Kest, Morn and Brasti joined me at the edge. ‘It’s only fifteen feet,’ I said.
‘Might as well be fifteen miles,’ Morn replied. ‘You’d have a devil of a time getting back up, even if we did have rope – which we don’t.’
I looked at Kest, but he was shaking his head. ‘Falcio, don’t.’
He was right, of course. If we did what he knew I was thinking, any pretence of being deserter-soldiers would be well and truly gone. I wasn’t worried about the mother and child, but the old man could rat us out as soon as we reached the border. ‘Go ahead with the others,’ I said to him, my tone grim. ‘I’ll wait it out with Yelena here. I don’t think it’ll be long now.’
I looked back down at the overhang. The child’s leg was bent at an impossible angle and blood was dripping from her forehead. She was making her way slowly, painfully, towards the edge.
‘Tillia, no!’ her mother screamed.
‘Girl, stop!’ I shouted. ‘Just stop.’
‘It’s our way,’ the old man said softly. ‘The girl knows she’s just holding her momma here. It’s better this way. Our way.’
I growled, ‘Shut your fucking mouth—’ but Kest laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘Falcio, stop. This isn’t helping,’ he said, but I shrugged him off.
I looked into Clock’s eyes. ‘I’m going to save that little girl now. If you utter one word of what happens here I’ll beat you blind, so no one will believe what you claim you saw. The Gods themselves won’t be able to save you if I find out you had a rope in your pack.’
I let him go and turned to Yelena. ‘Call to your daughter – keep her from going over the edge.’ I opened my pack and pulled my coat out. ‘Get your coats out,’ I told the others.
The old man’s eyes widened. ‘Greatcoats . . .’ he whispered.
‘Damned fool,’ Morn muttered. ‘Worst bloody spy I ever met.’
We tied three of the coats together, connecting the sleeve buckles from one to the other for added protection. Kest was about to start adding my coat when I stopped him.
‘It won’t be long enough with just three,’ he said.
I took the coat and put it on. ‘You won’t be able to pull me up – the leather will get caught on the rocks – so I’ll need to climb, which will take both hands, leaving me with no way to carry the girl.’
‘You’re going to use the coat to carry her?’ He looked over the edge. ‘It’s hard going, and slippery. The odds of falling are—’
‘Not helpful,’ I said, and motioned for Brasti and Morn to hold one end of our makeshift rope while I began to ease myself down.
The descent was awkward. The coats are a tremendous advantage in battle, but turns out, the stiff leather and bone plates that keep us safe from edged weapons also make the coats pretty useless as a rope. I was gripping, white-knuckled, as they lowered me a few inches at a time, and by the time I reached the bottom the muscles in my hands were already exhausted, shaking from the effort.
Thankfully, Tillia had passed out from the pain. It was already getting dark and there was nothing there I could use to splint the leg, but if I didn’t get her back up to the path it wouldn’t matter anyway. I pulled out my black salve – it wouldn’t knit bone, but it would help the pain and ward off infection for now – but as I carefully spread it on her skin, Tillia’s eyes opened and when she saw me kneeling over her in my coat she started screaming and tried to push herself over the ledge.
‘It’s all right!’ I cried, and grabbed her. ‘It’s okay, I’m going to get you back to your mother.’
The girl didn’t stop trying to get away from me until she passed out again. I took off my coat and carefully eased her onto it, then buttoned it around her and tied the sleeves together to create a makeshift sling: an awkward thing, but better than nothing. I stuck my head through the loop formed by the sleeves and lifted her up. She weighed almost nothing, and as I reached for the coat-rope and began the slow, dangerous process of working my way back up the side of the cliff, I felt like I were carrying a delicate glass figurine, one that would shatter at the slightest impact.
Fifteen feet isn’t a great distance, but everything was conspiring against me. This would have been a hard enough slog unencumbered, but carrying the girl made it murderously difficult. The cold air made it hard to feel my hands, which were constantly slipping on the smooth leather. It was almost impossible to find anything resembling a secure foothold on the mountain, an unhelpful mix of sharp, jagged rocks and fragile shale that meant I couldn’t use my climbing spikes either. The others couldn’t just pull me up in case the coat-rope got caught on the overhang.
