Gallow (12 page)

Two of the Vathen rushed him together. The other two bolted for the back door. Gallow met the charge with his own, buffeting one away with a great blow from his shield. He caught the swinging axe from the other with his own weapon, barged on with his shoulder and head-butted the next Vathan in the face, cracking the man’s nose. As he staggered back, Gallow turned and brought his axe down, shattering the first Vathan’s collar and splitting him to his breastbone. A torrent of blood exploded over both of them and the man went down. Gallow turned. The Vathan with the broken nose dived through the curtain to the night room. Gallow ignored him, went for the two who’d run outside and caught them at their horses. The first was vaulting into the saddle – Gallow threw his axe, catching the man in the ribs and caving in his side. The horse bolted and vanished into the night, the Vathan lolling lifelessly on its back. The last one jumped at Gallow with his knife. He pulled Gallow’s shield aside and stabbed. Gallow twisted sideways. The blade skittered off his mail, hard enough to spark; then he caught the man’s arm with his own and gave a vicious twist. There was a crack of breaking bone and the Vathan screamed. Gallow twisted more. The man fell, writhing; before he could get back up, Gallow had his sword out and drove it through the back of the Vathan’s neck.

He paused for an instant. Inside the house he saw movement – the Vathan with the broken nose bolting for the other door. He jumped up and gave chase but he needn’t have bothered – the last Vathan ran straight into the Screambreaker’s sword. The old man staggered. The Vathan stumbled on a few more paces and then toppled to his knees and fell to the dirt. Gallow made sure he was dead.

‘That’s a strong arm you have there, Screambreaker, to drive a sword through all that leather,’ he said as he came back.

Corvin looked at him. He was breathing hard. ‘You’ll not give me the pleasure of killing any of them, eh?’ He pointed. ‘You missed one.’

Someone was bolting for the horses. It was the man Gallow had taken to be a Marroc. From the way he landed in the saddle and sped away, he was a Vathan after all. A Vathan with no weapon, no armour, nothing but a shirt. The Screambreaker had been right. Five, not four. Gallow reached for a stone to throw, but the old man held his arm back.

‘Let him go,’ he said. ‘He saw my face and he knows who I am.’ He bared his teeth. ‘And that, Truesword, is a knife in every Vathan heart.’

T
hey ate what the Vathen had left and made themselves comfortable. In the morning when it was light Gallow found the first Vathan soldier who’d tried to flee lying on the ground with his horse standing beside him a hundred yards away from the farmhouse, Gallow’s axe still stuck through his ribs. Gallow pulled the axe free and set about cleaning and sharpening it.

‘We’ve missed the battle,’ grumbled Corvin. ‘You should have let me leave sooner.’

‘You were welcome to leave whenever you wanted,’ said Gallow. ‘Debate that with whoever thumped you on the head after Lostring Hill. How do you know we missed it, anyway?’

‘Listening to their talk before you made such a mule’s arse of killing them. But look. Quivers on their saddles but no javelots, so they used them already. And the horses – they’ve been ridden hard. The first one you killed, he’s got the sash of a ride leader. He should have sixteen men with him but he’s got four. Got a fresh wound too, a cut on his hand. There’s blood on one of the saddles that hasn’t been cleaned. If they were scouts then their quivers would be full and they’d have bows. If they were foragers then they should have a cart or some mules. This lot were on the wrong end of a fight not long before we came. Look at the way they ran from us. No spirit left in them.’

Gallow shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean they came from Andhun.’

‘Well they did, no-beard. Where else?’

They took the Vathan horses and rode on towards the coast. The farms and hamlets they passed were deserted. A few were burned-out but most were intact. The Marroc had fled, fearing the coming of the Vathen, but the Vathen had followed the sea road and now the land was deserted. Even the fields were empty, the animals taken or gone.

‘Twelvefingers must have sent them across the Isset.’ Corvin nodded approvingly. ‘Take away everything the Vathen can eat and Andhun is the only crossing.’

‘Not so, old man. If you know the paths, a man – a whole army of men – could cross the Isset through the Crackmarsh. Still, I doubt the Vathen know that.’

The Screambreaker stopped and looked at him long and hard. ‘They may not know it now, but sooner or later they’ll find a Marroc to tell them.’

Gallow shrugged. ‘Good luck to them if they try it. About time someone cleared out the ghuldogs.’

