Red Country by Joe Abercrombie
It felt an age of agony before the Mayor stepped out onto the balcony with Temple behind her, and spoke the longed for words, ‘They’re gone.’
Every part of him sagged and he gave a groan from the very bottom of his being. He removed that ridiculous helmet, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. He could scarcely recall having donned a more absurd costume in all his many years in the theatre. No garlands of flowers flung by an adoring audience, perhaps, as had littered the broad stage of Adua’s House of Drama after his every appearance as the First of the Magi, but his satisfaction was no less complete.
‘I told you I had one more great performance in me!’ said Lestek.
‘And so you did,’ said the Mayor.
‘You both provided able support, though, for amateurs. I daresay you have a future in the theatre.’
‘Did you have to hit me?’ asked Temple, probing at his split lip.
‘Someone had to,’ muttered the Mayor.
‘Ask yourself rather, would the terrible Legate Sarmis have struck you, and blame him for your pains,’ said Lestek. ‘A performance is all in the details, my boy, all in the details! One must inhabit the role entirely. Which occurs to me, do thank my little legion before they disperse, it was an ensemble effort.’
‘For five carpenters, three bankrupt prospectors, a barber and a drunk, they made quite an honour guard,’ said Temple.
‘That drunk scrubbed up surprisingly well,’ said Lestek.
‘A good find,’ added the Mayor.
‘It really worked?’ Shy South had limped up to lean against the door frame.
‘I told you it would,’ said Temple.
‘But you obviously didn’t believe it.’
‘No,’ he admitted, peering up at the skies. ‘There really must be a God.’
‘Are you sure they’ll believe it?’ asked the Mayor. ‘Once they’ve joined up with the rest of their Company and had time to think it over?’
‘Men believe what they want to,’ said Temple. ‘Cosca’s done. And those bastards want to go home.’
‘A victory for culture over barbarity!’ said Lestek, flicking the plume on the helmet.
‘A victory for law over chaos,’ said Temple, fanning himself with his worthless treaty.
‘A victory for lying,’ said the Mayor, ‘and only by the narrowest of margins.’
Shy South shrugged and said, with her talent for simplicity, ‘A win’s a win.’
‘All too true!’ Lestek took a long breath through his nose and, even with the pain, even though he knew he did not have long left, perhaps because he knew it, he breathed out with the deepest fulfillment. ‘As a young man I found happy endings cloying but, call me soppy, with age, I have come to appreciate them more and more.’
The Cost
Shy scooped up water and splashed it on her face, and groaned at the cold of it, just this side of ice. She worked her fingertips into her sore eyelids, and her aching cheeks, and her battered mouth. Stayed there, bent over the basin, her faint reflection sent scattering by the drops from her face. The water was pink with blood. Hard to say where from exactly. The last few months had left her beaten as a prizefighter. Just without the prize.
There was the long rope-burn coiling around one forearm and the new cut down the other, blood spotted through the bandage. Her hands were ripped up front and back, crack-nailed and scab-knuckled. She picked at the scar under her ear, a keepsake from that Ghost out on the plains. He’d almost got the whole ear to remember her by. She felt the lumps and scabs on her scalp, the nicks on her face, some of them she couldn’t even remember getting. She hunched her shoulders and wriggled her spine and all the countless sores and grazes and bruises niggled at her like a choir of ugly little voices.
She looked down into the street and watched the children for a moment. Majud had found them some new clothes–dark suit and shirt for Pit, green dress with lace at the sleeves for Ro. Better than Shy had ever been able to buy them. They might’ve passed for some rich man’s children if it hadn’t been for their shaved heads, the dark fuzz just starting to grow back. Curnsbick was pointing to his vast new building, talking with big, enthusiastic gestures, Ro watching and listening solemnly, taking it all in, Pit kicking a stone about the mud.
Shy sniffed, and swallowed, and splashed more water on her face. Couldn’t be crying if her eyes were wet already, could she? She should’ve been leaping with joy. In spite of the odds, the hardships, the dangers, she’d got them back.
But all she could think of was the cost.