Four feet from the top, my hands stopped responding completely.
Through sheer force of will I managed to keep them clenched enough to stop me slipping back down, but I couldn’t seem to make my fingers work any more.
‘Nearly there,’ Brasti called down. ‘What are you waiting for?’
I didn’t reply; that small effort might draw away the last shred of strength from my arms. And of course, that’s when the girl came to again, and began to cry.
‘It’s all right,’ I whispered. ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘It hurts,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’
‘I know, sweetheart . . .’
I started to pray to Saint Birgid-who-weeps-rivers, but of course she was dead and somehow praying to her successor felt odd since I was quite sure Ethalia wasn’t going to suddenly appear and save us. I hadn’t had much luck with Gods lately – although to be fair, they hadn’t had much luck themselves. Where are you, Valour? Too busy saving fucking alley cats to lend a hand?
The hells for Saints and Gods; I’ll do this myself. My hands were so cold, though – colder than they had any right to be. I tried to think about things that might inspire my body to be stronger. I thought about Aline, and Valiana. I thought about the mission ahead of me. I thought about Ethalia and what she would think if she knew I’d failed this child, and all these things went through my mind in the few seconds, the ticks of the clock, between near success and abject failure.
I was about to tell Kest that I couldn’t do it, that I’d try and slide back down and make the attempt again later, when my hands had warmed up and stopped shaking . . . But when I looked up to tell him, I saw the girl’s mother, barely more than a child herself, lying on her belly watching me, her face full of a thousand sorrows, already resigned to her daughter’s fate. What happened to hope in this damned country? When did we let go of all faith in ourselves?
I hated this woman lying there like a dead tree, so quick to give up on her daughter’s life. What was wrong with these people?
Maybe it was the momentary respite, or perhaps the muscles in my hands unlocked, but an angry fire seared my flesh, burning through the cold: a different kind of pain, and almost without my volition, the fingers of my right hand unclenched, reached up and wrapped themselves around the next length of coat and a hand’s-grip at a time, I made my agonising way up until, two feet from the top, I felt Kest grab one of my wrists and Brasti the other and the two of them hauled us the rest of the way.
I knelt there, unable to move, so Kest carefully undid my coat and took the girl. Her mother’s face was a mixture of desperate relief and terrible guilt as she looked at me and asked, ‘How will I carry her?’
*
‘Falcio, come on, we have to get going,’ Brasti said.
I was still on my knees at the edge of the cliff, so I think only a few minutes had passed, but it felt like a lifetime. There’s a strength when you’re exhausted that comes from beyond sore muscles and aching bones: it’s all in the heart’s need to keep beating. I kept reaching for that need.
‘You did a good thing there,’ the old man said.
It was a nice thing to say, but he wanted to see Aline dead. ‘You’ve seen our coats. You know what we are. If you tel
l the bordermen, I’ll kill you.’
Before the old man could reply, Kest said, ‘He won’t.’ He reached out and rested his hand on Clock’s shoulder. ‘Look at me. Falcio won’t kill you. He doesn’t have it in him to murder an old man. But I do.’
‘I believe you,’ Clock said, and walked on ahead.
I felt Brasti hauling me up. ‘Where’s Morn?’ I asked.
‘He splinted the girl’s leg and now he’s taking his shift carrying her and muttering about what an idiot you are.’
‘That’s fair.’
We stuffed the coats back into our packs – might as well try to keep anyone else from seeing them – then followed the path for another hour into darkness, until a shout from Morn brought Kest, Brasti and me running.
We found him lying on the ground, his leg twisted, holding Tillia – somehow he’d managed to fall without hurting her.
‘Is it broken?’ Brasti asked.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ the girl said defensively. ‘He just slipped on a rock and fell.’
