The Great Leveller by Joe Abercrombie
‘What were you?’ Her voice sounded a tiny croak in all that space. ‘A soldier?’
That frown of his got harder still. ‘A killer. Let’s call it what it is.’
‘You fought in the wars? Up in the North?’
‘In wars, in skirmishes, in duels, in anything offered, and when I ran out of fights I made my own, and when I ran out of enemies I turned my friends into more.’
She’d thought any answers would be better than none. Now she wasn’t so sure. ‘I guess you had your reasons,’ she muttered, so weak it turned into a wheedling question.
‘Good ones, at first. Then poor ones. Then I found you could still shed blood without ’em and gave up on the bastards altogether.’
‘You got a reason now, though.’
‘Aye. I’ve a reason now.’ He took a breath and drew himself up straighter. ‘Those children . . . they’re all the good I done in my life. Ro and Pit. And you.’
Shy snorted. ‘If you’re counting me in your good works you got to be desperate.’
‘I am.’ He looked across at her, so fixed and searching she’d trouble meeting his eye. ‘But as it happens you’re about the best person I know.’
She looked away, working that stiff shoulder again. She’d always found soft words a lot tougher to swallow than hard. A question of what you’re used to, maybe. ‘You got a damn limited circle of friends.’
‘Enemies always came more natural to me. But even so. I don’t know where you got it, but you’ve a good heart, Shy.’
She thought of him carrying her from that tree, singing to the children, putting the bandages on her back. ‘So have you.’
‘Oh, I can fool folk. The dead know I can fool myself.’ He looked back to the flat horizon. ‘But no, Shy, I don’t have a good heart. Where we’re going, there’ll be trouble. If we’re lucky, just a little, but luck ain’t exactly stuck to me down the years. So listen. When I next tell you to stay out of my way, you stay out, you hear?’
‘Why? Would you kill me?’ She meant it half as a joke, but his cold voice struck her laughter dead.
‘There’s no telling what I’ll do.’
The wind gusted into the silence and swept the long grass in waves and Shy thought she heard shouting sifting on it. An unmistakable note of panic.
‘You hear that?’
Lamb turned his horse towards the Fellowship. ‘What did I say about luck?’
They were in quite the spin, all bunched up and shouting over or riding into each other, wagons tangled and dogs darting under the wheels and children crying and a mood of terror like Glustrod had risen from the grave up ahead and was fixed on their destruction.
‘Ghosts!’ Shy heard someone wail. ‘They’ll have our ears!’
‘Calm down!’ Sweet was shouting. ‘It ain’t bloody Ghosts and they don’t want your ears! Travellers like us, is all!’
Peering off to the north Shy saw a line of slow-moving riders, wriggling little specks between the vast black earth and the vast white sky.
‘How can you be sure?’ shrieked Lord Ingelstad, clutching a few prized possessions to his chest as if he was about to make a dash for it, though where he’d dash to was anyone’s guess.
‘’Cause Ghosts fixed on blood don’t just trot across the horizon! You lot sit tight here and try not to injure yourselves. Me and Crying Rock’ll go parley.’
‘Might be these travellers know something about the children,’ said Lamb, and he spurred his horse after the two scouts, Shy following.
She’d thought their own Fellowship worn down and dirty, but they were a crowd of royalty beside the threadbare column of beggars they came upon, broken-down and feverish in the eyes, their horses lean round the rib and yellow at the tooth, a handful of wagons lurching after and a few flyblown cattle dragging at the rear. A Fellowship of the damned and no mistake.
‘How do,’ said Sweet.
‘How do?’ Their leader reined in, a big bastard in a tattered Union soldier’s coat, gold braid around the sleeves all torn and dangling.
‘How do?’ He leaned from his horse and spat. ‘A year older’n when we come the other way and not a fucking hour richer, that’s how we do. Enough of the Far Country for these boys. We’re heading back to Starikland. You want our advice, you’ll do the same.’
‘No gold up there?’ asked Shy.
‘Maybe there’s some, girl, but I ain’t dying for it.’
