The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (171 page)

‘That a fact?’ Dow tried to smile himself, but it looked more like a scowl. Calder might be a beaten man, but that was just the point. Having a beaten man fling shit at him was souring his day of victory.

‘Haven’t you got the bones to face me, man to man?’

‘Show me a man and we’ll see.’

‘I was man enough for Tenways’ daughter.’ Calder got a flutter of laughter of his own. ‘But what?’ And he nodded up to Shivers. ‘You get harder men to do your black work now, do you, Black Dow? Lost your taste for it? Come on! Fight me! The circle!’

Dow had no real reason to say yes. He’d nothing to win. But sometimes it’s more about how it looks than how it is. Calder was famous as the biggest coward and piss-poorest fighter in any given company. Dow’s name was all built on being the very opposite. This was a challenge to everything he was, in front of all the great men of the North. He couldn’t turn it down. Dow saw it, and he slouched back in Skarling’s Chair like a man who’d argued with his wife over whose turn it was to muck out the pigpen, and lost.

‘All right. You want it the hard way you can have it the fucking hard way. Tomorrow at dawn. And no pissing about spinning the shield and choosing weapons. Me and you. A sword each. To the death.’ He angrily waved his hand. ‘Take this bastard somewhere I don’t have to look at him smirk.’

Calder gasped as Shivers jerked him to his feet, twisted him around and marched him off. The crowd closed in behind them. Songs started up again, and laughter, and bragging, and all the business of victory and success. His imminent doom was a distraction hardly worth stopping the party for.

‘I thought I told you to run.’ Craw’s familiar voice in his ear, the old man pushing through the press beside him.

Calder snorted. ‘I thought I told you not to say anything. Seems neither of us can do as we’re told.’

‘I’m sorry it had to be this way.’

‘It didn’t have to be this way.’

He saw Craw’s grimace etched by firelight. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry this is what I chose, then.’

‘Don’t be. You’re a straight edge, everyone knows it. And let’s face the facts, I’ve been hurtling towards the grave ever since my father died. Just a surprise it’s taken me this long to hit mud. Who knows, though?’ he called as Shivers dragged him between two of the Heroes, giving Craw one last smirk over his shoulder. ‘Maybe I’ll beat Dow in the circle!’

He could tell from Craw’s sorry face he didn’t think it likely. Neither did Calder, if he was honest for once. The very reasons for the success of his little plan were also its awful shortcomings. Calder was the biggest coward and piss-poorest fighter in any given company. Black Dow was the very opposite. They hadn’t earned their reputations by accident.

He’d about as much chance in the circle as a side of ham, and everyone knew it.

‘I
’ve a letter for General Mitterick,’ said Tunny, hooding his lantern as he walked up out of the dusk to the general’s tent.

Even in the limited light, it was plain the guard was a man who nature had favoured better below the neck than above it. ‘He’s with the lord marshal. You’ll have to wait.’

Tunny displayed his sleeve. ‘I’m a full corporal, you know. Don’t I get precedence?’

The guard did not take the joke. ‘Press-a-what?’

‘Never mind.’ Tunny sighed, and stood beside him, and waited. Voices burbled from the tent, gaining in volume.

‘I demand the right to attack!’ one boomed out. Mitterick. There weren’t many soldiers in the army who had the good fortune not to recognise that voice. The guard frowned across at Tunny as though to say, you shouldn’t be listening to this. Tunny held up the letter and shrugged. ‘We’ve forced them back! They’re teetering, exhausted! They’ve no stomach left for it.’ Shadows moved on the side of the tent, perhaps a shaken fist. ‘The slightest push now … I have them just where I want them!’

‘You thought you had them there yesterday and it turned out they had you.’ Marshal Kroy’s more measured tones. ‘And the Northmen aren’t the only ones who’ve run out of stomach.’

‘My men deserve the chance to finish what they’ve started! Lord Marshal, I deserve the—’

‘No!’ Harsh as a whip cracking.

‘Then, sir, I demand the right to resign—’

‘No to that too. No even more to that.’ Mitterick tried to say something but Kroy spoke over him. ‘No! Must you argue every point? You will swallow your damn pride and do your damn duty! You will stand down, you will bring your men back across the bridge and you will prepare your division for the journey south to Uffrith as soon as we have completed negotiations. Do you understand me, General?’

There was a long pause and then, very quietly, ‘We lost.’ Mitterick’s voice, but hardly recognisable. Suddenly shrunk very small, and weak, sounding almost as if there were tears in it. As if some cord held vibrating
taut had suddenly snapped, and all Mitterick’s bluster had snapped with it. ‘We lost.’

‘We drew.’ Kroy’s voice was quiet now, but the night was quiet, and few men could drop eaves like Tunny when there was something worth hearing. ‘Sometimes that’s the most one can hope for. The irony of the soldier’s profession. War can only ever pave the way for peace. And it should be no other way. I used to be like you, Mitterick. I thought there was but one right thing to do. One day, probably very soon, you will replace me, and you will learn the world is otherwise.’

Another pause. ‘Replace you?’

‘I suspect the great architect has tired of this particular mason. General Jalenhorm died at the Heroes. You are the only reasonable choice. One that I support in any case.’

‘I am speechless.’

‘If I had known I could achieve that simply by resigning I would have done it years ago.’

A pause. ‘I would like Opker promoted to lead my division.’

‘I see no objection.’

‘And for General Jalenhorm’s I thought—’

‘Colonel Felnigg has been given the command,’ said Kroy. ‘General Felnigg, I should say.’

