Chapter 3 The Road

It's six days to Harrowgate by cart. Nobody had told me how long it was on foot, because nobody in Thornfell had ever been stupid enough to try it.

The first day was all right. The road follows the creek down out of the hills, through country I knew, and I made good time. I slept under a hedge near the Ellsby turn with Hal's coat over me and the cleaver beside me, and the itch between my shoulders eased off once I had my hand on the handle. I put that down to the sling rubbing.

The second day it rained.

Out our way we say it rains like a cow pissing on a flat rock, and this was that sort of rain. It came down in ropes. The road turned to soup, then to a creek, and by the middle of the afternoon I was walking through mud to my ankles with water running off the brim of my hat in a steady stream. Hal's coat held up well, I'll give it that. Everything under the coat was dry. Everything not under the coat was a different story.

A bit after four, a wagon came up behind me.

It was a big flat wool wagon piled high with bales under a tarpaulin, pulled by two grey mules, and driven by a short round man in a felt hat with the brim turned down. He pulled up alongside me. Both mules put their ears flat back and sped up for a few steps, and he had to haul them in.

"They never do that," he said, surprised. "Lazy pair of buggers, normally. You going to Harrowgate?"

"I am."

"On foot? In this?"

"Seemed like a good idea yesterday."

He laughed. It was a big laugh for a man his size. "Get up, get up. You're making me wet just looking at you. Fenwick Dorr, wool factor, of Ellsby. Call me Fen. Everybody does, except my wife, who calls me worse."

I climbed up beside him. The bench creaked when I sat down, but wagons do that.

Fen talked. He turned out to be a good bloke, but I'd never met a man who could talk like him. He talked about the rain and the price of wool and the state of the road. He talked about his wife Marta, who was the cleverest woman in the east and kept the books, and his four daughters, Bess and Nell and Ivy and little Rose, who were the loveliest girls in the east and would bankrupt him with ribbons. He talked about the wool exchange in Harrowgate and the Ram's Head where he stayed every autumn, which did the best mutton chops in the city and had a landlord called Dunny who'd once fought a bear. He asked me questions and then answered them himself before I could get a word in.

I didn't mind. It was nice to listen to someone after a few days of nobody.

We stopped for the night at a camping ground by a bridge. The rain had eased to a drizzle. I got a fire going under the wagon's lee while Fen saw to the mules, and I unwrapped the last of the rat tail and cut it into slices and warmed them in the pan with some of Fen's bread.

He took a slice to be polite, chewed it, and stopped.

"Oh, that's marvellous," he said, with his mouth full. "That's really marvellous. What is it?"

"Rat."

Fen laughed so hard he nearly dropped his bread. "Rat! Ha! Rat, he says."

He ate four more slices. I didn't push it.

* * *

The next morning the road took us out of the hills through a place called Gallow's Cut. It's a long, narrow gap where somebody once dug the road through a ridge instead of going round it, and the banks go up steep on both sides, higher than a house, with scrub and loose rock at the top. Fen went quiet as we came up to it, which was the first time he'd gone quiet since I'd met him.

"Bad spot, this," he said. "Keep your eyes open."

We were halfway through when a tree came down across the road in front of us.

It didn't fall. It had been cut most of the way through and somebody gave it a shove. It came down with a crack and a crash, and the mules reared and screamed, and Fen hauled on the reins and swore. Then five men came down the banks, two on each side and one walking out from behind the fallen tree, calm as you like.

The one in front was lean and weather-beaten, forty-odd, with a scar down one cheek that pulled his eye a little out of true. He had a good sword on his hip, a much better sword than the rest of him, and he walked like a man who'd done this a lot.

The other four were less impressive. Two of them had crossbows. One was a young fellow with a club and a lot of pimples. The last was very big and very slow-looking, with hands like shovels and no weapon at all. All five of them were thin. Not lean. Thin, the way people get when they've been hungry a while.

