‘We could have gone by sea,’ Talon said. ‘It would have been quicker, but I thought it might be useful to see the lie of the land.’
He said it on the second day out of Tethis, in a joking idle sort of way. Berren thought nothing of it at first, but as the days passed the words rattled around in his mind. Whether he’d meant it or not, Talon was thinking of coming back one day with the Fighting Hawks. All of them.
Forgenver lay one kingdom, one duchy, seven rivers and nine days away from Tethis. They arrived to find the rest of the Hawks already settled and barracked outside the city and in high spirits from a first skirmish with the enemy. By chance, a half-cohort sent to scout the coastal villages near the town had arrived as a raid was coming in. The raiders were caught in their longboats in choppy seas. The Hawks had rallied the villagers and together they’d repelled the boats with a mixture of stones and crossbow fire and a great deal of shouting from the beach. It hadn’t amounted to much and from the sound of things no one on either side had even been seriously hurt, but the boats had been turned away and it had pleased the duke.
Word of Tarn’s recovery spread too. No one said anything to Berren’s face, but a rumour spread like wildfire that Tarn had been dead and that Berren had brought him back to life again. No matter how much Tarn told them that was all rubbish, when Berren came by, conversations ended. Soldiers who were supposed to be his comrades made a sign against evil and slipped away. When he carried the stone that Princess Gelisya had given him, the skill to make potions was lodged in his head, there whenever he sought it. If he put it aside then the memories went away, but a part of him went with them. He felt that much more now. He’d carried a numbness with him ever since Deephaven, a dull lack of feeling that came back to him now whenever he didn’t carry the stone. As a ship’s skag, he hadn’t known any better — wasn’t this how all skags felt? But now. . But he couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even begin to describe what Saffran Kuy had done to him, so all anyone saw was that he carried it with him wherever he went, whatever it was.
‘They’re afraid of you,’ Tarn told him one day.
Berren shrugged. ‘Maybe they’re right.’ The two of them drew their practice swords and for half an hour they fought, Berren losing himself in the pattern of the blades and the interplay between them. This, this was when he felt at peace, with a sword singing in his hand. Block and riposte, parry and strike, one motion to the next, and all with the calm stillness in his head that Tasahre had taught him. Action without thought. This, and never anything else.
While Talon’s spies worked their way closer to where the raiders were coming from, the cohorts of the Hawks spread themselves in pairs along the coast and waited. In the mornings Berren and Tarn walked together sometimes, exploring the lands nearby and the village they were watching. In the afternoons Tarn stayed in the camp, talking and joking with the other men. At first Berren joined them, hoping for their acceptance, but it never came, and so as the weeks passed he drew apart. He spent more time than the rest standing watch, staring out at the sea, and when he wasn’t watching he practised alone. He taught himself to shoot a crossbow, quietly trying to forget the ten minutes he’d spent learning with Master Sy. He practised and practised until he was as good as any of them. He tried other weapons, learning their weight and their balance and how they felt in his hands, although the short stabbing sword that the thief-taker had taught him and the slightly longer cut-and-thrust blades of the sword-monks remained his first loves. Sometimes, when he was lucky, Tarn or one of the other soldiers would spar with him, but mostly he trained alone in the way of the monks of Deephaven. It took him a week or two to be sure, but one on one he could outfight every single one of them. Tasahre had given him that. A gift or a curse? He wasn’t sure.
Sometimes, late at night when it was dark, he would slip away into the village alone and quietly drink himself into a stupor. More and more his night-time dreams filled with the bondswoman from Tethis and the bloody weals he’d given her. Except her face wasn’t veiled and when he turned her towards him she was a stranger.
Talon came by twice, moving constantly up and down the coast to watch over his company. The second time he came, he sparred with Berren himself. By the end neither of them was quite sure who had won.
‘Deephaven soon,’ Talon said afterwards. ‘I’ll find you a ship just as quickly as I can, but it looks like you’ll be fighting with us again first.’ He bared his teeth. ‘I’ve tracked the enemy down at last. Again. This time they’ll not get away.’
‘Where’s Syannis?’ asked Berren, but Talon only wagged a finger and shook his head.
They struck camp and set off back to Forgenver the next morning. Berren watched the first wave of excitement sweep through the soldiers as they packed their tents and loaded their mules. He looked at them, milling and laughing and drinking around him, strangers nearly all, and wondered why they were here. What brought a man to a foreign land, far away from the place of his birth? What made them want to pick up a sword or an axe or a spear? They had their reasons, each of them. For their last night together in Forgenver and the two days at sea that followed, he could only watch them and wonder: How could they sing and laugh and cheer and joke when some of them must soon die? Or was that exactly why they did it? Was it the thought of death that made them so full of life? A lot of him wanted to join them, raucous and crude and merry, but he couldn’t. Wherever he looked, he felt the shadow of Saffran Kuy, standing at his shoulder, laughing at him.
