Gorst clutched hold of him, dragged him into an ungainly embrace between their two jostling horses. The axe came down but the shaft caught Gorst's shoulder and the blade only scraped harmlessly against his backplate. Gorst caught one of the absurd horns on the man's gilded helmet and twisted it, twisted it, twisting his head with it until it was pressed against Gorst's breastplate. The golden man snarled and spluttered, most of the way out of his saddle, one leg caught in his stirrup. He tried to drop his axe and wrestle but it was on a loop around his wrist, snagged on Gorst's armour, his other arm trapped by his battered shield.

Gorst bared his teeth, raised his fist and started punching the man in the face, his gauntlet crunching against one side of the golden helmet. Up and down, up and down, his fist was a hammer and gradually it marked, then dented, then twisted the helmet out of shape until one side of it dug into the man's face. Even better than the sword. Crunch, crunch, and it bent further, cutting into his cheek. More personal. No need for discussion or justification, for introductions or etiquette, for guilt or excuses. Only the incredible release of violence. So powerful that he felt this golden-armoured man must be his best friend in all the world. I love you. I love you, and that is why I must smash your head apart. He was laughing as he pounded his gauntleted knuckles into the man's bloody-blond moustache again. Laughing and crying at once.

Then something hit him in the backplate with a dull clang, his head snapped back and he was out of the saddle, jostled upside down between their two horses, gripped by cold and his helmet full of bubbling river. He came up coughing, water sprayed in his face by thrashing hooves.

The man in the golden armour had floundered to a riderless horse and was dragging himself drunkenly into the saddle. There were corpses everywhere: horses and men, Union and Northman, sprawled on the shingle, bobbing in the ford, carried gently by the soft current. He hardly saw any Union cavalry left. Only Northmen, weapons raised, nudging their horses cautiously towards him.

Gorst fumbled with the buckle on his helmet and dragged it off, the wind shockingly cold on his face. He clambered to his feet, armour leaden with river water. He held his arms out, as if to embrace a dear friend, and smiled as the nearest Northman raised his sword.

'I am ready,' he whispered.

'Shoot!' There was a volley of clicks and rattles behind him. The Northman toppled from his saddle, stuck through with flatbow bolts. Another shrieked, axe tumbling as he clapped his hand to a bolt in his cheek. Gorst turned, stupidly, to look over his shoulder. The south bank of the shallows was one long row of kneeling flatbowmen. Another rank stepped between them as they started to reload, knelt and levelled their bows with mechanical precision.

A big man sat on a large grey at the far end of the line. General Jalenhorm. 'Second rank!' he roared, slashing his hand down. 'Shoot!' Gorst ducked on an instinct, head whipping around as he followed the bolts flickering overhead and into the Northmen, already turning their horses to flee, men and beasts screaming and snorting as they dropped in the shallows.

'Third rank! Shoot!' The hiss and twitter of another volley. A few more fell peppered, one horse rearing and going over backwards, crushing its rider. But most of the rest had made it up the bank and were away into the barley on the other side, tearing off to the north as quickly as they had arrived.

Gorst slowly let his arms drop as the sound of hooves faded and left, aside from the chattering of the water and the moaning of the wounded, an uncanny silence.

Apparently the engagement was over, and he was still alive.

How strangely disappointing.

The Better Part of Valour By the time Calder pulled up his horse some fifty paces from the Old Bridge, the fighting was over. Not that he was shedding too many tears for having missed his part in it. That had been the point of hanging back.

The sun was starting to sink in the west and the shadows were stretching out towards the Heroes, insects floating lazily above the crops. Calder could almost have convinced himself he was out for an easy ride in the old days, son of the King of the Northmen and master of all he saw. Except for the few corpses of men and horses scattered on the track, one Union soldier spreadeagled on his face with a spear sticking straight up from his back, the dust underneath him stained dark.

It looked like the Old Bridge a moss-crusted double span of ancient stone that looked as if it was about to collapse under its own weight had been only lightly held, and when the Union men saw their fellows fleeing from the Heroes they'd pulled back to the other bank just as quickly as ever they could. Calder couldn't say he blamed them.

