by Nathan Hawke
‘The bridge, Marroc. Take down the bridge and the Vathen can’t cross the Isset. Nowhere else for a hundred miles and then you’re at the Crackmarsh. I’m told they could cross the Crackmarsh if someone showed them the way, but then again a clever man might make a whole army vanish in that swamp. Take down that bridge and by the time the Vathen have built it again, Yurlak himself will be here with the whole horde of the sea.’
Or I’ll have time to raise an army of Marroc to fight both of you. Valaric looked the forkbeard up and down. ‘And how would you take down the bridge, old man?’
The forkbeard laughed. ‘Was always a chance it would come to this.’
‘I can’t trust you.’ Valaric shook his head.
‘And I can’t trust you, Marroc.’ The forkbeard pulled a knife from his belt and made a shallow cut on the flesh of his forearm. ‘May the Maker-Devourer spit me into the Marches if I raise a hand against you while that bridge still stands. And take a look, Marroc. I have no sword. No spear. No axe.’
Valaric looked him over. He was old and battered. His mail was ripped in places and there was dried blood all over it. Some of it, he was sure, was the forkbeard’s own.
‘Well?’ The forkbeard offered Valaric his knife.
‘While that bridge still stands.’ Valaric took the knife and cut himself. They clasped arms, blood to blood, and it felt the strangest thing in the world to Valaric in the burning ruin of a town that this forkbeard’s kinsmen had set out to destroy.
Tolvis gave Medrin to the three Lhosir who’d stood with their prince. Let him be carried by his own soldiers. Gallow picked up one of their shields. He looked at it and his lip curled. Medrin’s men. The Legion of the Crimson Shield. They’d had them painted so they all looked the same, like Medrin’s god-borne shield itself.
‘And what are you going to do with him?’ he asked Tolvis, since Loudmouth hadn’t yet stuck a sword in Medrin’s hand and then finished him as he’d said.
‘Wait for him to wake up, if he does. If he doesn’t I’ll build him a pyre and one of these three can speak him out and Yurlak can at least know that his son died well enough, even if he didn’t live as he should.’
‘And if he lives?’
Tolvis shrugged. ‘Go home, Gallow. Go back to that Marroc woman of yours.’ They trailed down the spiral stairs and into the Marroc duke’s hall. Gallow’s fingers felt for the locket under his mail. Go home. He could do that now. He’d only stayed to try and save the Marroc of Andhun from Medrin, and he’d largely failed at that.
‘What are you going to do with Medrin?’
Tolvis shrugged. He opened the doors to the castle yard and strode out towards the open gates. ‘I don’t know, Truesword, I simply don’t. Lost at sea, perhaps. We’ll have to talk, all of us.’ In the middle of the yard he stopped and turned. ‘Truesword, before you and I part, the Screambreaker gave—’
A column of riders trotted through the castle gates. Vathen. Dozens of them. They paused, as surprised as the Lhosir, and then one of them lowered his spear and pointed it straight at Gallow and howled.
‘Feyrk’s balls! Back to the keep!’ Tolvis bolted back the way they’d come and the other Lhosir scrambled after him. Didn’t matter how fierce a man was; caught in the open and surrounded by horsemen he died and died quickly. The last of the Lhosir fell across the threshold with a javelot in his back.
‘Go!’ shouted Tolvis. ‘Take the cave path. I’ll hold the door.’
‘No, you won’t.’ Gallow helped him close it and then shoved his shoulder against it. ‘You go. I’ll hold them.’
Tolvis snorted. ‘You can hardly hold your own shield.’ They pressed themselves against the door.
‘Half your face is missing.’
‘Don’t need a face to fight!’
The door jerked ajar as the Vathen threw themselves against it. Gallow shoved back, forcing it closed. ‘You’d think there’d be a bar or something.’
The door shuddered again. Tolvis hissed. ‘Well then, Truesword, shall we stand and face them like men?’
Gallow tossed him his axe – the one he’d given to Tolvis on the road away from Andhun and Tolvis had just returned. ‘You’ll be needing this.’
The door shuddered again. ‘Is that it?’ Tolvis yelled. ‘My dead grandmother could push harder.’