They reached wherever it was they were going — the middle of nowhere by Berren’s reckoning. The sails were furled and the ship eased as close to the shore as it could. Two, maybe three, hundred yards away a wide sandy beach rose gently into a thick green forest. It was a warm day, sunny and dry with a light breeze that kept Berren cool under his padded leather jerkin. The beach was empty but Talon still had a dozen of his best crossbows standing watch, bolts at the ready as the first boats were lowered over the side.
The Hawks went ashore two cohorts at a time. The first ones to land scattered quickly into the fringes of the woods while the boats struggled back through the surf to the ship. Then it was Berren’s turn. He jumped in without hesitation, seized an oar and they all pulled hard together, conscious of how vulnerable they were, and Berren remembered another boat, crossing the river from Deephaven to Siltside, and the whistle of arrows and the shouts of soldiers. The longboat bucked and heaved in the breaking waves as they reached the shore as if trying to toss them into the sea. When they jumped out, the water was still up to Berren’s waist.
Tarn yelled at them to move out of the surf and up onto the beach while he and the tallest of the soldiers helped to turn the boats around and back out again. The waves knocked Berren forward, almost made him fall, and he was still wading out of the water, dripping and soaked, when the fighting started. Maybe the first shouts from the scouts had come as they were climbing out of the boats, but if so no one had heard over the breaking surf. Now the skirmishers were running back out onto the beach, waving their arms. Tarn roared at them, and then there were other men coming from the trees, dozens of them in a ragged horde, yelling and waving swords and axes and spears and clubs. The skirmishers ran as far as Tarn and his cohort and then turned. There was nowhere else for them to go.
‘Stand!’ bellowed Tarn. ‘Stand together! Hold firm!’
Berren could see the eyes of the first man charging at him now, wide and wild, full of fear and thoughtless rage. Those eyes terrified him. This wasn’t fighting in Tasahre’s circle or Silvestre’s square; this was death coming at him, over in a flash, one swing, one stab and then one of them would be dead. The urge to run was almost overwhelming.
‘Stand fast!’ screamed Tarn.
Berren took a step back. The two cohorts had formed a single line of shields. All he had behind him was the sea, the boats still struggling through the waves back towards Talon’s ship. A madman with an axe rushed at him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone fall, staggering back as though he’d been shot. He made himself stand firm and never mind how his heart was racing or how much he was sweating and his hands shaking. His mouth was dry with fear, his hands too tight on his sword, his legs had lost all strength and his feet had grown roots. It wasn’t an axe coming at him, he realised, it was a cleaver and it looked big enough to fell a horse. He was going to die!
And then it was almost as though he stood and watched and it was someone else who calmly stepped aside. The man with the cleaver tore past and swung, but where Berren had been only his blade remained. The man took a few more steps, stumbled, then fell face down onto the sand, his guts spilling around him. Berren blinked. The world seemed to go quiet for a moment. He stared at the man on the sand behind him, doubled up, clutching at himself as he spread a red strain across the beach. Then he looked at his hand, already holding his sword straight out in front of him, aimed at the eyes of the next man racing towards him. He stared at the steel, at the blood dripping from it. .
. . and snapped back to where the air was filled with shouts from so many voices that nothing made any sense, with the ringing sounds of steel on steel and with screams. The next man came at him with a sword. Berren didn’t move, didn’t flinch, just kept his own steel pointed straight at the man’s face. The man’s charge faltered. He slowed; the look in his eyes changed, fear winning out over fury, until he almost stopped, and it was the easiest thing in the world for Berren to step forward, lunge and stab him in the neck.
The Hawk to Berren’s right fell, ribs smashed open by the blow of an axe. The force knocked him sideways and he clawed at Berren’s arm as he died. The man who’d killed him was screaming bloody murder and already swinging again. Berren jumped out of the way of both of them. He stepped inside the swing of the axe, chopped the axeman’s arm off with one blow, smashed him with his shield and then stabbed him between the ribs.
More raiders were emerging from the woods. Bodies littered the sand now, some of them dead, most still moving, the crippled and the dying simply trying to get away. Outnumbered like this the two cohorts of the Hawks were supposed to form a single circle of swords and shields that would simply shrink back into itself whenever a man fell. They all knew it but they hadn’t drilled it, and Berren had no idea how it was supposed to work when the only thing you could do was jump out of the way of an axe and your own dying brother trying to drag you to the ground. They were all muddled together now, the mercenaries and the men from the woods, in a swirling melee where every man fought for himself with no idea of what was going on around him.
