Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

“Freedom!” roared Rulf, opening his arms wide to hold the vast expanse of empty white. “Freedom to freeze where you please! Freedom to starve where you like! Freedom to walk ’til you drop!”

His voice died quickly in that thin sharp air.

“Finished?” asked Nothing.

Rulf let his arms flop down. “Yes.” And they slogged on.

It was not the thought of his mother that kept Yarvi going, step after floundering step, stride after aching stride, fall after chilling fall, dogged in the tracks of the others. It was not the thought of his betrothed, or his dead father, or even his stool beside Mother Gundring’s fire. It was the thought of Odem, smiling with his hand on Yarvi’s shoulder. Of Odem, promising to be his shoulder-man. Of Odem, asking gently as the spring rain if a cripple should be King of Gettland.

“I think not ,” Yarvi snarled in smoke through his cracked lips. “I think not … I think not .”

And step after torturous step, Gettland edged ever closer.

The fifth day was clear and icy crisp, the sky blinding blue, so that it seemed Yarvi could see almost all the way to the sea, a strip of black and white on the far horizon of a land of black and white.

“We’ve done well,” he said. “You have to admit.”

Sumael, shading her eyes from the brightness as she frowned westward, had to do no such thing. “We’ve had good weatherluck.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” muttered Rulf, hugging himself. “Do you feel lucky, Jaud?”

“I feel cold,” said Jaud, rubbing at the pinked tips of his ears.

Sumael shook her head at the sky, which aside from a distant bruise far off to the north looked unusually clear. “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, you’ll learn what bad weatherluck looks like. There’s a storm coming.”

Rulf squinted up. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t tell you how to snore, do I? Don’t tell me how to navigate.”

Rulf looked at Yarvi, and shrugged. But before dark, as usual, she was proved right. That bruise on the sky grew, and swelled, and darkened, and turned odd colors.

“The gods are angry,” muttered Nothing, frowning up.

“When aren’t they?” said Yarvi.

The snow began to fall in giant flakes, in curtains and eddies. The wind blew up in shrieking gusts, bludgeoning from every way at once, barging them left and right. Yarvi took a fall and, when he clambered up, couldn’t see any of the others. He blundered on in a panic and ran straight into Jaud’s back.

“We have to get out of this!” he screeched, hardly able even to hear his own voice over the wind.

“I will not argue!” Jaud bellowed back.

“We need deep snow!”

“Snow we have!” roared Ankran.

They floundered to the bottom of a narrow gully, the most promising slope Yarvi could hope to find with the snow coming in such flurries that the others were little more than ghosts. He dug like a rabbit, scooping snow between his legs, burrowing desperately inwards then, when he’d tunnelled a body’s length, up. His hands burned with the cold inside their wrappings of wet sailcloth, his muscles burned with the effort but he forced himself on. He dug as if his life depended on it.

It did.

Sumael wormed her way after him, growling through her gritted teeth and using her hatchet like a trowel. They dug out first a shelf, then a hollow, then a tiny chamber. Ankran wriggled in behind, tongue wedged into the gap in his front teeth as he scooped the snow back. Rulf came next into the cold dimness, then Jaud worked his great shoulders up into the growing cave, and finally Nothing poked his head in.

“Neat,” he said.

“Keep the entrance clear,” Yarvi muttered, “or we’ll be buried in the night,” and he hunched against the packed snow, unwound the soaked wrappings and blew into his cupped hands. He had few enough fingers already: he could afford to lose no more.

“Where did you learn this?” asked Sumael, sitting back beside him.

“My father taught me.”

“I think he has saved our lives.”

“You must thank him, when you see him.” Ankran wriggled his shoulders into place. They were tightly squeezed, but they had been for days. There was no room for pride, or distaste, or enmity out here in the wastes.

Yarvi closed his eyes, then, and thought of his father, laid out pale and cold on the slab. “My father’s dead.”

“I am sorry,” came Jaud’s deep voice.

“It’s good that one of us is.”

Yarvi let his hand drop, and realized a moment later it had fallen against Sumael’s, her upturned fingers pressed into his palm. It felt good there, warm where her skin touched his. He did not move it. Nor did she.

Slowly he closed his fingers around hers.

There was a long silence then, the wind whining soft outside their shelter and the breath coming heavy inside, and Yarvi began to feel about as close to comfortable, packed under strides of frozen snow, as he had since they left Ankran’s fire.

“Here.” He felt the breath of the word on his face, felt Sumael gently take him by the wrist. His eyes flicked open but he could not guess at her expression in the darkness.

She turned his hand over and pressed something into his palm. Stale, and sour, and halfway between soggy and frozen, but it was bread, and by the gods he was glad to get it.

They sat pressed together, all eking out their shares, all chewing with something like contentment, or at least relief, and one by one swallowing, and falling silent, and leaving Yarvi wondering whether he dared take Sumael’s hand again.

Then she said, “that’s the last food.”

Another silence, but this one far less comfortable.

Rulf’s voice came muffled in the darkness. “How far to Vansterland?”

No one answered.

“Gettlanders are the better men,” came Nothing’s breathy croak. “They fight as one. Each guarded by the shield of his shoulder-man.”

“Gettlanders? Hah!” Rulf snorted smoke as he struggled on up the snowy slope after Sumael. “A herd of bloody sheep driven bleating to the butcher! When the shoulder-man falls, what then? Throvenmen have fire in them!”

They’d been arguing all day. Whether sword or bow was superior. Whether Hemenholm was south of Grenmer Island. Whether painted wood or oiled were more loved by Mother Sea and hence made for a more favoured vessel. Yarvi could not imagine where they found the breath. He hardly had enough for breathing with.

“Throvenmen?” croaked Nothing. “Hah! When the fires burn out what then?” First they would argue their case, then settle to stating their position with ever more certainty, and finally to a contest of scornful grunting. In Yarvi’s hearing neither had conceded a hair’s breadth since they left the South Wind sinking.

It was three days since the food ran out, and Yarvi’s hunger was an aching void inside him that swallowed every hope. When he had unwrapped the sailcloth from his hands that morning he had hardly recognized them: they were shrivelled and bloated at once. The skin on his fingertips had a waxy look, prickly-numb to the touch. Even Jaud was hollow about the cheeks. Ankran had a limp he was trying and failing to hide. Rulf’s breath came with a wheeze that made Yarvi wince. Nothing had frost in his straggling eyebrows. Sumael’s scarred lips were thinner and greyer and tighter pressed with every mile they trudged.

All Yarvi could think about, as this debate of the damned droned on, was which of them would die first.

“Gettlanders know discipline,” droned Nothing. “Gettlanders are-”

“What kind of fool even gives a damn?” snarled Yarvi, rounding on the two old men and stabbing his stub of a finger in their faces, suddenly furious. “Men are just men, good or bad depending on their luck! Now save your breath for walking!” And he wedged his hands back under his armpits and forced himself on up the slope.