“In other words, you’ve no notion.”
Isern glanced sideways. “If only someone could just look into the future and tell us how it’ll all unfold. That’d be handy.”
“Aye.” Rikke planted her chin in her palms and sagged. “It would.”
“Bravery,” said Glaward, staring gloomily at the fire, “audacity, loyalty… yes. But I never guessed patience would be the soldier’s most important virtue.”
Barniva rubbed at his scar with a thumbtip. “Fighting and soldiering are two very different things.”
They were starting to seem like opposite things to Leo. He frowned at the sun, the slightest pink smudge in the east. He could’ve sworn the damn thing was rising at a tenth the normal speed. No doubt it was somehow in league with his mother.
“Patience is the parent of success,” murmured Jurand, with so gentle a touch on Leo’s shoulder he only just felt it. “Stolicus.”
“Huh.” Normally, as the sun rose, Leo would’ve been training. He’d heard Bremer dan Gorst, well into his fifties, still trained for three hours every day, so he’d determined to do the same. But what’s the point of training if you end up stuck on your arse in a village miles from the fight? He took a hard breath and let it smoke away. His thousandth of the morning so far.
“Nothing to do but wait.” Whitewater Jin carefully pushed his sausages around the pan and made them sizzle. The fork looked tiny in his paw of a hand. “Wait, and eat.”
The smell was making Leo’s stomach rumble, but there was no way he could think of eating. He was too nervous. Too impatient. Too frustrated.
“By the dead!” He flung an arm towards the men scattered about the village, already in their armour. Angland’s cavalry. The best and the brightest, sitting idle. “She should be letting us fight! What’s she thinking?”
“I saw an army mishandled in Styria,” said Barniva. “This is not what it looks like.”
“If you ask me,” said Jurand, “the lady governor’s a hell of a general.”
“No one did ask you,” snapped Leo, even though he just had.
Jurand heaved out a sigh, and Barniva drew his blanket tight about his shoulders, and they went back to watching the sausages sizzle.
Leo frowned up at the sound of hooves. One rider trotting down the rutted track that led from the bridge. Antaup, loose in his saddle.
“Morning!” he called, scraping that lock of dark hair back with his fingers.
“Any news?” Leo couldn’t keep the eager little warble out of his voice, though it was perfectly clear there was no news at all. He was needy as a jilted lover, unable to stop pining no matter how often he was turned down.
“No news,” said Antaup, swinging from his saddle. He peered over Jin’s big shoulder at the pan. “Don’t suppose you lads have a sausage spare?”
Barniva grinned up. “For a boy with a smile as pretty as yours? I think we can find a sausage.”
“Do you have to?” snapped Leo, curling his lip with disgust. “What did mother say?” He right away regretted his choice of words, but how does a man make taking orders from his mother sound good?
“She said sit tight.” Antaup leaned on Jin’s shoulder, made him turn, then reached around his blind side and nimbly stole the fork from his plate. “She said she’d let you know if anything changed.” And he stretched over to fork one of the sausages from the pan.
“Oy!” snapped Jin, elbowing him away.
Leo frowned up towards the red-topped hill, a black lump against the pinking sky, here and there the telltale glint of metal where the men were getting ready for battle. Or for just another day of waiting.
The waiting, the waiting, the endless bloody waiting. He really was the worst man in the world at doing nothing.
“I’m going up there!” And he grabbed his helmet and strode for his horse.
“And she said don’t go up there!” called Antaup with his mouth full.
Leo froze for a moment, angrily clenching his jaw. Then he strode on. “I’m bloody going anyway!”
“I’ll come with you,” said Jurand. “Keep a sausage for me!”
“For a boy with such delicate features as yours,” said Barniva, laughter in his voice, “I’ll always have a sausage.”
“By the dead,” grumbled Leo, hunching his shoulders.
“I’ve got a feeling about today,” said Wonderful.
Clover was fully occupied trimming a blister on his big toe. “Good feeling or bad?”
“Just a feeling. Something’s going to happen.”
“Well, something happens every day.”