Berren danced amid the press of swords, dodging whichever way would keep space around him. Men fell, Hawks and raiders both. He had no idea how many there were, how hopeless the battle might be, whether they were on the brink of victory or defeat. All he could see was the space around him, the circle that marked the reach of his sword and anything that breached it. Another man with an axe came at Berren and lost his hand, and at the same time a heavy blow landed on his back. It knocked him forward but he was already spinning and pushing himself away. The man who’d attacked him had a club, raised for another blow. Berren split his face in half before he could bring it down.
Then he saw Tarn with three of the enemy around him. He leaped through the fight the way Tasahre had taught him, moving so fast that no one could touch him, chopped most of the way through the first man’s neck and barged the second aside with his shield. Tarn finished the third. Berren lunged again, but then there was another coming at him and he had to jump away, back towards Tarn, except Tarn wasn’t where he’d been, and now there was another man coming at him, this time with a spear, and all he could do was bat that aside and jump again, swinging at another raider as he did, missing, all the while feeling the sharpness seeping from his arms and his legs, the edge of speed draining away.
And then the raider in front of him turned his back and ran; and as Berren took a step after him, he saw that they were all running, twenty or thirty of them, fleeing back up the sand towards the woods. There were bodies everywhere.
‘After them!’ Berren felt a fresh surge of energy, his first rush of victory. He raced the other mercenaries, seeing which of them would be the first to bring a man down, but then they were at the edge of the woods and Tarn was screaming at them to stop, to hold, to watch for ambushes and archers. The hunger for more was strong, the urge to rush on and finish the enemy almost too much to resist. Berren tried to catch his breath and then, when he’d done that, he tried to work out what had actually happened.
‘Hold! Hold here!’ That was Tarn trying to sort out who was alive and who was dead, how many could still fight and how many were hurt. The men who’d made it to the woods were unscathed or else carried only small wounds, a nick or a sprain. There were others, though, left on the beach. You didn’t get in the way of a man swinging an axe and come out with just a scratch, after all. The scouts had taken the worst of it. Most of Tarn’s cohort was still standing as far as Berren could see, and so far they all had the usual number of arms and legs.
‘You fought like a man possessed. Like a demon.’ Tarn grinned as he passed. ‘Hurt?’
Berren shook his head.
‘How many did you send back to the sun?’
‘Four, I think. Maybe five.’
‘Maybe six or seven, more likely.’ Tarn laughed. ‘There’s about twenty of them lying on the beach back there and there’s six of us gone to the sun. Think about that.’ He nodded. ‘Glad to be your sergeant, soldier.’
They waited at the edge of the woods, tense and on their guard in case whoever had attacked them came back, but there was no more fighting. When the boats returned to the shore once more, Talon was with them with two fresh cohorts. There were a few hasty words with Tarn and then they were all at a run, Talon at the front, straight through the woods. The cohorts that followed would burn the dead and tend to the wounded, but for now Talon wanted to bring the raiders to bay before they had a chance to escape.
Ten minutes later they were standing in fields staring at a collection of huts that had been crudely thrown together from mud and wood. The Hawks swarmed through. Berren and Tarn kicked in door after door, shields raised and blades poised, but one after another the huts were empty. Berren was shaking: the excitement of the fight and then the charge through the woods and now the air of danger, the threat of every shadow, they all had a hold on him. His eyes flicked this way and that, and with every sign of movement, his hand flashed to his sword.
They passed a hut whose door was hanging broken from its frame. Tarn went straight past, but Berren thought he caught a flicker of movement, and when he stopped and looked again, he saw a pair of eyes looking back at him from the far corner of the floor. At first he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, but when he took a step through the doorway, the eyes rose and a woman scrabbled to her feet, showering cold ashes everywhere. She was dressed in rags, old and with a bad leg. Someone who couldn’t run. She had a knife and she was pointing it at him, holding it as far away from her as she could. She’d hidden in the firepit, covering herself with ash and half-burned wood and they’d almost missed her.
For a second they stared at each other and neither said a word, and then the woman lunged at him, stabbing at his face with her knife, hissing. Berren stepped around the knife and flicked the tip of his sword at her throat. Blood sprayed across the room and she collapsed where she stood. A stroke of mercy, he thought, but as he stared at her lying on the ground in a pool of blood all he saw was Tasahre on the deck of Radek’s ship, and she was shaking her head at him, and the last light in her eyes as they died was full of sadness. Action without thought. An old woman with a blunt and pitted knife. There were so many ways he could have spared her and yet his instinct had killed her. He looked at his hands. They’d betrayed him. They’d shown him who he really was.
‘What did you do that for?’ asked Tarn behind him. Berren turned his back on both of them and walked out of the hut. Outside, the search of the village was largely over. He walked blindly through it. I’ve become him, he thought. I’ve become Master Sy.
‘Hey!’ Tarn came after him. ‘Who made you the bloody judge of life and death?’
Berren didn’t answer and the killing was forgotten before long, at least by everyone else, but the name would stick to him for ever. The Bloody Judge.