Within reach of his hand, the Bloody-Nine was master.
The woman wriggled up and hurried past Bethod, snatching her clothes on the way and not even bothering to put them on. The dead knew the relief she felt. Bethod only had to talk to Ninefingers and his bowels felt weak. He dreaded to imagine what having to fuck him might be like. He took one last, longing glance into the daylight and let the flap drop, sealing him in the darkness with his old friend. His old enemy.
Ninefingers had rolled onto his back on the greasy furs, fully as careless as if he was alone, legs and arms wide and his half-hard cock flopped over to one side.
‘Nothing like a fuck in the afternoon, is there?’ he asked the tent’s ceiling.
‘What?’ Bethod prided himself on never being taken by surprise. These days Ninefingers’s every utterance seemed to catch him off balance.
‘A fuck.’ He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘You been fucking, Chief?’
‘I’ve been laying plans.’
Ninefingers wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, it smells like fucking.’
‘That’s you.’
‘Uh.’ Ninefingers sniffed at one armpit and raised a scarred brow in acknowledgement. ‘Well, you should fuck. Afternoon. Whenever. You look worried.’
‘I’m worried because half the North wants me dead.’
Logen grinned. ‘All the North wants me dead. Don’t see me frowning, do you? Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he looks on the sunny side o’ the case.’ Bethod ground his teeth. If he never heard that phrase again it would be too damn soon. ‘Your wife looked worried, too, when I saw her t’other day. Was it yesterday? Day before? Marriage won’t come to nothing without fucking, will it? Whole point o’ the exercise.’
Bethod hardly knew what to say. The smell of the place was chasing out his wits. ‘You’re teaching me about marriage now? You?’
‘Wisdom’s wisdom, ain’t it, no matter the source? I mean, if a man’s a fucker or a fighter then I’m more of a fighter. Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s a fighter, but a fuck just soothes all those-’
‘Rattleneck’s coming,’ said Bethod.
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
Ninefingers frowned. ‘Might be I should get dressed.’
‘That’s one idea.’
But, sadly, he didn’t. He brought his knees up to his face and, with snakelike speed, sprang onto his feet in one motion, drew himself to his full height, stretching his arms out wide and wriggling his fingers. His nine fingers and his stump, anyway.
Bethod swallowed. He swore the bastard kept getting bigger. He was no small man but Ninefingers stood half a head taller, a twisted mass of scar and muscle and woody sinew, like a machine made for killing with no thought spared by the engineers on the looks of it. The way he held himself was all pride, and hate, and contempt at the world and everyone in it. Contempt for Bethod, too, who was meant to be his Chief.
Bethod wondered again if he should do what Ursi wanted. Kill Ninefingers. He had been wondering about it ever since Heonan, when Logen climbed the cliffs and spilled the Hillmen’s blood in spite of his orders. While the rash fools cheered his audacity and made up bad songs about his skill, Bethod had been turning over how to kill the bloodthirsty fool. Who he could send to do it, and when. Knives in the night, how hard could it be? Put the mad dog down before he bit his master’s hand. Or perhaps cut off his master’s head.
And yet … and yet … they were friends, were they not? Bethod owed him, did he not? There were rules, were there not? A man should pay his dues, his father had always said.
And then there was the doubt niggling at the back of Bethod’s neck. What if something went wrong? What if the Bloody-Nine survived, and came for him?
‘So Rattleneck’s coming?’ Ninefingers strutted to a table made from an old door, his fruits slapping against his bare thighs with each step. ‘What’s that old bastard after?’
‘I asked him to come.’
Ninefingers paused with his left hand halfway towards the table. ‘You did?’ There was a wine jug there, and some cups. And there was a huge knife, too, only just this side of a sword, buried in the scarred tabletop close to Logen’s three reaching fingertips, its blade glittering cold in the chinks of daylight leaking into the tent.
Bethod realised then the place couldn’t have held more weapons had it been an armoury. A sheathed sword lay on the ground with its belt in a tangle, an unsheathed one on top of it. Nearby was an axe with a heavy head stained brown, Bethod hoped with rust but rather feared it wasn’t. There was a shield so hacked and dented and crossed with scars there was no telling what had once been painted on the face. And knives. Knives everywhere, the telltale glints of their blades and pommels among the furs, stabbed into the tent poles, buried to their crosspieces in the dirt. You can never have too many knives, Ninefingers was always saying.
Bethod wondered how many men he had killed. Wondered if anyone could put a count on it now. Named Men, and champions, and famed warriors, and Thralls, and Shanka, and peasants, and women, and children. Everything that breathed he’d stopped the breath of. For him to kill Bethod would be nothing. Every moment they stood together was a moment in which he chose not to do it. And Bethod felt again, as he did ten times a day, how weak a thing was power. How flimsy an illusion. A lie that everyone, for some unknown reason, agreed to treat as truth. And that blade in the table could, in an instant, be the ending of it, and the ending of Bethod, too, and all he had worked for. All he wanted to pass on to his sons.
Ninefingers grinned, a hungry grin, a wolf grin, as though he brushed aside the tissue of Bethod’s authority and saw into his thoughts. Then he wrapped his three fingers around the handle of the wine jug. ‘You want me to kill him?’
‘Rattleneck?’
‘Aye.’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ Ninefingers looked a little crestfallen, then started sloshing wine into a cup. ‘Right.’
‘I want to make peace with him.’
‘Peace, you’re saying?’ Ninefingers paused, cup halfway to his mouth. ‘Peace?’ He rolled the word around in his mouth as if it was a strange new dish. As if it was a word in a foreign tongue. ‘Why?’
Bethod blinked. ‘What do you mean, why?’
‘I can take that fucker, Chief, believe me! I can take him like that.’ And the cup burst apart in his hand, spraying wine and bits of pot across the furs on the floor of the tent. Ninefingers blinked at his bleeding fist, as though he’d no idea how that happened. ‘Uh. Shit.’ He looked for something to wipe it on, then gave up and wiped it on his chest.
Bethod stepped towards him. The dead knew he did not want to. The dead knew his heart was pounding. But he stepped towards him anyway, and fixed him with his eye, and said, ‘You can’t kill the whole world, Logen.’
Ninefingers grinned as he reached for another cup. ‘Folk are always telling me who I can’t kill. But strong men, weak men, big names, little names, they all die once you cut ’em enough. Shama Heartless, you remember him? Everyone told me not to fight him.’
‘I told you not to fight him.’
‘Only ’cause you were scared I’d lose. But when I fought him, and when I looked set to win … did you ask me to stop?’
Bethod swallowed, mouth dry. He remembered the day well enough. The snow on the trees, and the smoke of breath as the crowd roared, and the clashing of steel, and both his fists clenched painfully tight as he willed Ninefingers on. Willed him on desperately, every hope hanging on him.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No. And once I spilled his guts with his own sword … did you ask me to stop?’
‘No,’ said Bethod. He remembered the steam from them, remembered the smell of them, remembered the gurgling moan Shama Heartless made as he died, the great roar of triumph that had burst from his own throat. ‘I cheered you on.’