Last Argument of Kings (3 page)

He blinked round at the jumble of slate roofs, the walls of old grey stone, black wood, dirty grey render, all greasy with the thin rain. Seemed a strange way to live, sleeping in a box, waking all your days in the exact same spot. The idea alone made him restless, as though that bell hadn’t got him twitchy enough already. He cleared his throat and set it down on the cobbles beside him. Then he stood there waiting, one hand on the hilt of his sword in a way that he hoped meant business.

Some flapping footfalls came from down a street and a little girl ran out into the square. Her jaw dropped open when she saw them standing there, a dozen men all bearded and armed, Tul Duru in their midst. Probably she never saw a man half so big. She turned around sharp to run the other way, almost slipping over on the slick cobbles. Then she saw Dow sitting on a pile of wood just behind her, leaning back easy against the wall, his drawn sword on his knees, and she froze stone still.

“That’s alright, girl,” growled Dow. “You can stay where y’are.”

There were more of ’em coming now, hurrying down into the square from all around, all getting that same shocked look when they saw Dogman and his lads stood waiting. Women and boys, mostly, and a couple of old men. Dragged out o’ their beds by the bell and still half asleep, eyes red and faces puffy, clothes tangled, armed with whatever was to hand. A boy with a butcher’s cleaver. An old man all stooped over with a sword looked even older than he was. A girl at the front with a pitch fork and a lot of messy dark hair, had a look on her face reminded Dogman of Shari. Hard and thoughtful, the way she used to look at him before they started lying together. Dogman frowned down at her dirty bare feet, hoping that he wouldn’t have to kill her.

Getting ’em good and scared would be the best way to get things done quick and easy. So Dogman tried to talk like someone to be feared, rather than someone who was shitting himself. Like Logen might’ve talked. Or maybe that was more fear than was needful. Like Threetrees, then. Tough but fair, wanting what was best for everyone.

“The headman among you?” he growled.

“I’m him,” croaked the old man with the sword, his face all slack with shock at finding a score of well-armed strangers standing in the middle of his town square. “Brass is my name. Who the hell might you be?”

“I’m the Dogman, and this here is Harding Grim, and the big lad is Tul Duru Thunderhead.” Some eyes went wide, some folk muttered to each other. Seemed they’d heard the names before. “We’re here with five hundred Carls and last night we took your city off you.” A few gasps and squeals at that. It was closer to two hundred, but there was no point telling ’em so. They might’ve got the notion that fighting was a good idea and he’d no wish to end up stabbing a woman, or getting stabbed by one either. “There’s plenty more of us, round about, and your guards are all trussed up, those we didn’t have to kill. Some o’ my boys, and you ought to know I’m talking of Black Dow—”

“That’s me.” Dow flashed his nasty grin, and a few folk shuffled fearfully away from him like they’d been told hell itself was sat there.

“…Well, they were for putting the torch straight to your houses and getting some killing done. Do things like we used to with the Bloody-Nine in charge, you take my meaning?” Some child in amongst the rest started to cry a bit, a wet kind of snuffling. The boy stared round him, cleaver wobbling in his hand, the dark-haired girl blinked and clung on tighter to her pitch-fork. They got the gist, alright. “But I thought I’d give you a fair chance to give up, being as the town’s full with womenfolk and children and all the rest. My score’s with Bethod, not with you people. The Union want to use this place as a port, bring in men and supplies and whatever. They’ll be here inside an hour, in their ships. A lot of ’em. It’s happening with or without your say so. I guess my point is we can do this the bloody way, if that’s the way you want it. The dead know we’ve had the practice. Or you can give up your weapons, if you’ve got ’em, and we can all get along, nice and… what’s the word for it?”

“Civilised,” said Grim.

“Aye. Civilised. What d’you say?”

The old man fingered his sword, looking like he’d rather have leant on it than swung it, and he stared up at the walls, where a few of the Carls were looking down, and his shoulders slumped. “Looks like you got us cold. The Dogman, eh? I always heard you was a clever bastard. No one much left here to fight you, anyway. Bethod took every man could hold a spear and a shield at once.” He looked round at the sorry crowd behind him. “Will you leave the women be?”

“We’ll leave ’em be.”

“Those that want to be left be,” said Dow, leering at the girl with the pitch-fork.