The people killed. A few she’d miss and a lot she wouldn’t. Some she’d even have called evil, but no one’s evil to themselves, are they? They were still people dead, could do no good now, could make no amends and right no wrongs, people who’d taken a lifetime to make, plucked out from the world and turned to mud. Sangeed and his Ghosts. Papa Ring and his crooks. Waerdinur and his Dragon People. Leef left under the dirt out on the plains, and Grega Cantliss doing the hanged man’s dance, and Brachio with the arrows in him, and—
She stuck her face in the cloth and rubbed, hard, like she could rub them all away, but they were stuck tight to her. Tattooed into her sure as the rebel slogans into Corlin’s arms.
Was it her fault? Had she set it all rolling when she came out here like the kicked pebble that starts the landslide? Or was it Cantliss’ fault, or Waerdinur’s, or Lamb’s? Was it everyone’s? Her head hurt from trying to pull apart the tapestry of everything happened and follow her own nasty little thread through it, sifting for blame like a fevered miner dredging at a stream-bed. No point picking at it any more than at a scab. But still, now it was behind her, she couldn’t stop looking back.
She limped to the bed and sat with a groaning of old springs, arms around herself, wincing and twitching at flashes of things happened like they were happening now.
Cantliss smashing her head against a table leg. Her knife sliding into flesh. Grunting in her face. Things she’d had to do. Wrestling with a crazy Ghost. Leef without his ears. Sangeed’s head coming off, thud. It had been them or her. Looking down at that girl she’d shot, not much older’n Ro. Arrow in a horse and the rider tumbling. No choice, she’d had no choice. Lamb flinging her against the wall, Waerdinur’s skull split, click, and she was flying from the wagon, and over, and over, and over—
She jerked her head up at a knock, wiped her eyes on her bandage. ‘Who’s there?’ Doing her best to sound like it was any other morning.
‘Your lawyer.’ Temple swung the door open, that earnest look on his face which she could never quite be sure was genuine. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’ve had easier years.’
‘Anything I can do?’
‘Guess it’s a little late to ask you to keep that wagon on the road.’
‘A little.’ He came and sat down on the bed next to her. Didn’t feel uncomfortable. You go through what they’d been through together, maybe uncomfortable goes off the menu. ‘The Mayor wants us gone. She says we’re bad luck.’
‘Hard to argue with her. I’m surprised she hasn’t killed you.’
‘I suppose she still might.’
‘Just need to wait a little longer.’ Shy grunted as she wormed her foot into her boot, trying to work out how bad the ankle hurt. Bad enough she stopped trying. ‘Just ’til Lamb comes back.’
There was a silence then. A silence in which Temple didn’t say, ‘Do you really think he’s coming back?’ Instead he just nodded, as if Lamb coming was as sure as tomorrow, and she was grateful for that much. ‘Then where are you heading?’
‘That’s a question.’ New lives out west didn’t look much different to the old ones. No short cuts to riches, leastways, or none a sane woman might want to take. And it was no place for children neither. She’d never thought farming would look like the comfortable option, but now she shrugged. ‘The Near Country for me, I reckon. It’s no easy life but I’ve spotted nothing easier.’
‘I hear Dab Sweet and Cr
‘Any Ghosts turn up his wife can frown ’em to death.’
‘She’s staying. I hear she bought Camling’s Hostelry for a song.’
‘Good for her.’
‘The rest will be heading east within the week.’
‘Now? ’Fore the weather breaks?’
‘Sweet says now’s the time, before the meltwater swells the rivers and the Ghosts get tetchy again.’
She took a long breath. Could’ve done with a year or two in bed but life hadn’t often served her what she ordered. ‘Might be I’ll sign up.’
Temple looked across from under his brows. Nervous, almost. ‘Maybe… I’ll tag on?’
‘Can’t stop you, can I?’
‘Would you want to?’
She thought about that. ‘No. Might need someone to ride drag. Or jump out of a window. Or drive a wagon full of gold off a road.’
He puffed himself up. ‘As it happens, I am expert in all three. I’ll talk to Sweet and let him know we’ll be joining up. I suppose it’s possible he won’t value my skills as highly as you do, though… I might have to buy my way in.’
