Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

Jaud gently rolled her, sat her up, hugging her with one arm.

“Father won’t wait forever,” she whispered, faintest breath of smoke spilling from her blued lips.

“The cold’s in her head.” Yarvi put his palm against her clammy skin and found his hand shook. He might have saved her from drowning but without fire or food the winter would take her through the Last Door still, and he could not stand the thought of it. What would they do without her?

What would he do without her?

“Do something!” hissed Rulf, gripping hard at Yarvi’s arm.

But what? Yarvi chewed at his cracked lip, staring off into the forest as though some answer might present itself among those barren trunks.

There is always a way.

He frowned for a moment, then shook Rulf off and hurried to the nearest tree, tearing the wrappings from his good hand. He plucked a red-brown tuft of something from the bark, and the embers of hope sparked to life once again.

“Wool,” muttered Ankran, holding up another tuft. “Sheep passed this way.”

Rulf tore it from his fingers. “Were driven?”

“Southwards,” said Yarvi.

“How can you tell?”

“The moss grows out of the wind on the west side of the trunks.”

“Sheep mean warmth,” said Rulf.

“Sheep mean food,” said Jaud.

Yarvi did not say what he was thinking. That sheep meant people, and people might not be friendly. But to weigh your choices you need more than one.

“I’ll stay with her,” said Ankran. “You bring help, if you can.”

“No,” said Jaud. “We go together. We are all oarmates now.”

“Who’ll carry her?”

Jaud shrugged. “When you have a load to lift, you’re better lifting than weeping.” And he slipped his arms underneath Sumael and grimaced as he lifted her, stumbled just a little, then settled her twitching face against his shoulder and without another word started southwards, head held high. She must not have weighed much now but, cold and hungry and tired as Yarvi was, it seemed a feat almost impossible.

“I’ve lived a while,” muttered Rulf, blinking at Jaud’s back. “But I can’t say I ever saw a finer thing.”

“Nor I,” said Yarvi, clambering up and hurrying after. How could he complain, or doubt, or falter, with that lesson in strength before him?

How could any of them?

They huddled in the damp brush, and looked down towards the steading.

One building was stone-built, so old it had settled into the land, a thin plume of smoke drifting from the snow-humped roof which made Yarvi’s mouth water and his skin prickle at misty memories of food and warmth. Another building, which from the occasional muffled bleating was the barn where the sheep were kept, looked to be made from the hull of an upended ship, though how it might have come this far inland he had no notion. Others were rough-hewn sheds almost lost under the drifted snow, the gaps between them blocked by a fence of sharpened logs.

Just outside the entrance, by a hole in the ice and with his fishing rod propped on a pair of sticks, a small boy sat swaddled in furs, and from time to time noisily blew his nose.

“This worries me,” whispered Jaud. “How many will be in there? We know nothing about them.”

“Except that they are people and people are never to be trusted,” said Nothing.

“We know they have food, and clothes, and shelter.” Yarvi looked at Sumael, hunched in every thread they could spare, which was few enough. She was shivering so hard her teeth rattled, lips gray-blue like slate, eyelids drooping, closing, opening and drooping again. “Things we need to survive.”

“Then it is simple.” Nothing unwrapped the cloth from the hilt of his sword. “Steel is the answer.”

Yarvi stared at him. “You’re going to kill that boy?”

Rulf wriggled his shoulders uncomfortably, but Nothing only shrugged his. “If it is a choice between his death or ours then, yes, I will kill him, and anyone else down there. They can join my regrets.” He started to rise but Yarvi grabbed his ragged shirt and dragged him back down, found himself staring into his hard, flat, gray eyes. Close up, they looked no more sane. Quite the reverse.

“The same goes for you, cook’s boy,” whispered Nothing.

Yarvi swallowed, but he did not look away, and he did not let go. Sumael had risked her life for his on the South Wind . It was time to repay the debt. And besides, he was tired of being a coward.

“First we’ll try talking.” He stood, tried to think up some gesture that might make him look less like a ragged beggar at the utter extremes of desperation, and failed.

“Once they have killed you,” said Nothing. “Will steel be the answer?”

Yarvi breathed a smoky sigh. “I expect so.” And he shuffled down the slope towards the buildings.

All was still. No sign of life but for the boy. Yarvi stopped perhaps a dozen steps from him.

“Hey.”

The lad jerked up, upsetting his fishing rod, stumbled back and nearly fell, then ran towards the house. Yarvi could only wait, and shiver. Shiver with the cold, and with the fear of what was coming. You could not expect too much kindness from folk who lived in land as harsh as this.

They spilled from the stone building like bees from a broken hive. He counted seven, each well-wrapped in furs, each with a spear. Three of them had stone points rather than metal, but all were gripped with grim purpose. Silently they rushed to make half a circle around him, spears pointing in.

All Yarvi could do was lift his hands, empty apart from their swaddlings of filthy sailcloth, send up a silent prayer to Father Peace and croak out, “I need your help.”

The figure in the center planted their spear butt-down in the snow, and walked slowly up to Yarvi. She pushed her hood back to show a shag of yellow-gray hair and a face deep-lined, worn by work and weather. For a moment, she studied him.

Then she stepped forward and, before Yarvi could cringe away, threw her arms about him and hugged him tight.

“I am Shidwala,” she said in the Tongue. “Are you alone?”

“No,” he whispered, fighting to hold back his tears of relief. “My oarmates are with me.”

THE INSIDE OF THE HOUSE was low, and narrow, and stank of sweat and woodsmoke, and it seemed a palace. An oily stew of roots and mutton was doled out from a blackened pot into a wooden bowl polished with years of use. Yarvi dug into it with his fingers and had never tasted anything finer. Benches followed the curving walls, and Yarvi and his friends sat on one side of the sizzling firepit and their hosts on the other-Shidwala, and four men he took to be her sons, and the boy from the ice pool, who stared at Sumael and Jaud as if they were elves stepped out of legend.

Back in Thorlby, these people would have seemed beyond poor. Now the room was crammed with riches. Tools of wood and bone were bracketed on the walls, cunning instruments for hunting, and fishing, and digging shelter, and teasing a living from the ice, skins of wolf and goat and bear and seal on every surface. One of the hosts, a man with a thick brown beard, scraped out the pot to hand Jaud a second bowl, and the big man nodded his thanks and started to stuff it in, eyes closed in ecstasy.

Ankran leaned close to him. “I think we have eaten all their dinner.”

Jaud froze with his fingers in his mouth and the bearded man laughed and leaned across the fire to clap him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” said Yarvi, putting his own bowl aside.

“You are hungrier than us, I think,” said Shidwala. They spoke the Tongue with a strange accent. “And also remarkably far from your way.”