Gallow (25 page)

Valaric’s lips tightened. A slight nod. ‘
Nioingr.
Yes, I heard. What of it?’

‘Until even Medrin couldn’t ignore him and came and stuck a knife in his eye to shut him up. You all saw
that
.’ He looked up at the houses and streets of Andhun. ‘And if you’d had even one man like him in this city then Medrin would be dead and you’d be standing in front of me holding your precious shield. You know you’ve just brought doom on the whole of Andhun, don’t you?’

Valaric glowered. ‘Shut your hole, forkbeard.’ He snarled, looked away and took a deep breath as though struggling with something. ‘Go on, burn him then,’ he said at last. ‘You do it. You can make his pyre and you can light it and watch him burn and not one Marroc will lift a finger to help you. Then you can go. Get out of my city and get out of my sight. Go and fight the Vathen. I never want to see you again. If I do, you’re just another forkbeard to me and that’s all. Now give me your sword.’

Gallow blinked. He reversed the sword and held it out. ‘It’s not mine, Valaric. It’s just a blade I found and it belongs to Jyrdas now. But I think he’d be happy for me to give it to you. Please take this sword, the sword that Jyrdas held in his hand as he died, as his thanks for honouring him as a valiant foe.’

Valaric took the hilt and lifted the sword. He shook his head. ‘You Lhosir are demented.’ He left and the Marroc moved around Gallow, collecting the weapons and armour and the food and plunder that Medrin’s men had unloaded from their ships and then abandoned on the beach. Gallow took an axe to the ship that had been left behind, Jyrdas’s ship. It seemed only fitting that it should make his pyre. He took its oars and chopped out its rowing benches and collected pieces broken by the storm, but he left its hull and mast alone. It was still a good ship. He worked into the night and then slept on the beach in the shelter of its hull, and in the morning, when the rising sun woke him, he took the time to carve a name onto the ship’s prow:
The One-Eyed Hunter of the Sea.
He carved it deep and large. If ever it sailed again then it would take Jyrdas’s memory with it.

Afterwards, as he began to build his pyre, a Marroc came down onto the beach. Sarvic. He didn’t say anything, just started to help pile the wood. They worked until the middle of the day and the pyre was done.

‘For what you did on Lostring Hill and the debt I owe you,’ said Sarvic when it was finished. ‘Not for him.
He
was a bastard.’

There were still helms and hauberks and shields. Gallow took one of each for Jyrdas and carried them to the pyre. The rest he piled beside the ship for Valaric to take away. The Marroc of Andhun would need them, one way or the other. After that he carried and dragged Jyrdas across the beach and lifted him up onto the pile of wood, then looked at the sky. Clear and bright with no sign of rain, and so he sat waiting for twilight. Jyrdas would burn as the sun went down, dressed in mail, carrying a shield. Pity about his sword, but he could take an axe with him, the one Gallow had used to chop the wood.

The sun crept lower, the day wore on and a small crowd of Marroc began to gather. They didn’t do much except stand and stare but Gallow felt their hostility. Once or twice he saw Valaric moving among them, pushing and shoving and snapping at them. As the sun reddened and sank and its light began to fail, Gallow took the last mail hauberk he’d left hidden on the ship. He polished up his helm and his shield, and walked up the beach. The Marroc shouted and jeered at him, but they parted as he came.

A rock pinged off his helm. Not a big one, but he stopped and turned and stared at them anyway. Sheep, Jyrdas called them, but that was hardly fair. They were fishermen and weavers and bakers and housewives. People content to spend their time building a life for themselves, laughing and singing and making more happy Marroc. He stared at them and saw the same thing he saw in Middislet, in the eyes of the villagers. Muted after all these years but it was still there. They were afraid. Afraid of him because of what he was. Because men like Jyrdas would have tried to take an entire city from them with just a few dozen warriors and wouldn’t have given a fig of a thought for how it might end.

