The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘I have weighed them and I am content.’ Finree’s father was leaning forward slightly himself, eyes narrowed as if he was facing into a great wind. She thought she could see his hand trembling, but his voice emerged calm and measured. ‘I suspect my great regret will be that I allowed things to go so far.’

  The Magus’ brows drew in further, his hissing voice almost painful to the ear. ‘Oh, a man can have greater regrets than that, Lord Marshal—’

  ‘If I may?’ Bayaz’ servant was striding jauntily through the chaos towards them. He was wet through, as though he had swum a river, dirt-caked as though he had waded a bog, but he showed not the slightest discomfort. Bayaz leaned down towards him and the servant whispered in his ear through a cupped hand. The Magus’ frown slowly faded as he first listened, then sat slowly back in his saddle, considering, and finally shrugged.

  ‘Very well, Marshal Kroy,’ he said. ‘Yours is the command.’

  Finree’s father turned away. ‘I will need a translator. Who speaks the language?’

  An officer with a heavily bandaged arm stepped up. ‘The Dogman and some of his Northmen were with us at the start of the attack, sir, but …’ He squinted into the milling crowd of wounded and worn-out soldiery. Who could possibly know where anyone was now?

  ‘I have a smattering,’ said Gorst.

  ‘A smattering might cause misunderstandings. We cannot afford any.’

  ‘It should be me,’ said Finree.

  Her father stared at her, as if astonished to find her there, let alone volunteering for duty. ‘Absolutely not. I cannot—’

  ‘Afford to wait?’ she finished for him. ‘I spoke with Black Dow only yesterday. He knows me. He offered me terms. I am the best suited. It should be me.’

  He looked at her for a moment longer, then gave the slightest smile. ‘Very well.’

  ‘I will accompany you,’ piped Gorst with a show of chivalry sickeningly inappropriate among so many dead men. ‘Might I borrow your sword, Colonel Felnigg? I left mine at the summit.’

  So they set off, the three of them, through the thinning drizzle, the Heroes jutting clearly now from the hilltop ahead. Not far up the slope her father slipped, gasped as he fell awkwardly, catching at the grass. Finree started forward to help him up. He smiled, and patted her hand, but he looked suddenly old. As if his confrontation with Bayaz had sucked ten years out of him. She had always been proud of her father, of course. But she did not think she had ever been so proud of him as she was at that moment. Proud and sad at once.

  Wonderful slipped the needle through, pulled the thread after and tied it off. Normally it would’ve been Whirrun doing it, but Cracknut had sewed his last stitches, more was the pity. ‘Just as well you’ve got a thick head.’

  ‘Served me well my whole life.’ Craw made the joke without thinking, no laughter given or expected, just as shouting came up from the wall that faced the Children. Where shouting would come from if the Union came again. He stood, the world see-sawed wildly for a moment and his skull felt like it was going to burst.

  Yon grabbed his elbow. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Aye, all things considered.’ And Craw swallowed his urge to spew and pushed through the crowd, the valley opening out in front of him, sky stained strange colours as the storm passed off. ‘They coming again?’ He wasn’t sure they could stand another go. He was sure he couldn’t.

  Dow was all grin, though. ‘In a manner of speaking.’ He pointed out three figures making their way up the slope towards the Heroes. The very same route Hardbread had taken a few days before when he came to ask for his hill back. When Craw had still had the best part of a dozen, all looking to him to keep ’em safe. ‘Reckon they want to talk.’

  ‘Talk?’

  ‘Let’s go.’ And Dow tossed his blood-crusted axe to Shivers, straightened the chain about his shoulders and strode through the gap in the mossy wall and down the hillside.

  ‘Not too fast,’ called Craw as he set off after. ‘Don’t reckon my knees’ll take it!’

  The three figures came closer. Craw felt just the slightest bit happier when he realised one was the woman he’d taken across the bridge yesterday, wearing a soldier’s coat. The relief leaked quick when he saw who the third was, though. The big Union man who’d nearly killed him, a bandage around his thick skull.