‘No one’s ever giving aught away,’ said Sweet. ‘There’s always risks.’
The man snorted. ‘I was laughing at the risks when I came out last year. You see me laughing now?’ Shy didn’t, much. ‘Crease is at bloody war, killings every night and new folk piling in every day. They hardly even bother to bury the bodies any more.’
‘They were always keener there on digging than filling in, as I recall,’ said Sweet.
‘Well, they got worse. We pushed on up to Beacon, into the hills, to find us a claim to work. Place was crawling with men hoping for the same.’
‘Beacon was?’ Sweet snorted. ‘It weren’t more’n three tents last time I was there.’
‘Well, it’s a whole town now. Or was, at least.’
‘Was?’
‘We stopped there a night or two then off into the wilds. Come back to town after we’d checked a few creeks and found naught but cold mud . . .’ He ran out of words, just staring at nothing. One of his fellows took his hat off, the brim half-torn away, and looked into it. Strange to see in that hammered-out face, but there were tears in his eyes.
‘And?’ asked Sweet.
‘Everyone gone. Two hundred people in that camp, or more. Just gone, you understand?’
‘Gone where?’
‘To fucking hell was our guess, and we ain’t planning on joining ’em. The place empty, mark you. Meals still on the table and washing still hung out and all. And in the square we find the Dragon Circle painted ten strides across.’ The man shivered. ‘Fuck that, is what I’m saying.’
‘Fuck it to hell,’ agreed his neighbour, jamming his ruined hat back on.
‘Ain’t been no Dragon People seen in years,’ said Sweet, but looking a little worried. He never looked worried.
‘Dragon People?’ asked Shy. ‘What are they? A kind of Ghosts?’
‘A kind,’ grunted Crying Rock.
‘They live way up north,’ said Sweet. ‘High in the mountains. They ain’t to be dabbled with.’
‘I’d sooner dabble with Glustrod his self,’ said the man in the Union coat. ‘I fought Northmen in the war and I fought Ghosts on the plains and I fought Papa Ring’s men in Crease and I gave not a stride to any of ’em.’ He shook his head. ‘But I ain’t fighting those Dragon bastards. Not if the mountains was made of gold. Sorcerers, that’s what they are. Wizards and devils and I’ll have none of it.’
‘We appreciate the warning,’ said Sweet, ‘but we’ve come this far and I reckon we’ll go on.’
‘May you all get rich as Valint and Balk combined, but you’ll be doing it without me.’ He waved on his slumping companions. ‘Let’s go!’
Lamb caught him by the arm as he was turning back. ‘You heard of Grega Cantliss?’
The man tugged his sleeve free. ‘He works for Papa Ring, and you won’t find a blacker bastard in the Far Country. A Fellowship of thirty got killed and robbed up in the hills near Crease last summer, ears cut off and skinned and interfered with, and Papa Ring said it must be Ghosts and no one proved it otherwise. But I heard a whisper it was Cantliss did it.’
‘Him and us got business,’ said Shy.
The man turned his sunken eyes on her. ‘Then I’m sorry for you, but I ain’t seen him in months and I don’t plan to lay eyes on the bastard ever again. Not him, not Crease, not any part of this blasted country.’ And he clicked his tongue and rode away, heading eastwards.
They sat there a moment and watched the defeated shamble back the long way to civilisation. Not a sight to make anyone too optimistic about the destination, even if they??
‘Thought you knew everyone in the Far Country?’ she said to Sweet.
The old scout shrugged. ‘Those who been about a while.’
‘Not this Grega Cantliss, though?’
His shrug rose higher. ‘Crease is crawling with killers like a tree-stump with woodlice. I ain’t out there often enough to tell one from another. We both get there alive, I can make you an introduction to the Mayor. Then you can get some answers.’
‘The Mayor?’
‘The Mayor runs things in Crease. Well, the Mayor and Papa Ring run things, and it’s been that way ever since there was two planks nailed together in that place, and all that time neither one’s been too friendly with the other. Sounds like they’re getting no friendlier.’
‘The Mayor can help us find Cantliss?’ asked Lamb.
