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

by Joe Abercrombie

  He strode up frowning through the thickening rain, through the gap in the mossy wall that ringed the Heroes. He walked slow, shoulders back and head high, hoping folk would think this was all well planned and he’d done nothing the least bit cowardly—

  ‘Well, well, well. Who should I find running away from the Union but Cairm Ironhead?’ Who else but Glama Golden, the swollen prick, leaning against one of the great stones with a big, fat smile on his big, bruised face.

  By the dead, how Ironhead hated this bastard. Those big puffy cheeks. That moustache, like a pair of yellow slugs on his fat top lip. Ironhead’s skin crawled at the sight of him. The sight of him smug made him want to tear his own eyes out. ‘Pulling back,’ he growled.

  ‘Showing back, I’d call it.’

  That got a few laughs, but they sputtered out as Ironhead came forwards, baring his teeth. Golden took a careful step back, narrowed eyes flickering down to Ironhead’s drawn sword, hand dropping to his own axe, making ready.

  Then Ironhead stopped himself. He hadn’t got his name by letting anger tug him about by the nose. There was a right time to settle this, and a right way, and it wasn’t now, standing on even terms with all kinds of witnesses. No. He’d wait for his moment, and make sure he enjoyed it too. So he forced his face into a smile of his own. ‘We can’t all have your record of bravery, Glama Golden. Takes some bones to batter a man’s fist with your face the way you did.’

  ‘Least I fucking fought, didn’t I?’ snarled Golden, his Carls bristling up around him.

  ‘If you can call it fighting when a man just falls off his horse then runs away.’

  Golden’s turn to bare his teeth. ‘You dare talk to me about running away, you cowardly—’

  ‘Enough.’ Black Dow had Curnden Craw on his left, Caul Shivers on his right and Cracknut Whirrun just behind. That and a whole crowd of heavy-armed, heavy-scarred, heavy-scowled Carls. A fearsome company, but the look on Dow’s face was more fearsome still. He was rigid with rage, eyes bulging as if they might burst. ‘This what you call Named Men these days? A pair o’ great big names with a pair o’ sulking children hiding inside?’ Dow curled his tongue and blew spit onto the mud between Ironhead and Golden. ‘Rudd Threetrees was a stubborn bastard, and Bethod a sly bastard, and the Bloody-Nine an evil bastard, the dead know that, but there are times I miss ’em. Those were men!’ He roared the word in Ironhead’s face, spraying spit and making everyone flinch. ‘They said a thing, they did a fucking thing!’

  Ironhead thought it best to make a second quick retreat, eyes on Black Dow’s ready weapons just in case an even quicker one was needful. He was no keener on that fight than he was on the one with the Union. Even less, if anything, but luckily Golden couldn’t resist sticking his broken nose in.

  ‘I’m with you, Chief!’ he piped up. ‘With you all the way!’

  ‘Is that right?’ Dow turned to him, mouth curling with contempt. ‘Oh, lucky fucking me!’ And he shouldered Golden out of his way and led his men towards the wall.

  When Ironhead turned back he found Curnden Craw giving him a look from under his grey brows. ‘What?’ he snapped.

  Craw just kept giving him that look. ‘You know what.’

  He shook his head as he brushed between Ironhead and Golden. They were a sorry excuse for a pair of War Chiefs. For a pair of men, for that matter, but Craw had seen worse. Selfishness, cowardice and greed never surprised him these days. Those were the times.

  ‘Pair o’ fucking worms!’ Dow hissed into the drizzle as Craw came up beside him. He clawed at the old drystone, tore loose a rock and stood, every muscle flexed, lips twisting and moving with no sound as if he didn’t know whether to fling it down the slope or stave in someone’s skull with it or smash his own face with it or what. In the end he just gave a frustrated snarl, and put it helplessly back on top of the wall. ‘I should kill ’em. Maybe I will. Maybe I will. Burn the fucking pair.’

