by Nathan Hawke
‘Where are their horse?’ muttered Gallow. The longer they took about this next attack the better. His arm was killing him. They’d all tire soon. Whatever stamina advantage they’d had taking the battle to the Vathen today, that was surely gone now.
‘Not here,’ said the Lhosir beside him. ‘That’s all that matters. I don’t know your face, but you must be Gallow Truesword since you’re the only man without a beard. They say you’ve taken to living among the Marroc.’
‘So I did.’
‘Well you don’t fight like them.’ The soldier nudged him, the closest they could get to clasping arms with their shields still held up in front of them. ‘Nodas of Houndfell. I’ve heard of you. Some things good, some things bad. The good came from men I know and trust, the bad I’m less keen to believe now I’ve stood beside you.’
‘Well, Nodas of Houndfell, if we live through this, you can tell me all of both over a keg of Marroc beer.’
Nodas laughed. ‘More likely I’ll tell it to you in the Maker-Devourer’s cauldron.’
Here and there, up and down the line as the giant walked, other Lhosir stepped forward, throwing down their own challenges and laughing as they were ignored. ‘What’s he doing?’
‘Making a fool of himself.’
And the Vathen came again.
35
GIANT
Wave after wave came, and each time the Lhosir line threw them back and held its ground. Then finally the Vathen sent their horsemen, who threw a hail of javelots and withdrew, and when they did, the Lhosir plucked the javelots from the ground and out of their shields and passed them back to those behind them, so that the next ranks of advancing Vathen felt them too.
After each wave the giant was still there. The hill was awash with the dead now, piled up to make each Vathan advance harder than the last, but the Vathen weren’t the only ones dying and there were still thousands upon thousands of them on the lower slopes. Taking their time. Waiting. Slowly wearing the Lhosir down until they didn’t have the strength to hold their shields tight and their spears high. When Gallow looked over his shoulder, the Lhosir line looked thin. He couldn’t see much past the helms and the angry faces, but there, right at the brow of the hill, Medrin’s standard still flew. Five hundred men, the Screambreaker had said, to throw into the fight wherever they were needed.
‘Let them miss it all,’ said Nodas. ‘All the glory for us.’ He was breathing heavily and bleeding from a savage cut across his cheek that must have gone right through the skin, judging from the blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.
‘Medrin needs to do something with those.’
‘He does. Imagine if they miss it all. They’ll kill him.’
The next wave came. A moment before it broke, the Vathan in front of Gallow hooked Nodas’s shield with an axe and pulled it down, and the next Vathan along stabbed Nodas squarely with a long knife. The blade skittered off Nodas’s mail, straight up his chest and buried itself in his throat. Nodas looked surprised, then angry, and then nothing much at all. When the Vathen withdrew once more, he toppled forward onto the mound of bodies that lay in front of the Lhosir line. Gallow looked at the sky. A warm spring evening, the sun sinking low but not yet starting to tinge with orange. Another two hours maybe before dark. Two hours? He didn’t have the strength for that.
‘Twelvefingers!’ The Screambreaker stepped out from the line again. He looked exhausted. ‘Call our prince to the centre before we win the battle without him! Medrin! Medrin!’ The shout went up, but when Gallow looked to the brow of the hill, the prince’s standard never moved.
It started to rain again, a longer shower and heavier than the last. The Vathen didn’t wait this time but came again, though they weren’t happy about it. They slipped and stumbled among the bodies of their own fallen and this time broke quickly. On the slopes across the valley Gallow saw more movement. Men running away perhaps, chased down by Vathan riders? Or something else. But either way the battle was close to its end. The Lhosir were losing their strength and the Vathen were losing their stomach for it.
The giant was roaming in front of the next line of Vathen again. No one threw anything at him any more because no one had anything left to throw. Even the Marroc archers had fallen silent.
‘Face me!’ bellowed the Screambreaker. He looked as though he could barely stand. His shield sagged and he couldn’t keep the point of his spear up. And now, at last, the giant stopped and turned. He faced the Screambreaker and twirled his sword. Around him the air moaned, and if the giant was worn down at all by two hours of fighting, he didn’t show it. He came at the Screambreaker slowly, cautiously, while the Screambreaker circled away from his own men, inviting the giant in closer.
