The Last Bastion

by Nathan Hawke

  Their business. Not yours. That’s what Arda would say. Three years away and then a few days and nights trapped in a fortress and expecting to die, and then Valaric had come, and the forkbeards had gone away, and all of a sudden everything he sought was right there in front of him, begging to be taken, and he’d turned his back and left her there because . . . because Beyard had sent Oribas to be hanged and Oribas was his friend. Left her and lost everything, and he’d had to, because sooner or later Medrin would know he was back and the hunt would begin, and if he simply went home then one day he’d wake up to find Medrin standing over him with a thousand Lhosir and Medrin would kill them, all of them, slowly and with a great deal of lingering, because nothing would ever make up for the hand that Gallow had taken from him in Andhun. Medrin made the choice into no choice at all but Arda still wouldn’t wait for him, not again, and he could hardly blame her for that. Better to blame fate.

  He forced his way out into the yard. The mob was thinning, more and more Marroc crowding inside, pushing and shoving, climbing past each other, desperate for a share of the plunder. Around the scaffold he could see the bodies, Marroc and Lhosir both. Five Lhosir swung from the gallows. Small gangs of Marroc moved among the corpses, stripping them, shaking them. He saw the flash of a knife. Murdering them if they weren’t quite dead then. The Crackmarsh men were up on the walls, but Valaric was back in Witches’ Reach and the soldiers only stood and watched.

  Not. His. Business.

  Arda would be on her way home by now, back to the Crackmarsh to be with their children. His children. His sons and his daughter. He should have gone with her, wished he could, had always wanted to, but Sixfingers wouldn’t let him. He turned away, sick of it all. ‘Oribas? Oribas!’

  The nearest gang of Marroc stopped what they were doing and stared at him. Their malevolence filled the air. There were four of them and their glances around the yard were already drawing in others. They dropped the Lhosir they were looting and closed in. Gallow took a step back. The Crackmarsh men had a hungry hate for forkbeards but they kept it to themselves around Gallow because Valaric had told them the story of the Foxbeard and what he’d done. The mob from the city beneath the castle, though, all they saw was another forkbeard even if he was shaven. They eyed him, and the longer they did, the more Marroc turned to look. Gallow had seen it before, a wolf pack setting itself to bring down a bear.

  He’d seen how to stop it too. He stared right back at the four Marroc, picked out their leader, drew his sword and moved briskly forward. Marroc always turned and ran and this one would be no different. There’d be no need for blood; the threat would be—

  A stone hit the side of his helm, hard even through the iron. He staggered sideways and suddenly a snarling Marroc was flying at him. He braced his shield and then there was another coming from the other side and another from behind and more of them all around. He raised the Edge of Sorrows but the first Marroc didn’t flinch. The red sword sighed as it cut the air. Before Gallow could stop himself, he’d split the Marroc’s face in two; and then the others came and the sword wanted more while he stared at what he’d done.

  A second Marroc crashed into his side and tore at his shield. He battered the man away and tried to run but another tackled him from behind and staggered him; yet another grabbed his sword arm high around the shoulder and held on, trying to drag him down, and then another had his shield again, and however hard he forced his way onward, for every Marroc he shook off, another two came at him. He felt a knife stab at him, jabbing hard at his mail coat. Something hit his head, another stone or a stick, and then a hand had his leg and his foot, pulled hard, and he couldn’t break free. He staggered, hopped, and finally fell with a half a dozen Marroc on his back.

  ‘Hang him! Don’t kill him down there; hang him for everyone to see! Hang the forkbeard!’ He growled and snarled and twisted and writhed, trying to shake the Marroc off, but there were too many. One got his helm and someone hit him on the head with a stone. Light crashed through the back of his head and the sound of everything changed as though he was underwater again. Drowning as he’d been off the cliffs of Andhun after fleeing the Vathen. Should have sunk beneath the waves there, but somehow the Screambreaker had come in a little boat, sailing away from his own death towards the Herenian Marches, given one more day of life to do whatever needed to be done; but in the moments before, as the water had swallowed Gallow, the sounds of the world had fallen away like this. He felt another sharp pain in his back and then the weight came away and he was being carried, dragged, and his eyes were still open but there was only light, horrible flaming lances of light.

