Last Argument of Kings tfl-3

by Joe Abercrombie

  Logen looked up at him, hardly enough strength left to lift his head. “Oh aye. Good work. We’ll go at the back tomorrow though, eh, since you’re that keen? You can take the fucking wall.”

  The rain was slacking, down to a thin spit and drizzle. A glimmer of fading sunlight broke through the sagging clouds, bringing Bethod’s camp back into view, his muddy ditch and his standards, tents scattered across the valley. Dogman squinted, thought he could see a few men stood around the front watching the Easterners run back, a glint of sunlight on something. An eye-glass maybe, like the Union used, usually to look the wrong way. Dogman wondered if it was Bethod down there, watching it all happen. It would be just like Bethod to have got himself an eye-glass.

  He felt a big hand clap him on the shoulder. “We gave ’em a slap, chief,” rumbled Tul, “and a good ’un!”

  There was small doubt o’ that. There were a lot of dead Easterners scattered in the mud round the base of that wall, a lot of wounded carried by their mates, or dragging themselves slow and painful back towards their lines. But there were a fair few killed on their side of the wall as well. Dogman could see a stack of muddy corpses over near the back of the fortress where they were doing the burying. He could hear someone screaming. Hard and nasty screams, the kind a man makes when he needs a limb taken off, or he’s had one off already.

  “We gave ’em a slap, aye,” Dogman muttered, “but they gave us one as well. I’m not sure how many slaps we’ll stand.” The barrels that carried their arrows were no more’n half full now, the rocks close to run out. “Best send some boys to pick over the dead!” he shouted to the men over his shoulder. “Get what we can while we can!”

  “Can’t have too many arrows at a time like this,” said Tul. “Number o’ those Crinna bastards we killed today, I reckon we’ll have more spears tonight than we had this morning.”

  Dogman managed to put a grin on his face. “Nice of ’em to bring us something to fight with.”

  “Aye. Reckon they’d get bored right quick if we ran out of arrows.” Tul laughed, and he clapped the Dogman on the back harder than ever, hard enough to make his teeth rattle. “We did well! You did well! We’re still alive, ain’t we?”

  “Some of us are.” Dogman looked down at the corpse of the one man who’d died up on the tower. An old boy, hair mostly grey, a rough-made arrow in his neck. Bad luck, that had been, to catch a shaft on a day as wet as today, but you’re sure to get a measure of luck in a fight, both good and bad. He frowned down into the darkening valley. “Where the hell are the Union at?”

  At least the rain had stopped. You have to be grateful for the small things in life, like some smoky kind of a fire after the wet. You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.

  Logen sat alone beside his scrub of a flame, and rubbed gently at his right palm. It was sore, pink, stiff from gripping the rough hilt of the Maker’s sword all the long day, blistered round the joints of his fingers. His head was bruised all over. The cut on his leg was burning some, but he could still walk well enough. He could’ve ended up a lot worse. There were more than three score buried now, and they were putting them in pits for a dozen each, just as Crummock had said they would. Three score and more gone back to the mud, and twice that many hurt, a lot of them bad.

  Over by the big fire, he could hear Dow growling about how he’d stabbed some Easterner in the fruits. He could hear Tul’s rumbling laughter. Logen hardly felt like a part of it, any more. Maybe he never had been. A set of men he’d fought and beaten. Lives he’d spared, for no reason that made sense. Men who’d hated him worse than death, but been bound to follow. Hardly more his friends than Shivers was. Perhaps the Dogman was his only true friend in all the wide Circle of the World, and even in his eyes, from time to time, Logen thought he could see that old trace of doubt, that old trace of fear. He wondered if he could see it now, as the Dogman came up out of the darkness.

  “You think they’ll come tonight?” he asked.

  “He’ll give it a go in the dark sooner or later,” said Logen, “but my guess is he’ll leave it ’til we’re a bit more worn down.”

  “You get more worn down than this?”

  “I guess we’ll find out.” Logen grimaced as he stretched out his aching legs. “It really seems like this shit used to be easier.”

