The Trouble with Peace Read online

  Leo stood a moment, teeth bared, ready to fight. Then he sagged. He couldn’t stay angry with Jurand for longer than a breath or two. “You’re right, you bastard.”

  “He’s always right,” said Glaward, sadly.

  “He is the clever one,” said Antaup, flicking back his dark forelock.

  “Sanity prevails.” Jurand slapped the cane into Leo’s hand and strode off, shaking his head.

  “Shame, though,” muttered Jin.

  “Aye,” said Leo. “Shame.”

  “We have received a letter from His Majesty—”

  “From his Closed Council, you mean,” grumbled Lord Mustred.

  “Or from Old Sticks and his cronies,” grumbled Lord Clensher. They were quite the pair of old grumblers, those two. They could’ve won grumbling contests. Which was pretty much what these meetings came down to.

  Leo’s mother cleared her throat. “They ask us to raise an extra hundred thousand marks in taxes—”

  “Again?” Leo’s voice went shrill with dismay, while the worthies around the table shook their grey heads. The ones who weren’t entirely bald, at least. They shook bald heads.

  “They say since we have peace in the North revenues should rise, and Angland will not need so large an army—”

  “We have peace because we have an army!” Leo tried to leap up, winced at a stab through his leg and had to sink back, clenching his teeth, clenching his fists, clenching everything. “What about the cost of the war—are they paying that, at least?”

  Leo’s mother cleared her throat again. “They… do not mention it.”

  “Are we the king’s subjects or his bloody livestock?” snapped Mustred. “This is unacceptable!”

  “Disgraceful!” growled Clensher.

  “Outrageous!”

  “What the shit?” Leo smashed at the table with a fist and made the papers and most of the old men jump. “The bloody arrogance of the bastards! In war, all they sent were good wishes and in peace all they send are demands! I swear they’d ask for my fruits in a bag if they thought they could get a good price for the damn things!”

  “My lords.” Leo’s mother turned smiling to the room. “Do you suppose you could give us the chamber for a moment?”

  With tired voices and tired legs, the old lords of Angland shuffled to the door. They could hardly have looked more tired than Leo felt. As Lord Governor he was buried in responsibilities. If he didn’t spend four hours a day at his desk, he’d drown in paperwork. He hardly knew how his mother had done it. No small part of him wished she was still doing it.

  “We support you, Lord Brock.” Mustred’s moustaches vibrated with loyalty as he paused in the doorway.

  “We support you whatever.” Clensher’s jowls trembled as he nodded agreement. “Damn those bastards on the Closed Council!” And he pulled the doors shut.

  The gloomy room was silent for a moment as Leo’s anger drained away and he worked up the courage to look at his mother. To see that slightly disappointed, slightly exasperated, slightly resigned look she’d been perfecting ever since he could remember.

  “Another bloody lecture?”

  “Just an entreaty, Leo.” She took his hand, squeezed it in hers. “I share your annoyance, really I do, but you’re Lord Governor now. You have to be patient.”

  “How can I?” He couldn’t bear to sit a moment longer. He twisted his hand free and struggled up, half-hopped to the narrow windows and wrestled one open, desperate to feel fresh air on his face. He looked out across the rain-shiny roofs of Ostenhorm towards the grey sea, rubbing at his sore leg. “Are you sure I’m cut out for this? Managing petty complaints? I’m happier at war than at peace.”

  “Your father was just the same. But being Lord Governor is about managing the peace. The Closed Council know Nightfall respects you—”

  “The Great Wolf only respects the boot across his neck! To disarm us? How can they be so blind? It’s not half a year since we were fighting for our lives, without a shred of help from those bastards!”

  “I know. But if you’re furious whenever the Closed Council does something infuriating, you’ll be furious all the time. Rare anger can be inspiring. Frequent anger becomes contemptible.”

  Leo took a breath. Forced his shoulders down. By the dead, he was always angry these days. “You’re right. I know you’re right.” The wind was chill outside. He dragged the window closed, gripped his thigh and took a few hobbling steps back to his chair—his prison—and dropped down into it.