Pale-as-Snow had found a big rock to sit on, spear dug point first into the ground beside him, his grey horse nibbling at the grass and the grey fur around his shoulders blowing in the breeze. Whatever the weather, he never seemed warm. It took Calder a moment to find the end of his scabbard with the point of his sword not usually a problem of his before he sheathed it and sat down beside the old warrior.

'You took your time getting here,' said Pale-as-Snow, without looking up.

'I think my horse might be lame.'

'Something's lame, all right. You know your brother was right about one thing.' He nodded towards Scale, striding about in the open ground at the north end of the bridge, shouting and waving his mace around. He still had his shield in the other fist, a flatbow bolt lodged near the rim. 'Northmen won't follow a man reckoned a coward.'

'What's that to me?'

'Oh, nothing.' Pale-as-Snow's grey eyes showed no sign he was joking. 'You're everyone's hero.'

White-Eye Hansul was trying to argue with Scale, open hands up for calm. Scale shoved him over onto his back with an ill-tempered flick of his arm and started bellowing again. It looked as though there hadn't been enough fighting for his taste, and he was for pushing on across the river right away to find some more. It looked as though no one else thought that was a very good idea.

Pale-as-Snow gave a resigned sort of sigh, as if this had been happening a lot. 'By the dead, but once your brother gets the fire under him it can be hard work putting it out. Maybe you can play at the voice of reason?'

Calder shrugged. 'I've played at worse. Here's your shield back.' And he tossed it at Pale-as-Snow's stomach so he almost fell off his rock catching it. 'Oy! Pinhead!' Calder swaggered towards Scale with hands on his hips. 'Pinhead Scale! Brave as a bull, strong as a bull, thick as a bull's arse.' Scale's eyes bulged right out of his livid face as they followed him. So did everyone else's, but Calder didn't mind that. He liked nothing better than an audience.

'Good old stupid Scale! Great fighter but, you know ... nothing but shit in his head.' Calder tapped at his skull as he said it, then slowly stretched out his arm to point up towards the Heroes. 'That's what they say about you.' Scale's expression grew a touch less furious and a touch more thoughtful, but only a touch. 'Up there, at Dow's little wank-parties. Tenways, and Golden, and Ironhead, and the rest. They think you're a fucking idiot.' Calder didn't entirely disagree, if it came to that. He leaned in close to Scale, well within punching range, he was painfully aware. 'Why don't you ride on over that bridge, and prove them all right?'

'Fuck them!' barked Scale. 'We could get over that bridge and into Adwein. Get astride the Uffrith Road! Cut those Union bastards off at the roots. Get in behind 'em!' He was punching at the air with his shield, trying to stoke his rage up again, but the moment he'd started talking instead of doing he'd lost and Calder had won. Calder knew it, and had to smother his contempt. That was no challenge, though. He'd been hiding contempt around his brother for years.

'Astride the Uffrith Road? Might be half the Union army coming up that road before sunset.' Calder looked at Scale's horsemen, no more than ten score and most of their horses ridden out, the foot still hurrying through the fields far behind or stopped at a long wall that reached almost all the way to Skarling's Finger. 'No offence to the valour of our father's proud Named Men here, but are you really going to take on countless thousands with this lot?'

Scale gave them a look himself, jaw muscles squirming in the side of his head as he ground his teeth. White-Eye Hansul, who'd picked himself up and was dusting his dented armour down, shrugged his shoulders. Scale flung his mace on the ground. 'Shit!'

Calder risked a calming hand on his shoulder. 'We were told to take the bridge. We took the bridge. If the Union want it back, they can cross over and fight us for it. On our ground. And we'll be waiting for them. Ready and rested, dug in and close to supplies. Honestly, brother, if Black Dow doesn't kill the pair of us through pure meanness you'll more than likely do it through pure rashness.'

Scale took a long breath, and blew it out. He didn't look at all happy. But he didn't look like he was about to tear anyone's head off. 'All right, damn it!' He frowned across the river, then back at Calder, then shook off his hand. 'I swear, sometimes talking to you is like talking to our father.'

'Thanks,' said Calder. He wasn't sure it was meant as a compliment, but he took it as one anyway. One of their father's sons had to keep his temper.

Paths of Glory Corporal Tunny tried to hop from one patch of yellow weed to another, the regimental standard held high above the filth in his left hand, his right already spattered to the shoulder from slips into the scum. The bog was pretty much what Tunny had been expecting. And that wasn't a good thing.