  They met about half way between the Heroes and the Children. Where the first arrows were prickling the ground. The old man stood with shoulders back, one fist clasped behind him in the other. Clean-shaven, with short grey hair and a sharp look, like he missed nothing. He wore a black coat, stitched with leaves at the collar in silver thread, a sword at his side with a pommel made from some jewel, looked like it had never been drawn. The girl stood at his elbow, the neckless soldier a little further back, his eyes on Craw, the white of one turned all bloody red and a black cut under the other. Looked like he’d left his sword in the mud up on the hill, but he’d found another. You didn’t have to look far for a blade around here. Those were the times.

  Dow stopped a couple of paces above them and Craw stopped a pace behind that, hands crossed in front of him. Close enough to get at his sword quick, though he doubted he’d have had the strength to draw the damn thing. Standing up was enough of a challenge. Dow was chirpier.

  ‘Well, well.’ Grinning down at the girl with every tooth and spreading his arms in greeting. ‘Never expected to be seeing you again so soon. Do you want to hold me?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘This is my father, Lord Marshal Kroy, commander of his Majesty’s—’

  ‘I guessed. And you lied.’

  She frowned up at him. ‘Lied?’

  ‘He’s shorter’n me.’ Dow’s grin spread even wider. ‘Or he looks it from where I’m standing, anyway. Quite the day we’re having, ain’t it? Quite the red day.’ He lifted a fallen Union spear with the toe of his boot, then nudged it away. ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘My father would like to end the fighting.’

  Craw felt such a wave of relief his swollen knees almost went out from under him. Dow was cagier. ‘Could’ve done that yesterday when I offered, given us all a lot less bloody digging to do.’

  ‘He’s offering now.’

  Dow looked across at Craw, and Craw just about managed to shrug. ‘Better tardy than not at all.’

  ‘Huh.’ Dow narrowed his eyes at the girl, and at the soldier, and at the marshal, like he was thinking of saying no. Then he put his hands on his hips, and sighed. ‘All right. Can’t say I wanted any of this in the first place. There’s people of my own I could’ve been killing, ’stead o’ wasting my sweat on you bastards.’

  The girl said a few words to her father, he said a few back. ‘My father is greatly relieved.’

  ‘Then my life’s worth living. I’ve a few things to tidy up before we hammer out the details.’ He cast an eye over the carnage on the Children. ‘Probably you have too. We’ll talk tomorrow. Let’s say after lunch, I can’t do business with a hollow belly.’

  The girl passed it on to her father in Union, and while she did it Craw looked down at the red-eyed soldier, and he looked back. He had a long smear of blood down his neck. His, or Craw’s, or one of Craw’s dead friends’? Not even an hour ago they’d struggled with every shred of strength and will to murder each other. Now there was no need. Made him wonder why there ever had been.

  ‘He’s a right fucking killer, your man there,’ said Dow, more or less summing up Craw’s thoughts.

  The girl looked over her shoulder. ‘He is …’ searching for the right words. ‘The king’s watcher.’

  Dow snorted. ‘He did a bit more’n fucking watch today. He’s got a devil in him, and I mean that as a compliment. Man like him could do well over on our side o’ the Whiteflow. He was a Northman he’d be in all the songs. Shit, might be he’d be a king instead o’ just watching one.’ Dow smiled that killing smile he had. ‘Ask him if he wants to work for me.’

  The girl opened her mouth but the neckless one s
poke first, with a thick accent and the strangest, high, girlish little voice Craw had ever heard on a man. ‘I am happy where I am.’

  Dow raised one brow. “Course you are. Real happy. Must be why you’re so damn good at killing men.’

  ‘What about my friend?’ asked the girl. ‘The one who was captured with me—’

  ‘Don’t give up, do you?’ Dow showed his teeth again. ‘You really think anyone’ll want her back, now?’

  She looked him right in the eye. ‘I want her back. Didn’t I get what you asked for?’

  ‘Too late for some.’ Dow ran a careless eye over the carnage scattered across the slope, took in a breath, and blew it out. ‘But that’s war, eh? There have to be losers. Might be an idea to send some messengers, let everyone know they can all stop fighting and have a big sing-song instead. Be a shame to carry on butchering each other for nothing, wouldn’t it?’

  The woman blinked, then rendered it into Union again. ‘My father would like to recover our dead.’

