Abercrombie, Joe - The Heroes

Sergeant Lock charged forward, wasted bravery, hacked a lump from the edge of a shield. The shield had a bridge painted on it. He chopped at it again, just as another Northman ran up and hit him with an axe. He was knocked sideways, then back the other way by a sword that left a long scratch across his helmet and a deep cut across his face. He spun, arms up like a dancer, then was barged over in the rush and lost in the barley.

Lasmark sprang at the shield with the bridge, for some reason barely taking note of the man behind it. Perhaps he wanted to pretend there was no man behind it. His sword instructor would have been livid with him. Before he got there a spear caught his breastplate, sent him stumbling. The point scraped past and he swung at the man who thrust it, an ugly-looking fellow with a badly broken nose. The sword split his skull open and brains flew out. It was surprisingly easy to do. Swords are heavy and sharp, he supposed, even cheap ones.

There was a clicking sound and everything turned over, mud thumped and barley tangled him. One of his eyes was dark. There was a ringing, stupidly loud, as if his head was the clapper in a great bell. He tried to get up but the world was spinning. None of the things he’d promised to do by the time he was thirty. Oh. Except join the army.

The Southerner tried to push himself up and Lightsleep knocked him on the back of the head with his mace and bonked his helmet in. One boot kicked a little and he was done.

‘Lovely.’ The rest of the Union men were all surrounded and going down fast or scattering like a flock o’ starlings, just like Golden said they would. Lightsleep knelt, tucked his mace under his arm and started trying to twist a nice-looking ring off the dead Southerner’s finger. Couple of other lads were claiming their prizes, one was screaming with blood running down his face, but, you know, it’s a battle, ain’t it? If everyone came out smiling there’d be no point. Away south Golden’s riders were mopping up, driving the fleeing Southerners to the river.

‘Turn for the hill!’ Scabna was bellowing, pointing at it with his axe, the smug arse. ‘To the hill, you bastards!’

‘You turn for the hill,’ grunted Lightsleep, legs still sore from all that running, throat sore from all that screaming besides. ‘Hah!’ Finally got the Union lad’s ring off. Held it up to the light and frowned. Just some polished rock with a face cut into it, but he guessed it might fetch a couple of silvers. Tucked it into his jerkin. Took the lad’s sword for good measure and stuck it through his belt, though it was a light little toothpick of a thing and the hilt rattled.

‘Get on!’ Scabna dragged one scavenger up and booted him in the arse to set him going. ‘Bloody get on!’

‘All right, all right!’ Lightsleep jogged on after the others, towards the hill. Upset at not getting the chance to go through the Southerners’ pockets, maybe get his boots off. It’d all be swept by the pickers and the women following after now. Beggar bastards too cowardly to fight, turning a profit out of other men’s work. A disgrace, but he guessed there was no stopping it. Facts of life, like flies and bad weather.

There were Union men up on the Heroes, he could see metal glinting round the drystone wall near the top, spears pricking the sky. He kept his shield up, peering over the rim. Didn’t want to get stuck with one of those evil little arrows they used. Get stuck with one o’ those, you won’t never get yourself unstuck.

‘Will you look at that,’ Scabna grunted.

Now they’d climbed a little higher they could see all the way to the woods up north, and the land between was full of men. Black Dow’s Carls, and Tenways’, and Ironhead’s too. Thralls surging after. Thousands of ’em, all streaming across towards the Heroes. Lightsleep had never seen so many fighters in one place, not even when he fought with Bethod’s army. Not at the Cumnur, or Dunbrec, or in the High Places. He’d half a mind to let ’em take the Heroes while he hung back, maybe pleading a twisted ankle, but he weren’t going to raise a sharp dowry for his daughters on a cheap ring and a little sword, now, was he?

They hopped over a ditch patched with brown puddles and were out of the trampled crops at the foot of the slope. ‘Up the hill, you bastards!’ screeched Scabna, waving his axe.

Lightsleep had swallowed about enough of that fool’s carping, only Chief ’cause he was some friend to one of Golden’s sons. He twisted sideways, snarling, ‘You get up the fucking hill, you—’

There was a thud and an arrowhead stuck out of his jerkin. He spent a silent moment just staring at it, then he took a great whooping breath in and screamed. ‘Ah, fuck!’ He whimpered, shuddered, pain stabbing into his armpit as he tried to breathe again, coughed blood down his front, dropped on his knees.

Scabna stared at him, shield up to cover them both. ‘Lightsleep, what the hell?’

‘Bloody … I’m stuck right … through.’ He had to spit blood out, gurgling with every word. He couldn’t kneel any more, it was hurting him too much. He slumped over on his side. Seemed a shitty way to go back to the mud, but maybe they all are. Boots hammered around him as men started thumping up that hill, spraying spots of dirt in his face.

Scabna knelt, started to unbutton Lightsleep’s jerkin. ‘Let’s have a look here.’

Lightsleep couldn’t move hardly. Everything was going blurry. ‘By the … dead, it … hurts.’

‘Bet it does. Where did you put that ring?’

