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The whispering voice dropped lower, too quiet for Finree to hear. She tugged desperately at the knots with her nails, mouthing curses.
‘What are they saying?’ came Aliz’ whisper, croaky with terror.
‘Nothing,’ Finree hissed back. ‘Nothing.’
‘Black Dow takes a high hand with me in this,’ came the giant’s voice again.
‘He takes a high hand with me and all. There it is. He’s the one with the chain.’
‘I shit on his chain. Stranger-Come-Knocking has no masters but the sky and the earth. Black Dow does not command—’
‘He ain’t commanding nothing. He’s asking nicely. You can tell me no. Then I’ll tell him no. Then we can see.’
There was a pause. Finree pressed her tongue into her teeth, the knot starting to give, starting to give—
The door swung open and they were left blinking into the light. A man stood in the doorway. One of his eyes was strangely bright. Too bright. He stepped under the lintel, and Finree realised that his eye was made of metal, and set in the midst of an enormous, mottled scar. She had never seen a more monstrous-looking man. Aliz gave a kind of stuttering wheeze. Too scared even to scream, for once.
‘She got her hands free,’ he whispered over his shoulder.
‘I said she had bones,’ came the giant’s voice from outside. ‘Tell Black Dow there will be a price for this. A price for the woman and a price for the insult.’
‘I’ll tell him.’ The metal-eyed man came forward, pulling something from his belt. A knife, she saw the flash of metal in the gloom. Aliz saw it too, whimpered, gripped hard at Finree’s fingers and she gripped back. She was not sure what else she could do. He squatted down in front of them, forearms on his knees and his hands dangling, the knife loose in one. Finree’s eyes flickered from the gleam of the blade to the gleam of his metal eye, not sure which was more awful. ‘There’s a price for everything, ain’t there?’ he whispered to her.
The knife darted out and slit the cord between her ankles in one motion. He reached behind his back and pulled a canvas bag over her head with another, plunging her suddenly into fusty, onion-smelling darkness. She was dragged up by her armpit, hands slipping from Aliz’ limp grip.
‘Wait!’ she heard Aliz shouting behind her. ‘What about me? What about—’
The door clattered shut.
The Bridge
Your August Majesty,
If this letter reaches you I have fallen in battle, fighting for your cause with my final breath. I write it only in the hope of letting you know what I could not in person: that the days I spent serving with the Knights of the Body, and as your Majesty’s First Guard in particular, were the happiest of my life, and that the day when I lost that position was the saddest. If I failed you I hope you can forgive me, and think of me as I was before Sipani: dutiful, diligent, and always utterly loyal to your Majesty.
I bid you a fond farewell,
Bremer dan Gorst
He thought better of ‘a fond’ and crossed it out, realised he should probably rewrite the whole thing without it, then decided he did not have the time. He tossed the pen away, folded the paper without bothering to blot it and tucked it down inside his breastplate.
Perhaps they will find it there, later, on my crap-stained corpse. Dramatically bloodied at the corner, maybe? A final letter! Why, to whom? Family? Sweetheart? Friends? No, the sad fool had none of those, it is addressed to the king! And borne upon a velvet pillow into his Majesty’s throne room, there perhaps to wring out some wretched drip of guilt. A single sparkling tear spatters upon the marble tiles. Oh! Poor Gorst, how unfairly he was used! How unjustly stripped of his position! Alas, his blood has watered foreign fields, far from the warmth of my favour! Now what’s for breakfast?
Down on the Old Bridge the third assault had reached its critical moment. The narrow double span was one heaving mass, rows of nervous soldiers waiting unenthusiastically to take their turn while the wounded, exhausted and otherwise spent staggered away in the opposite direction. The resolve of Mitterick’s men was flickering, Gorst could see it in the pale faces of the officers, hear it in their nervous voices, in the sobs of the injured. Success or failure was balanced on a knife-edge.
‘Where the hell is bloody Vallimir?’ Mitterick was roaring at everyone and no one. ‘Bloody coward, I’ll have him cashiered in disgrace! I’ll go down there my bloody self! Where did Felnigg get to? Where … what … who …’ His words were buried in the hubbub as Gorst walked down towards the river, his mood lifting with every jaunty step as if a great weight was floating from his shoulders piece by leaden piece.
