The Blade Itself

“You’ve fucking killed me,” he whispered, staring open-mouthed at the wreckage of his hands. “I’m all done. I’ll never make it back, and even if I could, what for?” He gave a despairing laugh. “Bethod ain’t half so merciful as he used to be. Better you kill me now, before it starts to hurt. Better all round.” And he slumped back and lay in the road.

Logen looked up at Bayaz, but there was no help there. “I’m not much at healing,” snapped the wizard, glancing round at the circle of blasted stumps. “I told you we tend to specialise.” He closed his eyes and bent over, hands resting on his knees, breathing hard.

Logen thought of the floor in Bethod’s hall, and the two princes, laughing and poking. “Alright,” he muttered, standing up and hefting the sword. “Alright.”

Blacktoe smiled. “You were right, Ninefingers. I never should have knelt to Bethod. Never. Shit on him and his Feared. It would have been better to die up in the mountains, fighting him to the last. There might have been something fine in that. I just had enough. You can see that, can’t you?”

“I can see that,” muttered Logen. “I’ve had enough myself.”

“Something fine,” said Blacktoe, staring far up into the grey skies, “I just had enough. So I reckon I earned this. Fair is fair.” He lifted his chin. “Well then. Get it done, lad.”

Logen raised the sword.

“I’m glad it’s you, Ninefingers,” hissed Blacktoe through gritted teeth, “for what it’s worth.”

“I’m not.” Logen swung the blade down.

The scorched stumps were still smouldering, smoke curling up into the air, but all was cold now. Logen’s mouth tasted salty, like blood. Perhaps he bit his tongue somewhere. Perhaps it was someone else’s. He threw the sword down and it bounced and clattered, shedding red specks across the dirt. Quai gaped around for a moment, then he folded up and coughed puke into the road. Logen stared down at Blacktoe’s headless corpse. “That was a good man. Better than me.”

“History is littered with dead good men.” Bayaz knelt stiffly and picked up the sword, wiped the blade on Blacktoe’s coat, then he squinted up the road, peering through the haze of smoke. “We should be moving. Others might be on their way.”

Logen looked at his bloody hands, slowly turning them over and over. They were his hands, no doubt. There was the missing finger. “Nothing’s changed,” he mumbled to himself.

Bayaz straightened up, brushing the dirt from his knees. “When has it ever?” He held out the sword out to Logen, hilt first. “I think you’ll still be needing this.”

Logen stared at the blade for a moment. It was clean, dull grey, just as it had always been. Unlike him, it showed not so much as a scratch from the hard use it had seen that day. He didn’t want it back. Not ever.

But he took it anyway.

PART II

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.”

Joseph Brodsky

What Freedom Looks Like

The point of the shovel bit into the ground with the sharp scrape of metal on earth. An all too familiar sound. It didn’t bite in far, for all the effort put behind it, as the soil was rocky hard and baked by the sun.

But she wasn’t to be deterred by a little hard soil.

She had dug too many holes, and in ground worse for digging than this.

When the fighting is over, you dig, if you’re still alive. You dig graves for your dead comrades. A last mark of respect, however little you might have had for them. You dig as deep as you can be bothered, you dump them in, you cover them up, they rot away and are forgotten. That’s the way it’s always been.

She flicked her shoulder and a sent a shovelful of sandy soil flying. Her eyes followed the grains of dirt and little stones as they broke apart in the air, then fell across the face of one of the soldiers. One eye stared at her reproachfully. The other had one of her arrows snapped off in it. A couple of flies were buzzing lazily around his face. There would be no burial for him, the graves were for her people. He and his bastard friends could lie out in the merciless sun.

After all, the vultures have to eat.

The blade of the shovel swished through the air and bit again into the soil. Another clump of dirt tumbled away. She straightened up and wiped the sweat from her face. She squinted up at the sky. The sun was blazing, straight above, sucking whatever moisture remained out of the dusty landscape, drying the blood on the rocks. She looked at the two graves beside her. One more to go. She would finish this one, throw the earth on top of those three fools, rest for a moment, then away.

Others would be coming for her soon enough.