  The Marroc dropped him. He lay still, fingers clawing at a ground that was softer and warmer than the crushed-snow cobbles of the castle yard. Wood. The noises were slowly changing again. The Marroc mob, shouting and screaming. He opened his eyes. Everything was blurred. Bright blue sky above, a swirling sea of movement below.

  Hang him! Hang him!

  He blinked as the world swam back into focus. He was on the scaffold looking out over the heads of a few dozen angry Marroc. When he tried to get up, someone stamped him back down. He felt as weak as a baby. A great weight pressed on him, men sitting on his shoulders and his legs. They had his arms, were tying his wrists behind his back. Then hands reached under his shoulders and hauled him up. His sword was gone, his shield and helm too. He tried to shrug the hands away but the Marroc were too strong and too many. They pushed and shoved him and hauled a rope over his head, scraping it across his face, settling it around his neck. Panic washed away the dizziness, but too late. He snarled and raged and almost fell.

  ‘Hang the forkbeard!’

  The noose tightened and a vicious voice hissed in his ear, ‘Ready to meet your uncaring god, forkbeard?’ The voice grew into a shout. ‘Shall we hang us another one?’ The crowd howled with gleeful joy.

  Something hit the scaffold by Gallow’s feet. When he turned his head to look, an arrow was quivering in the wood. He couldn’t turn enough to see his executioner, but he felt his shiver of hesitation. Then another arrow hit the scaffold, and this time the mob saw it too. A cluster of soldiers was coming down the steps to the Hall of Thrones and forcing its way through. He saw Achista with her bow and an arrow nocked, Achista and Oribas. They shouldered their way onto the scaffold. ‘Jonnic! What are you doing?’

  The executioner barged past Gallow. ‘Killing a forkbeard.’

  ‘Let him go!’

  ‘Do I answer to you now? No, I answer to Mournful, and he’s not here.’

  ‘Are you dim? I said let him go!’

  ‘Or you’ll shoot me?’ The hangman pushed forward. The soldiers around Achista pressed forward until they were all almost nose to nose. ‘Kill a Marroc to save a forkbeard, would you? You know what we do to women who give themselves to forkbeards.’

  Oribas punched him, and for a moment Gallow was so surprised that he forgot he was standing with a noose around his neck. The Marroc lurched back and drew a hand across his face and then laughed as Oribas clutched his fist. Achista shoved past them all and stood beside Gallow, looking out over the crowd. ‘This is Gallow Foxbeard. The man who slew the iron devil of Varyxhun. The forkbeard who cut off Sixfingers’ hand.’

  ‘Still a forkbeard!’ yelled a voice from the crowd.

  ‘Hang him!’

  ‘Look what he did!’

  ‘He’s a killer!’

  The mob parted around the Marroc man Gallow had killed, eager to show his crime. He barely remembered doing it. An instinct, lashing out before he fell, that was all. Achista stared at the body, the fire stolen from her mouth. Then she looked at him. ‘You did this?’

  Gallow nodded. ‘He came at me.’

  ‘And you killed him.’

  ‘I had little choice.’

  ‘Angry Jonnic! Get your smelly hands off that noose!’ Another Marroc soldier was pushing through the crowd. Another face Gallow knew from a long time ago. He squinted, trying to remember where it had
been.

  ‘Piss off, Sarvic. I don’t answer to you either.’

  ‘But you do answer to Valaric and Mournful’ll string you up by your toes. I’ll vouch for this one. Years ago he fought among the Marroc against the Vathen at Lostring Hill. I stood beside him in the shield wall. He’s a forkbeard, yes, but we lost that day, and in the rout that came after the second Vathan charge he saved my life. Angry, I see you up there all hungry to kill another forkbeard and I have that hunger too. But a life for a life, I say. We both saw what happened here.’

  ‘What I saw was a Marroc killed by a forkbeard. Seen too much of that these last years.’

  Achista turned her back. ‘This forkbeard is nioingr to his own kind. Do you understand what that means?’

  ‘Means they won’t care what we do to him.’

  ‘Means you’re doing their work for them.’

  Jonnic snorted and shouted at the crowd. ‘Anyone else? Anyone else want to spare this forkbeard, or can we get on with it? Just one of you and I’ll let him live. Can’t say fairer than that.’

