Joe Abercrombie - Red Country

‘God,’ he croaked, and had to clear his throat. ‘It seems… sometimes… that you are not out here.’ It had mostly seemed to Temple, with all the blood and waste that he had seen, that He was not anywhere. ‘But I know you are,’ he lied. He was not paid for the truth. ‘You are everywhere. Around us, and in us, and watching over us.’ Not doing much about it, mind you, but that was God for you. ‘I ask you… I beg you, watch over these boys, buried in strange earth, under strange skies. These men and women, too. You know they had their shortcomings. But they set out to make something in the wilderness.’ Temple felt the sting of tears himself, had to bite his lip for a moment, look to the sky and blink them back. ‘Take them to your arms, and give them peace. There are none more deserving.’

They stood in silence for a while, the wind tugging at the ragged hem of Temple’s coat and snatching Shy’s hair across her face, then Buckhorm held out his palm, coins glinting there. ‘Thank you.’

Temple closed the drover’s calloused hand with both of his. ‘My honour to do it.’ Words did nothing. The children were still dead. He would not take money for that, whatever his debts.

The light was starting to fade when Sweet swung down from Majud’s wagon, the sky pinking in the west and streaks of black cloud spread across it like breakers on a calm sea. ‘They want to talk!’ he shouted. ‘They’ve lit a fire halfway to their camp and they’re waiting for word!’ He looked pretty damn pleased about it. Probably Temple should have been pleased, but he was sitting near Leef ’s grave, weight uncomfortably shifted off his throbbing buttock, feeling as if nothing would ever please him again.

‘ Now they want to talk,’ said Luline Buckhorm, bitterly. ‘Now my two boys are dead.’

Sweet winced. ‘Better’n when all your boys are. I’d best go out there.’

‘I’ll be coming,’ said Lamb, dry blood still speckled on the side of his face.

‘And me,’ said Savian. ‘Make sure those bastards don’t try anything.’

Sweet combed at his beard with his fingers. ‘Fair enough. Can’t hurt to show ’em we’ve got iron in us.’

‘I will be going, too.’ Majud limped up, grimacing badly so that gold tooth glinted, trouser-leg flapping where Corlin had cut it free of his wound. ‘I swore never to let you negotiate in my name again.’

‘You bloody won’t be going,’ said Sweet. ‘Things tend sour we might have to run, and you’re running nowhere.’

Majud ventured some weight on his injured leg, grimaced again, then nodded over at Shy. ‘She goes in my place, then.’

‘Me?’ she muttered, looking over. ‘Talk to those fuckers?’

‘There is no one else I trust to bargain. My partner Curnsbick would insist on the best price.’

‘I could get to dislike Curnsbick without ever having met the man.’

Sweet was shaking his head. ‘Sangeed won’t take much to a woman being there.’

It looked to Temple as though that made up Shy’s mind. ‘If he’s a practical thinker he’ll get over it. Let’s go.’

They sat in a crescent about their crackling fire, maybe a hundred strides from the Fellowship’s makeshift fort, the flickering lights of their own camp dim in the distance. The Ghosts. The terrible scourge of the plains. The fabled savages of the Far Country.

Shy tried her best to stoke up a towering hatred for them, but when she thought of Leef cold under the dirt, all she felt was sick at the waste of it, and worried for his brother and hers who were still lost as ever, and worn through and chewed up and hollowed out. That and, now she saw them sitting tame with no death cries or shook weapons, she’d rarely seen so wretched-looking a set of men, and she’d spent a good stretch of her life in desperate straits and most of the rest bone-poor.

They wore half-cured hides, and ragged skins, and threadbare fragments of a dozen different scavenged costumes, the bare skin showing stretched pale and hungry-tight over the bone. One was smiling, maybe at the thought of the riches they were soon to win, and he’d but one rotten tooth in his head. Another frowned solemnly under a helmet made from a beaten-out copper kettle, spout sticking from his forehead. Shy took the old Ghost in the centre for the great Sangeed. He wore a cloak of feathers over a tarnished breastplate looked like it had made some general of the Empire proud a thousand years ago. He had three necklaces of human ears, proof she supposed of his great prowess, but he was long past his best. She could hear his breathing, wet and crackly, and one half of his leathery face sagged, the drooping corner of his mouth glistening with stray spit.

Could these ridiculous little men and the monsters that had come screaming for them on the plain be the same flesh? A lesson she should’ve remembered from her own time as a fearsome bandit—between the horrible and pitiful there’s never much of a divide, and most of that is in how you look at it.

If anything, it was the old men on her side of the fire that scared her more now—deep-lined faces made devilish strangers by the shifting flames, eyes gleaming in chill-shadowed sockets, the head of the bolt in Savian’s loaded flatbow coldly glistening, Lamb’s face bent and twisted like a weather-worn tree, etched with old scars, no clue to his thoughts, not even to her who’d known him all these years. Especially not to her, maybe.

Sweet bowed his head and said a few words in the Ghosts’ tongue, making big gestures with his arms. Sangeed said a few back, slow and grinding, coughed, and managed a few more.

‘Just exchanging pleasantries,’ Sweet explained.

‘Ain’t nothing pleasant about this,’ snapped Shy. ‘Let’s get done and get back.’

‘We can talk in your words,’ said one of the Ghosts in a strange sort of common like he had a mouthful of gravel. He was a young one, sitting closest to Sangeed and frowning across the fire. His son, maybe. ‘My name is Locway.’

‘All right.’ Sweet cleared his throat. ‘Here’s a right fucking fuck up, then, ain’t it, Locway? There was no call for no one to die here. Now look. Corpses on both sides just to get to where we could’ve started if you’d just said how do.’

‘Every man takes his life in his hands who trespasses upon our lands,’ said Locway. Looked like he took himself mighty seriously, which was quite the achievement for someone wearing a ripped-up pair of old Union cavalry trousers with a beaver pelt over the crotch.

Sweet snorted. ‘I was ranging these plains long before you was sucking tit, lad. And now you’re going to tell me where I can ride?’ He curled his tongue and spat into the fire.

‘Who gives a shit who rides where?’ snapped Shy. ‘Ain’t like it’s land any sane man would want.’

The young Ghost frowned at her. ‘She has a sour tongue.’

‘Fuck yourself.’

‘Enough,’ growled Savian. ‘If we’re going to deal, let’s deal and go.’

Locway gave Shy a hard look, then leaned to speak to Sangeed, and the so-called Emperor of the Plains mulled his words over for a moment, then croaked a few of his own.

‘Five thousands of your silver marks,’ said Locway, ‘and twenty of cattle, and twenty of horses, and you leave with your ears. That is the word of dread Sangeed.’ And the old Ghost lifted his chin and grunted.

‘You can have two thousand,’ said Shy.

‘Three thousand, then, and the animals.’ His haggling was almost as piss-weak as his clothes.

‘My people agreed to two. That’s what you’re getting. Far as cattle go, you can have the dozen you were fool enough to make meat of with your arrows, that’s all. The horses, no.’

‘Then perhaps we will come and take them,’ said Locway.