  “Perhaps you should stop training,” she said softly. “Rest the leg—”

  “I did rest it, and it hurt more. So I trained, and it got worse. So I rested it again, and that didn’t help. Nothing bloody helps! I’m trapped by the fucking thing!”

  “A change of scene might do you good. We’ve been invited to Lord Isher’s wedding. A trip to Adua would present many opportunities.”

  “To kiss the king’s arse?”

  “To make your case to him. You said he was a reasonable man.”

  Leo scowled. He hated when his mother talked sense. It made it damn difficult to fight with her without talking nonsense himself. She and Jurand had him in a relentless bloody pincer movement of rationality. “I suppose so,” he grumbled.

  “Then reason with him. Build some friendships on the Open Council. Make some allies among the Closed. Use their rivalries to your advantage. You can be charming, Leo, when you want to be. Charm them.”

  He couldn’t help smiling. “Could you just for once be wrong, Mother?”

  “I’ve tried it a couple of times. It really didn’t suit me.”

  “By the dead, it stinks,” said Leo, face crushed up with pain and disgust as the bandages peeled sticky from his thigh.

  “An odour is entirely natural, Your Grace.” The surgeon nudged his eye-lenses back up his nose with his wrist. You’d have thought a man who had to wear lenses but use his hands would at least find a pair that weren’t constantly sliding down his nose, but in this, as in so much else, it seemed Leo would be disappointed. “Some corruption has found its way into the wound.”

  “Corruption? How?”

  “Some injuries simply become corrupt.”

  “Like everything bloody else,” hissed Leo as the man probed at the wound with his thumbs and made it weep a thick yellow tear. It looked like a red eye, lids stubbornly pressed shut in a refusal to see the truth.

  “I’ve seen men make complete recoveries from the most terrible injuries,” mused the surgeon, as if they were discussing a scientific curiosity rather than Leo’s life. “But I’ve seen men die from a thorn-prick.”

  “Very reassuring.”

  “How long ago was it inflicted?”

  “Five months?” grunted Leo through gritted teeth. “No, six—ah!”

  “And from a sword?”

  “The same time and the same sword as these others.” Leo waved at the scar on his face, faded to a pale line. The one on his side. The one on his shoulder. “But they all healed. This one… seems to be getting worse.”

  “We’ll have to drain it. That should ease the pain.”

  “Whatever you have to do,” whispered Leo, wiping the tears from his cheek on the back of his arm.

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t like husk for the—”

  “No!” Leo remembered his father, at the end, raving and drooling. “No. I need… to stay sharp.” Though what for? So he could watch his friends train from a chair? Sit through endless meetings about tax? He should take husk for the pain of that rubbish.

  The surgeon offered a strip of leather to bite on. “You might want to look away, Your Grace.”

  “I think I will.” Flashing steel used to delight him. Now the glint of the sun on the tiny blade was making him feel faint.

  He was the Young Lion! No man braver! Riding into a line of spears had been nothing. Now even the idea of moving the leg, touching the leg, using the leg, made him cringe. It was his first thought before he did anything—how much would i
t hurt? You would’ve thought the more pain you suffered, the more you’d get used to it, but it was the other way around. Hour after hour, day after day, it wore down your patience until everything was unbearable.

  So rather than suffer in heroic silence, he trembled and whimpered his way through it, sobbing at every touch of the blade. At even the expectation of a touch. When it was over, he peeled the wad of leather from his teeth, strings of spit hanging off it. “I swear it hurts more than when I took the wound in the first place.”

  “Pain dulls in the excitement of combat.” The surgeon wiped Leo’s thigh then wrinkled his nose at the cloth. “The chronic is, in the end, far harder to stand than the acute.”

  Leo lay back, limp as a wrung-out rag. “When will it heal?”

  “Perhaps weeks. Perhaps months.”

  “Months?” He made a fist as though he might punch his own leg, but quickly thought better of it.

  “But you should be aware…” The surgeon frowned as he dried his hands. “Some things never heal.”

  “It could be like this for ever?”