“Something big, you fool.”
“Ah,” said Clover. “Well, I hope I’m left out of it. I like little things, mostly.”
“You must be pleased wi’ your cock, then.” Magweer, sneering down from his horse with the sun behind.
Clover saw no pressing need to look away from his feet. “A cock’s not for pleasing yourself, boy, it’s for pleasing others. Maybe that’s where you’re going wrong.”
Magweer bristled. Always the ones quickest to insults got the thinnest skin, for some reason. “You spend more time on your blisters than your weapons.”
“My blisters are more important,” said Clover.
Magweer’s ill-favoured face crunched up in a clueless scowl.
“If you’re lucky, you might get through a whole campaign without drawing your sword.” Clover gave his blister one last shave with the point of his little knife, then sat back to admire the results. “But you will, without question, be using your feet.”
“The man has a point,” said Wonderful.
Magweer spat. “No fucking idea why, but Stour wants the two o’ you up front with him.”
“Oh, aye?” asked Clover. “Has he not got all the wise counsel he needs with you lot o’ heroes?”
“You mocking me, old man?”
Clover puffed out a weary breath. That boy seemed determined to butt heads with him. You let things go with most men, they let things go, too. But some are just fixed on taking offence. “Wouldn’t dare, Magweer,” he said. “But wars are depressing things, whatever the songs say. We must lighten the mood where we can, eh, Wonderful?”
“I smile whenever possible,” she said, stony-faced.
Magweer looked from one of them to the other, then gave a sour hiss, spat once more for luck and wrenched his horse roughly around to the west. “Just get up there with the scouts soon as you can or there’ll be trouble.” And he rode off, mud flicking from his horse’s hooves, nearly riding down some poor woman who’d been off fetching water and making her drop her buckets in the mud.
“I like that boy a lot. Reminds me of me as a young man.” Clover shook his head. “If I’d been an absolute cunt.”
“You were an absolute cunt,” said Wonderful. “And I’ve observed no significant changes in that regard.”
Clover started pulling his boot on. “Or, indeed, in any other.”
Wonderful scrubbed worriedly at the back of her shaved head as she frowned off down the road to the west. “Damn it, though,” she said, “I’ve got a feeling about today.”
“No sign,” said Rikke’s father, offering her his battered eyeglass.
“If you say there’s no sign,” she said, “I daresay there isn’t any. You’re the War Chief. I’m… I don’t know, a seer, maybe?” Sounded like a bloody presumptuous title. “Just… a really shit one.”
“Sooner or later, you’ll have to stop hiding your talents, girl. Your Long Eye may be patchy but your short ones are still way sharper’n mine.”
Rikke sighed, and took the eyeglass, and peered over the weed-sprouting old battlements, keeping low just in case. Spots of gorse on the hillside. Fast-flowing water in the stream. Sheep dotted about the yellow-green grass. Sunlight and shadow chasing each other down the valley as the gusting wind dragged clouds across the sky. There were a couple of hundred Union men gathered around the bridge, where a wagon had been carefully positioned to look like it
had just that moment broke an axle and was blocking things up halfway across.
The bait on their hook. Seemed a laughably obvious trick right then, but tricks always do when you know how they’re managed. Fish keep biting, even so.
“No sign.” Rikke handed back the glass, and clapped her father on the shoulder, and slipped down the steps.
The yard of the ruin was crammed with Oxel’s and Red Hat’s Carls, checking their gear, passing food, talking softly to one another. You’d think men would get fired up before a battle but more often they get maudlin. When you feel the Great Leveller’s shadow cold on your back, it’s not your hopes you come back to, but your regrets.
Isern had set her bony arse on the heap of crumbled masonry that was once the north wall of the fortress, spear across her knees, giving the blade a few licks with the whetstone.
“No sign?” she asked, not even looking up.
Rikke thought she caught a glint of metal among the trees at the bottom of the slope, but there was nothing there now. “No sign.” And she perched on the tumbledown wall and wriggled till she found a comfortable spot, then started to arrange the fronds of a surprisingly pretty weed growing out of it. “The songs don’t say much about all the time spent sitting down, do they?”
