There wasn’t much in the world to get your heart pumping harder than watching two men fight to the death. Only being one of ’em. He felt a guilty surge of excitement as Stour dashed forward again. Felt the eager grin on his own lips as Brock parried and fell back. No doubt he was a fine swordsman. But Stour was making him look ordinary. More so with every moment. He used that big sword nimbly as a dressmaker might her needle, all wrist and flick and effortless mastery.
Another flurry of blows, high and low, point and edge. Brock shuffled, blocked, but Stour caught him with the last cut as he whipped by. A slice across his left arm that sent a few spots of blood into the crowd. More than likely he could’ve left Brock’s arm hanging off, but Stour hadn’t become the Great Wolf by passing up a chance to pose, and he grinned as he showed the red edge of his sword to the crowd. He wasn’t only a hell of a swordsman but a hell of a braggart. The two went together with depressing frequency.
Brock gritted his teeth, cheek red from the cut on his face, and came on doggedly. You couldn’t fault his courage, but courage isn’t a warrior’s most valuable virtue, whatever the songs say. It’s ruthlessness, and savagery, and quickness to strike that win fights, the very qualities in which Stour excelled. He jumped in now, laughing as he swung his red sword in great circles, sending Brock staggering into the wall of shields.
Clover caught the Young Lion on his as he stumbled, gave a little like a good feather mattress, then nudged him back up so he could dodge, catch a blow of Stour’s and steer it wide with a screech of metal.
He doubted it’d change the result any. Looked like a black day for the Union. A black day for Leo dan Brock and anyone who loved him. A fine thing for Jonas Clover, you’d have thought. He did stand on the other side, after all, and winning was supposed to be meat and drink to a warrior.
Just sometimes he wished he had the bones to pick the right side, even if it was the losing one.
Someone had taken to beating a drum, slow and heavy. Rikke could’ve throttled the bastard.
By the dead, the tension. The long-drawn aching in her throat, worse and worse as the two of them circled, watchful, twisting like dogs after a scent, sniffing for an opening. Rikke’s sore mouth tasted of vomit and fear while the men with the shields shouted, stomped, bellowed their hatred and their encouragement.
By the dead, the helplessness. She wanted to scream. Wanted to punch something. Wanted to rip the ring out of her nose. No one, however big an optimist, could’ve doubted Leo was getting killed in there and there was nothing she could do.
Most of the crowd were treating it like a feast day. There were children up in a tree, staring down with wide eyes. Scale, that great fat fucker of a king, was laughing, quaffing from his goblet, laughing again. The great fat mountain of blubber.
“How can they laugh?” whispered Finree.
“’Cause they’re not the ones facing the Great Leveller,” said Rikke’s father, his face chiselled from grey stone.
The only thing worse than the fear of them coming together was the terror when they did, shocking as lightning every time, Rikke flinching at every movement, arse clenching at every flash of steel. She clung to the bench as if it was the saddle of a horse she was trying to break, clung to Finree’s cold hand in her hot one so hard her wrist ached.
She knew with one twitch of a sword she might lose her lover, her home, her future. People can be so tough, survive so much hunger and cold and disappointment, take beatings you wouldn’t believe and come out stronger. But they can be so fragile, too. One sharp piece of metal is all it takes to turn a man into mud. One little stroke of bad luck. One ill-judged whisper.
Had she done this? Had she made this happen?
She gasped as Nightfall came forward, switched direction in a blink. Steel rang once, twice, Leo lashed back, but too slow and Stour slipped around it, his sword catching Leo’s leg and making him stagger.
“No.” A kind of shudder went through Finree, and Rikke gripped her hand harder than ever. Tried to be strong for both of them though she wasn’t halfway strong enough for herself. Tried to bare her teeth, and focus on Stour’s smirk, and turn the sucking of fear and guilt into anger. Tried to make something from it she could use.
You cannot force the Long Eye open, no more than you can order the tide to come in. But where was the harm in trying?
She planted her fists on her knees and sat forward. Refusing to blink. Glaring at the grass like she could glare through it to what might come. Willing that heat into her eye.