  “It is a possibility.”

  Leo turned his head away towards the window. Watched the grey rooftops and the grey sea through the distorting little rain-flecked panes. Would he be a cripple? Like that bastard Glokta, imprisoned behind his desk, burrowing among his papers like a maggot in filth?

  Tears made his sight swim. He wished Rikke was with him. She would’ve turned it into a joke, played the fool, made him… feel good. It was a long time since he’d felt good.

  “All done for now.” And the surgeon began to wind a fresh bandage around Leo’s thigh, hiding that puckered red eye.

  He’d dreamed of leading armies and winning great victories, just like in the stories. He’d dreamed of fighting in the Circle and being reckoned a great warrior, just like in the songs. He’d dreamed of stepping from his mother’s shadow into the sunlight of renown and being cheered as Lord Governor of Angland. He’d done it all.

  And look where it had left him.

  That’s the trouble with songs. They tend to stop before it all turns to shit.

  With the Wind

  Downside frowned towards the burned-out shells of hovels and houses. Couple of chimney stacks still stood, couple of charred beams poked at the pink morning sky. He cleared his throat, worked the results around his mouth like he was tasting ale, then spat ’em out. He loved a good spit, did Downside. Might’ve been his favourite pastime. After killing folk.

  “Just like the village I came from, this,” he said.

  “Aye,” said Clover, “well. Villages all look much the same when they’re burned.”

  “You say that like you’ve seen a few.”

  “There was a time back in the wars…” Clover thought about it and gave a sorry grunt “…’fore you lot were born, I daresay, when burned villages were a more common sight in the North than unburned ones. I’d hoped those days were behind us but, you know. Hoping for a thing often seems the best way o’ bringing on the opposite.” There was another gurgling retch behind and Clover turned to look. “How can you have any puke left?”

  “It’s just…” Flick straightened up, wiping his mouth. “A sort o’ snot coming out now.’ And he peeked at the display from the corner of his eye, as if looking sidelong might make it prettier.

  You could tell it had been people once. A hand here. A face there. But mostly just bits of meat, nailed up high or dangling in the burned trees at the centre of the village, where the rain had washed the ash into a black slurry. There was something coiled snake-like around a trunk which Clover had an unpleasant sense might be someone’s guts. A scene from a nightmare, and no mistake.

  “Fucking flatheads,” muttered Flick, then he hunched over and coughed up another string of drool.

  “Chief?”

  “By the dead!” shouted Clover, near jumping in the air with fright. Sholla had slipped out of the bushes, silent as regrets, and was squatting not a step to his side, one eye big and white in her ash-smeared face and the other just a gleam behind her tangled hair. “Creep up on them, girl, not on me! I near shat myself!” He was worried he might’ve, just a streak.

  “Sorry.” She didn’t look sorry at all. She never looked much of anything. Deadpan as an actual pan, this girl.

  “I should hang a bell on you,” muttered Clover, bending over and trying to calm his racing heart. “What is it?”

  “The flatheads left tracks. Took some sheep with ’em. Wool tufted on the trees. Tracks all over. Couldn’t have left bigger ones if they’d driven a wagon. I could track ’em easy. Want me to track ’em? I’ll track ’em, shall I?” Maybe she spent so much time on her own, only trees for company, that she’d poor judgement now on quantity of words. It was either too few in little stabs or too many in a flurry. “Want to follow, Chief?”

  Clover still didn’t much like being called chief. The tallest flower is oft the first clipped, and no one he’d called chief down the years had lived to enjoy a pleasurable retirement. “No, I don’t much want to follow, as it happens.” He held a hand out to the nailed-up offal. “Adding my own innards to such a display in no way appeals.”

  There was a pause. Sholla’s one visible eye, and the gleam of the one hidden, slid to Downside, and he shrugged his great shoulders. They slid to Flick, who groaned, and straightened, and wiped his mouth again. They slid to the display, which still sat there in the trees, of course. They slid back up to Clover. “Shall we follow, though?”

