Mazarine split a lined smile. ‘Orso didn’t get where he is by throwing his sword in the river. No, he’ll keep us close to hand, don’t worry about that.’
Sculia gave a grunt of agreement. ‘He who prepares for peace prepares for defeat, Verturio said.’
‘Who’s he?’ asked Predo.
‘A very clever man,’ said Franchi.
‘There’ll be a place for us still, I reckon.’ And Mazarine leaned over and clapped Predo on the knee with his great scarred hand. ‘And if there’s a place for me, there’ll be a place for all of you. Plague took my wife and my daughter, but the Fates sent me a new family, and I don’t plan on losing that one.’
‘A family.’ Made Predo feel warm all over, that did, to have someone looking out for him. Someone so tough and solid. Never had anyone looking out for him before. ‘Soldiering’s a good life, I reckon.’ He glanced nervously into the darkness beyond the firelight, towards the faint lights of Ospria. Towards the fords of the Sulva where they’d fight tomorrow. ‘Apart from the battles, maybe.’
‘Battles ain’t so bad,’ said Franchi.
Mazarine leaned back onto one elbow, grinning. ‘Long as you’re on the winning side.’
‘It hurts,’ snarled Sculia through his red teeth. ‘Shit, it hurts.’
‘What do I do?’ There was blood everywhere. Blood all over Predo’s hands. Blood bubbling from around the shaft of the bolt and from the joints in Sculia’s armour and washing off in the frothing river. The white cross of Talins on his surcoat had turned red with it.
‘What the hell do I do?’ Predo screeched, but no one was listening, even if he could’ve been heard.
The noise was deafening. The sound of hell. Everyone shouting over each other. All questions and no answers. Howling, hardly like people at all. Men floundering past through the river, showering water over each other, falling, getting up, wounded screaming as they were dragged back the other way, arrows and bolts flitting from the blue sky without warning. Predo could see men sitting above the crowd. Riders. Metal twinkling as they hacked from their saddles with sword and axe. Predo wasn’t sure whether they were friends or enemies. Didn’t look like things could possibly be going to plan. Didn’t look like there could be a plan.
He knelt there, icy water babbling around his legs, soaked with spray as men splashed past, just staring. Sculia wasn’t saying it hurt any more. He wasn’t saying anything.
‘What do I do?’ Predo whispered, and he felt someone grab him under the arm.
‘He’s dead.’ Sergeant Mazarine, calm and steady as ever, a rock in this storm-tossed sea of men, pointing the way with his spear. ‘Forward!’ he roared over his shoulder. ‘Forward!’ Dragging Predo after him, sloshing in the cold river. Good thing he knew which way forward was, ’cause Predo had no notion, the breath wheezing and rattling in his throat as he scrambled on. Over the top of the blur of struggling men and mounts Ospria jerked and wobbled on its hill.
Something spattered in his face and he gasped. Touched his cheek, stared at his trembling hand. Blood, red-black on his water-wrinkled fingertips. A horse reared and kicked and sent a man flopping into Predo’s side, nearly knocked him over.
Mazarine was up ahead, wading forward with his spear in his fists. Predo staggered back as a horse fell near him, pitching its rider down into the river. An axe rose and fell. Metal shrieked. Men screamed. He scraped the wet hair out of his eyes and blinked. He saw a woman crouched in the river ahead. A woman in bright armour with black hair plastered across her pale face.
It had to be her. Murcatto. The Butcher of Caprile. Smaller than he’d imagined, but who else could it be?
She swung at someone with a mace but missed, staggered after it. It was Franchi, and he shoved her with his shield, knocked her off balance, lifting his sword. As he stepped close, someone stepped close to him from behind. A great big bastard, stripped to the waist. A Northman, maybe, all blood-speckled head to toe like some death-drunk madman from a story. He swung his axe whistling down before Franchi could swing his sword and it thudded deep into his shoulder, cleaved him open like a butcher might cleave a side of beef.