The giant closed the gap between them with a charge and swung the red sword. The Screambreaker didn’t even try to strike back but threw himself out of the way, stumbling and barely keeping his feet. The giant whirled and swung again – this time the Screambreaker slipped as he ducked out of the way. He rolled and dropped his shield as he scrabbled back. Gallow frowned. The Screambreaker? Dropping his shield?
The giant roared. He came on slowly.
‘He’s playing with him,’ Gallow whispered in disgust.
‘Yes,’ said the man beside him, a greybeard Lhosir who’d come up to stand in Nodas’s place. ‘But then he’s only fighting a Vathan, and the Vathan has refused him a half a dozen times already. Give the old sword his sport.’
It took Gallow a moment to understand. The greybeard thought he’d meant the Screambreaker?
The Vathan took another swing. As the Screambreaker launched himself out of the way, the giant lunged with his shield, battering the Screambreaker back and knocking him down. The Screambreaker dropped his spear now too. He rolled and barely got out of the way as the giant struck out yet again. He hauled himself to his feet and stumbled away, then staggered and tripped over a body with a spear sticking out of it and fell. The Vathan laughed. As the Screambreaker pulled himself to his feet, the giant roared and drew back the red sword for the killing blow.
The Screambreaker drew his own sword in the middle of the giant’s backswing and threw it. The Vathan swatted it away with his shield but just for a moment he blocked his own sight of the Screambreaker, and that was when Corvin moved with a sudden surge of speed, rolled and snatched his spear from the ground where he’d dropped it. The Vathan took a moment to see where the Screambreaker had gone and by then it was too late. The Nightmare of the North came up into a crouch to one side of him and thrust the spear sideways into the giant’s knee. The Vathan screamed. Now the Screambreaker didn’t look tired at all. He picked up an axe and a shield from the battlefield and marched straight forward, whirling the axe over his head as if to finish the fight, and then dropped suddenly to one knee and let the axe fly. It caught the giant just above the ankle of his other leg; the Vathan roared and down he went, both legs ruined. The Screambreaker picked up another spear. The giant tried to protect himself with his shield as Corvin walked in circles around him, out of reach of the red sword, jabbing with his spear, but it was hardly any time at all before the Screambreaker found a way through and touched the spear point to the giant’s throat. He held it there lightly.
‘Yield!’ he cried, loud enough for both the Vathen and the Lhosir to hear.
The giant’s answer, if he gave one, was lost to the wind, but it was clear what it must have been, for the Screambreaker suddenly leaned hard into his spear and drove it through the giant’s neck. Then he took another axe, cut off the giant’s hand, unpeeled his dead fingers from the red sword and held it high where everyone could to see. ‘Solace!’ He cried. ‘The Peacebringer! The Comforter! The Sword of the Weeping God! Sorrow’s Edge! See! Just a sword! That’s all it is! There is no god here guiding any hand to victory. There are only men.’
Cries went up from the Lhosir lines, jeering and cheering and laughing at their enemy, but if the Screambreaker was hoping for the Vathen to break and flee, what he got w
as the opposite. Instead of coming up the hill at a steady pace, the next wave broke into a run, howling in rage and fury, surging forward at such a fierce pace that the Screambreaker had to run to make it back to his own line. He pushed into the shield wall beside Gallow.
‘Look at it,’ he hissed. ‘It’s just a sword. Give me a spear any day.’ Gallow offered his own, but the Screambreaker shook his head. ‘I left the scabbard for this on the giant’s body.’
‘Then throw it away, if it’s just a sword.’
‘I’ll see how it swings first.’ The Vathen smashed into the Lhosir line and their first ranks were slaughtered, undone by their own fury, but more and more and more of them came, rank after rank running up the hill to pile into the back of the heaving melee, pushing and pushing. Gallow stabbed with his spear over and over. Beside him the Sword of the Weeping God sang as it cut the air. And it wasn’t just a sword, whatever the Screambreaker said, for the red steel cut through mail and man as nothing Gallow had ever seen. From behind his shield the Screambreaker lunged and the sword point seemed to seek out the Vathen with a will of its own over and over, throats and necks and faces. And the Vathen were afraid of it, Gallow saw that too. Within the Screambreaker’s reach they whimpered, eyes wild, and dropped their swords and axes and clutched at their shields, eyes on nothing else.
