Thorn saw the Horse People scattering, bounding away down the slope towards the open plain and their waiting horses and she held her weapons high and screamed, burning to the tips of her fingers. Her father’s ghost urged her on and she sprang after her fleeing enemies like a hound after hares.
“Stop her!” roared Rulf, and someone dragged her back, cursing and struggling, the hair she still had tangled across her face. It was Brand, his beard scratching her cheek and his left arm under hers so that his shield was across her. Beyond the running Uzhaks she saw others stalking forward through the grass, bows drawn and faces eager. Lots of them, and close behind the ebbing battle-joy a wave of fear washed in on her.
“Close up the wall!” roared Rulf, spit flecking from his teeth. The men edged back, shuffled together, stopping up the gaps, shields wobbling and rattling and the daylight flickering between them. Thorn heard arrows click against lime-wood, saw one spin from the rim of Brand’s shield and over his shoulder. Odda was down, a shaft in his side, spewing curses as he dragged himself up the hill.
“Back! Back! Steady, now!”
She caught Odda under his arms and started to haul him away, while he grunted and kicked and blew bloody bubbles. She fell with him on top of her, nearly cut herself with her own ax, struggled up and dragged him on, then Koll was there to help and between them they pulled him back to the crest of the hill, the shield wall edging after them. Back to where they’d stood a few mad moments ago, the river at their backs and the plain stretching away before them.
Thorn stood there dumb, numb, not sure how many of the crew were dead. Three? Four? Everyone had scratches and some were hurt bad. Didn’t know if she was hurt. Didn’t know whose blood was on her. From the look of that arrow she held no high hopes for Odda. She held no high hopes for anything. Through the gaps in the battered shields she could see the trampled slope scattered with bodies, some still moving, groaning, pawing at their wounds.
“Push it through or pull it out?” snapped Safrit, kneeling beside Odda, gripping his bloody hand tight.
Father Yarvi only stared down, and rubbed at his lean jaw, fingertips leaving red streaks across his cheek.
The fury was gone as though it had never been, the fire in her guttered to ashes. Thorn’s father never told her that the battle-joy is borrowed strength and must be repaid double. She gripped the pouch with his fingerbones in it but there was no comfort there. She saw the leaking wounds and the men moaning and the slaughter they’d done. The slaughter she’d done.
She was a killer, that there was no denying.
She hunched over as if she’d been punched in the guts and coughed thin puke into the grass, straightened shivering, and staring, with the world too bright and her knees all a-wobble and her eyes swimming.
She was a killer. And she wanted her mother.
She saw Brand staring at her over his shoulder, his face all grazed down one side and his neck streaked with blood into the collar of his shirt and the tattered bandages flapping about the red dagger in his hand.
“You all right?” he croaked at her.
“Don’t know,” she said, and was sick again, and if she’d eaten anything she might never have stopped.
“We have to get to the South Wind,” someone said in a voice squeaky with panic.
Father Yarvi shook his head. “They’d rain down arrows on us from the bank.”
“We need a miracle,” breathed Dosduvoi, eyes turned toward the pink sky.
“Skifr!” shouted Yarvi, and the old woman winced as though a fly was bothering her, muttering and hunching her shoulders. “Skifr, we need you!”
“They’re coming again!” someone called from the ragged wall.
“How many?” asked Yarvi.
“More than last time!” shouted Rulf, nocking an arrow to his black bow.
“How many more?”
“A lot more!”
Thorn tried to swallow but for once could find no spit. She felt so weak she could hardly lift her father’s sword. Koll was bringing water to the shield wall and they were drinking, and snarling, and wincing at their wounds.
Fror swilled water around his mouth and spat. “Time to sell our lives dearly, then. Your death comes!”
“Your death comes,” a couple of men muttered, but it was more lament than challenge.
Thorn could hear the Horse People coming, could hear their warcries and their quick footsteps on the hillside. She heard the growling of the crew as they made ready to meet the charge and, weak though she was, she clenched her teeth and hefted her red-speckled ax and sword. She walked toward the wall. Back to that trampled stretch of mud behind it, though the thought gave her anything but joy.