The place was a maze of sluggish channels of brown water, streaked on the surface with multicoloured oil, with rotten leaves, with smelly froth, ill-looking rushes scattered at random. If you put down your foot and it only squelched in to the ankle, you counted yourself lucky. Here and there some species of hell-tree had wormed its leathery roots deep enough to stay upright and hang out a few lank leaves, festooned with beards of brown creeper and sprouting with outsize mushrooms. There was a persistent croaking that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Some cursed variety of bird, or frog, or insect, but Tunny couldn't see any of the three. Maybe it was just the bog itself, laughing at them.

'Forest of the fucking damned,' he whispered. Getting a battalion across this was like driving a herd of sheep through a sewer. And, as usual, for reasons he could never understand, him and the four rawest recruits in the Union army were playing vanguard.

'Which way, Corporal Tunny?' asked Worth, doubled up around his guts.

'Stick to the grassy bits, the guide said!' Though there wasn't much around that an honest man could've called grass. Not that there were many honest men around either. 'Have you got a rope, boy?' he asked Yolk, struggling through the mulch beside him, a long smear of mud down his freckled cheek.

'Left 'em with the horses, Corporal.'

'Of course. Of course we bloody did.' By the Fates, how Tunny wished he'd been left with the horses. He took one step and cold water rushed over the top of his boot like a clammy hand clamping around his foot. He was just setting up to have a proper curse at that when a shrill cry came from behind.

'Ah! My boot!'

Tunny spun round. 'Keep quiet, idiot!' Totally failing to keep quiet himself. 'The Northmen'll hear us in bloody Carleon!'

But Klige wasn't listening. He'd strayed well away from the rushes and left one of his boots behind, sucked off by the bog. He was wading out to get it, sliding in up to his thighs. Yolk snickered at him as he started delving into the slime.

'Leave it, Klige, you fool!' snapped Tunny, floundering back towards him.

'Got it!' The bog made a squelching suck as Klige dragged his boot free, looking like it was caked in black porridge. 'Whoa!' He lurched one way, then the other. 'Whoa!' And he was in up to his waist, face flipped from triumph to panic in an instant. Yolk snickered again, then suddenly realised what was happening.

'Who's got a rope?' shouted Lederlingen. 'Someone get a rope!' He floundered out towards Klige, grabbing hold of the nearest piece of tree, a leafless twig thrust out over the mire. 'Take my hand! Take my hand!'

But Klige was panicking, thrashing around and only working himself deeper. He went down with shocking speed, face tipped back, only just above the level of the filth, a big black leaf stuck across one cheek.

'Help me!' he squealed, stretching fingers still a good stride short of Lederlingen's. Tunny slopped up, shoving the flagstaff out towards Klige. 'Help murghhh-' His bulging eyes rolled towards Tunny, then they were lost, his floating hair vanished, a few bubbles broke on the foetid surface, and that was it. Tunny poked at the mush uselessly, but Klige was gone. Aside from his rescued boot, floating slowly away, no trace he'd ever existed.

They struggled the rest of the way in silence, the other recruits looking stunned, Tunny with his jaw furiously clenched, all sticking to the tumps of yellow weed as close as new foals to their mothers. Soon enough the ground started to rise, the trees turned from twisted swamp monsters to firs and oaks. Tunny leaned the filthy standard against a trunk and stood, hands on hips. His magnificent boots were ruined.

'Shit!' he snarled. 'Fucking shit!'

Yolk sank down in the muck, staring into nowhere, white hands trembling. Lederlingen licked his pale lips, breathing hard and saying nothing. Worth was nowhere to be seen, though Tunny thought he could hear someone groaning in the undergrowth. Even the drowning of a comrade couldn't delay the working of that lad's troublesome bowels. If anything it had made them accelerate. Forest walked up, caked to the knees in black mud. They all were caked, daubed, spattered with it, and Tunny in particular.

'I hear we lost one of our recruits.' Forest had said it often enough that he could say it deadpan. That he had to.

'Klige,' Tunny squeezed between gritted teeth. 'Was going to be a weaver. We lost a man in a fucking bog. Why are we here, even?' The bottom half of his coat was heavy with oily filth and he peeled it off and flung it down.

'You did the best you could.'

'I know,' snapped Tunny.