A wounded man stumbled by, one arm around a fellow, clutching a bloody cloth to his eye. Someone will be missing from next year’s archery contest! Another was hauled past on a stretcher, crying out piteously as he bounced, the stump of his leg bound tightly with red-soaked bandages. No more walks in the park for you! He grinned at the injured men laid groaning at the verges of the muddy track, gave them merry salutes. Unlucky, my comrades! Life is not fair, is it?
He strode through a scattered crowd, then threaded through a tighter mass, then shouldered through a breathless press, the fear building around him as the bodies squeezed tighter, and with it his excitement. Feelings ran high. Men shoved at each other, thrashed with their elbows, screamed pointless insults. Weapons waved dangerously. Stray arrows would occasionally putter down, no longer in volleys but in apologetic ones and twos. Little gifts from our friends on the other side. No, really, you shouldn’t have!
The mud beneath Gorst’s feet levelled off, then began to rise, then gave way to old stone slabs. Between twisted faces he caught glimpses of the river, the bridge’s mossy parapet. He began to make out from the general din the metallic note of combat and the sound tugged at his heart like a lover’s voice across a crowded room. Like the whiff of the husk pipe to the addict. We all have our little vices. Our little obsessions. Drink, women, cards. And here is mine.
Tactics and technique were useless here, it was a question of brute strength and fury, and very few men were Gorst’s match in either. He put his head down and strained at the press as he had strained at the mired wagon a few days before. He began to grunt, then growl, then hiss, and he rammed his way through the soldiers like a ploughshare through soil, shoving heedlessly with shield and shoulder, tramping over the dead and wounded. No small talk. No apologies. No petty embarrassments here.
‘Out of my fucking way!’ he screeched, sending a soldier sprawling on his face and using him for a carpet. He caught a flash of metal and a spear-point raked his shield. For a moment he thought a Union man had taken objection, then he realised the spear had a Northman on the other end. Greetings, my friend! Gorst was trying to twist his sword free of the press and into a useful attitude when he was given an almighty shove from behind and found himself suddenly squashed up against the owner of the spear, their noses almost touching. A bearded face, with a scar on the top lip.
Gorst smashed his forehead into it, and again, and again, shoved him down and stomped on his head until it gave under his heel. He realised he was shouting at the falsetto top of his voice. He wasn’t even sure of the words, if they were words. All around him men were doing the same, spitting curses in each other’s faces that no one on the other side could possibly understand.
A glimpse of sky through a thicket of pole-arms and Gorst thrust his sword into it, another Northman bent sideways, breath wheezing silently through a mouth frozen in a drooling ring of surprise. Too tangled to swing, Gorst gritted his teeth and jabbed away, jabbed, jabbed, jabbed, point grating against armour, pricking at flesh, opening an arm up in a long red slit.
A growling face showed for a moment over the rim of Gorst’s shield and he set his boots and drove the man back, battering at his chest, jaw, legs. Back he went, and back, and squealing over the parapet, his spear splashing into the fast-flowing water below. Somehow he managed to cling on with the other hand, desperate fingers white on stone, blood leaking from his bloated nose, looking up imploringly. Mercy? Help? Forbearance, at least? Are we not all just men? Brothers eternal, on this crooked road of life? Could we be bosom friends, had we met in other circumstances?
Gorst smashed his shield down on the hand, bones crunching under the metal edge, watched the man fall cartwheeling into the river. ‘The Union!’ someone shrieked. ‘The Union!’ Was it him? He felt soldiers pushing forward, their blood rising, surging across the bridge with an irresistible momentum, carrying him northwards, a stick on the crest of a wave. He cut someone down with his long steel, laid someone’s else’s head open with the corner of his shield, strap twisting in his hand, his face aching he was smiling so hard, every breath burning with joy. This is living! This is living! Well, not for them, but—
He tottered suddenly into empty space. Fields opened wide before him, crops shifting in the breeze, golden in the evening sun like the paradise the Prophet promises to the Gurkish righteous. Northmen ran. Some running away, and more running towards. A counter-attack, and leading it a huge warrior, clad in plates of black metal strapped over black chain mail, a long sword in one gauntleted fist, a heavy mace in the other, steel glinting warm and welcoming in the mellow afternoon. Carls followed in a mailed wedge, painted shields up and offering their bright-daubed devices, screaming a chant – ‘Scale! Scale!’ in a thunder of voices.
