Red Country by Joe Abercrombie
‘No, they don’t,’ snapped Shy, giving him a look. ‘Let’s get on down there, hope to make a start on the other side before nightfall.’ And she turned and waved the signal to the Fellowship to move on.
‘Ain’t long before she takes charge, is it?’ she heard Sweet mutter.
‘Not if you’re lucky,’ said Lamb.
Folk had swarmed to the bridge like flies to a midden, sucked in from across the wild and windy country to trade and drink, fight and fuck, laugh and cry and do whatever else folk did when they found themselves with company after weeks or months or even years without. There were trappers and hunters and adventurers, all with their own wild clothes and hair but the same wild smell and that quite ripe. There were peaceable Ghosts set on selling furs or begging up scraps or tottering about drunk as shit on their profits. There were hopeful folk on their way to the gold-fields seeking to strike it rich and bitter folk on the way back looking to forget their failures, and merchants and gamblers and whores aiming to build their fortunes on the backs of both sets and each other. All as boisterous as if the world was ending tomorrow, crowded at smoky fires among the furs staked out to dry and the furs being pressed for the long trip back where they’d make some rich fool in Adua a hat to burn their neighbours up with jealousy.
‘Dab Sweet!’ growled a fellow with a beard like a carpet.
‘Dab Sweet!’ called a tiny woman skinning a carcass five times her size.
‘Dab Sweet!’ shrieked a half-naked old man building a fire out of smashed picture-frames, and the old scout nodded back and gave a how-do to each, by all appearances known intimately to half the plains.
Enterprising traders had draped wagons with gaudy cloth for stalls, lining the buckled flags of the Imperial road leading up to the bridge and making a bazaar of it, ringing with shouted prices and the complaints of livestock and the rattle of goods and coinage of every stamp. A woman with eyeglasses sat behind a table made from an old door with a set of dried-out, stitched up heads laid out on it. Above a sign read Ghost Skulls Bought and Sold. Food, weapons, clothing, horses, spare wagon parts and anything else that might keep a man alive out in the Far Country was going for five times its value. Treasured possessions from cutlery to windowpanes, abandoned by naïve colonists, were hawked off by cannier opportunists for next to nothing.
‘Reckon there’d be quite a profit in bringing swords out here and hauling furniture back,’ muttered Shy.
‘You’ve always got your eye open for a deal,’ said Corlin, grinning sideways at her. You couldn’t find a calmer head in a crisis but the woman had a sticky habit the rest of the time of always seeming to know better.
‘They won’t seek you out.’ Shy dodged back in her saddle as a streak of bird shit spattered the road beside her horse. There were crowds of birds everywhere, from the huge to the tiny, squawking and twittering, circling high above, sitting in beady-eyed rows, pecking at each other over the flyblown rubbish heaps, waddling up to thieve every crumb not currently held on to and a few that were, leaving bridge, and tents, and even a fair few of the people all streaked and crusted with grey droppings.
‘You’ll be needing one o’ these!’ a merchant screamed at them, thrusting a disgruntled tomcat at Shy by the scruff of the neck while all around him from tottering towers of cages other mangy specimens stared out with the haunted look of the long-imprisoned. ‘Crease is crawling with rats the size o’ horses!’
‘Then you’d best get some bigger cats!’ Corlin shouted back, and then to Shy, ‘Where’s your slave got to?’
‘Helping Buckhorm drive his cattle through this shambles, I daresay. And he ain’t a slave,’ she added, further niggled. She seemed to be forever calling upon herself to defend from others a man she’d sooner have been attacking herself.
‘All right, your man-whore.’
‘Ain’t that either, far as I’m aware.’ Shy frowned at one example of the type, peering from a greasy tent-flap with his shirt open to his belly. ‘Though he does often say he’s had a lot of professions…’
‘He might want to think about going back to that one. It’s about the only way I can see him clearing that debt of yours out here.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Shy. Though she was starting to think Temple wasn’t much of an investment. He’d be paying that debt ’til doomsday if he didn’t die first–which looked likely–or find some other fool to stick to and slip away into the night–which looked even more likely. All those times she’d called Lamb a coward. He’d never been scared of work, at least. Never once complained, that she could recall. Temple could hardly open his mouth without bitching on the dust or the weather or the debt or his sore arse.
