“Huh.” Calder worked his mouth, a little sourly in Clover’s opinion, and said in a voice sharp with sarcasm, “Don’t get up.”
“I haven’t.”
Calder worked his mouth even more sourly. He was a sour sort these days, given how much life had given him, or how much he’d managed to claw from it, leastways. Time was he’d had a fine sense of humour, but the more men get, the sourer they tend to turn, and Black Calder had almost the whole North. His brother Scale might wear the king’s chain, but everyone knew Black Calder made the king’s choices.
“I meant do get up,” he said.
“Ah.”
Clover took his time. He considered it a point of principle to always take as much time as he could get away with. Then he shook out his aching legs, then slapped the dirt and dried pine needles from the arse of his trousers, then slapped his palms clean, too.
“There we go,” he said. “I’m up.”
“Let ring the bells,” said Calder. “This here is Jonas Clover.”
Clover looked around and got quite the shock to see someone had come up behind him and was leaning against the tree. A black-haired lad maybe twelve or thirteen years old with a cleft top lip and watchful eyes. He looked Clover up and down, and didn’t say a thing.
“Used to be called Steepfield,” added Calder, which made Clover scratch unhappily at the back of his head. “Maybe you heard of him.”
“No,” said the lad, looking over at the two fighting boys with his pale eyes narrowed. “Who’re these?” They’d fallen to wrestling, lurching about with their sticks waggling at the sky.
“Those…” Clover considered denying any acquaintance with them, but doubted he’d get away with it. “Are my pupils.”
The lad considered ’em a moment, then pronounced his solemn judgement. “They’re no good.”
“You’ve an excellent eye. They’re shit. But that’s how you know what a truly great teacher I am. Any fool can get results from the gifted.”
The lad considered that. “So where’s the results?”
“You have to trust they’ll be along. Patience is a warrior’s most fearsome weapon. Take it from me. I’ve been in a few fights.”
“Did you win any?”
Clover snorted. “Oh, I like him, Calder. Did you come down here just to toss my hard-won reputation in the muck?”
“Not just that,” said Calder. “I need your help.”
“Thinking of learning some sword-work?”
“You ask me, swords are best swung by other men.”
“Then…?”
Calder took an unhappy, growling breath. “My son.”
“The Great Wolf? Our king-in-waiting? That peerless warrior Stour Nightfall? Thought he knew how to use a sword.”
“He does. Too well, if anything. He’s proving somewhat… wilful. Set fire to Uffrith, the bloody idiot. All those years I spent planning how to take the city, and the moment I get it, he sets fire to it.”
“Once you call it a war, folk tend to get overexcited.”
“My father used to say you point three Northmen the same way they’ll be killing each other before you can order the charge. I’ve got Gregun Hollowhead and his boys from the West Valleys as like to join the Dogman as fight against him. How do I make them take my say-so when my own blood won’t? If Stour weren’t my son, I’d be forced to say the boy’s a fucking prick.”
“But he is your son, so…?”
Calder wasn’t listening. “He cares about nothing but his own fame. His own legend. What’s a bloody name worth at a market? Warriors.” He spat the word out like it tasted bitter. “I swear, the more they win, the worse they get.”
“Defeat is good for the spirit.” Clover scratched gently at his own scar with the little fingernail he left long for the purpose. “Learned that the hard way.”
“He thinks he’s bloody invincible. And his name draws fools like a turd draws flies and they give him fool advice. I sent Wonderful over to be his second, try to teach the Great Wolf some caution.”
“Good choice. Good woman. Good judgement.”
“Stour’s got her tearing her bloody hair out.”
Clover frowned. “Wonderful’s got hair now?”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Ah.”
“I want you to help her out. Keep Stour on the right path.”
“I’m supposed to know where the right path is?”
“A damn sight better than my prick of a son. Maybe you can nudge him off a couple of wrong ones, anyway.”
