The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  Someone helped her to roll. Someone was wiping her thighs. Someone pulled a sheet over her. Cool linen, up to her chin.

  The bed was wet. Wet and sticky and she didn’t care. She lay, eyes closed, breathing. The agony had faded. Just a dull after-ache in her back.

  She was floating. Drifting on a cloud. Someone was dabbing her face with a flannel. She doubted it would help much but if it made them happy she let them get on with it.

  She could hear singing in the distance. One of the Breakers’ marches, out on the Middleway. So long kept prisoner, they loved to march. So long kept silent, they loved to sing. To blurt their opinions from every street corner. Food and fuel might be in short supply, but of opinion there was a glut.

  She could hear crying. High and wild and desperate. Like a wounded cat. Very loud. Was it in the room? Was it her? There were a lot of people crying lately. Making an exhibition of your emotions was in fashion. Ranting them at a crowd, even more so. But she supposed people had a lot to cry over. Some more than others.

  There was the odd absence, of course, among her circle. Those with particularly bad relations with their workers, or those with particularly bad luck. She heard the most appalling stories. Such-and-such was found drowned in the canal, by the way. And what’s-his-face knifed and stripped in a sewer, did you hear? She pretended they were nothing more than stories. She pretended she could not recall the faces of those people, laughing at some function before the Great Change.

  There was chaos, of course, in the Agriont. The Closed Council suddenly snuffed out, the bureaucracy wobbling on like a chicken with its head cut off. The Breakers had ripped out most of the machinery of government; now Risinau and his stooges waggled the levers around, apparently never realising they were no longer connected to anything. She asked Leo how things were in the Assembly of Representatives. He said he had lost battles and never seen a mess like that.

  But, at the same time, things carried on. Over in the Arches and across the Three Farms, the furnaces still burned. Most of them. The wheels still turned. Most of them. Goods were still made and prices still paid and business still done. In hushed tones, perhaps, with heads shaken over the state of things. Actors still strutted on the stages of Adua, though they had rushed out new pieces in praise of the common man, and asked for applause for Chairman Risinau when the curtain went up, rather than for His Majesty.

  So Savine heard. She had not been out of doors recently herself. She was not sure how she would be received. With boos and jeers, like the villain in a street play? With the cheers her husband always enjoyed, for doing nothing more than whatever he pleased? Or with fists and sticks and nooses from a warehouse jib, like some of her more unpopular business partners during those bloody first days?

  She had spent her life making an exhibition of herself. But there are times when it is only good sense to take a tasteful absence from the public stage.

  “It is a boy,” said Zuri.

  Savine had been drifting on the edge of sleep. Lamplight sparkled in her wet eyes as she opened them. Zuri stood over her, offering something out. A clean white bundle, carefully wrapped, like a present. A white bundle with a tiny, squashed-in face.

  Savine gave a kind of sob, right from her guts.

  She reached for it. She hardly had the strength to lift her arms, but she wanted to hold it so badly. She hardly even knew why. She was blubbing, snot clicking in her nose and her sore mouth hopelessly twisted. She pressed the little bundle to her chest and made noises at it.

  “I’m a mother,” she muttered.

  Zuri raised her black brows. “I can see no other conclusion.”

  She heard the sound of trickling water. The surgeon, washing his bloody hands in a basin.

  “Well done,” he said, a neat smile on his face. “Very well done. Tell Lord Brock he might meet his son.”

  Savine was vaguely tempted to swear at the surgeon again, but it would probably have been in bad taste now. And she was too busy staring at her baby’s face and smiling. Smiling in a weepy, trembly, utterly unguarded way that was quite unlike her.

  A person. A tiny, helpless person, that had emerged from her body.

  Savine had always scorned babies even more than pets. When other women cooed over them she used to smile indulgently, and say the things she was meant to say, and think to herself what ugly, wrinkly, pointless things these little shrieking people were, that needed help for everything and shat themselves once an hour.

  They all say, Yours will seem beautiful, of course. In a smugly knowing way, as if shitting out a child comes with secret knowledge, like joining the Order of Magi. They all say it, but you tell yourself the poor things are just trying to wring some shred of advantage from the curse of parenthood and let them have their self-delusion.

