Black Calder

‘Just give me the nod.’

‘The nod?’

Shivers turned to look at him, and nodded. ‘The nod. And it’s done.’

‘Simple as that,’ muttered Calder, hunching in his saddle.

‘Simple as that.’

Easy. Just nod, and you can be king. Just nod, and kill your brother.

It was hot, a few shreds of cloud hanging in the blue over the fells, bees floating about some yellow flowers at the edge of the barley, the river glittering silver. The last hot day, maybe, before autumn shooed the summer off and beckoned winter on. It should’ve been a day for lazy dreams and trailing hot toes in the shallows. Perhaps a hundred strides downstream a few Northmen had stripped off and were doing just that. A little further along the opposite bank and a dozen Union soldiers were doing the same. The laughter of both sets would occasionally drift to Calder’s ear over the happy chattering of the water. Sworn enemies one day, now they played like children, close enough almost to splash.

Peace. And that had to be a good thing.

For months he’d been preaching for it, hoping for it, plotting for it, with few allies and fewer rewards, and here it was. If ever there was a day to smirk it was this one, but Calder could’ve lifted one of the Heroes more easily than the corners of his mouth. His meeting with the First of the Magi had been weighing them down all through a sleepless night. That and the thought of the meeting that was coming.

‘Ain’t that him?’ asked Shivers.

‘Where?’ There was only one man on the bridge, and not one he recognised.

‘It is. That’s him.’

Calder narrowed his eyes, then shaded them against the glare. ‘By the …’

Until last night he’d thought his brother killed. He hadn’t been so far wrong. Scale was a ghost, crept from the land of the dead and ready to be snatched back by a breath of wind. Even at this distance he looked withered, shrunken, greasy hair plastered to one side of his head. He’d long had a limp but now he shuffled sideways, left boot dragging over the old stones. He had a threadbare blanket around his shoulders, left hand clutching two corners at his throat while the others flapped about his legs.

Calder slid from his saddle, tossing the reins over his horse’s neck, bruised ribs burning as he hurried to help his brother.

‘Just give me the nod,’ came Shivers’ whisper.

Calder froze, guts clenching. Then he went on.

‘Brother.’

Scale squinted up like a man who hadn’t seen the sun for days, sunken face covered with scabby grazes on one side, a black cut across the swollen bridge of his nose. ‘Calder?’ He gave a weak grin and Calder saw he’d lost his two front teeth, blood dried to his cracked lips. He let go of his blanket to take Calder’s hand and it slid off, left him hunched around the stump of his right arm like a beggar woman around her baby. Calder found his eyes drawn to that horrible absence of limb. Strangely, almost comically shortened, bound to the elbow with grubby bandages, spotted brown at the end.

‘Here.’ He unclasped his cloak and slipped it around his brother’s shoulders, his own broken hand tingling unpleasantly in sympathy.

Scale looked too pained and exhausted even to gesture at stopping him. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘I took your advice about fighting.’

‘How did it work out?’

‘Painfully for all concerned,’ said Calder, fumbling the clasp shut with one hand and one thumb.

Scale stood, swaying as if he might drop at any moment, blinking out across the shifting barley. ‘The battle’s over, then?’ he croaked.

‘It’s over.’

‘Who won?’

Calder paused. ‘We did.’

‘Dow did, you mean?’

‘Dow’s dead.’

Scale’s bloodshot eyes went wide. ‘In the battle?’

‘After.’

‘Back to the mud.’ Scale wriggled his hunched shoulders under the cloak. ‘I guess it was coming.’

All Calder could think of was the pit opening up at the toes of his boots. ‘It’s always coming.’

‘Who’s taken his place?’

Another pause. The swimming soldiers’ laughter drifted over, then faded back into the rustling crops. ‘I have.’ Scale’s scabbed mouth hung gormlessly open. ‘They’ve taken to calling me Black Calder, now.’

‘Black … Calder.’

‘Let’s get you mounted.’ Calder led his brother over to the horses, Shivers watching them all the way.

‘Are you two on the same side now?’ asked Scale.

Shivers put a finger on his scarred cheek and pulled it down so his metal eye bulged from the socket. ‘Just keeping an eye out.’

Scale reached for the saddle-bow with his right arm, stopped himself and took it awkwardly with his left. He found one stirrup with a fishing boot and started to drag himself up. Calder hooked a hand under his knee to help him. When Calder had been a child Scale used to lift him up into the saddle. Fling him up sometimes, none too gently. How things had changed.

The three of them set off up the track. Scale slumped in the saddle, reins dangling from his limp left hand and his head nodding with each hoofbeat. Calder rode grimly beside him. Shivers followed, like a shadow. The Great Leveller, waiting at their backs. Through the fields they went, at an interminable walk, towards the gap in Clail’s Wall where Calder had faced the Union charge a few days before.