Clover scratched his beard, and watched the boys flounder in the meadow, and Calder’s lad shaking his head in disgust, and he took a slow breath in and slowly breathed it out. “All right, then.” He’d been around long enough to know when there was no squirrelling out of a thing. He grunted as he bent down and fished up his sword. Slowly, because why not? “I’ll do what I can.”
“Reckon that’s all any of us can do, in the end. You’re a straight edge, Clover. You’ve always been loyal.”
“Doubtless. I was loyal to Bethod, then to Glama Golden, then to Cairm Ironhead, now to you.”
“Well. You were loyal to them till they put themselves on the losing side.”
“That sounds almost exactly like disloyalty.”
Calder shrugged. “A man has to bend with the breeze.”
“If I’ve got one talent, it’s bending with the breeze. You keep the apples.” And Clover nudged the basket towards the scar-lipped lad with his boot. “They make my tummy hurt.”
“And all my dreams came true,” said Clover, ambling up with his sword over one shoulder.
Wonderful turned her head, showing the white scar through the black and silver stubble on her scalp, and hacked out a laugh. A laugh without much joy in it.
“Look who it is,” she said.
He glanced down at himself. “I recognise those boots! Jonas Clover has arrived and all wrongs shall be set right.” He winked at her but she was not much charmed. “Must be your lucky day.”
“I’m fucking due one.” And she slapped her hand in his, and pulled him close by it, and they clapped each other around the back for good measure.
“You been eating well?” he asked, looking her up and down. “You’re like hugging a bundle of spears.”
“Always been lean.”
“Oh, me too.” And he patted his belly. “The body of a hero lies just below this carefully nurtured layer of fat.”
She raised a brow. Clover loved to see things done well, and she’d a hell of a brow-raise, did Wonderful. “And what could possibly drag your fat this close to the fighting?”
“Black Calder. He tells me you need help.”
“That I’ll not deny. When does it get here?”
“You dare trifle with me, woman? I’m supposed to mind the future of the North, the king-in-waiting, the Great Wolf, Stour Nightfall.”
Both her brows went up now. “You?”
“I’m to keep him on the right path. Calder’s words.”
“Good luck with that.” She beckoned him close and lowered her voice. “Not sure I ever met a bigger prick than that boy, and I stood second to Black Dow.”
Clover snorted. “For a day you did.”
“A day was plenty.”
“I do hear tell the Great Wolf can be somewhat prickish.”
Wonderful jerked her head towards a column of smoke rising above the trees. “He’s even now burning a village we just captured over yonder. He was going house to house when I left him. Making sure the flames got the lot.”
Clover thought he’d caught that old burning-building whiff on the breeze. “Why fight for something if all you do is burn it?”
“Maybe the Great Wolf could tell you. For damn sure I can’t.”
“Well.” Clover pushed his chin forward and scratched at the stubble on his stretched-out neck. “Luckily, I’m a man of heroic patience.”
“You’ll need to be.” Wonderful nodded sideways. “Here comes
the future.”
And Stour came swaggering down the track. He’d been given the name Nightfall as a babe, on account of being born during an eclipse. It had been an hour before, in fact, but no one dared say so now. All part of the ever-inflating legend of the Great Wolf. He’d long, dark hair, and fine clothes buckled and riveted with gold, and these grey-blue eyes that looked always a little wet, as if he was about to cry. Tears of acid contempt, maybe, for the world and everything in it.
He was no giant, but there was a quick strength to the way he moved. A dancer’s grace. And sneering confidence in crazed abundance. A surfeit of self-belief can get you killed, but Clover had seen it carry men through fire before as well. The old iron skin of arrogance. Here was a fellow who knew how to pick his moment, and to cut what he wanted from it with no hesitation and even less regret.
He had that crowd of cunts with him that famous fighters tend to gather, many of them proudly sporting the sign of the wolf on their shields. Men with no name of their own, drawn to the big name like moths to a bonfire. Clover had seen the wretched pattern a dozen times before. Glama Golden had a crew very similar, and the Bloody-Nine, too, and more than likely Skarling Hoodless had a glowering gaggle however many hundred years before.
Times change, but that crowd of cunts stays much the same.
