Abercrombie, Joe - The Heroes

‘Magic,’ muttered Craw. ‘Can’t say I care for the stuff.’ In his experience it did more harm than good. ‘I daresay a sorcerer’s got their uses and all but, I mean, do they always have to act so bloody strange?’

Dow flicked the twig away with a wrinkled lip. ‘It’s a war. I care for whatever gets the job done. Best not mention my black-skinned friend to anyone else though, eh? Folks might get the wrong idea.’

‘What’s the right idea?’

‘Whatever I fucking say it is!’ snarled Dow, and he didn’t look like he was faking the anger this time.

Craw held up his open hands. ‘You’re the Chief.’

‘Damn right!’ Dow frowned at that crack. ‘I’m the Chief.’ Almost like it was himself he was trying to convince. Just for a moment Craw wondered whether Black Dow ever felt like a fraud. Whether Black Dow’s courage needed stitching together every morning.

He didn’t like that thought much. ‘We’re fighting, then?’

Dow’s eyes swivelled sideways and his killing smile broke out fresh, no trace of doubt in it, or fear neither. ‘High fucking time, no? You hear what I was telling Reachey?’

‘Most of it. He’ll try and draw ’em off towards Osrung, then you’ll go straight at the Heroes.’

‘Straight at ’em!’ barked Dow, like he could make it work by shouting it. ‘The way Threetrees would’ve done it, eh?’

‘Would he?’

Dow opened his mouth, then paused. ‘What does it matter? Threetrees is seven winters in the mud.’

‘True. Where do you want me and my dozen?’

‘Right beside me when I charge up to the Heroes, o’ course. Expect there’s nothing in the world you’d like more’n to take that hill back from those Union bastards.’

Craw gave a long sigh, wondering what his dozen would have to say about that. ‘Oh, aye. It’s top o’ my list.’

The Very Model

‘An officer should command from horseback, eh, Gorst? The proper place for a headquarters is the saddle!’ General Jalenhorm affectionately patted the neck of his magnificent grey, then leaned over without waiting for an answer to roar at a spotty-faced courier. ‘Tell the captain that he must simply clear the road by whatever means necessary! Clear the road and move them up! Haste, all haste, lad, Marshal Kroy wants the division moving north!’ He swivelled to bellow over the other shoulder. ‘Speed, gentlemen, speed! Towards Carleon, and victory!’

Jalenhorm certainly looked a conquering hero. Fantastically young to command a division and with a smile that said he was prepared for anything, dressed with an admirable lack of pretension in a dusty trooper’s uniform and as comfortable in the saddle as a favourite armchair. If he had been half as fine a tactician as he was a horseman, they would long ago have had Black Dow in chains and on public display in Adua. But he is not, and we do not.

A constantly shifting body of staff officers, adjutants, liaisons and even a scarcely pubescent bugler trailed eagerly along in the general’s wake like wasps after a rotten apple, fighting to attract his fickle attention by snapping, jostling and shouting over one another with small dignity. Meanwhile Jalenhorm himself barked out a volley of confusing and contradictory replies, questions, orders and occasional musings on life.

‘On the right, on the right, of course!’ to one officer. ‘Tell him not to worry, worrying solves nothing!’ to another. ‘Move them up, Marshal Kroy wants them all up by lunch!’ A large body of infantry were obliged to shuffle exhausted from the road, watch the officers pass, then chew on their dust. ‘Beef, then,’ bellowed Jalenhorm with a regal wave, ‘or mutton, whichever, we have more important business! Will you come up the hill with me, Colonel Gorst? Apparently one gets quite the view from the Heroes. You are his Majesty’s observer, are you not?’

I am his Majesty’s fool. Almost as much his Majesty’s fool as you are. ‘Yes, General.’

Jalenhorm had already whisked his mount from the road and down the shingle towards the shallows, pebbles scattering. His hangers-on strained to follow, splashing out into the water and heedlessly showering a company of heavily loaded foot who were struggling across, up to their waists in the river. The hill rose out of the fields on the far side, a great green cone so regular as to seem artificial. The circle of standing stones that the Northmen called the Heroes jutted from its flat top, a much smaller circle on a spur to the right, a single tall needle of rock on another to the left.

Orchards grew on the far bank, the twisted trees heavy with reddening apples, thin grass underneath patched with shade and covered in halfrotten windfalls. Jalenhorm leaned out to pluck one from a low-hanging branch and happily bit into it. ‘Yuck.’ He shuddered and spat it out. ‘Cookers, I suppose.’

‘General Jalenhorm, sir!’ A breathless messenger whipping his horse down one row of trees towards them.

‘Speak, man!’ Without slowing from a trot.

‘Major Kalf is at the Old Bridge, sir, with two companies of the Fourteenth. He wonders whether he should push forward to a nearby farm and establish a perimeter—’

‘Absolutely! Forward. We need to make room! Where are the rest of his companies?’ The messenger had already saluted and galloped off westwards. Jalenhorm frowned around at his staff. ‘Major Kalf’s other companies? Where’s the rest of the Fourteenth?’

Dappled sunlight slid over baffled faces. An officer opened his mouth but said nothing. Another shrugged. ‘Perhaps held up in Adwein, sir, there is considerable confusion on the narrow roads—’

He was interrupted by another messenger, bringing a well-lathered horse from the opposite direction. ‘Sir! Colonel Vinkler wishes to know whether he should turn the residents of Osrung out of their houses and garrison—’

‘No, no, turn them out? No!’

‘Sir!’ The young man pulled his horse about.

‘Wait! Yes, turn them out. Garrison the houses. Wait! No. No. Hearts and minds, eh, Colonel Gorst? Hearts and mind, don’t you think? What do you think?’

I think your close friendship with the king has caused you to be promoted far beyond the rank at which you were most effective. I think you would have made an excellent lieutenant, a passable captain, a mediocre major and a dismal colonel, but as a general you are a liability. I think you know this, and have no confidence, which makes you behave, paradoxically, as if you have far too much. I think you make decisions with little thought, abandon some with none and stick furiously to others against all argument, thinking that to change your mind would be to show weakness. I think you fuss with details better left to subordinates, fearing to tackle the larger issues, and that makes your subordinates smother you with decisions on every trifle, which you then bungle. I think you are a decent, honest, courageous man. And I think you are a fool. ‘Hearts and minds,’ said Gorst.

Jalenhorm beamed. The messenger tore off, presumably to win the people of Osrung to the Union cause by allowing them keep their own houses. The rest of the officers emerged from the shade of the apple trees and into the sun, the grassy slope stretching away above them.

‘With me, boys, with me!’ Jalenhorm urged his charger uphill, maintaining an effortless balance in the saddle while his retainers struggled to keep up, one balding captain almost torn from his seat as a low branch clubbed him in the head.

An old drystone wall ringed the hill not far from the top, sprouting with seeding weeds, no higher than a stride or two even on its outside face. One of the more impetuous young ensigns tried to show off by jumping it, but his horse shied and nearly dumped him. A fitting metaphor for the Union involvement in the North so far – a lot of vainglory but it all ends in embarrassment.