The Crimson Shield

by Nathan Hawke

  She wanted him. Stupid pig-headed bloody-minded selfish forkbeard Gallow. She wanted him. And she was slowly realising that she wasn’t going to get him.

  Word of the battle of Andhun made its way up the river in bits and fragments: the Lhosir had been wiped out. They’d beaten the Vathen. Sometimes both, sometimes neither, and all said with gleeful joy. Andhun had fallen and then it hadn’t. Stories were like that. Rubbish mostly, but if she was putting all the stories together right, whatever had happened had been bloody.

  Stupid man hadn’t been supposed to do anything except take his stupid vicious bastard Widowmaker half-friend or whatever he was back to his own kind. Half-friend? Hadn’t even looked like that most of the time.

  Stupid man. Stupid.

  She had to stop for a moment to wipe her eyes. Stupid smoke from the stupid forge that Nadric could barely use any more making her eyes water all the time. At least he had that set up now. Maybe they had some chance of making a little money again and not starving when it came to winter.

  Stupid men. Both of them. Leaving her with their children to look after and not coming back again. Something in the air up here near the mountains. Must be. Eyes seemed to water a lot since they’d come here.

  ‘Arda Smithswife?’

  She jumped and looked up at the ugliest forkbeard she’d ever seen. One side of his face was a mass of scarring, red and fresh.

  ‘Who wants her?’ He wasn’t the first to have made his way this far south.

  The forkbeard held out a purse. ‘My name is Tolvis.’

  The name meant nothing but the purse had her eyes. ‘And what do you want, Tolvis from across the sea?’

  He tossed the purse to her. ‘I came here to give you this. A debt owed to Gallow Truesword.’ He might have turned and gone after that and she might have let him too, since if Gallow had been alive he’d have delivered the purse himself; and then she could have beaten him around the head and cursed him roundly for taking so long and leaving her in the hands of that miserable carter who’d turned out to be far less of a man than she’d thought. But there was a hesitation to him, and to her too, as if there was more to this story than a bag of silver.

  So she brought him inside and offered him goat’s milk and cheese, both of which he took with unusual grace for a forkbeard. In his turn he gave her an axe. Gallow’s axe, and she knew for sure then that Gallow wasn’t coming back.

  ‘You were a friend, were you?’ she asked. ‘Or did you loot his body?’ But not that, or why come all this way to hand her a bag of silver? Yes, and she could see she’d insulted him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Probably the first time she’d ever said sorry to a forkbeard.

  He told her about Gallow and how it was his fault that Gallow hadn’t come home, and of the crossing of the sea and the Crimson Shield and the fight with the Vathen and then in Andhun and what he’d done and how he’d finally come to his end.

  ‘You were in his thoughts.’ Tolvis had a distant look in his eyes. ‘Always. That was always what he wanted just as soon as he’d made everything right. To come back to you.’

  ‘Bloody idiot didn’t though, did he?’ Stupid eyes watering again. Stupid mountain air. ‘So he died thinking it was me then, did he? Who gave him away to the Vathen?’ Almost more than anything else, that was what she couldn’t bear.

  ‘The Screambreaker told him otherwise.’ Tolvis smiled. Or tried to, as best his ruined face would let him. ‘And Gallow believed him. And I’ll not ask.’

  She couldn’t stop the tears. Had to look away. ‘Bloody idiot,’ she said again.

  ‘Not the only idiot either.’ Tolvis laughed and shook his head. ‘Well I didn’t have anything better to do, what with Medrin’s men taking the only ship we had and leaving us on the beach and the Vathen hunting all over for us. So I went back. Last place they’d look. They were all a bit mad, mind you, on account of some crazy Marroc managing to fire the bridge across the Isset. The air stank of fish oil for days, but I think it was the bridge collapsing into the river that upset them rather than the smell.’ He sighed and a perplexed look furrowed his face. ‘They searched the beach for Gallow’s body, you know, and for the sword too. I watched while they waited for the tide to go right out. They searched and searched, then and every low tide since, and for all I know they’re searching still.’ He grinned. ‘Man jumps off a fifty-foot cliff into the sea in mail, he generally sinks right quick to the bottom by my reckoning. Same goes for swords. But they never found him and they never found Solace. The sea took them. Took him away and maybe washed him up somewhere and maybe didn’t.’

