There had been a fight, he remembered that. A fight among the stones. Someone had called out. A crunch and blinding light, then nothing but pain. Even trying to think was painful. He lifted his arm to feel his face, but found that he couldn’t. He tried to shift his legs, to push himself up, but he couldn’t do that either. He worked his mouth, grunting, moaning.
His tongue was unfamiliar, three times its usual size, like a bloody lump of ham that had been shoved between his jaws, filling his mouth so he could hardly breathe. The right side of his face was a mask of agony. With every lurch of the cart his jaws rattled together, sending white-hot stabs of pain from his teeth into his eyes, his neck, the very roots of his hair. There were bandages over his mouth, he had to breathe through the left side, but even the air moving in his throat was painful.
Panic started to claw at him. Every part of his body was screaming. One arm was bound tight across his chest but he clutched weakly at the side of the cart with the other, trying to do something, anything, his eyes bulging, heart hammering, breath snorting in his nose.
“Gugh!” he growled, “gurrr!” And the more he tried to speak, the more the pain grew, and grew, until it seemed his face would split, until it seemed his skull would fly apart—
“Easy.” A scarred face swam into view above. Ninefingers. Jezal grabbed at him, wildly, and the Northman caught his hand in his own big paw and squeezed it tight. “Easy, now, and listen to me. It hurts, yes. Seems like more than you can take, but it isn’t. You think you’re going to die, but you won’t. Listen to me, because I’ve been there, and I know. Each minute. Each hour. Each day, it gets better.”
He felt Ninefingers’ other hand on his shoulder, pushing him gently back down into the cart. “All you got to do is lie there, and it gets better. You understand? You got the light duty, you lucky bastard.”
Jezal let his limbs go heavy. All he had to do was lie there. He squeezed the big hand and the hand squeezed back. The pain seemed less. Awful still, but within his control. His breath slowed. His eyes closed.
The wind cut over the cold plain, plucking at the short grass, tugging at Jezal’s tattered coat, at his greasy hair, at his dirty bandages, but he ignored it. What could he do about the wind? What could he do about anything?
He sat, his back against the wheel of the cart, and stared down wide-eyed at his leg. A broken length of spear shaft had been strapped to either side, wrapped round and round with strips of torn-up cloth, held firmly and painfully straight. His arm was no better, sandwiched between two slats from a shield and bound tightly across his chest, the white hand dangling, fingers numb and useless as sausages.
Pitiful, improvised efforts at medicine that Jezal could never see working. They might almost have seemed amusing, had he not been the unfortunate patient. He would surely never recover. He was broken, shattered, ruined. Would he be now a cripple of the kind he avoided on the street corners of Adua? War-wounded, ragged and dirty, shoving their stumps in the faces of passers-by, holding their crabbing palms out for coppers, uncomfortable reminders that there was a dark side to soldiering that one would rather not think about?
Would he be now a cripple like… and a horrible coldness crept over him… like Sand dan Glokta? He tried to shift his leg and groaned at the pain. Would he walk for the rest of his life with a stick? A shambling horror, shunned and avoided? A salutary lesson, pointed at and whispered of? There goes Jezal dan Luthar! He used to be a promising man, a handsome man, he won a Contest and the crowd cheered for him! Who would believe it? What a waste, what a shame, here he comes, let’s move on…
And that was before he even thought about what his face might look like. He tried to move his tongue and the stab of agony made him grimace, but he could tell there was a terribly unfamiliar geography to the inside of his mouth. It felt slanted, twisted, nothing fitted together as it used to. There was a gap in his teeth that felt a mile wide. His lips tingled unpleasantly under the bandages. Torn, battered, ripped open. He was a monster.
A shadow fell across Jezal’s face and he squinted up into the sun. Ninefingers stood over him, a water-skin hanging from one big fist. “Water,” he grunted. Jezal shook his head but the Northman squatted down, pulled the stopper from the skin and held it out regardless. “Got to drink. Keep it clean.”
