‘How can you change the world with a road?’ asked Scale.
‘You’re an idiot,’ said Calder.
Scale hit him on the side of the head and knocked him over, thus demonstrating the limits of cleverness. Bethod heard Ursi gasp, and he hit Scale in much the same way and knocked him over, too, thus demonstrating the limits of brute force. An ugly pattern, often acted out between the four of them.
‘Up, the pair of you,’ Bethod snapped.
Calder glared darkly at his brother as he stood, one hand to his bloody mouth, while Scale glared darkly back, one hand to his. Bethod took them each by one arm and drew them close with a grip not to be resisted.
‘We are family,’ he said. ‘If we’re not always for each other, who will be? Scale, one day you’ll be Chieftain. You must control your temper. Calder, one day you’ll be your brother’s right hand, and first councillor, and most trusted adviser. You must control your tongue. Between the two of you, you have all the best of me and plenty more besides. Between the two of you, you could make our clan the greatest in the North. Alone, you’re nothing. Remember that.’
‘Yes, Father,’ muttered Calder.
‘Yes, Father,’ grunted Scale.
‘Now go, and if I hear of more fighting, let it be of how the two of you beat someone else together.’ He stood with his hands on his hips as they barged each other in the doorway then tumbled out into the corridor, the door swinging shut behind them. ‘I can scarcely keep the peace between my own sons,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘How will I do it between the leaders of the North?’
‘One might hope the leaders of the North will act more like grown men’ said Ursi, her dress swishing against the floor as she walked up behind him, her hands slipping gently around his ribs.
Bethod snorted as he held her arms against his heart. ‘I fear that would be a rash hope. They like great warriors in the North, and great warriors rarely make great leaders. Men without fear are men without imagination. Men who use their heads for smashing through things rather than thinking. They celebrate spiteful, prideful, wrathful men here, and pick the most childish of the crowd for leaders.’
‘They’ve found a different kind of leader in you.’
‘I’ve made them listen. And I will make Rattleneck listen. And I will make Ninefingers listen, too.’ Though Bethod wondered whether it was his wife or himself he was trying to convince. ‘He can be a reasonable man.’
‘Perhaps he used to be.’ Ursi’s breath tickled his neck as she spoke softly in his ear. ‘But Ninefingers is blood-drunk. Murder-proud. Every day he is less your friend, less to be trusted, less a man at all and more an animal. Every day he is less Logen and more the Bloody-Nine.’
Bethod winced. He knew she had the right of it. ‘Some days he’s calm enough.’
‘And the others? Last week he killed a whole pen full of sheep, did you know that?’
Bethod’s wince twisted into a grimace. ‘I heard.’
‘Because their bleating bothered him, he said. He killed them with his hands, one by one, so calmly the others didn’t even stir.’
‘I heard.’
‘And when the sheepdog barked he crushed her head, and they found him sound asleep and snoring among the corpses. He is made of death, and he brings death wherever he goes. He scares me.’
Bethod turned in her arms to look down at her, laid one hand gently on her cheek. ‘You need never be scared. Not you.’ Though the dead knew, he was scared enough himself. How long had he been living in fear?
She put her hand on his. ‘I’m not scared of him. I’m scared of the trouble he might bring you. Will bring you.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper as she looked into his eyes. ‘You know I’m right. What if you can stitch a peace together? Ninefingers is not a sword you can hang over the fireplace and tell fond tales of after supper. He is the Bloody-Nine. If you stop finding fights for him, do you think he’ll stop fighting? No. He will find his own, and with whoever’s nearest. That’s what he is. Sooner or later he will find a fight with you.’
‘But I owe him,’ he muttered. ‘Without him, we never—’
‘The Great Leveller pays all debts,’ she said.
‘There are rules.’ But his voice was weak now, so weak he could hardly meet her dark eyes.
‘Tell that to the children, by all means,’ she whispered. ‘But we know otherwise. There are only judgements – what is better, what is worse.’