He snatched a torch from one and walked back down the beach to the pyre and stood before it, the brand held over his head. They could shoot him if they wanted too. They’d shot Jyrdas, after all, but it didn’t bother him. If that’s what they did, then that was his fate. A sadness settled over him. To the Marroc he was always a forkbeard, to the Lhosir always a sheep. To Arda, he’d just been Gallow, and that had been enough and right, but she’d betrayed him and now it was gone.
Choose one or the other
, said the voices in his head, but in the final reckoning he’d always chosen her and never mind the rest. Without her he didn’t know who to be any more.

Most songs for the fallen that he knew were rowdy bawdy things because that was how the Lhosir dealt with death. The Maker-Devourer cast them out of his cauldron to live a life however they saw fit to live it, and when they died the Maker-Devourer took them back again and he only ever asked one question: Did you live it well? And he’d look into the eyes of the newly dead and see into their souls and know the truth of their answer, and if they answered yes and they believed it in their hearts, he’d take them back no matter what they’d done; and if they answered no then they were cast straight back to live a new life again, one that would be harder and more testing than the last, over and over until they found their courage. The ones who answered yes but knew in their hearts that it was a lie, best not to dwell on those.
Nioingr.
The true meaning of the word. Liars of the worst sort. Self-deceivers. They were ones who were devoured, their bones and shredded ghosts left to roam the Herenian Marches. Thus was the Maker-Devourer’s brew made ever richer and stronger.

He held the torch high and began to speak out the deeds of Jyrdas One-Eye, both the good and the bad as far as he knew them. He spoke them loud and clear, straight to the pyre, with the thought that they would find Jyrdas as he waited for the Maker-Devourer’s question, and remind him of anything he might forget. Everything that had made him. Everything that would be remembered.

‘Jyrdas will make your cauldron.’ He threw back his head to the dying sun and began to sing, the ‘Last Lament of Pennas Tar’, until something jabbed him in the side.

‘For the love of Modris, stop howling!’

He turned, ready to tear apart whoever had interrupted this moment, and there was Valaric, holding a sword. The one he’d just poked into Gallow’s mail. Gallow turned back to the pyre. ‘Go away, Marroc.’

‘The Vathen will be here tomorrow or the day after. The Widowmaker took his men out of the city. Every single one. To save Andhun from the Vathen. They can hardly launch an assault or dig in for a siege with the Nightmare of the North and four thousand Lhosir at their backs. The duke has his castle again and he’ll open the gates for whoever wins. If it was me, I’d keep them closed. I’d fight either of you. Both of you if I had to.’

‘Spoken like a forkbeard, Valaric. Now go away.’

‘The Widowmaker took my land from my people. Thousands of us died on the ends of his spears. Yet he came to Fedderhun and he fought at Lostring Hill. He’s my enemy and I’ll kill him if I can, but if he falls, I’ll let you honour his corpse too.’ He thumped Gallow with the sword again and then held it out, hilt first. ‘You want to give him this or not?’ Then he took the sword back. ‘No,
I’ll
do it. He really did call Twelvefingers a
nioingr
to his face, didn’t he?’

‘He did.’

‘And you?’

Gallow shrugged. ‘The Screambreaker said that Medrin had changed. He was wrong.’

Valaric walked to the pyre. He put the sword across Jyrdas’s chest beside the axe. When he stepped back, Gallow touched the torch to the kindling. As the flames leaped up, he stood away.

‘I’m not staying here on some all-night vigil to honour him, though.’ Valaric turned to leave. ‘That’s what you do, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’ Gallow stared at the flames.

‘Then I’ll come for you in the morning. I meant what I said. You can go and you can fight the Vathen or sail across the sea or find your Marroc wife and grow beans and cabbages for the rest of your life. I don’t care. Just get out of my city and get out of my sight. If I see you again and it’s not to get my horse shod or a new blade for my scythe, I’ll kill you.’

Valaric left him. The sun slowly set and Gallow watched Jyrdas One-Eye burn.

T
he Screambreaker looked out over the fires that sprang up in the fields outside Andhun’s walls. His father had called him Corvin after a rock at the end of one of his fields. Corvin’s Rock. He’d thought it was a strong name, hard and weathering like the stone. Turned out it had been called Corvin’s Rock after an old crow that had taken to making the rock its place to watch the world back a generation, but his father hadn’t known that. Corvin the crow. Mostly Corvin preferred the idea of being a rock, but there were days when he knew, in secret, that he was really the crow. Crows were drawn to battlefields, after all.

