Gallow (38 page)

Valaric stared at him. He was hurt. You could see that. The way he moved gave him away. Either that or he was even older than he looked. Every movement was pain to him. And yet . . . ‘Who are you?’

‘Care to cast your eyes upward, Marroc?’ asked the old man. Now he had a flint and tinder. Underneath the western edge of the bridge a dozen kegs had been tied to the piles. Slick wet stains spread over the wood beneath them, all the way down to the sea. Fish oil. ‘Never could make a keg that sealed properly in this town, you lot.’ The old forkbeard shook his head, idly striking the flint until the tinder caught and he had a small smouldering pile of grass. Next thing he pulled out from behind the piles was a small stick wrapped in cloth. The stick stank of fish too. He offered it to Valaric. ‘Yours if you want it.’

‘What?’

‘Seems to me it should be a Marroc who sets the bridge ablaze.’ He tossed the stick to Valaric, who caught it without thinking. ‘Come on, quick now, before this goes out.’

Valaric scrambled out of the boat. He shuffled past the old man to sit on the ledge. The forkbeard carefully lit the torch.

‘Set it as you like. I’d watch out for bits of blazing wood and oil falling on your head though, so don’t stay to admire your handiwork too long.’

The old forkbeard jumped into the boat. The next thing Valaric knew he’d cast off and was drifting away on the current and Valaric was stuck there on the ledge alone. He looked up. Yes, a man could climb the cliff easily enough. Maybe not if it was on fire though. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’

‘I have somewhere else to be. You can swim can’t you, Valaric of Witterslet? Don’t wait too long before you use that. It won’t burn for ever.’

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

The old forkbeard waved. ‘Don’t think I want any of those any more. Take care of your city, Marroc. Look after it. What we’ve left of it.’

Valaric watched him go then yelped and almost dropped the torch as it burned his fingers. He touched the torch to the stream of oil dripping down from above. It lit very nicely, as if it had been mixed with something else. He stayed for bit and watched the flame climb steadily towards the leaking kegs under the upper beams of the bridge. As it reached the top, the fire began to burn more brightly.

It occurred to him then that maybe he
should
start swimming.

The Vathan with the crested helm held out his hand. ‘The sword, Lhosir. The Sword of the Weeping God. Give it to me. No need for more to die. Give it to me and go in peace. This battle is lost to you.’

Gallow levelled the sword at the Vathan. ‘Come and take it.’

The Vathan took a pace towards him. For one long moment Gallow thought he might even do it, that he might just hand this cursed sword over if the Vathan had the courage to lower his weapons and come close enough to simply take it from his hand. Maybe that was the sign of someone who’d earned it. What had
he
done, after all? Taken it from a dead man.

The Vathan took his step but then stopped. ‘I am the ardshan of my people. Give me the sword!’

‘Not if you can’t take it. If you can’t take it then you haven’t earned it.’

The ardshan turned his back. ‘Kill him. But do
not
touch the sword.’

The other Vathen hesitated. Gallow had seen it enough times before. The mustering of courage to charge enemy shields, knowing that some of you must die but that if you don’t then death would come for all. The red sword held them at bay but they’d find their courage in a moment.

‘
Arda!
’

He turned and flung the sword over the cliff, as far out to sea as he could. The ardshan watched the Sword of the Weeping God arc out into the sky, eyes wide in horror. Before he could speak, Gallow was already running along the edge of the cliff – one step, two, three – and then the Vathen launched themselves towards him. Before they could reach him, he turned and leaped as mightily as he could, following the sword out over the cliffs and past the breaking waves to the sea.

‘Arda!’ Tolvis heard the shout above the crash of the waves. From the top of the cliff men were suddenly peering down at him. Vathen, and the way they looked and pointed was quite enough. By the time they were firing their arrows and throwing their javelots he was already running.

‘This way. There’s a ship.’ Medrin’s ship. The one he’d used to sail out of Andhun, assuming it hadn’t been washed away or found and burned, or taken already by some other band of fleeing Lhosir. But a couple of miles of running along beaches and climbing cliffs and racing through woods and climbing down to the sea again later, the ship was still there. There were even a few dozen Lhosir standing around it. Keeping guard for some reason. Tolvis couldn’t imagine what they were doing there but now wasn’t the time to be thinking about that. As he and the others approached they waved and shouted and he waved and shouted back, ‘Get the ship in the sea! Get the ship in the sea! The Vathen are coming!’

By the time he got to the bottom of the cliff the ship was already out in the surf, the sail rising. That was when he realised these Lhosir were more of Medrin’s men, quite sharp enough to see what was coming towards them. Next thing Tolvis knew there were a dozen men on his side and twice that on the other, all with swords drawn and facing each other, with the Vathen coming over the hill in about one minute and the barely living body of Medrin Twelvefingers on the beach between them.

The Lhosir glared at each other. Tolvis closed his eyes. ‘Really? Do we have to? I mean, right here and right now?’ Medrin Twelvefingers? He’d be Medrin Sixfingers now.

No one moved.

‘Well I don’t know about you lot, but I’ve got an errand to run before we all kill each other. Let me know how it ends.’ He turned his back on the lot of them and walked away. Then he remembered the Vathen and ran instead. He didn’t look back.

A
rda’s hand still smarted from where she’d slapped Fenaric. She’d slapped him two days ago. Quite a slap then.

She sighed. More of a punch really.

He wasn’t going to come back. Not this time. He’d still got half the money she’d made from selling the horses.
Her
money but she couldn’t quite make herself get worked up about it the way she ought to.
Scheming little thief.
But Fenaric was only trying to do what he thought was right for her. Just couldn’t get it into his thick head that she didn’t want what anyone else thought was right for her. She wanted . . .

