Gallow (30 page)

Not that he had much time to think about it as they pushed Medrin’s ship back into the sea before the Marroc found some more courage from somewhere, but it niggled at him anyway, itching like an old scab. He watched Medrin stab Jyrdas in the eye and come and climb into his ship and push away from the shores of Andhun. As he pulled at his oar he watched Gallow too, standing on the beach over Jyrdas and a pile of Marroc bodies. He watched the crowd waving angry fists and knives, and then he looked around him at the men in the ship and realised they were all Medrin’s men, every one of them, and that was the moment he understood what troubled him. The young ones Medrin had brought with him from across the sea, they knew the Screambreaker by his name but they’d never fought with him, never fought a real battle at all. Medrin had sailed for the monastery of Luonatta with sixty men. Maybe they’d only had a handful of old soldiers to start with, but now not one of that handful was left except him. Not that Medrin had done away with them, except for Jyrdas in the end, and that had just been old One-Eye looking for a clean way to die, but still, it was the sort of thing that set a man to thinking. And after that, now and then as they sailed along the coast, he caught Medrin looking at him. Looks that made him uneasy.

Damn the man! If he’d
seen
the prince do anything wrong then he could have called him out on it, but Medrin hadn’t, not really.
Really
all he’d done was honour the old ones. He’d let the Screambreaker’s men stand at the front of his lines where they were proud to fight. He’d let them have the glorious deaths they wanted.

But not me.
Not that he was shy of a fight if a fight had to be had, but mostly what he liked was the swapping of stories afterwards over a good bottle of mead or a cask of Marroc beer.

No, he didn’t like the way Medrin was looking at him at all. Couldn’t have said why but it set the hairs on his back all on edge; so when they beached the boat a few miles out of Andhun, where the cliffs parted to make a little cove, Tolvis made sure he was first over the side and into the waves. He made sure he had his shield and his sword and his axe and he didn’t look back, just set off along the beach away from Andhun. He didn’t turn to see if anyone followed. There were a few shouts, but over the breaking waves he couldn’t hear what they said, and it might just have been the others shouting at each other about making the ship safe on the beach.

He reached a headland where he had to climb over broken rocks that had fallen from the cliffs to get past. When he’d done that and the ship was out of sight, he collected a few good-sized stones from the litter on the beach, throwing stones that fitted nicely in the palm of his hand, and then he sat down to wait and to see what would happen.

He didn’t have to wait long before two more Lhosir came picking their way carefully through the rocks. Treacherous out on those rocks. The broken remains of waves still reached far enough to lap at a man’s feet here and there, and the lower parts were slimy with seaweed. He let them come closer, close enough that he could see who they were. Latti with his jaw all wrapped up tight and Dvag with his broken fingers. Two of Medrin’s closest, shields over their shoulders, helms and hauberks and all dressed up for a fight. Tolvis sighed and wearily got to his feet, a stone in his hand. He waited on the edge of the shambles of rocks until they were a few dozen paces away.

‘So this is what it comes to, is it? Twelvefingers couldn’t think of a way to do it properly, so he sends you two?’

The two Lhosir on the rocks stopped. Dvag opened his arms. ‘Loudmouth! Friend! We wanted to know where you were going, that’s all. In case you were lost. That’s the way to the Vathen.’

‘You might at least try and pretend there’s a good reason. I don’t know, maybe say I’m in league with them or something equally stupid.’

Dvag tried to smile. ‘Reason for what, Loudmouth?’

Tolvis threw his stone. It probably surprised them both when it flew straight and true and smacked Dvag in the face. He staggered on the top of his rock, lost his footing and fell out of sight between the boulders. After a moment, when he didn’t get back up again, Latti cocked his head. ‘Reckon that’s a reason enough right there.’

The words were mashed by his broken mouth, but the meaning was clear enough. Tolvis backed away into the shingle of the beach. ‘Reckon it is.’

‘You going to throw rocks at me too?’ Latti screwed up his face in pain.

‘Only if you pretend you didn’t come because Twelvefingers sent you to kill me. And if it hurts to talk, do feel free to spare us both.’

Latti shook his head. ‘Not Medrin. Came ourselves.’