But beyond the circle of fear that reached to the tip of the red sword, the Vathen had become a raging horde. They pressed and howled and died at the points of the Lhosir spears but still they came on, and the push of them forced the Lhosir slowly back up the hill, a litter of dead in their wake for the Vathen to climb.
‘Medrin!’ roared the Screambreaker. ‘Twelvefingers! We need his five hundred! We need them here! To the centre! Now!’
Gallow lost his spear, lodged in some Vathan helmet and torn out of his hand. A brief rain of arrows fell, loosed by the Vathen but falling on Vathen and Lhosir alike. He hacked and slashed with his axe, tearing at the men either side of him. His face was covered with blood, his helm, his mail; Vathan gore spattered across his shield. And always beside him the red sword lunged and lunged as if the Screambreaker’s arm was made of iron and never tired. The Lhosir beside Gallow on the other side fell and another pushed up to take his place and fell in turn to be replaced by yet another.
‘Where’s Twelvefingers?’ the Screambreaker shouted again.
The man on the other side of Gallow staggered, his helm knocked sideways by a javelin from among the Vathen. Before he could recover, an axe hooked his shield, a sword lunged and he was falling backwards. This time no one stepped forward. Gallow snatched a glance behind him. There was no one there. No Lhosir left, only fifty yards of open grass to the top of the hill. And Medrin with his five hundred. Standing fast and doing nothing.
The Vathen swarmed around him. He took a step back – had no choice or they’d be round his shield. Took another, back among those few Lhosir that were left. For a moment the Screambreaker was open. Unguarded where Gallow’s shield should have been. Gallow watched helplessly as the onslaught battered him back. They were all over Corvin. A Vathan clawed at the Screambreaker’s shield, pulling it away with his fingers. The red sword rose and fell, driven with such force it burst clear through the Vathan’s head. Another swung an axe and the arc of the red sword cut both axe and man in two; yet as that Vathan fell, another lunged with his sword and another leaped at the Screambreaker, and then another and another and they bore him staggering to the ground. Gallow screamed and swung his own axe in great circles around him, but there was no getting through. The Vathen were everywhere now. The centre of the Lhosir line had gone. There simply weren’t any of them left.
Then finally Medrin came.
36
THE SWORD OF THE WEEPING GOD
Medrin and his five hundred swept down the hillside, spears held high, Medrin in the middle of them, the Crimson Shield gleaming in the evening sun. A minute sooner and the Screambreaker would still have stood. A minute later and Gallow would have fallen too. The Vathen around him faltered and wavered. He swung wildly, not caring whether or what he struck, thinking of nothing except to drive them away from the fallen Screambreaker. He smashed this way and that and then Medrin’s Lhosir swept into the swirling melee and at last the Vathen broke and ran, colliding with their own men still marching up the hill. Gallow curled up as the Lhosir hit, and when they were past he staggered to where the Screambreaker lay still, surrounded by a ring of corpses, his face in a pool of blood. His grey beard was black, matted with it. There was no way to know whose blood, but he wasn’t moving. Gallow crouched beside him, cradling the old warrior. The roar of the battle died away, the shouts of victory mingling with the wails of the dying. Corvin looked old now, so frail and fragile and nothing like the Screambreaker who’d stood before them at the start of the battle, telling them how the Vathen would be smashed. There was so much blood that Gallow couldn’t see the wound that had finally brought him down. The Screambreaker was still breathing, though fast and shallow. Gallow had seen it a hundred times before: the last ragged breaths of a man as he set his sails and packed his axe for the Maker-Devourer’s cauldron.
‘He let this happen,’ Gallow whispered. ‘Medrin. He stood and watched with his men all around him, doing nothing, waiting for you to fall. And you very nearly didn’t.’