‘I’ll talk to him,’ he said again, knowing how feeble it sounded even in his own ear. He broke free of her and strode to the window. ‘He’ll give up Rattleneck’s son. He will see the sense of it. He must.’ He planted his fists on the sill and hung his head. ‘By the dead, I’m sick of this. So sick of the blood.’
She came close again, kneading at his shoulder, at the back of his neck, and he heaved a sigh at her touch. ‘You never looked for blood.’
He had to laugh at that, though there was little joy in it. ‘I did. I demanded it. Not this much, I never thought it could be this much, but that’s the trouble with blood. Wounds are so easy to open, so difficult to close. And I opened them eagerly. I needed a man to fight for me. I needed a man who’d stop at nothing. I needed a monster.’
‘And you found one.’
‘No,’ he whispered, shrugging off her hand. ‘I made one.’
It was one of those days at the very start of summer when, like a clever general, the warm sun draws you out then catches you unawares with a downpour of sudden violence. The straw eaves of the buildings dripped with the latest shower, the yard of the holdfast churned to slop and pocked with glistening puddles.
‘A bad day for attacking,’ said Craw, following watchfully at Bethod’s shoulder with one hand slack on his sword’s pommel. ‘A good day for holding a good position.’
‘There are no bad days for holding good positions,’ said Bethod as he squelched across the yard, trying and failing to find firm ground to step on.
‘A good leader holds positions whenever he can, I reckon. Lets less prudent men do the attacking.’
‘So he does,’ said Bethod. ‘How good is my position, do you think?’
Craw scratched at his brown beard. ‘Couldn’t say, Chief.’
A quarter of Bethod’s army was camped outside the gates. Men sat clustered around their tents, cooking and drinking, picking scabs and dicing for trophies from yesterday’s battle, lazing in the sunshine. They took up notched weapons to clash on their battered shields as he passed and roared out praise.
‘The Chief! It’s the Chief!’
‘Bethod!’
‘One more victory!’
He wondered how long the cheers would keep flowing if they went on fighting but the victories dried up. Not long, was his guess. He shook his head at the thought. By the dead, was there no success he couldn’t look at like it was a failure?
Logen’s tent was at a distance from the others. Whether he chose to pitch it away from them, or he pitched it where he pleased and everyone else chose to keep away, it was hard to say. But it was at a distance, anyway. Nothing from the outside said it belonged to the most feared man in the North. A big, shapeless, stained thing, mildewed canvas flapping with the breeze.
The Dogman sat at a dead fire near the stirring flap, trimming flights for arrows. Sitting as faithfully as any dog at his master’s doorway. Bethod had pity in him, whatever men might say, and he felt a touch of pity then. He was bound tight to Ninefingers, surely, but nowhere near as tight as this poor fool.
‘Where’s the rest of the flotsam?’ asked Bethod.
‘Threetrees took ’em out scouting.’ said the Dogman.
‘Took them where they didn’t have to face their shame, you mean.’
The Dogman looked up for a moment, not awed in the least. ‘Maybe, Chief. We all got our shame, I reckon.’
‘Wait here,’ Bethod grunted at Craw, wishing he was staying with him as he stooped towards the tent’s flap.
‘I wouldn’t go in there right now,
’ said the Dogman, starting to get up.
‘You don’t have to,’ snapped Bethod, with no intention of working up the courage to squelch all the way over here again later. He was the master, and he would act like it. He ripped back the tent’s flap, shouting, ‘Ninefingers!’
It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the fusty dimness. A moment in which he smelled the sharp stink of unwashed bodies, and heard a scuffling and a grunting and a slapping of skin.
Then he saw Ninefingers, naked on his knees on a heap of bald old furs, muscles knotted in his back, head twisted to glare over his great slab of a shoulder. There was a new scar on his cheek, glistening black in a track of twisted stitches. His eyes were starting wide and his teeth bared in an animal snarl and for a moment Bethod thought he’d come flying at him with murder in mind.
Then his fresh-scarred face broke out in a jaunty smile. ‘Well, either come in or go out, Chief, but don’t loiter, there’s a breeze on my arse.’
Bethod saw the woman then, on her knees beyond Ninefingers, the daylight harsh on her greasy hair and the sweaty side of her face.