Isern winced as she stretched her hurt leg out. “The skalds give disproportionate attention to the sword-work, it’s true. Truth is, battles are more often won with spades than blades. Roads, and ditches, and trenches, and proper shit-pits. You’ll dig your way to victory, my da always told me.”
“Thought you hated your da?”
“Being an utter fucker didn’t make him wrong. Quite the opposite, far as fighting goes.”
“It’s a sad fact that the…” Rikke trailed off, staring.
A man had stepped from the trees below them. A tall man with pale brows and pale hair in a spiky riot, shoulders hunched and elbows stuck out wide and short beard jutting. He had a sword in one hand and an axe in the other and he was frowning up the slope. Not at her, but at the tower beyond.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“Who’s who?”
The pale man beckoned with his axe, and Rikke’s jaw fell open as a couple of dozen others slipped from the trees around him, all well armed. She jumped up, near falling over that pretty weed, and pointing wildly down towards them.
“There’s men in the trees!” she screeched.
A few Carls scrambled onto the crumbling wall, staring down. Oxel was one. Rikke was waiting for him to roar out for more men, but all he did was turn his shifty sneer from the trees to her and spit.
“What the hell you talking about, girl?” he growled. “There’s no one there.”
“Fucking mad bitch,” she heard one of the others mutter as they drifted back into the ruin, shaking their heads.
Rikke wondered if she was going mad. Or more mad, maybe. Men were flooding from the trees now. Hundreds of the bastards. “You see ’em, don’t you?” she asked Isern in a small voice.
The hillwoman leaned on her spear, calmly chewing. “The men are rude, but the men are right. There’s no one there.” She gave Rikke a painful jab with her sharp elbow. “But maybe someone will be.”
“Oh, no.” And Rikke covered her eyes with a hand and the left one was hot. “Wanna be sick.” She bent over and coughed out an acrid little mouthful, but when she looked up, the men were still there, too brightly lit since the sun was still low, a great standard in their midst, flapping hard even though the breeze had died. “They even got a flag.”
“What flag?”
“Black with a red circle.”
Isern’s frown got harder. “That was Bethod’s standard. Now it’s Black Calder’s.”
Rikke was sick again. Just a little string of drool this time, and she spat and wiped her mouth. “Thought he… was way off north.”
“You cannot force the Long Eye open,” murmured Isern. “But when it opens by itself, it’s a fool who doesn’t see.” She turned and limped quick across the rubble-strewn yard of the fortress, making men grumble as she shouldered past. “Black Calder’s always had a bad habit of turning up where he shouldn’t.”
“So what’re you doing?”
“Warning your father.”
“You sure?” muttered Rikke as she followed Isern up the crumbling steps, still glimpsing those men out of the corner of her eye. An army of ’em now. “I mean, what if they’re going to turn up next week? Or next month? What if they turned up years ago!”
“Then we’ll look like a right pair o’ fools.” Isern grinned at her as she limped up onto the roof of the tower. “But at least we won’t be two corpses in a big heap of corpses. Dogman!”
“Isern-i-Phail,” muttered Rikke’s father with a sideways glance. “Make it good, I’ve got a battle to—”
“Black Calder’s in those woods.” She nodded off to the North. “Planning to sneak men around you, I reckon.”
“You seen ’em?”
“I must confess, I did not. But your daughter did.” She slapped a heavy hand down on Rikke’s shoulder. “The moon has smiled upon us all and blessed her with the rare gift o’ the Long Eye. We should make ready for blood.”
“You’re not joking.” Rikke’s father pointed in the opposite direction. “Stour Nightfall might be coming down that road any bloody minute and Lady Brock’s counting on us to be one-half of a trap for him! We don’t arrive, the whole plan’s in the shit.”
Isern grinned like this was all quite the lark. “Not half as deep as if Black Calder sidles up our arses while we’re facing t’other way, though, d’you see?”
Rikke’s father pressed at his temples. “By the dead. I can’t turn around just on your say-so, Rikke. I can’t.”