‘Then you should have brought some men with you who can actually fight.’ Tolvis backed away some more and yawned, waiting for Latti to make his way through the boulders. ‘Take your time. Don’t want you to slip and hurt yourself and spoil the fun of killing you.’

‘
Nioingr!
’

Tolvis shrugged. ‘I hear that word so much that I’m beginning to think it doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. Seems to me it just means someone who doesn’t do what Twelvefingers says.’

‘Medrin . . . our prince.’ Latti jumped onto the shingle. He took the shield off his back and drew his sword, swinging it from side to side, warming up his arms.

Tolvis began to pace back and forth. ‘For a man with a broken jaw you talk far too much. That bandage round your face isn’t tight enough. Now learn something before you die, boy: a
nioingr
is someone who is a traitor to himself, not to anyone else. I see I’ll have to teach you that.’ He ran at Latti and clattered into him, shield against shield, knocking him back, then brought his axe down at his head. Latti lurched sideways. Tolvis came at him again, before Latti could find his balance, battering him a second time. This time his axe slipped around Latti’s shield and Latti didn’t have a hand any more. He shrieked and stumbled back, falling on the stones. Tolvis jumped on him, crushing a foot hard into his throat.

‘Anything to say? No? At least you died well. No begging and pleading for mercy. Good for you.’ Tolvis leaned down, pushing all his weight into Latti’s throat, crushing until the light went out of his eyes. Then he went back to look at Dvag. Not much hope that a simple rock on the head had killed him, and when he found the bastard he was stuck between two boulders, eyes rolled back, muttering nonsense to himself. One of his ankles was twisted all wrong. He could add that to his mangled fingers. ‘I’d wake up before the tide comes in if I were you,’ Tolvis said, and left him there.

He walked a little way further along the beach until he found a way up the cliff and headed inland, looking for the Lhosir camp. Tricky, figuring out a way to get close that wouldn’t lead him into more of Medrin’s men or a band of Vathan scouts, and so he crept to the tops of ridges to survey the land ahead before retreating to make his way on beside hedges, along streams and ditches and, where he could, through woods. Twelvefingers would get to the Screambreaker first but that was by the way. Didn’t matter much either way as long as the Screambreaker got to hear what needed to be said.

The campfires in the evening darkness were what finally led him to the Lhosir camp – not that he knew which army it was until he got close and heard the swearing and the songs. Even then he walked among the soldiers with his head down, hiding his face as best he could, keeping his shield by his side.
Medrin didn’t send anyone. We sent ourselves.
Maybe that was even true. Twelvefingers had the knack of letting people know what he wanted done without ever saying, and once it was all too late he could put on that well practised look of horror he had and throw up his hands in despair and shake his head.

He reached the Screambreaker’s tent only to find Twelvefingers already in it and it was only sheer luck that no one happened to look up and see his face before he turned away and moved on. When he eventually found the Screambreaker’s standard, the old man was sitting on a stool, dressed in his mail, staring out across the fields.

‘Screambreaker!’

The old man didn’t move. Just sat and stared. ‘Maker-Devourer watch over you, Loudmouth. Medrin said you’d wandered off.’

‘That’s about right. Say anything else much?’

‘Lots of things, but none that particularly matter save that he has the Crimson Shield. There’s at least some Marroc that will fight with us now.’

‘The Marroc aren’t our enemy, Screambreaker.’

The Screambreaker turned and looked up at him. ‘It’s a wonder you need to say such a thing.’ He stared at Tolvis long and hard, and it seemed the old man was looking right through him at something far away. The Screambreaker looked . . . lost. Then the moment broke and the Screambreaker cocked his head. ‘Whatever you have on your mind, Loudmouth, you’d best shed it. It’s a stone around your shoulders as clear as the sun. Draw up a stool.’

So he did, and he told the Screambreaker about everything that had happened since Medrin had left Andhun, about Gallow and Jyrdas and Latti and Dvag, and how it was that Twelvefingers wasn’t to be trusted any more. The Screambreaker listened patiently, and when Tolvis was done, he offered him a horn of mead. ‘We’ll fight the Vathen tomorrow, Loudmouth,’ he said. ‘For now that’s all that matters.’

