by Leo Carew
That was Pryce’s third.
The record, awarded to Reynar the Tall, was four. Gray had imparted to them the story of how Reynar had died eighty years before, in the act of winning his final prize. It had taken him until the age of one hundred and twenty to win his four prizes. Pryce was barely forty.
Gray, at over one hundred and forty, had two.
Uvoren, almost one hundred, had two.
Roper pulled Pryce to his feet and they embraced, Pryce returning to his seat to the sound of thunderous applause.
“I have one more to give,” declared Roper. “Its recipient shall come as no surprise to those who were at Githru, but here I must honour Pryce once again, as well as Gray Konrathson.” At the mention of Gray’s name, the warriors began to beat their hands upon the table in support. Roper raised a hand and silence fell after a time. “Both showed mighty heroism and, if heroes were scarcer, would each be collecting a prize of their own.” He waited for the hubbub to subside. “But the final Prize is for Leon Kaldison, who ended the battle by the sea for us by slaying a true leader: Cedric of Northwic.” Through the din, Roper turned to Leon and beckoned him forward, affixing his ring as he had done Pryce’s and embracing him. Leon stood humbly before Roper and asked that he might be allowed to speak.
“By all means,” said Roper, standing aside and gesturing to the guardsman. The cheering fell away.
“This is my greatest honour: my first Prize of Valour.” Leon’s voice was deep and slow, and he frowned as he addressed those below him. “But I merely finished Lord Northwic. As my Lord Roper has said already, the work was done by Gray Konrathson and Pryce Rubenson. This ring,” he gestured at his adorned wrist, “is as much theirs as mine.” The hall clapped appreciatively and Leon bowed to Roper and returned to his seat.
Without waiting for silence, Roper hollered: “Peers, have at the meat!” and sat down to help himself to some of the splendid boar before him.
“Well spoke, Husband,” said Keturah, leaning close. “For your first time, at any rate. It’s a shame you can’t win the Prize of Valour. I’m told you’d have had one for charging single- handedly into the Suthern encampment.”
“Miss Keturah,” said Roper. “They exaggerate. The truth is that I lost control of the horse your father gave me.”
“Apparently, it took you rather a long time to regain control of it.” She played along, straight-faced.
“I am a poor rider,” confirmed Roper. “But I wasn’t single-handed. Gray was with me.”
Keturah looked past Roper to the guardsman on his right, who at that moment was weeping tears of laughter. Tekoa was looking on, amused, and every time it looked as though Gray was about to compose himself, Tekoa would mutter something else to him and Gray would almost collapse into the boar before him. “I think he will be with you as long as you need him.”
“He is the best man I know,” said Roper, sincerely.
“Have you met his wife?”
“No.”
“Sigrid Jureksdottir. You should know her, she’s Jormunrekur.”
“Is she?”
“And perhaps the most beautiful woman in the Black Kingdom.”
“How is it that I’ve never heard of her?”
“Not your generation,” said Keturah wryly. “But I’m told it was a scandal at the time. The beautiful daughter of the Jormunrekur, marrying a mere Pendeen legionary from House Alba. His esteem has risen considerably since those days.”
“The devil,” said Roper, grinning. “Good for Gray. And good for Sigrid, that her seeds have flourished.”
“As have mine,” said Keturah. “I married a boy who rode off to war and whom I never thought I’d see again. And now here I sit, at a victory feast with the Black Lord.”
“You didn’t trust me?”
“I didn’t know you. But I didn’t believe it when I heard you’d been defeated.”
“You knew I’d win?” said Roper hopefully. She laughed raucously at that, placing a hand on his arm.
“I knew my father wouldn’t have let you lose.”
Roper scowled. “Next time, I’ll leave your daddy at home and you’ll see I don’t need him.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please don’t: he’d be unbearable.”
“My lord!” boomed Uvoren over Keturah’s shoulder. Lord. “I trust you aren’t going to spend this entire night talking to a woman!”