“I know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders high as they’d go. “I wouldn’t.”
“You seen ’em, though?” croaked Shivers.
Rikke glanced sideways and there they still were, a great long line just in front of the trees, hundreds of Carls, their shields bright blobs of colour, gathered around Black Calder’s standard. “I see ’em now. The one at the front’s smiling right at me.”
“Describe him.”
“A long, lean, pale bastard with an axe and a sword, sort of hunched over, all elbows. Ugh.” And she had to bend over herself, hands on her knees, head spinning.
“Sounds a lot like the Nail,” said Shivers, frowning down towards the woods. “If Black Calder sent a man around the back, the Nail’s the sort o’ man he’d send.”
Rikke’s father gave a low grunt. “Maybe.”
“Give me a few Carls,” said Shivers. “I’ll have a root around those woods. I find nothing, nothing lost.”
Rikke’s father looked from Shivers, to Isern, to Rikke, and back. “Root around, then, but quick. If we’re called for, we can’t wait.”
Shivers nodded and slipped down the crumbling steps. The sun was getting higher, and down in the valley on the brown strip of the road, men were moving. A few, and coming carefully. “Oh, by the dead.” Rikke covered her eye with her hand, felt it still throbbing hot against her palm. “Tell me you see them?”
“Oh, aye. Stour Nightfall’s scouts, I reckon.” And Isern spat. “’Course I see them.”
Muddy grey dawn had become muddy grey morning by the time Leo rode up through the red bracken on the hillside. The men of Angland sat in massed ranks where they were hidden from the valley, armed and ready. Some stood to salute, a few held up their swords. Others called out, “The Young Lion!” against their orders to stay quiet. Seemed the soldiers approved of him a lot more than his mother did.
She was kneeling in the bracken just beyond the summit, an eyeglass trained on the valley, a whispering group of scouts and officers around her.
She shook her head as he crept over, keeping low. “I thought I gave Antaup orders that you shouldn’t come up here?”
“Yes, and I came anyway…” He trailed off. There were men in the valley. Mounted men, spread out, watching
their little show of incompetence down at the bridge. Northmen, without a doubt. “Nightfall’s scouts?” he asked in an eager whisper.
She handed him her eyeglass. “And his main body is following close behind. Head of the column is there at the farm.”
Leo trained the glass on a few pale farm buildings higher up the valley. Metal gleamed on the brown strip of road. Mail and spear points. A column of armed men, moving towards the bridge. Carls, from the little spots of bright colour which must be their shields. Like seeing one ant in the grass and suddenly seeing dozens, Leo became aware of another column, and another.
“Bloody hell,” he squawked, excitement surging up his throat and nearly choking him. “They’re taking the bait!”
He squinted harder. There was something waving beside the farm. A tall grey flag, and though he couldn’t be sure at this distance, he’d a feeling there was a black wolf on it.
“Nightfall’s standard,” he whispered.
“Yes.” His mother pulled her eyeglass from his limp grip and set it to her own eye again. “And this time, I’ve no doubt, the Great Wolf is here in person.”
“What did these bastards do?” asked Clover, frowning up at the bodies.
“They was on the Dogman’s side,” said Greenway, nodding like a family dangling from a tree was a job well done.
Couple of Thralls had dragged a cupboard from the farmhouse, now they shoved it over in the dirt and started hacking at it with axes. Clover squinted at ’em, bemused.
“What is it they think an axe will reveal that opening the doors won’t?”
“Hidden stuff. Gold, maybe.”
“Gold? You’re having a laugh.”
Greenway frowned a pouty frown—aside from sneers, it was his one expression. “Silver, then.”
“Silver? If these bastards had silver, let alone gold, why the hell would they be up here farming for a pittance? They’d be in town, drunk, which is where I should bloody be.”
“Best to be sure,” said one of the men.
“Oh, aye,” said Clover. “Daresay you’ll be burning the house once you’ve found nothing, ’cause fire is pretty.”
A Little Hatred Page 34