‘I’ll give him a sore arse,’ she muttered, ‘useless bastard…’
Maybe you’re best off looking for the best in people but if Temple had one he was keeping it well hid. Still. What can you expect when you fish men out of the river? Heroes?
Two towers had once stood watch at each end of the bridge. At the near side they were broken off a few strides up and the fallen stone scattered and overgrown. A makeshift gate had been rigged between them–as shoddy a piece of joinery as Shy ever saw and she’d done some injuries to wood herself–bits of old wagon, crate and cask bristling with scavenged nails and even a wheel lashed to the front. A boy was perched on a sheared-off column to one side, menacing the crowds with about the most warlike expression Shy ever saw.
‘Customers, Pa!’ he called as Lamb and Sweet and Shy approached, the wagons of the Fellowship spread out in the crush and jolting after.
‘I see ’em, son. Good work.’ The one who spoke was a hulking man, bigger’n Lamb even and with a riot of ginger beard. For company he had a stringy type with the knobbliest cheeks you ever saw and a helmet looked like it had been made for a man with cheeks of only average knobbliness. It fit him like a teacup on a mace end. Another worthy made himself known on top of one of the towers, bow in hand. Red Beard stepped in front of the gate, his spear not quite pointed at them, but surely not pointed away.
‘This here’s our bridge,’ he said.
‘It’s quite something.’ Lamb pulled off his hat and wiped his forehead. ‘Wouldn’t have pegged you boys for masonry on this scale.’
Ginger Beard frowned, not sure whether he was being insulted. ‘We didn’t build it.’
‘But it’s ours!’ shouted Knobbly, as though it was the shouting of it made it true.
‘You big idiot!’ added the boy from his pillar.
‘Who says it’s yours?’ asked Sweet.
‘Who says it isn’t?’ snapped Knobbly. ‘Possession is most o’ the law.’
Shy glanced over her shoulder but Temple was still back with the herd. ‘Huh. When you actually want a bloody lawyer there’s never one to hand…’
‘You want to cross, there’s a toll. A mark a body, two marks a beast, three marks a wagon.’
‘Aye!’ snarled the boy.
‘Some doings.’ Sweet shook his head as if at the decay of all things worthy. ‘Charging a man just to roll where he pleases.’
‘Some people will turn a profit from anything.’ Temple had finally arrived astride his mule. He’d pulled the rag from his dark face and the dusty yellow stripe around his eyes lent him a clownish look. He offered up a watery smile, like it was a gift Shy should feel grateful for.
‘One hundred and forty-four marks,’ she said. His smile slipped and that made her feel a little better.
‘Guess we’d better have a word with Majud,’ said Sweet. ‘See about a whip-around for the toll.’
‘Hold up there,’ said Shy, waving him down. ‘That gate don’t look up to much. Even I could kick that in.’
Red Beard planted the butt of his spear on the ground and frowned up at her. ‘You want to try it, woman?’
‘Try it, bitch!’ shouted the boy, his voice starting somewhat to grate at Shy’s nerves.
She held up her palms. ‘We’ve no violent intentions at all, but the Ghosts ain’t so peace
Red Beard shifted nervously. ‘Sangeed?’
‘The very same.’ Temple hopped aboard the plan with some nimbleness of mind. ‘The Terror of the Far Country! A Fellowship of fifty was massacred not a day’s ride from here.’ He opened his eyes very wide and drew his fingers down his ears. ‘Not an ear left between them.’
‘Saw it ourselves,’ threw in Sweet. ‘They done outrages upon those corpses it pains me to remember.’
‘Outrages,’ said Lamb. ‘I was sick.’
‘Him,’ said Shy, ‘sick. Things as they are I’d want a decent gate to hide behind. The one at the other end bad as this?’
‘We don’t got a gate at the other end,’ said the boy, before Red Beard shut him up with a dirty look.