Gallow blinked. Looked at him hard. Even with both of them putting their whole weight against it, the Vathen were coming through the door at any moment. ‘One stays, one runs.’ Gallow gritted his teeth. ‘They’re your men. You go.’ When Tolvis didn’t move, Gallow laughed. ‘If you like, Loudmouth, I’ll fight you for it. Besides, it’s my turn.’
‘What?’ Loudmouth stared at him as though he was mad but he must have seen the certainty in Gallow’s face, the simple resolve not to move.
‘In the Temple of Fates. We had the ironskins on us, on the other side of a door just like this. One of us could run but not both. Almost came to blows about who got to hold them. That time it was Beyard. This time it’s me. Now take the bloody axe and run before I hit you with it!’
As the door shook again Tolvis turned and looked at Gallow one last time. ‘A hundred men will speak you out, Truesword,’ he cried, and was gone.
No, Gallow thought, they probably won’t. For a moment as he held fast, he touched a finger to the amulet around his neck. ‘Sorry, but that’s a debt I carried before you ever knew me.’
Tolvis sprinted after his men and caught them down in the kitchens, wrestling their way into the pantries, hurling kegs and crates out of the way. He tipped a huge barrel of pickles on its side, spilling salted water all over the floor. The trapdoor was still there, same door as had been there years ago when the Screambreaker had made this castle his and they’d all been waiting for Yurlak to die. He pulled it open.
‘Come on then!’ He sent two of his own men first and then the three of Medrin’s, still carrying their prince. With a bit of luck they’d get to the bottom and find Twelvefingers was dead. Would save a lot of trouble.
‘You two!’ He picked men with good legs. ‘You stay up here. You hold the path for Truesword if he gets this far! You understand?’
The door flew open. Gallow bolted across the hall as the first Vathen tumbled in behind him, stumbling over one another. Voices sang in his head, calling him, telling him to turn and face them and cut them down, as many as he could. Telling him to die in the middle of a mound of Vathan corpses as the Screambreaker had done, to be sent on his way to the Maker-Devourer covered in the blood of his enemies, cup filled with glory. But there were other voices now, ones that hadn’t been born in those long years of war at the Screambreaker’s side. Arda. His sons and his daughter calling him to come home. And so he raced after Loudmouth and his Lhosir, across the hall and down the stairs behind it which would take him to the kitchens and the secret pathway through the caves and the tunnels to the beach. To run across the stones and the debris fallen from the cliffs and to the harbour and to the Marroc and Valaric and be rid of the red sword. Give it to some Marroc hero and jump into a boat and sail away up the coast and finally go home.
The stairs spat him out into a hall lined with doors, with an iron gate at the end through which streamed light. Sunlight. He’d gone the wrong way.
Back in the day he’d been in this castle long enough not to make that sort of stupid mistake, and so he wondered how he could have been so cursed until he realised that the old Lhosir songs were still singing in his head while those of the Marroc he’d come to love had fallen quiet. And for some daft reason he could hear the Screambreaker talking to him too: So, Truesword. Does that answer your question? Do you know who you are now?
Tolvis ran as best he could through the tunnels and passages to the shore, hustling Medrin’s men as fast as they could go. The tide was high, waves breaking into the throat of the caves, and the beach path was drowned so they’d have to make their way over the rocks with the sea crashing around their knees, but it was that or stay and fight the Vathen, and
the Vathen were far too many for that. Find a way back to the rest of the army, that was the thing.
‘Go!’ Tolvis shouted. ‘Go ahead!’
He waited for a few minutes but Truesword didn’t come and neither did the two men he’d left. He waited longer than he should have. By then he knew they wouldn’t be coming.
The gate opened onto the cliffs. Gallow knew this piece of the castle. A narrow strip of grass between the keep and the sea where the Marroc dukes once flew their sea eagles for sport. There was just the one gate, some walls, a strip of land a dozen yards wide and then the cliffs and the sea. He ran to the edge and looked down. Fifty feet below him the waves crashed against the bottom of the cliff.
A strong man, skilled and daring, might have climbed it, and he was all of those things and yet he paused.
Boats were flooding out of the harbour, big and small: Marroc fleeing the Lhosir and now the Vathen. There was a small one at the bottom of the cliff almost beneath him, barely past the breaking surf. Behind him the Vathen poured out into the sunlight. They fanned out around him, suddenly cautious. Gallow looked from them to the sea. And then he looked back again.