"Afternoon," said the scarred man. "The name's Haines. Cutter Haines, if you've heard of me, and you look like you might have. Here's how it goes. You get down, you leave the wagon, and you walk back the way you came. Nobody gets hurt."

"That's my whole season," Fen said. His voice had gone high. "That's a year's wool. I've got four daughters."

"Then you'll be wanting to stay alive for them." Haines looked at me. His eyes went to the cleaver on my back and stayed there. "And you. What's that you've got?"

"Cleaver," I said.

"Hand it here."

"No, sorry," I said. "It was my grandad's."

There was a short silence. The club lad laughed. Haines didn't.

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"Wrong answer," he said, and nodded to the crossbows.

I don't think they meant to kill me. I think they meant to put a bolt in my leg and make a point, because the first one was aimed low. But the second one was aimed at Fen, and that annoyed me. I put my hand out and caught the first bolt as it went past my knee, and then I caught the second one about a foot in front of Fen's chest, which was a bit of a stretch.

They were slow bolts. Cheap crossbows, I reckon, with the strings gone soft in the wet. You could see them coming the whole way.

Fen made a small noise. The crossbowmen looked at their crossbows.

I climbed down off the wagon. The club lad came at me, yelling, and swung. I took the club off him on the way past and tapped him behind the knee with it, and he sat down in the mud.

Haines drew his sword.

He was good. I could tell he was good because he didn't rush. He came in low and quick and the blade went for my ribs in a short, neat line. I didn't want to unsling the cleaver with Fen that close, so I put my hand out and caught the flat of the blade between my thumb and finger, the way you'd pick a fishbone out of your teeth.

Then I squeezed, because I wanted him to let go of it.

The sword bent. It folded at the middle like a green stick, slowly, with a sound like a hinge, until the point was aimed at his own belly.

Haines stared at it.

"What the fuck," he said, very quietly.

"Sorry," I said. "I'll pay for that."

He let go of the hilt. I don't think he meant to. His hand just opened.

The crossbowmen were trying to reload, and not doing well at it, so I walked over and took the crossbows off them and broke them across my knee and asked them to sit down next to the club lad, please. They did. The big fellow hadn't moved the whole time. He looked at me, and at Haines, and at the bent sword, and sat down by himself.

Fen was still on the wagon, holding the two bolts I'd handed him. He was holding them a long way from his body, the way you'd hold a snake.

"Fen," I said. "Have you got any rope?"

* * *

We tied them in a row on the bank, out of the rain under a ledge. Haines didn't say anything while I tied him. He kept looking at my hands.

The young one with the pimples started to cry after a bit. He tried to hide it but he was very hungry, and when you're very hungry and tired and you've just been beaten by a farmer, things come out.

"When did you last eat?" I asked him.

"Tuesday," he said. "Bit of a turnip."

It was Sunday.

I sighed and got the cookpot out. Fen had a sack of oats and some onions, and I still had the end of the rat tail, so I made a stew of it on a fire at the side of the road. Fen watched me do it with his mouth slightly open.

"You're cooking for them," he said.

"They're hungry."

"They tried to rob us. They tried to shoot me."

"They missed," I said. "And they're hungry."

The stew was good. Oats and onions and rat thicken up nicely. I untied their hands one at a time so they could eat, and they ate the way starving dogs eat, without looking up, and the young one cried again, but differently.

While I was serving out the last of it, the big fellow made his move.

I'd unslung the cleaver to cook and leaned it against the wagon wheel. He must have thought I'd forgotten it. He got his hands free while I was busy, a lot quicker than he looked, and lunged for it, grabbed the handle in both of those shovel hands and heaved.

Nothing happened.

He heaved again. His face went red, then purple. The veins stood out on his neck. The cleaver didn't move a hair. It sat against the wheel like it had grown there.

Then something in his back went pop, quite loudly, and he folded up in the mud with a groan.

I went over and helped him lie flat.

"You've got to lift with your legs," I said. "Not your back. Everyone does that."

He looked up at me with tears in his eyes and didn't say anything. I picked up the cleaver and put it back in the sling.

