‘Friend o’ mine.’ Dow didn’t even look up. ‘Well – when I say friend—’
‘Enemy’s enemy.’ She rolled off the back of the wall. Craw stared, waiting for the sound of her hitting the ground. ‘I am Ishri.’ The voice whispered in his ear.
This time he went right on his arse in the dirt. She stood over him, skin black, and smooth, and perfect, like the glazing on a good pot. She wore a long coat, tails dragging on the dirt, hanging open, body all bound in white bandages underneath. If anyone ever looked like a witch, she was it. Not that there was much more evidence of witchery needed past vanishing from one place and stepping out of another.
Dow barked with laughter. ‘You never can tell where she’ll spring from. I’m always worried she’ll pop out o’ nowhere while I’m … you know.’ And he mimed a wanking action with one fist.
‘You wish,’ said Ishri, looking down at Craw with eyes blacker than black, unblinking, like a jackdaw staring at a maggot.
‘Where did you come from?’ muttered Craw as he scrambled up, hopping a little on account of his stiff knee.
‘South,’ she said, though that much was clear enough from her skin. ‘Or do you mean, why did I come?’
‘I’ll take why.’
‘To do the right thing.’ There was a faint smile on her face, at that. ‘To fight against evil. To strike mighty blows for righteousness. Or … do you mean who sent me?’
‘All right, who sent you?’
‘God.’ Her eyes rolled to the sky, framed by jutting weeds and saplings. ‘And how could it be otherwise? God puts us all where he wants us.’
Craw rubbed at his knee. ‘Got a shitty sense o’ humour, don’t he?’
‘You do not know the half of it. I came to fight against the Union, is that enough?’
‘It’s enough for me,’ said Dow.
Ishri’s black eyes flicked away to him, and Craw felt greatly relieved. ‘They are moving onto the hill in numbers.’
‘Jalenhorm’s lot?’
‘I believe so.’ She stretched up tall, wriggling all over the place like she had no bones in her. Reminded Craw of the eels they used to catch from the lake near his workshop, spilling from the net, squirming in the children’s hands and making them squeal. ‘You fat pink men all look the same to me.’
‘What about Mitterick?’ asked Dow.
Her bony shoulders drifted up and down. ‘Some way behind, chomping at the bit, furious that Jalenhorm is in his way.’
‘Meed?’
‘Where is the fun in knowing everything?’ She pranced past Craw, up on her toes, almost brushing against him so he had to nervously step back and nearly trip again. ‘God must be so bored.’ She wedged one foot into a crack in the wall too narrow for a cat to squeeze through, twisting her leg, somehow working it in up to the hip. ‘To it, then, my heroes!’ She writhed like a worm cut in half, wriggling into the ruined masonry, her coat dragging up the mossy stonework behind her. ‘Do you not have a battle to fight?’ Her skull somehow slid into the gap, then her arms, she clapped her bandaged hands once and just a finger was left sticking from the crack. Dow walked over to it, reached out, and snapped it off. It wasn’t a finger at all, just a dead bit of twig.
‘Magic,’ muttered Craw. ‘Can’t say I care for the stuff.’ In his experience it did more harm than good. ‘I daresay a sorcerer’s got their uses and all but, I mean, do they always have to act so bloody strange?’
Dow flicked the twig away with a wrinkled lip. ‘It’s a war. I care for whatever gets the job done. Best not mention my black-skinned friend to anyone else though, eh? Folks might get the wrong idea.’
‘What’s the right idea?’
‘Whatever I fucking say it is!’ snarled Dow, and he didn’t look like he was faking the anger this time.
Craw held up his open hands. ‘You’re the Chief.’
‘Damn right!’ Dow frowned at that crack. ‘I’m the Chief.’ Almost like it was himself he was trying to convince. Just for a moment Craw wondered whether Black Dow ever felt like a fraud. Whether Black Dow’s courage needed stitching together every morning.
He didn’t like that thought much. ‘We’re fighting, then?’
Dow’s eyes swivelled sideways and his killing smile broke out fresh, no trace of doubt in it, or fear neither. ‘High fucking time, no? You hear what I was telling Reachey?’
‘Most of it. He’ll try and draw ’em off towards Osrung, then you’ll go straight at the Heroes.’
‘Straight at ’em!’ barked Dow, like he could make it work by shouting it. ‘The way Threetrees would’ve done it, eh?’
‘Would he?’
Dow opened his mouth, then paused. ‘What does it matter? Threetrees is seven winters in the mud.’
‘True. Where do you want me and my dozen?’
‘Right beside me when I charge up to the Heroes, o’ course. Expect there’s nothing in the world you’d like more’n to take that hill back from those Union bastards.’
Craw gave a long sigh, wondering what his dozen would have to say about that. ‘Oh, aye. It’s top o’ my list.’
The Very Model
‘An officer should command from horseback, eh, Gorst? The proper place for a headquarters is the saddle!’ General Jalenhorm affectionately patted the neck of his magnificent grey, then leaned over without waiting for an answer to roar at a spotty-faced courier. ‘Tell the captain that he must simply clear the road by whatever means necessary! Clear the road and move them up! Haste, all haste, lad, Marshal Kroy wants the division moving north!’ He swivelled to bellow over the other shoulder. ‘Speed, gentlemen, speed! Towards Carleon, and victory!’
Jalenhorm certainly looked a conquering hero. Fantastically young to command a division and with a smile that said he was prepared for anything, dressed with an admirable lack of pretension in a dusty trooper’s uniform and as comfortable in the saddle as a favourite armchair. If he had been half as fine a tactician as he was a horseman, they would long ago have had Black Dow in chains and on public display in Adua. But he is not, and we do not.
A constantly shifting body of staff officers, adjutants, liaisons and even a scarcely pubescent bugler trailed eagerly along in the general’s wake like wasps after a rotten apple, fighting to attract his fickle attention by snapping, jostling and shouting over one another with small dignity. Meanwhile Jalenhorm himself barked out a volley of confusing and contradictory replies, questions, orders and occasional musings on life.
‘On the right, on the right, of course!’ to one officer. ‘Tell him not to worry, worrying solves nothing!’ to another. ‘Move them up, Marshal Kroy wants them all up by lunch!’ A large body of infantry were obliged to shuffle exhausted from the road, watch the officers pass, then chew on their dust. ‘Beef, then,’ bellowed Jalenhorm with a regal wave, ‘or mutton, whichever, we have more important business! Will you come up the hill with me, Colonel Gorst? Apparently one gets quite the view from the Heroes. You are his Majesty’s observer, are you not?’
I am his Majesty’s fool. Almost as much his Majesty’s fool as you are. ‘Yes, General.’
Jalenhorm had already whisked his mount from the road and down the shingle towards the shallows, pebbles scattering. His hangers-on strained to follow, splashing out into the water and heedlessly showering a company of heavily loaded foot who were struggling across, up to their waists in the river. The hill rose out of the fields on the far side, a great green cone so regular as to seem artificial. The circle of standing stones that the Northmen called the Heroes jutted from its flat top, a much smaller circle on a spur to the right, a single tall needle of rock on another to the left.