With each day the Screambreaker grew stronger. As they started at last into the line of hills before Andhun, a band of riders came over a crest heading the other way. Lhosir, eight of them. When they saw Gallow and Corvin they stopped and one rode forward apart from the rest.

‘I’m Tolvis of the Black Mountain,’ he called. ‘Sworn blade to King Yurlak. Name yourselves.’

‘I know him,’ muttered Corvin.

‘The man I ride with is Corvin Screambreaker,’ cried Gallow. ‘Known among the Marroc as the Widowmaker and the Nightmare of the North. He too is a sworn blade to King Yurlak. I am Gallow of Middislet, sworn to no one.’

‘You’re sworn to the king, bare-beard, whether you like it or not,’ snapped Corvin.

‘Corvin Screambreaker?’ Tolvis of the Black Mountain took off his helm and cocked his head. ‘Now there’s a thing. See, we’d heard the Nightmare of the North was dead. The Marroc have been quietly drinking to that for a week now. When they think we won’t see and with one eye cast over their shoulder in case they’re wrong of course.’ He grinned.

‘Someone at Lostring Hill was kind enough to land the Screambreaker a good blow to the head and render him senseless just long enough for me to drag him away. Come see him for yourself if you don’t believe me.’

‘I’ll do that.’ Tolvis of the Black Mountain rode closer. He was cautious, more so than Gallow would have expected, but as he came close enough to be sure of Corvin’s face, a smile spread across his own. ‘Maker-Devourer! It’s true!’

The Screambreaker grunted. ‘Tolvis of the Black Mountain is it now? You fought with me years ago but you weren’t called that back then. It’s a Tolvis Loudmouth that
I
seem to remember.’

The smile broadened. ‘Pardon my caution, Screambreaker. You’re on Vathan horses.’

‘Their previous riders forgot their need of them. I’d hoped to aid you in the fight here but I hear the Vathen have already come.’

‘They have, but not in all their numbers.’ Tolvis turned his horse. ‘Very obliging of them it was, and so we obliged them right back. I’ll ride you to Andhun. We’ll pass the field on the way. You’ll know it when you see it – it’ll be the one that’s mostly the colour of Vathan blood. They were five or six thousand and a lot of them on horse, and we smashed them.’

The Screambreaker curled his nose. ‘Five or six thousand? That all? There were five times that number at Fedderhun. Did they have the Sword of the Weeping God with them? The red sword Solace?’

Gallow looked at Corvin, curious. Fenaric had said something about the same thing, words he’d heard at Fedderhun, but Gallow had never repeated them to the Screambreaker. Something he overheard from the Vathen at the farm, then?

Tolvis shrugged. ‘The Comforter? They didn’t have it here, no.’

‘You haven’t seen the main Vathan force yet.’

‘Oh, we know
that
.’ Tolvis laughed. ‘But let them come in bits and pieces – we’ll chew each one up and spit it back at the next.’

An hour later they began to see bodies. Dead Vathen, most of them speared from behind.

Corvin frowned as he passed them. ‘They look like they were killed by their own horsemen.’

A black cloud of rooks or crows circled ahead of them past a stand of trees. Tolvis put on a face as though he’d eaten a mouthful of something rotten. ‘Prince Medrin had those of us with horses mount up and ride them down, same as the Vathen used to do for us against the Marroc.’ He laughed. ‘I’ll tell you, the Vathen are a lot better at it than we are. Spent more time collecting spears that had missed than we did riding.’

‘
Medrin
had you do that?’

Tolvis wrinkled his nose. ‘Can’t say as any of us much liked it. Or were much good at it. But he
is
Yurlak’s heir.’

Through the trees on the open ground Gallow could see the walls of Andhun and the valley of the Isset, which flowed through the middle of it to the sea beyond. He could smell the city in the air, the stink of human waste and fish. The battlefield was in front of them now. The bodies of the fallen had been cleared away but there were looters on the field still, nervous Marroc folk scouring the trampled grass for swords, shields, helms, anything that might have been dropped in the fight and somehow missed in the three days since. There couldn’t be much left by now.

The Screambreaker rode a little further, then turned away from the walls of Andhun. He looked hard at the ground. ‘The Vathen came from over there.’ He pointed away from the city. ‘They had horses.’ He climbed down and picked up an arrow half buried in the mud. ‘You had archers?’

