“Bastards,” breathed Jurand, studying the valley through his eyeglass.
Leo plucked it from his hand and trained it on the ridge. Through its round window, wobbling with his own barely controlled frustration, he could see the Northmen, their spears black pinpricks against the dull sky. They hadn’t moved all morning. Maybe three score of them, thoroughly enjoying the sight of Angland’s shameful retreat. Leo thrust the eyeglass at Whitewater Jin. “Bastards.”
“Aye,” agreed Jin in his thick Northern accent, lowering the glass and thoughtfully scratching at his beard. “They’re some bastards, all right.”
Glaward slumped over his saddle bow with a groan. “Who’d have thought war could be so bloody boring?”
“Nine-tenths of war is waiting,” said Jurand. “According to Stolicus.” As though quoting a famous source made it any easier to bear.
“You’ve two choices in war,” said Barniva, “boredom or terror, and in my experience boredom’s far preferable.”
Leo was tiring of Barniva’s experience. Of his talk of horrors the rest of them couldn’t understand. Of his frowning off at the horizon as if there were haunting memories beyond. All because he’d spent eight months on campaign in Styria, and barely left Lord Marshal Mitterick’s well-guarded command post the whole time.
“Not everyone’s as fashionably war-weary as you.” Leo loosened his sword in the scabbard for the hundredth time that morning then shoved it back. “Some of us want to see some action.”
“Ritter saw some action.” Barniva rubbed at his scar with a fingertip. “That’s all I’ll say.”
Leo frowned, wishing he had a scar of his own. “If war’s so terrible, why don’t you take up farming or something?”
“I tried. I was no good at it.” And Barniva frowned off at the horizon as if there were haunting memories beyond.
Jurand caught Leo’s eye and rolled his to the heavens, and Leo had to smother a laugh. They knew each other’s minds so well they hardly even needed words.
“They still up there?” Antaup reined his horse in beside them, standing in his stirrups as Jin handed him the eyeglass.
“They’re there,” said Leo.
“Bastards.” Antaup tossed back that loose lock of dark hair that always hung across his forehead and right away it flopped down again. He was the one the girls couldn’t leave alone, slick and quick and well groomed as a winning racehorse, but all of Leo’s friends were fine-looking men in their own ways. Jin was fierce as the Bloody-Nine in a fight, but when that toothy grin split his red beard and those blue eyes twinkled, it was like the sun coming out. You couldn’t deny Barniva made the brooding veteran act work for him, especially with the scar on his forehead and the white streak it had left in his hair. Then Glaward was a slab of good-humoured manliness, with the height, and the shoulders, and the stubble already thick an hour after he shaved.
As handsome a crowd of young heroes as you could hope to find. What a painting they’d make! Maybe Leo would get one commissioned. Who’d know an artist? He found himself glancing sideways.
The ladies in Ostenhorm might not see it, but Jurand was the best-looking of the pack. They might’ve called his features soft, beside Glaward’s cleft chin or Antaup’s sharp cheekbones, but Leo thought of them more as… delicate? Subtle? The slightest bit vulnerable, even? But you’d find no one tougher than Jurand in defence of his friends. The expressiveness he could pack into a glance. The little frown as he thought something through. The twitch at the corner of his lips as he leaned close to say it. And always something worth hearing. Something nobody else would’ve—
Jurand glanced sideways and Leo looked quickly away, back up towards those Northmen on the ridge.
“Bastards,” he said, a little hoarse.
“And all we can do is sit here,” grumbled Antaup, having a little rummage to unstick his balls. “Like caged lions.”
“Like leashed puppies.” Glaward wrestled the eyeglass from Antaup’s hand. “Where the hell have you been, anyway?”
“Just… checking on the baggage.”
Jin snorted. “With a woman?”
“Not necessarily.” Antaup’s grin seemed to have twice as many teeth as a regulation mouth. “Could’ve been several. A man has to find something to stave off the despair. Who’d have thought war could be so bloody boring?”