Roper looked frostily at Uvoren but it was Keturah who spoke next. “Don’t worry, Husband,” she said, switching her hand on Roper’s arm so that she could turn to face Uvoren. “This is rather a new attitude from the captain. He was so keen to keep me company while you were away.”
“Is that so?” said Roper, leaning forward to look at Uvoren, who regarded Keturah with that familiar curl on his lips.
“Just making certain I didn’t feel your absence too keenly, I’m sure,” said Keturah sweetly. For the first time that Roper could remember, Uvoren had nothing to say. He looked away with a sneer, refilled his horn with ale and then changed the topic.
“I note that the Lieutenant of the Guard is not among us. Quite a departure from tradition.”
“He’s here,” said Roper, gesturing to Gray sitting at his right. “Oh, what? You didn’t hear? Asger fell at Githru. Gosta too.”
Uvoren froze, evidently considering Roper’s words, but before he could reply, Pryce had started speaking. “And Guardsman Hilmar, and Guardsman Skapti. They were all friends of yours, I believe.”
“What a shame that one battle claimed so many fine men,” said Uvoren carefully.
Pryce shrugged. “It was actually a little before Githru, Uvoren: those four were dead before the battle had begun.”
“Pryce,” said Roper, warningly. He was trying to make peace with Uvoren. He had learned that this did not mean letting him say whatever he pleased, but neither did it mean antagonising him unnecessarily.
Pryce seemed deaf to Roper’s warning. “That’s right,” he said as Uvoren turned to look at him with his eyes unnaturally wide. Pryce leaned a little closer to the captain and met his gaze unblinkingly. “They tried to attack my Lord Roper, so I killed them all. First, I tore out Asger’s neck. He was no guardsman; he died easily. Then, when I’d knocked Gosta to the ground, I rammed my sword into Skapti’s armpit. It sounded painful; his screaming was rather extravagant. He got me though,” Pryce added, indicating a deep, stitched cut on his forearm below his freshly minted arm-ring.
Uvoren was entirely tensed. It looked as though he was shrinking in his seat as his muscles contracted and rage pulsed from him almost as a physical aura.
“Unfortunately, I couldn’t kill Gosta right away. He was tough and my Lord Roper needed help with Hilmar, so I cut some tendons to immobilise him before I nicked a vein in his neck to bleed him out. I didn’t do it very well; he was still breathing when they collected the bodies half an hour later. But he got me a couple of times too.” Pryce held back his black hair to indicate his missing ear and several more slashes on his arms. Roper was watching in horrified fascination. It was fortunate that there were no weapons allowed in the Honour Hall, otherwise he was certain Uvoren and Pryce would be hacking each other to pieces. “I put down Hilmar last. I confess his back was turned; the Black Lord was keeping him busy so I went for his armpit again to see if it hurt as much as it had Skapti. He didn’t make any noise at all: just crumpled. I must’ve got him in the heart.”
Uvoren was breathing deeply, staring back into Pryce’s eyes and neither one was moving away from the other. Uvoren’s right hand twitched a little.
“Cousin, you do exaggerate,” said Keturah waspishly. “And your ear is horrible. What will the women of the Hindrunn say when they see? You may have to find a wife.”
That made Pryce blink and glance at Keturah. “What?” He felt the ear again. The tension began to dissipate as he and Uvoren broke eye contact. “Marks of combat. They don’t matter to a female.”
“They do if you want a human female.”
&nbs
p; Roper thought that was masterful from Keturah. Her assault on Pryce’s pride had distracted him enough to prevent what would almost certainly have been a fight between two of the foremost warriors of the realm. At any rate, Pryce no longer seemed intent on winding up Uvoren, his hand flying frequently to his savaged ear and a frown on his face.
After a month on campaign rations, the boar was exquisite. The legionaries had been dreaming of this feast throughout the endless mornings of boiled oats and evenings of boiled salt-mutton and, now that it had arrived, they attacked the food with savage pleasure. The mood was jubilant, with the enormous tension that had been built on their bold march to the Great Gate dissipated without bloodshed.