“Skifr!” screamed Father Yarvi.
With a shriek of anger the old woman sprang up, throwing off her coat. “Be damned, then!” And she began to chant, soft and low at first but growing louder. She strode past, singing words Thorn did not understand, had never heard the like of. But she guessed the language and it was no tongue of men.
These were elf-words, and this was elf-magic. The magic that had shattered God and broken the world, and as if at a chill wind every hair on Thorn’s body bristled.
Skifr chanted on, higher and faster and wilder, and from the straps about her body she drew two studded and slotted pieces of dark metal, sliding one into the other with a snap like a closing lock.
“What is she doing?” said Dosduvoi but Father Yarvi held him back with his withered hand.
“What she must.”
Skifr held the elf-relic at arm’s length. “Stand aside!”
The wavering shield wall split in two and Thorn stared through the gap. There were the Horse People, a crawling mass of them, weaving between the bodies of their fallen, springing swift and merciless with death in their eyes.
There was a clap like thunder close at hand, a flash of light and the nearest of the Uzhaks was flung tumbling down the hillside as though flicked by a giant finger. Another crack and a disbelieving murmur went up from the crew, another man sent spinning like a child’s toy, his shoulder on fire.
Skifr’s wailing went higher and higher, splinters of shining metal tumbling from the elf-relic in her hand and falling to smoke in the grass at her feet. Men whimpered, and gaped, and clutched at talismans, more fearful of this sorcery than they were of the Uzhaks. Six strokes of thunder rolled across the plain and six men were left ruined and burning and the rest of the Horse People ran squealing in terror.
“Great God,” whispered Dosduvoi, making a holy sign over his heart.
There was a silence then. The first in some time. Only the whisper of the wind in the grass and the rough clicking of Odda’s breath. There was a smell like burning meat. One of the fallen splinters had caught fire in the grass. Skifr stepped forward grimly and ground the flame out under her boot.
“What have you done?” whispered Dosduvoi.
“I have spoken the name of God,” said Skifr. “Written in fire and caught in elf-runes before the Breaking of the World. I have torn Death from her place beside the Last Door and sent her to do my bidding. But there is always a price to be paid.”
She walked over to where Odda was slumped pale against one of the stunted trees, Safrit bent over him trying to tease out the arrow.
“The name of God has seven letters,” she said, and she pointed that deadly piece of metal at him. “I am sorry.”
“No!” said Safrit, trying to put herself between them, but Odda pushed her gently away.
“Who wants to die old?” And he showed his mad grin, the filed lines in his teeth turned red with blood. “Death waits for us all.”
There was another deafening crack, and Odda arched his back, trembling, then fell still, smoke rising from a blackened hole in his mail.
Skifr stood looking down. “I said I would show you magic.”
NOT LIKE THE SONGS
“They’re running.” The wind whipped Thorn’s hair about her bloody face as she stared after the Uzhaks, t
he riders, and the horses without their riders, dwindling specks now far out across the ocean of grass.
“Can’t say I blame ’em,” muttered Brand, watching Skifr wrap her coat tight about herself and slump again crosslegged, gripping at the holy signs around her neck, glowering at the embers of the fire.
“We fought well,” said Rulf, though his voice sounded hollow.
“Hands of iron.” Fror nodded as he wiped the paint from his face with a wetted rag. “We won a victory to sing of.”
“We won, anyway.” Father Yarvi picked up one of the bits of metal Skifr had left in the grass and turned it this way and that so it twinkled in the sun. A hollow thing, still with a little smoke curling out. How could that reach across the plain and kill a man?
Safrit was frowning toward Skifr as she wiped her bloody hands clean. “We won using some black arts.”
“We won.” Father Yarvi shrugged. “Of the two endings to a fight that is the better. Let Father Peace shed tears over the methods. Mother War smiles upon results.”
“What about Odda?” Brand muttered. The little man had seemed invincible, but he was gone through the Last Door. No more jokes.
“He would not have survived the arrow,” said Yarvi. “It was him or all of us.”
