Last Argument Of Kings: Book Three (The First Law 3)

A couple of tattered standards still stood, hanging lifeless. Bethod’s own great banner had been torn down and trampled beneath horses’ hooves, and now its threadbare frame stuck up at a twisted angle, above the settling fog of dust, like clean-picked bones. A fitting symbol for the sudden fall of the King of the Northmen.

Poulder reined in his horse beside West, smiling primly at the carnage like a schoolmaster at an orderly classroom.

‘How did we fare, General?’

‘Casualties appear to have been heavy, sir, especially in our front ranks, but the enemy were largely taken by surprise. Most of their best troops were already committed to the attack on the fortress. Once our cavalry got them on the run, we drove them all the way to the walls! Picked their camp clean.’ Poulder wrinkled his nose, moustaches trembling with distaste. ‘Several hundred of those devilish Shanka we put to the sword, and a much greater number we drove off into the hills to the north, from whence, I do not doubt, they will be greatly reluctant to return. We wrought a slaughter among the Northmen to satisfy King Casamir himself, and the rest have laid down their arms. We guess at five thousand prisoners, sir. Bethod’s army has been quite crushed. Crushed!’ He gave a girlish chuckle. ‘No one could deny that you have well and truly avenged the death of Crown Prince Ladisla today, Lord Marshal!’

West swallowed. ‘Of course. Well and truly avenged.’

‘A master-stroke, to use our Northmen as a decoy. A bold and a decisive manoeuvre. I am, and will always be, honoured to have played my small part! A famous day for Union arms! Marshal Burr would have been proud to see it!’

West had never in his life expected to receive praise from General Poulder, but now the great moment had come he found that he could take no pleasure in it. He had performed no acts of bravery. He had taken no risks with his own life. He had done nothing but say charge. He felt saddle-sore and bone-weary, his jaw ached from being constantly clenched with worry. Even speaking seemed an effort. ‘Is Bethod among the dead, or the captured?’

‘As to specific prisoners, sir, I could not say. It may be that our Northern allies have him.’ Poulder gave vent to a jagged chuckle. ‘In which case I doubt he’ll be with us much longer, eh, Marshal? Eh, Sergeant Pike?’ He grinned as he drew his finger sharply across his belly and clicked his tongue. ‘The bloody cross for him, I shouldn’t wonder! Isn’t that what they do, these savages? The bloody cross, isn’t it?’

West did not see the funny side. ‘Ensure that our prisoners are given food and water, and such assistance with their wounded as we are able to provide. We should be gracious in victory.’ It seemed like the sort of thing that a leader should say, after a battle.

‘Quite so, my Lord Marshal.’ And Poulder gave a smart salute, the very model of an obedient underling, then reined his mount sideways and spurred away.

West slid down from his own horse, gathered himself for a moment, and began to trudge on foot up the valley. Pike came after him, sword drawn.

‘Can’t be too careful, sir,’ he said.

‘No,’ murmured West. ‘I suppose not.’

The long slope was scattered with men, alive and dead. The corpses of Union horsemen lay where they had fallen. Surgeons tended to the wounded with bloody hands and grim faces. Some men sat and wept, perhaps by fallen comrades. Some stared numbly at their own wounds. Others howled and gurgled, screamed for help, or water. Still others rushed to bring it to them. Final kindnesses, for the dying. A long procession of sullen prisoners was winding down the valley alongside the rock wall, watched carefully by mounted Union soldiers. Nearby were tangled heaps of surrendered weapons, piles of mail coats, stacks of painted shields.

West picked his way slowly through what had been Bethod’s camp, rendered in one furious half-hour into a great expanse of rubbish, scattered across the bare rock and the hard earth. The twisted bodies of men and horses were mixed in with the trampled frames of tents, ripped and dragged-out canvas, burst barrels, broken boxes, gear for cooking, and mending, and fighting. All trodden into the churned mud, stamped with the smeared prints of hooves and boots.

In the midst of all this chaos there were strange islands of calm, where all seemed undisturbed, just as it must have been before West ordered the charge. A pot still hung over a smouldering fire, stew bubbling inside. A set of spears were neatly stacked against each other, with stool and whetstone beside, ready to be sharpened. Three bedrolls formed a perfect triangle, blankets well folded at the head of each one, all neat and orderly, except that a man lay sprawled across them, the contents of his gaping skull splattered across the pale wool.

Not far beyond a Union officer knelt in the mud, cradling another in his arms. West felt a sick twinge of recognition. The one on his knees was his old friend Lieutenant Brint. The one lying limp was his old friend Lieutenant Kaspa. For some reason, West felt an almost overpowering urge to walk away, off up the slope without stopping, and pretend not to have seen them. He had to force himself to stride over, his mouth filling with sour spit.

