A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,136

depressing things, whatever the songs say. We must lighten the mood where we can, eh, Wonderful?’

‘I smile whenever possible,’ she said, stony-faced.

Magweer looked from one of them to the other, then gave a sour hiss, spat once more for luck and wrenched his horse roughly around to the west. ‘Just get up there with the scouts soon as you can or there’ll be trouble.’ And he rode off, mud flicking from his horse’s hooves, nearly riding down some poor woman who’d been off fetching water and making her drop her buckets in the mud.

‘I like that boy a lot. Reminds me of me as a young man.’ Clover shook his head. ‘If I’d been an absolute cunt.’

‘You were an absolute cunt,’ said Wonderful. ‘And I’ve observed no significant changes in that regard.’

Clover started pulling his boot on. ‘Or, indeed, in any other.’

Wonderful scrubbed worriedly at the back of her shaved head as she frowned off down the road to the west. ‘Damn it, though,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a feeling about today.’

‘No sign,’ said Rikke’s father, offering her his battered eyeglass.

‘If you say there’s no sign,’ she said, ‘I daresay there isn’t any. You’re the War Chief. I’m … I don’t know, a seer, maybe?’ Sounded like a bloody presumptuous title. ‘Just … a really shit one.’

‘Sooner or later, you’ll have to stop hiding your talents, girl. Your Long Eye may be patchy but your short ones are still way sharper’n mine.’

Rikke sighed, and took the eyeglass, and peered over the weed-sprouting old battlements, keeping low just in case. Spots of gorse on the hillside. Fast-flowing water in the stream. Sheep dotted about the yellow-green grass. Sunlight and shadow chasing each other down the valley as the gusting wind dragged clouds across the sky. There were a couple of hundred Union men gathered around the bridge, where a wagon had been carefully positioned to look like it had just that moment broke an axle and was blocking things up halfway across.

The bait on their hook. Seemed a laughably obvious trick right then, but tricks always do when you know how they’re managed. Fish keep biting, even so.

‘No sign.’ Rikke handed back the glass, and clapped her father on the shoulder, and slipped down the steps.

The yard of the ruin was crammed with Oxel’s and Red Hat’s Carls, checking their gear, passing food, talking softly to one another. You’d think men would get fired up before a battle but more often they get maudlin. When you feel the Great Leveller’s shadow cold on your back, it’s not your hopes you come back to, but your regrets.

Isern had set her bony arse on the heap of crumbled masonry that was once the north wall of the fortress, spear across her knees, giving the blade a few licks with the whetstone.

‘No sign?’ she asked, not even looking up.

Rikke thought she caught a glint of metal among the trees at the bottom of the slope, but there was nothing there now. ‘No sign.’ And she perched on the tumbledown wall and wriggled till she found a comfortable spot, then started to arrange the fronds of a surprisingly pretty weed growing out of it. ‘The songs don’t say much about all the time spent sitting down, do they?’

Isern winced as she stretched her hurt leg out. ‘The skalds give disproportionate attention to the sword-work, it’s true. Truth is, battles are more often won with spades than blades. Roads, and ditches, and trenches, and proper shit-pits. You’ll dig your way to victory, my da always told me.’

‘Thought you hated your da?’

‘Being an utter fucker didn’t make him wrong. Quite the opposite, far as fighting goes.’

‘It’s a sad fact that the …’ Rikke trailed off, staring.

A man had stepped from the trees below them. A tall man with pale brows and pale hair in a spiky riot, shoulders hunched and elbows stuck out wide and short beard jutting. He had a sword in one hand and an axe in the other and he was frowning up the slope. Not at her, but at the tower beyond.

‘Who’s that?’ she said.

‘Who’s who?’

The pale man beckoned with his axe, and Rikke’s jaw fell open as a couple of dozen others slipped from the trees around him, all well armed. She jumped up, near falling over that pretty weed, and pointing wildly down towards them.

‘There’s men in the trees!’ she screeched.

A few Carls scrambled onto the crumbling wall, staring down. Oxel was one. Rikke was waiting for him to roar out