Franchi made a hideous squeal, blood spraying out of him and into the woman’s face. She reeled back, spitting, blinded, and Mazarine was on her, growling with fury. He stabbed at her with his spear and it shrieked down her breastplate, sending her toppling back into the water with a cry.
Predo started forward to help but his boot caught on something on the riverbed and he fell, coughed out a mouthful of water as he struggled up. A fallen battle flag. White cross on black cloth.
He raised his head to see Murcatto floundering to her knees as Mazarine raised his spear over her. She twisted around, a flash of metal as she drove a knife into the side of his leg and he bent forward, eyes bulging.
‘No,’ whispered Predo, tearing the clutching cloth from his ankle, but too late.
He saw the woman’s teeth gritted through her tangle of bloody hair as she burst up, swinging the mace in a spray of shining water. There was a fountain of blood and teeth as it crunched into Mazarine’s jaw and sent him tottering back.
She snarled as she lifted her mace high and clubbed him in the throat, knocked him limp on his back in the river and fell across him, rolled hissing and snapping through the water and up.
Predo stared numbly around, sword limp in his hand, half-expecting that someone would be charging at him with murder in their eyes, but all of a sudden the fighting seemed to be done. Men stood and stared, just like he did. They sank into the river, clutching at wounds. They reeled about in confusion. Then a rider not far away stood tall in his stirrups, ripping off his helmet, and screamed out, ‘Victory!’
Sergeant Mazarine lay over a rock, arms spread wide. He was dead. They were all dead. Battles aren’t so bad. Long as you’re on the winning side.
Others began to cheer, and others. Osprians, clearly. Predo stared at the woman. She took a tottering step forward and flopped into the arms of the half-naked monster, her mace-head, still sticky with Sergeant Mazarine’s blood, dangling against his bare back.
They were no more than three paces off in an exhausted embrace, and Predo was quick. He could’ve charged up and split the back of her head with his sword. Right then, he could’ve put an end to the infamous Serpent of Talins.
But at that moment the Northman looked right at him, and Predo felt a great weight of icy fear settle on him. There was a mighty scar across his blood-dotted face, and in the midst of it a bright ball of dead metal, glinting with wet as the sun broke through the clouds.
That was the moment Predo decided soldiering weren’t really the life for him. He swallowed, then thrust his sword up high in the air.
‘Victory!’ he screamed out, along with everyone else.
It was all chaos down there, after all, and there was nothing to show whether he stood with Talins or Ospria. Just another lad in a leather jerkin. Just one of the lucky ones who’d lived through it.
‘Victory!’ he shouted again in a cracking voice, trying to make out they were tears of happiness on his cheeks as he looked down at Sergeant Mazarine’s broken corpse, draped over a rock with the river foaming around it.
Just life, ain’t it? You make the best of what you’re offered.
Seemed a lucky chance now he didn’t have a surcoat.
The Near Country,
Summer 584
Shy gave the horse her heels, its forelegs buckled and, before she had a notion what was happening, she and her saddle had bid each other a sad farewell.
She was offered a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Not a good one at a brief assay, and the impending earth allowed no time for a longer. She did her best to roll with the fall – as she tried to do with most of her many misfortunes – but the ground soon uncurled her, gave her a fair roughing up and tossed her flopping into a patch of sun-s
hrivelled scrub.
Dust settled.
She stole a moment just to get some breath in. Then one to groan while the world stopped rolling. Then another to shift gingerly an arm and a leg, waiting for that sick jolt of pain that meant something was broke and her miserable shadow of a life would soon be lost in the dusk. She would’ve welcomed it, if it meant she could stretch out and not have to run no more. But the pain didn’t come. Not outside of the usual compass, leastways. As far as her miserable shadow of a life went, she was still awaiting judgement.
Shy dragged herself up, scratched and scuffed, caked in dust and spitting out grit. She’d taken too many mouthfuls of sand the last few months but she’d a dismal premonition there’d be more. Her horse lay a few strides distant, one foamed-up flank heaving, forelegs black with blood. Neary’s arrow had snagged it in the shoulder, not deep enough to kill or even slow it right off, but deep enough to make it bleed at a good pace. With her hard riding, that had killed it just as dead as a shaft in the heart.
