The Crimson Shield

by Nathan Hawke

  ‘The Widowmaker took my land from my people. Thousands of us died on the ends of his spears. Yet he came to Fedderhun and he fought at Lostring Hill. He’s my enemy and I’ll kill him if I can, but if he falls, I’ll let you honour his corpse too.’ He thumped Gallow with the sword again and then held it out, hilt first. ‘You want to give him this or not?’ Then he took the sword back. ‘No, I’ll do it. He really did call Twelvefingers a nioingr to his face, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘And you?’

  Gallow shrugged. ‘The Screambreaker said that Medrin had changed. He was wrong.’

  Valaric walked to the pyre. He put the sword across Jyrdas’s chest beside the axe. When he stepped back, Gallow touched the torch to the kindling. As the flames leaped up, he stood away.

  ‘I’m not staying here on some all-night vigil to honour him, though.’ Valaric turned to leave. ‘That’s what you do, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’ Gallow stared at the flames.

  ‘Then I’ll come for you in the morning. I meant what I said. You can go and you can fight the Vathen or sail across the sea or find your Marroc wife and grow beans and cabbages for the rest of your life. I don’t care. Just get out of my city and get out of my sight. If I see you again and it’s not to get my horse shod or a new blade for my scythe, I’ll kill you.’

  Valaric left him. The sun slowly set and Gallow watched Jyrdas One-Eye burn.

  32

  THE SCREAMBREAKER

  The Screambreaker looked out over the fires that sprang up in the fields outside Andhun’s walls. His father had called him Corvin after a rock at the end of one of his fields. Corvin’s Rock. He’d thought it was a strong name, hard and weathering like the stone. Turned out it had been called Corvin’s Rock after an old crow that had taken to making the rock its place to watch the world back a generation, but his father hadn’t known that. Corvin the crow. Mostly Corvin preferred the idea of being a rock, but there were days when he knew, in secret, that he was really the crow. Crows were drawn to battlefields, after all.

  They called him Screambreaker after he shattered King Tane’s army. They said his battle cry as the two sides had met had broken the Marroc. It wasn’t true but it was a good story and so they called him that anyway. The other names, the ones the Marroc had given him, he supposed he’d earned them. He might, on another day, have claimed that they’d fallen on him unsought, that he’d never gone looking for them, but on nights like tonight he knew better. Battles made for widows. Wars made for nightmares. Death had danced with him with such an easy grace and for so long now that they might as well be wed. Together, the two of them in a longhouse somewhere growing old, Death and the Widowmaker. But they weren’t. They were looking for each other still, finding each other now and then, and yet somehow one of them had always had another lover at the time, and so they were never joined. Next year, when this one is gone. We both know we were meant to be. Twenty years of it. He looked out over the fires. Would they find each other tomorrow?

  The Vathen wouldn’t reach Andhun until the afternoon. They wouldn’t want a fight after a day of marching, and so he’d see that they got one. Tomorrow. One way or the other, his last great battle.

  ‘General, the prince wants to see you.’

  The Screambreaker didn’t move. General? When had he become that? A long time ago, and another thing he’d never sought. A firebrand even in his own land, just like his brother, and so Yurlak had sent him across the sea. Go and do something useful. If you have to stir up trouble, stir it with the Marroc not with me. Yurlak had been afraid of him . . . no, afraid wasn’t the right word, because he and Yurlak were two of a kind and neither had ever been afraid of anything. But Yurlak had known well enough that Corvin, left to his own ends, was bound to break something. Better if what he broke was somewhere far away.

  ‘I came here to be less trouble for my kin.’ He was talking to the stars.

  ‘General?’

  Bring me back something pretty, and what he’d brought back was a crunching great war and a kingdom three times the size of the one Yurlak already had, and he’d given it away without a thought. There had been moments when he’d wondered about that. Set himself up as king of the Marroc? But a throne and a crown, what did he want with either of those? What use were they to a man?

  He’d never married. Never raised a son. Rarely even taken a lover for long because he’d always known that death would be his bride. A tragic romance drawn out over the years, but they were bound together by fate, and every Lhosir knew better than to flout his destiny.

