The Heroes

Deep grinned over his shoulder. ‘How did your brother feel about you, my lordling?’
    Calder thought about Scale, fighting against the odds on that bridge, waiting for help that never came. ‘I’m guessing he went off me at the end.’
    ‘Wouldn’t cry too many tears about it. It’s a rare fine fellow who ain’t a villain to someone. Even if it’s only himself.’
    ‘Or his brother,’ whispered Shallow.
    ‘And here we are.’
    A ramshackle farmhouse had risen out of the darkness. Large and silent, stone covered with rustling creeper, flaking shutters slanting in the windows. Calder realised it was the same one he’d slept in for two nights, but it looked a lot more sinister now. Everything does with a knife at your back.
    ‘This way, if you please.’ To the porch on the side of the house, lean-to roof missing slates, a rotten table under it, chairs lying on their sides. A lamp swung gently from a hook on one of the flaking columns, its light shifting across a yard scattered with weeds, a slumping fence beyond separating the farm from its fields.
    There were a lot of tools leaning against the fence. Shovels, axes, pickaxes, caked in mud, as though they’d been hard used that day by a team of workmen and left there to be used again tomorrow. Tools for digging. Calder felt his fear, faded slightly on the walk, shoot up cold again. Through a gap in the fence and the light of Deep’s torch flared out across trampled crops and fell on fresh-turned earth. A knee-high heap of it, big as the foundations of a barn. Calder opened his mouth, maybe to make some desperate plea, strike some last bargain, but he had no words any more.
    ‘They been working hard,’ said Deep, as another mound crept from the night beside the first.
    ‘Slaving away,’ said Shallow, as the torchlight fell on a third.
    ‘They say war’s an awful affliction, but you’ll have a hard time finding a gravedigger to agree.’
    The last one hadn’t been filled in yet. Calder’s skin crawled as the torch found its edges, five strides across, maybe, its far end lost in the sliding shadows. Deep made it to the corner and peered over the edge. ‘Phew.’ He wedged his torch in the earth, turned and beckoned. ‘Up you come, then. Walking slow ain’t going to make the difference.’
    Shallow gave him a nudge and Calder plodded on, throat tightening with each drawn-out breath, more and more of the sides of the pit crawling into view with each unsteady step.
    Earth, and pebbles, and barley roots. Then a pale hand. Then a bare arm. Then corpses. Then more. The pit was full of them, heaped up in a grisly tangle. The refuse of battle.
    Most were naked. Stripped of everything. Would some gravedigger end up with Calder’s good cloak? The dirt and the blood looked the same in the torchlight. Black smears on dead white skin. Hard to say which twisted legs and arms belonged to which bodies.
    Had these been men a couple of days before? Men with ambitions, and hopes, and things they cared for? A mass of stories, cut off in the midst, no ending. The hero’s reward.
    He felt a warmth down his leg and realised he’d pissed himself.
    ‘Don’t worry.’ Deep’s voice was soft, like a father to a scared child. ‘That happens a lot.’
    ‘We’ve seen it all.’
    ‘And then a little more.’
    ‘You stand here.’ Shallow took him by the shoulders and turned him to face the pit, limp and helpless. You never think you’ll just meekly do what you’re told when you’re facing your death. But everyone does. ‘A little to the left.’ Guiding him a step to the right. ‘That’s left, right?’
    ‘That’s right, fool.’
    ‘Fuck!’ Shallow gave him a harder yank and Calder slipped at the edge, boot heel sending a few lumps of earth down onto the bodies. Shallow pulled him back straight. There?’
    ‘There,’ said Deep. ‘All right, then.’
    Calder stood, looking down, silently starting to cry. Dignity no longer seemed to matter much. He’d have even less soon enough. He wondered how deep the pit was. How many bodies he’d share it with when they picked those tools up in the morning and heaped the earth on top. Five score? Ten score? More?
    He stared at the nearest of them, right beneath him, a great black wound in the back of its head.
His
head, Calder supposed, though it was hard to think of it as a man. It was a thing, robbed of all identity. Robbed of all … unless …
    The face had been Black Dow’s. His mouth was open, half-full of