Before They Are Hanged (51 page)

“Walking across country,” whispered Brint, shaking his head as he poured, “with five Northmen. A girl, you say?”

“That’s right.” West frowned, wondering what Cathil was doing right now. Wondering whether she needed help… foolishness, she could look after herself. “You made it with my letter, then, Lieutenant?” he asked Jalenhorm.

“Some cold and nervous nights on the road,” grinned the big man, “but I did.”

“Except that it’s Captain now,” said Kaspa, sitting back on his stool.

“Is it indeed?”

Jalenhorm shrugged modestly. “Thanks to you, really. The Lord Marshal put me on his staff when I got back.”

“Though
Captain
Jalenhorm still finds time to spend with us little people, bless him.” Brint licked his fingertips and started dealing four hands.

“I’ve no stake, I’m afraid,” muttered West.

Kaspa grinned. “Don’t worry, Colonel, we don’t play for money any more. Without Luthar to make poor men of us all, it hardly seemed worth it.”

“He never turned up?”

“They just came and pulled him off the boat. Hoff sent for him. We’ve heard nothing since.”

“Friends in high places,” said Brint sourly. “Probably swanning about in Adua on some easy detail, making free with the women while the rest of us are freezing our arses off.”

“Though let’s be honest,” threw in Jalenhorm, “he made free enough with the women even when we were there.”

West frowned. That was all too unfortunately true.

Kaspa scraped his hand up off the table. “So anyway, we’re just playing for honour.”

“Though you’ll not find much of that here,” quipped Brint. The other two burst out laughing and Kaspa dribbled booze into his beard. West raised his eyebrows. Clearly they were drunk, and the sooner he joined them the better. He swilled down the next glass and reached for the bottle.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Jalenhorm was saying, sorting his cards with fumbling fingers, “I’m glad as all hell that I won’t have to tell your sister anything for you. I’ve scarcely slept in weeks for thinking through how I’d go about it, and I still haven’t got a thought in my head.”

“You’ve never yet had a thought in your head,” said Brint, and the other two chortled away again. Even West managed a smile this time, but it didn’t last long.

“How was the battle?” asked Jalenhorm.

West stared at his glass for a long moment. “It was bad. The Northmen set a trap for Ladisla and he fell right into it, squandered his cavalry. Then a mist came up, all of a sudden, and you couldn’t see the hand before your face. Their horse were on us before we knew what was happening. I took a knock on the head, I think. Next I remember I was in the mud on my back and there was a Northman bearing down on me. With this.” He slid the heavy sword out of his belt and laid it down on the table.

The three officers stared at it, spellbound. “Bloody hell,” muttered Kaspa.

Brint’s eyes were wide. “How did you get the better of him?”

“I didn’t. This girl I was telling you about…”

“Yes?”

“She smashed his brains out with a hammer. Saved my life.”

“Bloody hell,” muttered Kaspa.

“Phew,” Brint sat back heavily in his chair. “Sounds like quite a woman!”

West was frowning, staring down at the glass in his hand. “You could say that.” He remembered the feeling of Cathil sleeping beside him, her breath against his cheek. Quite a woman. “You really could say that.” He drained his glass and stood up, stuck the Northman’s sword back through his belt.

“You’re going?” asked Brint.

“There’s something I need to take care of.”

Jalenhorm stood up with him. “I should thank you, Colonel. For sending me off with the letter. It sounds like you were right. There was nothing I could have done.”

“No.” West took a deep breath, and blew it out. “There was nothing anyone could have done.”

The night was still, and crisp, and cold, and West’s boots slipped and squelched in the half-frozen mud. Fires burned here and there and men clustered round them in the darkness, swaddled in all the clothes they possessed, breath smoking, pinched faces lit in flickering yellow. One fire burned brighter than the others, up on a slope above the camp, and West made for that now, feet weaving from the drink. He saw two dark figures sitting near it, taking shape as he came closer.