Might be she saw what she wanted to. The dead knew there’d been plenty o’ that going on the past few days. But for the briefest moment, she thought she saw ghosts there, in the Circle. Faint, they were, and flickering. Hints of figures. Stour and Leo, and their swords, torn apart like cobwebs on the breeze as the real men passed through them.
Rikke curled back her lips, and clenched her fists, and squeezed her jaw so hard it felt like her teeth might crack, and she stared at the Circle as if she was staring into a gale.
She made herself see.
Stour was laughing now. Giggling as if every contact was a brilliant joke.
Leo wasn’t finding it funny. He told himself he was the Young Lion. The Lord Governor of Angland. The proud son of a proud line of warriors, with glory in his grasp. But in truth, he was scarcely even trying to hit back. Barniva’s sword was getting heavier every time he swung it. He was scared if he attacked, he’d give Stour a fatal opening. But he was scared if he defended, things could only go one way.
It was getting to the point where he was just scared.
Stour jerked forward and Leo stumbled back. Just a mocking feint with the foot, a twitch of the hand, and Leo was sent scampering. Stour wasn’t only aiming to win now, but to make a show of it. To teach a lesson. To show the whole North that the Great Wolf was a man to be feared. His sword flickered past Leo’s tired guard. Stour could’ve spitted him, but he chose just to prick his stomach. Prick him then whip away again, laughing.
He was the Young Lion, but he was bleeding. Blood on his face, blood on his leg. Red streaks down his right hand, grip of Barniva’s sword sticky with it. The idea of blood watering the Circle had thrilled him when he listened to stories of the Bloody-Nine. Thrills you a lot less when it’s your own.
He was the Young Lion, but he was tiring. He panted, gasped, cold air raw in his throat, but he could never get enough breath. His knees were trembling, the snap going out of his arm. No way he could outlast Stour now. His only chance was to out-think him. Trouble was, he’d never been much of a thinker. If he had been, he might not have taken the challenge in the first place.
His eyes darted about the Circle, searching for some clue.
His friends, their shields drooping. Glaward chewing his lip. Jin tearing his beard. Antaup crestfallen. Jurand wincing as if he felt every wound himself. He caught a glimpse of his mother, stricken, pale, staring. The Dogman sat grim beside her, and Rikke, glaring into the Circle, fiddling with the ring through her nose.
Fight dirty, she’d told him. No one remembers how the fight was won, only who won it. A gritty philosophy. Words to die by.
Stour feinted and Leo fell back again, stumbled again, but this time he went down harder than he had to. He put a hand out behind as if to steady himself, tore up a handful of grass. Stour came on again, grinning, and Leo growled as he forced the snap into his legs, sprang up, throwing his grass in Stour’s face, swinging his sword at Stour’s neck.
Even blinking, spitting and off balance, Nightfall managed to parry, but Leo was already coming at him with all the strength he had left. He smashed his forehead into Stour’s mouth with a glorious crunch, making the Great Wolf stagger back onto the shields of his men.
For a moment, his eyes were bleary, his bloody mouth wide with surprise. Leo took a great whooping breath, brought his sword whistling up and over, but the blade hacked into the shields where Stour had been a moment before, and Leo only just kept his grip on the buzzing hilt.
/>
Stour danced back, spitting grass, showing red teeth as he grinned. “Oh, now we got us a fight!”
He darted one way, switched in an instant and whipped past on the other side, quick as the wind and as hard to pin down. Leo was left stranded, gasped as the edge of Stour’s sword whipped across his thigh, left a cold line that soon turned burning hot. It was the most he could do to stay standing as the blood soaked into his trouser leg.
He wasn’t a lion, he was a scared little boy who didn’t want to die.
But it was too late to listen to Mother now.
Brock was cut bad. Red streaks down his face from the cut on his cheek, trousers dark around the cut on his leg, hand red from the cut on his arm. Watering the Circle with his blood, as the skalds have it. Not a pleasant sight, but nothing Clover hadn’t seen before. Hadn’t lived before. If pleasant sights are what you’re after, the Circle’s a bad place to come.