  Dogman gave a snort. Not a laugh, really. More just letting Logen know he’d heard. “Memory can work some magic. You remember Carleon?”

  “Course I do.” Logen looked down at his missing finger, and he bunched his fist, so it looked the same as it always had. “Strange, how it all seemed so simple back in them days. Who you fought for, and why. Can’t say it ever bothered me.”

  “It bothered me,” said Dogman.

  “It did? You should’ve said something.”

  “Would you have listened?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  They sat there for a minute, in silence.

  “You reckon we’ll live through this?” asked the Dogman.

  “Maybe. If the Union turns up tomorrow, or the day after.”

  “You think they will?”

  “Maybe. We can hope.”

  “Hoping for a thing don’t make it happen.”

  “The opposite, usually. But every day we’re still alive is a chance. Maybe this time it’ll work.”

  Dogman frowned at the shifting flames. “That’s a lot of maybes.”

  “That’s war.”

  “Who’d have thought we’d be relying on a bunch of Southerners to solve our problems for us, eh?”

  “I reckon you solve ’em any way you can. You have to be realistic.”

  “Being realistic, then. You reckon we’ll live through this?”

  Logen thought about it for a while. “Maybe.”

  Boots squelched in the soft earth, and Shivers walked up quiet towards the fire. There was a grey bandage wrapped round his head, where he’d taken that cut, and his hair hung down damp and greasy from under it.

  “Chief,” he said.

  Dogman smiled as he got up, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Alright, Shivers. That was good work, today. I’m glad you came over, lad. We all are.” He gave Logen a long look. “All of us. Think I might try and get a rest for a minute. I’ll see you boys when they come again. Most likely it’ll be soon enough.” He walked off into the night, and left Shivers and Logen staring one at the other.

  Probably Logen should have got his hand near to a knife, watched for sudden moves and all the rest. But he was too tired and too sore for it. So he just sat there, and watched. Shivers pressed his lips together, squatting down beside the fire opposite, slow and reluctant, as if he was about to eat something he knew was rotten, but had no choice.

  “If I’d have been in your place,” he said, after a while, “I would’ve let those bastards kill me today.”

  “Few years ago I’m sure I would’ve.”

  “What changed?”

  Logen frowned as he thought about it. Then he shrugged his aching shoulders. “I’m trying to be better than I was.”

  “You think that’s enough?”

  “What else can I do?”

  Shivers frowned at the fire. “I wanted to say…” He worked the words around in his mouth and spat them out. “That I’m grateful, I guess. You saved my life today. I know it.” He wasn’t happy about saying it, and Logen knew why. It’s hard to be done a favour by a man you hate. It’s hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you’ve had him for long enough.

  So Logen shrugged again. “It’s nothing. What a man should do for his crew, that’s all. I owe you a lot more. I know that. I can never pay what I owe you.”

  “No. But it’s some kind o’ start at it, far as I’m concerned.” Shivers got up and took a step away. Then he stopped, and turned back, firelight shifting over one side of his hard, angry face. “It ain’t ever as simple, is it, as a man is just good or bad? Not even you. Not e
ven Bethod. Not anybody.”

  “No.” Logen sat and watched the flames moving. “No, it ain’t ever that simple. We all got our reasons. Good men and bad men. It’s all a matter of where you stand.”

  The Perfect Couple

  One of Jezal’s countless footmen perched on the stepladder, and lowered the crown with frowning precision onto his head, its single enormous diamond flashing pricelessly bright. He gave it the very slightest twist back and forth, the fur-trimmed rim gripping Jezal’s skull. He climbed back down, whisked the stepladder away, and surveyed the result. So did half a dozen of his fellows. One of them stepped forward to tweak the precise positioning of Jezal’s gold-embroidered sleeve. Another grimaced as he flicked an infinitesimal speck of dust from his pure white collar.

  “Very good,” said Bayaz, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “I believe that you are ready for your wedding.”