For a thousand reasons, Bethod would have very much liked to leave. But Rattleneck was on his way. It had to be done, and done now.
‘Get out,’ said Bethod to the woman. Instead of leaping to obey, she twisted about for Ninefingers’s say.
He shrugged. ‘You heard the Chief.’
Bethod might have been Chieftain of Carleon and Uffrith both, winner of two dozen battles, acknowledged by all the greatest war leader since Skarling Hoodless. But Logen Ninefingers had gathered an aura of fear about him the past few years. An aura of death. Like the one Shama Heartless used to have, but worse, and with every duel won and every man killed, it grew worse yet.
Within reach of his hand, the Bloody-Nine was master.
The woman wriggled up and hurried past Bethod, snatching her clothes on the way and not even bothering to put them on. The dead knew the relief she felt. Bethod only had to talk to Ninefingers and his bowels felt weak. He dreaded to imagine what having to fuck him might be like. He took one last, longing glance into the daylight and let the flap drop, sealing him in the darkness with his old friend. His old enemy.
Ninefingers had rolled onto his back on the greasy furs, fully as careless as if he was alone, legs and arms wide and his half-hard cock flopped over to one side.
‘Nothing like a fuck in the afternoon, is there?’ he asked the tent’s ceiling.
‘What?’ Bethod prided himself on never being taken by surprise. These days Ninefingers’s every utterance seemed to catch him off balance.
‘A fuck.’ He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘You been fucking, Chief?’
‘I’ve been laying plans.’
Ninefingers wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, it smells like fucking.’
‘That’s you.’
‘Uh.’ Ninefingers sniffed at one armpit and raised a scarred brow in acknowledgement. ‘Well, you should fuck. Afternoon. Whenever. You look worried.’
‘I’m worried because half the North wants me dead.’
Logen grinned. ‘All the North wants me dead. Don’t see me frowning, do you? Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he looks on the sunny side o’ the case.’ Bethod ground his teeth. If he never heard that phrase again it would be too damn soon. ‘Your wife looked worried, too, when I saw her t’other day. Was it yesterday? Day before? Marriage won’t come to nothing without fucking, will it? Whole point o’ the exercise.’
Bethod hardly knew what to say. The smell of the place was chasing out his wits. ‘You’re teaching me about marriage now? You?’
‘Wisdom’s wisdom, ain’t it, no matter the source? I mean, if a man’s a fucker or a fighter then I’m more of a fighter. Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s a fighter, but a fuck just soothes all those—’
‘Rattleneck’s coming,’ said Bethod.
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
Ninefingers frowned. ‘Might be I should get dressed.’
‘That’s one idea.’
But, sadly, he didn’t. He brought his knees up to his face and, with snakelike speed, sprang onto his feet in one motion, drew himself to his full height, stretching his arms out wide and wriggling his fingers. His nine fingers and his stump, anyway.
Bethod swallowed. He swore the bastard kept getting bigger. He was no small man but Ninefingers stood half a head taller, a twisted mass of scar and muscle and woody sinew, like a machine made for killing with no thought spared by the engineers on the looks of it. The way he held himself was all pride, and hate, and contempt at the world and everyone in it. Contempt for Bethod, too, who was meant to be his Chief.
Bethod wondered again if he should do what Ursi wanted. Kill Ninefingers. He had been wondering about it ever since Heonan, when Logen climbed the cliffs and spilled the Hillmen’s blood in spite of his orders. While the rash fools cheered his audacity and made up bad songs about his skill, Bethod had been turning over how to kill the bloodthirsty fool. Who he could send to do it, and when. Knives in the night, how hard could it be? Put the mad dog down before he bit his master’s hand. Or perhaps cut off his master’s head.
And yet … and yet … they were friends, were they not? Bethod owed him, did he not? There were rules, were there not? A man should pay his dues, his father had always said.
And then there was the doubt niggling at the back of Bethod’s neck. What if something went wrong? What if the Bloody-Nine survived, and came for him?