  But the Protector of the North was already turning away. ‘Tomorrow. They won’t run off.’

  Black Dow walked off up the slope, the older man giving her the faintest, apologetic grin before he followed.

  Finree took a long breath, held it, then let it out. ‘I suppose that’s it.’

  ‘Peace is always an anticlimax,’ said her father, ‘but no less desirable for that.’ He started stiffly back towards the Children and she walked beside him.

  A throwaway conversation, a couple of bad jokes that half the gathering of five could not even have understood, and it was done. The battle was over. The war was over. Could they have had that conversation at the start, and would all those men – all these men – still be alive? Still have their arms, or legs? However she turned it around, she could not make it fit. Perhaps she should have been angry at the stupendous waste, but she was too tired, too irritated by the way her damp clothes were chafing her back. And at least it was over now after—

  Thunder rolled across the battlefield. Terribly, frighteningly loud. For a moment she thought it must be lightning striking the Heroes. A last, petulant stroke of the storm. Then she saw the mighty ball of fire belching up from Osrung, so large she fancied she could feel the heat of it on her face. Specks flew about it, spun away from it, streaks and spirals of dust following them high into the sky. Pieces of buildings, she realised. Beams,blocks. Men. The flame vanished and a great cloud of black smoke shot up after it, spilling into the sky like a waterfall reversed.

  ‘Hal,’ she muttered, and before she knew it, she was running.

  ‘Finree!’ shouted her father.

  ‘I’ll go.’ Gorst’s voice.

  She took no notice, charging on downhill as fast as she could with the tails of Hal’s coat snatching at her legs.

  ‘What the hell—’ muttered Craw, watching the column of smoke crawl up, the wind already dragging it billowing out towards them, the orange of fires flickering at its base, licking at the jagged wrecks that used to be buildings.

  ‘Oops,’ said Dow. ‘That’ll be Ishri’s surprise. Shitty timing for all concerned.’

  Another day Craw might’ve been horror-struck, but today it was hard to get worked up. A man can only feel so sorry and he was way past his limit. He swallowed, and turned from the giant tree of dirt spreading its branches over the valley, and struggled back up the hillside after Dow.

  ‘You couldn’t call it a win, exactly,’ he was saying, ‘but not a bad result, all in all. Best send someone off to Reachey, tell him tools down. Tenways and Calder too, if they’re still—’

  ‘Chief.’ Craw stopped on the wet slope, next to the face-down corpse of a Union soldier. A man has to do the right thing. Has to stand by his Chief, whatever his feelings. He’d stuck to that all his life, and they say an old horse can’t jump new fences.

  ‘Aye?’ Dow’s grin faded as he looked into Craw’s face. ‘What’s to frown about?’

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  The Moment of Truth

  The deluge had finally come to an end but the leaves were still dripping relentlessly on the soaked, sore, unhappy soldiers of his Majesty’s First. Corporal Tunny was the most soaked, sore and unhappy of the lot. Still crouching in the bushes. Still staring towards that same stretch of wall he’d been staring at all day and much of the day before. His eye chafed raw from the brass end of his eyeglass, his neck chafed raw from his constant scratching, his arse and armpits chafed raw from his wet clothes. He’d had some shitty duties in his chequered career, but this was down there among the worst, somehow combining the two awful constants of the army life – terror and tedium. For some time the wall had been lost in the hammering rain but now had taken shape again. The same mossy pile slanting down towards the water. And the same spears bristling above it.

  ‘Can we see yet?’ hissed Colonel Vallimir.

  ‘Yes, sir. They’re still there.’

  ‘Give me that!’ Vallimir snatched the eyeglass, peered towards the wall for a moment, then sulkily let it fall. ‘Damn it!’ Tunny had mild sympathy. About as much as he could ever have for an officer. Going meant disobeying the letter of Mitterick’s order. Staying meant disobeying the tone of it. Either way there was a good chance he’d suffer. Here, if one was needed, was a compelling argument against ever rising beyond corporal.

  ‘We go anyway!’ snapped Vallimir, desire for glory evidently having tipped the scales. ‘Get the men ready to charge!’

