The Heroes

Fawning merchants held swatches of bright cloth against officers too drunk to stand. Armourers battered out a shattering anvil music while salesmen demonstrated the strength, sharpness or beauty of wares nimbly replaced with trash when the money was handed over. A major with a bristling moustache sat frozen in double-chinned belligerence while a painter dashed off a shoddy representation by candlelight. Joyless laughter and meaningless babble hammered at Gorst’s aching head. Everything the best, the finest, the bespoke and renowned.

‘The new self-sharpening sheath!’ someone roared. ‘Self-sharpening!’

‘Advances to officers! Loans at first-rate rates!’

‘Suljuk girls here! Best fuckery you’ll ever get!’

‘Flowers!’ in a voice somewhere between song and scream. ‘For your wife! For your daughter! For your lover! For your whore!’

‘For pet or pot!’ a woman shrieked, thrusting up a bemused puppy. ‘For pet or pot!’

Children old long before their time darted through the crowd offering polishing or prophecy, sharpening or shaving, grooming or gravedigging. Offering anything and everything that could be bought or paid for. A girl whose age could not be reckoned slipped all around Gorst in a capering dance, bare feet mud-caked to the knee. Suljuk, Gurkish, Styrian, who knew of what mongrel derivation. ‘Like this?’ she cooed, gesturing at a stick upon which samples of gold braid were stapled.

Gorst felt a sudden choking need to weep, and gave her a sad smile, and shook his head. She spat at his feet, and was gone. A pair of elderly ladies stood at the flap of a dripping tent, handing out printed papers extolling the virtues of temperance and sobriety to illiterate soldiers who had already left them trampled in the mud for a half- mile in every direction, worthy lessons gently erased by the rain.

A few more steps, each an unimaginable effort, and Gorst stopped in the track, alone in the midst of all that crowd. Cursing soldiers slopped through the mud around him, all stranded like him with their petty despairs, all shopping like him for what cannot be bought. He looked up, open-mouthed, rain tickling his tongue. Hoping for guidance, perhaps, but the stars were shrouded in cloud. They light the happy way for better men. Harod dan Brock, and his like. Shoulders and elbows knocked and jostled him. Someone help me, please.

But who?

‘You can’t say that civilisation don’t advance,

however, for in every war they kill you in a new way’

Will Rogers

Dawn

When Craw dragged himself from his bed, cold and clammy as a drowned man’s grave, the sun was no more’n a smear of mud-brown in the blackness of the eastern sky. He fumbled his sword through the clasp at his belt then stretched, creaked and grunted through his morning routine of working out exactly how much everything hurt. His aching jaw he could blame on Hardbread and his lads, his aching legs on a lengthy jog across some fields and up a hill followed by a night huddled in the wind, but the bastard of a headache he’d have to take the blame for himself. He’d had a drink or two or even a few more last night, softening the loss of the fallen, toasting the luck of the living.

Most of the dozen were already gathered about the pile of damp wood that on a happier day would’ve been a fire. Drofd was bent over it, cursing softly while he failed to get it lit. Cold breakfast, then.

‘Oh, for a roof,’ whispered Craw as he limped over.

‘I slice the bread thin, d’you see?’ Whirrun had the Father of Swords gripped between his knees with a hand’s length drawn, and now he was rubbing loaf against blade with ludicrous care, like a carpenter chiselling at a vital joint.

‘Sliced bread?’ Wonderful turned away from the black valley to watch him. ‘Can’t see it catching on, can you?’

Yon spat over his shoulder. ‘Either way, could you bloody get on with it? I’m hungry.’

Whirrun ignored ’em. ‘Then, when I’ve got two cut,’ and he dropped a pale slab of cheese on one slice then slapped the other on top like he was catching a fly, ‘I trap the cheese between them, and there you have it!’

‘Bread and cheese.’ Yon weighed the half-loaf in one hand and the cheese in the other. ‘Just the same as I’ve got.’ And he bit a lump off the cheese and tossed it to Scorry.

Whirrun sighed. ‘Have none of you no vision?’ He held up his masterpiece to such light as there was, which was almost none. ‘This is no more bread and cheese than a fine axe is wood and iron, or a live person is meat and hair.’

‘What is it, then?’ asked Drofd, rocking back from his wet wood and tossing the flint aside in disgust.

‘A whole new thing. A forging of the humble parts of bread and cheese into a greater whole. I call it … a cheese-trap.’ Whirrun took a dainty nibble from one corner. ‘Oh, yes, my friends. This tastes like … progress. Works with ham, too. Works with anything.’

‘You should try it with a turd,’ said Wonderful.

Drofd laughed up snot but Whirrun hardly seemed to notice. ‘This is the thing about war. Forces men to do new things with what they have. Forces them to think new ways. No war, no progress.’ He leaned back on one elbow. ‘War, d’you see, is like the plough that keeps the earth rich, like the fire that clears the fields, like—’

‘The shit that makes the flowers grow?’ asked Wonderful.

‘Exactly!’ Whirrun pointed at her sharply with his whole new thing and the cheese fell out into the unlit fire. Wonderful near fell over from laughing. Yon snorted so hard he blew bread out of his nose. Even Scorry stopped his singing to have a high chuckle. Craw laughed along, and it felt good. Felt like too long since the last time.