Barniva looked up. “You’ve two choices in—”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll stab you,” said Leo.
“Looks like we could all use a boost to morale.” Glaward nodded towards a column of much less fine-looking men slogging along the valley bottom, clutching torn coats, tattered cloaks, threadbare blankets, spears drooping on hunched shoulders at every angle but straight.
Leo could usually rely on some cheering when the common soldiers saw him. A few shouts of, “The Young Lion!” so he could shake a fist and slap a back and bellow some nonsense about the king. Now the men struggled past in silence with their eyes on the mud, and with no help yet from Midderland, even Leo was a lot less inspired by royalty than he used to be. It seemed the days of warrior-kings like Harod the Great and Casamir the Steadfast were far in the past, and supplies of patriotic bluster were running dangerously short.
“I’d never argue with your mother on strategy,” grunted Antaup, “but constant retreat is no good for men’s spirits.”
“Taste o’ victory would soon perk ’em up,” said Whitewater.
“Perk us up, too.” Glaward nudged his horse closer to Leo, dropping his voice. “Be easy to teach those bastards a lesson.” And he bunched one big, veiny fist and punched at the air with it. “Like we did at that farm.”
Leo fiddled with the pommel of his sword, loosening it in the scabbard again. He could remember every detail of the charge. Ripping wind and thundering hooves. The axe-haft jolting in his hand. The fear-stricken faces of the enemy. The giddy joy as they broke and ran.
Jurand had that little crease of worry between his brows. “We’ve no idea what’s behind that ridge.”
Leo thought of Ritter’s funeral. The words by the grave. The weak-chinned wife weeping by the fireside. Men’s lives were in his hands. These men’s lives, who’d ride through fire for him. His friends. His brothers. He couldn’t stand to lose another.
“Jurand’s right.” He slapped his sword back, forced his hand away from the hilt. “We don’t know what’s behind that ridge. And mother would kill me.”
“Ride up there, you’ll save me the trouble.”
Leo winced at that odd mix of reassurance and resentment that always came with his mother’s voice, though every time, the reassurance was less and the resentment more.
“My Lady Governor.” Jurand pulled his horse sideways to let her ride through next to Leo, her crowd of officers loitering on the slope.
“We did all right against Stour Nightfall’s men last week,” grumbled Leo.
“Nightfall is over on our right just now.” She swished her baton towards the South, making him wince again. There was just something off about a woman waving a baton around, even if she was in command for now. “Those are Black Calder’s men. And Calder is not a warrior, like his son.” She raised one brow at Leo. “Or mine. Calder is a thinker, like me. You see those woods, over to the right? He has horsemen there, waiting for us to make a fool’s mistake.”
Jurand whisked his eyeglass out of Glaward’s fist. “Metal,” he murmured. “In the trees.”
Leo should’ve been pleased at his own good judgement. Instead he felt angry at missing the obvious. “So we just sit here and let them laugh at us?”
“I wouldn’t want them to miss the show.” His mother nodded towards the straggling column, thrown into even more disarray by a puddle in the track. “I put our shabbiest men in this valley with orders to march as badly as they could.”
“You did what?”
“Let them laugh, Leo. Their laughter will leave no widows weeping. We have our best companies out of sight in the valley behind. If they c
ome, we’ll be ready.” She leaned from her saddle to push back his hair. “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” he said, brushing her hands away from the scab. “I was training. With Antaup and Barniva.”
“Finally managed to land one on him,” said Antaup, grinning.
Jurand cleared his throat and Leo’s mother frowned. “Tell me he didn’t fight you both at once.”
Antaup’s famous way with the ladies clearly didn’t include lady governors. “Well… not as such—”
“When will you learn you’ll never beat two strong men together?”
“I saw Bremer dan Gorst do it,” said Leo.
“That man’s no model for anything,” she snapped. “Think of your father. He was brave, none braver, but between your grandfather’s treason and the weakness of Angland when he took charge, he learned to be patient. He knew what he was good at. He never had too high an opinion of himself.”