Black Dow was having a pipe, chagga smoke curling out from his fierce grin, an open bottle wedged between his crossed legs, several empty ones scattered in the snow nearby. Somewhere away to the right, off in the darkness, West could hear someone singing in Northern. A huge, deep voice, and singing very badly. “He cut him to the boooones. No. To the boooones. To the… wait on.”

“You alright?” asked West, holding his gloved hands out to the crackling flames.

Threetrees grinned happily up at him, wobbling slightly back and forward. West wondered if it was the first time he had seen the old warrior smile. He jerked a thumb down the hill. “Tul’s having a piss. And singing. I’m drunk as fucking shit.” He fell slowly backwards and crunched down into the snow, arms and legs spread out wide. “And I been smoking. I’m soaked. I’m wet as the fucking Crinna. Where are we, Dow?”

Dow squinted across the fire, mouth wide open, like he was looking at something far away. “Middle o’ fucking nowhere,” he said, waving the pipe around. He started cackling, grabbed hold of Threetrees’ boot and shook it. “Where else would we be? You want this, Furious?” He thrust the pipe up at West.

“Alright.” He sucked on the stem, felt the smoke biting in his lungs. He coughed brown steam out into the frosty air, and sucked again.

“Give me that,” said Threetrees, sitting up and snatching the pipe off him.

Tul’s great rumbling voice came floating up out of the darkness, horribly out of tune. “He swung his axe like… what is it? He swung his axe like… shit. No. Hold on…”

“Do you know where Cathil is?” asked West.

Dow leered up at him. “Oh, she’s around.” He waved his hand toward a cluster of tents higher up the slope. “Up that way, I reckon.”

“Around,” echoed Threetrees, chuckling softly. “Around.”

“He was… the Bloody… Niiiiine!” came gurgling from the trees.

West followed footprints off up the slope, towards the tents. The smoke was already having an effect on him. His head felt light, his feet moved easily. His nose didn’t feel cold any more, just pleasantly tingling. He heard a woman’s voice, laughing softly. He grinned, took a few more crunching steps through the snow towards the tents. Warm light spilled out from one, through a narrow gap in the cloth. The laughter grew louder.

“Uh… uh… uh…”

West frowned. That didn’t sound like laughter. He came closer, doing his best to be quiet. Another sound wandered into his fuzzy mind. An intermittent growling, like some kind of animal. He edged closer still, bending down to peer through the gap, hardly daring even to breathe.

“Uh… uh… uh…”

He saw a woman’s bare back, squirming up and down. A thin back, he could see the sinews bunching as she moved, the knobbles of her backbone shifting under her skin. Closer still, and he could see her hair, shaggy brown and messy. Cathil. A pair of sinewy legs stuck out from under her towards West, one foot almost close enough for him to touch, its thick toes wriggling.

“Uh… uh… uh…”

A hand slid up under her armpit, another round behind one knee. There was a low growl and the lovers, if you could call them that, rolled smoothly over so she was underneath. West’s mouth dropped open. He could see the side of the man’s head, and he stared at it. There was no mistaking the sharp, stubbly jaw line. The Dogman. His arse was sticking up towards West, moving in and out. Cathil’s hand clutched at one hairy buttock, squeezing at it in time to the movement.

“Uh… Uh… Uh!”

West clamped one hand over his mouth, eyes bulging, half-horrified, half strangely aroused. He was caught hopelessly between wanting to watch, and wanting to run, and came down on the latter without thinking. He took a step back, his heel caught a tent peg and he went sprawling over with a stifled cry.

“What the fuck?” he heard from inside the tent. He scrambled up and turned away, started to flounder through the snow in the darkness as he heard the flap thrown back. “Which of you is it, you bastards?” came Dogman’s voice from above, bellowing in Northern. “That you, Dow? I’ll fucking kill you!”

The High Places

“The Broken Mountains,” breathed Brother Longfoot, his voice hushed with awe. “Truly, a magnificent sight.”

“I think I’d like it better if I didn’t have to climb ’em,” grunted Logen.

