Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

  The next wagon might have been the biggest in the Fellowship, with glass windows and The Famous Iosiv Lestek written along the side in already peeling purple paint. Seemed to Shy that if a man was that famous he wouldn’t have to paint his name on a wagon, but since her own brush with fame had been through bills widely posted for her arrest she hardly considered herself an expert.

  A scratty-haired boy was driving and the great man sat swaying beside him, old and gaunt and leached of all colour, swaddled in a threadbare Ghost blanket. He perked up at the opportunity to boast as Shy and Lamb trotted over.

  ‘I… am Iosiv Lestek.’ It was a shock to hear the voice of a king boom from that withered head, rich and deep and fruity as plum sauce. ‘I daresay the name is familiar.’

  ‘Sorry to say we don’t get often to the theatre,’ said Lamb.

  ‘What brings you to the Far Country?’ asked Shy.

  ‘I was forced to abandon a role at Adua’s House of Drama due to illness. The ensemble was crushed to lose me, of course, quite crushed, but I am fully recovered.’

  ‘Good news.’ She dreaded to picture him before his recovery. He seemed a corpse raised by sorcery now.

  ‘I am in transit to Crease to take a leading part in a cultural extravaganza!’

  ‘Culture?’ Shy eased up her hat brim to survey the empty country ahead, grey grass and ill scrub and parched slopes of baked brown boulder, no sign of life but for a couple of hopeful hawks circling on high. ‘Out there?’

  ‘Even the meanest hearts hunger for a glimpse of the sublime,’ he informed them.

  ‘I’ll take your word on that,’ said Lamb.

  Lestek was busy smiling out at the reddening horizon, a hand so pale as almost to be see-through clutched against his chest. She got the feeling he was one of those men didn’t really see the need for two sides to a conversation. ‘My greatest performance is yet ahead of me, that much I know.’

  ‘Something to look forward to,’ muttered Shy, turning her horse.

  A group of a dozen or so Suljuks watched the exchange, clustered to themselves around a rotten-looking wagon. They spoke no common, and Shy could barely recognise a word of Suljuk let alone understand one, so she just nodded to them as she rode by and they nodded back, pleasantly inscrutable to each other.

  Ashjid was a Gurkish priest, fixed on being the first to spread the word of the Prophet west to Crease. Or actually the second, since a man called Oktaadi had given up after three months there and been skinned by the Ghosts on the return trip. Ashjid was having a good stab at spreading the word to the Fellowship in the meantime through daily blessings, though so far his only convert was a curious retard responsible for collecting drinking water. He had no information for them beyond the revelation of the scripture, but he asked God to smile upon their search and Shy thanked him for that. Seemed better to her to have blessings than curses, for all time’s plough would more’n likely turn up what it turned regardless.

  The priest pointed out a stern-looking type on a neatly kept wagon as Savian, a man not to be fiddled with. He’d a long sword at his side looked like it had seen plenty of action and a grey-stubbled face looked like it had seen plenty more, eyes narrowed to slits in the shadow of his low hat-brim.

  ‘My name’s Shy South, this is Lamb.’ Savian just nodded, like he accepted that was a possibility but had no set opinion on it. ‘I’m looking for my brother and sister. Six years and ten.’ He didn’t even nod to that. A tight-mouthed bastard, and no mistake. ‘They were stole by a man named Grega Cantliss.’

  ‘Can’t help you.’ A trace of an Imperial accent, and all the while Savian looked at her long and level, like he’d got just her measure and wasn’t moved by it. Then his eyes shifted to Lamb, and took his measure, too, and wasn’t moved by that either. He put a fist over his mouth and gave a long, gravelly cough.

  ‘That cough sounds bad,’ she said.

  ‘When’s a cough good?’

  Shy noticed a flatbow hooked to the seat beside him. Not loaded, but full-drawn and with a wedge in the trigger. Exactly as ready as it needed to be. ‘You along to fight?’

  ‘Hoping I won’t have to.’ Though the whole set of him said his hopes hadn’t always washed out in that regard.

  ‘What kind of a fool hopes for a fight, eh?’

  ‘Sad to say there’s always one or two about.’