Sweet’s shrug went higher yet. Any further and it’d knock his hat off. ‘The Mayor can always help you. If you can help the Mayor.’ And he gave his horse his heels and trotted back towards the Fellowship.
Oh God, the Dust
‘Wake up.’
‘No.’ Temple strove to pull his miserable scrap of blanket over his face. ‘Please, God, no.’
‘You owe me one hundred and fifty-three marks,’ said Shy, looking down. Every morning the same. If you could even call it morning. In the Company of the Gracious Hand, unless there was booty in the offing, few would stir until the sun was well up, and the notary stirred last of all. In the Fellowship they did things differently. Above Shy the brighter stars still twinkled, the sky about them only a shade lighter than pitch.
‘Where did the debt begin?’ he croaked, trying to clear yesterday’s dust from his throat.
‘One hundred and fifty-six.’
‘What?’ Nine days of back-breaking, lung-shredding, buttock-skinning labour and he had shaved a mere three marks from the bill. Say what you will about Nicomo Cosca, the old bastard had been a handsome payer.
‘Buckhorm docked you three for that cow you lost yesterday.’
‘I am no better than a slave,’ Temple murmured bitterly.
‘You’re worse. A slave I could sell.’ Shy poked him with her foot and he struggled grumbling up, pulled his oversized boots onto feet dewy from sticking out beyond the bottom of his undersized blanket, shrugged his fourth-hand coat over his one sweat-stiffened shirt and limped for the cook’s wagon, clutching at his saddle-bludgeoned backside. He badly wanted to weep but refused to give Shy the satisfaction. Not that anything satisfied her.
He stood, sore and miserable, choking down cold water and half-raw meat that had been buried under the fire the previous night. Around him men readied themselves for the day’s labours and spoke in hushed tones, words smoking on the dawn chill, of the gold that awaited them at trail’s end, eyes wide with wonder as if, instead of yellow metal, it was the secret of existence they hoped to find written in the rocks of those unmapped places.
‘You’re riding drag again,’ said Shy.
Many of Temple’s previous professions had involved dirty, dangerous, desperate work but none had approached, for its excruciating mixture of tedium, discomfort, and minute wages, the task of riding drag behind a Fellowship.
‘Again?’ His shoulders slumped as if he had been told he would be spending the morning in hell. Which he more or less had been.
‘No, I’m joking. Your legal skills are in high demand. Hedges wants you to petition the King of the Union on his behalf, Lestek’s decided to form a new country and needs advice on the constitution and Crying Rock’s asked for another codicil to her will.’
They stood there in the almost-darkness, the wind cutting across the emptiness and finding out the hole near his armpit.
‘I’m riding drag.’
‘Yes.’
Temple was tempted to beg, but this time his pride held out. Perhaps at lunch he would beg. Instead he took up the mass of decayed leather that served him for saddle and pillow both and limped for his mule. It watched him approach, eyes inflamed with hatred.
He had made every effort to cast the mule as a partner in this unfortunate business but the beast could not be persuaded to see it that way. He was its arch-enemy and it took every opportunity to bite or buck him, and had on one occasion most memorably pissed on his ill-fitting boots while he was trying to mount. By the time he had finally saddled and turned the stubborn animal towards the back of the column, the lead wagons were already rolling, their grinding wheels already sending up dust.
Oh God, the dust.
Concerned about Ghosts after Temple’s encounter, Dab Sweet had led the Fellowship into a dry expanse of parched grass and sun-bleached bramble, where you only had to look at the desiccated ground to stir up dust. The further back in the column you were, the closer companions you and dust became, and Temple had spent six days at the very back. Much of the time it blotted out the sun and entombed him in a perpetual soupy gloom, landscape expunged, wagons vanished, often the cattle just ahead made insubstantial phantoms. Every part of him was dried out by wind and impregnated by dirt. And if the dust did not choke you the stink of the animals would finish the job.
He could have achieved the same effect by rubbing his arse with wire wool for fourteen hours while eating a mixture of sand and cow-shit.
