Джо Аберкромби - A Little Hatred - Book One (The Age of Madness)

‘Good choice. Good woman. Good judgement.’

‘Stour’s got her tearing her bloody hair out.’

Clover frowned. ‘Wonderful’s got hair now?’

‘It’s a figure of speech.’

‘Ah.’

‘I want you to help her out. Keep Stour on the right path.’

‘I’m supposed to know where the right path is?’

‘A damn sight better than my prick of a son. Maybe you can nudge him off a couple of wrong ones, anyway.’

Clover scratched his beard, and watched the boys flounder in the meadow, and Calder’s lad shaking his head in disgust, and he took a slow breath in and slowly breathed it out. ‘All right, then.’ He’d been around long enough to know when there was no squirrelling out of a thing. He grunted as he bent down and fished up his sword. Slowly, because why not? ‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘Reckon that’s all any of us can do, in the end. You’re a straight edge, Clover. You’ve always been loyal.’

‘Doubtless. I was loyal to Bethod, then to Glama Golden, then to Cairm Ironhead, now to you.’

‘Well. You were loyal to them till they put themselves on the losing side.’

‘That sounds almost exactly like disloyalty.’

Calder shrugged. ‘A man has to bend with the breeze.’

‘If I’ve got one talent, it’s bending with the breeze. You keep the apples.’ And Clover nudged the basket towards the scar-lipped lad with his boot. ‘They make my tummy hurt.’

‘And all my dreams came true,’ said Clover, ambling up with his sword over one shoulder.

Wonderful turned her head, showing the white scar through the black and silver stubble on her scalp, and hacked out a laugh. A laugh without much joy in it.

‘Look who it is,’ she said.

He glanced down at himself. ‘I recognise those boots! Jonas Clover has arrived and all wrongs shall be set right.’ He winked at her but she was not much charmed. ‘Must be your lucky day.’

‘I’m fucking due one.’ And she slapped her hand in his, and pulled him close by it, and they clapped each other around the back for good measure.

‘You been eating well?’ he asked, looking her up and down. ‘You’re like hugging a bundle of spears.’

‘Always been lean.’

‘Oh, me too.’ And he patted his belly. ‘The body of a hero lies just below this carefully nurtured layer of fat.’

She raised a brow. Clover loved to see things done well, and she’d a hell of a brow-raise, did Wonderful. ‘And what could possibly drag your fat this close to the fighting?’

‘Black Calder. He tells me you need help.’

‘That I’ll not deny. When does it get here?’

‘You dare trifle with me, woman? I’m supposed to mind the future of the North, the king-in-waiting, the Great Wolf, Stour Nightfall.’

Both her brows went up now. ‘You?’

‘I’m to keep him on the right path. Calder’s words.’

‘Good luck with that.’ She beckoned him close and lowered her voice. ‘Not sure I ever met a bigger prick than that boy, and I stood second to Black Dow.’

Clover snorted. ‘For a day you did.’

‘A day was plenty.’

‘I do hear tell the Great Wolf can be somewhat prickish.’

Wonderful jerked her head towards a column of smoke rising above the trees. ‘He’s even now burning a village we just captured over yonder. He was going house to house when I left him. Making sure the flames got the lot.’

Clover thought he’d caught that old burning-building whiff on the breeze. ‘Why fight for something if all you do is burn it?’

‘Maybe the Great Wolf could tell you. For damn sure I can’t.’

‘Well.’ Clover pushed his chin forward and scratched at the stubble on his stretched-out neck. ‘Luckily, I’m a man of heroic patience.’

‘You’ll need to be.’ Wonderful nodded sideways. ‘Here comes the future.’

And Stour came swaggering down the track. He’d been given the name Nightfall as a babe, on account of being born during an eclipse. It had been an hour before, in fact, but no one dared say so now. All part of the ever-inflating legend of the Great Wolf. He’d long, dark hair, and fine clothes buckled and riveted with gold, and these grey-blue eyes that looked always a little wet, as if he was about to cry. Tears of acid contempt, maybe, for the world and everything in it.

He was no giant, but there was a quick strength to the way he moved. A dancer’s grace. And sneering confidence in crazed abundance. A surfeit of self-belief can get you killed, but Clover had seen it carry men through fire before as well. The old iron skin of arrogance. Here was a fellow who knew how to pick his moment, and to cut what he wanted from it with no hesitation and even less regret.

He had that crowd of cunts with him that famous fighters tend to gather, many of them proudly sporting the sign of the wolf on their shields. Men with no name of their own, drawn to the big name like moths to a bonfire. Clover had seen the wretched pattern a dozen times before. Glama Golden had a crew very similar, and the Bloody-Nine, too, and more than likely Skarling Hoodless had a glowering gaggle however many hundred years before.

Times change, but that crowd of cunts stays much the same.

Stour Nightfall fixed Clover with that wet, cold, hollow stare, quick hand sitting loose on the pommel of his sword, and his grin was full of good teeth and bad threats.

‘Jonas Clover,’ he said. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Your father sent me. Black Calder.’

‘I know who my father is.’

‘He knows who his father is,’ sneered one of the sneerers. A heavy-muscled young bastard with a whole armoury strapped about him, made a sound on the move like a knife-seller carting too much stock.

Stour scowled sideways. ‘Shut your mouth, Magweer.’ Magweer bristled to be slapped down, a wearisome pattern of manly goings-on in which Clover, to his shame, had once been a keen participant. ‘What I want to know is – why did he send you?’

‘To keep you on the right path.’ Clover gave a helpless little shrug. ‘His words, you understand.’

‘And you can tell the right path from a midden, can you?’

Stour’s wolf-shield arse-lickers chuckled like that was some high wit, and Clover smiled along with ’em. If all a man can do is pick his moment, then this was no moment for pride. ‘I make no grand claims for myself, but I’ve chosen a few wrong paths down the years. Could be I can spare you from stepping in some of the turds that’ve made my boots so fragrant.’

‘I thought I could smell dung.’ And Stour sniffed, and licked his teeth, and wiped at his nose with a thumbtip. ‘So what’d be your first advice?’

‘Never scratch your eyebrows with a sword.’ Clover grinned. No one else did, but that was their lookout. ‘Best to just leave ’em in the scabbard whenever possible, I’d say. Drawn swords are bloody dangerous, that’s a fact.’

Stour stepped a little closer and brought a little bubble of menace with him. ‘Wisdom fit for a hero,’ he whispered.

‘I used to want to be a hero.’ Clover patted his belly. ‘Grew out of it. But I told your father I’d do what I could.’

‘So …’ Stour swept his hand out towards the valley. ‘Care to point out the path?’

‘Wouldn’t presume. I know what I am, and I’m one of life’s followers.’

The king-in-waiting opened his wet eyes wide. ‘Try to keep up, then, old man.’ And he brushed past, eyes fixed on his next conquest, and Clover stepped out of the way of his scowling companions, bowing low. ‘I want to burn us another village or two before sundown!’ the Great Wolf called over his shoulder, and the young glories competed with each other to laugh the loudest.

‘What did I say?’ Wonderful leaned close. ‘Absolute prick.’