Joe Abercrombie - Half a War

Skara was left standing on the sward with Raith. The birds continued to twitter. The calls of the labourers in the ditch floated towards them. The breeze fumbled across the grass. Skara did not look sideways. But she liked knowing he was there, at her shoulder.

‘You can go,’ she said. ‘If you want to.’

‘I said I’d die for you. I meant it.’

He had some of that old swagger as she looked around, daring and dangerous and making no apologies, and she smiled to see it. ‘No need quite yet. I still need someone to threaten my visitors with.’

‘I can do that too.’ He smiled back. That hard and hungry smile that showed all his teeth. Long enough for it to be no accident. Long enough for that warm nervousness to set her skin tingling.

There was a part of her that would have liked to follow Gudrun’s example. To piss on the proper thing and go rolling in the hay with her stable-boy. At least to know what it felt like.

But there was a much larger part of her that laughed at the notion. She was no romantic. She could not afford to be. She was a queen, and promised to Grom-gil-Gorm, the Breaker of Swords. A nation relied on her. However she had railed at and complained to and rebelled against Mother Kyre, after all, in the end she had always done her duty.

So instead of clutching hold of Raith like a drowning girl to a log and kissing him as if the secret of life was in his mouth, she swallowed, and frowned back at Gudrun’s Tower.

‘It means a lot,’ she said. ‘That you’d fight for me.’

‘Not that much.’ The sun had been covered by cloud for a moment and the jewels in the grass were turned to cold water. ‘Every good killer needs someone to kill for.’

Soryorn was a grand archer and cut a hero’s figure against the bloody sunset, one foot up on the battlements at the top of Gudrun’s tower, back curved as he bent his great bow, the light from the flaming arrow shifting on his hard-set face.

‘Burn it,’ said Gorm.

The eyes of the thousand picked warriors of Throvenland, Vansterland and Gettland followed the streak of fire as the shaft curved through the still evening and thudded into the deck of Bright Yilling’s ship. Blue flame shot from it as the southern oil caught with a gentle whomp . In a moment the whole boat was alight in a blaze Raith could almost feel the heat of, even up here on the wall.

He glanced sideways and saw the warm glow light up Skara’s smile. It had been her idea. A warrior’s ship is his heart and his home, after all.

It had been a bastard of a job hauling it out of the harbour and on rollers up the long ramp to the yard. Raith’s back was aching and his hands raw from his part in it. Queen Skara had given the gilded weathervane to Blue Jenner, King Gorm had torn out the silver fittings to melt down and make cups, King Uthil had taken the red-dyed sail to spare the women of Gettland some weaving. They’d pulled the mast down to fit it through the entrance passage and they’d gouged the fine carvings when it got wedged in the gateway, but they’d got it outside in the end.

Raith hoped Bright Yilling would appreciate the effort they’d made to welcome him to Bail’s Point. But either way the defenders enjoyed the sight of his ship in flames. There was cheering, there was laughter, there were insults spat at Yilling’s scouts, sat calmly on horseback far out of bowshot. The high spirits were shortlived, though.

Grandmother Wexen’s army was beginning to arrive.

They tramped down the road from the north in an orderly column, an iron snake of men with the High King’s great standard at their head, the seven-rayed sun of the One God bobbing here and there above the crowd, and the marks of a hundred heroes and more hanging limp in the evening stillness. On they came, through the ruins of the village, more, and more, stretching away into the haze of distance.

‘When do they stop coming?’ Raith heard Skara whisper, one arm across her chest to nervously twist her armring.

‘I’d been hoping the scouts got their numbers wrong,’ muttered Blue Jenner.

‘Looks like they did,’ grunted Raith. ‘They guessed too few.’

Up on the walls mocking laughs became grim smiles, then even grimmer frowns as that mighty snake of men split, flowed about the fortress like flooding water about an island, and the warriors of the Lowlands, and Inglefold, and Yutmark encircled Bail’s Point from the cliffs in the east to the cliffs in the west.

No need for shows of defiance on their side. Their numbers spoke in thunder.

‘Mother War spreads her wings over Bail’s Point,’ murmured Owd.

A fleet of wagons came now, groaning with forage, and after them an endless crowd of families and thralls, servants and merchants, priests and profiteers, diggers and drovers with a lowing and bleating herd of sheep and cows that put any market Raith had ever seen to shame.

‘A whole city on the move,’ he muttered.

Darkness was closing in and the rearguard were only just arriving in a river of twinkling torches. Wild-looking men, their bone standards lit by flame, their bare chests marked with scars and smeared with war-paint.

‘Shends,’ said Raith.

‘Aren’t they sworn enemies of the High King?’ asked Skara, her voice more shrill than usual.

Mother Owd’s mouth was a hard line. ‘Grandmother Wexen must have prevailed upon them to be our enemies instead.’

‘I hear they eat their captives alive,’ someone muttered.

Blue Jenner gave the man a glare. ‘Best not get captured.’

Raith worked his sweaty palm around the handle of his shield and glanced towards the harbour, where plenty of ships were still gathered behind the safety of the chains to carry the thousand defenders away …

He bit his tongue until he tasted blood and forced his eyes back to the host gathering outside their walls. He’d never felt scared of a fight before. Maybe it was that the odds had always been stacked on his side. Or maybe it was that he’d lost his place, and his family, and any hope of getting them back.

They say it’s men with nothing to lose you should fear. But it’s them who fear most.

‘There,’ said Skara, pointing out at the High King’s ranks.

Someone was walking towards the fortress. Swaggering the way you might to a friend’s hall rather than an enemy’s stronghold. A warrior in bright mail that caught the light of the burning ship and seemed to burn itself. A warrior with long hair breeze-stirred and an oddly soft, young, handsome face, who carried no shield and propped his left hand loose on his sword’s hilt.

‘Bright Yilling,’ growled Jenner, baring all the teeth he still had.

Yilling stopped well within bowshot, grinning up towards the crowded battlements, and called out high and clear. ‘I don’t suppose King Uthil’s up there?’

It was some comfort to hear Uthil’s voice just as harsh and careless whether he faced one enemy or ten thousand. ‘Are you this man they call Bright Yilling?’

Yilling gave an extravagant shrug. ‘Someone has to be.’

‘The one who killed fifty men in the battle at Fornholt?’ called Gorm, from the roof of Gudrun’s tower.

‘Couldn’t say. I was killing, not counting.’

‘The one who cut the prow-beast from Prince Conmer’s ship with a single blow?’ asked Uthil.

‘It’s all in the wrist,’ said Yilling.

‘The one who murdered King Fynn and his defenceless minister?’ barked Skara.

Yilling kept smiling. ‘Aye, that one. And you should have seen what I did to my dinner just now.’ He happily patted his belly. ‘There was a slaughter!’

‘You are smaller than I expected,’ said Gorm.

‘And you are larger than I dared hope.’ Yilling wound a strand of his long hair around one finger. ‘Big men make a fine loud crash when I knock them down. I am dismayed to find the Iron King and the Breaker of Swords penned up like hogs in a sty. I felt sure you would be keen to test your sword-work against mine, steel to steel.’