The Heroes

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 thisvalley 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

    ‘B y 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