The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘I heard that—’ he almost whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  An exquisitely uncomfortable pause. ‘Are you—’

  ‘Yes. Go on, you can tell me. Tell me I shouldn’t have been down there in the first place. Go on.’

  Another pause, more uncomfortable yet. For him there was a chasm between mind and mouth he could not see how to bridge. Did not dare to bridge. She did it so easily it quite took his breath away. ‘You brought men back,’ he managed to murmur in the end. ‘You saved lives. You should be proud of—’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m a real hero. Everyone’s terribly proud. Do you know Aliz dan Brint?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither did I, really. Thought she was a fool, if I’m honest. She was with me. Down there.’ She jerked her head towards the dark valley. ‘She’s still down there. What’s happening to her now, do you think, while we stand here, talking?’

  ‘Nothing good,’ said Gorst, before he had considered it.

  She frowned sideways at him. ‘Well. At least you say what you really think.’ And she turned her back and walked away up the slope towards her father’s headquarters, leaving him standing there as she always did, mouth half-open to say words he never could.

  Oh yes, I always say what I really think. Would you like to suck my cock, by the way? Please? Or a tongue in the mouth? A hug would be something. She disappeared inside the low barn, and the door was closed, and the light shut in. Hold hands? No? Anyone?

  The rain had started to come down again.

  Anyone?

  My Land

  Calder took his time strolling up out of the night, towards the fires behind Clail’s Wall, spitting and hissing in the drizzle. He’d been in danger for a long time, and never deeper than now, but the strange thing was he still had his smirk.

  His father was dead. His brother was dead. He’d even managed to turn his old friend Craw against him. His scheming had got him nowhere. All his careful seeds had yielded not the slightest bitter little fruit. With the help of an impatient mood and a bit too much of Shallow’s cheap booze he’d made a big, big mistake tonight, and there was a good chance it was going to kill him. Soon. Horribly.

  And he felt strong. Free. No more the younger son, the younger brother. No more the cowardly one, the treacherous one, the lying one. He was even enjoying the throbbing pain in his left hand where he’d skinned his knuckles on Tenways’ mail. For the first time in his life he felt … brave.

  ‘What happened up there?’ Deep’s voice came out of the darkness behind him without warning, but Calder was hardly surprised.

  He gave a sigh. ‘I made a mistake.’

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t make another, then,’ came Shallow’s whine from the other side.

  Deep’s voice again. ‘You ain’t thinking of fighting tomorrow, are you?’

  ‘I am, in fact.’

  A pair of sharp in-breaths. ‘Fighting?’ said Deep.

  ‘You?’ said Shallow.

  ‘Get moving now, we could be ten miles away before sun up. No reason to—’

  ‘No,’ said Calder. There was nothing to think about. He couldn’t run. The Calder of ten years ago, who’d ordered Forley the Weakest killed without a second thought, would already have been galloping off on the fastest horse he could steal. But now he had Seff, and an unborn child. If Calder stayed to pay for his own stupidity, Dow would probably stop at ripping him apart in front of a laughing crowd but spare Seff so Reachey would be left owing him. If Calder ran, Dow would see her hanged, and he couldn’t let that happen. It wasn’t in him.

  ‘Can’t recommend this,’ said Deep. ‘Battles. Never a good idea.’

  Shallow clicked his tongue. ‘You want to kill a man, by the dead, you do it while he’s facing the other way.’

  ‘I heartily concur,’ said Deep. ‘I thought you did too.’

  ‘I did.’ Calder shrugged. ‘Things change.’

  Whatever else he might be, he was Bethod’s last son. His father had been a great man, and he wasn’t about to put a cowardly joke on the end of his memory. Scale might have been an idiot but at least he’d had the dignity to die in battle. Better to follow his example than be hunted down in some desolate corner of the North, begging for his worthless hide.

  But more than that, Calder couldn’t run because … fuck them. Fuck Tenways, and Golden, and Ironhead. Fuck Black Dow. Fuck Curnden Craw, too. He was sick of being laughed at. Sick of being called a coward. Sick of being one.

  ‘We don’t do battles,’ said Shallow.

  ‘Can’t watch over you if you’re fixed on fighting,’ said Deep.

