Quite as if he hadn’t spared it a thought until now. But Koll knew Father Yarvi was not a man to leave the field of the future unsown with plans.
Gods, was Skifr right? Were they the same as the elves? Their little feet in mighty footprints, but on the same path? He thought of Thorlby made an empty ruin, a giant tomb, the people of Gettland burned away to leave only silence and dust, perhaps some fragment of his carved mast left, a ghostly echo for those who came long after to puzzle over.
Koll took one last glance back at that gloriously happy face thousands of years dead, and saw something glint among the shattered glass. A golden bangle, just like the one in the painting, and Koll darted out a hand and slipped it into his pocket.
He doubted the elf-woman would miss it.
Father Earth’s Guts
‘It will be dangerous,’ said Skara, grimly.
An apt moment for Raith to puff himself up with some hero’s bluster. There’d been a time he was an ever-gushing fountain of it, after all. That’s what I’m counting on, or danger’s my breakfast, or for our enemies, maybe! But all he could manage was a strangled, ‘Aye. But we have to stop that mine before it gets under the walls …’
No need to say more. They all knew what was at stake.
Everything.
Raith glanced about at the volunteers, their faces, their shield-rims, their weapons all smeared with ashes to keep them hidden in the night. Two dozen of the fastest Gettlanders, two dozen of the fiercest Vanstermen, and him.
The Breaker of Swords had drawn lots with King Uthil for the honour of leading them, and won. Now he stood smiling as they waited for their moment, savouring each breath as if the night smelled of flowers. The man showed no fear, not ever, Raith had to give him that. But where it used to feel like bravery, now it looked like madness.
‘No one will think less of you if you stay,’ said Skara.
‘I’ll think less of me.’ If that was even possible. Raith met his brother’s eye for an instant before Rakki looked away, ash-dark face fixed hard. Desperate to prove he could be the tough one, even if they both knew he couldn’t. ‘Got to watch my brother’s back.’
‘Even if he doesn’t want your help?’
‘Specially then.’
Rakki had one of the big clay jars over his shoulder that held Father Yarvi’s southern fire, Soryorn another. Raith thought of how that stuff had burst blazing over the High King’s ships, burning men toppling into the sea, then he thought of smearing it on timbers deep under the ground and setting a torch to it, and his courage took another hard knock. He wondered how many more it’d stand. Time was nothing scared him. Or had he always been pretending?
Gods, he wished they could go. ‘It’s the waiting hurts worst,’ he muttered.
‘Worse than being stabbed, or burned, or buried in that mine?’
Raith swallowed. ‘No. Not worse than those.’
‘You need not fear for me, my queen.’ Gorm had strode over with his thumbs wedged into his great belt, keen to make it all about him. There’s kings for you. Their towering opinions of themselves are generally both their making and their downfall. ‘Mother War breathed on me in my crib,’ he said, a tiresome refrain if ever there was one. ‘It has been foreseen no man can kill me.’
Skara raised a brow. ‘What about a vasty weight of dirt falling on your head?’
‘Oh, Father Earth fashioned me too large to squeeze into Yilling’s mine. Others will go delving while I guard the entrance. But you must learn to rejoice at the risks.’
Skara looked more likely to be sick at them. ‘Why?’
‘Without Death, war would be a dull business.’ Gorm slipped his great chain over his head and offered it to her. ‘Would you honour me by keeping this safe until the task is done? I would hate for its rattling to catch Death’s ear.’
As their owner swaggered away Skara blinked down at the pommels draped over her hands, silver and gold and precious stones shining with the torchlight.
‘Each of these is a dead man, then,’ she murmured, pale as if she stared into their faces. ‘Dozens of them.’
‘And that’s not counting all those he’s killed that didn’t have swords. Or all those that had no weapons at all.’
Time was Raith had looked at that chain and swelled with pride that he followed so great a warrior. Time was he’d dreamed of forging his own. Now he wondered how long a chain he might’ve forged already, and the thought made him feel almost as queasy as Skara seemed when she looked up.
‘I didn’t choose this.’
Gods, she was beautiful. It was like there was a light in her, and the darker things got the brighter she seemed to shine. He wondered, and not for the first time, what might’ve happened if they were different people, in a different place, at a different time. If she wasn’t a queen and he wasn’t a killer. But you can’t choose who you are.
‘Who’d choose this?’ he croaked out.
‘It’s time.’ Gorm took a prim little nibble from the last loaf, passed it on and stooped to fit his great frame into the narrow passageway.
Each man took his own bite as he followed, each no doubt wondering if it truly would be his last. Raith came at the back, took his mouthful and crumbled the rest in his fist, tossed it behind him as a gift for Mother War’s children, the crows. He might be no great believer in luck, but he knew they’d need every bit they could get.
Down the passage through the elf-walls, echoing with their quick breath. The same one Raith had come charging up a few weeks before with no doubts and no fears, burning with battle-joy. Blue Jenner stood beside the hand-thick door, ready to triple bolt it after them, slapping each man on the back as they slipped past.
‘Come back alive,’ hissed the old raider. ‘That’s all that matters.’ And he pushed Raith through the archway and out into the chill night.
A shroud of fog had drifted in from Mother Sea and Raith muttered his thanks to her. He reckoned it a gift that tripled his chances of living out the night. The fires of Bright Yilling’s men were gloomy smears in the murk on their left. The walls of Bail’s Point a black mass on their right.
They wore no mail so they’d run the swifter, all bent double and black as coal, ghosts in the darkness, quick and silent. Raith’s every sense was sharpened double-keen by the whetstone of danger, every grunt and footfall seeming loud as a drum-beat, his nose full of the damp night and the distant campfires.
One after another they slid into the ditch, picking their way along the boggy bottom. Raith’s boot hit something hard and he realized it was a corpse. They were everywhere, unclaimed, unburned, unburied, tangled with the shattered remains of ladders, rocks flung from above, dead men’s fallen shields.
He saw Gorm’s smiling teeth in the darkness, leaning towards Soryorn, heard him whisper, ‘Here was Mother War’s good work done.’
The last loaf had left Raith’s mouth sour and he spat as they struggled up from the ditch, men silently offering their hands to help each other climb, hissing curses as they slipped and slid, boots mashing the earth to sticky mud.
On they went, over ground prickled everywhere with arrows, the harvest of Bright Yilling’s failed attacks, dense as the wind-slanted sedge on the high moors of Vansterland. Raith heard shouting in the distance as they left the fortress behind, the clashing of steel. King Uthil was sallying from the main gate, hoping to draw Bright Yilling’s attention from his mine.
Shapes shifted in the mist, whipped into tricking shadows by the hurrying men. Snakes, twisting together and breaking apart. Wolf faces. Man faces. The faces of those he’d killed, shrieking silently for vengeance. Raith wafted them away with his shield but they formed anew. He tried to tell himself the dead are dead, but he knew Jenner had been right. Their ghosts stick in the minds of those that knew them, loved them, hated them. Those that killed them most of all.