The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘You have nine fingers.’

  Suddenly Lamb was frowning at him, and he didn’t look like such a slow and friendly old fellow any more. ‘You a missing-finger enthusiast?’

  ‘No, but . . . I may have met one. He said he’d been sent to the Far

  Country to find a nine-fingered man.’

  ‘I probably ain’t the only man in the Far Country missing a finger.’

  Temple felt the need to pick his words carefully. ‘I have a feeling you’re the sort of man that sort of man might be looking for. He had a metal eye.’

  No flash of recognition. ‘A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There’s a song in there somewhere, I reckon. He give a name?’

  ‘Caul Shivers.’

  Lamb’s scarred face twisted as though he’d bitten into something sour. ‘By the dead. The past just won’t stay where you put it.’

  ‘You do know him, then?’

  ‘I did. Long time back. But you know what they say – old milk turns sour but old scores just get sweeter.’

  ‘Talking of scores.’ A second shadow fell across him and Temple squinted around. Shy stood over him again, hands on her hips. ‘One hundred and fifty-two marks. And eight bits.’

  ‘Oh God! Why didn’t you just leave me in the river?’

  ‘It’s a question I ask myself every morning.’ That pointed boot of hers poked at his back. ‘Now up you get. Majud wants a Bill of Ownership drawn up on a set of horses.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked, hope flickering in his breast.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m riding drag again.’

  Shy only grinned, and turned, and walked way.

  ‘Just soft enough, did you say?’ Temple muttered.

  Lamb stood, wiping his hands dry on the seat of his trousers. ‘There’s always tomorrow.’

  Sweet’s Crossing

  ‘Did I exaggerate?’ asked Sweet.

  ‘For once,’ said Corlin, ‘no.’

  ‘It surely is a big one,’ muttered Lamb.

  ‘No doubt,’ added Shy. She wasn’t a woman easily impressed, but the Imperial bridge at Sictus was some sight, specially for those who’d scarcely seen a thing you could call a building in weeks. It crossed the wide, slow river in five soaring spans, so high above the water you could hardly fathom the monstrous scale of it. The sculptures on its pitted pedestals were wind-worn to melted lumps, its stonework sprouted with pink-flowered weeds and ivy and even whole spreading trees, and all along its length and in clusters at both ends it was infested with itinerant humanity. Even so diminished by time it was a thing of majesty and awe, more like some wonder of the landscape than a structure man’s ambition could ever have contemplated, let alone his hands assembled.

  ‘Been standing more’n a thousand years,’ said Sweet.

  Shy snorted. ‘Almost as long as you been sitting that saddle.’

  ‘And in all that time I’ve changed my trousers but twice.’

  Lamb shook his head. ‘Ain’t something I can endorse.’

  ‘Changing ’em so rarely?’ asked Shy.

  ‘Changing ’em at all.’

  ‘This’ll be our last chance to trade before Crease,’ said Sweet. ‘’Less we have the good luck to run into a friendly party.’

  ‘Good luck’s never a thing to count on,’ said Lamb.

  ‘Specially not in the Far Country. So make sure and buy what you need, and make sure you don’t buy what you don’t.’ Sweet nodded at a polished chest of drawers left abandoned beside the way, fine joints all sprung open from the rain, in which a colony of huge ants appeared to have taken up residence. They’d been passing all kinds of weighty possessions over the past few miles, scattered like driftwood after a flood. Things folk had thought they couldn’t live without when they and civilisation parted. Fine furniture looked a deal less appealing when you had to carry it. ‘Never own a thing you couldn’t swim a river with, old Corley Ball used to tell me.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Shy.

  ‘Drowned, as I understand.’

  ‘Men rarely live by their own lessons,’ murmured Lamb, hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

  ‘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 arranged 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 peaceful lately, I hear . . .’ She took a breath, and let the silence do her work for her. ‘Sangeed’s got his sword drawed again.’

  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 hun
dred 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.