The damage was done, though. Shy took a sharper breath. ‘Well, that’s up to you, I reckon. It is your bridge. But…’
‘What?’ snapped Knobbly.
‘It so happens we got a man along by the name of Abram Majud. A wonder of a smith, among other things.’
Red Beard snorted. ‘And he brought his forge with him, did he?’
‘Why, that he did,’ said Shy. ‘His Curnsbick patent portable forge.’
‘His what?’
‘As wondrous a creation of the modern age as your bridge is one of the ancient,’ said Temple, earnest as you like.
‘Half a day,’ said Shy, ‘and he’ll have you a set of bands, bolts and hinges both ends of this bridge it’d take an army to get through.’
Red Beard licked his lips, and looked at Knobbly, and he licked his lips, too. ‘All right, I tell you what, then. Half price if you fix up our gates—’
‘We go free or not at all.’
‘Half-price,’ growled Red Beard.
‘Bitch!’ added his son.’
Shy narrowed her eyes at him. ‘What do you reckon, Sweet?’
‘I reckon I’ve been robbed before and at least they didn’t dress it up any, the—’
‘Sweet?’ Red Beard’s tone switched from bullying to wheedling. ‘You’re Dab Sweet, the scout?’
‘The one killed that there red bear?’ asked Knobbly.
Sweet drew himself up in his saddle. ‘Twisted that furry fucker’s head off with these very fingers.’
‘Him?’ called the boy. ‘He’s a bloody midget!’
His father shut him up with a wave. ‘No one cares how big he is. Tell you what, could we use your name on the bridge?’ He swept one hand through the air, like he could see the sign already. ‘We’ll call it Sweet’s Crossing.’
The celebrated frontiersman was all bafflement. ‘It’s been here a thousand years, friend. Ain’t no one going to believe I built it.’
‘They’ll believe you use it, though. Every time you cross this river you come this way.’
‘I come whatever way makes best sense on that occasion. Reckon I’d be a piss-poor pilot were it any other how, now, wouldn’t I?’
‘But we’ll say you come this way!’
Sweet sighed. ‘Sounds a damn fool notion to me but I guess it’s just a name.’
‘He usually charges five hundred marks for the usage of it,’ put in Shy.
‘What?’ said Red Beard.
‘What?’ said Sweet.
‘Why,’ said Temple, nimble with this notion, too, ‘there is a manufacturer of biscuits in Adua who pays him a thousand marks a year just to put his face on the box.’
‘What?’ said Knobbly.
‘What?’ said Sweet.
‘But,’ went on Shy, ‘seeing as we’re using your bridge ourselves—’
‘And it is a wonder of the ancient age,’ put in Temple.
‘—we can do you a cut-price deal. One hundred and fifty only, our Fellowship cross free and you can put his name to the bridge. How’s that? You’ve made three hundred and fifty marks today and you didn’t even move!’
Knobbly looked delighted with his profit. Red Beard yet doubted. ‘We pay you that, what’s to stop you selling his name to every other bridge, ford and ferry across the Far Country?’
‘We’ll draw up a contract, good and proper, and all make our marks to it.’
‘A con… tract?’ He could hardly speak the word, it was that unfamiliar. ‘Where the hell you going to find a lawyer out here?’
Some days don’t work out. Some days do. Shy slapped a hand down on Temple’s shoulder, and he grinned at her, and she grinned back. ‘We’ve got the good fortune to be travelling with the best damn lawyer west of Starikland!’
‘He looks like a fucking beggar to me,’ sneered the boy.
‘Looks can lie,’ said Lamb.
‘So can lawyers,’ said Sweet. ‘It’s halfway a habit with those bastards.’
‘He can draw up the papers,’ said Shy. ‘Just twenty-five marks.’ She spat in her free hand and offered it down.
‘All right, then.’ Red Beard smiled, or at least it looked like he might’ve in the midst of all that beard, and he spat, and they shook.
‘In what language shall I draft the papers?’ asked Temple.
Red Beard looked at Knobbly and shrugged. ‘Don’t matter. None of us can read.’ And they turned away to see about getting the gate open.