“A ruthless arithmetic,” said Safrit, her mouth set in a hard line.
The minister did not look at her. “Such are the sums a leader must solve.”
“What if this sorcery brings a curse on us?” asked Dosduvoi. “What if we risk a second Breaking of God? What if we—”
“We won.” Father Yarvi’s voice was as cold and sharp as drawn steel, and he curled the fingers of his good hand about that little piece of elf-metal and made a white-knuckled fist of it. “Thank whatever god you believe in for your life, if you know how. Then help with the bodies.”
Dosduvoi shut his mouth and walked away, shaking his great head.
Brand pried open his sore fingers and let his shield drop, Rin’s painted dragon all hacked and gouged, the rim bright with new scratches, the bandages on his palm blood-spotted. Gods, he was bruised and grazed and aching all over. He hardly had the strength to stand, let alone to quibble over the good thing to have done. The more he saw, the less sure he was of what the good thing might be. There was a burning at his neck, wet when he touched it. A scratch there, from friend or enemy he couldn’t say. The wounds hurt just as much whoever dealt them.
“Lay them out with dignity,” Father Yarvi was saying, “and fell these trees for pyres.”
“Those bastards too?” Koll pointed to the Horse People scattered torn and bloody down the slope, several of the crew picking over their bodies for anything worth the taking.
“Them too.”
“Why give them a proper burning?”
Rulf caught the lad by the arm. “Because if we beat beggars here, we’re no better than beggars. If we beat great men, we’re greater still.”
“Are you hurt?” asked Safrit.
Brand stared at her as if she was speaking a foreign tongue. “What?
“Sit down.”
That wasn’t hard to do. He was so weak at the knees he was near falling already. He stared across the windswept hilltop as the crew put aside their weapons and started dragging the corpses into lines, others setting about the stunted trees with axes to make a great pyre. Safrit leaned over him, probing at the cut on his neck with strong fingers.
“It’s not deep. There’s plenty worse off.”
“I killed a man,” he muttered, to no one in particular. Maybe it sounded like a boast, but it surely wasn’t meant to be. “A man with his own hopes, and his own worries, and his own family.”
Rulf squatted beside him, scratching at his gray beard. “Killing a man is nowhere near so light a matter as the bards would have you believe.” He put a fatherly hand on Brand’s shoulder. “You did well today.”
“Did I?” muttered Brand, rubbing his bandaged hands together. “Keep wondering who he was, and what brought him here, and why we had to fight. Keep seeing his face.”
“Chances are you’ll be seeing it till you step through the Last Door yourself. That’s the price of the shield wall, Brand.” And Rulf held out a sword to him. A good sword, with silver on the hilt and a scabbard stained from long use. “Odda’s. But he’d have wanted you to take it. A proper warrior should have a proper blade.”
Brand had dreamed of having his own sword, now looking at it made him feel sick. “I’m no warrior.”
“Yes y’are.”
“A warrior doesn’t fear.”
“A fool doesn’t fear. A warrior stands in spite of his fear. You stood.”
Brand plucked at his damp trousers. “I stood and pissed myself.”
“You won’t be the only one.”
“The hero never pisses himself in the songs.”
“Aye, well.” Rulf gave his shoulder a parting squeeze, and stood. “That’s why those are songs, and this is life.”
Mother Sun was high over the steppe when they set off, the pyre-smoke slowly rising. Though the blood had drained from the sky and left only a clear and beautiful blue, it was still crusted dark under Brand’s fingernails, and in his bandages, and at his throbbing neck. It was still a red day. He felt every day he lived would be a red day now.
Four oars lay still beside the mast, the ashes of the men who’d pulled them already whirling out across the plains. Skifr sat brooding among the cargo, hood drawn up, the nearest oarsmen all shuffled as far from her as they could get without falling out of the boat.
Brand glanced across at Thorn as they settled to rowing and she looked back, her face as pale and hollow as Odda’s had been when they stacked the wood around him. He tried to smile, but his mouth wouldn’t find the shape of it.