Brint looked up, pale face streaked with tears. ‘An arrow,’ he whispered. ‘Just a stray. He never even drew his sword.’

‘Bad luck,’ grunted Pike. ‘Bad luck.’

West stared down. Bad luck indeed. He could just see, snapped off at the edge of Kaspa’s beard, under his jaw, the broken shaft of an arrow, but there was surprisingly little blood. Few marks of any kind. A splatter of mud down one sleeve of his uniform, and that was all. Despite the fact they were, in essence, staring cross-eyed at nothing, West could not help the feeling that Kaspa’s eyes were looking directly into his. There was a peevish twist to his lip, an accusatory wrinkling of his brows. West almost wanted to take him up on it, demand to know what he meant by it, then had to remind himself that the man was dead.

‘A letter, then,’ muttered West, his fingers fussing with each other, ‘to his family.’

Brint gave a miserable sniff which West found, for some reason, utterly infuriating. ‘Yes, a letter.’

‘Yes. Sergeant Pike, with me.’ West could not stand there a moment longer. He turned away from his friends, one living and one dead, and strode off up the valley. He did his very best not to dwell on the fact that, had he not ordered the charge, one of the most pleasant and inoffensive men of his acquaintance would still be alive. One cannot be a leader without a certain ruthlessness, perhaps. But ruthlessness is not always easy.

He and Pike floundered over a crushed earth rampart and a trampled ditch, the valley growing steadily narrower, the high cliffs of stone pressing in on either side. More corpses here. Northmen, and wild men such as they found in Dunbrec, and Shanka too, all peppered liberally across the broken ground. West could see the wall of the fortress now, little more than a mossy hump in the landscape with more death scattered round its foot.

‘They held out in there, for seven days?’ muttered Pike.

‘So it would seem.’

The one entrance was a rough archway in the centre of the wall, its gates torn off and lying ruined. There seemed to be three strange shapes within it. As he got closer, West realised with some discomfort what they were. Three men, hanging dead by their necks from ropes over the top of the wall, their limp boots swinging gently at about chest height. There were a lot of grim Northmen gathered around that gate, looking up at those dangling corpses with some satisfaction. One in particular turned a cruel grin on West and Pike as they came close.

‘Well, well, well, if it ain’t my old friend Furious,’ said Black Dow. ‘Turned up late to the party, eh? You always was a slow mover, lad.’

‘There were some difficulties. Marshal Burr is dead.’

‘Back to the mud, eh? Well, he’s in good company, at least. Plenty of good men done that these past days. Who’s your chief, now?’

West took a long breath. ‘I am.’

Dow laughed, and West watched him laugh, feeling the slightest bit sick. ‘Big chief Furious, what do you know?’ and he stood up straight and made a mockery of a Union salute while the bodies turned slowly this way and that behind him. ‘You should meet my friends. They’re all big men too. This here is Crendel Goring, fought for Bethod from way back.’ And he reached up and gave one of the bodies a shove, watched it sway back and forth.

‘This here is Whitesides, and you couldn’t have found a better man anywhere for killing folk and stealing their land.’ And he gave the next a push and set it spinning round and round one way, then back the other, limbs all limp and floppy.

‘And this one here is Littlebone. As hard a bastard as I’ve ever hung.’ This last man was hacked near to meat, his gold-chased armour battered and dented, a great wound across his chest and his hanging grey hair thick with blood. One leg was off below his knee, and a pool of dry blood stained the ground underneath him.

‘What happened to him?’ asked West.

‘To Littlebone?’ The great fat hillman, Crummock-i-Phail, was one of the crowd. ‘He got cut down in the battle, fighting to the last man, over yonder.’

‘That he did,’ said Dow, and he gave West a grin even bigger than usual. ‘But that’s no kind of a reason not to hang him now, I reckon.’

Crummock laughed. ‘No kind of a reason!’ And he smiled at the three bodies turning round and round, the ropes creaking. ‘They make a pretty picture, don’t they, hanging there? They say you can see all the beauty in the world in the way a hanged man swings.’

‘Who does?’ asked West.

Crummock shrugged his great shoulders. ‘Them.’

‘Them, eh?’ West swallowed his nausea and pushed his way between the hanging bodies into the fortress. ‘They surely are a bloodthirsty crowd.’

He winced as Grim stuck the needle in, curled his lips back and hissed through his teeth. A nice pricking and niggling to add to the dull throb. The needle went through the skin and dragged the thread after, and Dogman’s arm started burning worse and worse. He took another swig, rocking back and forward, but it didn’t help.

‘Shit,’ he hissed. ‘Shit, shit!’

Grim looked up at him. ‘Don’t watch, then.’