'Nothing more you-'

'He had some of my bloody gear in his pack! Eight good bottles of brandy! You know how much that could've made me?'

There was a pause.

'Eight bottles.' Forest slowly nodded. 'Well, you're a piece of work, Corporal Tunny, you know that? Twenty-six years in his Majesty's army but you can always find a way to surprise me. I tell you what, you can get up that rise and find out where in the pit of hell we are while I try and get the rest of the battalion across without sinking any more bottles. Maybe that'll take your mind off the depth of your loss.' And he stalked away, hissing to some men who were trying to heave a trembling mule out of the knee-deep muck.

Tunny stood fuming a moment longer, but fuming was going to do no good. 'Yolk, Latherlister, Worth, get over here!'

Yolk stood up, wide-eyed. 'Worth ... Worth-'

'Still squirting,' said Lederlingen, busy rooting through his pack and hanging various sodden items up on branches to dry.

''Course he is. What else would he be doing? You wait for him, then. Yolk, follow me and try not to bloody die.' He stalked off up the slope, sodden trousers chafing horribly, kicking bits of fallen wood out of his way.

'Shouldn't we be keeping quiet?' whispered Yolk. 'What if we run into the enemy?'

'Enemy!' snorted Tunny. 'Probably we'll run into the other bloody battalion, just trotted over the Old Bridge and up a path and got there ahead of us all nice and dry. That'll make a fine bloody picture, won't it?'

'Couldn't say, sir,' muttered Yolk, dragging himself up the muddy slope almost on all fours.

'Corporal Tunny! And I wasn't soliciting an opinion. Some big bloody grins they'll have when they see the state of us. Some laugh they'll all have!' They were coming to the edge of the trees. Beyond the branches he could see the faint outline of the distant hill, the stones sticking from the top. 'At least we're in the right bloody place,' and then, under his breath, 'to get wet, sore, hungry and poor, that is. General fucking Jalenhorm, I swear, a soldier expects to get shat on, but this ...'

Beyond the trees the ground sloped down, studded with old stumps and new saplings where some woodcutters had once been busy, their slumping sheds abandoned and already rotting back to the earth. Beyond them a gentle river babbled, hardly more than a stream, really, flowing south to empty into the nightmare of swamp they'd just crossed. There was an earthy overhang on the far bank, then a grassy upslope on which some boundary-conscious farmer seemed to have built an irregular drystone wall. Above the wall Tunny saw movement. Spears, their tips glinting in the fading light. So he'd been right. The other battalion were there ahead of them. He just couldn't work out why they were on the north side of the wall ...

'What is it, Corporal-'

'Didn't I tell you to stay bloody quiet?' Tunny dragged Yolk down into the bushes and pulled out his eyeglass, a good three-part brass one he won in a game of squares with an officer from the Sixth. He edged forwards, finding a gap in the undergrowth. The ground rose sharply on the other side of the stream then dipped away, but there were spears behind the whole length of wall that he could see. He glimpsed helmets too. Some smoke, perhaps from a cook-fire. Then he saw a man wading out into the stream, waving a fishing rod made from a spear and some twine, wild-haired and stripped to the waist, and very definitely not a Union soldier. Perhaps only two hundred strides from where they were squatting in the brush.

'Uh-oh,' he breathed.

'Are those Northmen?' whispered Yolk.

'Those are a lot of bloody Northmen. And we're right on their flank.' Tunny handed his eyeglass over, half-expecting the lad to look through the wrong end.

'Where did they come from?'

'I'd guess the North, wouldn't you?' He snatched back his eyeglass. 'Someone's going to have to go back. Let someone higher up the dunghill know the bother we're in here.'

'They must know already, though. They'll have run into the Northmen themselves, won't they?' Yolk's voice, never particularly calm, had taken on a slightly hysterical note. 'I mean, they must've! They must know!'

'Who knows what who knows, Yolk? It's a battle.' As he said the words, Tunny realised with mounting worry they were true. If there were Northmen behind that wall, there must have been fighting. It was a battle, all right. Maybe the start of a big one. The Northman in the river had landed something, a flashing sliver of a fish flapping on the end of his line. Some of his mates stood up on the wall, shouting and waving. All bloody smiles. If there had been fighting, it looked pretty damn clear they won.