‘Felnigg?’ came Mitterick’s voice, with a tinge of horror.

‘He has the seniority, and my recommendation to the king is already sent.’

‘I simply cannot work with that man—’

‘You can and you will. Felnigg is sharp, and cautious, and he will balance you out, as you have balanced me. Though you were often, frankly, a pain in my arse, by and large it has been an honour.’ There was a sharp crack, as of polished boot heels snapping together.

Then another. ‘Lord Marshal Kroy, the honour has been entirely mine.’

Tunny and the guard both flung themselves to the most rigid attention as the two biggest hats in the army suddenly strode from the tent. Kroy made sharply off into the gathering gloom. Mitterick stayed there, looking after him, one hand opening and closing by his side.

Tunny had a pressing appointment with a bottle and a bedroll. He cleared his throat. ‘General Mitterick, sir!’

Mitterick turned, very obviously wiping away a tear while pretending to be clearing dust from his eye. ‘Yes?’

‘Corporal Tunny, sir, standard-bearer of his Majesty’s First Regiment.’

Mitterick frowned. ‘The same Tunny who was made colour sergeant after Ulrioch?’

Tunny puffed out his chest. ‘The same, sir.’

‘The same Tunny who was demoted after Dunbrec?’

Tunny’s shoulders slumped. ‘The same, sir.’

‘The same Tunny who was court-martialled after that business at Shricta?’

And further yet. The same, sir, though I hasten to point out that the tribunal found no evidence of wrongdoing, sir.’

Mitterick snorted. ‘So much for tribunals. ‘What brings you here, Tunny?’

He held out the letter. ‘I have come in my official capacity as standard-bearer, sir, with a letter from my commanding officer, Colonel Vallimir.’

Mitterick looked down at it. What does it say?’

‘I wouldn’t—’

‘I do not believe a soldier with your experience of tribunals would carry a letter without a good idea of the contents. What does it say?’

Tunny conceded the point. ‘Sir, I believe the colonel lays out at some length the reasons behind his failure to attack today.’

‘Does he.’

‘He does, sir, and he furthermore apologises most profusely to you, sir, to Marshal Kroy, to his Majesty, and in fact to the people of the Union in general, and he offers his immediate resignation, sir, but also demands the right to explain himself before a court martial – he was rather vague on that point, sir – he goes on to praise the men and to shoulder the blame entirely himself, and—’

Mitterick took the letter from Tunny’s hand, crumpled it up in his fist and tossed it into a puddle.

‘Tell Colonel Vallimir not to worry.’ He watched the letter for a moment, drifting in the broken reflection of the evening sky, then shrugged. ‘It’s a battle. We all made mistakes. Would it be pointless, Corporal Tunny, to tell you to stay out of trouble?’

‘All advice gratefully considered, sir.’

‘What if I make it an order?’

‘All orders considered too, sir.’

‘Huh. Dismissed.’

Tunny snapped out his most sycophantic salute, turned and quick-marched off into the night before anyone decided to court martial him.

The moments after a battle are a profiteer’s dream. Corpses to be picked over, or dug up and picked over, trophies to be traded, booze, and chagga, and husk to be sold to the celebrating or the commiserating at equally outrageous mark-ups. He’d seen men without a bit to their names in the year leading up to an engagement make their fortunes in the hour after. But most of Tunny’s stock was still on his horse, which was who knew where, and, besides, his heart just wasn’t in it.

So he kept his distance from the fires and the men around them, strolling along behind the lines, heading north across the trampled battlefield. He passed a pair of clerks booking the dead by lamplight, one making notes in a ledger while the other twitched up shrouds to look for
corpses worth noting and shipping back to Midderland, men too noble to go in the Northern dirt. As though one dead man’s any different from another. He clambered over the wall he’d spent all day watching, become again the unremarkable farmer’s folly it had been before the battle, and picked his way through the dusk towards the far left of the line where the remains of the First were stationed.

‘I didn’t know, I just didn’t know, I just didn’t see him!’

Two men stood in barley patched with little white flowers, maybe thirty strides from the nearest fire, staring down at something. One was a nervous-looking young lad Tunny didn’t recognise, holding an empty flatbow. A new recruit, maybe. The other was Yolk, a torch in one hand, stabbing at the lad with a pointed finger.

‘What’s to do?’ growled Tunny as he walked up, already developing a bad feeling. It got worse when he saw what they were looking at. ‘Oh, no, no.’ Worth lay in a bald patch of earth, his eyes open and his tongue hanging out, a flatbow bolt right through his breastbone.

‘I thought it was Northmen!’ said the lad.

‘The Northmen are on the north side of the lines, you fucking idiot!’ snapped Yolk at him.

‘I thought he had an axe!’

‘A shovel.’ Tunny dug it out of the barley, just beyond the limp fingers of Worth’s left hand. ‘Reckon he’d been off doing what he did best.’

‘I should fucking kill you!’ snarled Yolk, reaching for his sword. The lad gave a helpless squeak, holding his flatbow up in front of him.

‘Leave it.’ Tunny stepped between them, put a restraining palm on Yolk’s chest and gave a long, painful sigh. ‘It’s a battle. We all made mistakes. I’ll go to Sergeant Forest, see what’s to be done.’ He pulled the flatbow from the lad’s limp hands and pushed the shovel into them. ‘In the meantime, you’d better get digging.’ For Worth, the Northern dirt would have to do.

‘You never have to wait long, or look far,
to be reminded of how thin the line is
between being a hero or a goat’

Mickey Mantle