Jezal by no means disagreed. The character of the land they rode through had been changing day by day, from softly sloping grassland, to gently rolling plains, to buckled hills spattered with bare rocks and sullen groups of stunted trees. Always in the distance had been the dim grey rumours of the mountain peaks, growing larger and more distinct with each morning until they seemed to pierce the brooding clouds themselves.

Now they sat in their very shadow. The long valley they had been following with its waving trees and winding stream ended at a maze of broken walls. Beyond it lay a steep rise into the rugged foothills, beyond them the first true outlier of the mountains rose, a stark oudine of jagged rock, proud and magnificent, smeared at the distant top with white snow. A child’s vertiginous notion of what a mountain should be.

Bayaz swept the ruined foundations with his hard green eyes. “There was a strong fortress here. It marked the western limits of the Empire, before pioneers crossed the pass and settled the valleys on the far side.” The place was nothing more now than a home for stinging weeds and scratching brambles. The Magus clambered from the cart and squatted down, stretching out his back and working his legs, grimacing all the while. He still looked old and ill, but a great deal of both flesh and colour had returned to his face since they left Aulcus behind. “Here ends my rest,” he sighed. “This cart has served us well, and the beasts too, but the pass will be too steep for horses.”

Jezal saw the track now, switching back and forth as it climbed, a faint line through the piles of wild grass and steep rock, lost over a ridge high above. “It looks a long way.”

Bayaz snorted. “But the first ascent of many we will make today, and there will be many more beyond them. We will be a week at least in the mountains, my boy, if all goes well.” Jezal hardly dared ask what might happen if things went badly. “We must travel light. We have a long, steep road to follow. Water and all the food we have left. Warm clothes, for it will be bitter cold among the peaks.”

“The birth of spring is perhaps not the best time to cross a mountain range,” observed Longfoot under his breath.

Bayaz looked sharply sideways. “Some would say the best time to cross an obstacle is when one finds oneself on the wrong side of it! Or do you suggest we wait for summer?” The Navigator chose, wisely in Jezal’s opinion, not to reply. “The pass is well-sheltered in the main, the weather should be far from our most pressing worry. We will need ropes, though. The road was good, in the Old Time, if narrow, but that was long ago. It might have been washed away in places, or tumbled into deep valleys, who knows? We may have some tough climbing ahead of us.”

“I can hardly wait,” muttered Jezal.

“Then there is this.” The Magus pulled one of the nearly empty fodder sacks open, pushed the hay out of the way with his bony hands. The box they had taken from the House of the Maker lay in its bottom, a block of darkness among the pale, dry grass.

“And who gets the joy of carrying that bastard?” Logen looked up from under his brows. “How about we draw lots? No?” No one said anything. The Northman grunted as he hooked his hands under it and dragged it off the cart towards him, its edge squealing against the wood. “Reckon it’s me, then,” he said, thick veins standing out from his neck as he hauled the weighty thing onto a blanket.

Jezal did not at all enjoy looking at it. It reminded him too much of the suffocating hallways of the Maker’s House. Of Bayaz’ dark stories about magic, and demons, and the Other Side. Of the fact that there was a purpose to this journey that he did not understand, but definitely did not like the sound of. He was glad when Logen finally had it wrapped up in blankets and stowed in a pack. Out of sight, at least, if not entirely out of mind.

They all had plenty to carry. Jezal took his steels, of course, sheathed at his belt. The clothes he wore: the least stained, torn and reeking he possessed, his ripped and battered, one-armed coat over the top. He had a spare shirt in his pack, a coil of rope above it, and half their stock of food on top of that. He almost wished that were heavier: they were down to their last box of biscuits, half a sack of oatmeal and a packet of salted fish that disgusted everyone except Quai. He rolled up a pair of blankets and belted them to the top of his pack, hung a full canteen at his waist, and was ready to go. As ready as he was going to get, anyway.

Quai unhitched the carthorses while Jezal stripped the saddles and harness from the other two. It seemed hardly fair, leaving them in the middle of nowhere after they had carried them all the way from Calcis. It felt like years ago to Jezal, thinking back. He was a different man now from the one who had set out from that city across the plain. He almost winced to remember his arrogance, and his ignorance, and his selfishness.