  Craw winced. ‘Don’t know they’d take a flame in this weather, Chief.’ He peered down through the shroud of rain towards the Children. ‘And I reckon there’ll be killing enough for everyone soon.’ The Union had fearsome numbers down there and, from what he could tell, they were finding their order. Forming ranks. Lots and lots of close-packed ranks. ‘Looks like they’re coming on.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they? Ironhead good as invited the bastards.’ Dow took a scowling breath and snorted it out like a bull ready to charge, breath smoking in the wet. ‘You’d think it’d be easy being Chief.’ He shifted his shoulders like the chain sat too heavy on ’em. ‘But it’s like dragging a fucking mountain through the muck. Threetrees told me that. Told me every leader stands alone.’

  ‘Ground’s still with us.’ Craw thought he should have a stab at building up the positive. ‘And this rain’ll help too.’

  Dow only frowned down at his free hand, fingers spread. ‘Once they’re bloody …’

  ‘Chief!’ Some lad was forcing his way through the crowd of sodden Carls, shoulders of his jerkin dark with damp. ‘Chief! Reachey’s hard pressed down in Osrung! They’re over the bridge and fighting in the streets and he needs someone to lend a— Gah!’

  Dow grabbed him around the back of his neck, jerked him roughly forward and steered his face towards the Children and the Union men swarming over ’em like ants on a trodden nest. ‘Do I look like I’ve got fucking men to spare? Well? What do you reckon?’

  The lad swallowed. ‘No, Chief?’

  Dow shoved him tottering back and Craw managed to stick out a hand and catch him ’fore he fell. ‘Tell Reachey to hold on best he can,’ Dow tossed over his shoulder. ‘Might be some help will come along.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’ And the lad backed off quick and was soon lost in the press.

  The Heroes was left a strange, funeral quiet. Only the odd mutter, the faint clatter of gear, the soft ping and patter of rain on metal. Down at the Children, someone was tooting on a horn. Seemed a mournful little tune, somehow, floating up out of the rain. Or maybe it was just a tune, and Craw was the mournful one. Wondering who out of all these men around him would kill before the sun was set, and who get killed. Wondering which of them had the Great Leveller’s cold hand on their shoulder. Wondering if he did. He closed his eyes, and made himself a promise that if he got through this he’d retire. Just like he had a dozen times before.

  ‘Looks like it’s time.’ Wonderful was holding out her hand.

  ‘Aye.’ Craw took it, and shook it, and looked her in the face, her jaw set hard, her stubbly hair black in the wet, line of the long scar white down the side. ‘Don’t die, eh?’

  ‘I’m not planning on it. Stick close and I’ll try not to let you die either.’

  ‘Deal.’ And they were all grabbing each other’s hands, and slapping each other’s shoulders, that last moment of comradeship before the blood, when you feel bound together closer than with your own family. Craw clasped hands with Flood, and with Scorry, and with Drofd, and Shivers, even, and he found himself seeking among strangers for Brack’s big paw to shake, then realised he was under the sod behind ’em.

  ‘Craw.’ Jolly Yon, and clear from his sorry look what he was after.

  ‘Aye, Yon. I’ll tell ’em. You know I will.’

  ‘I know.’ And they clasped hands, and Yon had a twitch to the corner of his mouth might’ve been a smile for him. All the while Beck just stood there, dark hair plastered to pale forehead, staring down towards the Children like he was staring at nothing.

  Craw took the lad’s hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘Just do what’s right. Stand with your crew, stand with your Chief.’ He leaned a little closer. ‘Don’t get killed.’

  Beck squeezed back. ‘Aye. Thanks, Chief.’

  ‘Where’s Whirrun?’

  ‘Never fear!’ And he came shouldering through the wet and unhappy throng. ‘Whirrun of Bligh stands among you!’

  For reasons known only to himself he’d taken his shirt off and was standing stripped to his waist, Father of Sw
ords over one shoulder. ‘By the dead,’ muttered Craw. ‘Every time we fight you’re bloody wearing less.’

  Whirrun tipped his head back and blinked into the rain. ‘I’m not wearing a shirt in this. A wet shirt only chafes my nipples.’

  Wonderful shook her head. ‘All part of the hero’s mystery.’

  ‘That too.’ Whirrun grinned. ‘How about it, Wonderful? Does a wet shirt chafe your nipples? I need to know.’

  She shook his hand. ‘You worry about your nipples, Cracknut, I’ll handle mine.’