  ‘Wasn’t expecting you to.’ And Calder left them in the darkness without a backward glance and strolled on down the track to Clail’s Wall, past men darning shirts, and cleaning weapons, and discussing their chances on the morrow. Not too good, the general opinion. He put one foot up on a crumbled patch of drystone and grinned over at the scarecrow, hanging sadly limp. ‘Cheer up,’ he told it. ‘I’m going nowhere. These are my men. This is my land.’

  ‘If it ain’t Bare-Knuckle Calder, the punching prince!’ Pale-as-Snow came swaggering from the night. ‘Our noble leader returns! Thought maybe we’d lost you.’ He didn’t sound too upset at the possibility.

  ‘I was giving some thought to running for the hills, in fact.’ Calder worked his toes inside his boot, enjoying the feel of it. He was enjoying little things a lot, tonight. Maybe that’s what happened when you saw your death coming at you fast. ‘But the hills are probably turning cold this time of year.’

  ‘The weather’s on our side, then.’

  ‘We’ll see. Thanks for drawing your sword for me. I always had you down as a man to back the favourite.’

  ‘So did I. But for a moment up there you reminded me of your father.’ Pale-as-Snow planted his own boot on the wall beside Calder’s. ‘I remembered how it felt to follow a man I admire.’

  Calder snorted. ‘I wouldn’t get used to that feeling.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s gone already.’

  ‘Then I’ll spend every moment I’ve got left struggling to bring it back for you.’ Calder hopped up onto the wall, waving his arms for balance as a loose stone rocked under his feet, then stood, peering off across the black fields towards the Old Bridge. The torches of the Union pickets formed a dotted line, others moving about as soldiers poured across the river. Making ready to come flooding across the fields tomorrow morning, and over their tumbledown little wall, and murder the lot of them, and leave Bethod’s memory a joke regardless.

  Calder squinted, shading his eyes from the light of his own fires. It looked as if they’d stuck two tall flags right up at the front. He could see them shifting in the wind, gold thread faintly glinting. It seemed strange that they were so easy to see, until he realised they were lit up on purpose. Some sort of display. Some show of strength, maybe.

  ‘By the dead,’ he muttered, and snorted with laughter. His father used to tell him it’s easy to see the enemy one of two ways. As some implacable, terrifying, unstoppable force that can only be feared and never understood. Or some block of wood that doesn’t think, doesn’t move, a dumb target to shoot your plans at. But the enemy is neither one. Imagine he’s you, that he’s no more and no less of a fool, or a coward, or a hero than you are. If you can imagine that, you won’t go too far wrong. The enemy is just a set of men. That’s the realisation that makes war easy. And the one that makes it hard.

  The chances were high that General Mitterick and the rest were just as big a set of idiots as Calder was himself. Which meant they were big ones. ‘Have you seen those bloody flags?’ he called down.

  Pale-as-Snow shrugged. ‘It’s the Union.’

  ‘Where’s White-Eye?’

  ‘Touring the fires, trying to keep mens’ spirits up.’

  ‘Not buoyed by having me in charge, then?’

  Pale-as-Snow shrugged again. ‘They don’t all know you like I do. Probably Hansul’s busy singing the son
g of how you punched Brodd Tenways in the face. That’ll do their love for you no harm.’

  Maybe not, but punching men on his own side wasn’t going to be enough. Calder’s men were beaten and demoralised. They’d lost a leader they loved and gained one nobody did. If he did any more nothing, the chances were high they’d fall apart in battle tomorrow morning, if they were even there when the sun rose.

  Scale had said it. This is the North. Sometimes you have to fight.

  He pressed his tongue into his teeth, the glimmers of an idea starting to take shape from the darkness. ‘Mitterick, is it, across the way?’

  ‘The Union Chief? Aye, Mitterick, I think.’

  ‘Sharp, Dow told me, but reckless.’

  ‘He was reckless enough today.’

  ‘Worked for him, in the end. Men tend to stick to what works. He loves horses, I heard.’

  ‘What? Loves ’em?’ Pale-as-Snow mimed a grabbing action and gave a couple of thrusts of his hips.

  ‘Maybe that too. But I think fighting on them was more the point.’