Gulsukh held up his hand, commanding his men to stop. One Lhosir. Wounded by the way he held his shield, but he had Solace the Comforter in his hand, and he’d turned to face them all. Gulsukh stepped forward. He took a deep breath and bowed his head. This beardless Lhosir would give him the sword in front of all his men. Give it, not have it taken, and then they’d all see that Gulsukh was the heir to the Weeping Giant and everything would change. They could go back to their homes or they could continue their conquest, one or the other, but it would be his to decide and even the priests of the Weeping God would have to bow to that.
He paused a little longer, letting the Lhosir see how hopeless his situation was. Gulsukh kept his head bowed. The Lhosir seemed to understand: he took off his helm and placed it on the grass by his feet. Then he sheathed the sword.
‘I honour your courage,’ said the ardshan as quietly as the rush of the wind and the hiss of the waves below would allow. ‘Your skill. Few men could do what you have done.’
‘Why?’ The ardshan’s eyes twitched as the Lhosir unbuckled his belt but held on to the Comforter, still in its scabbard. ‘Why? What have I done?’
‘You’re the warrior who killed the Weeping Giant.’ Gulsukh frowned at the expression on the man’s face. ‘Are you not?’
‘No. That man was the Screambreaker.’ The Lhosir shook off his gauntlets. ‘He fell beside me. I’m just a man who took up his sword.’
The ardshan raised his head and looked this just-a-man in the eye. He felt a quiver in his heart as the Lhosir met his gaze.
49
THE SEA
The old forkbeard knew his way around the city, no doubt about that. Knew it better than Valaric did, as though it was his home. He led Valaric through the maze of alleys down by the river to a place where a boat lay tied to a post and together they rowed across. There were Vathen already on the other bank but they weren’t rampaging through the streets, not yet.
‘Keeping the bridge,’ said the forkbeard. He rowed them to the massive tree-trunk piles that rose from the base of the cliff on the western bank of the Isset and supported that end of the bridge, monstrous pines from far away in the Varyxhun valley, floated down the river. No one lived down at the foot of these cliffs. There were no houses, no roads, no paths. Just sheer rock.
‘What’s your plan, old man? Cut it down with an axe?’
‘Something like that.’
‘But I don’t have an axe and nor do you.’
The old forkbeard drew the boat up against the cliff and tied it fast to an outcrop of stone. He hauled himself onto a narrow ledge and sat down beside one of the great trunks. The air stank of fish. The forkbeard produced an axe from among the stones and tossed it to Valaric. ‘Now you do, Marroc.’
Valaric stared at him. He was hurt. You could see that. The way he moved gave him away. Either that or he was even older than he looked. Every movement was pain to him. And yet . . . ‘Who are you?’
‘Care to cast your eyes upward, Marroc?’ asked the old man. Now he had a flint and tinder. Underneath the western edge of the bridge a dozen kegs had been tied to the piles. Slick wet stains spread over the wood beneath them, all the way down to the sea. Fish oil. ‘Never could make a keg that sealed properly in this town, you lot.’ The old forkbeard shook his head, idly striking the flint until the tinder caught and he had a small smouldering pile of grass. Next thing he pulled out from behind the piles was a small stick wrapped in cloth. The stick stank of fish too. He offered it to Valaric. ‘Yours if you want it.’
‘What?’
‘Seems to me it should be a Marroc who sets the bridge ablaze.’ He tossed the stick to Valaric, who caught it without thinking. ‘Come on, quick now, before this goes out.’
Valaric scrambled out of the boat. He shuffled past the old man to sit on the ledge. The forkbeard carefully lit the torch.
‘Set it as you like. I’d watch out for bits of blazing wood and oil falling on your head though, so don’t stay to admire your handiwork too long.’
The old forkbeard jumped into the boat. The next thing Valaric knew he’d cast off and was drifting away on the current and Valaric was stuck there on the ledge alone. He looked up. Yes, a man could climb the cliff easily enough. Maybe not if it was on fire though. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’
‘I have somewhere else to be. You can swim can’t you, Valaric of Witterslet? Don’t wait too long before you use that. It won’t burn for ever.’