A coldness washed through him as the frenzy of battle slowly drained. He hadn’t really thought about what he was saying, but now the words were spoken he saw they had a truth to them. Medrin had waited, and now there was no one left to stand up to him. No one left to keep him from crashing into Andhun, from slaughtering every Marroc inside, man, woman and child.
He let the Screambreaker slide back into the bloody mud. The dead littered the hillside like autumn leaves after a storm. The sun hung low and bloated and orange. It shimmered on burnished helms, broken swords and blood-drenched mail. Solace slipped out of the old man’s fingers, almost as if he was making one last wish. You stop him.
Gallow looked at the red sword. His hand closed around the hilt. Medrin wanted that sword, he wanted it badly. Maybe Gallow could bargain with it. The sword for Andhun? But Medrin was the worst nioingr, a liar and not to be trusted. Gallow stood with the Sword of the Weeping God in his hand, looking down the hill. The Vathen were streaming away down the hillside. Bodies lay scattered everywhere, trampled. In the dying light of the day the valley was stained by a tide of red. Like a beach at low tide after a storm, littered with debris, only here the sea had been a sea of blood.
A last few Lhosir were standing around him, dazed and confused and wondering what to do. The Screambreaker’s men, the handful who’d survived. Old soldiers all, most of them bloody and broken from Vathan swords and spears, staggering and close to collapse. They’d fought for hours, watched the battle slowly slip away and then watched Medrin steal it back at the last. Gallow raised the red sword.
‘Men of the sea! You fought for the Screambreaker. Here he lies!’ He began to walk among them, pointing to the Screambreaker’s body, still surrounded by Vathan dead. ‘It was no Vathan who killed him. Twelvefingers did this. Your prince. He waited for us to die.’
‘He gave us glory,’ said one whose arm hung uselessly at his side.
‘No. We took our own glory. Twelvefingers wants us gone. We who remember the old ways, who honour the Maker-Devourer.’ He picked a face he knew. ‘I knew you once, Thanni Ironfoot. Jyrdas was your friend. Medrin poked out his other eye.’ Another. ‘Galdun. You too. At Selleuk’s Bridge we turned and ran, but never again. And Twelvefingers has you guarding gates?’
But they wouldn’t listen. They were too hurt, too dimmed by their wounds and dazzled by victory. He’d end it himself then. The Red Sword raised once more against the Crimson Shield. The Weeping God come at last to face his old brother and foe, Modris the Protector. He left the Screambreaker where he’d fallen to finish his dying among the men who remembered him best and started off down the hill, picking his way through the dead. There
were so many, Lhosir and Vathen all jumbled together, lying on top of one another; and then further on there were only Vathen. He reached the black-armoured giant and stopped to take the belt and the scabbard of the Weeping God. On the ground the giant didn’t seem so large after all.
So many dead. Did any of them even know why the Vathen had come? Did the Vathen know themselves? He saw a few of them still alive, the injured, the crippled, the ones too frightened or damaged to move. They watched him fearfully but he let them be. There was only one man left on this battlefield he wanted to add to the tally of the dead.
He began to pass Lhosir moving among the bodies, looting them while it was still light. Men who’d lost their spears and their axes, their helms, searching among the dead for weapons, stripping boots and hauberks, plucking out arrows, collecting javelins before night fell and the battlefield belonged to the wolves. The sun had touched the hills now. It would be too dark to chase the Vathen down before long, and so the Screambreaker’s design had a flaw after all. The Vathen wouldn’t be scattered. They’d come again in the morning, if they had the will for it.
‘Medrin?’ The Lhosir he passed pointed down into the valley where the last shouts of fighting still echoed; and as the sun sank behind the hills he found the prince marching back up the slope of the battlefield with Horsan and a dozen more of his men around him. They stopped when they saw Gallow. Medrin spread his arms wide.
‘Truesword! Look at us! Victorious once again.’ He squinted at Gallow. ‘How many Vathen came to this field today? My men say thirty thousand marched through Fedderhun. The Screambreaker said it was more like twenty-five and my own eyes say more like twenty. But still, four or five times our numbers, and look at them, Gallow. Look! When word of this crosses the sea, more will come. We’ll march across their nation as the Screambreaker marched across the Marroc!’