They called him Screambreaker after he shattered King Tane’s army. They said his battle cry as the two sides had met had broken the Marroc. It wasn’t true but it was a good story and so they called him that anyway. The other names, the ones the Marroc had given him, he supposed he’d earned them. He might, on another day, have claimed that they’d fallen on him unsought, that he’d never gone looking for them, but on nights like tonight he knew better. Battles made for widows. Wars made for nightmares. Death had danced with him with such an easy grace and for so long now that they might as well be wed. Together, the two of them in a longhouse somewhere growing old, Death and the Widowmaker. But they weren’t. They were looking for each other still, finding each other now and then, and yet somehow one of them had always had another lover at the time, and so they were never joined.
Next year, when this one is gone. We both know we were meant to be.
Twenty years of it. He looked out over the fires. Would they find each other tomorrow?

The Vathen wouldn’t reach Andhun until the afternoon. They wouldn’t want a fight after a day of marching, and so he’d see that they got one. Tomorrow. One way or the other, his last great battle.

‘General, the prince wants to see you.’

The Screambreaker didn’t move.
General?
When had he become that? A long time ago, and another thing he’d never sought. A firebrand even in his own land, just like his brother, and so Yurlak had sent him across the sea.
Go and do something useful. If you have to stir up trouble, stir it with the Marroc not with me.
Yurlak had been afraid of him . . . no,
afraid
wasn’t the right word, because he and Yurlak were two of a kind and neither had ever been afraid of anything. But Yurlak had known well enough that Corvin, left to his own ends, was bound to break something. Better if what he broke was somewhere far away.

‘I came here to be less trouble for my kin.’ He was talking to the stars.

‘General?’

Bring me back something pretty
, and what he’d brought back was a crunching great war and a kingdom three times the size of the one Yurlak already had, and he’d given it away without a thought. There had been moments when he’d wondered about that. Set himself up as king of the Marroc? But a throne and a crown, what did he want with either of those? What use were they to a man?

He’d never married. Never raised a son. Rarely even taken a lover for long because he’d always known that death would be his bride. A tragic romance drawn out over the years, but they were bound together by fate, and every Lhosir knew better than to flout his destiny.

‘General, the prince requires your ear.’

Corvin got to his feet. His knees ached from sitting still for too long. His bones creaked and groaned. He was getting old. He could have lived out his days back across the sea and taken his pick of what he wanted. Could have had Yurlak’s own throne if he’d fancied it, pickling himself in mead and women until he was too fat to put on his armour, until horses screamed and bolted rather than carry him. The thought had filled him with daily horror as he’d seen the torpor of a quiet life slowly overtake him. Only a fool prayed to the Maker-Devourer, so he’d prayed to his mistress, to death. And death had answered and had sent the Vathen for him.

‘What does he want, our great prince?’ The words dripped out of him. Twelvefingers had been so like the young Corvin that Yurlak had sent away. But the fates were fickle and Medrin had almost died in his first battle at Corvin’s side, and the wound had taken years to truly heal, and by the time he was strong again, the war was all but done. Now look at him.

‘That’s for him to say, General.’

It hardly mattered. Tomorrow he’d either smash the Vathen or the Vathen would break him at last, and it would be what it would be. He followed the young soldier who’d been sent for him, a man too young to even have a full beard yet. Medrin’s men they called themselves, the young ones who’d grown up seeing their fathers and their uncles sailing across the sea to fight. Who were used to tales of war and battles, used to hearing of nothing but victory, even if maybe their fathers and half their uncles never came back again. They were hungry for it, feeling they’d missed something, yet they had no idea of what war truly was. Tomorrow they’d know better.

Medrin had taken his tent. The Screambreaker supposed he was entitled. Yurlak’s son, after all, but didn’t he have his own?

‘Screambreaker.’ Medrin sat on a stool. He had a thin knife in his hand and he was using it to pick at the dirt under his fingernails.

‘Medrin.’ Corvin didn’t bow. Medrin might expect it but that was a Marroc thing. Lhosir faced one another as equals. Always.

‘You left Andhun to the Marroc.’