  ‘General, the prince requires your ear.’

  Corvin got to his feet. His knees ached from sitting still for too long. His bones creaked and groaned. He was getting old. He could have lived out his days back across the sea and taken his pick of what he wanted. Could have had Yurlak’s own throne if he’d fancied it, pickling himself in mead and women until he was too fat to put on his armour, until horses screamed and bolted rather than carry him. The thought had filled him with daily horror as he’d seen the torpor of a quiet life slowly overtake him. Only a fool prayed to the Maker-Devourer, so he’d prayed to his mistress, to death. And death had answered and had sent the Vathen for him.

  ‘What does he want, our great prince?’ The words dripped out of him. Twelvefingers had been so like the young Corvin that Yurlak had sent away. But the fates were fickle and Medrin had almost died in his first battle at Corvin’s side, and the wound had taken years to truly heal, and by the time he was strong again, the war was all but done. Now look at him.

  ‘That’s for him to say, General.’

  It hardly mattered. Tomorrow he’d either smash the Vathen or the Vathen would break him at last, and it would be what it would be. He followed the young soldier who’d been sent for him, a man too young to even have a full beard yet. Medrin’s men they called themselves, the young ones who’d grown up seeing their fathers and their uncles sailing across the sea to fight. Who were used to tales of war and battles, used to hearing of nothing but victory, even if maybe their fathers and half their uncles never came back again. They were hungry for it, feeling they’d missed something, yet they had no idea of what war truly was. Tomorrow they’d know better.

  Medrin had taken his tent. The Screambreaker supposed he was entitled. Yurlak’s son, after all, but didn’t he have his own?

  ‘Screambreaker.’ Medrin sat on a stool. He had a thin knife in his hand and he was using it to pick at the dirt under his fingernails.

  ‘Medrin.’ Corvin didn’t bow. Medrin might expect it but that was a Marroc thing. Lhosir faced one another as equals. Always.

  ‘You left Andhun to the Marroc.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I returned they tried to take the shield from me.’

  ‘Did they succeed?’

  Medrin stopped his picking and looked up. ‘Clearly not, Screambreaker, otherwise I would not be here. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘I’ve seen it before.’ He nodded. ‘It’s a good thing. People will sing your saga for this. Your men will fight harder when they face the Vathen.’

  ‘Why did you leave Andhun, Screambreaker?’

  ‘To face the Vathen in the field.’

  ‘But Andhun has walls.’

  ‘It does. And a Lhosir doesn’t hide behind walls.’

  ‘And what’s a row of shields then, if not a wall, Screambreaker? Indeed, do we not call it a wall? A wall of shields?’

  ‘A wall held by men.’ Corvin closed his eyes for a moment. A headache. Yes, he had a headache coming. Now there was a thing that never used to trouble him on the night before a battle. Slept like a newborn, he used to. ‘Do you mean to order us back through the gates, Medrin?’

  ‘I strongly doubt the Marroc will open them for you. If the reception they gave their prince is anything to go by, I imagine they’d welcome us with arrows and javelins and anything else they can lift and throw.’

  ‘They gave their word they would
n’t close their gates until the Vathen were in sight of the walls.’

  ‘Have you looked, Screambreaker? Don’t bother, because I have and they’re firmly shut. I had to beach my ship a mile down the coast to get here at all.’ Twelvefingers got up and walked to the back of the tent. He picked something out of the shadows, something dark and round. The shield. In the gloom it had lost its colour. ‘Are we going to win, Screambreaker? Are you going to win?’

  ‘Yes.’ Strange to have no doubts about such a thing.

  ‘They are ten times our number.’

  ‘More like five.’

  ‘They beat you outside Fedderhun.’

  ‘Fedderhun was lost before the first blow.’

  ‘Yet you fought it anyway?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hoping some good might come of it. Or that he might finally die.

  ‘Me, I would have stayed behind the walls – as I was told by my prince until my prince came back and said otherwise.’ He lifted the shield. ‘You’ll face the Vathen in the vanguard?’

  ‘A man who claims leadership can do no less.’

  Medrin put a hand over his heart, over the wound he’d taken half a lifetime ago when he’d first crossed the sea. ‘Harder for some than others.’

