‘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.