Joe Abercrombie - Half a War

‘Are you the new diggers?’ said one, frowning at Raith’s shield.

The best fighters don’t think too much. Not much before the fight, not much after, and not at all during. Tends to be the one strikes first that still stands in the end. So Raith knocked the man’s pick away with his shield and stabbed him in the neck, blood spraying across the passageway.

The other miner swung his shovel but Raith was carried forward, stumbling into him, shrugging the blow off his shield, shoving the man against the wall so they were left snarling in one another’s faces, so close Raith could have stuck his tongue out and licked him. He stabbed under the rim of his shield, wild, vicious, punches with steel on the end, and the digger gurgled and snorted with each one until Raith stepped back and let him drop, left him sitting with his hands clutched to his ripped-up belly and his blood black on Raith’s shield, on his fist, on his dagger.

Rakki was staring, mouth hanging open, the way he always did when Raith set to killing, but there’d be time to pile the regrets up later.

‘Finish it!’ Raith scuttled to the passage they came in by to snatch a breath of clean air. His head was spinning from the reek. He could hear the sounds of fighting coming faint from outside. ‘Now!’

Rakki tipped up the jar, coughing, soaking the props, the walls, the ground. Soryorn tossed his jar down, oil still gurgling from it across the floor, pushed past Raith and into the passageway, the shouts coming louder from above.

‘Gods!’ he heard Rakki croak, and spun around.

One of the miners was staggering across the room, mad eyes bulging, still clutching at his torn guts with one red hand. He caught Rakki with the other, growling through his clenched teeth, spraying red spit.

By every rule he should’ve been gone through the Last Door. But Death is a fickle mistress and has her own rules. Only she could say why it pleased her to give him a few more moments.

Rakki’s jar tumbled down as he wrestled with the wounded miner, shattered against a timber, oil spattering the pair of them as they stumbled back.

Raith took a step, jaw dropping, but he was too far away.

They blundered into one of the props, and Rakki pulled his arm back for a punch, and his elbow clipped the lamp and knocked it from its hook.

It fell so slow, leaving a bright smear across Raith’s sight, and not a thing he could do. He heard his own breath whoop in. He saw the light from that little flame bright across the oily floor. He saw Rakki turn, caught one glimpse of his face, eyes wide.

Raith dropped down huddled behind his shield. What else could he do?

Then the narrow chamber was brighter than day.

No doubt a woman should be tearful with relief when her betrothed comes back alive from battle, but Skara found herself dry-eyed when the Breaker of Swords was the first through the little gate.

His great shield had a broken shaft stuck in it near the rim, but otherwise he was unhurt. He slapped the arrow out, looked around as if for someone to hand the shield to, then frowned.

‘Huh.’ And he set it down against the wall.

Skara forced a smile onto her face. ‘I am glad to see you returned, my king.’ Though there were others she would rather have greeted.

‘In truth I am glad to be back, Queen Skara. Fighting at night is little fun. We brought down their mine, however.’

‘Thank the gods. What happens now?’

He smiled, teeth white in his ash-blacked face. ‘Now they dig another.’

Men were straggling back into the fortress. All exhausted. Several hurt. Mother Owd started forward to help, Rin squatting beside her with some heavy pincers, already cutting a man’s bloody jerkin open around a wound.

‘Where is Raith?’

‘He was with his brother in the tunnel when the oil caught fire.’ A thrall had brought Gorm water and he was wiping the ash from his face.

Skara could hardly speak her throat was suddenly so closed up. ‘He’s dead?’

Gorm gave a grim nod. ‘I taught him to fight, and kill, and die, and now he has done all three.’

‘Only two,’ she said, with a surge of relief that made her head spin.

Raith came shuffling from the shadows, his hair caked with dirt and his bloody teeth gritted, one arm over Blue Jenner’s shoulder.

‘Huh.’ Gorm raised his brows. ‘He always was the tough one.’

Skara darted forward, caught Raith by his elbow. His sleeve was ripped, scorched, strangely blistered. Then she realized to her horror it was not his sleeve, but his skin. ‘Gods, your arm! Mother Owd!’

Raith hardly seemed to notice. ‘Rakki’s dead,’ he whispered.

A slave had brought Gorm a bowl of meat fresh off the spit. The similarity between it and Raith’s arm as Mother Owd peeled the burned cloth away made Skara’s gorge rise.

But if the Breaker of Swords had any fears at all, he did not keep them in his stomach. ‘Fighting always gives me quite an appetite,’ he said around a mouthful of meat, spraying grease. ‘All in all, Mother War favoured us tonight.’

‘What about Rakki?’ snarled Raith, Owd hissing with annoyance as he jerked his half-bandaged arm from her hands.

‘I shall remember him fondly. Unlike others, he proved his loyalty.’

Skara saw the tendons starting from Raith’s fist as it clenched around his axe-haft, and she slipped quickly in front of him.

‘Your chain, my king.’ Lifting that rattling mass of dead men’s pommels up was such an effort her arms trembled.

Gorm stooped to duck his head inside and it brought them closer than they had ever been, her hands behind his neck, almost an awkward embrace. He had a damp-fur smell like the hounds her grandfather had kept.

‘It has grown long over the years,’ he said as he straightened.

This close he seemed bigger than ever. The top of her head could scarcely have reached his neck. Would she need to carry a step with her to kiss her husband? She might have laughed at the thought another time. She did not feel much like laughing then.

‘It was an honour to hold it.’ She wanted very much to back away but knew she could not, dropped her hands to arrange the gaudy, ghastly mementoes on his chest.

‘When we are married, I will cut off a length for you to wear.’

She blinked up at him, cold all over. A chain of dead men to be forever tethered with. ‘I have not earned the right,’ she croaked out.

‘No false modesty, please! Only half a war is fought with swords, my queen, and you have fought the other half with skill and courage.’ He was smiling as he turned away. ‘There will be hundreds dead for your brave work.’

Skara jerked awake, clutching at the furs on her bed, ears straining at the silence.

Nothing.

She hardly slept now. Two or three times every night Bright Yilling’s warriors would come.

They had tried to swim into the harbour, brave men fighting the surging waves in the darkness. But sentries on the towers above had riddled them with arrows, left their bodies tangled on the chains across the entrance.

They had charged up with a felled tree shod in iron as a ram, brave men holding shields above, and made a din upon the gates to wake the dead. But the gates had hardly been scratched.

They had shot swarms of burning arrows over the walls to fall on the yard like tiny shooting stars in the night. They had bounced harmless from flagstones and slates but some had caught among the thatch. Skara’s chest was sore from the billowing smoke, her voice cracked from shrieking orders to soak the roofs, her hands raw from dragging buckets from the well. The stables where she had first saddled a pony as a girl were a scorched shell, but they had managed to stop the fire from spreading.