  The peculiar thing, now that Jezal had a rare moment to think about it, was that he had not, in any way of which he was aware, agreed to get married. He had neither proposed nor accepted a proposal. He had never actually said “yes” to anything. And yet here he was, preparing to be joined in matrimony in a few short hours, and to a woman he scarcely knew at all. It had not escaped his notice that in order to have been managed so quickly the arrangements must have been well underway before Bayaz had even suggested the notion. Perhaps before Jezal had even been crowned… but he supposed it was not so very surprising. Since his enthronement he had drifted helplessly through one incomprehensible event after another, like a man shipwrecked and struggling to keep his head above water, out of sight of land, dragged who knew where by unseen, irresistible currents. But considerably better dressed.

  He was gradually starting to realise that the more powerful a man became, the fewer choices he really had. Captain Jezal dan Luthar had been able to eat what he liked, to sleep when he liked, to see who he liked. His August Majesty King Jezal the First, on the other hand, was bound by invisible chains of tradition, expectation, and responsibility, that prescribed every aspect of his existence, however small.

  Bayaz took a discerning step forward. “Perhaps the top button undone here—”

  Jezal jerked away with some annoyance. The attention of the Magus to every tiny detail of his life was becoming more than tiresome. It seemed that he could scarcely use the latrine without the old bastard poking through the results. “I know how to button a coat!” he snapped. “Should I expect to find you here tonight when I bring my new wife to our bed-chamber, ready to instruct me on how best to use my prick?”

  The footmen coughed, and averted their eyes, and scraped away towards the corners of the room. Bayaz himself neither smiled nor frowned. “I stand always ready to advise your Majesty, but I had hoped that might be one item of business you could manage alone.”

  “I hope you’re well prepared for our little outing. I’ve been getting ready all morn—” Ardee froze when she looked up and saw Glokta’s face. “What happened to you?”

  “What, this?” He waved his hand at the mottled mass of bruises. “A Kantic woman broke into my apartments in the night, punched me repeatedly and near drowned me in the bath.” An experience I would not recommend.

  Evidently she did not believe him. “What really happened?”

  “I fell down the stairs.”

  “Ah. Stairs. They can be brutal bastards when you’re not that firm on your feet.” She stared at her half-full glass, her eyes slightly misty.

  “Are you drunk?”

  “It’s the afternoon, isn’t it? I try always to be drunk by now. Once you start a job you should give it your best. Or so my father liked to tell me.”

  Glokta narrowed his eyes at her, and she stared back evenly over the rim of her glass. No trembling lip, no tragic face, no streaks of bitter tears down the cheek. She seemed no less happy than usual. Or no more unhappy, perhaps. But Jezal dan Luthar’s wedding day can be no joyous occasion for her. No one appreciates being jilted, whatever the circumstances. No one enjoys being abandoned.

  “We need not go, you know.” Glokta winced as he tried unsuccessfully to stretch some movement into his wasted leg, and the wince itself caused a ripple of pain through his split lips and across his battered face. “I certainly won’t complain if I do not have to walk another step today. We can sit here, and talk of rubbish and politics.”

  “And miss the king’s marriage?” gasped Ardee, one hand pressed to her chest in fake horror. “But I really must see what the Princess Terez is wearing! They say she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and even scum like me must have someone to look up to.” She tipped back her head and swilled down the last of her wine. “Having fucked the groom is really no excuse for missing a wedding, you know.”

  The flagship of Grand Duke Orso of Talins ploughed slowly, deliberately, majestically forwards, under no more than quarter sail, a host of seabirds flapping and calling in the rich blue sky above. It was by far the largest ship that Jezal, or anyone among the vast crowds that lined the quay and crammed the roofs and windows of the buildings along the waterfront, had ever laid eyes upon.

  It was decked out in its finest: coloured bunting fluttered from the rigging and its three towering masts were hung with bright flags, the sable cross of Talins and the golden sun of the Union, side by side in honour of the happy occasion. But it looked no less menacing for that. It looked as Logen Ninefingers might have in a dandy’s jacket. Unmistakably still a man of war, and appearing more savage rather than less for the gaudy finery in which it was plainly uncomfortable. As the means of bringing a single woman to Adua, and that woman Jezal’s bride-to-be, this mighty vessel was anything but reassuring. It implied that Grand Duke Orso might be an intimidating presence as a father-in-law.

