The Heroes

‘Ah! My boot!’

Tunny spun round. ‘Keep quiet, idiot!’ Totally failing to keep quiet himself. ‘The Northmen’ll hear us in bloody Carleon!’

But Klige wasn’t listening. He’d strayed well away from the rushes and left one of his boots behind, sucked off by the bog. He was wading out to get it, sliding in up to his thighs. Yolk snickered at him as he started delving into the slime.

‘Leave it, Klige, you fool!’ snapped Tunny, floundering back towards him.

‘Got it!’ The bog made a squelching suck as Klige dragged his boot free, looking like it was caked in black porridge. ‘Whoa!’ He lurched one way, then the other. ‘Whoa!’ And he was in up to his waist, face flipped from triumph to panic in an instant. Yolk snickered again, then suddenly realised what was happening.

‘Who’s got a rope?’ shouted Lederlingen. ‘Someone get a rope!’ He floundered out towards Klige, grabbing hold of the nearest piece of tree, a leafless twig thrust out over the mire. ‘Take my hand! Take my hand!’

But Klige was panicking, thrashing around and only working himself deeper. He went down with shocking speed, face tipped back, only just above the level of the filth, a big black leaf stuck across one cheek.

‘Help me!’ he squealed, stretching fingers still a good stride short of Lederlingen’s. Tunny slopped up, shoving the flagstaff out towards Klige. ‘Help murghhh—’ His bulging eyes rolled towards Tunny, then they were lost, his floating hair vanished, a few bubbles broke on the foetid surface, and that was it. Tunny poked at the mush uselessly, but Klige was gone. Aside from his rescued boot, floating slowly away, no trace he’d ever existed.

They struggled the rest of the way in silence, the other recruits looking stunned, Tunny with his jaw furiously clenched, all sticking to the tumps of yellow weed as close as new foals to their mothers. Soon enough the ground started to rise, the trees turned from twisted swamp monsters to firs and oaks. Tunny leaned the filthy standard against a trunk and stood, hands on hips. His magnificent boots were ruined.

‘Shit!’ he snarled. ‘Fucking shit!’

Yolk sank down in the muck, staring into nowhere, white hands trembling. Lederlingen licked his pale lips, breathing hard and saying nothing. Worth was nowhere to be seen, though Tunny thought he could hear someone groaning in the undergrowth. Even the drowning of a comrade couldn’t delay the working of that lad’s troublesome bowels. If anything it had made them accelerate. Forest walked up, caked to the knees in black mud. They all were caked, daubed, spattered with it, and Tunny in particular.

‘I hear we lost one of our recruits.’ Forest had said it often enough that he could say it deadpan. That he had to.

‘Klige,’ Tunny squeezed between gritted teeth. ‘Was going to be a weaver. We lost a man in a fucking bog. Why are we here, even?’ The bottom half of his coat was heavy with oily filth and he peeled it off and flung it down.

‘You did the best you could.’

‘I know,’ snapped Tunny.

‘Nothing more you—’

‘He had some of my bloody gear in his pack! Eight good bottles of brandy! You know how much that could’ve made me?’

There was a pause.

‘Eight bottles.’ Forest slowly nodded. ‘Well, you’re a piece of work, Corporal Tunny, you know that? Twenty-six years in his Majesty’s army but you can always find a way to surprise me. I tell you what, you can get up that rise and find out where in the pit of hell we are while I try and get the rest of the battalion across without sinking any more bottles. Maybe that’ll take your mind off the depth of your loss.’ And he stalked away, hissing to some men who were trying to heave a trembling mule out of the knee-deep muck.

Tunny stood fuming a moment longer, but fuming was going to do no good. ‘Yolk, Latherlister, Worth, get over here!’

Yolk stood up, wide-eyed. ‘Worth … Worth—’

‘Still squirting,’ said Lederlingen, busy rooting through his pack and hanging various sodden items up on branches to dry.

‘’Course he is. What else would he be doing? You wait for him, then. Yolk, follow me and try not to bloody die.’ He stalked off up the slope, sodden trousers chafing horribly, kicking bits of fallen wood out of his way.

‘Shouldn’t we be keeping quiet?’ whispered Yolk. ‘What if we run into the enemy?’

‘Enemy!’ snorted Tunny. ‘Probably we’ll run into the other bloody battalion, just trotted over the Old Bridge and up a path and got there ahead of us all nice and dry. That’ll make a fine bloody picture, won’t it?’

‘Couldn’t say, sir,’ muttered Yolk, dragging himself up the muddy slope almost on all fours.

‘Corporal Tunny! And I wasn’t soliciting an opinion. Some big bloody grins they’ll have when they see the state of us. Some laugh they’ll all have!’ They were coming to the edge of the trees. Beyond the branches he could see the faint outline of the distant hill, the stones sticking from the top. ‘At least we’re in the right bloody place,’ and then, under his breath, ‘to get wet, sore, hungry and poor, that is. General fucking Jalenhorm, I swear, a soldier expects to get shat on, but this …’

Beyond the trees the ground sloped down, studded with old stumps and new saplings where some woodcutters had once been busy, their slumping sheds abandoned and already rotting back to the earth. Beyond them a gentle river babbled, hardly more than a stream, really, flowing south to empty into the nightmare of swamp they’d just crossed. There was an earthy overhang on the far bank, then a grassy upslope on which some boundary-conscious farmer seemed to have built an irregular drystone wall. Above the wall Tunny saw movement. Spears, their tips glinting in the fading light. So he’d been right. The other battalion were there ahead of them. He just couldn’t work out why they were on the north side of the wall …

‘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