“We’ll leave ’em be,” growled Dogman, giving him a hard look. “I’ll see to it.”

“Well then,” wheezed the old man, shuffling up and wincing as he knelt and dropped his rusty blade at Dogman’s feet. “You’re a better man than Bethod, far as I’m concerned. I suppose I ought to be thanking you for your mercy, if you keep your word.”

“Uh.” Dogman didn’t feel too merciful. He doubted the old boy he’d killed on the dock would be thanking him, or the one-armed man stabbed through from behind, or the lad with the cut throat who’d had his whole life stolen.

One by one the rest of the crowd came forward, and one by one the weapons, if you could call ’em that, got dropped in a heap. A pile of old rusty tools and junk. The boy came up last and let his cleaver clatter down with the rest, gave a scared look at Black Dow, then hurried back to the others and clung to the dark-haired girl’s hand.

They stood there, in a wide-eyed huddle, and Dogman could almost smell their fear. They were waiting for Dow and his Carls to set to hacking ’em down where they stood. They were waiting to get herded in a house and locked in and the place set fire to. Dogman had seen all that before. So he didn’t blame ’em one bit as they all crowded together like sheep pressed up in a field in winter. He’d have done the same.

“Alright!” he barked. “That’s it! Back to your houses, or whatever. Union’ll be here before midday, and it’d be better if the streets were empty.”

They blinked at Dogman, and at Tul, and at Black Dow, and at each other. They swallowed and trembled, and muttered their thanks to the dead. They broke up, slowly, and spread out, and went off their own ways. Alive, to everyone’s great relief.

“Nicely done, chief,” said Tul in Dogman’s ear. “Threetrees himself couldn’t have done it no better.”

Dow sidled up from the other side. “About the women, though, if you’re asking my opinion—”

“I’m not,” said Dogman.

“Have you seen my son?” There was one woman who wasn’t going home. She was coming up from one man to another, half-tears in her eyes and her face all wild from worry. The Dogman put his head down and looked the other way. “My son, he was on guard, down by the water! You seen him?” She tugged at Dogman’s coat, her voice cracked and wet-sounding. “Please, where’s my son?”

“You think I know where everyone’s at?” he snapped in her weepy face. He strode away like he had a load of important stuff to do, and all the while he was thinking—you’re a coward, Dogman, you’re a bastard bloody coward. Some hero, pulling a neat trick on a bunch of women, and children, and old men.

It ain’t easy, being chief.

This Noble Business

The great moat had been drained early in the siege, leaving behind a wide ditch full of black mud. At the far end of the bridge across it four soldiers worked by a cart, dragging corpses to the bank and rolling them flopping down to the bottom. The corpses of the last defenders, gashed and burned, spattered with blood and dirt. Wild men, from past the River Crinna far to the east, tangle-haired and bearded. Their limp bodies seemed pitifully withered after three months sealed up behind the walls of Dunbrec, pitifully starved. Scarcely human. It was hard for West to take much joy in the victory over such sorry creatures as these.

“Seems a shame,” muttered Jalenhorm, “after they fought so bravely. To end like that.”

West watched another ragged corpse slither down the bank and into the tangled heap of muddy limbs. “This is how most sieges end. Especially for the brave. They’ll be buried down there in the muck, then the moat will be flooded again. The waters of the Whiteflow will surge over them, and their bravery, or lack of it, will have meant nothing.”

The fortress of Dunbrec loomed over the two officers as they crossed the bridge, black outlines of walls and towers like great, stark holes in the heavy white sky. A few ragged birds circled above. A couple more croaked from the scarred battlements.

It had taken General Kroy’s men a month to make this same journey, bloodily repulsed time and again, and to finally break through the heavy doors under a steady rain of arrows, stones, and boiling water. Another week of claustrophobic slaughter to force the dozen strides down the tunnel beyond, to burst through the second gate with axe and fire and finally seize control of the outer wall. Every advantage had lain with the defenders. The place had been most carefully designed to ensure that it was so.

And once they had made it through the gatehouse, their problems were only just beginning. The inner wall was twice the height and thickness of the outer, dominating its walkways at every point. There had been no shelter from missiles from the six monstrous towers.

