Logen scratched at his scarred jaw. “We’ve got work to be about, Crummock. You got something worth saying you can get to it.”
“Then I will. Bethod hates me, and the feeling’s mutual, but he hates you more. Because you’ve stood against him, and you’re living proof a man of the North can be his own man, without bending on his knee and tonguing the arse of that golden-hat bastard and his two fat sons and his witch.” He frowned. “Though I could be persuaded to take my tongue to her. D’you follow me so far?”
“I’m keeping up,” said Logen, but Dogman weren’t altogether sure that he was.
“Just whistle if you drop behind and I’ll come right back for you. My meaning’s this. If Bethod were to get a good chance at catching you all alone, away from your Union friends, your crawling-like-ants sunny-weather lovers over down there yonder, then, well, he might give up a lot to take it. He might be coaxed down from his pretty hills for a chance like that, I’m thinking, hmmm?”
“You’re betting that he hates me a lot.”
“What? Do you doubt that a man could hate you that much?” Crummock turned away, spreading his great long arms out wide at Tul and Grim. “But it’s not just you, Bloody-Nine! It’s all of you, and me as well, and my three sons here!” The girl threw the hammer down again and planted her hands on her hips, but Crummock blathered on regardless. “I’m thinking your boys join up with my boys and it might be we’ll have eight hundred spears. We’ll head up north, like we’re going up into the High Places, to get around behind Bethod and play merry mischief with his arse end. I’m thinking that’ll get his blood up. I’m thinking he won’t be able to pass on a chance to put all of us back in the mud.”
The Dogman thought it over. Chances were that a lot of Bethod’s people were jumpy about now. Worried to be fighting on the wrong side of the Whiteflow. Maybe they were hearing the Bloody-Nine was back, and thinking they’d picked the wrong side. Bethod would love to put a few heads on sticks for everyone to look at. Ninefingers, and Crummock-i-Phail, Tul Duru and Black Dow, and maybe even the Dogman too. He’d like that, would Bethod. Show the North there was no future in anything but him. He’d like it a lot.
“Supposing we do wander off north,” asked Dogman. “How’s Bethod even going to know about it?”
Crummock grinned wider than ever. “Oh, he’ll know because his witch’ll know.”
“Bloody witch,” piped up the lad with the spear, his thin arms trembling as he fought to keep it up straight.
“That spell-cooking, painted-face bitch Bethod keeps with him. Or does she keep him with her? There’s a question, though. Either way, she’s watching. Ain’t she, Bloody-Nine?”
“I know who you mean,” said Logen, and not looking happy. “Caurib. A friend o’ mine once told me she had the long eye.” Dogman didn’t have the first clue about all that, but if Logen was taking it to heart he reckoned he’d better too.
“The long eye, is it?” grinned Crummock. “Your friend’s got a pretty name for an ugly trick. She sees all manner of goings-on with it. All kind of things it’d be better for us if she didn’t. Bethod trusts her eyes before he trusts his own, these days, and he’ll have her watching for us, and for you in particular. She’ll have both her long eyes open for it, that she will. I may be no wizard,” and he spun one of the wooden signs around and around on his necklace, “but the moon knows I’m no stranger to the business neither.”
“And what if it goes like you say?” rumbled Tul, “what happens then? Apart from we give Bethod our heads?”
“Oh, I like my head where it is, big lad. We draw him on, north by north, that’s what the forest told me. There’s a place up in the mountains, a place well loved by the moon. A strong valley, and watched over by the dead of my family, and the dead of my people, and the dead of the mountains, all the way back until when the world was made.”
Dogman scratched his head. “A fortress in the mountains?”
“A strong, high place. High and strong enough for a few to hold off a many until help were to arrive. We lure him on up into the valley, and your Union friends follow up at a lazy distance. Far enough that his witch don’t see ’em coming, she’s so busy looking at us. Then, while he’s all caught up in trying to snuff us out for good and all, the Southerners creep up behind, and—” He slapped his palms together with an echoing crack. “We squash him between us, the sheep-fucking bastard!”
“Sheep-fucker!” cursed the girl, kicking at the hammer on the ground.
They all looked at each other for a moment. Dogman didn’t much like the sound of this for a plan. He didn’t much like the notion of trusting their lives to the say-so o’ this crazy hillman. But it sounded like some kind of a chance. Enough that he couldn’t just say no, however much he’d have liked to. “We got to talk on this.”
“Course you do, my new best friends, course you do. Don’t take too long about it though, eh?” Crummock grinned wide. “I been down from the High Places for way too long, and the rest o’ my beautiful children, and my beautiful wives, and the beautiful mountains themselves will all of them be missing me. Think on the sunny side o’ this. If Bethod don’t follow, you get a few nights sat up in the High Places as the summer dies, warming yourselves at my fire, and listening to my songs, and watching the sun going down over the mountains. That sound so bad? Does it?”
“You thinking of listening to that mad bastard?” muttered Tul, once they’d got out of earshot. “Witches and wizards and all that bloody rubbish? He makes it up as he goes along!”
Logen scratched his face. “He’s nowhere near as mad as he sounds. He’s held out against Bethod all these years. The only one who has. Twelve winters is it now, he’s been hiding, and raiding, and keeping one foot ahead? Up in the mountains maybe, but still. He’d have to be slippery as fishes and tough as iron to make that work.”
“You trust him, then?” asked Dogman.
“Trust him?” Logen snorted. “Shit, no. But his feud with Bethod’s deeper even than ours is. He’s right about that witch, I seen her, and I seen some other things this past year… if he says she’ll see us, I reckon I believe him. If she doesn’t, and Bethod don’t come, well, nothing lost is there?”
Dogman had that empty feeling, worse’n ever. He looked over at Crummock, sitting on a rock with his children round him, and the madman smiled back a mouthful of yellow teeth. Hardly the man you’d want to hang all your hopes on, but Dogman could feel the wind changing. “We’d be taking one bastard of a risk,” he muttered. “What if Bethod caught up to us and got his way?”
“We move fast, then, don’t we!” growled Dow. “It’s a war. Taking risks is what you do if you reckon on winning!”
“Uh,” grunted Grim.
Tul nodded his big head. “We’ve got to do something. I didn’t come here to watch Bethod sit on a hill. He needs to be got down.”
“Got down where we can set to work on him!” hissed Dow.
“But it’s your choice.” Logen clapped his hand down on the Dogman’s shoulder. “You’re the chief.”
He was the chief. He remembered them deciding on it, gathered round Threetrees’ grave. Dogman had to admit, he’d much rather have told Crummock to fuck himself, then turned round and headed back, and told West they never found a thing except woods. But once you’ve got a task, you get it done. That’s what Threetrees would’ve said.
Dogman gave a long sigh, that feeling in his gut bubbling up so high he was right on the point of puking. “Alright. But this plan ain’t going to get us anything but dead unless the Union are ready to do their part, and in good time too. We’ll take it to Furious, and let their chief Burr know what we’re about.”