The Heroes

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 aweaver. 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 anearthy 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