  ‘That’s good ground for horses.’ Pale-as-Snow nodded at the sweep of dark crops to the south. ‘Nice and flat. Maybe he thinks he’ll ride all over us tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe he will.’ Calder pursed his lips, thinking about it. Thinking about the order crumpled in his shirt pocket. My men and I are giving our all. ‘Reckless. Arrogant. Vain.’ Roughly what men said about Calder, as it went. Which maybe gave him a little insight into his opponent. His eyes shifted back to those idiot flags, thrust out front, lit up like a dance on midsummer eve. His mouth found that familiar smirk, and stayed there. ‘I want you to get your best men together. No more than a few score. Enough to keep together and work quickly at night.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We’re not going to beat the Union moping back here.’ He kicked the bit of loose stone from the top of the wall. ‘And I don’t think some farmer’s boundary mark is going to keep them out either, do you?’

  Pale-as-Snow showed his teeth. ‘Now you’re reminding me of your father again. What about the rest of the lads?’

  Calder hopped down from the wall. ‘Get White-Eye to round them up. They’ve got some digging to do.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much violence and

  butchery the readers will stand’

  Robert E. Howard

  The Standard Issue

  The light came and went as the clouds tore across the sky, showing a glimpse of the big full moon then hiding it away, like a clever whore might show a glimpse of tit once in a while, just to keep the punters eager. By the dead, Calder wished he was with a clever whore now, rather than crouching in the middle of a damp barley-field, peering through the thrashing stalks in the vain hope of seeing a whole pile of night-dark nothing. It was a sad fact, or perhaps a happy one, that he was a man better suited to brothels than battlefields.

  Pale-as-Snow was rather the reverse. The only part of him that had moved in an hour or more was his jaw, slowly shifting as he ground a lump of chagga down to mush. His flinty calm only made Calder more jumpy. Everything did. The scraping of shovels dug at his nerves behind them, sounding just a few strides distant one moment then swallowed up by the wind the next. The same wind that was whipping Calder’s hair in his face, blasting his eyes with grit and cutting through his clothes to the bone.

  ‘Shit on this wind,’ he muttered.

  ‘Wind’s a good thing,’ grunted Pale-as-Snow. ‘Masks the sound. And if you’re chill, brought up to the North, think how they feel over there, used to sunnier climes. All in our favour.’ Good points, maybe, and Calder was annoyed he hadn’t thought of them, but they didn’t make him feel any warmer. He clutched his cloak tight at his chest, other hand wedged into his armpit, and pressed one eye shut.

  ‘I expected war to be terrifying but I never thought it’d be so bloody boring.’

  ‘Patience.’ Pale-as-Snow turned his head, softly spat and licked the juice from his bottom lip. ‘Patience is as fearsome a weapon as rage. More so, in fact, ’cause fewer men have it.’

  ‘Chief.’ Calder spun about, fumbling for his sword hilt. A man had slithered from the barley beside them, mud smeared on his face, eyes standing out strangely white in the midst of it. One of theirs. Calder wondered if he should’ve smeared some mud on his face too. It made a man look like he knew his business. He waited for Pale-as-Snow to answer for a while. Then he realised he was the Chief.

  ‘Oh, right.’ Letting go of his sword and pretending he hadn’t been surprised at all. ‘What?’

  ‘We’re in the trenches,’ whispered the newcomer. ‘Sent a few Union boys back to the mud.’

  ‘They seem ready?’ asked Pale-as-Snow, who hadn’t so much as looked round.

  ‘Shit, no.’ The man’s grin was a pale curve in his blacked-out face. ‘Most of ’em were sleeping.’

  ‘Best time to kill a man.’ Though Calder had to wonder whether the dead would agree. The old warrior held out one hand. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘We shall.’ Calder winced as he set off crawling through the barley. It was far sharper, rougher, more painful stuff to sneak through than you could ever have expected. It didn’t take long for his hands to chafe raw, and it hardly helped that he knew he was heading towards the enemy. He was a man better suited to the opposite direction. ‘Bloody barley.’ When he took his father’s chain back he’d make a law against growing the bastard stuff. Only soft crops allowed, on pain of— He ripped two more bristly wedges out of his way and froze.