No doubt he should have been revelling in his luck and thanking God that he was alive, yet he found it hard to be grateful for this purgatory of dust. Gratitude and resentment are brothers eternal, after all. Time and again he considered how he might escape, slip from beneath his smothering debt and be free, but there was no way out, let alone an easy one. Surrounded by hundreds of miles of open country and he was imprisoned as surely as if he had been in a cage. He complained bitterly to everyone who would listen, which was no one. Leef was the nearest rider, and the boy was self-evidently in the throes of an adolescent infatuation with Shy, had cast her somewhere between lover and mother, and exhibited almost comical extremes of jealousy whenever she talked or laughed with another man, which, alas for him, was often. Still, he need not have worried. Temple had no romantic designs on the ringleader of his tormentors.
Though he had to concede there was something oddly interesting about that swift, strong, certain way she had, always on the move, first to work and last to rest, standing when others sat, fiddling with her hat, or her belt, or her knife, or the buttons on her shirt. He did occasionally catch himself wondering whether she was as hard all over as her shoulder had been under his hand. As her side had been pressed up against his. Would she kiss as fiercely as she haggled . . . ?
When Sweet finally brought them to a miserable trickle of a stream, it was the best they could do to stop a stampede from cattle and people both. The animals wedged in and clambered over each other, churning the bitter water brown. Buckhorm’s children frolicked and splashed. Ashjid thanked God for His bounty while his idiot nodded and chuckled and filled the drinking barrels. Iosiv Lestek dabbed his pale face and quoted pastoral poetry at length. Temple found a spot upstream and flopped down on his back in the mossy grass, smiling wide as the damp soaked gently through his clothes. His standard for a pleasurable sensation had decidedly lowered over the past few weeks. In fact he was greatly enjoying the sun’s warmth on his face, until it was suddenly blotted out.
‘My daughter getting her money’s worth out of you?’ Lamb stood over him. Luline Buckhorm had cut her childrens’ hair that morning and the Northman had reluctantly allowed himself to be put at the back of the queue. He looked bigger, and harder, and even more scarred with his grey hair and beard clipped short.
‘I daresay she’ll turn a profit if she has to sell me for meat.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past her,’ said Lamb, offering a canteen.
‘She’s a hard woman,’ said Temple as he took it.
‘Not all through. Saved you, didn’t she?’
‘She did,’ he was forced to admit, though he wondered whether death would have been kinder.
Temple swilled water around his mouth. ‘She certainly seems angry about something.’
‘She’s been often disappointed.’
‘Sad to say I doubt I’ll be reversing that trend. I’ve always been a deeply disappointing man.’
‘I know that feeling.’ Lamb scratched slowly at his shortened beard. ‘But there’s always tomorrow. Doing better next time. That’s what life is.’
‘Is that why you two are out here?’ asked Temple, handing back the canteen. ‘For a fresh beginning?’
Lamb’s eyes twitched towards him. ‘Didn’t Shy tell you?’
‘When she talks to me it’s mostly about our debt and how slowly I’m clearing it.’
‘I hear that ain’t moving too quick.’
‘Every mark feels like a year off my life.’
Lamb squatted beside the stream. ‘Shy has a brother and a sister. They were . . . taken.’ He held the canteen under the water, bubbles popping. ‘Bandits stole ’em, and burned our farm, and killed a friend of ours. They stole maybe twenty children all told and took them up the river towards Crease. We’re following on.’
‘What happens when you find them?’
He pushed the cork back into the canteen, hard enough that the scarred knuckles of his big right hand turned white. ‘Whatever needs to. I made a promise to their mother to keep those children safe. I broken a lot of promises in my time. This one I mean to keep.’ He took a long breath. ‘And what brought you floating down the river? I’ve always been a poor judge of men, but you don’t look the type to carve a new life from the wilderness.’
‘I was running away. One way and another I’ve made quite a habit of it.’
‘Done a fair bit myself. I find the trouble is, though, wherever you run to . . . there y’are.’ He offered out his hand to pull Temple up, and Temple reached to take it, and stopped.
‘You have nine fingers.’