His heart was beating just as fast as it had then. The Union had pulled back behind the river that morning and Pale-as-Snow’s boys were up north behind the Heroes, but there were still eyes around. A few nervous pickers combing through the trampled barley, searching for some trifle others might have missed. Scrounging up arrowheads or buckles or anything that could turn a copper. A couple of men thrashing through the crops off to the east, one with a fishing rod over his shoulder. Strange, how quickly a battlefield turned back to being just a stretch of ground. One day every finger’s breadth of it is something men can die over. The next it’s just a path from here to there. As he looked about Calder caught Shivers’ eye and the killer lifted his chin, silently asking the question. Calder jerked his head away like a hand from a boiling pot.

He’d killed men before. He’d killed Brodd Tenways with his own sword hours after the man had saved his life. He’d ordered Forley the Weakest dead for nothing but his own vanity. Killing a man when Skarling’s Chair was the prize shouldn’t have made his hand shake on the reins, should it?

‘Why didn’t you help me, Calder?’ Scale had eased his stump out from the gap in the cloak and was frowning down at it, jaw set hard. ‘At the bridge. Why didn’t you come?’

‘I wanted to.’ Liar, liar. ‘Found out there were Union men in the woods across that stream. Right on our flank. I wanted to go but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.’ That much was true. He was sorry. For what good that did.

‘Well.’ Scale’s face was a grimacing mask as he slid the stump back under his cloak. ‘Looks like you were right. The world needs more thinkers and fewer heroes.’ He glanced over for an instant and the look in his eye made Calder wince. ‘You always were the clever one.’

‘No. It was you who was right. Sometimes you have to fight.’

This was where he’d made his little stand and the land still bore the scars. Crops trodden, broken arrow shafts scattered, scraps of ruined gear around the remains of the trenches. Before Clail’s Wall the ground had been churned to mud then baked hard again, smeared bootprints, hoof-prints, handprints stamped into it, all that was left of the men who died there.

‘Get what you can with words,’ muttered Calder, ‘but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter. Like you said. Like our father said.’ And hadn’t he said something about family, as well? How nothing is more important? And mercy? Always think about mercy?

‘When you’re young you think your father knows everything,’ said Scale. ‘Now I’m starting to realise he might’ve been wrong on more than one score. Look how he ended up, after all.’

‘True.’ Every word said was like lifting a great stone. How long had Calder lived with the frustration of having this thick-headed heap of brawn in his way? How many knocks, and mocks, and insults had he endured from him? His fist closed tight around the metal in his pocket. His father’s chain. His chain. Is nothing more important than family? Or is family the lead that weighs you down?

They’d left the pickers behind, and the scene of the fighting too. Down the quiet track near the farmhouse where Scale had woken him a few mornings before. Where Bayaz had given him an even harsher awakening the previous night. Was this a test? To see whether Calder was ruthless enough for the wizard’s tastes? He’d been accused of many things, but never too little ruthlessness.

How long had he dreamed of taking back his father’s place? Even before his father lost it, and now there was only one last little fence to jump. All it would take was a nod. He looked sideways at Scale, wrung-out wreck that he was. Not much of a fence to trip a man with ambition. Calder had been accused of many things, but never too little ambition.

‘You were the one took after our father,’ Scale was saying. ‘I tried, but … couldn’t ever do it. Always thought you’d make a better king.’

‘Maybe,’ whispered Calder. Definitely.

Shivers was close behind, one hand on the reins, the other resting on his hip. He looked as relaxed as ever a man could, swaying gently with the movements of his horse. But his fingertips just so happened to be brushing the grip of his sword, sheathed beside the saddle in easy reach. The sword that had been Black Dow’s. The sword that had been the Bloody-Nine’s. Shivers raised one brow, asking the question.

The blood was surging behind Calder’s eyes. Now was the time. He could have everything he wanted.

Bayaz had been right. You don’t get to be a king without making some sacrifices.

Calder took an endless breath in, and held it. Now.

And he gently shook his head.

Shivers’ hand slid away. His horse dropped ever so slowly back.

‘Maybe I’m the better brother,’ said Calder, ‘but you’re the elder.’ He brought his horse up close, and he pulled their father’s chain from his pocket and slipped it over Scale’s neck, arranged it carefully across his shoulders. Patted him on the back and left his hand there, wondering when he got to love this stupid bastard. When he got to love anyone besides himself. He lowered his head. ‘Let me be the first to bow before the new King of the Northmen.’

Scale blinked down at the diamond on his grubby shirt. ‘Never thought things would end up this way.’

Neither had Calder. But he found he was glad they had. ‘End?’ He smirked across at his brother. ‘This is the beginning.’