The Crimson Shield (23 page)

The moon had sunk below the horizon. Clouds hid half the stars, making every stone and every divot a hazard in the dark. They stumbled across the fields and cliff-tops in moody silence, carrying
what they could, shields thrown over their backs, plunder on their shoulders, the fires of the burning monastery lighting their way. Medrin would expect them to sail as soon as they reached the
ships and work the oars until the morning. As far as Gallow could see, the monks of Luonatta had hardly been rich. The spoils were meagre. A few barrels and casks stolen from the pantry but no
gold, no treasures, no women, nothing worth taking home, nothing even making it worth leaving Andhun in the first place except for the Crimson Shield.

Tolvis and Gallow took turns to prop up Jyrdas. They reached the beach. No one had burned their ships, and before dawn broke the sky they were riding the sea again. A melancholy settled around
them despite their victory. A sadness for the men who were dead and an uneasy sense of something changed and thus something lost. Maybe on the other ship, with Medrin and with the Crimson Shield
there for all to see, things were different, but on the second boat Gallow thought he felt a creeping edge of doubt. Jyrdas hobbled around, screaming murder at anyone in his way, face screwed up in
permanent pain. Wind and wave fought against them as if trying to turn them back, making them slow. With the madness of the fight cleared from their heads, the Lhosir around him remembered what
they and Medrin had done. Gallow made sure to remind them.

They kept him bound, tied to the mast through wind and rain even when they could have used another strong pair of arms on the oars. ‘I can row,’ he told them. ‘Where am I going
to go?’ He saw them waver but that was all. Even Jyrdas looked at him with a face full of rage. Maybe they were afraid he’d throw them all over the side and sail to Andhun
single-handed.

On their third day at sea a storm hit. They took in water and almost foundered. Oars broke, snapped by the strength of the waves. The Marroc in Gallow would have said it was a miracle they
didn’t sink and drown, but Lhosir didn’t believe in miracles. Fate, perhaps, had spared them, or perhaps they were merely lucky: Jyrdas and the others who’d been to sea before
certainly thought so. When the winds passed and the waves fell, they lay about the deck and slept and broke open a cask of mead taken from the monastery and drank toasts to the Maker-Devourer, and
Gallow thought nothing of it until Tivik, who might have been the youngest of them, raised a drunken horn to the clouds.

‘To Medrin! It was the Crimson Shield that guided us! The shield of the Protector!’

Jyrdas, on another day, might have thrown Tivik into the sea for being an idiot, but Jyrdas was fast asleep and half dead. The other Lhosir gave Tivik queer looks and muttered to themselves, but
he wasn’t alone. It spread among them like some disease, slow but lethal.

‘It’s just a shield,’ Gallow tried to tell them, but by the time they reached Andhun none of them wanted to know.

A
fter the storm, the wind and the waves favoured them to Andhun. The castle still sat on the cliffs overlooking the harbour. Teenar’s Bridge
still lay strung across the Isset. Nothing, as far as Gallow could see, had burned down, although the blood ravens hung across the docks had been cut down and the gibbets were gone. The town felt
quiet and peaceful. The Vathen, then, hadn’t yet come.

The Lhosir made good their ships and unloaded what was left of their plunder from the monastery. Their melancholy had gone after the storm, replaced by a strange fervour for the shield. They
bound Gallow and manhandled him to the shore and then when they were standing on the beach together, they crowded Medrin, trying to see the shield more closely. Touching it. And yes, in the light
of the day it was as crimson as fresh blood, and either Medrin had spent a great deal of time cleaning and polishing it, or perhaps it did have a magic to it after all.

The shield took their eyes, and that was why they didn’t see the Marroc at first. Not too many, just a dozen men gradually gathering together, keeping their distance but watching from the
top of the shingle beach with the air of those waiting for something to happen. As Gallow eyed them they were joined by more, and then more still, until the first dozen had become two and more were
coming all the time. He saw Valaric among them, and was that Sarvic too?

Soldiers. Marroc soldiers. A cry of alarm caught in Gallow’s throat. The Lhosir were still hauling their swords and their armour and everything else out of the boats, or were clustered
around Medrin. Elsewhere the docks were falling still, Marroc workmen scurrying to safety or else joining Valaric and his band. Something was coming and they knew it.

