Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

There was a bit of mumbling, a few shifty looks. Red Hat glanced sideways, his tongue wedged into his bottom lip. “Maybe we did. Don’t get me wrong, chief, or your Royal Highness, or whatever it is now.” He bowed his head to show he meant no disrespect by it. “I’ve fought before and hard enough, had my life balanced on a sword’s edge, and all o’ that. Just, well… why fight now, is what I’m saying. What we’re all thinking, I reckon. Ain’t none of our business, is it? Ain’t our fight, this.”

Dogman shook his head. “The Union are going to take us for a right crowd o’ cowards.”

“Who cares what they think?” someone said.

Red Hat stepped up close. “Look, chief, I don’t care much of a shit whether some fool I don’t know thinks I’m a coward. I’ve spilled enough blood for that. We all have.”

“Huh,” grunted Logen. “So your vote’s to stay here, then, is it?”

Red Hat shrugged. “Well, I guess—” He squawked as Logen’s forehead crunched into his face, smashing his nose like a nut on an anvil. He dropped hard on his back in the mud, spluttering blood down his chin.

Logen turned round, and he let his face hang on one side, the way he used to. The Bloody-Nine’s face—cold and dead, caring for nothing. It was easy to do it. Felt as natural on him as a favourite pair of boots. His hand found the cold grip of the Maker’s sword, and all around him men eased back, shuffled away, muttered and whispered.

“Any other one o’ you cunts want a vote?”

The lad dropped his flask in the grass and jumped up from where he’d been sitting. Logen gave a few of them his eye, one by one, whoever looked hardest, and one by one they looked at the ground, at the trees, at anything but him. Until he looked at Shivers. That longhaired bastard stared straight back at him. Logen narrowed his eyes. “How about you?”

Shivers shook his head, hair swaying across his face. “Oh no. Not now.”

“When you’re ready, then. When any one o’ you are ready. Until then, I’ll have some work out o’ you. Weapons,” he growled.

Swords and axes, spears and shields were all made ready quick-time. Men fussed about, finding their places, competing all of a sudden to be the first to charge. Red Hat was just getting up, wincing with one hand to his bloody face. Logen looked down at him. “If you’re feeling hard done by, think on this. In the old days you’d be trying to hold your guts in about now.”

“Aye,” he grunted, wiping his mouth. “Right y’are.” Logen watched him walk off back to his boys, spitting blood. Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s got a talent for turning a friend into an enemy.

“Did you have to?” asked the Dogman.

Logen shrugged. He hadn’t wanted it, but he was leader now. Always a disaster, but there it was, and a man in charge can’t have men putting questions. Just can’t have it. They come with questions first, then they come with knives. “Couldn’t see another way. That’s how it’s always been, ain’t it?”

“I was hoping times changed.”

“Times never change. You have to be realistic, Dogman.”

“Aye. Shame, though.”

A lot of things were a shame. Logen had given up trying to put them right a long time ago. He slid out the Maker’s sword and held it up. “Let’s go, then! And this time like we care a shit!” He started off through the trees, hearing the rest of the lads following. Out into the open air, and the walls of Adua loomed up, a sheer grey cliff at the top of a grassy rise, studded with round towers. There were quite a number of corpses lying around. Enough to give even a battle-hardened Carl some cold feelings. Gurkish corpses mostly, from the colour of their skin, sprawled among all kinds of broken gear, squashed into muddy earth, trampled with hoof-prints.

“Steady!” shouted Logen as he jogged on through them. “Steady!” He caught sight of something up ahead, a fence of sharpened stakes, the body of a horse hanging dead from one of them. Behind the stakes, men moved. Men with bows.

“Cover up!” A few arrows came zipping down. One thudded into Shivers’ shield, a couple more into the ground round Logen’s feet. A Carl not a stride from him got one in the chest and tumbled over.

Logen ran. The fence came wobbling towards him, a good bit slower than he’d have liked. Someone stood between two of the stakes, dark-faced, with a shining breastplate, a red plume on his pointed helmet. He was shouting to a crowd of others gathered behind him, waving a curved sword. A Gurkish officer, maybe. As good a thing to charge at as any. Logen’s boots squelched at the churned-up ground. A couple more arrows spun past him, hastily aimed. The officer’s eyes went wide. He took a nervous step back, raised his sword.

Logen jerked to his left and the curved blade thudded into the turf at his feet. He growled as he swung the Maker’s sword round and the heavy length of metal clanged deep into the officer’s bright breastplate, left a great dent in it. He screeched, then tottered forwards, all doubled up and hardly able to gasp in a breath. His sword spun out of his hand and Logen hit him on the back of his head, crushed his helmet and sent him sprawling in the mud.

He looked to the others, but not one of them had moved. They were a tattered-looking set, like a dark-skinned version of the weakest kind of Thralls. Hardly the ruthless bastards he’d expected from the way that Ferro had always talked about the Gurkish. They huddled together, spears sticking out this way and that. A couple even had bows with arrows nocked, probably could have stuck him like a hedgehog, but they didn’t. Still, charging right at them might well have been the very thing to wake them up. Logen had taken an arrow or two in his time and he didn’t fancy another.

So instead of coming forward, he stood up tall, and he gave a roar. A fighting roar, like the one he’d given when he charged down the hill at Carleon, all those years ago, when he still had all his fingers and all his hopes intact. He felt the Dogman come up beside him, and lift his sword, and give a scream of his own. Then Shivers was up with them, bellowing like a bull and smashing the head of his axe against his shield. Then Red Hat, with his bloody face, and Grim, and all the rest, yelling their war cries.

They stood in a long line, shaking their weapons, beating them crashing together, roaring and screaming and whooping at the tops of their voices, making a sound as if hell itself had opened up and a crowd of devils was singing welcome. The brown men watched them, staring and trembling, their mouths and their eyes wide open. Logen didn’t reckon they’d ever seen anything like this before.

One of them dropped his spear. Didn’t mean to, maybe, just so struck with the noise and the sight of all these crazy hairy bastards his fingers came open. It fell anyway, whether he meant it or not, and that was it, they all started dropping their gear. Fast as they could, it clattered down in the grass. Seemed stupid to keep shouting, and the war cries died out, left the two groups of men staring at each other in silence across that stretch of mud, planted with bent stakes and twisted corpses.

“Strange kind o’ battle, that,” muttered Shivers.

The Dogman leaned towards Logen. “What do we do with ’em now we’ve got ’em?”

“We can’t just sit hear minding ’em.”

“Uh,” said Grim.

Logen chewed at his lip, spun his sword round and round in his hand, trying to think of some clever way to come at this. He couldn’t see one. “Might as well just let ’em go.” He jerked his head away north. None of them moved, so he tried it again, and pointed with his sword. They cringed and muttered to each other when he lifted it, one of them falling over in the mud. “Just piss off that way,” he said, “and we’ve got no argument. Just piss… off… that way!” He stabbed with the sword again.