard?”

  “Not enough snow,” said Yarvi.

  “With branches, then?”

  “Too much snow.”

  “Got keep going.” Sumael suddenly wobbled to her feet, Rulf’s outsize coat dropping in the snow behind her. “Too hot,” she said, unwinding the sailcloth from her hands so it flapped free, tugging her shirt open and pulling at the chain inside. “Scarf’s too tight.” She took a couple more shambling steps and pitched straight on her face. “Got keep going,” she mumbled into the snow.

  Jaud gently rolled her, sat her up, hugging her with one arm.

  “Father won’t wait forever,” she whispered, faintest breath of smoke spilling from her blued lips.

  “The cold’s in her head.” Yarvi put his palm against her clammy skin and found his hand shook. He might have saved her from drowning but without fire or food the winter would take her through the Last Door still, and he could not stand the thought of it. What would they do without her?

  What would he do without her?

  “Do something!” hissed Rulf, gripping hard at Yarvi’s arm.

  But what? Yarvi chewed at his cracked lip, staring off into the forest as though some answer might present itself among those barren trunks.

  There is always a way.

  He frowned for a moment, then shook Rulf off and hurried to the nearest tree, tearing the wrappings from his good hand. He plucked a red-brown tuft of something from the bark, and the embers of hope sparked to life once again.

  “Wool,” muttered Ankran, holding up another tuft. “Sheep passed this way.”

  Rulf tore it from his fingers. “Were driven?”

  “Southwards,” said Yarvi.

  “How can you tell?”

  “The moss grows out of the wind on the west side of the trunks.”

  “Sheep mean warmth,” said Rulf.

  “Sheep mean food,” said Jaud.

  Yarvi did not say what he was thinking. That sheep meant people, and people might not be friendly. But to weigh your choices you need more than one.