Jezal snatched the skin bad-temperedly from him, lifted it gingerly to the better side of his mouth and tried to tilt it. It hung bloated and baggy. He struggled for a moment, before realising there was no way of drinking with only one good hand. He fell back, eyes closed, snorting through his nose. He almost ground his teeth with frustration, but quickly thought better of it.
“Here.” He felt a hand slide behind his neck and firmly lift his head.
“Gugh!” he grunted furiously, with half a mind to struggle, but in the end he allowed his body to sag, and submitted to the ignominy of being handled like a baby. What was the point, after all, in pretending he was anything other than utterly helpless? Sour, lukewarm water seeped into his mouth, and he tried to force it down. It was like swallowing broken glass. He coughed and spat the rest out. Or he tried to spit and found the pain far too great. He had to lean forward and let it dribble from his face, most of it running down his neck and into the filthy collar of his shirt. He sat back heavily with a moan and pushed the skin away with his good hand.
Ninefingers shrugged. “Alright, but you’ll have to try again later. Got to keep drinking. You remember what happened?” Jezal shook his head.
“There was a fight. Me and sunshine there,” and he nodded over at Ferro, who scowled back, “handled most of ’em, but it seems three got around us. You dealt with two, and you did well with that, but you missed one, and he hit you in the mouth with a mace.” He gestured at Jezal’s bandaged face. “Hit you hard, and you’re familiar with the outcome. Then you fell, and I’m guessing he hit you when you were down, which is how you got the arm and the leg broke. Could have been a lot worse. If I was you I’d be thanking the dead that Quai was there.”
Jezal blinked over at the apprentice. What did he have to do with anything? But Ninefingers was already answering his question.
“Came up and knocked him on the head with a pan. Well, I say knocked. Smashed his skull to mush, didn’t you?” He grinned over at the apprentice, who sat staring out across the plain. “He hits hard for a thin man, our boy, eh? Shame about that pan, though.”
Quai shrugged as though he stove a man’s head in most mornings. Jezal supposed he should be thanking the sickly fool for saving his life, but he didn’t feel so very saved. Instead he tried to form the sounds as clearly as he could without hurting himself, making little more than a whisper. “Ow bad ith it?”
“I’ve had worse.” Small comfort indeed. “You’ll get through alright. You’re young. Arm and leg’ll mend quick.” Meaning, Jezal inferred, that his face would not. “Always tough taking a wound, and never tougher than the first. I cried like a baby at every one of these,” and Ninefingers waved a hand at his battered face. “Most everyone cries, and that’s a fact. If it’s any help.”
It was not. “Ow bad?”
Ninefingers scratched at the thick stubble on the side of his face. “Your jaw’s broke, you lost some teeth, you got your mouth ripped, but we stitched you up pretty good.” Jezal swallowed, hardly able to think. His worst fears seemed to be confirmed. “It’s a hard wound you got there, and a nasty place to get it. In your mouth so you can’t eat, can’t drink, can’t hardly talk without pain. Can’t kiss either of course, though that shouldn’t be a problem out here, eh?” The Northman grinned but Jezal was in no mood to join him. “A bad wound, alright. A naming wound they’d call it, where I come from.”
“A wha?” muttered Jezal, immediately regretting it as pain licked at his jaw.
“A naming wound, you know,” and Ninefingers waggled the stump of his finger. “A wound you could get named after. They’d probably call you Brokejaw, or Bentface or Lackteeth or something.” He smiled again, but Jezal had
left his sense of humour on the hill among the stones, along with his broken teeth. He could feel tears stinging at his eyes. He wanted to cry, but that made his mouth stretch, the stitches tug at his bloated lips under the bandages.
Ninefingers made a further effort. “You got to look at the bright side. It ain’t likely to kill you now. If the rot was going to get into it, I reckon it would’ve already.” Jezal gawped, horrified, eyes going wider and wider as the implications of that last utterance sank in. His jaw would surely have dropped, had it not been shattered and bound tightly to his face. Wasn’t likely to kill him? The possibility of the wound going bad had never even occurred. Rot? In his mouth?
“I’m not helping, am I?” muttered Logen.
Jezal covered his eyes with his one good hand and tried to weep without hurting himself, silent sobs making his shoulders shake.
