The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (118 page)

Reachey slowly stood. ‘Right y’are, Chief. We’ll make it a red day. A day for the songs.’

‘Shit on the songs,’ said Dow, standing himself. ‘I’ll take just victory.’

They clasped hands a moment, then Reachey moved for the entrance, saw Craw and gave a big gap-toothed smile.

‘Old Caul Reachey.’ And Craw held out his hand.

‘Curnden Craw, as I live and breathe.’ Reachey folded it in one of his then slapped the other down on top. ‘Ain’t enough of us good men left.’

‘Those are the times.’

‘How’s the knee?’

‘You know. It is how it is.’

‘Mine too. Yon Cumber?’

‘Always with a joke ready. How’s Flood getting on?’

Reachey grinned. ‘Got him looking after some new recruits. Right shower o’ piss-water, in the main.’

‘Maybe they’ll shape up.’

‘They better had, and fast. I hear we got a battle coming.’ Reachey clapped him on the arm as he passed. ‘Be waiting for your order, Chief!’ And he left Craw and Black Dow watching each other over a few strides of rubble-strewn, weed-sprouting, nettle-waving old mud. Birds twittered, leaves rustled, the hint of distant metal serving notice there was bloody business due.

‘Chief.’ Craw licked his lips, no idea how this was going to go.

Dow took a long breath in and screamed at the top of his voice. ‘Didn’t I tell you to hold on to that
fucking
hill!’

Craw went cold as the echoes rang from the crumbling walls. Looked like it might not go well at all. He wondered if he might find himself stripped in a cage before sundown. ‘Well, I was holding on to it all right … until the Union showed up …’

Dow came closer, sheathed sword still in one fist, and Craw had to make himself not back off. Dow leaned forwards and Craw had to make himself not flinch. Dow raised one hand and put it gently down on Craw’s sore shoulder, and he had to make himself not shudder. ‘Sorry ’bout this,’ said Dow quietly, ‘but I’ve a reputation to look to.’

A wave of giddy relief. ‘’Course, Chief. Let rip.’ He narrowed his eyes as Dow took another breath.

‘You
useless
old limping
fuck
!’ Spraying Craw with spit, then patting the bruised side of his face, none too gently. ‘You made a fight of it, then?’

‘Aye. With Hardbread and a few of his lads.’

‘I remember that old bastard. How many did he have?’

‘Twenty-two.’

Dow bared his teeth somewhere between smile and scowl. ‘And you, what, ten?’

‘Aye, with Shivers.’

‘And you saw ’em off?’

‘Well—’

‘Wish I’d fucking been there!’ Dow twitched with violence, eyes fixed on nothing like he could see Hardbread and his boys coming up that slope and they couldn’t come fast enough for him.
‘Wish
I’d been there!’ And he lashed out with the pommel of his sheathed sword and struck splinters from the nearest pillar, making Craw take a careful step back. ‘’Stead of sitting back here fucking
talking.
Talking, talking, fucking talking!’ Dow spat, and took a breath, then seemed to remember Craw was there, eyes sliding back towards him. ‘You saw the Union come up?’

‘At least a thousand on the road to Adwein and I got the feeling there were more behind.’

‘Jalenhorm’s division,’ said Dow.

‘How d’you know that?’

‘He has his ways.’

‘By the—’ Craw took a startled pace, got his feet caught in a bramble and nearly fell. There was a woman lying on one of the highest walls. Draped over it like a wet cloth, one arm and one leg dangling, head hanging over the side like she was resting on some garden bench ’stead of a tottering heap of masonry six strides above the dirt.

‘Friend o’ mine.’ Dow didn’t even look up. ‘Well – when I say friend—’

‘Enemy’s enemy.’ She rolled off the back of the wall. Craw stared, waiting for the sound of her hitting the ground. ‘I am Ishri.’ The voice whispered in his ear.

This time he went right on his arse in the dirt. She stood over him, skin black, and smooth, and perfect, like the glazing on a good pot. She wore a long coat, tails dragging on the dirt, hanging open, body all bound in white bandages underneath. If anyone ever looked like a witch, she was it. Not that there was much more evidence of witchery needed past vanishing from one place and stepping out of another.

Dow barked with laughter. ‘You never can tell where she’ll spring from. I’m always worried she’ll pop out o’ nowhere while I’m … you know.’ And he mimed a wanking action with one fist.