  Now it appeared they had been understating the case all along. Her own baby was astonishingly, breathtakingly beautiful, its every twitch a miracle. What a cliché.

  “A boy,” whispered Savine. She vaguely remembered preferring a daughter. But now somehow a son was exactly the thing she had always wanted.

  She could hear talking near the door. Men’s voices. Warm words. Congratulations. As though they had done any of the work. She heard the uneven thumping of crutch on boards. She looked up through her swimming eyes to see Leo standing over the bed. He had this odd slant to his shoulders, these days. One dropped, where his useless arm was tucked into his jacket, one high, with the effort of leaning on his crutch.

  “There’s a lot of blood,” he croaked, eyes wide.

  “Entirely normal,” said the surgeon. “No need to worry.”

  “It’s a boy,” said Savine, smiling and crying at once.

  His brow furrowed as he stared down at the baby’s tiny features. As though the whole business was coming as a total shock to him. “I have a son.”

  “We have a son— Ah!” She gritted her teeth at a sudden, stabbing pain through her stomach, down into her legs. “Ah!” And another, even worse, that made her jerk up.

  “What is it?”

  “Take him,” she grunted, offering the baby out with trembling arms.

  Leo tried to rest his crutch against the side of the bed, got his wrist tangled with it, was nearly knocked over as Zuri slipped around him. “Damn it!”

  “Take him— Ah!” Savine arched her back. Another spasm of pain, much longer, much stronger, and she had to twist onto her side, kicking, whimpering, wriggling in her bloody sheets back onto her hands and knees, groaning for breath, shaking with weariness, trembling with fear.

  How many women had she known who died giving birth?

  “What’s wrong?” stammered Leo, leaning against the wall beside the bed.

  The surgeon was behind her now, frowning, his cold hand pressing at her belly. “Lord— I mean Citizen Brock, you might be happier waiting outside—”

  “Who cares a shit whether he’s happy!” hissed Savine through her gritted teeth. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” The surgeon looked up at her over his glinting lenses. “But I fear you still have some work to do.”

  She felt a kind of cold horror, then, along with the pain. “What is it?”

  Zuri had the baby in the crook of one arm, but she slid her free hand under one of Savine’s and squeezed it. “Twins.”

  A Little Public Hanging

  As a child, Orso had delighted in the sound of distant crowds. Crowds meant spectacles, festivals, excitement: the thrill of the Summer Contest, the pomp of a parade. As a young man, he had begun to find that noise tiresome. Crowds meant functions, rituals, responsibilities: the disappointment of grand banquets, the tedium of state visits. Now the sound of a crowd filled him with horror. In the new Union, crowds meant riots, terror, random violence. The baying of the mob.

  Lost in the anonymity of a crowd, people would commit horrors that would have sickened them alone. That no doubt sickened them afterwards. But their regret was scant consolation for the victims.

  “What’s going
on, Hildi?” he murmured.

  “Don’t know.” And Hildi bit her lip, as if steeling herself for bad news. She always looked that way, these days.

  As soon as they stepped out into the Square of Marshals the nature of the occasion became clear.

  “Oh, damn,” said Orso, his shoulders slumping. “I bloody hate hangings.”

  It was a new kind of gallows. Progress, he supposed. Instead of a cross-beam with ropes, five tall spars stuck up at an angle behind the platform, like the fingers of a clawing hand. There were pulleys at the tips, a counterweight of iron plates behind each one. Instead of rope, steel cables had been looped into five nooses. Orso noticed, as he was herded by his guards towards an enclosure where, as usual, he could be made an exhibit for the curious, that there was a life-sized dummy hanging from one of them.

  Chairman Risinau sat at the very front of the crowd, Judge on one side and Pike on the other. The leaders of the Great Change. That bloody writer, Sworbreck, was leaning towards them, waving up at the towering gallows. “The trouble with the previous system was that the bodies fell beneath the trapdoor. Justice was done, but justice was not seen to be done. Now, with a counterweight released…” He gave a showman’s flourish. Nothing happened. “Go on, then!”

