‘Dear me, you’re an ass, Mr Scribe. This is the army! If I put in a good word for you and tried pulling strings it would be as though I’d embroidered “lemon” on your back in gold thread! You’d have a hard time in your troop, laddie.’

‘What about if I joined…’ blinked Jarre, ‘your unit…’

‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘Because there’s only room for dwarves in it, right?’ the boy said bitterly. ‘And not for me?’

‘Right.’

Not for you, thought Dennis Cranmer. Not for you, Jarre. Because I still have unpaid debts with Nenneke. Which is why I’d prefer you to return from the war in one piece. And the Mahakam Volunteer Regiment, consisting of dwarves, specimens of a foreign and inferior race, will always be sent to do the lousiest tasks, to the worst sectors. The ones you don’t come back from. The ones you don’t send humans to.

‘So how can I make sure,’ Jarre continued, downcast, ‘that I’ll end up in a good troop?’

‘And which one, according to you, is so first-rate it’s worth trying to get into?’

Jarre turned around on hearing singing, swelling like a breaking wave, growing like the thunder of an approaching storm. Loud, powerful, swaggering singing, as hard as steel. He’d heard singing like that before.

The mercenary troop, formed up into threes, walked their horses along the narrow street leading from the castle. At their head, on a grey stallion, beneath a pole decorated with human skulls, rode the commander, a grey-haired man with an aquiline nose and hair plaited into a queue falling down onto his armour.

‘Adam “Adieu” Pangratt,’ mumbled Dennis Cranmer.

The singing of the mercenaries thundered, roared and rumbled. Counterpointed by the ringing of horseshoes on cobbles, it filled the narrow street way up to the tops of the houses, and into the blue sky above the town.

No lovers or wives spill tears

When the time comes to bite the blood-soaked dust

For we briskly go to war

For the ducat, as red as the sun!

‘You ask what troop…’ said Jarre, unable to tear his eyes from the cavalrymen. ‘Why, one like that! In one such as that I’d like to—’

‘Each has his song,’ the dwarf interrupted quietly. ‘And each bites the blood-soaked earth his own way. Just as it befalls him. And they either cry for him or not. In a war, scribbler, you only sing and march as one, you stand in the ranks as one. And later in battle everyone gets what is written for him. Whether in “Adieu” Pangratt’s Free Company, or in the infantry, or in the convoys… Whether in a shining suit of armour with a glorious crest, or in bast shoes and a flea-ridden sheepskin coat… Whether on a fleet steed, or behind a shield… Something different comes to each one. As it befalls him! Well, and there’s the commission, do you see the sign above the entrance? That’s your way, since you’ve thought to become a soldier. Go, Jarre. Farewell. We’ll meet again when it’s all over.’