To conquer that second wall Kroy’s men had tried every strategy in the manual of siege. They had worked with pick and crowbar, but the masonry was five strides thick at the base. They had made an effort at a mine but the ground was waterlogged outside the fortress and solid Angland rock beneath. They had bombarded the place with catapults, but scarcely scratched the mighty bastions. They had come with scaling ladders, again and again, in waves and in parties, by surprise at night or brazenly in the day, and in the darkness and the light the straggling lines of Union wounded had shuffled away from their failed attempts, the dead dragged solemnly behind. They had finally tried reasoning with the wild defenders, through the medium of a Northern translator, and the unfortunate man had been pelted with night soil.

It had been pure fortune, in the end. After studying the movements of the guards, one enterprising sergeant had tried his luck with a grapple under cover of night. He had climbed up and a dozen other brave men had followed him. They took the defenders by surprise, killed several of them and seized the gatehouse. The whole effort took ten minutes and cost one Union life. It was a fitting irony, to West’s mind, that having tried every roundabout method and been bloodily repulsed, the Union army had finally entered the inner fortress by its open front gate.

A soldier was bent over near that archway now, being noisily sick onto the stained flagstones. West passed him with some foreboding, the sound of his clicking boot heels echoing around the long tunnel, and emerged into the wide courtyard at the centre of the fortress. It was a regular hexagon, echoing the shape of the inner and outer walls, all part of the perfectly symmetrical design. West doubted that the architects would have approved, however, of the state in which the Northmen had left the place.

A long wooden building at one side of the yard, perhaps a stables, had caught fire in the attack and was now reduced to a mass of charred beams, the embers still glowing. Those clearing away the mess had too much work outside the walls, and the ground was still scattered with fallen weapons and tangled corpses. The Union dead had been stretched out in rows near one corner and covered up with blankets. The Northmen lay in every attitude, on their faces or on their backs, curled up or stretched out where they fell. Beneath the bodies the stone flags were deeply scored, and not just with the random damage of a three-month siege. A great circle had been chiselled from the rock, and other circles within it, strange marks and symbols laid out in an intricate design. West did not care for its look in the least. Worse still, he was becoming aware of a repulsive stench to the place, more pungent even than the tang of burned wood.

“What ever is that smell?” muttered Jalenhorm, putting one hand over his mouth.

A sergeant nearby overheard him. “Seems that our Northern friends chose to decorate the place.” He pointed up above their heads, and West followed the gauntleted finger with his eyes.

They were so decayed that it took him a moment to realise he was looking at the remains of men. They had been nailed, spread-eagled, to the inside walls of each of the towers, high above the lean-to buildings round the courtyard. Rotting offal hung down from their bellies, crawling with flies. Cut with the Bloody Cross, as the Northmen would say. Tattered shreds of brightly-coloured Union uniforms were still vaguely visible, fluttering in the breeze among the masses of putrefying flesh.

Clearly they had been hanging there some time. Since before the siege began, certainly. Perhaps since the fortress first fell to the Northmen. Corpses of the original defenders, nailed there, rotting, for all those months. Three appeared to be without their heads. The companion pieces, perhaps, to those three gifts that had been sent to Marshal Burr all that time ago. West found himself wondering, pointlessly, whether any of them had been alive when they were nailed up. Spit rushed into his mouth, the sound of flies buzzing seeming suddenly, sickeningly loud.

Jalenhorm had gone pale as a ghost. He did not say anything. He did not have to. “What happened here?” muttered West through his gritted teeth, as much to himself as anything.

“Well, sir, we think they were hoping to get help.” The sergeant grinned at him, clearly possessed of a very strong stomach. “Help from some unfriendly gods, we’ve been guessing. Seems that no one was listening down below though, eh?”

West frowned at the ragged markings on the ground. “Get rid of them! Tear up the flags and replace them if you have to.” His eyes strayed to the decaying cadavers above, and he felt his stomach give a painful squeeze. “And offer a ten-mark bounty to the man with guts enough to climb up there and cut those corpses down.”

“Ten marks, sir? Bring me over that ladder!”

West turned and strode out through the open gates of the fortress of Dunbrec, holding his breath and hoping like hell that he never had occasion to visit the place again. He knew that he would be back, though. If only in his dreams.

