Joe Abercrombie - The Heroes

The three of them set off up the track. Scale slumped in the saddle, reins dangling from his limp left hand and his head nodding with each hoofbeat. Calder rode grimly beside him. Shivers followed, like a shadow. The Great Leveller, waiting at their backs. Through the fields they went, at an interminable walk, towards the gap in Clail’s Wall where Calder had faced the Union charge a few days before.

His heart was beating just as fast as it had then. The Union had pulled back behind the river that morning and Pale-as-Snow’s boys were up north behind the Heroes, but there were still eyes around. A few nervous pickers combing through the trampled barley, searching for some trifle others might have missed. Scrounging up arrowheads or buckles or anything that could turn a copper. A couple of men thrashing through the crops off to the east, one with a fishing rod over his shoulder. Strange, how quickly a battlefield turned back to being just a stretch of ground. One day every finger’s breadth of it is something men can die over. The next it’s just a path from here to there. As he looked about Calder caught Shivers’ eye and the killer lifted his chin, silently asking the question. Calder jerked his head away like a hand from a boiling pot.

He’d killed men before. He’d killed Brodd Tenways with his own sword hours after the man had saved his life. He’d ordered Forley the Weakest dead for nothing but his own vanity. Killing a man when Skarling’s Chair was the prize shouldn’t have made his hand shake on the reins, should it?

‘Why didn’t you help me, Calder?’ Scale had eased his stump out from the gap in the cloak and was frowning down at it, jaw set hard. ‘At the bridge. Why didn’t you come?’

‘I wanted to.’ Liar, liar. ‘Found out there were Union men in the woods across that stream. Right on our flank. I wanted to go but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.’ That much was true. He was sorry. For what good that did.

‘Well.’ Scale’s face was a grimacing mask as he slid the stump back under his cloak. ‘Looks like you were right. The world needs more thinkers and fewer heroes.’ He glanced over for an instant and the look in his eye made Calder wince. ‘You always were the clever one.’

‘No. It was you who was right. Sometimes you have to fight.’

This was where he’d made his little stand and the land still bore the scars. Crops trodden, broken arrow shafts scattered, scraps of ruined gear around the remains of the trenches. Before Clail’s Wall the ground had been churned to mud then baked hard again, smeared bootprints, hoof-prints, handprints stamped into it, all that was left of the men who died there.

‘Get what you can with words,’ muttered Calder, ‘but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter. Like you said. Like our father said.’ And hadn’t he said something about family, as well? How nothing is more important? And mercy? Always think about mercy?

‘When you’re young you think your father knows everything,’ said Scale. ‘Now I’m starting to realise he might’ve been wrong on more than one score. Look how he ended up, after all.’

‘True.’ Every word said was like lifting a great stone. How long had Calder lived with the frustration of having this thick-headed heap of brawn in his way? How many knocks, and mocks, and insults had he endured from him? His fist closed tight around the metal in his pocket. His father’s chain. His chain. Is nothing more important than family? Or is family the lead that weighs you down?

They’d left the pickers behind, and the scene of the fighting too. Down the quiet track near the farmhouse where Scale had woken him a few mornings before. Where Bayaz had given him an even harsher awakening the previous night. Was this a test? To see whether Calder was ruthless enough for the wizard’s tastes? He’d been accused of many things, but never too little ruthlessness.

How long had he dreamed of taking back his father’s place? Even before his father lost it, and now there was only one last little fence to jump. All it would take was a nod. He looked sideways at Scale, wrung-out wreck that he was. Not much of a fence to trip a man with ambition. Calder had been accused of many things, but never too little ambition.

‘You were the one took after our father,’ Scale was saying. ‘I tried, but … couldn’t ever do it. Always thought you’d make a better king.’

‘Maybe,’ whispered Calder. Definitely.

Shivers was close behind, one hand on the reins, the other resting on his hip. He looked as relaxed as ever a man could, swaying gently with the movements of his horse. But his fingertips just so happened to be brushing the grip of his sword, sheathed beside the saddle in easy reach. The sword that had been Black Dow’s. The sword that had been the Bloody-Nine’s. Shivers raised one brow, asking the question.

The blood was surging behind Calder’s eyes. Now was the time. He could have everything he wanted.

Bayaz had been right. You don’t get to be a king without making some sacrifices.

Calder took an endless breath in, and held it. Now.

And he gently shook his head.

Shivers’ hand slid away. His horse dropped ever so slowly back.

‘Maybe I’m the better brother,’ said Calder, ‘but you’re the elder.’ He brought his horse up close, and he pulled their father’s chain from his pocket and slipped it over Scale’s neck, arranged it carefully across his shoulders. Patted him on the back and left his hand there, wondering when he got to love this stupid bastard. When he got to love anyone besides himself. He lowered his head. ‘Let me be the first to bow before the new King of the Northmen.’

Scale blinked down at the diamond on his grubby shirt. ‘Never thought things would end up this way.’

Neither had Calder. But he found he was glad they had. ‘End?’ He smirked across at his brother. ‘This is the beginning.’

Retired

The house wasn’t by the water. It didn’t have a porch. It did have a bench outside with a view of the valley, but when he sat on it of an evening with his pipe he didn’t tend to smile, just thought of all the men he’d buried. It leaked somewhat around the western eaves when the rain came down, which it had in quite some measure lately. It had just the one room, and a shelf up a ladder for sleeping on, and when it came to the great divide between sheds and houses, was only just on the right side of the issue. But it was a house, still, with good oak bones and a good stone chimney. And it was his. Dreams don’t just spring up by themselves, they need tending to, and you’ve got to plant that first seed somewhere. Or so Craw told himself.

‘Shit!’ Hammer and nail clattered to the boards and he was off around the room, spitting and cursing and shaking his hand about.

Working wood was a tough way to earn a living. He might not have been chewing his nails so much, but he’d taken to hammering the bastards into his fingers instead. The sad fact was, now the wounds all over Craw’s hands had forced him to face it, he wasn’t much of a carpenter. In his dreams of retirement he’d always seen himself crafting things of beauty. Probably while light streamed in through coloured windows and sawdust went up in artful puffs. Gables carved with gilded dragon heads, so lifelike they’d be the wonder of the North, folk flocking from miles around to get a look. But it turned out wood was just as full of split, and warp, and splinters as people were.

‘Bloody hell.’ Rubbing the life back into his thumb, nail already black from where he caught it yesterday.

They smiled at him in the village, brought him odd jobs, but he reckoned more’n one of the farmers was a good stretch better with a hammer than he was. Certainly they’d got that new barn up without calling on his skills and he had to admit it was likely a finer building for it. He’d started to think they wanted him in the valley more for his sword than his saw. While the war was on, the North’s ready supply of scum had the Southerners to kill and rob. Now they just had their own kind, and were taking every chance at it. A Named Man to hand was no bad thing. Those were the times. Those were still the times, and maybe they always would be.