Haines had stopped eating. He was watching me.

* * *

There's a Crown waystation about two hours past the Cut, a stone blockhouse with a stable and a couple of cells, where the post riders change horses. We got there after dark with the five of them in the back of the wagon, sitting on the wool bales with their hands tied. The big fellow lay flat on his back and groaned at every bump.

The sergeant on duty was a grizzled old soldier with a lamp and a face that had seen everything twice. He held the lamp up to Haines's face and his eyebrows went up.

"Well, well," he said. "Cutter Haines."

"Evening, Sergeant," said Haines.

"You know him?" I asked.

"Everyone knows him. Used to be Guild. Silver rank. Level a hundred and twenty, last time he was measured." The sergeant looked at me, then at the bent sword I'd brought in as evidence, then back at me. "He's had a bounty on him for two years. Eight gold, from the Crown."

Fen made a small sound like a punctured bladder.

"Eight gold," I said.

"Redeemable at any Crown office." The sergeant sat down and wrote out a chit with a scratchy pen, slowly, like it hurt him. He stamped it, blew on it, and held it out. "Who took him?"

"Me, mostly," I said. "Fen helped."

"I held the rope," said Fen faintly.

The sergeant looked at me for a long time. Then he gave me the chit.

They put Haines in the end cell. As I turned to go, he came to the bars.

"Farmer," he said.

"Yeah?"

"What level are you?"

"Don't know," I said. "Never been measured."

Haines laughed. It wasn't a nice laugh. It went on a bit too long and it had something cracked in it, and he was still laughing when the sergeant shut the outer door.

* * *

There was an inn across the road from the waystation, small and smoky. Fen bought us both a pint, which was good of him, and sat with his hands round his mug and looked at me.

"You've never been measured," he said.

"No."

"You don't know about levels."

"I know there's such a thing. Nobody talks about them much in Thornfell."

Fen put his pint down and took a deep breath, like a man about to explain the wool market. "Right. Everybody's got a level. It's on your Tally, your status, with your name and your class and your skills. Most people never get past ten. Farmers, millers, wool factors. I'm a seven." He said it with a bit of pride. "Adventurers go higher, because they kill things, and killing things is how you level. Guild ranks go by it. Copper, Iron, Silver, Gold. A Gold rank's a hundred and fifty or better. A national hero's about four hundred."

"Like who?"

"Sir Gareth Vantrell. Knight-Captain. He's four hundred and twelve. Killed a wyvern at Corrow Ford, single-handed, a wyvern a whole cart-length long. They wrote a song about it." He hummed a bit of it, badly.

"And the highest?"

"The Witch of Hollowmere. Six hundred. She's three hundred years old and she lives out in the Saltfens and nobody goes there. Six hundred's the record. Nobody's come close."

"How high does it go?"

"Nine hundred and ninety-nine. That's the cap. The Ledger can't count any higher than that."

"But nobody's past six hundred."

"Nobody."

"Seems a waste of numbers," I said.

Fen laughed, then stopped laughing. He gave me a long look.

I drank my pint and thought about the wyvern. A cart-length long. The big rat was three cart-lengths, and I'd killed it before breakfast.

But wyverns fly. Anything with wings is a different job, because you can't get at it, and you can't do the trick with the seam under the jaw if it won't come down. And they'd have been fighting it in the open, not in a barn where it couldn't turn. It wasn't the same thing at all.

I went to bed early. The inn's bed was lumpy and the walls were thin, and I could hear Fen snoring through two of them.

I lay awake for a long time thinking about Haines.

He was half starved. All of them were. You don't fight well on a turnip since Tuesday. And he'd come at me careful, not hard, like he didn't want to hurt a farmer if he didn't have to. Going easy, probably. A sword that bends that easy wasn't much of a sword anyway, whatever it looked like.

That would be it.

Twenty-two gold now, counting the chit. A hundred and seventy-eight to go.

I rolled over, put my hand on the cleaver handle, and the itch between my shoulders went quiet.