“Yah!” he shouted. His horse looked at him sadly without moving, then put its head down and began to nibble at the grass near his feet. He rubbed its back fondly. “Well. I suppose they will find their way in time.”

“Or not,” grunted Ferro, drawing her sword.

“What are you—”

The curved blade chopped halfway through the neck of Jezal’s horse, spattering warm, wet specks in his stricken face. Its front legs crumpled and it slid to the ground, toppled onto its side, blood gushing out into the grass.

Ferro grabbed hold of one of its hooves, hauled it towards her with one hand and started hacking the leg from the carcass with short, efficient blows while Jezal stared, his mouth open. She scowled up at him.

“I am not leaving all this meat for the birds. It will not keep long, but we will eat well enough tonight, at least. Get that sack.”

Logen flung one of the empty feed bags to her, and shrugged. “You can’t get attached to things, Jezal. Not out here in the wild.”

No one spoke as they began to climb. They all were bent over and concentrating on the crumbling track beneath their shuffling feet. The path rose and turned back, rose and turned back time after time and soon Jezal’s legs were aching, his shoulders were sore, his face was damp with sweat. One step at a time. That was what West used to tell him, when he was flagging on the long runs round the Agriont. One step at a time, and he had been right. Left foot, right foot, and up they went.

After a spell of this repetitive effort he stopped and looked down. It was amazing, how high they had climbed in so short a time. He could see the foundations of the ruined fortress, grey outlines in the green turf at the foot of the pass. Beyond it the rutted track led back through the crumpled hills towards Aulcus. Jezal gave a sudden shudder and turned back towards the mountains. Better to leave all that behind him.

Logen slogged up the steep path, his worn boots scraping and crunching in the gravel and the dirt, the metal box in his pack a dead weight that dragged on his shoulders and seemed to get heavier with each step, that dug into his flesh like a bag of nails even though it was wrapped in blankets. But Logen was not so very bothered by it. He was too busy watching Ferro’s arse move as she walked ahead of him, lean muscles squeezing with every step under the stained canvas of her trousers.

It was an odd thing. Before he’d fucked her he hadn’t thought about her that way at all. He’d been too concerned with trying to stop her running off, or shooting him, or stabbing one of the others. So busy watching her scowl that he hadn’t seen her face. So busy watching her hands that he’d never noticed the rest of her. Now he couldn’t think about anything else.

Every movement of hers seemed fascinating. He’d catch himself watching her all the time. While they were on the move. While they were sitting down. While she was eating, or drinking, or talking, or spitting. While she was pulling her boots on in the morning or pulling them off at night. To make matters worse, his cock was halfway hard the whole time from watching her out of the corners of his eyes, and imagining her naked. It was getting to be quite an embarrassment.

“What are you looking at?” Logen stopped and gazed up into the sun. Ferro was frowning down at him. He stood and shifted the pack on his back, rubbing at his sore shoulders, wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead. He could’ve thought up a lie, easily enough. He’d been watching the magnificent mountain peaks. He’d been watching where he put his feet. He’d been checking that her pack was on right. But what would’ve been the point? They both knew well enough what he’d been looking at, and the others had pushed on well out of earshot.

“I’m looking at your arse,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Sorry, but it’s a good one. No harm looking, is there?”

She opened her mouth angrily but he put his head down and trudged round her before she had the chance to speak, his thumbs hooked under the straps of his pack. When he’d got ten paces or so he looked over his shoulder. She was still standing there, hands on her hips, frowning up at him. He grinned back.

“What are you looking at?” he said.

They stopped for water in the cold fresh morning, on a ledge above a plunging valley. Through spreading trees heavy with red berries growing sideways from the bare rock, Jezal could see white water surging in its narrow bottom. Dizzying cliffs rose on the far side, sheets of grey stone not far from sheer, ending in towering crags high above, where dark birds flapped and crowed to each other, while swirls of white cloud turned in the pale sky beyond. A spectacular setting, if somewhat unsettling.