  Lamb snorted. ‘There’s the sorry truth.’

  ‘What’s your business in the Far Country?’ asked Shy, trying to chisel something more from that hardwood block of a face.

  ‘My business.’ And he coughed again. Even when he did that his mouth hardly moved. Made her wonder if he’d any muscles in his head.

  ‘Thought we might try our hand at prospecting.’ A woman had poked her face out from the wagon. Lean and strong, hair cut short and with these blue, blue eyes looked like they saw a long way. ‘I’m Corlin.’

  ‘My niece,’ added Savian, though there was something odd about the way they looked at each other. Shy couldn’t quite get it pegged.

  ‘Prospecting?’ she asked, pushing her hat back. ‘Don’t see a lot of women at that business.’

  ‘Are you saying there’s a limit on what a woman can do?’ asked Corlin.

  Shy raised her brows. ‘Might be one on what she’s dumb enough to try.’

  ‘It seems neither sex has a monopoly on hubris.’

  ‘Seems not,’ said Shy, adding, under her breath, ‘whatever the fuck that means.’ She gave the two of them a nod and pulled her horse about. ‘Be seeing you on the trail.’

  Neither Corlin nor her uncle answered, just gave each other some deadly competition at who could stare after her the hardest.

  ‘Something odd about them two,’ she muttered to Lamb as they rode off. ‘Didn’t see no mining gear.’

  ‘Maybe they mean to buy it in Crease.’

  ‘And pay five times the going rate? You look in their eyes? Don’t reckon they’re a pair used to making fool deals.’

  ‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’

  ‘I try to be aware of ’em, at least, in case they end up being played on me. You think they’re trouble?’

  Lamb shrugged. ‘I think you’re best off treating folk the way you’d want to be treated and leaving their choices to them. We’re all of us trouble o’ one kind or another. Half this whole crowd probably got a sad story to tell. Why else would they be plodding across the long and level nowhere with the likes of us for company?’

  All Raynault Buckhorm had to tell about was hopes, though he did it with something of a stutter. He owned half the cattle with the Fellowship, employed a good few of the men to drive ’em, and was making his fifth trip to Crease where he said there was always call for meat, this time bringing his wife and children and planning to stay. The exact number of children was hard to reckon but the impression was of many. Buckhorm asked Lamb if he’d seen the grass out there in the Far Country. Best damn grass in the Circle of the World, he thought. Best water, too. Worth facing the weather and the Ghosts and the murderous distance for that grass and that water. When Shy told him about Grega Cantliss and his band he shook his head and said he could still be surprised by how low men could sink. Buckhorm’s wife Luline—possessed of a giant smile but a tiny body you could hardly believe had produced such a brood—shook her head too, and said it was the most awful thing she’d ever heard, and she wished there was something she could do, and probably would’ve hugged her if they hadn’t had the height of a horse between them. Then she gave Shy a little pie and asked if she’d spoken to Hedges.

  Hedges was a shifty sort with a wore-out mule, not enough gear and a charmless habit of talking to her from the neck down. He’d never heard of Grega Cantliss but he did point out his ruined leg, which he said he’d got leading a charge at the battle of Osrung. Shy had her doubts about that story. Still, her mother used to say, you’re best off looking for the best in people, and it was good advice even if the woman never had taken it herself. So Shy offered Hedges
Luline Buckhorm’s pie and he looked her in the eye finally and said, ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘Don’t let a pie fool you.’ But when she rode off he was still looking down at it in his dirty hand, like it meant so much he couldn’t bring himself to eat it.

  Shy went on around them ’til her voice was sore from sharing her troubles and her ears from lending them to others’ dreams. A Fellowship was a good name for it, she reckoned, ’cause they were a good-humoured and a giving company, in the main. Raw and strange and foolish, some of them, but all fixed on finding a better tomorrow. Even Shy felt it, time and trouble-toughened, work and weather-worn, weighed down with worries about Pit and Ro’s future and Lamb’s past. The new wind on her face and the new hopes ringing in her ears and she found a dopey smile creeping under her nose as she threaded between the wagons, nodding to folks she didn’t know, slapping the backs of those she’d only just met. Soon as she’d remember why she was there and wipe that smile away she’d find it was back, like pigeons shouted off a new-sown field.