‘Loudmouth!’ Gallow shouted. But Tolvis was still on the ship, and the devil inside Gallow wanted to wait, wait for the Marroc numbers to swell a bit. A good charge now and
they’d break and scatter and that would be that, but if more came . . . He wondered what Valaric was thinking, yet still the Lhosir didn’t see, not until Tolvis finally started climbing
out of the boat, helping Jyrdas, who kept trying to push him away, the last ones ashore.

‘Get off me, you sheep!’

From across the beach a Marroc let fly an arrow. It hit Jyrdas and staggered Tolvis enough to make him jump down from the boat. He half caught One-Eye as he fell and they both stared at the
arrow sticking out of One-Eye’s side. Jyrdas bellowed in pain. He stumbled back to his feet and picked up the first axe he saw and looked, wild-eyed, for someone to hit. He stared at the
Marroc mob and held the axe high. ‘
Nioingr
! Come on then, if you think you can take me!’

There were forty or fifty of them now, the same sort of numbers as the Lhosir, and the arrow must have been a sign, because even as Jyrdas raised his axe, they howled and ran down the beach,
waving clubs and spears. They had shields and helms and some even had armour and swords. The Lhosir drew back around Medrin.

‘Loudmouth! Cut me loose!’ Gallow looked about for anyone to help him, but all the Lhosir eyes were on the Marroc now. Valaric at their van slowed and raised a hand. The Marroc
stopped around him, an angry line facing the Lhosir.

‘What you have there belongs to the Marroc, Twelvefingers,’ he cried. ‘Give it here and go back where you belong before I cut you down to six.’

Medrin burst out laughing. ‘How many are you? Fifty? Sixty? And you think to throw me out of my own city.’ He shook his head. With deliberate care he buckled the Crimson Shield to
his arm and bent to pick up a seagull feather from the ground. He held it high. ‘When this touches the ground, I’ll have every Marroc still standing in front of me hung by his own
spine.’

‘How many are we?’ Valaric laughed right back in Medrin’s face. ‘How many Marroc in Andhun? And how many demon-beards? Take a look around you. The Vathen are coming. Your
army has moved outside the walls to face the enemy and we’ve closed the gates behind them. There’s not one of you left inside the walls to save you. So drop your feather and let me kill
you or just give me the shield and slink away like a fox before a bear. I’ll have it from you either way.’

Medrin cocked his head. He let the feather slip from his fingers. The Marroc and the Lhosir watched each other as it fell. Nobody moved. Gallow howled again for Tolvis to cut him free but no one
was listening. More Marroc had stopped to watch. Valaric’s fifty would become a hundred the moment it seemed as though they might win. And if they did, that one hundred would become five, and
then a thousand, and with the Crimson Shield Valaric would turn the whole of Andhun, and its gates would stay closed to both Vathen and Lhosir alike.

And Gallow wondered:
Would that be so bad?
‘Cut me free!’ He couldn’t have said, even to himself, whose side his sword would have taken. For Medrin? The thought was
bitter. Turn against his own kin? More bitter still. But worst of all was to stand idly by and do nothing, to be cut down by some Marroc who saw only another forkbeard, easy and helpless.

The feather touched the beach. The stillness remained, and then Valaric howled and Medrin screamed and drew his sword, and the Marroc and the Lhosir threw themselves at one another. There was no
shield wall, no tight press of men pushed together. They flew at each other, spears and swords and axes fired by fury. Gallow watched, helpless. Valaric and Medrin were trying to reach each other
while the other Marroc and the Lhosir tried to protect them. He watched a score of men die on either side, then the Marroc suddenly scattered and ran back across the beach, even Valaric, and Medrin
stood by his ships, blood dripping from his sword in one hand, the Crimson Shield in the other, the Lhosir jeering and waving their spears. Bodies lay scattered around them, the dead and the dying.
Dozens of them. Half the Lhosir to come back from the monastery were down and no more had appeared. Valaric’s words were true then: the Screambreaker had left the city.

Jyrdas broke away from Medrin’s men and staggered up to Gallow, walking like he was steaming drunk. He still had the Marroc arrow sticking out of his side. His beard and his shirt were
soaked in blood. He sat beside Gallow.

‘I lost my sword,’ he said. ‘I killed two of the faithless
nioingr
and then I dropped it.’ For a moment he looked scared. ‘I can’t pick it up again,
Truesword.’ Frothy blood bubbled from the corners of his mouth when he spoke.

‘Cut me loose! I’ll find it for you.’

