Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

He pulled on the reins and slowed his horse to a walk. He clattered over a wooden bridge, one of Bethod’s new ones, the river underneath surging with the autumn rain. Up the gentle rise, the wall looming over him. High, sheer, dark and solid looking. A threatening piece of wall if ever there’d been one. He couldn’t see men at the slots in the battlements, but he guessed they had to be there. He swallowed, spit moving awkward in his throat, then made himself sit up tall, pretending he wasn’t cut and aching all over from seven days of battle in the mountains. He wondered if he was about to hear a flatbow click, feel the stab of pain then drop into the mud, dead. Some kind of an embarrassing song that would make.

“Well, well, well!” came a deep voice, and Logen knew it right away. Who else would it be but Bethod?

The strange thing was that he was glad to hear it, for the quickest moment. Until he remembered all the blood between them. Until he remembered they hated each other. You can have enemies you never really meet, Logen had plenty. You can kill men you don’t know, he’d done it often. But you can’t truly hate a man without loving him first, and there’s always a trace of that love left over.

“I’m taking a look down from my gates and who should ride up out of the past?” Bethod called to him. “The Bloody-Nine! Would you believe it? I’d organise a feast, but we’ve no food to spare in here!” He stood there, at the parapet, high up above the doors, fists on the stone. He didn’t sneer. He didn’t smile. He didn’t do much of anything.

“If it ain’t the King o’ the Northmen!” Logen shouted up. “Still got your golden hat, then?”

Bethod touched the ring round his head, the big jewel on his brow glittering with the setting sun. “Why wouldn’t I have?”

“Let me see…” Logen looked left and right, up and down the bare walls. “Just that you’ve got shit all left to be King of, far as I can tell.”

“Huh. I reckon we’re both feeling lonely. Where are your friends, Bloody-Nine? Those killers you liked around you. Where’s the Thunderhead, and Grim, and the Dogman, and that bastard Black Dow?”

“All done with, Bethod. Dead, up in the mountains. Dead as Skarling. Them and Littlebone, and Goring, and Whitesides, and plenty more besides.”

Bethod looked grim at that. “Not much to cheer about, if you’re asking me. That’s some useful men gone back to the mud, one way or another. Some friends of mine, and some of yours. There never is a happy outcome with we two, is there? Bad as friends, and worse as enemies. What did you come here for, Ninefingers?”

Logen sat there, for a moment, thinking of all the other times he’d done what he had to do now. The challenges he’d made, and their outcomes, and there were no happy memories among that lot. Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s reluctant. But there was no other way. “I’m here to make a challenge!” he bellowed, and the sound of it echoed back from the damp, dark walls and died a slow death in the misty air.

Bethod tipped back his head and laughed. A laugh without much joy in it, Logen reckoned. “By the dead, Ninefingers, but you never change. You’re like some old dog no one can stop from barking. Challenge? What have we got left to fight over?”

“I win, you open the gates and belong to me. My prisoner. I lose, the Union pack up and sail for home, and you’re free.”

Bethod’s smile slowly faded and his eyes narrowed, suspicious. Logen knew that look from way back. Turning over the chances, sorting through the reasons why. “That sounds like a golden offer, considering the fix I’m in. Hard to believe it. What’s in it for your Southern friends up there?”

Logen snorted. “They’ll wait, if they have to, but they don’t much care about you, Bethod. You’re nothing to them, for all your bluster. They kicked your arse across the North already and they reckon you’ll not be bothering them again either way. If I win, they get your head. If I lose, they can go home early.”

“I’m nothing to them, eh?” Bethod split a sad smile. “Is that what it’s come to, after all my work, and sweat, and pain? Are you happy, Ninefingers? To see all I’ve fought for put in the dust?”

“Why shouldn’t I be? You’ve no one but yourself to blame for it. It was you brought us to this. Take my challenge, Bethod, then maybe one of us can have peace!”

The King of the Northmen gaped down, eyes wide. “No one else to blame? Me? How soon we all forget!” He grabbed the chain round his shoulders and rattled it. “You think I wanted this? You think I asked for any of it? All I wanted was a strip more land to feed my people, to stop the big clans squeezing me. All I wanted was to win a few victories to be proud of, to pass on something better to my sons than I got from my father.” He leaned forward, his hands clutching at the battlements. “Who was it always had to push a step further? Who was it would never let me stop? Who was it had to taste blood, and once he’d tasted it got drunk on it, went mad with it, could never get enough?” His finger stabbed down. “Who else but the Bloody-Nine?”

“That’s not how it was,” growled Logen.

Bethod’s laughter echoed harsh on the wind. “Is it not? I wanted to talk with Shama Heartless, but you had to kill him! I tried to strike a deal at Heonan, but you had to climb up and settle your score, and start a dozen more! Peace, you say? I begged you to let me make peace at Uffrith, but you had to fight Threetrees! On my knees I begged you, but you had to have the biggest name in all the North! Then once you’d beaten him, you broke your word to me and let him live, as though there was nothing bigger to think about than your damn pride!”

“That’s not how it was,” said Logen.

“There’s not a man in the North that doesn’t know the truth of it! Peace? Hah! What about Rattleneck, eh? I would have ransomed his son back to him, and we could all have gone home happy, but no! What did you say to me? Easier to stop the Whiteflow than to stop the Bloody-Nine! Then you had to nail his head to my standard for the whole world to see, so the vengeance would never find an end! Every time I tried to stop, you dragged me on, deeper and deeper into the mire! Until there could be no stopping any longer! Until it was kill or be killed! Until I had to put down the whole North! You made me King, Ninefingers. What other choices did you leave me?”

“That’s not how it was,” whispered Logen. But he knew it had been.

“Tell yourself that I’m the cause of all your woes if it makes you happy! Tell yourself I’m the merciless one, the murderous one, the bloodthirsty one, but ask yourself who I learned it from. I had the best master! Play at being the good man if you please, the man with no choices, but we both know what you really are. Peace? You’ll never have peace, Bloody-Nine. You’re made of death!”

Logen would’ve liked to deny it, but it would just have been more lies. Bethod truly knew him. Bethod truly understood him. Better than anyone. His worst enemy, and still his best friend. “Then why not kill me, when you had the chance?”

The King of the Northmen frowned, as though he couldn’t understand something. Then he started to laugh again. He shrieked with it. “You don’t know why? You stood right beside him and you don’t know? You learned nothing from me, Ninefingers! After all these years, you still let the rain wash you any way it pleases!”

“What’re you saying?” snarled Logen.

“Bayaz!”

“Bayaz? What of him?”

“I was ready to put the bloody cross in you, sink your carcass in a bog with all the rest of your misfit idiots and was happy to do it, until that old liar came calling!”