I reached out a hand to comfort her and she flinched. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘we know it’s not your fault.’
Kest was examining Morn’s leg. ‘It’s not broken, but he’s sprained both his left knee and his right ankle. There’s no way he can walk.’ He glanced around us. ‘And there’s nothing to make a litter from either . . .’
Clock came back and joined us. ‘You’ll never get there if you try to carry him,’ he said pragmatically, ‘and there’s nobody will take turns humping him along.’
‘No one?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Look around. Everyone’s exhausted – they’re all of them near the end of their strength and their supplies. There’s no room for charity now.’
‘Leave me,’ Morn said, his jaw tight. ‘I’ll camp here, join you when I can walk again.’
Clock leaned over him. ‘You’ll die out here, son. If the cold doesn’t get you, wolves or something worse will. Best your friends stay with you.’
‘No,’ Morn said, ‘I can take care of myself. I know how to stay alive in the mountains. Just go,’ he said firmly.
‘Is there anything you want from our supplies?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got my own – just get out of here.’
I exchanged glances with the others. ‘All right. We’d better do as he says.’
Clock looked surprised. ‘I thought you Trat— I thought you types . . . were all loyal to each other?’
‘It’s too cold for loyalty,’ I said, walking past him to rejoin the line.
*
We plodded along with the rest of the travellers for the next two hours, our way lit only by the moon above us.
‘Why aren’t we stopping?’ I called out to Clock at last.
‘No protection from the wind,’ he replied. ‘We’ll rest when we get to the base of the mountain.’ Despite our earlier threats, he smiled at me. ‘Tomorrow we go up the mountain, easy as can be.’
‘Are you mad? It’s hardly been steep until now and people are still barely making it – how in all the hells will they get up a mountain?’
He laughed. ‘Look,’ he said, and pointed.
It was too far for me to make out what I was supposed to be seeing but Brasti’s eyes are better than most.
‘Saint Brughan-who-chews-stone—’ he swore.
Kest looked at him. ‘Which one’s that?’
‘Saint of Mountain. Or rocks. I don’t know, I just made him up. It’s too much work trying to keep track of which Saints are still alive and which ones aren’t.’
‘What am I looking at?’ I asked him.
‘Ladders,’ Brasti replied. ‘There are ladders bolted onto the mountainside, and what looks like long sections of steps cut into the rock. And look there—’ He pointed to something else I couldn’t make out.
‘I’m not seeing it. Still.’
‘I do,’ Kest said. ‘Pulleys and winches – is that a platform?’
‘It is,’ Brasti said. ‘Looks to be at least fifteen feet square. How did they ever engineer all that?’
Clock smiled at us, oblivious to what was troubling me. ‘See? Most of us can climb those easy enough: a few hours to the top, then it’s a straight road to the next mountain and just a day’s march to the first town in Avares. Those pulley systems can help get the injured up there.’
But that’s not what they’d been built for. Kest and Brasti had understood immediately, too: Avares had put in a highly effective system to move men and equipment back and forth across the mountains – across the only barrier that had impeded their attempts at invasion in the past – and Tristia knew nothing about it.
‘Ah, look, see?’ Clock said. ‘There’s a greeting party now.’
I saw big men with torches up ahead, handing out flasks and food to the weary travellers.
‘Remember what I said,’ Kest warned the old man.
‘Don’t you worry about me, son. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I don’t know why you’re here, Trattari, and I don’t imagine I’d like it if I did, but it’s my own life I’m concerned with, not whatever plans you have.’
I wasn’t sure if I believed him but in the end, it didn’t matter. By the time we reached the camp, twelve Avarean warriors were waiting for us. We’d already been betrayed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Art of Taking a Beating
There’s an art to taking a beating.
Lying there on the ground as brutes of men punch and kick you into oblivion might not seem as complex a skill as wielding a sword, but trust me, it is. I’m a master at it.