  Everything was bright now, and still, and quiet. Water gleaming on armour, furs curled up with wet, bright painted shields beaded with dew. Faces flashed at Craw, known and unknown. Grinning, stern, crazy, afraid. He held out his hand, and Whirrun pressed it in his own, grinning with every tooth. ‘You ready?’

  Craw always had his doubts. Ate ’em, breathed ’em, lived ’em twenty years or more. Hardly a moment free of the bastards. Every day since he buried his brothers.

  But now was no time for doubts. ‘I’m ready.’ And he drew his sword, and looked down towards the Union men, hundreds upon hundreds, blurring in the rain to spots and splashes and glints of colour, and he smiled. Maybe Whirrun was right, and a man ain’t really alive until he faces death. Craw raised his sword up high, and he gave a howl, and all around him men did the same.

  And they waited for the Union to come.

  More Tricks

  The sun had to be up somewhere but you’d never have known it. The angry clouds had thickened and the light was still poor. Positively beggarly, in fact. As far as Corporal Tunny could tell, and somewhat to his surprise, no one had moved. The helmets and spears still showed above the stretch of wall that he could see, shifting a little from time to time but going nowhere fast. Mitterick’s attack was well underway. That much they could hear. But on this forgotten far end of the battle, the Northmen waited.

  ‘Are they still there?’ asked Worth. Waiting for action like this got most men shitting themselves. Worth was unique, in that it seemed it was the one thing that could stop him.

  ‘They’re still there.’

  ‘Not moving?’ squeaked Yolk.

  ‘If they were moving we’d be moving, wouldn’t we?’ Tunny peered through his eyeglass once again. ‘No. They’re not moving.’

  ‘Is that fighting I can hear?’ muttered Worth, as a gust of wind brought the echoing of angry men, horses and metal across the stream.

  ‘It’s that or it’s a serious disagreement in a stable. Do you think it’s a disagreement in a stable?’

  ‘No, Corporal Tunny.’

  ‘No. Neither do I.’

  ‘Then what’s going on?’ asked Yolk. A riderless horse appeared from over the rise, stirrups flapping at its flanks, trotted down towards the water, stopped and started nibbling at the grass.

  Tunny lowered his eyeglass. ‘Honestly, I’m not sure.’ All around them, rain tapped at the leaves.

  The trampled barley was scattered with dead and dying horses, dead and dying men. In front of Calder and his stolen standards they were heaped up in a bloody tangle. Only a few strides away, three Carls were arguing with each other as they tried to free their spears, all impaled in the same Union rider. A few boys had been sent scurrying out to gather spent arrows. A couple more had been unable to resist clambering into the third pit to get an early start at picking over the bodies there, and White-Eye was roaring at them to get back into line.

  The Union cavalry were all done. A brave effort, but a stupid one. It seemed to Calder the two often went together. To make matters worse, having failed once they’d insisted on giving it another try, still more doomed. Three score or so had jumped the third pit on the right, managed to get over Clail’s Wall and kill a few archers before they were shot or speared themselves. All pointless as mopping a beach. That was the trouble with pride, and courage, and all those clench-jawed virtues bards love to harp on. The more you have, the more likely you are to end up bottom in a pile of dead men. All the Union’s bravest had achieved was to give Calder’s men the biggest boost to their spirits they’d had since Bethod was King of the Northmen.

  They were letting the Union know it, now, as the survivors rode, or limped, or crawled back towards their lines. They danced about, and clapped and whooped into the drizzle. They shook each others’ hands, and thumped each other’s backs, and clashed their shields together. They chanted Bethod’s name, and Scale’s, and even quite frequently Calder’s, which was gratifying. The comradeship of warriors, who would’ve thought? He grinned around as men cheered and brandished their weapons at him, held up his sword and gave it a wave in return. He wondered whether it was too late to smear a bit of blood on the blade, since he hadn’t quite got around to swinging it. There was plenty of blood about and he doubted its previous owners would miss it now.

  ‘Chief?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Pale-as-Snow was pointing off to the south. ‘Might want to pull ’em back into position.’

  The rain was getting weightier, fat drops leaving the earth spattered with dark spots, pinging from the armour of the living and the dead. It had drawn a misty haze across the battlefield to the south, but beyond the riderless horses aimlessly wandering, and the horseless riders stumbling back towards the Old Bridge, Calder thought he could see shapes moving in the barley.