  Soon enough she stopped trying. Pigeons’ll ruin your crop, but what harm will smiles do, really?

  So she let it sit there. Felt good on her.

  ‘Lots of sympathy,’ she said, once they’d talked to most everyone, and the sun had sunk to a gilt sliver ahead of them, the first torches lit so the Fellowship could slog another mile before making camp. ‘Lots of sympathy but not much help.’

  ‘I guess sympathy’s something,’ said Lamb. She waited for more but he just sat hunched, nodding along to the slow walk of his horse.

  ‘They seem all right, though, mostly.’ Gabbing just to fill the hole, and feeling annoyed that she had to. ‘Don’t know how they’ll fare if the Ghosts come and things get ugly, but they’re all right.’

  ‘Guess you never know how folk’ll fare if things get ugly.’

  She looked across at him. ‘You’re damn right there.’

  He caught her eye for a moment, then guiltily looked away. She opened her mouth but before she could say more, Sweet’s deep voice echoed through the dusk, calling halt for the day.

  The Rugged Outdoorsman

  Temple wrenched himself around in his saddle, heart suddenly bursting—

  And saw nothing but moonlight on shifting branches. It was so dark he could scarcely see that. He might have heard a twig torn loose by the wind, or a rabbit about its harmless nocturnal business in the brush, or a murderous Ghost savage daubed with the blood of slaughtered innocents, fixed on skinning him alive and wearing his face as a hat.

  He hunched his shoulders as another chilly gust whipped up, shook the pines and chilled him to his marrow. The Company of the Gracious Hand had enveloped him in its foul embrace for so long he had come to take the physical safety it provided entirely for granted. Now he keenly felt its loss. There were many things in life one did not fully appreciate until one had cavalierly tossed them aside. Like a good coat. Or a very small knife. Or a few-score hardened killers and an affable geriatric villain.

  The first day he had ridden hard and worried only that they would catch him. Then, when the second morning dawned chill and vastly empty, that they wouldn’t. By the third morning he was feeling deeply aggrieved at the thought that they might not even have tried. Fleeing the Company, directionless and unequipped, into the unmapped wasteland, was looking less and less like the easy way to anything.

  Temple had played many parts during his thirty ill-starred years alive. Beggar, thief, unwilling trainee priest, ineffective surgeon, disgusted butcher, sore-handed carpenter, briefly a loving husband and even more briefly a doting father followed closely by a wretched mourner and bitter drunk, overconfident confidence trickster, prisoner of the Inquisition then informant for them, translator, accountant and lawyer, collaborator with a whole range of different wrong sides, accomplice to mass murder, of course, and, most recently and disastrously, man of conscience. But rugged outdoorsman made no appearance on the list.

  Temple did not even have the equipment to make a fire. Or, had he had it, known how to use it. He had nothing to cook anyway. And now he was lost in every sense of the word. The barbs of hunger, cold and fear had quickly come to bother him vastly more than the feeble prodding of his conscience ever had. He should probably have thought more carefully before fleeing, but flight and careful thought are like oil and water, ever reluctant to mix. He blamed Cosca. He blamed Lorsen. He blamed Jubair, and Sheel, and Sufeen. He blamed every fucker available excepting, of course, the one who was actually to blame, the one sitting in his saddle and getting colder, hungrier, and more lost with every unpleasant moment.

  ‘Shit!’ he roared at nothing.

  His horse checked, ears swivelling, then plodded on. It was becoming resignedly immune to his outbursts. Temple peered up through the crooked branches, the moon casting a glow through the fast-moving streaks of cloud.

  ‘God?’ he muttered, too desperate to feel a fool. ‘Can you hear me?’ No answer, of course. God does not answer, especially not the likes of him. ‘I know I haven’t been the best man. Or even a particularly good one…’ He winced. Once you accept He’s up there, and all-knowing and all-seeing and so on, you probably have to accept that there’s no point gilding the truth for Him. ‘All right, I’m a pretty poor one, but… far from the worst about?’ A proud boast, that. What a headstone it would make. Except, of course, there would be no one to carve it when he died out here alone and rotted in the open. ‘I am sure I could improve, though, if you could just see your way to giving me… one more chance?’ Wheedling, wheedling. ‘Just… one more?’