  An eager murmur rolled through the crowd, but then another Marroc pushed through them and climbed onto the scaffold. ‘When the devil Sixfingers was prince of Andhun, three forkbeards threw me into the Isset and left me for dead. Then another one pulled me out, this one, and if he hadn’t, I’d have drowned. I’ll spit at him in the street now just as I did then. But I’m with Sarvic: a life for a life. Let this one go to never come back.’

  Achista pushed past Jonnic. ‘Now take him down.’ There was steel in her voice. She snatched the rope and pulled it roughly off Gallow’s head and no one moved to stop her. When she was done, Angry Jonnic punched Gallow in the kidneys hard enough to stagger him even through his mail and forced Gallow down to his knees. Achista squatted beside him. ‘You’re not welcome, Gallow Foxbeard. Varyxhun belongs to the Marroc now. Leave this valley and never come back. If you do, you’ll be what Jonnic says: just another forkbeard to be welcomed with spears and arrows. Do you understand?’ Her voice softened. ‘Go home, Gallow. Go to Arda. She’ll open her arms quick enough, for all her blunt words.’

  Oribas pushed forward. ‘Achista!’

  She turned to him. ‘You’d better choose whether you follow him or stay, Oribas. I know he’s your friend and I know he came here because of you, but I can’t change what has to be. If you have to go, I won’t begrudge it.’

  Gallow hauled himself wearily to his feet and shook his head. ‘No, old friend. I’ve nothing to offer you and I don’t want your company. I came home for my family, and if Beyard hadn’t sent you here to be hanged then that’s where I’d be; and I’d be there without you.’

  He clapped Oribas on the shoulder and picked his way down the steps from the scaffold and through the hissing crowd. He walked to the Marroc he’d killed, picked up his helm and put it on slowly and deliberately. He found his shield and a spear and, last of all, the red sword. Then he turned to face the crowd, a Lhosir warrior dressed for battle. The mob glared back, full of hate but with fear now too, and when he walked towards them again, they parted easily. He stopped by the scaffold. ‘I wish you a long and happy life, Achista of the Marroc, and your brother too.’ He glanced toward the Marroc who claimed they’d fought together at Lostring Hill. He remembered it, a distant thing: fleeing at full tilt down a grassy slope, a Marroc ahead of him, Vathan horse cutting at them as they ran, throwing the Marroc to the ground, catching a Vathan javelot on his shield. Angry Jonnic had called him Sarvic. Yes, that was him, but he’d changed, a frightened goat become another wolf. ‘My greetings to Valaric when he comes. Tell him he’ll be more than welcome to have his plough fixed or to buy some nails once Sixfingers is dead.’ He almost laughed. Sarvic stood there looking confused, but Valaric would understand.

  He looked at the other one, the Marroc he’d hauled out of the Isset three years back. He remembered doing it, but he hadn’t ever seen the man’s face until now, not properly. Then at his one last friend, the Aulian. He raised his spear in salute. ‘Oribas. You were always a better man. Remember that. Remember what you told me.’ He turned away from the Marroc and from Oribas and this new beginning they had before them, and rubbed his neck where the noose had touched his skin. His heart felt strangely empty. Go home? But he couldn’t. Not until they’d be safe and forgotten, and that would never happen, not while Medrin was alive.

  Inside the gates he stopped by the Dragon’s Maw. The Marroc soldiers there looked uncertain, and when Gallow drew out the red sword they stepped back in alarm and drew their own. But Gallow reversed his grip and drove the sword into the hard-packed dirt between the cracked stones of the yard.

  ‘Yours,’ he whispered to the sky. ‘For whoever is foolish enough to take it.’

  *

  Achista stood beside Oribas. They held hands as they watched Gallow go. ‘What was it you told him?’ she asked.

  Oribas didn’t answer for a very long time. When he turned to look at her, his face was pale and he looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A long time ago.’ He shook himself. Shivered as if trying to free himself of something. ‘A long time ago I told him that every heart is wicked. That there are no good men in the world at all, just those who have the courage to look at their own deeds with honest eyes, and those who don’t.’