  Clover puffed out his cheeks. They’d been puffed out ever since Stour gave him these scrapings from the pot and told him to hunt Shanka. But when your chief gives you a task, you get to it, don’t you? Even if it’s far from the task you’d have picked.

  “Aye,” he grunted. “We shall.”

  “Chief?”

  “Huh?”

  Flick knelt in the wet brush, twisting his spear nervously in his pale fists. “What you thinking about?”

  Clover stood, trying to find a gap in the leaves so he could peer into the valley, grunted as he stretched one aching leg, then the other, then squatted down again. “The past. Choices made. Things done.”

  “Regrets, eh?” Flick nodded sagely, like he knew all about regrets, though if he’d seen sixteen winters Clover would’ve been surprised.

  “Might be a parade o’ triumphs and successes, mightn’t it?”

  “Didn’t look that way.”

  “Aye, well.” Clover took a long breath through his nose. “You’ve got to blow with the wind. Let go of the past. Dwelling on your mistakes does no one any good.”

  “You really think that?”

  Clover opened his mouth to speak, then shrugged. “It’s the sort of shit I always say. Keep talking and I’ll more than likely crack out the one about choosing your moment.”

  “Habit, eh?”

  “I’m like a wife who’s served the same stew every night for years, and hates it more each time, but can’t cook aught else.”

  Downside looked up from checking his axe to grunt, “Who wants to marry that bitch?”

  Clover puffed out his cheeks again. “Who indeed?”

  That was when Sholla came bounding up the gully, springing from rock to rock, making no effort to stay quiet this time. She flung herself into the bushes and slid to a stop in the undergrowth beside Clover, breathing hard and her face shining with sweat but otherwise not looking much bothered by a deadly chase through the woods.

  “They coming?” asked Flick, voice shrill with fear.

  “Aye.”

  “All of ’em?” asked Downside, voice growly with excitement.

  “Pretty much.”

  “You sure?” asked Clover.

  She glanced at him through her hair, which had a couple of bits of twig stuck in it. “I am irresistible.”

  “No doubt,” he said, with the ghost of a grin. It was the sort of thing Wonderful might’ve said.

  Then Clover heard ’em, and the grin faded fast. A howling firs
t, like a pack of wolves far off, making the hairs on his neck prickle. Then a clattering and clanking, like armoured men coming on the rush, making his mouth turn dry. Then a mad snuffling and gibbering and hooting somewhere between a crowd of hungry hogs and a gaggle of angry geese, setting his palms to itch.

  “Ready!” he hissed, men shifting in the undergrowth all around him, gripping their weapons tight. “And as Rudd Threetrees used to say, let’s us get them killed, not the other way around!” He gave Sholla a nudge with the rim of his shield. “To the back, now.”

  “I can fight,” she whispered. He saw she’d pulled out a hatchet and a wicked-looking knife with a long, thin blade. “I can fight better than your champion puker here.”

  Flick looked a little hurt, but he looked a little green, too.

  “I’ve got plenty o’ folk can fight,” said Clover, “but just the one who can sneak up on a squirrel. Get to the back.”

  He saw a flicker of movement in the trees, then another, then they burst from the branches and into the open, swarming up the gulley, funnelled between the steep rocks and straight towards Clover. Exactly the way he’d planned. Though the plan didn’t seem such a clever one right then.

  A vile mass they were, whooping and warbling, skittering and scuttling, limping on legs of different lengths, all teeth and claws and mad fury. All twisted and misshapen, mockeries of men, squashed from clay by children with no knack for sculpting.

  “Fuck,” whimpered Flick.

  Clover caught his shoulder and gripped it hard. “Steady.” At a moment like that, everyone’s thinking about running, at least a bit, and it only takes one doing it to convince ’em all it’s the best idea. Before you know it, you’re being hunted through the woods instead of celebrating a victory. And Clover’s knees were getting far too stiff for doing the hunting, let alone for being the prey.

  “Steady,” he hissed again as the Shanka scrambled closer, sun glinting on the jagged edges of their crude weapons and the plates and rivets they’d bolted into their lumpen bodies.