Stour Nightfall fixed Clover with that wet, cold, hollow stare, quick hand sitting loose on the pommel of his sword, and his grin was full of good teeth and bad threats.
“Jonas Clover,” he said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Your father sent me. Black Calder.”
“I know who my father is.”
“He knows who his father is,” sneered one of the sneerers. A heavy-muscled young bastard with a whole armoury strapped about him, made a sound on the move like a knife-seller carting too much stock.
Stour scowled sideways. “Shut your mouth, Magweer.” Magweer bristled to be slapped down, a wearisome pattern of manly goings-on in which Clover, to his shame, had once been a keen participant. “What I want to know is—why did he send you?”
“To keep you on the right path.” Clover gave a helpless little shrug. “His words, you understand.”
“And you can tell the right path from a midden, can you?”
Stour’s wolf-shield arse-lickers chuckled like that was some high wit, and Clover smiled along with ’em. If all a man can do is pick his moment, then this was no moment for pride. “I make no grand claims for myself, but I’ve chosen a few wrong paths down the years. Could be I can spare you from stepping in some of the turds that’ve made my boots so fragrant.”
“I thought I could smell dung.” And Stour sniffed, and licked his teeth, and wiped at his nose with a thumbtip. “So what’d be your first advice?”
“Never scratch your eyebrows with a sword.” Clover grinned. No one else did, but that was their lookout. “Best to just leave ’em in the scabbard whenever possible, I’d say. Drawn swords are bloody dangerous, that’s a fact.”
Stour stepped a little closer and brought a little bubble of menace with him. “Wisdom fit for a hero,” he whispered.
“I used to want to be a hero.” Clover patted his belly. “Grew out of it. But I told your father I’d do what I could.”
“So…” Stour swept his hand out towards the valley. “Care to point out the path?”
“Wouldn’t presume. I know what I am, and I’m one of life’s followers.”
The king-in-waiting opened his wet eyes wide. “Try to keep up, then, old man.” And he brushed past, eyes fixed on his next conquest, and Clover stepped out of the way of his scowling companions, bowing low. “I want to burn us another village or two before sundown!” the Great Wolf called over his shoulder, and the young glories competed with each other to laugh the loudest.
“What did I say?” Wonderful leaned close. “Absolute prick.”
Break What They Love
Rikke wriggled her shoulders further back among the knotted roots, up to her neck in the icy river and her hair full of dirt, listening to the warriors of her enemy trudge past on the path above. By the sound of it, there were a lot of the bastards. She wondered, yet again, what would happen if they caught her. When they caught her. She tried to make her breath come slow, come even, come quiet.
What with the grinding fear for herself, and the chafing worry for everyone she knew, and the niggling pain of a hundred little knocks and scratches, and the gnawing hunger and gripping cold, it all added up to quite the shittest afternoon she’d ever had, and that with some recent savage competition.
She felt a fingertip under her jaw, pushing her mouth closed, and realised her teeth had started chattering. Isern was pressed against the bank beside her, river to her sharp chin and hair plastered to her frowning face, still as the earth, patient as the trees, hard as the stones. Her eyes rolled up from Rikke’s to the root-riddled overhang above, and she quietly slipped one finger from the water and over her scarred lips for quiet.
“Shit,” came a voice, so loud it seemed in Rikke’s ear, and she startled, might’ve splashed from the bank on an instinct if Isern’s hand hadn’t clamped tight about her numb arm under the water.
“Shit… and…” A man’s voice, getting on in years but soft and slow, like he was in no hurry. “There we go.” A satisfied grunt, and a stream of faintly steaming piss came spattering into the water not a stride from Rikke’s face. Sad thing was, she was tempted to stick her head under it just for the warmth.
“There’s all kinds of pleasures in life,” came the voice, “but I’ve come to think there’s little better than a piss when you really need one.”
“Huh.” A woman’s voice this time, picking each word careful as a smith picks the nails for a rich man’s horseshoes. “Not sure whether I’ve more respect for you or less following that little revelation.”