Stour was sure of victory. Grinning like a wolf, strutting like a cock. The kind that rules the farmyard rather’n the kind you piss with, but Clover reckoned both meanings fit the heir to the North pretty well. He laughed, arms spread wide, urging the crowd to ever-louder shrieks of admiration and delight. Some men take to applause like other men take to drink. The more they get, the more they need, until too much is never enough.
Scale was loving it almost as much as his nephew, shaking his iron hand at the Circle and roaring, “Play with him!” The admiration of one cock for another. Seemed to sting an effort from Brock, who lumbered in, sluggish from the bleeding, took a clumsy swing you could see coming ten strides off. Stour flicked it away with a contemptuous sneer, could’ve chopped Brock across the back but chose to let him stumble by.
“Finish him, damn it!” snarled Black Calder, as disgusted by his son’s display as his brother was delighted by it.
Stour could’ve finished Brock five times now but he was enjoying hooking him so much, he kept letting him wriggle free so he could hook him again. Clover thought that ill-advised, to say the least. You take no risks in the Circle and give no chances, not with all you’ve got and all you’ll ever have in the balance. It only takes a little twist of fate to land you back in the mud, and fate can be a twisty little bastard.
No one knew that better than Clover.
Rikke’s head spun, sight swam, stomach churned as she stared down into the Circle. Her left eye was hot, burning in her head. She forced it open wider, staring, staring.
Leo bent, clumsy, hunched around the wound in his side, blood-streaked top to toe. Stour looked quicker than ever, surer than ever, prancing, dancing, only a short step from blowing kisses to the audience.
Rikke saw ghosts of swords and spears above the crowd. Of flags shifting with a wind that wasn’t there. The battle yesterday? A battle yet to come? By the dead, she wanted to be sick. Her head was pulsing. The cold sweat tickled at her scalp, trickled down her face, but she didn’t dare shift her eyes. Didn’t dare blink. Didn’t dare break the spell.
There were ghosts in the Circle, too. Shimmering and shifting. Ghosts of Leo and of Stour. Ghosts of hands and feet and faces. Ghosts of swords.
Leo winced as Stour’s blade caught him across the belly. Not a killing blow. Just a kiss. A slash that spotted the shields beside him with blood. Leo stumbled, fell to his knees, sword slipping from his hand into the grass.
“No,” whispered Leo’s mother, tears running down her cheeks as she closed her eyes.
Nightfall turned slowly around in the middle of the Circle, stretching out the victory, sucking up the glory, and he looked over his shoulder at Rikke, and he winked.
By the dead, her eye was on fire. Like it might burn right out of her head.
Stour turned away from her, raising his arm.
She saw his sword.
But she saw it with the Long Eye.
And for an instant, like the water flooding in when the dam bursts, the absolute knowing of that sword flooded into her.
She saw the ore of its iron, ripped from the cold earth, made steel in the flame-spurting furnace and poured white-hot into the mould.
She saw Watersmeet the smith swing his hammer, face lit orange by sparks at each blow, his children working the bellows, his mother Drenna puffing plumes of chagga smoke from her pipe as she tugged at the binding on the grip.
She saw it gifted to Stour on his tenth birthday, Black Calder setting his hand on the smiling boy’s shoulder and saying, “In war, it’s the winning counts. The rest is for fools to sing about.”
She saw it in the Great Wolf’s scabbard, whipped free as the duel began, cut and thrust, the Circle full of the bright ribbons of its passing.
She saw it swung in a shining blur at neck height, Stour’s teeth bared in a triumphant snarl. A great, heedless, showy sweep fit to take a man’s head right from his shoulders.
She knew with utter certainty where that sword would be, always, but she didn’t feel the joy she had when she knew the arrow, that day in the wet woods. For beyond Stour’s bright sword she saw a crack in the sky, and beyond that crack a black pit yawned, a pit with no bottom and no end and no beginning in which there was a knowing not of a sword or an arrow but of everything. A knowing so vast and terrible that the merest splinter of it might rip her mind apart.
Leo dragged himself to his knees, groggy, bloody, clawing his own blade from the grass.
Rikke tottered up with him, moaning, gasping, gripping her throbbing head. The sky was opening, sucking her in.