“You’re saying I do?”
Jurand cleared his throat again and Leo’s mother laughed. “You know I love you, Leo, but yes, painfully so. Still, it’s hardly a surprise you turned out hotheaded. You were conceived on a battlefield.”
Leo caught Glaward and Barniva grinning at each other and felt himself blushing. “Do you have to, Mother?”
“I don’t have to. Honestly, every generation seems to think coupling is some grand new invention never thought of before. How they believe they came into being in the first place is entirely beyond me. High time you found a wife of your own. Someone to keep you out of trouble.”
“I thought that was your job,” he grumbled.
“I have a war to fight.”
“That’s the problem. You’re not bloody fighting.”
“Did you never read that Verturio I gave you? Not fighting is what war’s all about.” And taking the last word, as ever, she trotted off westwards with her retinue following.
Jurand cleared his throat yet again and Leo rounded on him. “Could you just bloody cough and get it over with?”
“Well, the lady governor always makes some very good points. And you really should read Verturio—”
“She’s only governor until the king confirms me in my father’s place.” Three years since the funeral, and Leo was still bloody waiting. He glared across the valley at those bastard Northmen, watching from their ridge. “Then I can do things my way.”
“Mmm.” Jurand had that worried crease between his brows again.
“Whose side are you on?”
“The Union side, along with you and your mother.”
Leo couldn’t help grinning. “Very reasonable, as always.”
Jurand grinned back. “Someone needs to be.”
“Reasonable men might live longer.” Leo pulled his gloves off and tossed them over, left Jurand juggling them as he swung down from his saddle. “But does anyone remember the bastards afterwards?”
The drummer boy at the head of the next company had given up playing altogether, shambling along with knees knocking against his drum, teeth chattering from the cold. He looked up as Leo came close and snatched his white hands from his armpits, but fumbled his sticks and sent them tumbling to the dirt.
Leo stooped and plucked them up before the boy could bend, gripped them in his teeth while he shrugged off his cloak and offered it out. “I’ll swap you.”
“My lord?” The boy could hardly believe his luck as he wriggled from the strap of his drum and swaddled himself in several dozen marks’ worth of best Midderland wool.
Barniva had hopped down from his horse, smiling for once as he fell into step with the soldiers. Now Glaward and Jurand joined him, too, Whitewater Jin shaking his shaggy head but showing that grin as he muscled into the column.
“I’ll just take the bloody horses back, then, shall I?” called Antaup, struggling to gather the reins.
“Mine’s a mare!” shouted Glaward. “You’re always saying how much the ladies love you!”
Some laughter through the column at that. The first in some time, by the look of things. Leo settled the drumsticks in his fingers, just like he used to when he marched the servants around the lord governor’s residence as a boy.
A leader should share the hardships of his men, his father used to tell him. He’d have a dry tent, a warm fire and a good dinner this evening, while they’d be lucky to get a blanket and a bowl of soup. But if he could put a little spring in their step on the way, it would be something. Something for them, and something for him. Something to show those bastards on the hill.
That, and Leo had always been the worst man in the world when it came to doing nothing.
“I’ll try to remember how to play,” he called over his shoulder, “if you lot can remember how to march!”
“I’m no genius like Jurand,” called Glaward, turning so he was trotting backwards, “but as I recall, it’s one foot after the other!”
“We’ll give it a try, my lord!” called a thickset sergeant, the men already moving faster.
Leo smiled as he started to tap out the rhythm. “That’s all I ask.”
The Moment
“You asleep?”
“No,” grunted Clover. Only sort of a lie, since he had in fact just woken up. “Shut my eyes, is all.”
“Why?”
He opened one and peered up at the boy. Hard to say which he was, with the sun flickering through the branches. Specially since Clover had forgotten their names again. “So I don’t have to see the injury you two are doing to the noble art of swordsmanship.”
“Doing the best we can,” grumbled the other boy, whichever one he was.