‘So Rattleneck’s coming?’ Ninefingers strutted to a table made from an old door, his fruits slapping against his bare thighs with each step. ‘What’s that old bastard after?’
‘I asked him to come.’
Ninefingers paused with his left hand halfway towards the table. ‘You did?’ There was a wine jug there, and some cups. And there was a huge knife, too, only just this side of a sword, buried in the scarred tabletop close to Logen’s three reaching fingertips, its blade glittering cold in the chinks of daylight leaking into the tent.
Bethod realised then the place couldn’t have held more weapons had it been an armoury. A sheathed sword lay on the ground with its belt in a tangle, an unsheathed one on top of it. Nearby was an axe with a heavy head stained brown, Bethod hoped with rust but rather feared it wasn’t. There was a shield so hacked and dented and crossed with scars there was no telling what had once been painted on the face. And knives. Knives everywhere, the telltale glints of their blades and pommels among the furs, stabbed into the tent poles, buried to their crosspieces in the dirt. You can never have too many knives, Ninefingers was always saying.
Bethod wondered how many men he had killed. Wondered if anyone could put a count on it now. Named Men, and champions, and famed warriors, and Thralls, and Shanka, and peasants, and women, and children. Everything that breathed he’d stopped the breath of. For him to kill Bethod would be nothing. Every moment they stood together was a moment in which he chose not to do it. And Bethod felt again, as he did ten times a day, how weak a thing was power. How flimsy an illusion. A lie that everyone, for some unknown reason, agreed to treat as truth. And that blade in the table could, in an instant, be the ending of it, and the ending of Bethod, too, and all he had worked for. All he wanted to pass on to his sons.
Ninefingers grinned, a hungry grin, a wolf grin, as though he brushed aside the tissue of Bethod’s authority and saw into his thoughts. Then he wrapped his three fingers around the handle of the wine jug. ‘You want me to kill him?’
‘Rattleneck?’
‘Aye.’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ Ninefingers looked a little crestfallen, then started sloshing wine into a cup. ‘Right.’
‘I want to make peace with him.’
‘Peace, you’re saying?’ Ninefingers paused, cup halfway to his mouth. ‘Peace?’ He rolled the word around in his mouth as if it was a strange new dish. As if it was a word in a foreign tongue. ‘Why?’
Bethod blinke
d. ‘What do you mean, why?’
‘I can take that fucker, Chief, believe me! I can take him like that.’ And the cup burst apart in his hand, spraying wine and bits of pot across the furs on the floor of the tent. Ninefingers blinked at his bleeding fist, as though he’d no idea how that happened. ‘Uh. Shit.’ He looked for something to wipe it on, then gave up and wiped it on his chest.
Bethod stepped towards him. The dead knew he did not want to. The dead knew his heart was pounding. But he stepped towards him anyway, and fixed him with his eye, and said, ‘You can’t kill the whole world, Logen.’
Ninefingers grinned as he reached for another cup. ‘Folk are always telling me who I can’t kill. But strong men, weak men, big names, little names, they all die once you cut ’em enough. Shama Heartless, you remember him? Everyone told me not to fight him.’
‘I told you not to fight him.’
‘Only ’cause you were scared I’d lose. But when I fought him, and when I looked set to win … did you ask me to stop?’
Bethod swallowed, mouth dry. He remembered the day well enough. The snow on the trees, and the smoke of breath as the crowd roared, and the clashing of steel, and both his fists clenched painfully tight as he willed Ninefingers on. Willed him on desperately, every hope hanging on him.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No. And once I spilled his guts with his own sword … did you ask me to stop?’
‘No,’ said Bethod. He remembered the steam from them, remembered the smell of them, remembered the gurgling moan Shama Heartless made as he died, the great roar of triumph that had burst from his own throat. ‘I cheered you on.’
‘Yes. You called for no peace then, if I remember right. You felt …’ Ninefingers’s eyes were fever-bright, his hands clutching at the air as he searched for the word. ‘You felt … the joy of it, didn’t you! Better’n love. Better’n fucking. Better’n anything. Don’t deny it!’
Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of The First Law Page 29
