Joe Abercrombie - Red Country

Hell of a thing.

Savian was roaring, and coughing, and pointing everywhere with his flatbow, trying to get the wagons dragged into some kind of fort with barrels and clothes-chests and rope coils stacked up to hide behind, the cattle corralled inside and the women and children to the safest place, though Shy had no notion where that might be. Folk were scrambling about like the idea of Ghosts had never been discussed before, running to do what they were told or exactly what they hadn’t been, to tug at stubborn animals or find stowed weapons or save their gear or their children or just to stare and clutch at themselves like they were stabbed and their ears off already.

Iosiv Lestek’s big wagon had run into a ditch and a couple of men were struggling to rock it free. ‘Leave it!’ shouted Savian. ‘We ain’t going to act our way out o’ this!’ And they left it colourfully advertising the world’s finest theatrical entertainment to the empty plains.

Shy shouldered her way through the madness and up onto Majud’s wagon. Away to the south, across the waving, shifting grass, three Ghosts rode around in circles, one shaking a horned lance at the sky, and Shy thought she could hear them singing, high and joyful. Sweet watched, his loaded flatbow propped on one knee, rubbing at his bearded jaw, and it felt like there was a small piece of calm around him she gratefully squatted in.

‘How’s the boy?’

‘Dead,’ said Shy, and it made her sick that was all she had to say.

‘Ah, damn it.’ Sweet gave a bitter grimace, and closed his eyes and pressed them with finger and thumb. ‘Damn it.’ Then he trained them on the mounted Ghosts on the horizon, shaking his head. ‘Best fix ourselves on making sure the rest of us don’t go the same way.’

Savian’s cracked voice shouted on and all around folk were clambering onto the wagons with bows in unpractised hands, new ones never drawn with purpose and antiques long out of service.

‘What are they singing of?’ asked Shy, pulling an arrow from her

quiver and slowly turning it round and round, feeling the roughness against her fingertips like wood was a new thing never felt before.

Sweet snorted. ‘Our violent demise. They reckon it’s near at hand.’

‘Is it?’ she couldn’t help asking.

‘Depends.’ Sweet’s jaw muscles worked under his beard, then he slowly, calmly spat. ‘On whether those three are some of Sangeed’s main warband or he’s split it up into smaller parties.’

‘And which is it?’

‘Guess we can count ’em when they arrive, and if there’s a few dozen we’ll know we’ve a chance, and if there’s a few hundred we’ll have our profound fucking doubts.’

Buckhorm had clambered up on the wagon, a mail shirt flapping at his thighs that suited him even worse than it fitted him. ‘Why are we just waiting?’ he hissed, the Ghosts chased his stutter away for now. ‘Why don’t we move?’

Sweet turned his slow grey eyes on him. ‘Move where? Ain’t no castles nearby.’ He looked back to the plains, empty in every direction, and the three Ghosts circling at the edge of that shallow valley, faint singing keening across the empty grass. ‘One patch of nowhere’s as good to die on as another.’

‘Our time’s better spent getting ready for what’s coming than running from it.’ Lamb stood tall on the next wagon. He’d built up quite the collection of knives the last few weeks and now he was checking them one by one, calm as if he was getting ready to plough a field back on the farm instead of fight for his life in wild and lawless country. More than calm, now Shy thought about it. Like it was a field he’d long dreamed of ploughing but was only now getting the chance at.

‘Who are you?’ she said.

He looked up from his blades for a moment. ‘You know me.’

‘I know a big, soft Northman scared to whip a mule. I know a beggar turned up to our farm in the night to work for crusts. I know a man used to hold my brother and sing when he had the fever. You ain’t that man.’

‘I am.’ He stepped across the gap between the wagons, and he put his arms around her crushing tight, and she heard him whisper in her ear. ‘But that’s not all I am. Stay out of my way, Shy.’ Then he hopped down from the wagon. ‘You’d better keep her safe!’ he called to Sweet.

‘You joking?’ The old scout was busy sighting down his bow. ‘I’m counting on her to save me!’

Just then Crying Rock gave a high shout and pointed off to the south, and over the crest they boiled as if from some nightmare, relics of a savage age long past, toothed with a hundred jagged stolen blades and chipped-stone axes and sharp arrows glinting and a lifetime of laughed-at stories of massacre came boiling with them and stole Shy’s breath.

‘We’re all going to lose our ears!’ someone whimpered.

‘Ain’t like you use ’em now, is it? Sweet levelled his flatbow with a grim smile. ‘Looks like a few dozen to me.’

Shy knelt there trying to count them but some horses had other horses painted on their sides and some had no riders and some had two or carried scarecrow figures made to look like men and others flapping canvas stretched on sticks to make them giants bloated like bodies drowned, all swimming and blurring before her leaking eyes, mindless and deadly and unknowable as a plague.

Shy thought she could hear Temple praying. She wished she knew how.

‘Easy!’ Savian was shouting. ‘Easy!’ Shy hardly knew what he meant. One Ghost wore a hood crusted with fragments of broken glass that sparkled like jewels, mouth yawning in a spit-stringed scream. ‘Stand and live! Run and die!’ She’d always had a knack for running and no stomach for standing, and if there’d ever been a time to run, her whole body was telling her that time was now. ‘Under that fucking paint they’re just men!’ A Ghost stood in his or her or its stirrups and shook a feathered lance, naked but for paint and a necklace of ears bouncing and swinging around its neck.

‘Stand together or die alone!’ roared Savian, and one of the whores whose name Shy had forgotten stood with a bow in her hand and her yellow hair stirred by the wind, and she nodded to Shy and Shy nodded back. Goldy, that was it. Stand together. That’s why they call it a Fellowship, ain’t it?

The first bowstring went, panicky and pointless, arrow falling well short, then more and Shy shot her own, barely picking out one target there were so many. Arrows flickered down and fell among the waving grass and the heaving flesh and here or there a shape tumbled from a saddle or a horse veered. The Ghost with the hood slumped back, Savian’s bolt through its painted chest, but the rest swarmed up to the feeble ring of wagons and swallowed it whole, whirling and rearing and sending up a murk of dust until they and their painted horses were phantoms indeed, their screams and shrieks and animal howls disembodied and treacherous as the voices a madman hears.

Arrows dropped around Shy, zip and clatter as one tumbled from a crate, another lodged in a sack just beside her, a third left trembling in the wagon’s seat. She nocked a shaft and shot again, and again, and again, shot at nothing, at anything, crying with fear and anger and her teeth crushed together and her ears full of joyous wailing and her own spat curses. Lestek’s mired wagon was a red hump with shapes crawling over it, hacking it with axes, stabbing it with spears like hunters that had brought down some great beast.

A pony stuck with arrows tottered sideways past, biting at its neighbour and, while Shy stared at it, a ragged shape came hurtling over the side of the wagon. She saw just a bulging eye in a face red-painted like an eye and she grabbed at it, her finger in a mouth and ripping at a cheek and together they tumbled off the wagon, rolling in the dust. There were strong hands around her head, lifting it and twisting it while she snarled and tried to find her knife and suddenly her head burst with light and the world was quiet and strange all shuffling feet and choking dust and she felt a burning, ripping pain under her ear and she screamed and thrashed and bit at nothing but couldn’t get free.