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

Magweer bristled. Always the ones quickest to insults got the thinnest skin, for some reason. ‘You spend more time on your blisters than your weapons.’

‘My blisters are more important,’ said Clover.

Magweer’s ill-favoured face crunched up in a clueless scowl.

‘If you’re lucky, you might get through a whole campaign without drawing your sword.’ Clover gave his blister one last shave with the point of his little knife, then sat back to admire the results. ‘But you will, without question, be using your feet.’

‘The man has a point,’ said Wonderful.

Magweer spat. ‘No fucking idea why, but Stour wants the two o’ you up front with him.’

‘Oh, aye?’ asked Clover. ‘Has he not got all the wise counsel he needs with you lot o’ heroes?’

‘You mocking me, old man?’

Clover puffed out a weary breath. That boy seemed determined to butt heads with him. You let things go with most men, they let things go, too. But some are just fixed on taking offence. ‘Wouldn’t dare, Magweer,’ he said. ‘But wars are depressing things, whatever the songs say. We must lighten the mood where we can, eh, Wonderful?’

‘I smile whenever possible,’ she said, stony-faced.

Magweer looked from one of them to the other, then gave a sour hiss, spat once more for luck and wrenched his horse roughly around to the west. ‘Just get up there with the scouts soon as you can or there’ll be trouble.’ And he rode off, mud flicking from his horse’s hooves, nearly riding down some poor woman who’d been off fetching water and making her drop her buckets in the mud.

‘I like that boy a lot. Reminds me of me as a young man.’ Clover shook his head. ‘If I’d been an absolute cunt.’

‘You were an absolute cunt,’ said Wonderful. ‘And I’ve observed no significant changes in that regard.’

Clover started pulling his boot on. ‘Or, indeed, in any other.’

Wonderful scrubbed worriedly at the back of her shaved head as she frowned off down the road to the west. ‘Damn it, though,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a feeling about today.’

‘No sign,’ said Rikke’s father, offering her his battered eyeglass.

‘If you say there’s no sign,’ she said, ‘I daresay there isn’t any. You’re the War Chief. I’m … I don’t know, a seer, maybe?’ Sounded like a bloody presumptuous title. ‘Just … a really shit one.’

‘Sooner or later, you’ll have to stop hiding your talents, girl. Your Long Eye may be patchy but your short ones are still way sharper’n mine.’

Rikke sighed, and took the eyeglass, and peered over the weed-sprouting old battlements, keeping low just in case. Spots of gorse on the hillside. Fast-flowing water in the stream. Sheep dotted about the yellow-green grass. Sunlight and shadow chasing each other down the valley as the gusting wind dragged clouds across the sky. There were a couple of hundred Union men gathered around the bridge, where a wagon had been carefully positioned to look like it had just that moment broke an axle and was blocking things up halfway across.

The bait on their hook. Seemed a laughably obvious trick right then, but tricks always do when you know how they’re managed. Fish keep biting, even so.

‘No sign.’ Rikke handed back the glass, and clapped her father on the shoulder, and slipped down the steps.

The yard of the ruin was crammed with Oxel’s and Red Hat’s Carls, checking their gear, passing food, talking softly to one another. You’d think men would get fired up before a battle but more often they get maudlin. When you feel the Great Leveller’s shadow cold on your back, it’s not your hopes you come back to, but your regrets.

Isern had set her bony arse on the heap of crumbled masonry that was once the north wall of the fortress, spear across her knees, giving the blade a few licks with the whetstone.

‘No sign?’ she asked, not even looking up.

Rikke thought she caught a glint of metal among the trees at the bottom of the slope, but there was nothing there now. ‘No sign.’ And she perched on the tumbledown wall and wriggled till she found a comfortable spot, then started to arrange the fronds of a surprisingly pretty weed growing out of it. ‘The songs don’t say much about all the time spent sitting down, do they?’

Isern winced as she stretched her hurt leg out. ‘The skalds give disproportionate attention to the sword-work, it’s true. Truth is, battles are more often won with spades than blades. Roads, and ditches, and trenches, and proper shit-pits. You’ll dig your way to victory, my da always told me.’

‘Thought you hated your da?’

‘Being an utter fucker didn’t make him wrong. Quite the opposite, far as fighting goes.’

‘It’s a sad fact that the …’ Rikke trailed off, staring.

A man had stepped from the trees below them. A tall man with pale brows and pale hair in a spiky riot, shoulders hunched and elbows stuck out wide and short beard jutting. He had a sword in one hand and an axe in the other and he was frowning up the slope. Not at her, but at the tower beyond.

‘Who’s that?’ she said.

‘Who’s who?’

The pale man beckoned with his axe, and Rikke’s jaw fell open as a couple of dozen others slipped from the trees around him, all well armed. She jumped up, near falling over that pretty weed, and pointing wildly down towards them.

‘There’s men in the trees!’ she screeched.

A few Carls scrambled onto the crumbling wall, staring down. Oxel was one. Rikke was waiting for him to roar out for more men, but all he did was turn his shifty sneer from the trees to her and spit.

‘What the hell you talking about, girl?’ he growled. ‘There’s no one there.’

‘Fucking mad bitch,’ she heard one of the others mutter as they drifted back into the ruin, shaking their heads.

Rikke wondered if she was going mad. Or more mad, maybe. Men were flooding from the trees now. Hundreds of the bastards. ‘You see ’em, don’t you?’ she asked Isern in a small voice.

The hillwoman leaned on her spear, calmly chewing. ‘The men are rude, but the men are right. There’s no one there.’ She gave Rikke a painful jab with her sharp elbow. ‘But maybe someone will be.’

‘Oh, no.’ And Rikke covered her eyes with a hand and the left one was hot. ‘Wanna be sick.’ She bent over and coughed out an acrid little mouthful, but when she looked up, the men were still there, too brightly lit since the sun was still low, a great standard in their midst, flapping hard even though the breeze had died. ‘They even got a flag.’

‘What flag?’

‘Black with a red circle.’

Isern’s frown got harder. ‘That was Bethod’s standard. Now it’s Black Calder’s.’

Rikke was sick again. Just a little string of drool this time, and she spat and wiped her mouth. ‘Thought he … was way off north.’

‘You cannot force the Long Eye open,’ murmured Isern. ‘But when it opens by itself, it’s a fool who doesn’t see.’ She turned and limped quick across the rubble-strewn yard of the fortress, making men grumble as she shouldered past. ‘Black Calder’s always had a bad habit of turning up where he shouldn’t.’

‘So what’re you doing?’

‘Warning your father.’

‘You sure?’ muttered Rikke as she followed Isern up the crumbling steps, still glimpsing those men out of the corner of her eye. An army of ’em now. ‘I mean, what if they’re going to turn up next week? Or next month? What if they turned up years ago!’

‘Then we’ll look like a right pair o’ fools.’ Isern grinned at her as she limped up onto the roof of the tower. ‘But at least we won’t be two corpses in a big heap of corpses. Dogman!’

‘Isern-i-Phail,’ muttered Rikke’s father with a sideways glance. ‘Make it good, I’ve got a battle to—’