  He shielded his eyes with one hand. More and more emerged from the rain, turning from ghosts to flesh and metal. Union foot. Vast blocks of them, trampling forward in carefully measured, well-ordered, dreadfully purposeful ranks, pole-arms held high, flags struck limp by the wet.

  Calder’s men had seen them too, and their triumphant jeering was already a memory. The barking voices of Named Men rang through the rain, bringing them grimly back to their places behind the third pit. White-Eye was marshalling some of the lightly wounded to fight as a reserve and plug any holes. Calder wondered if they’d be plugging holes in him before the day was out. It looked a good bet.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got any more tricks?’ asked Pale-as-Snow.

  ‘Not really.’ Unless you counted running like hell. ‘You?’

  ‘Just the one.’ And the old warrior carefully wiped the blood from his sword with a rag and held it up.

  ‘Oh.’ Calder looked down at his own clean blade, glistening with beads of water. ‘That.’

  The Tyranny of Distance

  ‘I can’t see a damn thing!’ hissed Finree’s father, taking a stride forwards and peering through his eyeglass again, presumably to no more effect than before. ‘Can you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ grumbled one of his staff, unhelpfully.

  They had witnessed Mitterick’s premature charge in stunned silence. Then, as the first light crawled across the valley, the start of Jalenhorm’s advance. Then the drizzle had begun. First Osrung had disappeared in the grey pall on the right, then Clail’s Wall on the left, then the Old Bridge and the nameless inn where Finree had almost died yesterday. Now even the shallows were half-remembered ghosts. Everyone stood silent, paralysed with anxiety, straining for sounds that would occasionally tickle at the edge of hearing, over the damp whisper of the rain. For all that they could see now, there might as well have been no battle at all.

  Finree’s father paced back and forth, the fingers of one hand fussing at nothing. He came to stand beside her, staring off into the featureless grey. ‘I sometimes think there isn’t a person in the world more powerless than a supreme commander on a battlefield,’ he muttered.

  ‘How about his daughter?’

  He gave her a tight smile. ‘Are you all right?’

  She thought about smiling back but gave up on it. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied, and quite transparently too. Apart from the very real pain through her neck whenever she turned her head, down her arm whenever she used her hand, and across her scalp all the time, she still felt a constant, suffocating worry. Time and again she would startle, staring about like a miser for his lost purse, but with no idea what she was even lookin
g for. ‘You have far more important things to worry about—’

  As if to prove her point he was already striding away to meet a messenger, riding up towards the barn from the east. ‘News?’

  ‘Colonel Brock reports that his men have begun their attack on the bridge in Osrung!’ Hal was in the fight, then. Leading from the front, no doubt. She felt herself sweating more than ever under her clothes, the damp beneath Hal’s coat meeting the damp leaking through from above in a crescendo of chafing discomfort. ‘Colonel Brint, meanwhile, is leading an assault against the savages who yesterday …’ His eyes flickered nervously to Finree, and back. ‘Against the savages.’

  ‘And?’ asked her father.

  ‘That is all, Lord Marshal.’

  He grimaced. ‘My thanks. Please, bring further news when you are able.’

  The messenger saluted, turned his horse and galloped off through the rain.

  ‘No doubt your husband is distinguishing himself enormously in the assault.’ Bayaz leaned beside her on his staff, bald pate glistening with moisture. ‘Leading from the front, in the style of Harod the Great. A latter-day hero! I’ve always had the greatest admiration for men of that stamp.’

  ‘Perhaps you should try it yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I have. I was quite the firebrand in my youth. But an unquenchable thirst for danger is unseemly in the old. Heroes have their uses, but someone has to point them the right way. And clean up afterwards. They always raise a cheer from the public, but they leave a hell of a mess.’ Bayaz thoughtfully patted his stomach. ‘No, a cup of tea at the rear is more my style. Men like your husband can gather the plaudits.’

  ‘You are far too generous.’

  ‘Few indeed would agree.’

  ‘But where is your tea now?’

  Bayaz frowned at his empty hand. ‘My servant has … more important errands to run this morning.’

  ‘Can there be anything more important than attending to your whims?’