They’d fought in the wall. They’d stood at the Last Door. They’d faced Death and left a harvest for the Mother of Crows. Whatever Master Hunnan might’ve said, they were both warriors now.
But it wasn’t like the songs.
WHAT GETTLAND NEEDS
Kalyiv was a sprawling mass, infesting one bank of the Denied and spreading like a muddy sickness onto the other, the bright sky above smudged with the smoke of countless fires and dotted with scavenging birds.
The prince’s hall stood on a low hill over the river, gilded horses carved upon its vast roof beams, the wall around it made as much from mud as masonry. Crowding outside that was a riot of wooden buildings ringed by a fence of stout logs, the spears of warriors glinting at the walkway. Crowding outside that, a chaos of tents, yurts, wagons, shacks and temporary dwellings of horrible wretchedness sprawled out over the blackened landscape in every direction.
“Gods, it’s vast,” muttered Brand.
“Gods, it’s ugly,” muttered Thorn.
“Kalyiv is as a slow-filling bladder,” said Skifr, thoughtfully picking her nose, considering the results, then wiping them on the shoulder of the nearest oarsman so gently he didn’t even notice. “In spring it swells with northerners, and folk from the empire, and Horse People from across the steppe all swarming here to trade. In summer it splits its skin and spills filth over the plains. In winter they all move on and it shrivels back to nothing.”
“It surely smells like a bladder,” grunted Rulf, wrinkling his nose.
Two huge, squat towers of mighty logs had been thrown up on either side of the river and a web of chains strung between them, links of black iron spiked and studded, bowing under the weight of frothing water, snarled up with driftwood and rubbish, stopping dead all traffic on the Denied.
“Prince Varoslaf has fished up quite a catch with his iron net,” said Father Yarvi.
Thorn had never seen so many ships. They bobbed on the river, and clogged the wharves, and had been dragged up on the banks in tight-packed rows stripped of their masts. There were ships from Gettland and Vansterland and Throvenland. There were ships from Yutmark and the Islands. There were strange ships which must have come up from the south, dark-hulled and far
too fat-bellied for the trip over the tall hauls. There were even two towering galleys, each with three ranks of oars, dwarfing the South Wind as they glided towards the harbor.
“Look at those monsters,” murmured Brand.
“Ships from the Empire of the South,” said Rulf. “Crews of three hundred.”
“It’s the crews he’s after,” said Father Yarvi. “To fight his fool’s war against the Horse People.”
Thorn was far from delighted at the thought of fighting more Horse People. Or for that matter of staying in Kalyiv for the summer. It had smelled a great deal better in her father’s stories. “You think he’ll want our help?”
“Certainly he’ll want it, as we want his.” Yarvi frowned up toward the prince’s hall. “Will he demand it, is the question.”
He had demanded it of many others. The harbor thronged with sour-faced men of the Shattered Sea, all mired in Kalyiv until Prince Varoslaf chose to loosen the river’s chains. They lazed in sullen groups about slumping tents and under rotten awnings, and played loaded dice, and drank sour ale, and swore at great volume, and stared at everything with hardened eyes, the newest arrivals in particular.
“Varoslaf had better find enemies for these men soon,” murmured Yarvi, as they stepped from the South Wind. “Before they find some nearer to hand.”
Fror nodded as he made fast the prow-rope. “Nothing more dangerous than idle warriors.”
“They’re all looking at us.” Brand’s bandages had come off that morning and he kept picking nervously at the rope-scabs snaking up his forearms.
Thorn dug him with her elbow. “Maybe your hero’s fame goes ahead of us, Ship-lifter.”
“More likely Father Yarvi’s does. I don’t like it.”
“Then pretend you do,” said Thorn, putting her bravest face on and meeting every stare with a challenge. Or the most challenge she could manage with a hot wind whipping grit in her eyes and flapping her shirt against her sweaty back.
“Gods, it stinks,” choked Brand as they made it off the creaking wharves and onto Father Earth, and Thorn could not have disagreed even if she could have taken a full breath to do it. The crooked streets were scattered with baking dung, dogs squabbling over rubbish, dead animals skewered on poles beside doorways.
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