She wanted
him.
Stupid pig-headed bloody-minded selfish forkbeard Gallow. She wanted him. And she was slowly realising that she wasn’t going to get him.

Word of the battle of Andhun made its way up the river in bits and fragments: the Lhosir had been wiped out. They’d beaten the Vathen. Sometimes both, sometimes neither, and all said with gleeful joy. Andhun had fallen and then it hadn’t. Stories were like that. Rubbish mostly, but if she was putting all the stories together right, whatever had happened had been bloody.

Stupid man hadn’t been supposed to do anything except take his stupid vicious bastard Widowmaker half-friend or whatever he was back to his own kind. Half-friend? Hadn’t even looked like
that
most of the time.

Stupid man. Stupid.

She had to stop for a moment to wipe her eyes. Stupid smoke from the stupid forge that Nadric could barely use any more making her eyes water all the time. At least he had that set up now. Maybe they had some chance of making a little money again and not starving when it came to winter.

Stupid men. Both of them. Leaving her with their children to look after and not coming back again. Something in the air up here near the mountains. Must be. Eyes seemed to water a lot since they’d come here.

‘Arda Smithswife?’

She jumped and looked up at the ugliest forkbeard she’d ever seen. One side of his face was a mass of scarring, red and fresh.

‘Who wants her?’ He wasn’t the first to have made his way this far south.

The forkbeard held out a purse. ‘My name is Tolvis.’

The name meant nothing but the purse had her eyes. ‘And what do you want, Tolvis from across the sea?’

He tossed the purse to her. ‘I came here to give you this. A debt owed to Gallow Truesword.’ He might have turned and gone after that and she might have let him too, since if Gallow had been alive he’d have delivered the purse himself; and then she could have beaten him around the head and cursed him roundly for taking so long and leaving her in the hands of that miserable carter who’d turned out to be far less of a man than she’d thought. But there was a hesitation to him, and to her too, as if there was more to this story than a bag of silver.

So she brought him inside and offered him goat’s milk and cheese, both of which he took with unusual grace for a forkbeard. In his turn he gave her an axe. Gallow’s axe, and she knew for sure then that Gallow wasn’t coming back.

‘You were a friend, were you?’ she asked. ‘Or did you loot his body?’ But not that, or why come all this way to hand her a bag of silver? Yes, and she could see she’d insulted him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Probably the first time she’d ever said sorry to a forkbeard.

He told her about Gallow and how it was his fault that Gallow hadn’t come home, and of the crossing of the sea and the Crimson Shield and the fight with the Vathen and then in Andhun and what he’d done and how he’d finally come to his end.

‘You were in his thoughts.’ Tolvis had a distant look in his eyes. ‘Always. That was always what he wanted just as soon as he’d made everything right. To come back to you.’

‘Bloody idiot didn’t though, did he?’ Stupid eyes watering again. Stupid mountain air. ‘So he died thinking it was me then, did he? Who gave him away to the Vathen?’ Almost more than anything else, that was what she couldn’t bear.

‘The Screambreaker told him otherwise.’ Tolvis smiled. Or tried to, as best his ruined face would let him. ‘And Gallow believed him. And I’ll not ask.’

She couldn’t stop the tears. Had to look away. ‘Bloody idiot,’ she said again.

‘Not the only idiot either.’ Tolvis laughed and shook his head. ‘Well I didn’t have anything better to do, what with Medrin’s men taking the only ship we had and leaving us on the beach and the Vathen hunting all over for us. So I went back. Last place they’d look. They were all a bit mad, mind you, on account of some crazy Marroc managing to fire the bridge across the Isset. The air stank of fish oil for days, but I think it was the bridge collapsing into the river that upset them rather than the smell.’ He sighed and a perplexed look furrowed his face. ‘They searched the beach for Gallow’s body, you know, and for the sword too. I watched while they waited for the tide to go right out. They searched and searched, then and every low tide since, and for all I know they’re searching still.’ He grinned. ‘Man jumps off a fifty-foot cliff into the sea in mail, he generally sinks right quick to the bottom by my reckoning. Same goes for swords. But they never found him and they never found Solace. The sea took them. Took him away and maybe washed him up somewhere and maybe didn’t.’

He got up and she let him go, but when he was at the door and the wretched mountain air had stopped blurring everything for a moment she told him he could stay if he wanted. It was a long journey he’d come, and Varyxhun was a bit full of Marroc running from the Vathen just now, and he’d pay far more than he ought for a place to sleep, if a forkbeard could find a place at all, and that was hardly fair considering why he’d come. And the Lhosir Tolvis, he said well maybe, because he could do with a couple of days without there being Vathen in the morning and Marroc in the afternoon and brigands in between and all of them trying to kill him.

‘Forkbeard wants it easy?’ she mocked.

‘Yes,’ said Tolvis without any bitterness but maybe a touch of the wistful. ‘Sometimes a forkbeard does.’

Pug-ugly scar
though she thought to herself when he went to get his horse. But she was smiling as she thought it, and that was good, because there hadn’t been any smiles for a while.

And Tolvis Loudmouth stayed, for a while at least. After all, the Vathen still hadn’t crossed the Isset and likely wouldn’t for a while now, so he was hardly going to miss anything. But mostly he stayed because he could have sworn that the very last time he’d looked back as he’d run from the hail of Vathan spears and arrows, he’d caught a glimpse of a boat amid the waves and some old Lhosir soldier hauling something big and heavy out of the water.

Or maybe that had just been wishful thinking, because the next time he looked the boat had been gone. But yes, he stayed a while in Varyxhun just in case, because if Gallow Truesword wasn’t drowned after all then sooner or later this was where he’d show his face.