Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

To one side of the wall there was a tower, built up against the cliff. Or at least there was a great natural pillar sticking out from the rock with half-cut chunks of stone mortared to the top, making a wide platform on the cliff-side, overlooking the wall from high above. Logen looked at the Dogman as he trudged up, and the Dogman squinted at that wall as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“This is it?” growled Dow, coming up next to them, his lip curling. A few trees had taken root at one side, just under the tower, must have been fifty years ago at least. Now they loomed up over the wall. A man could have climbed them easily, and stepped inside the place without even stretching far.

Tul stared up at the ragged excuse for a fortress. “A strong place in the mountains, you said.”

“Strong… ish.” Crummock waved his hand. “We hillmen have never been much for building and so on. What were you expecting? Ten marble towers and a hall bigger’n Skarling’s?”

“I was expecting a halfway decent wall, at least,” growled Dow.

“Bah! Walls? I heard you were cold as snow and hot as piss, Black Dow, and now you want walls to hide behind?”

“We’ll be outnumbered ten to one if Bethod does turn up, you mad fuck! You’re damn right I want a wall, and you told us there’d be one!”

“But you said it yourself friend.” Crummock spoke soft and slow as though he was explaining it to a child, and he tapped at the side of his head with one thick finger. “I’m mad! Mad as a sack of owls, and everyone says so! I can’t remember the names of my own children. Who knows what I think a wall looks like? I hardly know what I’m talking of myself, most of the time, and you’re fool enough to listen to me? You must be mad yourselves!”

Logen rubbed at the bridge of his nose and he gave a groan. The Dogman’s Carls were gathering near them now, looking up at that mossy heap of stones and muttering to each other, far from happy. Logen could hardly blame them. It was a long, hot walk they’d had to find this at the end of it. But they had no choices, as far as he could see. “It’s a bit late to build a better one,” he grumbled. “We’ll have to do what we can with what we’ve got.”

“That’s it Bloody-Nine, you need no wall and you know it!” Crummock clapped Logen on the arm with his great fat hand. “You cannot die! You’re beloved of the moon, my fine new friend, above all others! You cannot die, not with the moon looking over you! You cannot—”

“Shut up,” said Logen.

They crunched sourly across the slope towards the gate. Crummock called out and the old doors wobbled open. A pair of suspicious hillmen stood on the other side, watching them come in. They slogged up a steep ramp cut into the rock, all tired and grumbling, and came out into a flat space above. A saddle between the two crags, might have been a hundred strides wide and two hundred long, sheer cliffs of stone all round. There were a few wooden shacks and sheds scattered about the edges, all green with old moss, a slumping stone hall built against the rock face with smoke rising out of a squat chimney. Just next to it a narrow stair was cut into the cliff, climbing up to the platform at the top of the tower.

“Nowhere to run to,” Logen muttered, “if things turn sour.”

Crummock only grinned the wider. “Course not. That’s the whole point, ain’t it? Bethod’ll think he’s got us like beetles in a bottle.”

“He will have,” growled the Dogman.

“Aye, but then your friends will come up behind him and won’t he get the father of all shocks, though? It’ll almost be worth it for the look on his face, the shit-eating bastard!”

Logen worked his mouth and spat onto the stony ground. “I wonder what the looks on our faces’ll be by then? All slack and corpse-like would be my guess.” A herd of shaggy sheep were pressed in tight together in a pen, staring around wide-eyed, bleating to each other. Hemmed in and helpless, and Logen knew exactly how they felt. From inside the fort, where the ground was a good deal higher, there was hardly a wall at all. You could’ve stepped up onto its walkway, if you’d got long legs, and stood at its crumbling, moss-ridden excuse for a parapet.

“Don’t you worry your beautiful self about nothing, Bloody-Nine,” laughed Crummock. “My fortress could be better built, I’ll grant you, but the ground is with us, and the mountains, and the moon, all smiling on our bold endeavour. This is a strong place, with a strong history. Do you not know the story of Laffa the Brave?”

“Can’t say that I do.” Logen wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to hear it now, but he was in the long habit of not getting what he wanted.

“Laffa was a great bandit chief of the hillmen, a long time ago. He raided all the clans around for years, him and his brothers. One hot summer the clans had enough, so they banded together and hunted him in the mountains. Here’s where he made his last stand. Right here in this fortress. Laffa and his brothers and all his people.”

“What happened?” asked Dogman.

“They all got killed, and their heads cut off and put in a sack, and the sack was buried in the pit they used to shit in.” Crummock beamed. “Guess that’s why they call it a last stand, eh?”

“That’s it? That’s the story?”

“That’s all of it that I know, but I’m not right sure what else there could be. That was pretty much the end for Laffa, I’d say.”

“Thanks for the encouragement.”

“That’s alright, that’s alright! I’ve more stories, if you need more!”

“No, no, that’s enough for me.” Logen turned and started walking off, the Dogman beside him. “You can tell me more once we’ve won!”

“Ha ha, Bloody-Nine!” shouted Crummock after him, “that’ll be a story in itself, eh? You can’t fool me! You’re like I am, beloved of the moon! We fight hardest when our backs are to the mountains and there’s no way out! Tell me it ain’t so! We love it when we got no choices!”

“Oh aye,” Logen muttered to himself as he stalked off towards the gate. “There’s nothing better than no choices.”

Dogman stood at the foot o’ the wall, staring up at it, and wondering what to do to give him and the rest a better chance at living out the week.

“It’d be a good thing to get all this creeper and grass cleared off it,” he said. “Makes it a damn sight easier to climb.”

Tul raised an eyebrow. “You sure it ain’t all that plant that’s holding it together?”

Grim tugged at a vine and a shower of dried-out mortar came with it.

“Might be you’re right.” Dogman sighed. “Cut off what we can, then, eh? Some work at the top would be time well spent and all. Be nice to have a decent stack o’ stones to hide behind when Bethod starts shooting arrows at us.”

“That it would,” said Tul. “And we could dig us a ditch down here in front, plant some stakes round the bottom, make it harder for ’em to get up close.”

“Then close that gate, nail it shut, and wedge a load of rocks in behind it.”

“We’ll have trouble getting out,” said Tul.

Logen snorted. “Us getting out won’t be the pressing problem, I’m thinking.”

“You’ve a point right there,” laughed Crummock, ambling up with a lit pipe in his fat fist. “It’s Bethod’s boys getting in that we should worry on.”

“Getting these walls patched up would be a good start at settling my mind.” Dogman pointed at the trees grown up over the wall. “We need to get these cut down and cut up, carve us out some stone, mix us some mortar and all the rest. Crummock, you got people can do that? You got tools?”

He puffed at his pipe, frowning at Dogman all the long while, then blew brown smoke. “I might have, but I won’t take my orders from such as you, Dogman. The moon knows my talents, and they’re for murder, not mortaring.” Grim rolled his eyes.