The Seventh Day

The Easterners had come again last night. Crept up by darkness, found a spot to climb in and killed a sentry. Then they’d set a ladder and a crowd of ’em had sneaked inside by the time they were found out. The cries had woken the Dogman, hardly sleeping anyway, and he’d scrabbled awake in the black, all tangled with his blanket. Enemies inside the fortress, men running and shouting, shadows in the dark, everything reeking of panic and chaos. Men fighting by starlight, and by torchlight, and by no light at all, blades swung with hardly a notion of where they were headed, boots stumbling and kicking showers of bright sparks out of the guttering campfires.

They’d driven ’em back in the end. They’d herded them to the wall, and cut them down in numbers, and only three had lived to drop their weapons and give up. A bad mistake for them, as it turned out. There were a lot of men dead, these seven days. Every time the sun went down there were more graves. No one was in much of a merciful mood, providing they’d been suited that way in the first place, and not many had. So when they’d caught these three, Black Dow had trussed ’em up on the wall where Bethod and all the rest could see. Trussed ’em up in the hard blue dawn, first streaks of light just stabbing across the black sky, and he’d doused them all with oil and set a spark to them. One by one he’d done it. So the others could see what was coming and set to screaming before their turn.

Dogman didn’t much take to seeing men on fire. He didn’t like hearing their shrieks and their fat crackling. He didn’t smile at a nose-full of the sick-sweet stink of their burning meat. But he didn’t think of trying to stop it neither. There was a time for soft opinions, and this weren’t it. Mercy and weakness are the same thing in war, and there’s no prizes for nice behaviour. He’d learned that from Bethod, a long time ago. Maybe now those Easterners would give it a second thought before they came again at night and fucked up everyone’s breakfast.

Might help to put some steel in the rest of the Dogman’s crew besides, because more than a few were getting itchy. Some lads had tried to get away two nights before. Given up their places and crept over the wall in the darkness, tried to get down into the valley. Bethod had their heads on spears out in front of his ditch now. A dozen battered lumps, hair blowing about in the breeze. You could hardly see their faces from the wall, but it seemed somehow they had an angry, upset sort of a look. Like they blamed the Dogman for leading them to this. As though he hadn’t enough to worry about with the reproaches of the living.

He frowned down at Bethod’s camp, the shapes of his tents and his signs just starting to come up black out of the mist and the darkness, and he wondered what he could do, except for stand there, and wait. All his boys were looking to him, hoping he’d pull some trick of magic to get them out of this alive. But Dogman didn’t know any magic. A valley, and a wall, and no ways out. No ways out had been the whole point of the plan. He wondered if they could stand another day. But then he’d wondered that yesterday morning.

“What’s Bethod planning for today, do we reckon?” he murmured to himself. “What’s he got planned?”

“A massacre?” grunted Grim.

Dogman gave him a hard look. “Attack is the word I might’ve picked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we get it your way, before the day’s out.” He narrowed his eyes and stared down into the shadowy valley, hoping to see what he’d been hoping for all the last seven long days. Some sign that the Union were coming. But there was nothing. Below Bethod’s wide camp, his tents, and his standards, and his masses of men, there was nothing but the bare and empty land, mist clinging in the shady hollows.

Tul nudged him in the ribs with a great big elbow, and managed to make a grin. “I don’t know about this plan. Waiting for the Union, and all that. Sounds a bit risky, if you ask me. Any chance I can change my mind now?”

The Dogman didn’t laugh. He hadn’t any laughter left. “Not much.”

“No.” The giant puffed out a weighty sigh. “I don’t suppose there is.”

Seven days, since the Shanka first came at the walls. Seven days, and it felt like seven months. Logen hardly had a muscle that didn’t ache from hard use. He was covered in a legion of bruises, a host of scratches, an army of grazes, and knocks, and burns. He had the long cut down his leg bandaged, his ribs all bound up tight from getting kicked in them, a pair of good-sized scabs under his hair, his shoulder stiff as wood from where he’d got battered with a shield, his knuckles scraped and swollen from punching at an Easterner and catching stone instead. He was one enormous sore spot.

The rest of the crowd were little better off. There was hardly a man in the whole fortress without some kind of an injury. Even Crummock’s daughter had picked up a scratch from somewhere. One of Shivers’ boys had lost himself a finger the day before yesterday. Little one, on his left hand. He was looking at it now, wrapped up tight in dirty, bloody cloth, wincing.

“Burns, don’t it?” he said, looking up at Logen, bunching up the rest of his fingers and opening them again.

Logen should’ve felt sorry for him, probably. He remembered the pain, and the disappointment even worse. Hardly able to believe that you wouldn’t have that finger any more, for the whole rest of your life. But he’d got no pity left for anyone beyond himself. “It surely does,” he grunted.

“Feels like it’s still there.”

“Aye.”

“Does that feeling go away?”

“In time.”

“How much time?”

“More than we’ve got, most likely.”

The man nodded, slow and grim. “Aye.”

Seven days, and even the cold stone and wet wood of the fortress itself seemed to have had enough. The new parapets were crumbled and sagging, shored up as best they could be, and crumbled again. The gates were chopped to rotten firewood, daylight showing through the hacked-out gaps, boulders piled in behind. A firm knock might have brought them down. A firm knock might have brought Logen down, for that matter, the way he was feeling.

He took a mouthful of sour water from his flask. They were getting to the rank stuff at the bottom of the barrels. Low on food too, and on everything else. Hope, in particular, was in short and dwindling supply. “Still alive,” he whispered to himself, but there wasn’t much triumph in it. Even less than usual. Civilisation might not have been all to his taste, but a soft bed, a strange place to piss, and a bit of scorn from some skinny idiots didn’t seem like such a bad option right then. He was busy asking himself for the thousandth time why he came back at all when he heard Crummock-i-Phail’s voice behind him.

“Well, well, Bloody-Nine. You look tired, man.”

Logen frowned up. The hillman’s mad blather was starting to grate on him. “It’s been hard work these past days, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I have, and I’ve had my part in it, haven’t I, my beauties?” His three children looked at each other.

“Aye?” said the girl in a tiny voice.

Crummock frowned down at them. “Don’t like the way the game’s played no more, eh? How about you, Bloody-Nine? The moon stopped smiling, has it? You scared, are you?”

Logen gave the fat bastard a long, hard look. “Tired is what I am, Crummock. Tired o’ your fortress, your food, and most of all I’m tired of your fucking talk. Not everyone loves the sound o’ your fat lips flapping as much as you. Why don’t you piss off and see if you can fit the moon up your arse.”

Crummock split a grin, a curve of yellow teeth standing out from his brown beard. “That’s the man I love, right there.” One of his sons, the one that carried the spear with him, was tugging at his shirt. “What the hell is it, boy?”