‘All right, gentlemen,’ I said, as the Avarean guards began circling us, ‘we surrender.’ The rough-looking men in thick woollen kilts and furs had axes of varying sizes strapped across their backs or hanging at their sides; their odd shape and slightly serrated edges made me think they were for breaking through ice as much as cutting off heads.
One of the guards stepped to within a foot of me. He had lustrous blond hair falling in waves over his massive shoulders to his equally massive chest. I wondered briefly how he could keep his hair so healthy and shiny in this environment, but decided it probably wasn’t the right time to ask. I decided to call him Princess.
‘Se–renn–dur?’ he said.
‘Surrender. Yes.’
Maybe he didn’t appreciate my correcting his pronunciation or (more likely) he had no idea what the word meant, but Princess delivered an impressive punch to my jaw. It was a solid hit – but it didn’t do much damage, as I’d seen it coming. It’s the ones you don’t see coming that do the most harm. I let the impact swing me around a bit and tumbled impressively to the ground.
‘Se-renn-dur,’ Princess repeated.
You might be wondering why I didn’t duck his first blow and follow up with some impressive feat of martial prowess – well, first, because there were twelve of them and three of us; second, because there were dozens more armed men all around, and third, we hadn’t completed the mission yet, and being captured was far more likely to get us to where we needed to be than climbing the mountains and then trying to navigate the freezing wastes of Avares by ourselves.
‘Whoof!’ I said dramatically as the man I dubbed Goatface, with curly black hair and a magnificent forked beard, delivered the first good kick to my belly, sending me rolling over onto my side, icy snow sneaking its way down my collar and cuffs. While I was down, I noted that Kest and Brasti were also on the ground, pursuing similar strategies to mine. Goatface laughed and repeated, ‘Se-renn-dur.’
The ground is a good place to be during a beating. It’s like having a massive shield protecting one side of your body. Granted, it’s not great for manoeuvrability, but if you try to move about too much, someone will invariably hold you so the others can continue the beating, and that can get painful.
<
br /> My third man, Rosie, on account of his flaming red cheeks, tried a face-stomp. There’s always someone who goes for the face-stomp, and that’s the one thing you really must avoid. Rosie’s heavy-booted foot would have landed squarely on my right cheek, breaking my jaw and sending half my teeth flying across the frozen ground, had I not twisted out of the way. Of course, this earned me a nasty kick to the back from Princess, who I guess was starting to feel he was missing out on the fun.
In a situation like this, it’s helpful to determine the purpose of the beating. Committing an act of violence against another human being without intending to kill them requires either moral or pragmatic restraint – Avareans have never shown any discomfort when it comes to killing Tristians (or even each other, really) so morality was unlikely to keep them from hacking us to bits. And since our captors’ axes hadn’t yet made an appearance, there had to be some other reason for the beating.
If, say, your attackers wanted to rob you but would rather avoid a messy family vendetta, or maybe greater punishment from the law if they were caught, they’d go for a good old pummelling, rather than a stabbing or hacking. But Avareans love blood-feuds, because they add to their personal prestige, and given that the men duffing me up at that precise moment probably were the law, I doubted they were much worried about being charged with any crime.
Goatface lined up his foot with my stomach and brought it back in preparation for another good kicking. I curled up, getting my forearms low, ready to take most of the hit and avoid any more damage to my gut, then rolled onto my back and let out a big moan, so as to not offend him. I caught a glimpse of Kest, who was in middle of a ‘cow-hop’ – that’s when you’re on your hands and knees and your opponent tries to kick up into your stomach. The trick there is to push off on all fours so you come up in the air a few inches, thus allowing your aggressor to feel extremely powerful while ensuring they make barely any contact at all.
Kest caught my eye and let out a yelp that was louder than necessary, which I correctly interpreted as a warning, and sure enough, Rosie had come around and was gleefully intent on driving his foot down upon my face again – I don’t know why, but some people are just obsessed from birth with the desire to stomp another man’s skull in. Once again I rolled out of the way just in time and heard his boot thud into the ground just behind my head. If that had connected with my face, I wouldn’t have been much use for interrogation.
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