‘You wish,’ said Ishri, looking down at Craw with eyes blacker than black, unblinking, like a jackdaw staring at a maggot.

‘Where did you come from?’ muttered Craw as he scrambled up, hopping a little on account of his stiff knee.

‘South,’ she said, though that much was clear enough from her skin. ‘Or do you mean, why did I come?’

‘I’ll take why.’

‘To do the right thing.’ There was a faint smile on her face, at that. ‘To fight against evil. To strike mighty blows for righteousness. Or … do you mean who sent me?’

‘All right, who sent you?’

‘God.’ Her eyes rolled to the sky, framed by jutting weeds and saplings. ‘And how could it be otherwise? God puts us all where he wants us.’

Craw rubbed at his knee. ‘Got a shitty sense o’ humour, don’t he?’

‘You do not know the half of it. I came to fight against the Union, is that enough?’

‘It’s enough for me,’ said Dow.

Ishri’s black eyes flicked away to him, and Craw felt greatly relieved. ‘They are moving onto the hill in numbers.’

‘Jalenhorm’s lot?’

‘I believe so.’ She stretched up tall, wriggling all over the place like she had no bones in her. Reminded Craw of the eels they used to catch from the lake near his workshop, spilling from the net, squirming in the
children’s hands and making them squeal. ‘You fat pink men all look the same to me.’

‘What about Mitterick?’ asked Dow.

Her bony shoulders drifted up and down. ‘Some way behind, chomping at the bit, furious that Jalenhorm is in his way.’

‘Meed?’

‘Where is the fun in knowing everything?’ She pranced past Craw, up on her toes, almost brushing against him so he had to nervously step back and nearly trip again. ‘God must be so
bored.’
She wedged one foot into a crack in the wall too narrow for a cat to squeeze through, twisting her leg, somehow working it in up to the hip. ‘To it, then, my heroes!’ She writhed like a worm cut in half, wriggling into the ruined masonry, her coat dragging up the mossy stonework behind her. ‘Do you not have a battle to fight?’ Her skull somehow slid into the gap, then her arms, she clapped her bandaged hands once and just a finger was left sticking from the crack. Dow walked over to it, reached out, and snapped it off. It wasn’t a finger at all, just a dead bit of twig.

‘Magic,’ muttered Craw. ‘Can’t say I care for the stuff.’ In his experience it did more harm than good. ‘I daresay a sorcerer’s got their uses and all but, I mean, do they always have to act so bloody
strange?’

Dow flicked the twig away with a wrinkled lip. ‘It’s a war. I care for whatever gets the job done. Best not mention my black-skinned friend to anyone else though, eh? Folks might get the wrong idea.’

‘What’s the right idea?’

‘Whatever I fucking say it is!’ snarled Dow, and he didn’t look like he was faking the anger this time.

Craw held up his open hands. ‘You’re the Chief.’

‘Damn right!’ Dow frowned at that crack. ‘I’m the Chief.’ Almost like it was himself he was trying to convince. Just for a moment Craw wondered whether Black Dow ever felt like a fraud. Whether Black Dow’s courage needed stitching together every morning.

He didn’t like that thought much. ‘We’re fighting, then?’

Dow’s eyes swivelled sideways and his killing smile broke out fresh, no trace of doubt in it, or fear neither. ‘High fucking time, no? You hear what I was telling Reachey?’

‘Most of it. He’ll try and draw ’em off towards Osrung, then you’ll go straight at the Heroes.’

‘Straight at ’em!’ barked Dow, like he could make it work by shouting it. ‘The way Threetrees would’ve done it, eh?’

‘Would he?’

Dow opened his mouth, then paused. ‘What does it matter? Threetrees is seven winters in the mud.’

‘True. Where do you want me and my dozen?’

‘Right beside me when I charge up to the Heroes, o’ course. Expect
there’s nothing in the world you’d like more’n to take that hill back from those Union bastards.’

Craw gave a long sigh, wondering what his dozen would have to say about that. ‘Oh, aye. It’s top o’ my list.’

