Joe Abercrombie - The Heroes

‘It’s that or it’s a serious disagreement in a stable. Do you think it’s a disagreement in a stable?’

‘No, Corporal Tunny.’

‘No. Neither do I.’

‘Then what’s going on?’ asked Yolk. A riderless horse appeared from over the rise, stirrups flapping at its flanks, trotted down towards the water, stopped and started nibbling at the grass.

Tunny lowered his eyeglass. ‘Honestly, I’m not sure.’ All around them, rain tapped at the leaves.

The trampled barley was scattered with dead and dying horses, dead and dying men. In front of Calder and his stolen standards they were heaped up in a bloody tangle. Only a few strides away, three Carls were arguing with each other as they tried to free their spears, all impaled in the same Union rider. A few boys had been sent scurrying out to gather spent arrows. A couple more had been unable to resist clambering into the third pit to get an early start at picking over the bodies there, and White-Eye was roaring at them to get back into line.

The Union cavalry were all done. A brave effort, but a stupid one. It seemed to Calder the two often went together. To make matters worse, having failed once they’d insisted on giving it another try, still more doomed. Three score or so had jumped the third pit on the right, managed to get over Clail’s Wall and kill a few archers before they were shot or speared themselves. All pointless as mopping a beach. That was the trouble with pride, and courage, and all those clench-jawed virtues bards love to harp on. The more you have, the more likely you are to end up bottom in a pile of dead men. All the Union’s bravest had achieved was to give Calder’s men the biggest boost to their spirits they’d had since Bethod was King of the Northmen.

They were letting the Union know it, now, as the survivors rode, or limped, or crawled back towards their lines. They danced about, and clapped and whooped into the drizzle. They shook each others’ hands, and thumped each other’s backs, and clashed their shields together. They chanted Bethod’s name, and Scale’s, and even quite frequently Calder’s, which was gratifying. The comradeship of warriors, who would’ve thought? He grinned around as men cheered and brandished their weapons at him, held up his sword and gave it a wave in return. He wondered whether it was too late to smear a bit of blood on the blade, since he hadn’t quite got around to swinging it. There was plenty of blood about and he doubted its previous owners would miss it now.

‘Chief?’

‘Eh?’

Pale-as-Snow was pointing off to the south. ‘Might want to pull ’em back into position.’

The rain was getting weightier, fat drops leaving the earth spattered with dark spots, pinging from the armour of the living and the dead. It had drawn a misty haze across the battlefield to the south, but beyond the riderless horses aimlessly wandering, and the horseless riders stumbling back towards the Old Bridge, Calder thought he could see shapes moving in the barley.

He shielded his eyes with one hand. More and more emerged from the rain, turning from ghosts to flesh and metal. Union foot. Vast blocks of them, trampling forward in carefully measured, well-ordered, dreadfully purposeful ranks, pole-arms held high, flags struck limp by the wet.

Calder’s men had seen them too, and their triumphant jeering was already a memory. The barking voices of Named Men rang through the rain, bringing them grimly back to their places behind the third pit. White-Eye was marshalling some of the lightly wounded to fight as a reserve and plug any holes. Calder wondered if they’d be plugging holes in him before the day was out. It looked a good bet.

‘Don’t suppose you’ve got any more tricks?’ asked Pale-as-Snow.

‘Not really.’ Unless you counted running like hell. ‘You?’

‘Just the one.’ And the old warrior carefully wiped the blood from his sword with a rag and held it up.

‘Oh.’ Calder looked down at his own clean blade, glistening with beads of water. ‘That.’

The Tyranny of Distance

‘Ican’t see a damn thing!’ hissed Finree’s father, taking a stride forwards and peering through his eyeglass again, presumably to no more effect than before. ‘Can you?’

‘No, sir,’ grumbled one of his staff, unhelpfully.

They had witnessed Mitterick’s premature charge in stunned silence. Then, as the first light crawled across the valley, the start of Jalenhorm’s advance. Then the drizzle had begun. First Osrung had disappeared in the grey pall on the right, then Clail’s Wall on the left, then the Old Bridge and the nameless inn where Finree had almost died yesterday. Now even the shallows were half-remembered ghosts. Everyone stood silent, paralysed with anxiety, straining for sounds that would occasionally tickle at the edge of hearing, over the damp whisper of the rain. For all that they could see now, there might as well have been no battle at all.

Finree’s father paced back and forth, the fingers of one hand fussing at nothing. He came to stand beside her, staring off into the featureless grey. ‘I sometimes think there isn’t a person in the world more powerless than a supreme commander on a battlefield,’ he muttered.

‘How about his daughter?’

He gave her a tight smile. ‘Are you all right?’

She thought about smiling back but gave up on it. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied, and quite transparently too. Apart from the very real pain through her neck whenever she turned her head, down her arm whenever she used her hand, and across her scalp all the time, she still felt a constant, suffocating worry. Time and again she would startle, staring about like a miser for his lost purse, but with no idea what she was even looking for. ‘You have far more important things to worry about—’

As if to prove her point he was already striding away to meet a messenger, riding up towards the barn from the east. ‘News?’

‘Colonel Brock reports that his men have begun their attack on the bridge in Osrung!’ Hal was in the fight, then. Leading from the front, no doubt. She felt herself sweating more than ever under her clothes, the damp beneath Hal’s coat meeting the damp leaking through from above in a crescendo of chafing discomfort. ‘Colonel Brint, meanwhile, is leading an assault against the savages who yesterday …’ His eyes flickered nervously to Finree, and back. ‘Against the savages.’

‘And?’ asked her father.

‘That is all, Lord Marshal.’

He grimaced. ‘My thanks. Please, bring further news when you are able.’

The messenger saluted, turned his horse and galloped off through the rain.

‘No doubt your husband is distinguishing himself enormously in the assault.’ Bayaz leaned beside her on his staff, bald pate glistening with moisture. ‘Leading from the front, in the style of Harod the Great. A latter-day hero! I’ve always had the greatest admiration for men of that stamp.’

‘Perhaps you should try it yourself.’

‘Oh, I have. I was quite the firebrand in my youth. But an unquenchable thirst for danger is unseemly in the old. Heroes have their uses, but someone has to point them the right way. And clean up afterwards. They always raise a cheer from the public, but they leave a hell of a mess.’ Bayaz thoughtfully patted his stomach. ‘No, a cup of tea at the rear is more my style. Men like your husband can gather the plaudits.’

‘You are far too generous.’

‘Few indeed would agree.’

‘But where is your tea now?’

Bayaz frowned at his empty hand. ‘My servant has … more important errands to run this morning.’

‘Can there be anything more important than attending to your whims?’

‘Oh, my whims stretch beyond the kettle …’