‘Who are you? What’s your name?’
The old forkbeard waved. ‘Don’t think I want any of those any more. Take care of your city, Marroc. Look after it. What we’ve left of it.’
Valaric watched him go then yelped and almost dropped the torch as it burned his fingers. He touched the torch to the stream of oil dripping down from above. It lit very nicely, as if it had been mixed with something else. He stayed for bit and watched the flame climb steadily towards the leaking kegs under the upper beams of the bridge. As it reached the top, the fire began to burn more brightly.
It occurred to him then that maybe he should start swimming.
The Vathan with the crested helm held out his hand. ‘The sword, Lhosir. The Sword of the Weeping God. Give it to me. No need for more to die. Give it to me and go in peace. This battle is lost to you.’
Gallow levelled the sword at the Vathan. ‘Come and take it.’
The Vathan took a pace towards him. For one long moment Gallow thought he might even do it, that he might just hand this cursed sword over if the Vathan had the courage to lower his weapons and come close enough to simply take it from his hand. Maybe that was the sign of someone who’d earned it. What had he done, after all? Taken it from a dead man.
The Vathan took his step but then stopped. ‘I am the ardshan of my people. Give me the sword!’
‘Not if you can’t take it. If you can’t take it then you haven’t earned it.’
The ardshan turned his back. ‘Kill him. But do not touch the sword.’
The other Vathen hesitated. Gallow had seen it enough times before. The mustering of courage to charge enemy shields, knowing that some of you must die but that if you don’t then death would come for all. The red sword held them at bay but they’d find their courage in a moment.
‘Arda!’
He turned and flung the sword over the cliff, as far out to sea as he could. The ardshan watched the Sword of the Weeping God arc out into the sky, eyes wide in horror. Before he could speak, Gallow was already running along the edge of the cliff – one step, two, three – and then the Vathen launched themselves towards him. Before they could reach him, he turned and leaped as mightily as he could, following the sword out over the cliffs and past the breaking waves to the sea.
‘Arda!’ Tolvis heard the shout above the crash of the waves. From the top of the cliff men were suddenly peering down
at him. Vathen, and the way they looked and pointed was quite enough. By the time they were firing their arrows and throwing their javelots he was already running.
‘This way. There’s a ship.’ Medrin’s ship. The one he’d used to sail out of Andhun, assuming it hadn’t been washed away or found and burned, or taken already by some other band of fleeing Lhosir. But a couple of miles of running along beaches and climbing cliffs and racing through woods and climbing down to the sea again later, the ship was still there. There were even a few dozen Lhosir standing around it. Keeping guard for some reason. Tolvis couldn’t imagine what they were doing there but now wasn’t the time to be thinking about that. As he and the others approached they waved and shouted and he waved and shouted back, ‘Get the ship in the sea! Get the ship in the sea! The Vathen are coming!’
By the time he got to the bottom of the cliff the ship was already out in the surf, the sail rising. That was when he realised these Lhosir were more of Medrin’s men, quite sharp enough to see what was coming towards them. Next thing Tolvis knew there were a dozen men on his side and twice that on the other, all with swords drawn and facing each other, with the Vathen coming over the hill in about one minute and the barely living body of Medrin Twelvefingers on the beach between them.
The Lhosir glared at each other. Tolvis closed his eyes. ‘Really? Do we have to? I mean, right here and right now?’ Medrin Twelvefingers? He’d be Medrin Sixfingers now.
No one moved.
‘Well I don’t know about you lot, but I’ve got an errand to run before we all kill each other. Let me know how it ends.’ He turned his back on the lot of them and walked away. Then he remembered the Vathen and ran instead. He didn’t look back.
EPILOGUE VARYXHUN
Arda’s hand still smarted from where she’d slapped Fenaric. She’d slapped him two days ago. Quite a slap then.
She sighed. More of a punch really.
He wasn’t going to come back. Not this time. He’d still got half the money she’d made from selling the horses. Her money but she couldn’t quite make herself get worked up about it the way she ought to. Scheming little thief. But Fenaric was only trying to do what he thought was right for her. Just couldn’t get it into his thick head that she didn’t want what anyone else thought was right for her. She wanted . . .