“Beautiful,” murmured Jezal, but taking care not to get too close to the edge.

Logen nodded. “Reminds me of home. When I was a lad, I used to spend weeks at a time up in the High Places, testing myself against the mountains.” He took a swallow from the flask then handed it to Jezal, staring up through narrowed eyes at the dark peaks. “They always win, though. This Empire’s come and gone, and here they still are, looking down on it all. Here they’ll still be, long after all of us have gone back to the mud. They looked down on my home.” He gave a long snort, then spat phlegm over the edge of the valley. “Now they look down on nothing.”

Jezal took a swallow of water himself. “Will you go back to the North, after this?”

“Maybe. I’ve some scores to settle. Some deep, hard scores.” The Northman shrugged his shoulders. “But if I let ’em lie I daresay no one would be the worse off. I reckon they all think I’m dead, and no one’s anything but relieved about it.”

“Nothing to go back to?”

Logen winced. “Nothing but more blood. My family’s long dead and rotted, and those friends I didn’t turn on and kill myself, I got killed with my pride and my stupidity. So much for my achievements. But you’ve still got time, eh, Jezal? A good chance at a nice, peaceful life. What will you do?”

“Well… I’ve been thinking…” he cleared his throat, suddenly nervous, as though giving voice to his plans made them far closer to reality. “There’s a girl back home… well, a woman, I suppose. My friend’s sister, in fact… her name is Ardee. I think that, perhaps, I love her…” It was strange, that he was discussing his innermost feelings with this man he had thought a savage. With this man who could understand nothing of the delicate rules of life in the Union, of the sacrifice that Jezal was considering. But somehow it was easy to say. “I’ve been thinking… well… if she’ll have me, perhaps… we might marry.”

“That sounds like a good plan.” Logen grinned and nodded. “Marry her, and sow some seeds.”

Jezal raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know much about farming.”

The Northman spluttered with laughter. “Not those kind of seeds, boy!” He clapped him on the arm. “One piece of advice, though, if you’ll take one from the likes of me, find something to do with your life that don’t involve killing.” He bent and swung up his pack, shoved his arms through the straps. “Leave the fighting to those with less sense.” And he turned and struggled up the track.

Jezal nodded slowly to himself. He touched one hand to the scar on his chin, his tongue finding the hole in his teeth. Logen was right. Fighting was not the life for him. He already had one scar too many.

It was a bright day. The first time Ferro had been warm in a long while and the sun felt good, hot and angry on her face, on her bare forearms, on the backs of her hands. The shadows of rock and branch were laid out sharp on the stony ground, the spray from the falling water that flowed beside the old track flashed as it fell through the air.

The others had fallen behind. Longfoot, taking his time, smiling up at anything and everything, blathering on about the majesty of the views. Quai hunched up and dogged under the weight of his pack. Bayaz wincing and sweating, puffing as though he might fall dead at any minute. Luthar moaning about his blisters to anyone who would listen, which was no one. So it was only her and Ninefingers, striding up ahead in stony silence.

Just the way she liked it.

She scrambled over a lip of crumbling rock and came upon a dark pool, lapping at a crescent of flat stones, water hissing and splattering down into it over piled up rocks bearded with wet moss. A pair of twisted trees spread their branches out above, thin, fresh-budded leaves shimmering and rustling in the breeze. The sunlight sparkled, and insects skated and buzzed lazily on the rippling water.

A beautiful place, most likely, if you thought that way.

Ferro did not. “Fish in there,” she murmured, licking her lips. A fish would be nice, stuck on a twig over a fire. The bits of horse they had carried with them were all gone, and she was hungry. She watched the vague shapes flicker under the shimmering water as she squatted down to fill up her canteen. Lots of fish. Ninefingers dumped his heavy pack and sat down on the rocks beside it, dragging his boots off. He rolled his trousers up above his knees. “What are you doing, pink?”