Half a War

Sprouted a Conscience

Raith stood on the man-built stretch of wall near Gudrun’s Tower, staring across the scarred, trampled, arrow-prickled turf towards the stakes that marked the High King’s lines.

He’d hardly slept. Dozed outside Skara’s door. Dreamed again of that woman and her children, and started up in a chill sweat with his hand on his dagger. Nothing but silence.

Five days since the siege began and every day they’d come at the walls. Come with ladders, and wicker screens to guard them from the shower of arrows, the hail of stones. Come bravely, with their fiercest faces and their fiercest prayers, and bravely been beaten back. They hadn’t killed many of the thousand defenders but they’d made their mark even so. Every warrior in Bail’s Point was pink-eyed from sleeplessness, grey-faced from fear. Facing Death for a wild moment is one thing. Her cold breath on your neck day in and day out is more than men were made to bear.

Great humps of fresh-turned earth had been thrown up just out of bowshot. Barrows for the High King’s dead. They were still digging now. Raith could hear the scraping of distant shovels, some priest’s song warbled in the southerner’s tongue to the southerner’s One God. He lifted his chin, winced as he scratched at his neck with the backs of his fingernails. A warrior should rejoice in the corpses of his enemies, but Raith had no rejoicing left in him.

‘Beard bothering you?’ Blue Jenner strolled up yawning, smoothing down his few wild strands of hair and leaving them wilder than before.

‘Itchy. Strange, how little things still find a way to niggle at you, even in the midst of all this.’

‘Life’s a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end. You could just shave.’

Raith kept scratching. ‘Always pictured myself dying with a beard. Like most things long anticipated, turns out rather a disappointment.’

‘A beard’s just a beard,’ said Jenner, scratching at his own. ‘Keeps your face warm in a snowstorm and catches food from time to time, but I knew a man grew his long and got it caught in his horse’s bridle. Dragged through a hedge and broke his neck.’

‘Killed by his own beard? That’s embarrassing.’

‘The dead feel no shame.’

‘The dead feel no anything,’ said Raith. ‘No coming back through the Last Door, is there?’

‘Maybe not. But we always leave a bit of ourselves on this side.’

‘Eh?’ muttered Raith, not caring much for that notion.

‘Our ghosts stick in the memories of those that knew us. Those that loved us, hated us.’

Raith thought of that woman’s face, lit by flames, tears glistening, still so clear after all this time, and he worked his fingers and felt the old ache there. ‘Those that killed us.’

‘Aye.’ Blue Jenner’s eyes were fixed far off. On his own tally of dead folk, maybe. ‘Them most of all. You all right?’

‘Broke my hand once. Never quite healed.’

‘Nothing ever quite heals.’ Blue Jenner sniffed, hawked noisily, worked his mouth, and sent spittle spinning over the walls. ‘Seems Thorn Bathu introduced herself in the night.’

‘Aye,’ said Raith. There was a charred scar through one side of Bright Yilling’s camp, and by the faint smell of burning straw it seemed she’d done for a good deal of his fodder. ‘Reckon it was an even more painful experience than my first meeting with her.’

‘A good friend to have, that girl, and a bad, bad enemy.’ Jenner chuckled. ‘Liked her since I first ran into her out on the Denied.’

‘You’ve been down the Denied?’ asked Raith.

‘Three times.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s very much like a big river.’

Raith was looking past Blue Jenner towards the crumbling doorway in the side of Gudrun’s Tower. Rakki had just stepped out of it, his white hair ruffled by the breeze as he frowned towards Yilling’s great gravedigging.

Jenner raised one grey brow. ‘Anything I can do?’

‘Some things you have to do alone.’ And Raith patted the old raider on the shoulder as he walked past.

‘Brother.’

Rakki didn’t look at him, but a muscle at his temple twitched. ‘Am I?’

‘If you’re not you look surprisingly like me.’

Rakki didn’t smile. ‘You should go.’

‘Why?’ But even as he said it Raith felt the great presence, and turned reluctantly to find the Breaker of Swords stooping through the doorway and into the dawn, Soryorn at his shoulder.

‘Look who comes strolling,’ sang Gorm.

Soryorn carefully adjusted his garnet-studded thrall-collar. ‘It is Raith.’ He’d always been a man of few words and those the obvious.

Gorm stood with eyes closed, listening to the distant songs of the One God priests. ‘Can there be more soothing music of a morning than an enemy’s prayers for his dead?’

‘A harp?’ said Raith. ‘I like a harp.’

Gorm opened his eyes. ‘Do you truly think jokes will mend what you have broken?’

