Joe Abercrombie - Red Country

‘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.’