‘One hundred and nineteen marks,’ muttered Temple in her ear, and while no one was looking nudged his mule forward, stood in his stirrups and shoved the boy off his perch, sending him sprawling in the mud next to the gate. ‘My humble apologies,’ he said. ‘I did not see you there.’
He probably shouldn’t have, just for that, but Shy found afterwards he’d moved up quite considerably in her estimation.
Dreams
Hedges hated this Fellowship. That stinking brown bastard Majud and that stuttering fuck Buckhorm and that old fake Sweet and their little-minded rules. Rules about when to eat and when to stop and what to drink and where to shit and what size of dog you could have along. It was worse’n being in the bloody army. Strange thing about the army–when he was in it he couldn’t wait to get out, but soon as he was out he missed it.
He winced as he rubbed at his leg, trying to knead out the aches, but they was always there, laughing at him. Damn, but he was sick of being laughed at. If he’d known the wound would go bad he never would’ve stabbed himself. Thinking he was the clever one as he watched the rest of the battalion charge off after that arsehole Tunny. Little stab in the leg was a whole lot better than the big one through the heart, wasn’t it? Except the enemy had left the wall the night before and they hadn’t even had to fight. The battle over and him the only casualty, kicked out of the army with one good leg and no prospects. Misfortunes. He’d always been dogged by ’em.
The Fellowship weren’t all bad, though. He turned in his battered saddle and picked out Shy South, riding back there near the cattle. She wasn’t what you’d call a beauty but there was something to her, not caring about nothing, shirt dark with sweat so you could get a notion of her shape–and there was nothing wrong with it, far as he could tell. He’d always liked a strong woman. She weren’t lazy either, always busy at something. No notion why she was laughing with that spice-eating arsehole Temple, worthless brown fuck if ever there was, she should’ve come over to him, he’d have given her something to smile at.
Hedges rubbed at his leg again, and shifted in his saddle, and spat. She was all right, but most of ’em were bastards. His eyes found Savian, swaying on his wagon-seat next to that sneering bitch of his, sharp chin up like she was better’n everyone else and Hedges in particular. He spat again. Spit was free so he might as well use plenty.
People spoke over him, looked through him, and when they passed a bottle round it never got to him, but he had eyes, and he had ears, and he’d seen that Savian in Rostod, after the massacre, dishing out orders like he was the big man, that hard-faced bitch of a niece loitering, too, maybe, and he’d heard the name Conthus. Heard it spoken soft and the rebels scrap
In the meantime, wait, and smile, and think about how much he hated that stuttering fuck Buckhorm.
He knew it was a waste of strength he didn’t have, but sometimes Raynault Buckhorm hated his horse. He hated his horse, and he hated his saddle, and his canteen and his boots and his hat and his face-rag. But he knew his life depended on them sure as a climber’s on his rope. There were plenty of spectacular ways to die out in the Far Country, skinned by a Ghost or struck by lightning or swept away in a flood. But most deaths out here would make a dull story. A mean horse in your string could kill you. A broken saddle-girth could kill you. A snake under your bare foot could kill you. He’d known this would be hard. Everyone had said so, shaking their heads and clucking like he was mad to go. But hearing it’s one thing, and living it another. The work, the sheer graft of it, and the weather always wrong. You were burned by the sun or chafed by the rain and forever torn at by the wind, ripping across the plains to nowhere.
Sometimes he’d look out at the punishing emptiness ahead and wonder–has anyone else ever stood here? The thought would make him dizzy. How far had they come? How far still to go? What happened if Sweet didn’t come back from one of his three-day scouts? Could they find their way through this ocean of grass without him?
He had to appear fixed, though, had to stay cheerful, had to be strong. Like Lamb. He took a look sideways at the big Northman, who’d got down to roll Lord Ingelstad’s wagon out of a rut. Buckhorm didn’t think him and all his sons could’ve managed it, but Lamb just shrugged it free without a word. Ten years Buckhorm’s senior at the least, but might as well have been carved out of rock still, never tiring, never complaining. Folk were looking to Buckhorm for an example, and if he weakened everyone might, and then what? Turn back? He glanced over his shoulder, and though every direction looked about the same, saw failure that way.