There’d been a time Shy had got attached to horses. A time – despite reckoning herself hard with people and being mostly right – she’d been uncommon soft about animals. But that time was a long time gone. There wasn’t much soft on Shy these days, body or mind. So she left her mount to its final red-frothed breaths without the solace of her calming hand and ran for the town, tottering some at first but quickly warming to the exercise. At running she’d a heap of practice.
Town was perhaps an overstatement. It was six buildings and calling them buildings was being generous to two or three. All rough lumber and an entire stranger to straight angles, sun-baked, rain-peeled and dust-blasted, huddled about a dirt square and a crumbling well.
The biggest building had the look of tavern or brothel or trading post or more likely all three amalgamated. A rickety sign still clung to the boards above the doorway but the name had been rubbed by the wind to just a few pale streaks in the grain. Nothing, nowhere, was all its proclamation now. Up the steps two by two, bare feet making the old boards wheeze, thoughts boiling away at how she’d play it when she got inside, what truths she’d season with what lies for the most likely recipe.
There’s men chasing me! Gulping breath in the doorway and doing her best to look beyond desperate – no mighty effort of acting at that moment, or any occupying the last twelve months, indeed.
Three of the bastards! Then – provided no one recognised her from all the bills for her arrest – They tried to rob me! A fact. No need to add she’d good and robbed the money herself from the new bank in Hommenaw in the company of those three worthies plus another since caught and hanged by the authorities.
They killed my brother! They’re drunk on blood! Her brother was safe at home where she wished she was and if her pursuers were drunk it would likely be on cheap spirits, as usual, but she’d shriek it with that little warble in her throat. Shy could do quite a warble when she needed one, she’d practised it ’til it was something to hear. She pictured the patrons springing to their feet in their eagerness to aid a woman in distress. They shot my horse! She had to admit it didn’t seem overpowering likely that anyone hardbitten enough to live out here would be getting into a sweat of chivalry but maybe fate would deal her a winning hand for once.
It had been known.
She blundered through the tavern’s door, opening her mouth to serve up the tale, and stopped cold.
The place was empty.
Not just no one there but nothing, and for damn sure no winning hand. Not a twig of furniture in the bare common room. A narrow stairway and a balcony running across the left-hand wall, doorways yawning empty upstairs. Chinks of light scattered where the rising sun was seeking out the many gaps in the splitting carpentry. Maybe just a lizard skittering away into the shadows – of which there was no shortage – and a bumper harvest of dust, greying every surface, drifted into every corner. Shy stood there a moment, just blinking, then dashed back out, along the rickety stoop and to the next building. When she shoved the door it dropped right off its rusted hinges.
This one hadn’t even a roof. Hadn’t even a floor. Just bare rafters with the careless, pinking sky above, and bare joists with a stretch of dirt below every bit as desolate as the miles of dirt outside.
She saw it now, as she stepped back into the street with vision unhindered by hope. No glass in the windows, or wax-paper even. No rope by the crumbling well. No animals to be seen – aside from her own dead horse, that was, which only served to prove the point.
It was a dried-out corpse of a town, long since expired.
Shy stood in that forsaken place, up on the balls of her bare feet as though she was about to sprint off somewhere but lacked the destination, hugging herself with one arm while the fingers of the other hand fluttered and twitched at nothing, biting on her lip and sucking air fast and rasping through the little gap between her front teeth.
Even by recent standards, it was a low moment. But if she’d learned anything the last few months it was that things can always get lower. Looking back the way she’d come, Shy saw the dust rising. Three little grey trails in the shimmer off the grey land.
‘Oh, hell,’ she whispered, and bit her lip harder. She pulled her eating knife from her belt and wiped the little splinter of metal on her dirty shirt, as though cleaning it might somehow settle the odds. Shy had been told she was blessed with a fertile imagination, but even so it was hard to picture a more feeble weapon. She’d have laughed if she hadn’t been on the verge of weeping. She’d spent way too much time on the verge of weeping the last few months, now she thought about it.