Stour smiled. Began to turn. Rikke’s eye was a smouldering coal in her skull.
Leo started to clamber up, head rising towards the shimmering ghost of Stour’s sword.
She clapped her hands over her burning face and screamed out in the Union tongue, screamed at the very top of her lungs.
“Go low!”
Leo couldn’t have said why, but it seemed important he die on his feet.
Hardly hurt any more. Just numb. Just weak. So heavy.
Took everything he had to heave himself up.
The world wobbled like jelly, all dark earth and bright pink sky and a swimming mass of painted shields and snarling faces and smoking breath.
He could hardly hear for his own thudding heartbeat, hardly tell the roaring of the crowd from the roaring of his breath. He’d clutched up a handful of grass along with his sword. Bloody grass. Bloody dirt.
His mouth tasted like metal. In battle, a man finds out who he truly is. He forced his legs straight, swaying, trying to focus.
He caught a glimpse of Stour turning away, a flash of his bloody grin. Then, over the din of the crowd, he heard a scream.
“Go low!”
So he dropped. Or just fell, maybe. Felt wind pluck at his hair and with a last effort swung his sword low. Far from his best swing ever. Clumsy and weak, grip loose in his sore fingers.
But sometimes a bad swing can be good enough.
There was a smack as the blade chopped deep into Nightfall’s thigh.
Stour’s eyes bulged, and he opened his mouth very wide and made a strange, high shriek. More shock than pain. He staggered a half-step, took a great whooping breath in the sudden silence and started screeching again. More pain than shock, this time.
Leo pulled his sword free and Nightfall tottered, spluttering bloody spit, rearing up on his good leg, raising his sword high so the blade glimmered red with the setting sun.
A slap as Leo caught Stour’s fist in his and stepped forward, growling, jerking his other arm out hard so the pommel of Barniva’s sword crunched into Nightfall’s face, cutting his shriek off dead. His head snapped up, black blood against the pink sunset, and Leo caught the crosspiece of Stour’s sword and tore it from his limp fingers as he toppled back.
The Great Wolf hit the ground hard, arms flopped out wide, blowing bubbles of blood from his broken nose with each snorting breath. Leo stood over him, by some strange chance holding both the swords. How had that happened?
The painted shields of the men around the Ci
rcle drifted down, limp, their mouths dropping open, and no one more shocked than Leo himself.
And now the noise of the crowd on his side rose up, louder than ever. Shock turned to stunned delight, and stunned delight to wild triumph.
“Leo dan Brock!”
“The Young Lion!”
And, loudest of all, “Kill him!”
No doubt Nightfall would’ve killed Leo, if he’d been the one lying there, helpless. Would’ve killed him in the slowest, most painful, most shameful way he could. Would’ve crowed his victory from the rooftops of Uffrith and laughed as the skalds sang the story back to him for years to come.
Stour tried to wriggle away, gave a bubbling moan as he moved his wounded leg, then cowered as the points of the two swords came to hover over his neck. He stared up, bloody hair stuck across his face, eyes wide and full of fear.
Not invincible, after all.
The shouts found a rhythm and became a chant.
“Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”
Louder and louder, the smoke of the shouted words rising up into the chill evening all around.
“Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”
Louder and louder, joined by the rattle of weapons, the clash of fist on shield, the thud of stomped boots making the chill ground shake, matching Leo’s thudding heartbeat, echoing through him from his feet to his scalp.
“Kill him!” he heard Glaward roaring over his shield.
“Kill him!” he heard Antaup shriek, face twisted with fury.
“Kill the fucker!” snarled Whitewater Jin.
Leo saw his mother, tears in her eyes and a hand over her mouth. He saw the Dogman, caught halfway between sitting and standing with a disbelieving grin. He saw Rikke, stood up from the bench between them, her hands over her face, one eye gleaming between her fingers.
“Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”
Leo took a long, cold breath, lifted Barniva’s sword and Stour’s, the growl in his raw throat growing to a throbbing roar as he brought them both stabbing down with a single thud.
Right into the turf on either side of the Great Wolf’s cringing face.
A Little Hatred Page 41