Briefings with Poulder and Kroy were more than enough to sicken the healthiest of men, and Lord Marshal Burr was by no means in that category. The commander of His Majesty’s armies in Angland was as pitifully shrunken as the defenders of Dunbrec had been, his simple uniform hanging loose around him while his pale skin seemed stretched too tight over the bones. In a dozen short weeks he had aged as many years. His hand shook, his lip trembled, he could not stand for long, and could not ride at all. From time to time he would grimace and shiver as though he was racked by unseen pangs. West hardly knew how he was able to carry on, but carry on he did, fourteen hours a day and more. He attended to his duties with all his old diligence. Only now they seemed to eat him up, piece by piece.

Burr frowned grimly up at the great map of the border region, his hands resting on his belly. The Whiteflow was a winding blue line down the middle, Dunbrec a black hexagon marked in swirly script. On its left, the Union. On its right, the North. “So,” he croaked, then coughed and cleared his throat, “The fortress is back in our hands.”

General Kroy gave a stiff nod. “It is.”

“Finally,” observed Poulder under his breath. The two generals still appeared to regard Bethod and his Northmen as a minor distraction from the real enemy; each other.

Kroy bristled, his staff muttering around him like a flock of angry crows. “Dunbrec was designed by the Union’s foremost military architects, and no expense was spared in its construction! Capturing it has been no mean task!”

“Of course, of course,” growled Burr, doing his best to mount a diversion. “Damned difficult place to take. Do we have any notion of how the Northmen managed it?”

“None survived to tell us what trickery they employed, sir. They fought, without exception, to the death. The last few barricaded themselves in the stables and set fire to the structure.”

Burr glanced at West, and slowly shook his head. “How can one understand such an enemy? What is the condition of the fortress now?”

“The moat was drained, the outer gatehouse partly destroyed, considerable damage done to the inner wall. The defenders tore down some buildings for wood to burn and stones to throw and left the rest in…” Kroy worked his lips as though struggling to find the words. “A very poor condition. Repairs will take some weeks.”

“Huh.” Burr rubbed unhappily at his stomach. “The Closed Council are anxious that we cross the Whiteflow into the North as soon as possible, and take the fight to the enemy. Positive news for the restless populace, and so on.”

“The capture of Uffrith,” leaped in Poulder, with a grin of towering smugness, “has left our position far stronger. We have gained at a stroke one of the best ports in the North, perfectly situated to supply our forces as we push into enemy territory. Before, everything had to come the length of Angland by cart, over bad roads in bad weather. Now we can bring in supplies and reinforcements by ship and almost straight to the front! And the whole thing managed without a single casualty!”

West was not about to allow him to steal the credit for that.

“Absolutely,” he droned in an emotionless monotone. “Our northern allies have once again proved invaluable.”

Poulder’s red-jacketed staff frowned and grumbled. “They played a part,” the General was forced to admit.

“Their leader, the Dogman, came to us with the original plan, executed it himself using his own men, and delivered the town to you, its gates open and its people compliant. That was my understanding.”

Poulder frowned angrily across at Kroy, who was now allowing himself the very thinnest of smiles. “My men are in possession of the city and are already building up a stockpile of supplies! We have outflanked the enemy and forced him to fall back towards Carleon! That, Colonel West, is surely the issue here, and not precisely who did what!”

“Indeed!” cut in Burr, waving one big hand. “You have both done great services for your country. But we must now look forward to future successes. General Kroy, arrange for work parties to be left behind to complete the repairs to Dunbrec, and a regiment of levies to man the defences. With a commander that knows his business, please. It would be embarrassing, to say the least, if we were to lose the fortress for a second time.”

“There will be no mistake,” snarled Kroy at Poulder, “you can depend on it.”

“The rest of the army can cross the Whiteflow and form up on the far bank. Then we can begin to press east and northward, towards Carleon, using the harbour at Uffrith to bring in our supplies. We have driven the enemy out of Angland. Now we must press forward and grind Bethod to his knees.” And the Marshal twisted a heavy fist into his palm by way of demonstration.

“My division will be across the river by tomorrow evening,” hissed Poulder at Kroy, “and in good order!”

Burr grimaced. “We must move carefully, whatever the Closed Council say. The last time a Union army crossed the Whiteflow was when King Casamir invaded the North. I need hardly remind you that he was forced to withdraw in some disarray. Bethod has caught us out before, and will only grow stronger as he falls back into his own territory. We must work together. This is not a competition, gentlemen.”

The two generals immediately competed with each other to be the one to agree most. West gave a long sigh, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.