‘A
n officer should command from horseback, eh, Gorst? The proper place for a headquarters is the saddle!’ General Jalenhorm affectionately patted the neck of his magnificent grey, then leaned over without waiting for an answer to roar at a spotty-faced courier. ‘Tell the captain that he must simply clear the road by whatever means necessary! Clear the road and move them up! Haste, all haste, lad, Marshal Kroy wants the division moving north!’ He swivelled to bellow over the other shoulder. ‘Speed, gentlemen, speed! Towards Carleon, and victory!’

Jalenhorm certainly looked a conquering hero. Fantastically young to command a division and with a smile that said he was prepared for anything, dressed with an admirable lack of pretension in a dusty trooper’s uniform and as comfortable in the saddle as a favourite armchair. If he had been half as fine a tactician as he was a horseman, they would long ago have had Black Dow in chains and on public display in Adua.
But he is not, and we do not.

A constantly shifting body of staff officers, adjutants, liaisons and even a scarcely pubescent bugler trailed eagerly along in the general’s wake like wasps after a rotten apple, fighting to attract his fickle attention by snapping, jostling and shouting over one another with small dignity. Meanwhile Jalenhorm himself barked out a volley of confusing and contradictory replies, questions, orders and occasional musings on life.

‘On the right, on the right, of course!’ to one officer. ‘Tell him not to worry, worrying solves nothing!’ to another. ‘Move them up, Marshal Kroy wants them all up by lunch!’ A large body of infantry were obliged to shuffle exhausted from the road, watch the officers pass, then chew on their dust. ‘Beef, then,’ bellowed Jalenhorm with a regal wave, ‘or mutton, whichever, we have more important business! Will you come up the hill with me, Colonel Gorst? Apparently one gets quite the view from the Heroes. You are his Majesty’s observer, are you not?’

I am his Majesty’s fool. Almost as much his Majesty’s fool as you are.
‘Yes, General.’

Jalenhorm had already whisked his mount from the road and down the shingle towards the shallows, pebbles scattering. His hangers-on strained to
follow, splashing out into the water and heedlessly showering a company of heavily loaded foot who were struggling across, up to their waists in the river. The hill rose out of the fields on the far side, a great green cone so regular as to seem artificial. The circle of standing stones that the Northmen called the Heroes jutted from its flat top, a much smaller circle on a spur to the right, a single tall needle of rock on another to the left.

Orchards grew on the far bank, the twisted trees heavy with reddening apples, thin grass underneath patched with shade and covered in halfrotten windfalls. Jalenhorm leaned out to pluck one from a low-hanging branch and happily bit into it. ‘Yuck.’ He shuddered and spat it out. ‘Cookers, I suppose.’

‘General Jalenhorm, sir!’ A breathless messenger whipping his horse down one row of trees towards them.

‘Speak, man!’ Without slowing from a trot.

‘Major Kalf is at the Old Bridge, sir, with two companies of the Fourteenth. He wonders whether he should push forward to a nearby farm and establish a perimeter—’

‘Absolutely! Forward. We need to make room! Where are the rest of his companies?’ The messenger had already saluted and galloped off westwards. Jalenhorm frowned around at his staff. ‘Major Kalf’s other companies? Where’s the rest of the Fourteenth?’

Dappled sunlight slid over baffled faces. An officer opened his mouth but said nothing. Another shrugged. ‘Perhaps held up in Adwein, sir, there is considerable confusion on the narrow roads—’

He was interrupted by another messenger, bringing a well-lathered horse from the opposite direction. ‘Sir! Colonel Vinkler wishes to know whether he should turn the residents of Osrung out of their houses and garrison—’

‘No, no, turn them out? No!’

‘Sir!’ The young man pulled his horse about.

‘Wait! Yes, turn them out. Garrison the houses. Wait! No. No. Hearts and minds, eh, Colonel Gorst? Hearts and mind, don’t you think? What do you think?’

I think your close friendship with the king has caused you to be promoted far beyond the rank at which you were most effective. I think you would have made an excellent lieutenant, a passable captain, a mediocre major and a dismal colonel, but as a general you are a liability. I think you know this, and have no confidence, which makes you behave, paradoxically, as if you have far too much. I think you make decisions with little thought, abandon some with none and stick furiously to others against all argument, thinking that to change your mind would be to show weakness. I think you fuss with details better left to subordinates, fearing to tackle the larger issues, and that makes your subordinates smother you with decisions on every trifle, which you then bungle. I think you are a decent, honest, courageous man. And I think you are a fool.
‘Hearts and minds,’ said Gorst.