  There was a clatter of machinery, weights dropped, cable whizzed and the dummy was jerked up by the neck to flop about in the wind some five strides above the platform. The crowd gasped, then began to applaud, to cheer, to hurl good-natured abuse. A carnival atmosphere. Orso winced and tried to loosen his collar with a finger.

  “Ingenious.” Risinau nodded sagely, as though at a demonstration of a machine to peel fruit. He might not have been much of an administrator, but he knew the power of a good show. “You should be immensely proud.”

  “A happy combination of my flare for theatre and Citizen Curnsbick’s technical know-how.” And Sworbreck put an arm around the Great Machinist and gave him a friendly squeeze. Curnsbick, who had abandoned his spectacular waistcoats and was now modelling the inconspicuous tones of mud, looked more than a little nauseous.

  “Ain’t it a bit bloodless?” said Judge, with her usual deadly sneer.

  Risinau rolled his eyes. “I do declare, Citizeness Judge, you would see the condemned torn apart by wild dogs if you thought it could be managed.”

  She sat back, rubbing thoughtfully at her rashy throat, as if weighing up the benefits of public execution by canines. “Let’s see how this works first. Bring out the prisoners!”

  “Oh no,” muttered Orso.

  Lord Chamberlain Hoff came first. Orso remembered him ushering portraits of potential brides into his mother’s salon in tedious procession. What happy times those seemed, now. Lord Chancellor Gorodets was next. Then High Consul Matstringer. Then the surveyor general—by the Fates, he’d been kept away from the Closed Council by his bladder so often that Orso couldn’t remember the man’s name. Lord Marshal Rucksted brought up the rear, walking with a pronounced limp. It looked as if half his moustache had been torn out. Chains clanked as they were led up onto the platform, into the shadows of those five tall beams. The great lords of the Closed Council. The men who had ruled the Union in Orso’s name. They made a sorry sight now, in sackcloth rather than fur and braid, in fetters rather than chains of office, their grey hair and beards in greasy tangles.

  “Fellow Citizens!” Risinau never missed a chance to address a crowd. “We are gathered to see five enemies of the people receive their just deserts. To see righteous retribution on behalf of the Union’s oppressed. To wave farewell to the age of tyranny.” He spread his arms wide. “And to welcome the age of equality with open arms!”

  Cheers. Boos. Laughter. A few bits of rubbish flung at the scaffold as nooses were tightened around necks. The Great Change had made little difference to the behaviour of the mob at an execution. A rotten orange spattered against the side of Gorodets’ head.

  “We’ve danced for their benefit the last few centuries!” screeched Judge, twisting to face the crowd. “Now they can dance for ours!”

  Orso had never harboured much affection for his Closed Council. He had thought of its members as a man thinks of his creditors, his landlords, his jailers. But seeing them like this, he had to hold back tears.

  Hoff shuffled forwards as far as the cable would allow, which was not far. “Your Majesty!” he cried over the noise. “I’m sorry!”

  “It’s me who should be sorry!” Orso rounded on Judge, Risinau and Pike. “Please! What crime are they accused of?”

  “Corruption, profiteering and exploitation,” said Risinau.

  “Treason against the People of the Union!” hissed Judge.

  “Is there evidence?” asked Orso.

  Judge glared back at him. “They sat on the Closed Council. What more evidence do you need?”

  “Were they allowed a defence?”

  “They sat on the Closed Council. What defence could there be?”

  “We sat there, too, Your Majesty,” said Pike softly. “You know each man of them was a willing cog in the monstrous machine, a callous accomplice in the purges and injustice. Can you truly pretend that these are better men than the ones they ordered hanged outside Valbeck?”

  Orso swallowed. “The ones you ordered hanged.”

  “A better world comes with a bill to pay. We all must make sacrifices. And look around you.” Pike calmly scanned the baying crowd. “The people have given their verdict.”

  “Get on and hang the bastards!” someone roared, and other voices joined him. Plainly, there was no appetite for clemency. When was there ever?