  The standards were right ahead, no more than twenty strides off, flapping hard on their staves. Each was embroidered with a golden sun, glittering in the light of a dozen lanterns. Beyond them the stretch of bald, soggy ground Scale had died defending sloped down towards the river, crawling with Union horses. Hundreds of tons of big, glossy, dangerous-looking horseflesh and, as far as he could tell by the patchy torchlight, they were still coming across, hooves clattering on the flags of the bridge, panicked whinnies echoing out as they jostled each other in the darkness. There was no shortage of men either, shouting as they struggled to get their mounts into position, bellowed orders fading on the wind. All making good and ready to trample Calder and his boys into the mud in a few short hours. Not a particularly comforting thought, it had to be said. Calder didn’t mind the odd trampling but he much preferred being in the saddle to being under the hooves.

  A pair of guards flanked the standards, one with his arms wrapped around him and a halberd hugged tight in the crook of his elbow, the other stamping his feet, sword sheathed and using his shield as a windbreak.

  ‘Do we go?’ whispered Pale-as-Snow.

  Calder looked at those guards, and he thought about mercy. Neither one seemed the slightest bit ready for what was coming. They looked even more unhappy about being here than he was, which was quite the achievement. He wondered whether they had wives waiting for them too. Wives with children in their soft bellies, maybe, curled up asleep under the furs with a warm space beside them. He sighed. Damn shame they weren’t all with their wives, but mercy wasn’t going to drive the Union out of the North, or Black Dow out of his father’s chair either.

  ‘We go,’ he said.

  Pale-as-Snow held up a hand and made a couple of gestures. Then he did the same on the other side and settled back onto his haunches. Calder wasn’t sure who he was even waving at, let alone what the meaning was, but it worked like magic.

  The guard with the shield suddenly went over backwards. The other turned his head to look then did the same. Calder realised they’d both had their throats cut. Two black shapes lowered them gently to the ground. A third had caught the halberd as it dropped and now he turned, hugging it in the crook of his own elbow, giving them a gap-toothed grin as he imitated the Union guard.

  More Northmen had broken from the crops and were scurrying forwards, bent double, weapons gleaming faintly as the moon slipped from the clouds again. Not twenty strides away from them three Union soldiers were struggling
with a wind-torn tent. Calder chewed at his lip, hardly able to believe they weren’t seen as they crept across the open ground and into the lamplight, one of them taking a hold of the right-hand flag, starting to twist it free of the earth.

  ‘You!’ A Union soldier, a flatbow part-raised, a look of mild puzzlement on his face. There was a moment of awkward silence, everyone holding their breath.

  ‘Ah,’ said Calder.

  ‘Shit,’ said Pale-as-Snow.

  The soldier frowned. ‘Who are—’ Then he had an arrow in his chest. Calder didn’t hear the bowstring but he could see the black line of the shaft. The soldier shot his flatbow into the ground, gave a high shriek and fell to his knees. Not far away some horses startled, one dragging its surprised handler over onto his face and bumping across the mud. The three soldiers with the tent all snapped around at the same moment, two of them letting go of the canvas so that it was blown straight into the face of the third. Calder felt a sucking feeling in his stomach.

  More Union men spilled into the light with frightening suddenness, a dozen or more, a couple with torches, flames whipped out sideways by a new gust. High wails echoed on Calder’s right and men darted from nowhere, steel glinting as swords were swung. Shadows flickered in the darkness, a weapon, or an arm, or the outline of a face caught for an instant against the orange glow of fire. Calder could hardly tell what was happening, then one of the torches guttered out and he couldn’t tell at all. It sounded as if there was fighting over on the left now too, his head yanked about by every sound.

  He nearly jumped into the sky when he felt Pale-as-Snow’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Best be moving.’

  Calder needed no further encouragement, he was off through the barley like a rabbit. He could hear other men, whooping, laughing, cursing, no clue whether they were his or the enemy. Something hissed into the crops next to him. An arrow, or just the wind blowing stalks about. Crops tangled his ankles, thrashed at his calves. He tripped and fell on his face, tore his way back up with Pale-as-Snow’s hand under his arm.