“It’s getting to the point…” The stream stopped, then started up again. “Where I sometimes hold on to it… so when I do go…” A few more little squirts. “It feels better than ever. How goes the noble clash of arms?”
“Union are pulling back as fast as they can. Some skirmishes but there’s no real fight in ’em. No sign o’ the Dogman’s boys. Running, I reckon.”
“Suits me well enough,” said the man. “Any luck, they’ll run all the way back to Angland and we can all have a lie down.”
Rikke glanced over at Isern. She’d been right. She always was bloody right, specially when it came to disheartening predictions.
That morning they’d come upon a clearing full of corpses. A dozen or more. Men from both sides, all on the same side now. They say the Great Leveller settles all differences. Rikke had stared at those bodies, her wrist against her mouth, her breath crawling. Then she’d seen Isern, squatting over the dead like a corpse-eater from the songs, plucking at torn clothes, fiddling with buckles.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for anything we can eat.”
And Rikke had set to searching herself. Trying not to look at their faces as she rooted through pockets with numb fingers. Isern had been right about that, too. Your fear, your guilt, your disgust, they all vanish once you get hungry enough. The thing that really upset her as they crept away from the dead was that they hadn’t found anything.
“Chief!” someone roared up on the road. “Nightfall! The king-in-waiting!” And there was an approving clatter of weapons on shields.
Rikke stiffened under the water. Stiffened far as she could given she was near enough a block of ice already, and Isern pressed against her and whispered, hardly more’n a breath, “Shhhhhhhh…”
“By the dead,” she heard the woman mutter above, and then, with forced good cheer, “Chief! How’s the day?”
“Bloodless so far, but it’s still early.” The voice of Stour Nightfall himself, then. A whining sort of voice for a famous warrior. Sounded like a boy on the edge of a tantrum. “They’re thin sauce, these Southerners, always trickling away. The Bloody-Nine had Ru
dd Threetrees to fight, and Black Dow, and Harding Grim and all the rest. How’s a man meant to win a great name without great enemies to weigh it against?”
A brief pause. “It’s a tester, all right,” said the woman.
“I’ve a task for you, Wonderful. There’s a girl out in these woods.” Rikke had a bad feeling in her stomach. Worse than the hunger, and she shrank against the bank like she could become one with the dirt. “I want her.”
A snorting chuckle from the enthusiastic pisser. “Well, who wouldn’t want a girl out in the woods?” There was a silence, like the jest had miscarried. Certainly Rikke wasn’t fucking laughing. “How do we tell this girl from another?”
“They say she’s got a twitchy way. She’ll have a gold ring through her nose, maybe a cross painted over her eye.”
Rikke touched the tip of her tongue to the ring through her nose and whispered, “Fuck.”
“She might have some witch of a hillwoman with her. That you can kill. But the girl we need alive.”
“Must be important,” said the woman called Wonderful.
Nightfall gave a little hooting giggle. “Well, there’s the thing. She’s the Dogman’s daughter.”
“Double fuck,” mouthed Rikke.
“Shhhhhhh,” hissed Isern.
“What happens if we catch her?”
An unhappy grunt. “Well, if my father gets her, I daresay he’ll ransom her back, dangle her as bait, use her to get his way when it comes to talking peace.” And Nightfall spat out the word like it tasted bad. “You know my father. Plans within plans.”
“Always been clever, Black Calder,” came the man’s voice.
“I see things different. How I see it, the way you break your enemy is you break what they love. Way I hear it, those old fools on the other side love that twitching bitch. Sort of a little mascot for ’em.” Rikke heard the smile in his voice. “So if I get hold of her, I’ll strip her, and whip her, and pull her teeth out, and maybe get some Thralls to fuck her, out between the lines where everyone can hear her squealing.” Bit of a silence, and Rikke heard her own breath coming ragged, and Isern’s hand tightening around her arm. “Or maybe I’d get my horse to fuck her. Or my dogs. Or… like, a pig, maybe?”
A Little Hatred Page 8