  A hundred fishing boats once sheltered in the sweep of Andhun Bay, protected by cliffs that swept the north-east winds from the Storm Coast up into the air and over the tops of their masts, but no more. The Marroc had taken to the sea when the Vathen came. Their ships had gone and the harbour had burned and the busiest port east of Kelfhun was gone in a single day. Few ships came now.

  It was a sight then, when a white ship sailed across the mouth of the bay, driven by the freezing winds that blew down from the Ice Wraiths of the north. She didn’t turn towards the harbour but men still stopped to look. Eyes followed her, wondering who might be coming; on both sides of the Isset they stared. In the eastern half of divided Andhun the ardshan of the Vathen paused at the window of his stolen castle and peered and then called for the Aulian tinker he’d taken to keeping around like a court fool. Across the waters of the Isset and the cliffs that kept the two halves of the city apart, the Lhosir looked with more knowing eyes, for she was a Lhosir ship and the white of her sails and her hull gave her away: she was a priest ship from the Temple of Fates on the edge of the frozen wastes, and that alone was reason to stare. White as though she carried the snow of the north through the waters with her, she passed Andhun Bay and sailed on a little way along the coast to the first cove where a party could put ashore. There she dropped her sail. Boats eased their way through the waves, and by the time they’d landed the first party and had returned to come back with the next, Lhosir riders from the city reached the cove. They came filled with questions from their lord of Andhun but their words died in their throats. The men on the stony beach were clad in iron. There were twelve of them.

  The next boats brought men more familiar. Holy men, as far as the Lhosir had such things. Chanters of nonsense and rhyme who sent their words not to the Maker-Devourer but to the Fates themselves and to the frozen palace far to the north.

  The boats went back a second time and headed for the shore once more. The holy men cried out for all to look away but the Lhosir were too curious and unafraid to do such a thing, and so their eyes burned as the last burden of the white ship came ashore. The ones who stared the longest remembered only white and light and a terrible brightness. The ones who looked away more quickly would say afterwards that what they had seen was another of the Fateguard, armoured in an iron skin but missing chest and back plates, and that what was there instead was the whiteness of ice and the brightness of the cold winter sun and patterns of both that wove with such a brilliance that for a while they thought they were blinded.

  All understood at once what they saw: the Eyes of Time come down from the iron palace. A thing that had never happened in any re
membered life.

  The Fateguard commanded the Lhosir to get down from their horses and then took them, and the Lhosir – those who could still see anything at all – were left to watch the Eyes of Time and the iron-skinned men of fate as they vanished across the hills.

  MIDDISLET

  4

  NADRIC’S SECRET

  The wind roared and moaned and the rain beat on the roof of the forge and swirled inside, another winter storm come howling off the seas to the north. Arda stood, steadfastly ignoring it, drawing wire. The forge fire kept everything nearby comfortably warm and dry, even in the bitter tail of winter. Tathic and Pursic sat in the dirt nearby, keeping out of the rain, playing with the little wooden figures Nadric had carved for them while they’d been hiding in the Crackmarsh. Nadric wasn’t much of a carver but they had at least the suggestion of legs and arms and a head, and that was enough. Pursic jumped his toy man onto Tathic’s and the two boys started wrestling on the floor.

  ‘I’m Valaric the Wolf! You’re a forkbeard. Yaargh!’

  Forkbeard. The word still made Arda stop. Made her look up too, eyes scanning the track to the big barn and the road beyond to Fedderhun, or else the other way, south to the Crackmarsh and then the long way round to Hrodicslet. A month ago she’d watched him leave Witches’ Reach and head south for Varyxhun. An hour later she’d followed with a dozen Crackmarsh men, but they’d quickly turned from the Varyxhun Road and followed the secret trail through the Devil’s Caves and Jodderslet. A mountain path had taken them to Hrodicslet and to the Crackmarsh, where the villagers of Middislet always hid in troubled times. To her children. To Nadric, who’d been father to the Marroc husband she’d had before the forkbeards had killed him. To Jelira, the oldest, the one who wasn’t his but remembered him better than the rest. To her sons Tathic and little Pursic. To Feya, their daughter. She’d vowed she’d never let herself think of him ever again and she broke that vow every single day. Gallow. Gallow, the clay-brained, sheep-witted, onion-eyed, flap-eared clod.