  ‘Yes. But still true.’

  ‘Should I give you this shield then, since you say you lead my army?’

  ‘I lead those who will follow, no more. You took the shield. It’s yours by right.’

  Twelvefingers smiled for a moment. ‘You took it first.’

  ‘And I lost it, and now you have it. It’s a shield and I already have one.’

  ‘I might give it to you as a gift.’

  ‘And I will accept any gift given with a good heart, Twelvefingers. But there’s no need.’

  ‘I’m displeased with you about Andhun, so you’ll get no gifts from me today. Win this battle and the shield is yours, Screambreaker. Now tell me how you’ll do it.’

  So Corvin told him. It wasn’t any work of genius. Only the plan of a man who’d seen more of war than any other.

  33

  THE ROAD TO VARYXHUN

  Gallow watched Jyrdas burn through the night. As the flames died, he went back to the beached ship and slept. In the morning Valaric was waiting for him. ‘Give me your axe. No Lhosir carries arms in the streets of Andhun now.’

  ‘My axe went to Jyrdas. If you want it, pick over his ashes.’

  They walked side by side in silence up the beach, along the bank of the Isset and up the hill, past the castle towards the Castle Gate. The gibbets were all gone. Valaric followed his eyes. ‘What, did you think we’d leave them?’ Marroc soldiers fell in behind them. They jeered and threw insults, and if Valaric hadn’t been there, Gallow knew they would have set upon him. They knew who he was. What he was.

  The gates opened to let him through. Valaric turned his back.

  ‘I fought among you against the Vathen,’ Gallow said. ‘I don’t regret that. As for the rest, all I wanted was my family and my forge, making a life for us all. Watching my sons grow up happy and strong.’

  Valaric turned his head and spat. ‘Isn’t that what we all wanted? A lot more of us would have had it if you forkbeards had stayed across the sea where you belong.’ He walked away. The gates closed and Gallow was alone. The stumps of the gibbets remained beside the road where they’d been cut down. He stopped beside them and took the locket out from under his shirt, closing his fist around it. The Vathen had come. How could he not fight them? Our land, yours and mine. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask to find the Screambreaker half dead after we fled, but how could I leave him when he’d stood and fought as I had, with no reason save the doing of what was right? I didn’t ask you to bring the Vathen to our home, and when you did, how could I send him away alone, barely alive? O Arda, why did you have to do that? His grip on the locket was so tight it hurt. His vision was swimming, tears on his cheeks. He still had the money Tolvis had given him for the horses. A little to get him home and plenty left to put a smile on Arda’s face. If that was what he wanted.

  Fate. He walked past the ruins of homes that had once crowded in the shadows of Andhun’s walls. Was he sorry for what he was? No. But no one had made him sail with Medrin, chasing after the Crimson Shield. No one had made him offer Tolvis Loudmouth his axe instead of leaving him in the road and heading for Varyxhun with a string of Vathan horses. He could have been beside a warm fire, listening to Arda shout and rave at him for what had happened to their home, knowing all the while that she loved him despite herself. He could have been holding his children in his arms, watching them sleep. All he had to do was forgive her for the one terrible thing she’d done. Say it was a mistake, a moment of madness, though they both knew it had been neither of those things.

  The gibbets, the blood ravens, Medrin’s murderous hunger, Jyrdas’s pyre: none of that would have been any different, but he wouldn’t have seen it. Yet now he had. And Arda would be a lie too, however easy it might feel, and when the Maker-Devourer whispered in his head at the end of his days, Have you led a good life? what could he say? Not Yes, yes, I have, not any more.

  He could feel Jyrdas’s ghost laughing at him. You’ve turned into one of them. A sheep. And perhaps it was true and perhaps he was, and perhaps that wasn’t so bad after all. He looked at the locket one last time and then squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he put it back inside his shirt.

