‘What’s going on?’ asked Pale-as-Snow. ‘The men are…’
‘The Union are in the woods on the other side of that stream!’
There was a silence, in which Calder realised he’d spoken far louder than he needed to.
‘The Union’s over there? You sure?’
‘Why haven’t they come already?’ White-Eye wanted to know.
Calder held up the paper. ‘Because I’ve got their orders. But they’ll get more.’
He could hear the Carls around him muttering. Knew they were passing the news from man to man. Probably that was no bad thing. Probably that was why he’d shouted it.
‘What do we do, then?’ hissed White-Eye. ‘Scale’s waiting for help.’
‘I know that, don’t I? No one knows that better than me!’ Calder stood frowning towards the trees, his free hand opening and closing. ‘Tenways.’ By the dead, he was clutching at dust now, running for help to a man who’d tried to have him murdered a few days before. ‘Hansul, get up to Skarling’s Finger and tell Brodd Tenways we’ve got the Union out there in the woods to the west. Tell him Scale needs him. Needs him now, or we’ll lose the Old Bridge.’
Hansul raised an eyebrow. ‘Tenways?’
‘Dow said he should help, if we needed it! We need it.’
‘But…’
‘Get up there!’
Pale-as-Snow and Hansul traded a glance. Then White-Eye clambered back up onto his horse and cantered off towards Skarling’s Finger. Calder realised everyone was watching him. Wondering why he hadn’t done the right thing already, and charged to his brother’s rescue. Wondering whether they should stay loyal to this clueless idiot with the good hair.
‘Tenways has to help,’ he muttered, though he wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince. ‘We lose that bridge and we’re all in the shit. This is about the whole North.’ As if he’d ever cared a damn about the whole North, or even anyone much further away than the end of his own foot.
His patriotic bluster carried no more weight with Pale-as-Snow than it did with him. ‘If the world worked that way,’ said the old warrior, ‘we’d have no need for swords in the first place. No offence, Calder, but Tenways hates you like the plague hates the living, and he doesn’t feel a whole stretch warmer towards your brother. He won’t put himself or his men on the line for your sakes, whatever Dow says. If you want your brother helped, I reckon you’ll have to do it yourself. And soon.’ He raised his white brows. ‘So what do we do?’
Calder wanted very much to hit him, but he was right. He wanted to hit him because he was right. What should he do? He lifted his eyeglass again and scanned the treeline, slowly one way, then the other, then stopped dead.
Did he catch, just for a moment, the glint of another eyeglass trained on him?
Corporal Tunny peered through his eyeglass towards the drystone wall. He wondered if, just for an instant, he caught the glint of another trained on him? But probably he’d just imagined it. There certainly wasn’t much sign of anything else going on.
‘Movement?’ squeaked Yolk.
‘Nah.’ Tunny slapped the glass closed then scratched at his increasingly stubbly, greasy, itchy neck. He’d a strong feeling something other than him had taken up residence in his collar. A decision hard to understand, since he’d rather have been pretty much anywhere else himself. ‘They’re just sitting there, far as I can tell.’
‘Like us.’
‘Welcome to the glory-fields, Trooper Yolk.’
‘Still no damn orders? Where the hell has bloody Lederlingen got to?’
‘No way of knowing.’ Tunny had long ago given up feeling any surprise when the army didn’t function quite as advertised. He glanced over his shoulder. Behind them, Colonel Vallimir was having another one of his rages, this time directed at Sergeant Forest.
‘Yolk leaned in to whisper, ‘Every man shitting on the man below, Corporal?’
‘Oh, you’re developing a keen sense of the mechanisms of his Majesty’s forces. I do believe you’ll make a fine general one day, Yolk.’
‘My ambition don’t go past corporal, Corporal.’
‘I think that’s very wise. As you can tell.’
‘Still no orders, sir,’ Forest was saying, face screwed up like a man looking into a stiff wind.
‘Bloody hell!’ snapped Vallimir. ‘It’s the right time to go! Any fool can see that.’
‘But … we can’t go without orders, sir.’
‘Of course we bloody can’t! Dereliction of duty, that’d be! But now’s the right time, so of course General bloody Mitterick will be demanding to know why I didn’t act on my own initiative!’
‘Very likely, sir.’
‘Initiative, eh, Forest?
Tunny gave a sigh, and handed his eyeglass to Yolk.
‘Where you going, Corporal?’
‘Nowhere, I reckon. Absolutely nowhere.’ He wedged himself back against his tree trunk and dragged his coat closed over him. ‘Wake me if that changes, eh?’ He scratched his neck, then pulled his cap down over his eyes. ‘By some miracle.’
Closing Arguments
It was the noise that was the most unexpected thing about battle. It was probably the loudest thing Finree had ever heard. Several dozen men roaring and shrieking at the very highest extent of their broken voices, crashing wood, stamping boots, clanging metal, all amplified and rendered meaningless by the enclosed space, the walls of the room ringing with mindless echoes of pain, and fury, and violence. If hell had a noise, it sounded like this. No one could have heard orders, but it hardly mattered.
Orders could have made no difference now.
The shutters of another window were bludgeoned open, a gilded cupboard that had been blocking them flattening an unfortunate lieutenant and spewing an avalanche of shattering dress crockery across the floor. Men swarmed through the square of brightness, ragged black outlines at first, gaining awful detail as they burst into the inn. Snarling faces smeared with paint, and dirt, and fury. Wild hair tangled with bones, with rough-carved wooden rings and rough-cast metal. They brandished jagged axes and clubs toothed with dull iron. They wept and gurgled a mad clamour, eyes bulging with battle-madness.
Aliz screamed again, but Finree felt oddly cold-headed. Perhaps it was some kind of beginner’s luck at bravery. Or perhaps it had yet to really dawn on her how bad things were. They were very, very bad. Her eyes darted around as she struggled to take it all in, not daring to blink in case she missed something.
In the middle of the room an old sergeant was wrestling with a grey-haired primitive, each holding the other’s wrist with weapons waggling at the ceiling, dragging each other this way and that as though through the steps of some drunken dance, unable to agree on who should be leading. Nearby one of the violinists was beating at someone with his shattered instrument, reduced now to a tangle of strings and splinters. Outside in the courtyard the gates were shuddering, splinters flying from their inside faces while guardsmen tried desperately to prop them shut with their halberds.
She found herself rather wishing that Bremer dan Gorst was beside her. Probably she should have wished for Hal instead, but she had a feeling courage, and duty, and honour would do no good here. Brute strength and rage were what was needed.
She saw a plump captain with a scratch down his face, who was rumoured to be the bastard son of someone-or-other important, stabbing at a man wearing a necklace of bones, both of them slick with red. She saw a pleasant major who used to tell her bad jokes when she was a girl clubbed on the back of the head. He tottered sideways, knees buckling like a clown’s, one hand fishing at his empty scabbard. He was caught with a sword and