  Forest saluted. ‘Sir.’

  So there it was. No stratagems for delay, no routes to light duty, no feigning of illness or injuries. It was time to fight, and Tunny had to admit he was almost relieved as he did up the buckle on his helmet. Anything but crouching in the bloody bushes any longer. There was a whispering as the order was passed down the line, a rattling and scraping as men stood, adjusted their armour, drew their weapons.

  ‘That it, then?’ asked Yolk, eyes wide.

  ‘That’s it.’ Tunny was strangely light-headed as he undid the ties and slid the canvas cover from the standard. He felt that old, familiar tightness in his throat as he gently unfurled the precious square of red material. Not fear. Not fear at all. That other, much more dangerous thing. The one Tunny had tried over and over to smother, but always sprouted up again as powerful as ever when he wanted it least.

  ‘Oh, here we go,’ he whispered. The golden sun of the Union slipped out of hiding as the cloth unrolled. The number one embroidered on it. The standard of Corporal Tunny’s regiment, which he’d served with since a boy. Served with in the desert and the snow. The names of a score of old battles stitched in gold thread, glittering in the shadows. The names of battles fought and won by better men than him.

  ‘Oh, here we bloody go.’ His nose hurt. He looked up at the branches, at the black leaves and the bright cracks of sky between them, at the glittering beads of water at their edges. His eyelids fluttered, blinking back tears. He stepped forward to the very edge of the trees, trying to swallow the dull pain behind his breastbone as men gathered around him in a long line. His limbs were tingling. Yolk and Worth behind him, the last of his little flock of recruits, both pale as they faced towards the water, and the wall beyond it. As they faced—

  ‘Charge!’ roared Forest, and Tunny was away. He burst from the trees and down the long slope, threading between old tree stumps, bounding from one to another. He heard men shouting behind him, men running, but he was too busy holding the standard high in both hands, the wind taking the cloth and dragging it out straight above his head, tugging hard at his hands, his arms, his shoulders.

  He splashed out into the stream, floundered through the slow water to the middle, no more than thigh deep. He turned, waving the standard back and forth, its golden sun flashing. ‘On, you bastards!’ he roared at the crowd of running men behind him. ‘On, the First! Forward! Forward!’ Something whipped past in the air, just seen out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘I’m hit!’ shrieked Worth, stagg
ering in the stream, helmet twisted across his stricken face, clutching at his breastplate.

  ‘By birdshit, idiot!’ Tunny took the standard in one hand and wedged the other under Worth’s armpit, dragged him along a few steps until he had his balance back then plunged on himself, lifting his knees up high, spraying water with every step.

  He hauled himself up the mossy bank, free hand clutching at roots, wet boots wrestling at the loose earth, finally clambering onto the overhanging turf. He snatched a look back, all he could hear his own whooping breath echoing in his helmet. The whole regiment, or the few hundred who remained, at any rate, were flooding down the slope and across the stream after him, kicking up sparkling drops.

  He shoved the snapping standard high into the air, gave a meaningless roar as he drew his sword and ran on, face locked into a snarling mask, thumping towards the wall, spear-tips showing above it. Two more great strides and he sprang up onto the drystone, screaming like a madman, swinging his sword wildly one way and the other to clatter against the spears and knock them toppling …

  There was no one there.

  Just old pole-arms leaning loose against the wall, and damp barley shifting in the wind, and the calm, wooded fells rising faint at the north side of the valley very much like they did at the south side.

  No one to fight.

  No doubt there had been fighting, and plenty of it too. Over to the right the crops were flattened, the ground before the wall trampled to a mass of mud, littered with the bodies of men and horses, the ugly rubbish of victory and defeat.

  But the fighting was over now.

  Tunny narrowed his eyes. A few hundred strides away, off to the north and east, figures were jogging across the fields, chinks of sunlight through the heavy clouds glinting on armour. The Northmen, presumably. And since no one appeared to be pursuing them, pulling back in their own time, and on their own terms.

  ‘Yah!’ shrieked Yolk as he ran up, a war cry that could hardly have made a duck nervous. ‘Yah!’ Leaning over the wall to poke away wildly with his sword. ‘Yah?’