They had stopped on the shore of a wide lake. Choppy grey water under a dark sky, heavy with bruises. Brooding water, brooding sky, all seeming full of secrets, full of threats. Sullen waves slapped at the cold shingle. Sullen birds croaked to one another above the water. Sullen pain pulsed through every corner of Jezal’s body, and would not stop.
Ferro squatted down in front of him, frowning, as always, cutting the bandages away while Bayaz stood behind her, looking down. The First of the Magi had woken from his torpor, it seemed. He had given no explanation of what had caused it, or why he had so suddenly recovered, but he still looked ill. Older than ever, and a lot bonier, his eyes sunken, his skin looking somehow thin, pale, almost transparent. But Jezal had no sympathy to spare, especially not for the architect of this disaster.
“Where are we?” he muttered, through the twinges. It was less painful to talk than it had been, but he still had to speak quietly, carefully, the words thick and stumbling like some village halfwit’s.
Bayaz nodded over his shoulder towards the great expanse of water. “This is the first of the three lakes. We are well on the way to Aulcus. More than half of our journey is behind us, I would say.”
Jezal swallowed. Halfway was hardly the greatest reassurance he could have asked for. “How long was—”
“I can’t work with you flapping your lips, fool,” hissed Ferro. “Do I leave you like this, or do you shut up?”
Jezal shut up. She peeled the dressing carefully from his face, peered down at the brown blood on the cloth, sniffed it, wrinkled her nose and tossed it away, then stared angrily at his mouth for a moment. He swallowed, watching her dark face for any sign of what she might be thinking. He would have given his teeth for a mirror at that moment, if he had still had a full set. “How bad is it?” he muttered at her, tasting blood on his tongue.
She scowled up at him. “You’ve confused me with someone who cares.”
A sob coughed up from his throat. Tears stung at his eyes, he had to look away and blink to stop himself crying. He was a pitiable specimen, alright. A brave son of the Union, a bold officer of the King’s Own, a winner of the Contest, no less, and he could scarcely keep from weeping.
“Hold this,” snapped Ferro’s voice.
“Uh,” he whispered, trying to press the sobs down into his chest and stop them cracking his voice. He held one end of the fresh bandage against his face while she wrapped it round his head and under his jaw, round and round, holding his mouth near shut.
“You’ll live.”
“Is that supposed to be a comfort?” he mumbled.
She shrugged as she turned away. “There are plenty who don’t.”
Jezal almost envied them as he watched her stalk off through the waving grass. How he wished Ardee was here. He remembered the last sight of her, looking up at him in the soft rain with that crooked smile. She would never have left him like this, helpless and in pain. She would have spoken soft words, and touched his face, and looked at him with her dark eyes, and kissed him gently, and… sentimental shit. Probably she had found some other idiot to tease, and confuse, and make miserable, and had never paid him so much as a second thought. He tortured himself with the thought of her laughing at some other man’s jokes, smiling into some other man’s face, kissing some other man’s mouth. She would never want him now, that was sure. No one would want him. He felt his lip trembling again, his eyes tingling.
“All the great heroes of old, you know—the great kings, the great generals—they all faced adversity from time to time.” Jezal looked up. He had almost forgotten that Bayaz was there. “Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest.”
The old man winced as he squatted down beside Jezal. “Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us. Self-pity goes with selfishness, and there is nothing more to be deplored in a leader than that. Selfishness belongs to children, and to halfwits. A great leader puts others before himself. You would be surprised how acting so makes it easier to bear one’s own troubles. In order to act like a king, one need only treat everyone else like one.” And he placed a hand on Jezal’s shoulder. Perhaps it was supposed to be a fatherly and reassuring touch, but he could feel it trembling through his shirt. Bayaz let it rest there for a moment as though he had not the strength to move it, then pushed himself slowly up, stretched his legs, and shuffled off.