Jyrdas shrugged. ‘I don’t have the strength. Don’t have a blade. I can see the Marches, Gallow. Don’t let me die without my sword.’

The Lhosir survivors were pushing Medrin’s ship back into the sea now. At the top of the beach Valaric and his Marroc were gathering again. They’d run but they weren’t broken,
and Valaric was screaming and pointing. In a few minutes Medrin would have his ship back in the water. He’d sail away and the shield would go with him. If Valaric couldn’t get enough
men together with the courage to fight this last handful of Lhosir then perhaps the Marroc didn’t deserve to have it. Gallow hobbled, bent almost double by the ropes that tied his ankles to
his wrists, to where the dead lay. With his hands tied behind his back he groped for a sword and hobbled back to Jyrdas. Valaric and a dozen Marroc were starting back down the beach again now, but
he didn’t have enough and Medrin’s ship was almost in the water.

‘That’s right!’ shouted Valaric. ‘Run! What’s your word for it?
Nioingr!
Faithless worthless cowards, that’s what you are!’

Trying to goad Medrin into another fight. Gallow managed to drop the sword into Jyrdas’s lap. ‘If it was you and not Medrin, you’d stop and turn and fight him for that, never
mind how many Marroc there were behind him.’

‘He wouldn’t have to call me names. I’d do it anyway.’ Jyrdas groped for the sword. The ship was in the water now, the Lhosir ignoring Valaric. ‘If it was me or
Yurlak or the Screambreaker, or any one of us who fought them the first time, we’d never have thought about leaving. Twenty of us, a whole city of them, so what? We fought, they ran, the city
was ours. We’d have taken it. Hindhun was taken from a thousand Marroc by fifty of us. We’d win or we died trying, and either way served a purpose.’ Jyrdas closed his eyes.
‘Maker-Devourer take me quickly, before I see a prince of the sea driven from these shores by a rabble of Marroc.’ His brow furrowed and then he stood up and turned. ‘No.
I’ll not watch this in silence.’ Up on the beach the Marroc were finding their numbers and their nerve, spurred by Valaric’s taunts. ‘Hoy! Twelvefingers!’ Jyrdas
roared. ‘The Marroc’s right. You’re
nioingr
! You hear me? Running like a sheep?
Nioingr!
’ He shouted it until the Lhosir couldn’t pretend not to
hear. It must have taken the last strength he had; he sat heavily down and the sword fell from his hand again.

Medrin walked quickly over, two men at his back, all of them glancing up the beach towards the approaching Marroc as the ship ground out into the surf. ‘Eat your words and beg for
forgiveness, One-Eye,’ hissed Medrin. ‘These men will witness it.’

‘
Nioingr
,’ whispered Jyrdas again. Medrin whipped out a thin dagger and stabbed him through his good eye. Jyrdas slumped sideways and fell without another sound.

‘Was it really an accident that one of your men took Jyrdas from behind in the monastery?’ Gallow asked him.

Medrin bared his teeth. He backed away, shouting as he ran into the breaking waves and to his ship, ‘The Marroc can have you! Back to your own kind, clean-skin!’

Gallow watched him go. He watched Valaric and the Marroc on the beach do the same and pitied them for how it must feel, seeing Medrin get away when they had so nearly stopped him. When the only
thing that stood in their way was their own fear. How it must feel for Valaric, who had the courage in himself but couldn’t find it in the men around him. Or for the Marroc who were afraid,
who knew it was their own weakness that brought their defeat. Terrible to be either. One day the Marroc would find their hearts. One day the sheep would become wolves.

He bent down and fumbled Jyrdas’s sword off the beach and dropped it beside him. It was the best he could do, but the Maker-Devourer would understand.

T
he Marroc didn’t know what to make of him. The first ones looked at his face, saw no beard, took him to be a Marroc prisoner and cut him
loose. When they kicked and spat on Jyrdas’s corpse and Gallow knocked them both to the floor, they wondered what they’d done.

‘Valaric knows me,’ he said, ‘and any who fought at Lostring Hill. They’ll vouch for who I am. One way or the other.’

‘Lock him up. We’ll deal with him later,’ said Valaric when they brought him to Gallow. ‘He’s not one of us and he’s not one of them. He’s half and half
and you never really know which half it’s going to be.’ He looked Gallow up and down and stared hard at the sword Gallow held – Jyrdas’s sword. ‘You coming nicely or
do we have to have a fight at last, you and I?’