  He got up and she let him go, but when he was at the door and the wretched mountain air had stopped blurring everything for a moment she told him he could stay if he wanted. It was a long journey he’d come, and Varyxhun was a bit full of Marroc running from the Vathen just now, and he’d pay far more than he ought for a place to sleep, if a forkbeard could find a place at all, and that was hardly fair considering why he’d come. And the Lhosir Tolvis, he said well maybe, because he could do with a couple of days without there being Vathen in the morning and Marroc in the afternoon and brigands in between and all of them trying to kill him.

  ‘Forkbeard wants it easy?’ she mocked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tolvis without any bitterness but maybe a touch of the wistful. ‘Sometimes a forkbeard does.’

  Pug-ugly scar though she thought to herself when he went to get his horse. But she was smiling as she thought it, and that was good, because there hadn’t been any smiles for a while.

  And Tolvis Loudmouth stayed, for a while at least. After all, the Vathen still hadn’t crossed the Isset and likely wouldn’t for a while now, so he was hardly going to miss anything. But mostly he stayed because he could have sworn that the very last time he’d looked back as he’d run from the hail of Vathan spears and arrows, he’d caught a glimpse of a boat amid the waves and some old Lhosir soldier hauling something big and heavy out of the water.

  Or maybe that had just been wishful thinking, because the next time he looked the boat had been gone. But yes, he stayed a while in Varyxhun just in case, because if Gallow Truesword wasn’t drowned after all then sooner or later this was where he’d show his face.

  PROLOGUE THE RAKSHASA

  The gods had sent Oribas away from his home, out to the edge of this ocean of sand where it met the sea at the far fringes of what the Aulians had once called their own. They were mocking him for the audacity of asking for their help but he’d come anyway because he had nowhere else to go. He’d not expected to find anything except perhaps a snake with a novel poison or else a slow death from thirst and hunger.

  He stared along the beach. An hour ago he could have looked either way for miles along the flat sands and the barely restless waters and seen nothing, not a single thing. It had been like that for days.

  But now it wasn’t. He quickened his pace. Something was on the sand. Something large. A chest, perhaps, washed up by the sea and wrapped in seaweed. Filled with the treasure of the gods? He laughed at himself. More likely it was the half-eaten corpse of some giant sea creature or a piece of a wrecked galley.

  But it wasn’t either of these things. When he came closer it was a man. Two arms, two legs. Surely dead so not much use, but wrapped in armour of metal rings. Maybe he had a use for that? The man was clinging to the remains of a mast or tree trunk, his arms still wrapped tight around it. He was lying on a shield and his hand was clenched tight around something that hung from his neck.

  Oribas rolled the man over and his eyes grew wide. As well as his shield the man was clutching a sword. A strange dark reddish steel, unusual but a fine weapon. Oribas reached down to take it.

  Under the bright desert sun the man’s eyes flicked open.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  When Simon Spanton, who commissioned this and with whom I war perpetually on the subject of prologues, called me up to ask if I could do it, he didn’t know I was surrounded by Vikings at the time. If there are a lot
of axes in this, that’s probably why. So thanks to Simon for his endless faith, sometimes rewarded and sometimes not, and to Marcus Gipps for his editorial work, and thanks to all the crazy people who thought the best way to spend a week in February was to strut though York in mail carrying an axe.

  Thank you too for reading this. As always, if you liked this story, please tell others who might like it too.

  Also by Nathan Hawke

  Gallow: The Crimson Shield

  Gallow: Cold Redemption

  Gallow: The Last Bastion

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Nathan Hawke 2013

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Nathan Hawke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 11509 5

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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