  No reply but another chill gust filling the trees with whispers. If there was a God, He was a tight-mouthed bastard, and no—

  Temple caught the faintest glimmer of flickering orange through the trees.

  A fire! Jubilation sprang to life in his breast!

  Then caution smothered it.

  Whose fire? Ear-collecting barbarians, but a step above wild animals?

  He caught a whiff of cooking meat and his stomach gave a long, squelching growl, so loud he worried it might give him away. Temple had spent a great deal of his early life hungry and become quite adept at it, but, as with so many things, to do it well one has to stay in practice.

  He gently reined in his horse, slid as quietly as he could from the saddle and looped the reins around a branch. Keeping low, he eased through the brush, tree-limbs casting clawing shadows towards him, breathing curses as he caught his clothes, his boots, his face on snatching twigs.

  The fire had been built in the middle of a narrow clearing, a small animal neatly skinned and spitted on sticks above it. Temple suppressed a powerful impulse to dive at it teeth first. A single blanket was spread out between the fire and a worn saddle. A round shield leaned against a tree, metal rim and wooden front marked with the scars of hard use. Next to it was an axe with a heavy bearded head. It took no expert in the use of weapons to see this was a tool not for chopping wood but people.

  The gear of one man, but clearly a man it would be a bad idea to be caught stealing the dinner of.

  Temple’s eyes crawled from meat to axe and back, and his mouth watered with an intensity almost painful. Possible death by axe loomed large at any time, but at that moment certain death from hunger loomed larger yet. He slowly straightened, preparing to—

  ‘Nice night for it.’ Northern words in a throaty whisper of a voice, just behind Temple’s ear.

  He froze, small hairs tingling up his neck. ‘Bit windy,’ he managed to croak.

  ‘I’ve seen worse.’ A cold and terrible point pricked at the small of Temple’s back. ‘Let’s see your weapons, slow as snails in winter.’

  ‘I am… unarmed.’

  A pause. ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I had a knife, but…’ He had given it to a bony farmer who killed his best friend with it. ‘I lost it.’

  ‘Out in the big empty without a blade?’ As though it was strange as to be without a nose. Temple gave a girlish squeak as a
big hand slipped under his arm and started to pat him down. ‘Nor have you, ’less you’re hiding one up your arse.’ An unpleasing notion. ‘I ain’t looking there.’ That was some relief. ‘You a madman?’

  ‘I am a lawyer.’

  ‘Can’t a man be both?’

  Self-evidently. ‘I… suppose.’

  Another pause. ‘Cosca’s lawyer?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Huh.’ The point slipped away, its absence leaving a prickling spot in Temple’s back. Even unpleasant things can be sorely missed, apparently, if you have lived with them long enough.

  A man stepped past Temple. A great, black, shaggy shape, knife-blade glinting in one hand. He dragged a long sword from his belt and tossed it on the blanket, then lowered himself cross-legged, firelight twinkling red and yellow in the mirror of his metal eye.

  ‘Life takes you down some strange paths, don’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Caul Shivers,’ muttered Temple, not at all sure whether to feel better or worse.

  Shivers reached out and turned the spit between finger and thumb, fat dripping into the flames. ‘Hungry?’

  Temple licked his lips. ‘Is that just a question… or an invitation?’

  ‘I’ve got more’n I can eat. You’d best bring that horse up before it shakes loose. Watch your step, though.’ The Northman jerked his head back into the trees. ‘There’s a gorge that way might be twenty strides deep, and with some angry water at the bottom.’

  Temple brought the horse up and hobbled it, stripped its saddle and the damp blanket beneath, abandoned it to nuzzle at whatever grass it could find. A sad fact, but the hungrier a man is the less he tends to care about the hunger of others. Shivers had carved the carcass down to the bones and was eating from a tin plate with the point of his knife. More meat lay gleaming on some torn-off bark on the other side of the fire. Temple sank to his knees before it as though it were a most hallowed altar.