'Tunny!' Forest was creeping up through the brush behind them, bent double. 'There are Northmen on the other side of that stream!'

'And fishing, would you believe. That wall's crawling with the bastards.'

'One of the lads shinned up a tree. Said he could see horsemen at the Old Bridge.'

'They took the bridge?' Tunny was starting to think that if he left this valley with no greater losses than eight bottles of brandy he might count himself lucky. 'They cross it, we'll be cut off!'

'I'm aware of that, Tunny. I'm very bloody well aware of that. We need to take a message back to General Jalenhorm. Pick someone out. And stay out of bloody sight!' And he crawled away through the undergrowth.

'Someone's got to go back through the bog?' whispered Yolk.

'Unless you can fly there.'

'Me?' The lad's face was grey. 'I can't do it, Corporal Tunny, not after Klige ... I just can't do it!'

Tunny shrugged. 'Someone has to go. You made it across, you can make it back. Just stick to the grassy bits.'

'Corporal!' Yolk had grabbed Tunny's dirty sleeve and come close, freckled face uncomfortably near. He let his voice drop down quiet. That intimate, urgent little tone that Tunny always liked to hear. The tone in which deals were made. 'You told me, if I ever needed anything ...' His wet eyes darted left and right, checking they were unobserved. He reached into his jacket and slid out a pewter flask, pressed it into Tunny's hand. Tunny raised a brow, unscrewed the cap, took a sniff, replaced the cap and slipped it into his own jacket. Then he nodded. Hardly made a dent in what he'd lost in the bog, but it was something.

'Leatherlicker!' he hissed as he crept back through the brush. 'I need a volunteer!'

The Day's Work 'By the dead,' grunted Craw, and there were enough of 'em.

They were scattered up the north slope of the hill as he limped past, a fair few wounded too, howling and whimpering as the wounded do, a sound that set Craw's teeth on edge more with every passing year. Made him want to scream at the poor bastards to shut up, then made him guilty that he wanted to, knowing he'd done plenty of his own squealing one time or another, and probably wasn't done with it yet.

Lots more dead around the drystone wall. Enough almost to climb the bloody hill without once stepping on the mangled grass. Ended men from both sides, all on the same side now the pale and gaping, cold far side of the great divide. One young Union lad seemed to have died on his face, arse in the air, staring sideways at Craw with a look of baffled upset, like he was about to ask if someone could lay him out in a fashion more dignified.

Craw didn't bother. Dignity ain't much use to the living, it's none to the dead.

The slopes were just a build-up to the carnage inside the Heroes, though. The Great Leveller was a joker today, wending his long way up to the punchline. Craw wasn't sure he ever saw so many dead men all squeezed into one space. Heaps of 'em, all tangled up in the old grave-pit embrace. Hungry birds danced over the stones, waiting their chance. Flies already busy at the open mouths, open eyes, open wounds. Where do all the flies come from, on a sudden? The place had that hero's smell already. All those bodies bloating in the evening sun, emptying out their innards.

Should've been a sight to get anyone pondering his own mortality, but the dozens of Thralls picking over the wreckage seemed no more concerned than if they'd been picking daisies. Stripping off clothes and armour, stacking up weapons and shields good enough to be used. If they were upset it was 'cause the Carls who'd led the charge had snaffled the best booty.

'Too old for this shit,' muttered Craw, leaning down to grip at his sore knee, a cold cord of pain running through it from ankle to hip.

'If it ain't Curnden Craw, at last!' Whirrun had been sitting against one of the Heroes and now he stood, brushing dirt from his arse. 'I'd almost given up on waiting.' He swung the Father of Swords up onto one shoulder, sheathed again, and pointed into the valley with it, the way they'd come. 'Thought maybe you'd decided to settle down in one of those farms on the way over here.'

'I wish I had.'

'Aw, but then who'd show me my destiny?'

'Did you fight?'

'I did, yes, as it happens. Stuck into the midst of it. I'm quite a one for fighting, according to the songs. Lots of fighting here.' Not that he had a scratch on him. Craw had never seen Whirrun come out of a fight with a single mark. He frowned around the circle of butchery, scrubbing at his hair, and the wind chose that moment to freshen, stirring the tattered clothes of the corpses. 'Lot of dead men, ain't there.'

'Aye,' said Craw.

'Heaps and heaps.'