‘What is it, Corporal…’
‘Didn’t I tell you to stay bloody quiet?’ Tunny dragged Yolk down into the bushes and pulled out his eyeglass, a good three-part brass one he won in a game of squares with an officer from the Sixth. He edged forwards, finding a gap in the undergrowth. The ground rose sharply on the other side of the stream then dipped away, but there were spears behind the whole length of wall that he could see. He glimpsed helmets too. Some smoke, perhaps from a cook-fire. Then he saw a man wading out into the stream, waving a fishing rod made from a spear and some twine, wild-haired and stripped to the waist, and very definitely not a Union soldier. Perhaps only two hundred strides from where they were squatting in the brush.
‘Uh-oh,’ he breathed.
‘Are those Northmen?’ whispered Yolk.
‘Those are a lot of bloody Northmen. And we’re right on their flank.’ Tunny handed his eyeglass over, half- expecting the lad to look through the wrong end.
‘Where did they come from?’
‘I’d guess the North, wouldn’t you?’ He snatched back his eyeglass. ‘Someone’s going to have to go back. Let someone higher up the dunghill know the bother we’re in here.’
‘They must know already, though. They’ll have run into the Northmen themselves, won’t they?’ Yolk’s voice, never particularly calm, had taken on a slightly hysterical note. ‘I mean, they must’ve! They must know!’
‘Who knows what who knows, Yolk? It’s a battle.’ As he said the words, Tunny realised with mounting worry they were true. If there were Northmen behind that wall, there must have been fighting. It was a battle, all right. Maybe the start of a big one. The Northman in the river had landed something, a flashing sliver of a fish flapping on the end of his line. Some of his mates stood up on the wall, shouting and waving. All bloody smiles. If there had been fighting, it looked pretty damn clear they won.
‘Tunny!’ Forest was creeping up through the brush behind them, bent double. ‘There are Northmen on the other side of that stream!’
‘And fishing, would you believe. That wall’s crawling with the bastards.’
‘One of the lads shinned up a tree. Said he could see horsemen at the Old Bridge.’
‘They took the bridge?’ Tunny was starting to think that if he left this valley with no greater losses than eight bottles of brandy he might count himself lucky. ‘They cross it, we’ll be cut off!’
‘I’m aware of that, Tunny. I’m very bloody well aware of that. We need to take a message back to General Jalenhorm. Pick someone out. And stay out of bloody sight!’ And he crawled away through the undergrowth.
‘Someone’s got to go back through the bog?’ whispered Yolk.
‘Unless you can fly there.’
‘Me?’ The lad’s face was grey. ‘I can’t do it, Corporal Tunny, not after Klige … I just can’t do it!’
Tunny shrugged. ‘Someone has to go. You made it across, you can make it back. Just stick to the grassy bits.’
‘Corporal!’ Yolk had grabbed Tunny’s dirty sleeve and come close, freckled face uncomfortably near. He let his voice drop down quiet. That intimate, urgent little tone that Tunny always liked to hear. The tone in which deals were made. ‘You told me, if I ever needed anything …’ His wet eyes darted left and right, checking they were unobserved. He reached into his jacket and slid out a pewter flask, pressed it into Tunny’s hand. Tunny raised a brow, unscrewed the cap, took a sniff, replaced the cap and slipped it into his own jacket. Then he nodded. Hardly made a dent in what he’d lost in the bog, but it was something.
‘Leatherlicker!’ he hissed as he crept back through the brush. ‘I need a volunteer!’
The Day’s Work
‘By the dead,’ grunted Craw, and there were enough of ’em.
They were scattered up the north slope of the hill as he limped past, a fair few wounded too, howling and whimpering as the wounded do, a sound that set Craw’s teeth on edge more with every passing year. Made him want to scream at the poor bastards to shut up, then made him guilty that he wanted to, knowing he’d done plenty of his own squealing one time or another, and probably wasn’t done with it yet.
Lots more dead around the drystone wall. Enough almost to climb the bloody hill without once stepping on the mangled grass. Ended men from both sides, all on the same side now — the pale and gaping, cold far side of the great divide. One young Union lad seemed to have died on his face, arse in the air, staring sideways at Craw with a look of baffled upset, like he was about to ask if someone could lay him out in a fashion more dignified.
Craw didn’t bother. Dignity ain’t much use to the living, it’s none to the dead.
The slopes were just a build-up to the carnage inside the Heroes, though. The Great Leveller was a joker today, wending his long way up to the punchline. Craw wasn’t sure he ever saw so many dead men all squeezed into one space. Heaps of ’em, all tangled up in the old grave-pit embrace. Hungry birds danced over the stones, waiting their chance. Flies already busy at the open mouths, open eyes, open wounds. Where do all the flies come from, on a sudden? The place had that hero’s smell already. All those bodies bloating in the evening sun, emptying out their innards.
Should’ve been a sight to get anyone pondering his own mortality, but the dozens of Thralls picking over the wreckage seemed no more concerned than if they’d been picking daisies. Stripping off clothes and armour, stacking up weapons and shields good enough to be used. If they were upset it was ’cause the Carls who’d led the charge had snaffled the best booty.
‘Too old for this shit,’ muttered Craw, leaning down to grip at his sore knee, a cold cord of pain running through it from ankle to hip.
‘If it ain’t Curnden Craw, at last!’ Whirrun had been sitting against one of the Heroes and now he stood, brushing dirt from his arse. ‘I’d almost given up on waiting.’ He swung the Father of Swords up onto one shoulder, sheathed again, and pointed into the valley with it, the way they’d come. ‘Thought maybe you’d decided to settle down in one of those farms on the way over here.’
‘I wish I had.’
‘Aw, but then who’d show me my destiny?’
‘Did you fight?’
‘I did, yes, as it happens. Stuck into the midst of it. I’m quite a one for fighting, according to the songs. Lots of fighting here.’ Not that he had a scratch on him. Craw had never seen Whirrun come out of a fight with a single mark. He frowned around the circle of butchery, scrubbing at his hair, and the wind chose that moment to freshen, stirring the tattered clothes of the corpses. ‘Lot of dead men, ain’t there.’
‘Aye,’ said Craw.
‘Heaps and heaps.’
‘Aye.’
‘Union mostly, though.’
‘Aye.’
Whirrun shrugged his sword off his shoulder and stood it on its tip, hilt in both hands, leaning forward so his chin rested on the pommel. ‘Still, even when it’s enemies, a sight like this, well … makes you wonder whether war’s really such a good thing after all.’
‘You joking?’
Whirrun paused, turning the hilt round and round so the end of the stained scabbard twisted into the stained grass. ‘I don’t really know any more. Agrick’s dead.’ Craw looked up, mouth open. ‘He charged off right at the head. Got killed in the circle. Stabbed, I think, with a sword, just about here,’ and he poked at his side, ‘under the ribs and went right through, probably…’
‘Don’t matter exactly how, does it?’ snapped Craw.
‘I guess not. Mud is mud. He had the shadow over him since his brother died, though. You could see it on him. I could, anyway. The boy wasn’t going to last.’
Some consolation, that. ‘The rest?’
‘Jolly Yon got a nick or two. Brack’s leg’s still bothering him, though he won’t say so. Other than that, they’re all good. Good as before, leastways. Wonderful thought we could try and bury Agrick next to his brother.’