“That’ll be a comfort to your mothers when you’re killed for not attending to my wisdom.” Clover let his hand hover over the basket of apples, then plucked out one he liked the look of. Nice blush to it. He took a bite and sucked out the juice.
“Tart,” he said, baring his teeth, “but tolerable. Like life, eh, lads? Like life.” They stared at him blankly. He heaved a weary sigh. “Back to it, then.”
They shambled unhappily out into the sun and turned to face each other.
“Yah!” The dark one dashed in, swinging his stick.
“Urgh!” The blond one parried, stumbling back.
Clack, clack, as the sticks knocked together. Coo, coo, went a cuckoo in the trees behind. Somewhere men were arguing over something, but so far off their voices were no more than a comforting burble. Clover wedged one hand behind his neck and wriggled back against the tree.
Sometimes, it could feel like life wasn’t so bad.
Then he gave an unhappy grunt. Then a twitch. Then a grimace. Problem was, these students of his were about the most terrible swordsmen he ever saw. The blond one swung, swung, swung, teeth clenched, while the dark one snarled and burbled, more running away than defending, both already out of breath.
“Stop!” He sat up, tossing his half-eaten apple away. “For the dead’s sake, stop!”
The boys stuttered to a halt, sticks wobbling down.
“No, lads, no.” Clover shook his head. “Very much no. You’re going at each other like a dog at a bitch. Wild and wayward. You’ve got to put more thought into this moment than any other. All your thought and all your effort, because everything you’ll ever have is apt to be snatched away in the next breath. Your lives are hanging in the balance!”
“They’re just sticks,” said the blond one.
Clover rubbed at his temples. “But we’re pretending they’re swords, you halfhead. I’m not a bloody stick teacher, am I?” The dark-haired boy opened his mouth and Clover held up a silencing hand. “Don’t answer that. Just take some time. Your dinner ain’t getting cold, is it?”
“You said strike fast.”
“Aye, once you strike, like lightning! But think before you strike, eh?”
“Why don’t you come and show us?” asked the dark one.
“Out there in the sun?” Clover chuckled to himself. “I didn’t become a bloody teacher so I could get up and do it my bl
oody self.”
“But…” The blond boy shaded his eyes with his hand. If Clover had been the dark one, he’d have smashed him right then when he wasn’t looking. But the dark boy just stood there picking his nose. No initiative, these little bastards. “Aren’t you going to show us some… what do you call it… technique?”
“Technique.” Clover laughed. “Technique is what we come to last. So far, you two are only just holding the sword by the right end.”
“It’s a stick,” said the blond one, frowning at his stick. “The ends are the same.”
Clover ignored him. “It’s a mindset I’m trying to teach you. A winning way of looking at the world.”
The dark boy was so baffled, he looked almost in pain. “It’s about hitting him with a sword, ain’t it?”
Clover took a slow breath in and slowly blew it out. “First of all, it’s about deciding when to, and when not to. In the end… the only thing a man can really do… is pick his moment. Watch for the opening, and recognise it when it comes, and seize it.” And Clover snatched at a handful o’ nothing and shook his fist. “Picking your moment. That’s the secret. You understand?”
The dark boy looked doubtful. “My da always said it was all in the grip.”
“Aye. Well. If you had no grip, the sword would just drop out of your hand.”
The boys stared blankly at him again. Clover sighed again.
“To it once more, lads, and this time pick your moment.”
Clack, clack went the sticks. Tock, tock went a woodpecker in the trees behind. The snap of a stick in the brush and Clover slipped the knife from its sheath at his back and held it down behind his arm.
Another footstep and Clover reached out, without looking around, and tipped the basket of apples towards the newcomer.
“Apple?” he asked.
Black Calder was standing there, rubbing at that little scar on his chin as he watched the two boys swinging away and not picking their moment in the least. “No,” he grunted.
“Hard day, Chief?”
“You get to my position, they all are.”
Clover looked back to the demonstration of how not to use a sword, knife already put away and his hands clasped across his belly. “Reckon that’s why I prefer my position.”
A Little Hatred Page 7