The Trap
Coming up into the High Places again, and the air felt crisp and clear, sharp and familiar in Logen’s throat. Their march had begun gently as they came up through the woods, a rise you’d hardly notice. Then the trees thinned out and their path took them up a valley between grassy fells, cracked with trickling streams, patched with sedge and gorse. Now the valley had narrowed to a gorge, hemmed in on both sides with slopes of bare rock and crumbling scree, getting always steeper. Above them, on either side of that gorge, two great crags rose up. Beyond, the hazy hints of mountain peaks—grey, and light grey, and even lighter grey, melted in the distance into the heavy grey sky.
The sun was out, and meaning business, and it was hot to walk in, bright to squint into. They were all weary from climbing, and worrying, and looking behind them for Bethod. Four hundred Carls, maybe, and as many painted-face hillmen, all spread out in a great long column, cursing and spitting, boots crunching and sliding in the dry dirt and the loose stones. Crummock’s daughter was struggling up ahead of Logen, bent double under the weight of her father’s hammer, hair round her face dark with sweat. Logen’s own daughter would have been older than that, by now. If she hadn’t been killed by the Shanka, along with her mother and her brothers. That thought gave Logen a hollow, guilty feeling. A bad one.
“You want a hand with that mallet, girl?”
“No I fucking don’t!” she screamed at him, then dropped it off her shoulder and dragged it away up the slope by the handle, scowling at him all the way, the hammer’s head clattering along and leaving a groove in the stony soil. Logen blinked after her. Seemed his touch with the women went all the way down to ones ten years old.
Crummock came up behind him, fingerbones swinging round his neck. “Fierce, ah? Y’ave to be fierce, to get on in my family!” He leaned close and gave a wink. “And she’s the fiercest of the lot, that little bitch. If I’m honest, she’s my favourite.” He shook his head as he watched her dragging at that hammer. “She’ll make some poor bastard one hell of a wife one day. We’re here, in case you were wondering.”
“Eh?” Logen wiped sweat from his face, frowning as he stared about. “Where’s the—”
Then he realised. Crummock’s fortress, if you could call it that, was right ahead of them.
The valley was no more than a hundred strides now from one cliff to the other, and a wall was built across it. An ancient and crumbling wall of rough blocks, so full of cracks, so coated with creeper, brambles, seeding grass, that it seemed almost part of the mountains. It wasn’t a whole lot steeper than the valley itself, and as tall as three men on each other’s shoulders at its highest, sagging here and there as if it was about to fall down on its own. In the centre was a gate of weathered grey planks, splattered with lichen, managing to seem rotten and dried-out both at once.
To one side of the wall there was a tower, built up against the cliff. Or at least there was a great natural pillar sticking out from the rock with half-cut chunks of stone mortared to the top, making a wide platform on the cliff-side, overlooking the wall from high above. Logen looked at the Dogman as he trudged up, and the Dogman squinted at that wall as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“This is it?” growled Dow, coming up next to them, his lip curling. A few trees had taken root at one side, just under the tower, must have been fifty years ago at least. Now they loomed up over the wall. A man could have climbed them easily, and stepped inside the place without even stretching far.
Tul stared up at the ragged excuse for a fortress. “A strong place in the mountains, you said.”
“Strong… ish.” Crummock waved his hand. “We hillmen have never been much for building and so on. What were you expecting? Ten marble towers and a hall bigger’n Skarling’s?”
“I was expecting a halfway decent wall, at least,” growled Dow.
“Bah! Walls? I heard you were cold as snow and hot as piss, Black Dow, and now you want walls to hide behind?”
“We’ll be outnumbered ten to one if Bethod does turn up, you mad fuck! You’re damn right I want a wall, and you told us there’d be one!”
“But you said it yourself friend.” Crummock spoke soft and slow as though he was explaining it to a child, and he tapped at the side of his head with one thick finger. “I’m mad! Mad as a sack of owls, and everyone says so! I can’t remember the names of my own children. Who knows what I think a wall looks like? I hardly know what I’m talking of myself, most of the time, and you’re fool enough to listen to me? You must be mad yourselves!”
Logen rubbed at the bridge of his nose and he gave a groan. The Dogman’s Carls were gathering near them now, looking up at that mossy heap of stones and muttering to each other, far from happy. Logen could hardly blame them. It was a long, hot walk they’d had to find this at the end of it. But they had no choices, as far as he could see. “It’s a bit late to build a better one,” he grumbled. “We’ll have to do what we can with what we’ve got.”
“That’s it Bloody-Nine, you need no wall and you know it!” Crummock clapped Logen on the arm with his great fat hand. “You cannot die! You’re beloved of the moon, my fine new friend, above all others! You cannot die, not with the moon looking over you! You cannot—”
“Shut up,” said Logen.
They crunched sourly across the slope towards the gate. Crummock called out and the old doors wobbled open. A pair of suspicious hillmen stood on the other side, watching them come in. They slogged up a steep ramp cut into the rock, all tired and grumbling, and came out into a flat space above. A saddle between the two crags, might have been a hundred strides wide and two hundred long, sheer cliffs of stone all round. There were a few wooden shacks and sheds scattered about the edges, all green with old moss, a slumping stone hall built against the rock face with smoke rising out of a squat chimney. Just next to it a narrow stair was cut into the cliff, climbing up to the platform at the top of the tower.
“Nowhere to run to,” Logen muttered, “if things turn sour.”
Crummock only grinned the wider. “Course not. That’s the whole point, ain’t it? Bethod’ll think he’s got us like beetles in a bottle.”
“He will have,” growled the Dogman.
“Aye, but then your friends will come up behind him and won’t he get the father of all shocks, though? It’ll almost be worth it for the look on his face, the shit-eating bastard!”
Logen worked his mouth and spat onto the stony ground. “I wonder what the looks on our faces’ll be by then? All slack and corpse-like would be my guess.” A herd of shaggy sheep were pressed in tight together in a pen, staring around wide-eyed, bleating to each other. Hemmed in and helpless, and Logen knew exactly how they felt. From inside the fort, where the ground was a good deal higher, there was hardly a wall at all. You could’ve stepped up onto its walkway, if you’d got long legs, and stood at its crumbling, moss-ridden excuse for a parapet.
“Don’t you worry your beautiful self about nothing, Bloody-Nine,” laughed Crummock. “My fortress could be better built, I’ll grant you, but the ground is with us, and the mountains, and the moon, all smiling on our bold endeavour. This is a strong place, with a strong history. Do you not know the story of Laffa the Brave?”
“Can’t say that I do.” Logen wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to hear it now, but he was in the long habit of not getting what he wanted.
“Laffa was a great bandit chief of the hillmen, a long time ago. He raided all the clans around for years, him and his brothers. One hot summer the clans had enough, so they banded together and hunted him in the mountains. Here’s where he made his last stand. Right here in this fortress. Laffa and his brothers and all his people.”
“What happened?” asked Dogman.