As they had approached, Roper had no way of knowing whether his ruse had worked. He simply had to trust that his concealed soldiers had made it inside undetected and stayed loyal to him. He had been waiting for the clunk that would have meant the fire-throwers had been unleashed, and for the jet of sticky-fire that would have consumed the entire Sacred Guard.
It was the berserkers who took fullest advantage of the feast. Ordinarily, they lived entirely separate lives from the rest of society. Nobody outside their ranks was quite sure what their training involved, that flipped them from normal men into individuals of disproportionate and frightening violence. Some were spat out of the training system, apparently unsuited to be berserkers. Some died. Those who survived the ordeal were tattooed with the angel of madness and carried around phials of vinegar that had been infused with the fly agaric mushroom. Once it was consumed, usually directly before battle, they entered a state of hyper-arousal where they were unable to tell friend from foe and attacked on almost any stimulus. Use of this vinegar was governed by strict rules and they were forbidden to take it when they would be fighting in close proximity with their comrades. That evening, deprived of their phials, they still hurled brute fists at one another at the slightest provocation. Roper saw one pair just headbutting again and again until one of them fell aside feebly, trying to crawl on hands and knees but finally sprawling onto his face. Another stood and punched the victor in the stomach, unleashing such a spectacular jet of vomit that it was enough to douse a candle and make even a berserker back off.
“They don’t seem to be selected for their intelligence,” Roper observed to Gray.
“Quite the contrary, lord,” Gray agreed.
Beside Roper, Keturah seemed to be regretting breaking the tension between Uvoren and her cousin and had started harrying the captain. She needled him over his age, over Pryce’s third Prize of Valour, over having been so content to wait in the fortress while other men did the fighting, over his use of a war hammer which she declared “clumsy.”
“And what would a woman know of this matter?” growled Uvoren.
“Oh I’m sorry, Captain, have I upset you? I do apologise, but there’s really no need to take it so seriously. I am, as you say, a woman. All I know is what other warriors have told me. Admittedly, there is something close to a consensus that your use of Marrow-Hunter is impractical and nothing more than a move to enhance your own prestige, but I’m sure you have your own reasons.”
Uvoren was looking more and more displeased, but even he would not retaliate physically. He tried to fire some shots back at her, but they fell well wide of the mark and were merely greeted by her delighted laugh.
Uvoren stood abruptly and raised his horn. “Warriors!” he called. “Warriors!” The men were too drunk for silence to fall swiftly and, even once most of the noise had died away, there was still the loud squabbling of several berserkers. They were hushed impatiently by those around them. They resisted until Roper thumped a fist on the High Table, when at last they fell still.
Uvoren inclined his head in Roper’s direction by way of thanks. “I thank my Lord Roper for a magnificent feast!” There was a roar directed at the Black Lord who acknowledged it with a graceful nod before training his attention back to Uvoren, keen to hear what he was to say. “Truly, it is a worthy celebration of a campaign which we may proudly add to our noble history. To have dug such a hole,” more good-natured laughter, “and extracted himself quite so masterfully is testament to this young lord. He has spirit.” And Uvoren raised his horn to Roper, taking a drink. There was something in that last sentence that made Roper think they were the first words that Uvoren had truly meant. It was a salute to a worthy adversary. “But as he has already said, this campaign was three battles and not two. On our first, we did retreat from the battlefield for the first time in centuries. Our full strength was not enough to defeat the Sutherners and we left many, many brave legionaries in those flood waters. For the first time, the Sutherners tasted blood. They sensed our weakness and it emboldened them.
“My warriors, I don’t know about you, but that fills me with rage. How dare those low creatures presume they could defeat the Black Legions! Don’t they know who they’re dealing with?” There was a cheer and shouts of anger from those who had lost friends. Roper had started frowning. “Warriors, we must exact revenge! We must make it clear once and for all who the dominant force in Albion is. Why, we have not raided beyond our borders since the days of Rokkvi! The Sutherner grows bold and we cower in the north!”
Uvoren was forced to wait while the fervent noise subsided.
“You all know me. You know what I and my war hammer have done. By my hand, King Offa lies in his long grave!” He held up his left arm and indicated the silver ring that gleamed there, his Prize of Valour. He indicated his right. “I took Lundenceaster!”