  “Whatever they did, they did in my name,” said Orso, his voice cracking. “At least put me up there with them.”

  “All in good time, Your Majesty,” he heard Judge murmur.

  Risinau held up a hand to quiet her, his hard little eyes fixed on Orso. “If the king cannot remain silent while the People’s Justice is administered, he will have to be restrained. Captain Broad?”

  A monster of a man stepped up to the royal enclosure. The royal pigpen. A neckless bull made to look even more savage by a pair of wire-framed eye-lenses perched on the flat bridge of his nose. He planted one great hand on the rail before Orso, a tattoo on the back. An axe and a bolt of lighting, with stars on the scarred knuckles. Hildi took a step towards him, bunching her fists, like a kitten raising its hackles at a bear. The big man just gave her a sad smile and took off those little lenses to show tired, weak eyes.

  “It’s a brave show, Your Majesty.” No threat in his soft voice, just a weary pragmatism, and he breathed ever so gently on his lenses and gave them a wipe with his cuff. “But it’ll do no good. You don’t want to get hurt, and I damn sure don’t want to hurt you.” He perched them back in their place and raised his brows at Orso. “Things are bad enough. Why make ’em worse?”

  He was right. Thousands of people had crammed into the Square of Marshals to see these men hang. Orso was powerless. More so than ever. He let Hildi drag him back into his chair and sat mute, hands limp in his lap.

  Lord Hoff noisily cleared his throat. “If I might say… a few words before—”

  “No.” And Judge snapped her fingers.

  A clank from beneath the platform. With a whirring of gears, the counterweight dropped and Hoff was snatched up, just like the dummy. He bounced wildly at the top, his head caught the beam and he flopped, swinging, blood bubbling down his face, his neck grotesquely stretched.

  Orso clung to the rail of his enclosure, his white hands either side of Broad’s.

  Judge snapped her fingers again. Gorodets gave a whoop as he was whisked into the air. Pike watched his one-time colleagues dangle, emotionless, eyes glittering.

  “Wait!” Matstringer left one shoe behind as he was plucked from the platform by the throat. The surveyor general squeezed his eyes shut, then his counterweight dropped and he was flung up, too.

  Hoff swung, his distended neck turning black. The surveyor general did not appear to have been ki
lled instantly. He was still kicking. Perhaps just some nervous impulse. Orso hoped so. Something ran from the leg of his sackcloth trousers and spattered to the platform below.

  Curnsbick put his head in his hands.

  Rucksted bared his teeth. “Fuck the lot of you.”

  Snap. The last counterweight dropped. Rucksted flew up, but something must have gone wrong with the mechanism. Instead of being left hanging high, the noose was jerked all the way into the pulley. His head flew off one way. His body dropped the other, crashing onto the platform, showering blood.

  “Ha!” screeched Judge, leaping to her feet in delight.

  The crowd gave an almighty roar of approval. A woman danced, pulling off her apron to wave it over her head like a flag.

  “Oh,” said Hildi, in a high little voice. Because she was so clever and so tough, Orso forgot, sometimes, how young she was. He wanted to put his hand over her eyes. He wanted to put his hand over his own. But it was far too late.

  He had sat horrified through those meetings in the White Chamber where, beneath the blandly monstrous oversight of the First of the Magi, principles were squashed beneath profits, corruption was raised to an art form and justice was reduced to a jelly. He had known it was wrong, but he had thrown up his hands and told himself it was the way things were. The way things had to be. He had failed to protect his people from his councillors. Now he had failed to protect his councillors from his people.

  “I have failed at everything,” he whispered.

  The four corpses hung limp. Gorodets dangled a little lower than the others, for some reason, twisting slowly one way, then the other. The crowd had turned quiet. Towards the back, people were already drifting away. There was a sense of disappointment. Perhaps they had discovered that when enemies fall, they leave a hole. No doubt they would find new ones to fill it with soon enough.

  “Well.” Risinau stood, hands on his paunch. “I for one am glad to have that behind us. Now we can focus on putting things right.”

  “Behind us?” Judge growled as she glared up at the dangling bodies. “We’ve barely begun.”