‘Can’t hurt, my king. I wanted to congratulate you on your betrothal.’ Though few betrothals could’ve delighted him less. ‘Skara will be the envy of the world as a queen, and she brings all of Throvenland for a dowry-’

‘Great prizes indeed.’ Gorm raised an arm and swept it towards the warriors that encircled them on every side. ‘But there is the small matter of defeating the High King before I claim them. Your disloyalty has forced me to gamble everything on Father Yarvi’s cunning, rather than bartering a peace with Grandmother Wexen, as I and Mother Scaer had planned.’

Raith glanced at Rakki, but his eyes were on the ground. ‘I didn’t think-’

‘I do not keep dogs to think. I keep them to obey. I have no use for a cur who does not come when he is whistled for. Who does not bite who I tell him to bite. There is no place in my household for such a wretched thing as that. I warned you that I saw a grain of mercy in you. I warned you it might crush you. Now it has.’ Gorm shook his head as he turned away. ‘All those eager boys who would have killed a hundred times for your place, and I chose you.’

‘Disappointing,’ said Soryorn, then with a parting sneer he followed his master down the walkway.

Raith stood there in silence. There’d been a time he admired Grom-gil-Gorm beyond all other men. His strength. His ruthlessness. He used to dream of being like him. ‘Hard to believe I ever looked up to that bastard.’

‘There’s one difference between us,’ muttered Rakki. ‘I’ve always hated him. Here’s another, though. I know I still need him. What’s your plan now?’

‘Can’t say I’ve been working to a plan.’ Raith frowned at his brother. ‘Ain’t easy, killing someone who’s done you no harm.’

‘No one said it was easy.’

‘Well it’s easier if you’re not the one has to do it. Seems it’s always you that wants the hard thing done,’ snapped Raith, trying to keep his voice down, and his fists down too, ‘but it’s me has to do it!’

‘Well you can’t help me now, can you?’ Rakki stabbed towards Bail’s Hall with one finger. ‘Since you chose that little bitch over your own-’

‘Don’t talk about her that way!’ snarled Raith, bunching his fists. ‘All I chose was not to kill her!’

‘And now look where we are. Some time to sprout a conscience.’ Rakki looked back to the graves. ‘I’ll pray for you, brother.’

Raith snorted. ‘Those folk on the border, I reckon they prayed when we came in the night. I reckon they prayed hard as anyone can.’

‘So?’

‘Their prayers didn’t save them from me, did it? Why would yours save me from some other bastard?’ And Raith stalked off down the walls, back to Blue Jenner.

‘Problem?’ asked the old raider.

‘Hatful of ’em.’

‘Well, family’s family. Daresay your brother will come around.’

‘He might. I doubt the Breaker of Swords will be so giving.’

‘He doesn’t strike me as a giver.’

‘I’m done with him.’ Raith spat over the walls. ‘I’m done with me too, the way I was.’

‘Did you like what you were?’

‘Plenty at the time. Now it seems I was more than a bit of a bastard.’ That woman’s face wouldn’t leave him alone, and he swallowed and looked down at the old stones under his feet. ‘How does a man know what’s right to do?’

Jenner puffed out his cheeks. ‘I’ve spent half my life doing the wrong thing. Most of the rest trying to work out the least wrong thing. The few times I’ve done the right thing it’s mostly been by accident.’

‘And you’re about the best man I know.’

Blue Jenner’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I thank you for the compliment. And I pity you.’

‘So do I, old man. So do I.’ Raith watched the little figures moving in Bright Yilling’s camp. Men crawling from their beds, gathered about their fires, picking at their breakfasts, maybe somewhere an old man and a young, looking up to where they stood on the walls and talking about nothing. ‘Reckon they’ll come again today?’

‘Aye, and that concerns me somewhat.’

‘They’ll never get over these walls with ladders. Not ever.’

‘No, and Yilling must know it. So why waste his strength trying?’

‘Keep us nervous. Keep us worried. It’s a siege, isn’t it? He wants to get in somehow.’

‘And in such a way as will burnish his fame.’ Jenner nodded out towards the graves. ‘After a battle, do you dig big howes for every man?’

‘Most of ’em we’d burn in a heap, but these One God-worshippers got odd ways with their dead.’

‘Why so close to our walls, though? You hide your hurts from an enemy. You don’t shove your losses under his nose, even if you can afford them.’

Raith reached up and rubbed at that old notch out of his ear. ‘I’m taking it you’ve got some clever explanation?’

‘You’re getting to know and admire me, I see.’ Jenner pushed his chin forward to scratch at his neck. ‘It had occurred to me Yilling might be ordering these mad attacks just so he’s got bodies to bury.’

‘He’s what?’

‘Worships Death, don’t he? And he’s got men to spare.’

‘Why kill men just to bury them?’

‘So we’d think that’s all he’s doing. But I don’t reckon Bright Yilling’s digging graves all night, just out of bowshot from where we’re weakest.’

Raith stared at him a moment, and then out towards those brown humps, and felt a cold shiver up his back. ‘They’re digging under the walls.’