Dogman turned his head. The Union uniform jumped out at him straight away. Red cloth in the midst of all that brown dirt. ‘Furious!’ shouted the Dogman, feeling a grin on his face even through the pain. ‘Glad you could make it! Real glad!’

‘Better to come late than not to come at all.’

‘You’ll get no trace of an argument from me. That is a fact.’

West frowned down at Grim sewing his arm up. ‘You alright?’

‘Well, you know. Tul’s dead.’

‘Dead?’ West stared at him. ‘How?’

‘It’s a battle, ain’t it? Dead men are the point o’ the fucking exercise.’ He waved the flask around. ‘I’ve been sat here, thinking about what I could’ve done differently. Stopped him going down them steps, or gone down with him to watch his back, or made the sky fall in, or all kind o’ stupid notions, none of ’em any help to the dead nor the living. Seems I can’t stop thinking, though.’

West frowned down at the rutted earth. ‘Might be’s a game with no winners.’

‘Ah, fuck!’ Dogman snarled as the needle jabbed into his arm again, and he flung the empty flask bouncing away. ‘The whole fucking business has no winners, though, does it! Shit on it all, I say.’

Grim pulled his knife out and cut the thread. ‘Move your fingers.’ It burned all the way up Dogman’s arm to make a fist, but he forced the fingers closed, growling at the pain as they bunched up tight.

‘Looks alright,’ said Grim. ‘You’re lucky.’

The Dogman stared round miserably at the carnage. ‘So this is what luck looks like, is it? I’ve often wondered.’ Grim shrugged his shoulders, ripped a piece of cloth for a bandage.

‘Do you have Bethod?’

Dogman looked up at West, his mouth open. ‘Don’t you?’

‘A lot of prisoners, but he wasn’t among them.’

Dogman turned his head and spat his disgust out into the mud. ‘Nor his witch, nor his Feared, nor neither one of his swollen up sons, I’ll be bound.’

‘I imagine they’ll be riding for Carleon as swiftly as possible.’

‘More’n likely.’

‘I imagine he’ll try to raise new forces, to find new allies, to prepare for a siege.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘We should follow him as soon as the prisoners are secure.’

Dogman felt a sudden wave of hopelessness, enough almost to knock him over. ‘By the dead. Bethod got away.’ He laughed, and felt tears prickling his eyes the next moment. ‘Will there ever be an end to it?’

Grim finished wrapping the bandage and tied it up tight. ‘You’re done.’

Dogman stared back at him. ‘Done? I’m starting to think I won’t ever be done.’ He held his hand out. ‘Help me up, eh, Furious? I got a friend to bury.’

‘Who wants to speak?’ asked the Dogman, looking at them, one by one. Logen stared down at his feet, not even able to meet his eye, let alone say a word. He wasn’t sure what had happened, in the battle, but he could guess. He could guess well enough, from the bits he did remember. He glanced around, licking at his split lips, but if anyone else guessed, they kept it to themselves.

‘No one going to say a word?’ asked Dogman again, his voice cracking.

‘Guess it best be fucking me, then, eh?’ And Black Dow stepped forward. He took a long look round at the gathering. Took a long look at Logen in particular, it seemed to him, but that was most likely just his own worries playing tricks.

‘Tul Duru Thunderhead,’ said Dow. ‘Back to the mud. The dead know, we didn’t always see things the same way, me and him. Didn’t often agree on nothing, but maybe that was my fault, as I’m a contrary bastard at the best o’ times. I regret it now, I reckon. Now it’s too late.’ He took a ragged breath.

‘Tul Duru. Every man in the North knew his name, and every man said it with respect, even his enemies. He was the sort o’ man . . . that gave you hope, I reckon. That gave you hope. You want strength, do you? You want courage? You want things done right and proper, the old way?’ He nodded down at the new-turned earth. ‘There you go. Tul Duru Thunderhead. Look no fucking further. I’m less, now that he’s gone, and so are all o’ you.’ And Dow turned and stalked off away from the grave and into the dusk, his head down.

‘We’re all less,’ muttered Dogman, staring down at the earth with the glimmer of a tear in his eye. ‘Good words.’ They all looked broken up, every one of them stood around the grave. West, and his man Pike, and Shivers, and even Grim. All broken up.

Logen wanted to feel as they did. He wanted to weep. For the death of a good man. For the fact that he might’ve been the one to cause it. But the tears wouldn’t come. He frowned down at the fresh-turned earth, as the sun sank behind the mountains, and the fortress in the High Places grew dark, and he felt less than nothing.

If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person? You have to be realistic. He’d played at being a different man, but it had all been lies. The hardest kind to see through. The kind you tell yourself. He was the Bloody-Nine. That was the fact, and however he twisted, and squirmed, and wished to be someone else, there was no escaping it. Logen wanted to care.

But the Bloody-Nine cares for nothing.