And that was all he would say while they drank together, and Tolvis talked and talked and finally walked away filled with anger and frustration, but in the middle of the next day, as the Lhosir army formed its lines, the Screambreaker called him one last time and told him how Gallow Truesword had come out of Andhun and how things were between the two of them, and how, if he wasn’t alive by the end of the day, it would fall to Tolvis and to the dozen Lhosir beside him who’d fought in the last war from the beginning. He told Tolvis one other thing and then he laughed and told Tolvis what he had to do before any of that could happen. ‘The woods on our seaward flank. Take ropes and shovels and fill it with traps for their horsemen. Let none of the Vathen pass.’

Tolvis looked at the men he’d been given. ‘A dozen of us and you want us to hold off a thousand Vathan horsemen?’

‘But you’re more than a dozen. You have the trees, Loudmouth, and there are more trees than there are Vathen. And you’re Lhosir so it shouldn’t be too hard for you.’

He never stopped smiling and somehow he was right, and by the end of the day as the sun sank and the Vathen fled, Tolvis was still alive and he hadn’t had to kill quite as many as a thousand Vathan horsemen after all.

G
ulsukh Ardshan watched the disaster unfold from the top of a hill of his own. Two defeats in a row now, and the best that could said of this one was that it wasn’t
his
defeat. He’d taken four thousand men to fight two thousand Lhosir and lost nearly half of them. Now the Weeping Giant had taken twenty thousand, but he’d also taken his time, and the Lhosir had kept on coming from across the sea while he’d sat in Fedderhun, waiting for the sword to tell him it was the right day to march.

‘It was the right day to march when I said it was,’ Gulsukh muttered to himself.

‘There are more of them now?’ Moonjal Bashar hadn’t seen the first battle. A part of Gulsukh was disappointed – it would have been a good lesson for a young bashar to see an ardshan beaten. A larger part was relieved that a son hadn’t seen his own father humiliated. ‘Twice as many. Perhaps more. If we’d all marched on Andhun a month ago, we’d have destroyed the Lhosir and taken it. We’d be in Sithhun by now.’

Still, twenty thousand men should have been enough. The bashars of the Weeping Giant had conducted themselves well, sending each of the clans into battle one after the other and withdrawing each one before they turned to rout. Wearing the supposedly invincible forkbeards down, because no one, in the end, was truly unbeatable. The horsemasters were wary this time too, racing their men in to hurl their javelots and racing out again before the Marroc archers could wreak the havoc they had before. The forkbeards had chosen their field well, pitched between a steep gully lined with stakes and a light wood. From his hill Gulsukh hadn’t been able to see what had happened to the horsemasters and their efforts to flank the Lhosir line and take it from behind, but they’d clearly failed.

The Weeping Giant had fallen, but even then the day hadn’t been lost. The enraged Vathen fell on the forkbeards, heedless of their bashars. They pushed and pushed them back, slowly breaking them down until finally,
finally
, they broke the Lhosir line. Gulsukh had to admire whoever had held the top of that hill for the forkbeards. However many men he had there, he’d waited and he’d waited. A lesser mind might have thrown them into the fight sooner, but no, this one waited until the very last possible moment, for when the battle hung in the balance and the Vathen had taken beating after beating and yet found themselves on the point of victory, and
then
he threw them in, snatching it away again. Five hundred men, give or take, while the Vathen were still thousands upon thousands, but in that one moment he broke their spirit. The Vathan soldiers crumbled, their bashars failed, they broke and they ran, and the Lhosir cut them down. The best that could be said for what happened next was that the forkbeards themselves were too bloodied and spent to turn the rout into a proper slaughter.

He raised an eyebrow to Moonjal Bashar. ‘My advice would be to have the horsemasters supply cover to our retreat.’ Not that anyone listened to him any more. An ardshan in disgrace. Disobedient to the Weeping Giant, and then he’d gone and lost as well.

‘I’ll send a messenger.’

‘Will you? I’m not sure who you’re going to send it to.’ He watched Moonjal send a runner anyway.

‘You don’t seem disturbed, Ardshan. Is there some finer point I’m missing?’

‘Not really. The setting sun means the forkbeards won’t be able to make the most of what they’ve done to us. Other than that, no.’ There was a little consolation to be taken there, but the smile on his face that he couldn’t quite hide was because the Weeping Giant was dead. The Sword Brothers would be in disarray and a good few of those dead too. They needed an ardshan again. There was still a horde here, if he could keep it together.