*

Gaunt lowered his bow, watched a few Northmen in the crowd topple over as the rest of the volley flickered down into them. From this height, the bolts from a heavy flatbow could split their shields and punch through chain mail easily as a lady’s gown. One of them threw his weapons down and ran off hooting, clutching his stomach, left a gently curving trail through the crops. Gaunt had no way of knowing if his own bolt had found a mark or not, but it hardly mattered. It was all about quantity. Crank, load, level, shoot, crank, load …

‘Come on, lads!’ he shouted at the men around him. ‘Shoot! Shoot!’

‘By the Fates,’ he heard Rose whisper, voice all choked off, pointing a wavering forefinger towards the north. The enemy were still pouring from the trees in fearsome numbers. The fields were crawling with them already, surging south towards the hill in a dully twinkling tide. But it took more than a pack of angry apes to make Sergeant Gaunt nervy. He’d watched the numberless Gurkish charge their little hill at Bishak and he’d cranked his flatbow just as hard as he could for the best part of an hour and in the end he’d watched them all run back again. Apart from those they left peppered in heaps. He grabbed Rose by the shoulder and steered him back to the wall.

‘Never mind about that. The next bolt is all that matters.’

‘Sergeant.’ And Rose bent over his bow again, pale but set to his task.

‘Crank, lads, crank!’ Gaunt turned his own at a nice, measured pace, all oiled and clean and working smoothly. Not too fast, not too slow, making sure he did the job right. He fished out another bolt, frowning to himself. No more than ten left in his quiver. ‘What happened to that ammunition?’ he roared over his shoulder, and then at his own people, ‘Pick your targets, nice and careful!’ And he stood, levelled his bow, stock pressing into his shoulder.

The sight below gave a moment’s pause, even to a man of his experience. The foremost Northmen had reached the hill and were charging up, slowing on the grassy slope but showing no sign of stopping. Their war cry got worryingly louder as he came up from behind the wall, the vague keening becoming a shrill howl.

He gritted his teeth, aiming low. Squeezed the trigger, felt the jolt, string humming. He saw where this one went, thudding straight into a shield and knocking the man who held it over backwards. Rattle and pop as a dozen or more bows went on his left, two or three Northmen dropping, one shot in the face, going over backwards and his axe spinning into the blue sky.

‘That’s the recipe, lads, keep shooting! Just load and—’ There was a loud click beside him. Gaunt felt a searing pain in his neck, and all the strength went out of his legs.

*

It was an accident. Rose had been tinkering with the trigger of his flatbow for a week or longer, trying to stop it wobbling, worried it might go off at the wrong moment, but he’d never been any good with machines. Why they’d made him a bowman he’d no clue. Would have been better off with a spear. Sergeant Gaunt would have been a lot better off if they’d given Rose a spear, that was a fact most definite. It just went off as he was lifting it, the point of the metal lath leaving a long scratch down his arm. As he was cursing at that, he looked sideways, and Gaunt had the bolt through his neck.

They stared at each other for a moment, then Gaunt’s eyes rolled down, crossed, towards the flights, and he dropped his own bow and reached up to his neck. His quivering fingers came away bloody. ‘Gurgh,’ he said. ‘Bwuthers.’ And his lids flickered, and he dropped all of a sudden, his skull smacking against the wall and knocking his helmet skewed across his face.

‘Gaunt? Sergeant Gaunt?’ Rose slapped his cheek as though trying to wake him from an unauthorised nap, smeared blood across his face. There was more and more blood welling out of him all the time. Out of his nose, out of the neat slit where the bolt entered his neck. Oily dark, almost black, and his skin so white.

‘He’s dead!’ Rose felt himself dragged towards the wall. Someone shoved his empty flatbow back into his bloody hands. ‘Shoot, damn you! Shoot!’ A young officer, one of the new ones, Rose couldn’t remember his name. Could hardly remember his own name.

‘What?’

‘Shoot!’

Rose started cranking, aware of other men around him doing the same. Sweating, struggling, cursing, leaning over the wall to shoot. He could hear wounded men screaming, and above that a strange howl. He fumbled a bolt from his quiver, slotted it into the groove, cursing to himself at his trembling fingers, all smeared pink from Gaunt’s blood.

He was crying. There were tears streaming down his face. His hands felt very cold, though it wasn’t cold. His teeth were chattering. The man beside him threw down his bow and ran towards the top of the hill. There were a lot of men running, ignoring the desperate bellows of their officers.

Arrows flitted down. One went spinning from a steel cap just beside him. Others stuck into the hillside behind the wall. Silent, still, as if they’d suddenly sprung from the ground by magic rather than dropped from the sky. Someone else turned to run, but before he got a step the officer cut him down with his sword.

‘For the king!’ he squealed, his eyes gone all mad. ‘For the king!’

Rose had never seen the king. A Northman jumped up on the wall just to his left. He was stabbed with two spears right away, screamed and fell back. The man beside Rose stood, cursing as he raised his flatbow. The top of his head came off and he stumbled, shot his bolt high into the sky. A Northman sprang over the wall into the gap he left, young-looking, face all twisted up with rage. A devil, screaming like a devil. A Union man came at him with a spear but he turned it away with his shield, swung as he dropped from the wall, axe blade thudding into the man’s shoulder and sending blood flying in dark streaks. Northmen were coming over the wall all around. The gap to their left was choked with straining bodies, a tangle of spears, slipping boots ripping at the muddy grass.