Horror on Horror

“Finally, you show yourself,” Clover grunted at the sun, “you coy bastard.”

It was good to feel its warmth on his face, finally. Like an old friend, much missed. Like Wonderful, in that regard. He couldn’t help wincing at the thought. She wouldn’t be back. His knife had made sure of that. As for the sun, it had turned up too late to help much.

A couple of weeks of marching and Black Calder’s carefully stitched-together host was coming apart at the seams. Men sick. Men hungry. Men frozen and frostbitten. Men sleepless and exhausted. Men so filth-caked they looked like devils, white eyes staring haunted from dirt-grey faces. Plenty more chosen to turn their backs on this boggy nightmare and run, in spite of the deserters strung from trees by the road and carved with the bloody cross, flyblown guts dangling. Scouts stared into their fires rather than at the far hills. Carls fretted more on warmth than weapons. The only enemy on anyone’s mind was the mud, against whom no victory could be won, a great trail of discarded gear, mired wagons, dead horses, not to mention dead men left abandoned across the boot-mashed country behind them.

Not far from the jealously guarded patch of grass on which Clover and his people had got a lick of fire going, a column cursed through the swampy morass in the valley’s bottom, spears wobbling at all angles like the prickles of a hedgehog, a filthy standard slumping from a filthy pole. There’d been a road under that slop once, Clover thought, a thing now dimly remembered, a fantastical story once heard, like dry boots, warmth and unchafed fruits.

“I’m starting to think…” murmured Flick as he added a couple of damp sticks to the fire with wincing care, “that war ain’t half the fun it’s made out to be.”

“It’s worth all the effort,” grunted Downside, “when you get a good battle.”

“Good… battle.” Sholla held her hands so close to the flames it was only the stubborn damp in their rag-wrappings stopped ’em catching fire. “Not sure those two words belong next to one another.”

“A bit like saying it’s worth the weeks of slow death to enjoy an hour or two’s furious murder.” Clover tried to pull his bedraggled wolfskin collar up higher, but there was no hiding from the keen wind knifing down the valley sides, still with the odd patch of melting snow splattered on ’em.

“Talking o’ furious murder…” Flick stared wide-eyed the way they’d come, a great wagon grinding towards them, men backing horrified out of its way. “Here comes Stand-i’-the-Barrows.”

Clover had expected some raven-haired, brooding giant, like Stranger-Come-Knocking had been. But the new Chief of a Hundred Tribes was a colourless man, with whirls of grey scar cut into his hollow cheeks, thick veins showing in the skull-like rings under his eyes in which you almost thought you could see the blood pulse.

He sat swaying in the wagon’s seat as its wheels ground through the rutted mud, calm and easy as a farmer on his turnip cart. Trouble was, his cargo wasn’t turnips but bones. Heaps of ’em, boiled bare, white and yellow. The four horses that drew it were covered head to hoof in bones, made devil-steeds, their eyes showing wild through split horse skulls, bones dangling from their tattered manes, woven into their tails. The man himself had tiny bones stitched to his armour in strange designs. Finger bones. Children’s finger bones, maybe.