By this time the men were baying. Roper glanced at Gray and saw for the first time base contempt in the guardsman’s face as he watched Uvoren speak. “You do hate him,” prodded Roper with a reproachful smile. Gray glanced at Roper and composed his face.
Uvoren was still speaking: “I would do anything for this country. And if it needed it of me, I would remain in the Hindrunn and guard it through Catastrophe itself. Even whilst heroes like Pryce and Leon win prizes in glorious open combat, I am content so long as I serve my country. But I still thirst for Suthern blood. Marrow-Hunter is restless and I would do anything for my chance against our enemy. You know me, and I am not done yet. I implore you all, may I have the honour to lead you against the Sutherners?”
“Yes!” roared the hall.
“Will you come south with me and do as honour demands?”
“Yes!”
“Remember this moment! If you ever need a warrior to take you south and to war; remember that Uvoren Ymerson still lives. Remember that Marrow-Hunter always thirsts for Suthern blood! And if my Lord Roper forgets, remind him!” He grinned and winked at the crowd who burst into applause. Someone started thumping a table and the rest of the hall took it up, chanting “U-vor-en! U-vor-en!”
Now Roper stood and Gray, Pryce and Tekoa began to bay for silence, which came after a time. “How fortunate we are to live in an age of such warriors,” said Roper, more calmly than Uvoren. He nodded at the captain. “Peers; rest assured your swords will not lie idle for long. Winter is upon us and the campaign season has ended. Rest, eat well, grow close with your family and, by spring, we shall be ready to march again.” He raised his horn and there was polite applause. Uvoren sank into his chair a fraction after Roper, beaming as though reluctant to surrender their attention.
Chatter broke out again and Gray leaned close to Roper. “Well done, my lord. It was important that you spoke. But this is the problem with keeping Uvoren close. As he said, he’s not done yet.”
“What else can we do? It seems we have kept the civil war in the shadows for now, but he is too powerful for us to truly disgrace him, or to have him killed. It would fracture the country. We must just wait until his threat subsides.”
“I’m not sure he’ll give you that chance,” said Gray, watching Uvoren who had turned back to Keturah with a broad smile and begun speaking to her again. She was looking coldly back at him.
Roper’s head was hazy and he was too happy for Uvoren’s words
to bother him unduly. There were no more speeches and the warriors feasted until the sun began to slip through the small windows of the Honour Hall, when they stumbled back to their homes. Roper and Keturah had been last to leave, she leading him from the hall by his hand, picking their way over the wreckage and out to the Central Keep.
14
The Barn
“Wooden houses,” said the big man. “Bloody hell, they’re beautiful.”
There was nothing especially beautiful about the buildings: a stooped cluster of raggedly thatched timber and daub homesteads, barely discernible through the thick flakes of floating snow. Such poor villages studded every part of Suthdal, but were not to be found north of the Abus, hence their beauty in the eyes of Bellamus’s men.
The upstart could hear cheers and cries of relief echo from his small column as the men behind sighted the village too. He turned and saw that some of them had dropped to their knees at the sight, arms held up at the sky in thanksgiving. Many others were embracing with tears in their eyes or raising fists into the air. He turned away, neither responding to the comment from Stepan, nor the reaction at his back.
The village looked like failure to him.
He had gone north beneath a fluttering stream of banners, leading a column clanking and tinkling with the panoply of war and truly believing his would be the invasion which at last subdued their ancient enemy. As far as he knew, his filthy, truncated band were the only remnant of that proud force to have stumbled back across the Abus. There were barely four hundred of them: all reeking, bearded and dressed in tatters. The others lay still beside the sea.
“God grant this dung heap an inn,” said Stepan. The towering, amber-bearded knight had been Bellamus’s most constant companion on the retreat from Githru, though the two had never spoken before the calamitous battle. He combined easy company with the stoic endurance Bellamus valued so highly in his soldiers. Unusually for a noble, he also seemed more than happy to take instructions from Bellamus, who had come to rely very much on his humour and consistency.