Tolvis grunted. ‘Marroc,’ he said, disapproving. ‘But then they came at us on horseback so they deserved that. We fought them properly after their riders fled.’ He grinned. ‘And we destroyed them. There were a thousand Vathan corpses here when we were done and a few hundred more scattered where they ran. Vris, Ironfoot and Igel lost a few dozen each and Jank took a thumping on the flank. Didn’t get his spears and his shields sorted properly when the Vathen started throwing their javelots.’

‘Vris is here?’ For a moment the Screambreaker looked up and grinned. ‘And Ironfoot? Jank was always a bit dim when it came to horses. Whoever put him in charge of anything,
he’s
the one who needs to be thumped.’

Tolvis laughed. ‘You can thump Twelvefingers then.’

‘Oh, so he’s here at last, is he? Then I will.’

They walked their horses slowly across the battlefield. There wasn’t much left: the broken shaft of a javelot here, a few arrows in the ground, bloodstains in the mud and the grass. Three crows picked at the remains of a hand and half an arm already stripped to the bone. On the far side Gallow saw half a dozen corpses hanging from the trees. Closer and he could see what had been done to them. They hung, arms and legs dangling loose, each man drooping over a wheel with two stakes driven right through him and emerging from his back. A bolt fastened the stakes together. They were suspended like this from ropes. Below the stakes, ribs had been cleaved from spines, the lungs drawn out and with twine sewn into them and tied to the branches of the trees so the ragged sails of dead flesh seemed to rise like wings. Corvin wrinkled his nose. The men had been hanging there for days; birds had already pecked at them and strips of dried red skin and muscle dangled from gleaming bone.

Blood ravens. Gallow couldn’t say whether they were Vathen or Marroc, or Lhosir who’d first had their beards cut.

‘Deserters?’ Corvin frowned.

Tolvis shook his head. ‘Vathen. The wounded horsemen. The ones who couldn’t get away. Pretty, eh?’

‘What did they do to deserve this?’

Tolvis shrugged carelessly. ‘Lost.’

‘Medrin ordered this, did he?’ asked Gallow.

‘Couldn’t say. I was off discovering how hard it is to throw a spear into the back of a man who keeps dodging out of the way.’

They passed the hanging men and soon came to another cluster of corpses, this time bound upright to the trunks of trees. The bark around each one was scarred with the marks of spears and Gallow understood at once: the Lhosir had taken Vathan captives and used them for spear-throwing games. He’d seen it done with the Marroc once before, years ago, before the Screambreaker put a stop to it.

In the fields closer to Andhun small companies of Marroc were digging pits and erecting wooden poles. Dozens already stood surrounding the city. Each had a dead Vathan hanging from it. More blood ravens, like the ones around the battlefield.

‘Something for the rest of the Vathen to think about when they get here, I suppose,’ said Tolvis.

The Screambreaker frowned. ‘This is for
nioingr
.’

‘Apparently they’re all
nioingr
for staying on their horses and throwing javelots at us instead of doing things properly and getting nice and close where we can chop them up with our axes and stab out their eyes with our spears.’ Tolvis shrugged.

‘No.’ The Screambreaker’s lips tightened. ‘No. This isn’t right.’

‘Well you won’t be the only one who doesn’t think much of it, but Medrin wants it done and there’s a lot of the younger ones who see it his way. Might be for the best. Maybe the Vathen are sheep like the Marroc, easily scared.’ He laughed. ‘Pity if they are though. Be a shame to come all this way only for them to go running back home again.’

They crossed another field, turned onto a road churned to mud and passed two open burial pits. The bodies, Gallow saw, were neither Vathan nor Lhosir. They were mostly Marroc.

‘And this?’ Corvin asked.

‘Some trouble with the Marroc when we first came off the ships. Apparently a few of them weren’t too pleased at having the son of their king come to visit. They learned to be happy about it soon enough.’

Close to the city walls black patches of earth and charred stumps of wood scarred the roadside. There had been huts outside Andhun’s gates once but now they’d been burned. Gallow supposed it made sense. If it came to an assault on the walls then the slums here would give cover to the Vathen. Today, though, the gates stood open, inviting them in. Six bored and sour-looking Lhosir lounged around them, picking their noses and sharpening their axes. Over them a row of spikes stuck out from the stonework. The spikes looked new, the mortar around them fresh and lighter than the rest. Each spike had a head on it. The heads wore Vathan helms.