They looked at each other for a moment. ‘You coming up a little short?’
‘You didn’t exactly give me time to pack. I’ve nothing but the clothes I’m wearing.’
‘Lucky for you I’m always willing to help out.’ She reached into her pocket and drew out a few of the ancient coins she’d taken while the wagon sped across the plateau. ‘Will that cover it?’
‘I’d say so.’ He took them between finger and thumb but she didn’t let go.
‘Reckon that’s about two hundred marks you owe.’
He stared at her. ‘Are you trying to upset me?
‘I can do that without trying.’ And she let go the coins.
‘I suppose a person should stick to what they’re good at.’ He smiled, and flicked one of the coins spinning up and snatched it from the air. ‘Seems I’m at my best in debt.’
‘Tell you what.’ She grabbed a bottle from the table by her bed and wedged it in her shirt pocket. ‘I’ll pay you a mark to help me downstairs.’
Outside a sleety drizzle had set in, falling brown around Curnsbick’s belching chimneys, his workmen struggling in the mush on the far side of the street. Temple helped her to the rail and she leaned against it, watching. Funny thing. She didn’t want to let go of him.
‘I’m bored,’ said Pit.
‘One day, young man, you will learn what a luxury it is to be bored.’ Temple offered him his hand. ‘Why not help me seek out that noted scout and frontiersman, Dab Sweet? There may even be gingerbread in it for you. I have recently come into some money.’
‘All right.’ Temple lifted the boy onto his shoulders and they set off down the rattling porches at half a jog, Pit laughing as he bounced.
He had a touch with the children, had Temple. More than she had, now, it seemed. Shy hopped to the bench against the front of the house and dropped onto it, stretched her hurt leg out in front of her and eased back. She grunted as she let her muscles go soft by slow degrees, and finally pulled the cork from her bottle with that echoing thwop that sets your mouth watering. Oh, the simple joy of doing nothing. Thinking nothing. She reckoned she could allow herself a rest.
It had been hard work, the last few months.
She lowered that bottle, looking up the street, liquor burning at the cuts in her mouth in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. There was a rider coming through the murk of smoke and drizzle. A particularly slouching rider coming at a slow walk, taking shape as he came closer–big, and old, and battered. His coat was torn, and dirtied, and ash-smeared. He’d lost his hat, short scrub of grey hair matted with blood and rain, face streaked with dirt, mottled with bruise, scabbed and grazed and swollen.
She took another sip from her bottle. ‘I was wondering when you’d turn up.’
‘You can stop,’ grunted Lamb, stopping himself, his old horse looking like it didn’t have another stride in it. ‘The children all right?’
‘They’re as well as they were.’
‘How about you?’
‘Don’t know when I was last all right, but I’m still just about alive.
You?’
‘Just about.’ He clambered down from his horse, teeth gritted, not even bothering to tie it up. ‘Say one thing for me… say I’m a survivor.’ He held his ribs as he limped up the steps and onto the porch. He looked at the bench, then his sword, realised he wouldn’t be able to sit with it on, started struggling with the buckle on the belt, his knuckles scabbed raw and two of the fingers he still had bandaged together and held stiff.
‘By… the… fucking—’
‘Here.’ She leaned and flicked the buckle open and he pulled the sword off, belt dangling, cast about for somewhere to put it, then gave up and dropped it on the boards, sank down beside her and slowly, slowly stretched his legs out next to hers.
‘Savian?’ she asked.
Lamb shook his head a little. Like shaking it a lot would hurt him. ‘Where’s Cosca?’
‘Gone.’ She passed him the bottle. ‘Temple lawyered him off.’
‘Lawyered him?’
‘With a little help from the Mayor and a final performance of remarkable quality.’
‘Well, I never did.’ Lamb took a long swig and wiped his scabbed lips, looking across the street at Curnsbick’s manufactory. A couple of doors down, above an old card-hall, they were hauling up a sign reading Valint and Balk, Bankers. Lamb took another swallow. ‘Times sure are changing.’
‘Feel left out?’