How had it come to this?
A question for some jilted girl rather than an outlaw with four thousand marks offered, but still a question she was never done asking. Some desperado. She’d grown expert on the desperate part but the rest remained a mystery. The sorry truth was she knew full well how it came to this – the same way as always. One disaster following so hard on another she just bounced between ’em, pinging about like a moth in a lantern. The second usual question followed hard on the first.
What the fuck now?
She sucked in her stomach – not that there was much to suck in these days – and dragged the bag out by the drawstrings, coins inside clicking together with that special sound only money makes. Two thousand marks in silver, give or take. You’d think a bank would hold a lot more – they told depositors they always had fifty thousand on hand – but it turns out you can’t trust banks any more than bandits.
She dug her hand in, dragged free a fistful of coins and tossed money across the street, leaving it gleaming in the dust. She did it like she did most things these days – hardly knowing why. Maybe she valued her life a lot higher’n two thousand marks, even if no one else did. Maybe she hoped they’d just take the silver and leave her be, though what she’d do once she was left be in this corpse town – no horse, no food, no weapon – she hadn’t thought out. Clearly she hadn’t fixed up a whole plan, or not one that would hold too much water, leastways. Leaky planning had always been a problem of hers.
She sprinkled silver as if she was tossing seed on her mother’s farm, miles and years and a dozen violent deaths away. Whoever would’ve thought she’d miss the place? Miss the bone-poor house and the broke-down barn and the fences that always needed mending. The stubborn cow that never gave milk and the stubborn well that never gave water and the stubborn soil that only weeds would thrive in. Her stubborn little sister and brother, too. Even big, scarred, soft-headed Lamb. What Shy would’ve given now to hear her mother’s shrill voice curse her out again. She sniffed hard, her nose hurting, her eyes stinging, and wiped ’em on the back of her frayed cuff. No time for tearful reminiscences. She could see three dark spots of riders now beneath those three inevitable dust trails. She flung the empty bag away, ran back to the tavern and—
‘Ah!’ She hopped over the threshold, bare sole of her foot torn
on a loose nailhead. The world’s nothing but a mean bully, that’s a fact. Even when you’ve big misfortunes threatening to drop on your head, small ones still take every chance to prick your toes. How she wished she’d got the chance to grab her boots. Just to keep a shred of dignity. But she had what she had, and neither boots nor dignity were on the list, and a hundred big wishes weren’t worth one little fact – as Lamb used boringly to drone at her whenever she cursed him and her mother and her lot in life and swore she’d be gone in the morning.
Shy remembered how she’d been, then, and wished she had the chance now to punch her earlier self in the face. But she could punch herself in the face when she got out of this.
She’d a procession of other willing fists to weather first.
She hurried up the stairs, limping a little and cursing a lot. When she reached the top she saw she’d left bloody toe-prints on every other one. She was working up to feeling pretty damn low about that glistening trail leading right to the end of her leg when something like an idea came trickling through the panic.
She paced down the balcony, making sure to press her bloody foot firm to the boards, and turned into an abandoned room at the end. Then she held her foot up, gripping it hard with one hand to stop the bleeding, and hopped back the way she’d come and through the first doorway, near the top of the steps, pressing herself into the shadows inside.
A pitiful effort, doubtless. As pitiful as her bare feet and her eating knife and her two-thousand-mark haul and her big dream of making it back home to the shit-hole she’d had the big dream of leaving. Small chance those three bastards would fall for that, even stupid as they were. But what else could she do?
When you’re down to small stakes you have to play long odds.
Her own breath was her only company, echoing in the emptiness, hard on the out, ragged on the in, almost painful down her throat. The breath of someone scared near the point of involuntary shitting and all out of ideas. She just couldn’t see her way to the other side of this. She ever made it back to that farm she’d jump out of bed every morning she woke alive and do a little dance, and give her mother a kiss for every cuss, and never snap at her sister or mock Lamb again for being a coward. She promised it, then wished she was the sort who kept promises.
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