Jezal stared vacantly after him. A few weeks ago he would have been left fuming silently by such a lecture. Now he sat limp and absorbed it meekly. He hardly knew who he was any more. It was difficult to maintain any sense of superiority in the face of his utter dependence on other people. And people of whom, until recently, he had held such a very low opinion. He was no longer under any illusions. Without Ferro’s savage doctoring, and Ninefingers’ clumsy nursing, he would most likely have been dead.
The Northman was walking over, boots crunching in the shingle. Time to go back in the cart. Time for more squeaking and jolting. Time for more pain. Jezal gave a long, ragged, self-pitying sigh, but stopped himself halfway through. Self-pity was for children and halfwits.
“Alright, you know the drill.” Jezal leaned forward and Ninefingers hooked his arm behind his back, the other under his knees, lifted him up over the side of the cart without even breathing hard and dumped him unceremoniously among the supplies. Jezal caught his big, dirty, three-fingered hand as he was moving away, and the Northman turned to look at him, one heavy brow lifted. Jezal swallowed. “Thank you,” he muttered.
“What, for this?”
“For everything.”
Ninefingers looked at him for a long moment, then shrugged. “Nothing to it. You treat folk the way you’d want to be treated, and you can’t go far wrong. That’s what my father told me. Forgot that advice, for a long time, and I done things I can never make up for.” He gave a long sigh. “Still, it doesn’t hurt to try. My experience? You get what you give, in the end.”
Jezal blinked at Ninefingers’ broad back as he walked over to his horse. You treat folk the way you’d want to be treated. Could Jezal honestly say that he had ever done that much? He thought about it as the cart set off, axles shrieking, carelessly at first, and then with deepening worry.
He had bullied his juniors, pandered to his seniors. He had often screwed money from friends who could not afford it, had taken advantage of girls, then brushed them off. He had never once thanked his friend West for any of his help, and would happily have bedded his sister behind his back if she had let him. He realised, with increasing horror, that he could scarcely think of a single selfless thing that he had ever done.
He shifted uncomfortably against the sacks of fodder in the cart. You get what you give, in the long run, and manners cost nothing. From now on, he would think of others first. He would treat everyone as if they were his equal. But later, of course. There would be plenty of time to be a better man when he could eat again. He touched one hand to the bandages on his face, scratched absently at them then had to stop himself. Bayaz was riding just behind the cart, looking out across the water.
“You saw it?” Jezal muttered at him.
“Saw what?”
“This.” He jabbed a finger at his face.
“Ah, that. Yes, I saw it.”
“How bad is it?”
Bayaz cocked his head on one side. “Do you know? All in all, I believe I like it.”
“You like it?”
“Not now, perhaps, but the stitches will come out, the swelling will go down, the bruises will fade, the scabs will heal and drop away. I would guess your jaw will never quite regain its shape, and your teeth, of course, will not grow back, but what you lose in boyish charm you will gain, I have no doubt, in a certain danger, a flair, a rugged mystery. People respect a man who has seen action, and your appearance will be very far from ruined. I daresay girls could still be persuaded to swoon for you, if you were to do anything worth swooning over.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. All in all, I think it will serve.”
“Serve?” muttered Jezal, one hand pressed against his bandages. “Serve what?”
But Bayaz’ mind had wandered off. “Harod the Great had a scar, you know, across his cheek, and it never did him any harm. You don’t see it on the statues, of course, but people respected him the more for it, in life. Truly a great man, Harod. He had a shining reputation for being fair and trustworthy, and indeed he often was. But he knew how not to be, when the situation demanded it.” The Magus chuckled to himself. “Did I tell you of the time he invited his two greatest enemies to negotiate with him? He had them feuding one with the other before the day was out, and later they destroyed each other’s armies in battle, leaving him to claim victory over both without striking a blow. He knew, you see, that Ardlic had a beautiful wife…”
Jezal lay back in the cart. Bayaz had, in fact, told him that story before, but there seemed no purpose in saying so. He was actually enjoying hearing it for a second time, and it was hardly as though there was anything better for him to do. There was something calming in the repetitive droning of the old man’s deep voice, especially now the sun was breaking through the clouds. His mouth was barely even hurting, if he kept it still.
Before They Are Hanged tfl-2 Page 32