  The road towards the mountains was the one that he and the Screambreaker had travelled after the hills around the Crackmarsh. If he followed it far enough, it would take him to Tarkhun, squeezed between the Isset and the Shadowwood and the Ironwood. A boat across the water and he’d be on the Aulian Way, past the Crackmarsh and then winding up the mountains to the Aulian Bridge and the old fortress of Witches’ Reach guarding the entrance to the valley. And, past that, Varyxhun. He wasn’t sure how long it would take. Ten days? Twelve? Something like that. Plenty of time to think about what to say when he got there.

  Away from the city gates the gibbets were still up. The bodies were little more than skeletons now, pecked clean by the birds. Further still and he passed small knots of men on the road. Lhosir. They looked him over.

  ‘Another Marroc who wants to fight,’ said one. ‘Good for you. That way.’ They pointed across the fields to where a haze of smoke hung over a low rise.

  ‘What’s that way?’ he asked.

  ‘The Vathen!’ They laughed. ‘Any more of you in there?’

  Gallow shrugged. ‘I’d keep out of the city for a bit if I were you, after the battle’s done. Be safer out here.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. Best if you keep away, more likely.’ They laughed again and rode on towards the gates.

  ‘And what does that mean?’ he called after them. They didn’t answer but they didn’t need to. If Medrin won, his anger with the Marroc for what Valaric had done on the beach would be unquenchable. Andhun would burn.

  He walked on, talking to himself, muttering under his breath. Varyxhun, that was where he should be going. To Arda. To his family. To what mattered. And if Medrin happened to beat the Vathen and turned on Andhun and then burned it to the ground and slaughtered and raped every man and woman within its walls, was that his business? Arda would tell him no, it wasn’t. And she was right, wasn’t she?

  Was that how to say he’d led a good life? Just let that be?

  He didn’t even notice that his feet had left the road until he reached the rise and saw the Lhosir army spread out on the other side of it. They’d taken him that way instead of towards his home, quietly and without a fuss, as though they knew perfectly well where he needed to go. A fat lot of good that pledge was then. Arda was laughing at him, mocking and scornful. Lasted what? A few minutes?

  He pushed his hand to his chest. ‘Sorry.’

  Was that how to say he’d led a good life? No, it wasn’t.

  Can’t eat sorry. But she’d betrayed him. She’d betrayed all of them. And she had no answer to that.

/>   Smoke from the campfires – he could smell it, could see its dirty stain in the air. It was hardly suffocating, but for some reason it was making his eyes water again. He saw Arda behind him, clear as the sun, waving him away as he’d gone to fight the Vathen at Lostring Hill, shaking her head. Stupid men. Always think they have to fight. Can’t you just stay here and look after the people who matter? What about us, Gallow? What do we do when you get yourself stuck on the end of a spear? She too had had tears in her eyes. Going to have to find myself a Vathan now, am I? The more she shouted and raved at him not to go, the more she gave herself away.

  ‘I will come back,’ he’d murmured, ‘I swear it.’

  That’s what Merethin said. She turned her back on him and disappeared.

  No one challenged him as he walked through the Lhosir army. He found the Screambreaker at his breakfast at the far edge of the camp, looking out towards where the Vathen would come.

  ‘Truesword.’ He didn’t look up. ‘When Medrin came back with the shield, I wondered what happened to you. And to Loudmouth and to Jyrdas.’

  Gallow looked around him. The soldiers nearby were old ones. The Screambreaker’s men, the ones who’d fought the Marroc years ago. Men he trusted. ‘Jyrdas? A Marroc put an arrow in him. Jyrdas killed a couple of them anyway, just to make a point. Then he called Medrin nioingr until Medrin stuck a knife through his good eye to shut him up.’

  ‘Sounds like Jyrdas.’

  ‘The Marroc let me built him a pyre and speak him out and then they let me go.’

  ‘Good of them.’ The Screambreaker was still staring out across the fields as though none of what Gallow was telling him particularly mattered. He pointed. ‘The Vathen will come from there. They won’t want to fight today, so we’ll take it to them.’ He beckoned an old Lhosir closer and whispered in his ear. The soldier nodded and trotted away.

  ‘I feel the Maker-Devourer more closely these days,’ said Gallow. ‘You and I have a grudge between us. I would have it ended before I meet him. You spoke words not fitting for a guest in my house. Or were you too gone with fever to remember?’