  Jezal saw sailors now, crawling among the myriad ropes like ants through a bush, bringing the acres of sailcloth in with well-practised speed. They let the mighty ship plough forward under its own momentum, its vast shadow falling over the quay and plunging half the welcoming party into darkness. It slowed, the air full of the creaking of timbers and hawsers. It came to a deliberate stop, dwarfing the now tiny-seeming boats meekly tethered to either side as a tiger might dwarf kittens. The golden figurehead, a woman twice life-size thrusting a spear towards the heavens, glittered menacingly far over Jezal’s head.

  A huge wharf had been specially constructed in the middle of the quay where the draught was at its deepest. Down this gently sloping ramp the royal party of Talins descended into Adua, like visitors from a distant star where everyone was rich, beautiful, and obliviously happy.

  To either side marched a row of bearded guardsmen, all dressed in identical black uniforms, their helmets polished to a painful pitch of mirror brightness. Between them, in two rows of six, came a dozen ladies-in-waiting, each one arrayed in red, or blue, or vivid purple silks, each one as splendid as a queen herself.

  But not one of the awestruck multitude on the waterfront could have been in any doubt who was the centre of attention. The Princess Terez glided along at the fore: tall, slender, impossibly regal, as graceful as a circus dancer and as stately as an Empress of legend. Her pure white gown was stitched with glittering gold, her shimmering hair was the colour of polished bronze, a chain of daunting diamonds flashed and sparkled on her pale chest in the bright sunlight. The Jewel of Talins seemed at that moment an apt name indeed. Terez looked as pure and dazzling, as proud and brilliant, as hard and beautiful as a flawless gemstone.

  As her feet touched the stones the crowds burst out into a tumultuous cheer, and flower petals began to fall in well-orchestrated cascades from the windows of the buildings high above. So it was that she advanced on Jezal with magnificent dignity, her head held imperiously high, her hands clasped proudly before her, over a soft carpet and through a sweet-smelling haze of fluttering pink and red.

  To call it a breathtaking entrance would have been understatement of an epic order.

  “Your August Majesty,” she murmured, somehow m
anaging to make him feel like the humble one as she curtsied, and behind her the ladies followed suit, and the guardsmen bowed low, all with impeccable coordination. “My father, the Grand Duke Orso of Talins, sends his profound apologies,” and she rose up perfectly erect again as though hoisted by invisible strings, “but urgent business in Styria prevents him from attending our wedding.”

  “You are all we need,” croaked Jezal, cursing silently a moment later as he realised he had completely ignored the proper form of address. It was somewhat difficult to think clearly, under the circumstances. Terez was even more breathtaking now than when he had last seen her, a year or more ago, arguing savagely with Prince Ladisla at the feast held in his honour. The memory of her vicious shrieking did little to encourage him, but then Jezal would hardly have been delighted by the prospect of marrying Ladisla himself. After all, the man had been a complete ass. Jezal was an entirely different sort of person and could no doubt expect a different response. So he hoped.

  “Please, your Highness,” and he held out his hand to her. She rested hers on it, seeming to weigh less than a feather.

  “Your Majesty does me too much honour.”

  The hooves of the grey horses crackled on the paving, the carriage-wheels whirred smoothly. They set off up the Kingsway, a company of Knights of the Body riding in tight formation around them, arms and armour glinting, each stride of the great thoroughfare lined with appreciative commoners, each door and window filled with smiling subjects. All there to cheer for their new king, and for the woman soon to be their queen.

  Jezal knew he must look an utter idiot next to her. A clumsy, lowborn, ill-mannered oaf, who had not the slightest right to share her carriage, unless, perhaps, she was using him as a footrest. He had never in his life felt truly inferior before. He could scarcely believe that he was marrying this woman. Today. His hands were shaking. Positively shaking. Perhaps some heartfelt words might help them both relax.