The Union drive faltered, the vanguard still shuffling reluctantly forward from the weight of those behind. Gorst stood at their front and watched, smiling into the dropping sun, not daring to move a muscle in case the feeling ended. It was sublime. Like a scene from the tales he had read as a boy. Like that ridiculous painting in his father’s library of Harod the Great facing Ardlic of Keln. A meeting of champions! All gritted teeth and clenched buttocks! All glorious lives, glorious deaths and glorious … glory?
The man in black hammered up onto the bridge, big boots thumping the stones. His blade came whistling at shoulder height and Gorst set himself to parry, the breathtaking shock humming up his arm. The mace came a moment later and he caught it on his shield, the heavy head leaving a dent just short of his nose.
Gorst gave two savage cuts in return, high and low, and the man in black ducked the first and blocked the second with the shaft of his mace, lashed at Gorst with his sword and made him spin away, using a Union soldier’s shield as a backrest.
He was strong, this champion of the North, and brave, but strength and bravery are not always enough. He had not studied every significant text on swordsmanship ever committed to paper. Had not trained three hours a day every day since he was fourteen. Had run no ten thousand miles in his armour. Had endured no bitter, enraging years of humiliation. And, worst of all, he cares whether he loses.
Their blades met in the air with a deafening crash but Gorst’s timing was perfect and it was the Northman who staggered off balance, favouring perhaps a weak left knee. Gorst was on him in a flash but someone else’s stray weapon struck him on the shoulder-plate before he could swing, sent him stumbling into the man in black’s arms.
They lumbered in an awkward embrace. The Northman tried to beat at him with the haft of his mace, trip him, shake him off. Gorst held tight. He was vaguely aware of fighting around them, of men locked in their own desperate struggles, of the screams of tortured flesh and tortured metal, but he was lost in the moment, eyes closed.
When was the last time I truly held someone? When I won the semi-final in the contest, did my father hug me? No. A firm shake of the hand. An awkward clap on the shoulder. Perhaps he would have hugged me if I’d won, but I failed, just as he said I would. When, then? Women paid to do it? Men I scarcely know in meaningless drunken camaraderie? But not like this. By an equal, who truly understands me. If only it could last…
He leaped back, jerking his head away from the whistling mace and letting the man in black stumble past. Gorst’s steel flashed towards his head as he righted himself and he only just managed to deflect the blow, sword wrenched from his hand and sent skittering away among the pounding boots. The man in black bellowed, twisting to swing his mace at a vicious diagonal.
Too much brawn, not enough precision. Gorst saw it coming, let it glance harmlessly from his shield and slid around it into space, aimed a carefully gauged chop, little more than a fencer’s flick, at that weak left knee. The blade of his steel caught the thigh-plate, found the chain mail on the joint and bit through. The man in black lurched sideways, only staying upright by clawing at the parapet, his mace scraping the mossy stone.
Gorst blew air from his nose as he brought the steel scything up and over, no fencer’s movement this. It chopped cleanly through the man’s thick forearm, armour, flesh and bone, and clanged against the old rock underneath, streaks of blood, rings of mail, splinters of stone flying.
The man in black gave an outraged snort as he struggled up, roared as he swung his mace at Gorst’s head with a killing blow. Or would have, had his hand still been attached. Somewhat to the disappointment of them both, Gorst suspected, his gauntlet and half his forearm were hanging by a last shred of chain mail, the mace dangling puppet-like from the wrist by a leather thong. As far as Gorst could tell without seeing his face, the man was greatly confused.
Gorst smashed him in the head with his shield and snapped his helmet back, blood squirting from his severed arm in thick black drops. He was pawing clumsily for a dagger at his belt when Gorst’s long steel clanged into his black faceplate and left a bright dent down the middle. He tottered, arms out wide, then toppled backwards like a great tree felled.
Gorst held up his shield and bloody sword, shaking them at the last few dismayed Northmen like a savage, and gave a great shrill scream. I win, fuckers! I win! I win!
As if that were an order, the lot of them turned and fled northwards, thrashing through the crops in their desperate haste to get away, weighed down by their flapping mail and their fatigue and their panic, and Gorst was among them, a lion among the goats.
Compared to his morning routine this was like dancing on air. A Northman slipped beside him, yelping in terror. Gorst charted the downward movement of his body, timed the downward movement of his arm to match and neatly cut the man’s head off, felt it bounce from his knee as he plunged on up the track. A young lad tossed away a spear, face contorted with fear as he looked over his shoulder. Gorst chopped deep into his backside and he went down howling in the crops.
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