He rolled one eye to her, half-swollen shut and all blown and bloodshot, and offered the bottle back. ‘For a while now.’
They sat there, looking at each other, like two survivors of an avalanche. ‘What happened, Lamb?’
He opened his mouth, as if he was thinking about where to start, then just shrugged, looking even more tired and hurt than she did. ‘Does it matter?’
If there’s nothing needs saying, why bother? She lifted the bottle. ‘No. I guess not.’
Last Words
‘Just like old times, eh?’ said Sweet, grinning at the snow-patched landscape.
‘Colder,’ said Shy, wriggling into her new coat.
‘Few more scars,’ said Lamb, wincing as he rubbed gently at the pinked flesh around one of his face’s recent additions.
‘Even bigger debts,’ said Temple, patting his empty pockets.
Sweet chuckled. ‘Bunch o’ bloody gripers. Still alive, ain’t you, and found your children, and got the Far Country spread out ahead? I’d call that a fair result.’
Lamb frowned off towards the horizon. Shy grumbled her grudging agreement. Temple smiled to himself, and closed his eyes, and tipped his face back to let the sun shine pink through his lids. He was alive. He was free. His debts were deeper than ever, but still, a fair result. If there was a God, He was an indulgent father, who always forgave no matter how far His children strayed.
‘Reckon our old friend Buckhorm’s prospered,’ said Lamb, as they crested a rise and looked down on his farmstead.
It had been carefully sited beside a stream, a set of solid-looking cabins arranged in a square, narrow windows facing outwards, a fence of sharpened logs closing up the gaps and a wooden tower twice a man’s height beside the gate. A safe, and civilised, and comfortable-looking place, smoke slipping gently up from a chimney and smudging the sky. The valley around it, as far as Temple could see, was carpeted with tall green grass, patched white with snow in the hollows, dotted brown with cattle.
‘Looks like he’s got stock to trade,’ said Shy.
Sweet stood in his stirrups to study the nearest cow. ‘Good stock, too. I look forward to eating ’em.’ The cow peered suspiciously back, apparently less enamoured of that idea.
‘Maybe we should pick up some extra,’
Always got your eyes open for a profit, don’t you?’ asked Sweet.
‘Why close your eyes to one? Specially when we’ve got one of the world’s foremost drag riders sitting idle.’
‘Oh God,’ muttered Temple.
‘Buckhorm?’ bellowed Sweet as the four of them rode up. ‘You about?’ But there was no reply. The gate stood ajar, a stiff hinge faintly creaking as the breeze moved it. Otherwise, except for the cattle lowing in the distance, all was quiet.
Then the soft scrape as Lamb drew his sword. ‘Something ain’t right.’
‘Aye,’ said Sweet, laying his flatbow calmly across his knees and slipping a bolt into place.
‘No doubt.’ Shy shrugged her own bow off her shoulder and jerked an arrow from the quiver by her knee.
‘Oh God,’ said Temple, making sure he came last as they eased through the gateway, hooves of their horses squelching and crunching in the half-frozen mud. Was there no end to it? He peered at the doors and into the windows, grimacing with anticipation, expecting any and every horror from a welter of bandits, to a horde of Ghosts, to Waerdinur’s vengeful dragon erupting from the earth to demand its money back.
‘Where’s my gold, Temple?’
The dragon would have been preferable to the awful phantom that now stooped beneath the low lintel of Buckhorm’s house and into the light. Who else but that infamous soldier of fortune, Nicomo Cosca?
His once-fine clothes were reduced to muddy rags, corroded breastplate lost and his filthy shirt hanging by two buttons, one trouser-leg torn gaping and a length of scrawny, trembling white calf exposed. His magnificent hat was a memory, the few strands of grey hair he had so carefully cultivated to cross his liver-spotted pate now floating about his skull in a grease-stiffened nimbus. His rash had turned crimson, scabbed with nail marks and, like mould up a cellar wall, spread flaking up the side of his head to speckle his waxy face. His hand quivered on the door, his gait was uncertain, he looked like nothing so much as a corpse exhumed, brought to a mockery of life by sorcerous intervention.