Joe Abercrombie - Red Country

Shy’s face looked little better than Lamb’s, scratched and swollen, nose cut across the bridge, neck a mass of bruises. It hurt him to see it. Not as much as if he’d taken the beating, of course. But it hurt still. She didn’t look upset to see him. She didn’t look that interested. She left the door open, limping slightly, and showed her teeth as she sank down on a bench under the window, bare feet looking very white against the floorboards.

‘How was the hanging?’ she asked.

He stepped inside and gently pushed the door to. ‘Very much like they always are.’

‘Can’t say I’ve ever understood their appeal.’

‘Perhaps it makes people feel like winners, seeing someone else lose so hard.’

‘Losing hard I know all about.’

‘Are you all right?’

She looked up and he could hardly meet her eye. ‘Bit sore.’

‘You’re angry with me.’ He sounded like a sulking child.

‘I’m not. I’m just sore.’

‘What good would I have done if I’d stayed?’

She licked at her split lip. ‘I daresay you’d just have got yourself killed.’

‘Exactly. But instead I ran for help.’

‘You ran all right, that I can corroborate.’

‘I got Savian.’

‘And Savian got me. Just in time.’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s right.’ She held her side as she slowly fished up one boot and started to pull it on. ‘So I guess what we’re saying is, I owe you my life. Thanks, Temple, you’re a fucking hero. Next time I see a bare arse vanishing out my window I’ll know to just lie back and await salvation.’

They looked at each other in silence, while outside in the street the hanging crowd started to drift away. Then he sank into a chair facing her. ‘I’m fucking ashamed of myself.’

‘That’s a great comfort. I’ll use your shame as a poultice on my grazes.’

‘I’ve got no excuse.’

‘And yet I feel one’s coming.’

His turn to grimace. ‘I’m a coward, simple as that. I’ve been running away so long it’s come to be a habit. Not easy, changing old habits. However much we might—’

‘Don’t bother.’ She gave a long, pained sigh. ‘I got low expectations. To be fair, you already exceeded ’em once when you paid your debt. So you tend to the cowardly. Who doesn’t? You ain’t the brave knight and I ain’t the swooning maiden and this ain’t no storybook, that’s for sure. You’re forgiven. You can go your way.’ And she waved him out the door with the scabbed back of her hand.

That was closer to forgiveness than he could have hoped for, but he found he was not moving. ‘I don’t want to go.’

‘I’m not asking you to jump again, you can use the stairs.’

‘Let me make it right.’

She looked up at him from under her brows. ‘We’re heading into the mountains, Temple. That bastard Cantliss’ll show us where these Dragon People are, and we’re going to try and get my brother and sister back, and I can’t promise there’ll be anything made right at all. A few promises I can make—it’ll be hard and cold and dangerous and there won’t even be any windows to jump out of. You’ll be about as useful there as a spent match, and let’s neither one of us offend honesty by pretending otherwise.’

‘Please.’ He took a wheedling step towards her, ‘Please give me one more—’

‘Leave me be,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at him. ‘I just want to sit and hurt in peace.’

So that was all. Maybe he should have fought harder, but Temple had never been much of a fighter. So he nodded at the floor, and quietly shut the door behind him, and went back down the steps, and over to the counter.

‘Get what you wanted?’ asked Lamb.

‘No,’ said Temple, spilling a pocketful of coins across the wood. ‘What I deserved.’ And he started drinking.

He was vaguely aware of the dull thud of hooves out in the street, shouting and the jingle of harness. Some new Fellowship pulling into town. Some new set of forthcoming disappointments. But he was too busy with his own even to bother to look up. He told the man behind the counter to leave the bottle.

This time there was no one else to blame. Not God, not Cosca, certainly not Shy. Lamb had been right. The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are. Temple’s problem was Temple, and it always had been. He heard heavy footsteps, spurs jingling, calls for drink and women, but he ignored them, inflicted another burning glassful on his gullet, banged it down, eyes watering, reached for the bottle.

Someone else got there first.

‘You’d best leave that be,’ growled Temple.

‘How would I drink it then?’

At the sound of that voice a terrible chill prickled his spine. His eyes crawled to the hand on the bottle—aged, liver-spotted, dirt beneath the cracked nails, a gaudy ring upon the first finger. His eyes crawled past the grubby lacework on the sleeve, up the mud-spotted material, over the breastplate, gilt peeling, up a scrawny neck speckled with rash, and to the face. That awfully familiar, hollowed visage: the nose sharp, the eyes bright, the greyed moustaches waxed to curling points.

‘Oh God,’ breathed Temple.

‘Close enough,’ said Nicomo Cosca, and delivered that luminous smile of which only he was capable, good humour and good intentions radiating from his deep-lined face. ‘Look who it is, boys!’

At least two dozen well-known and deeply detested figures had made their way in after the Old Man. ‘Whatever are the odds?’ asked Brachio, showing his yellow teeth. He had a couple fewer knives in his bandolier than when Temple had left the Company, but was otherwise unchanged.

‘Rejoice, ye faithful,’ rumbled Jubair, quoting scripture in Kantic, ‘for the wanderer returns.’

‘Scouting, were you?’ sneered Dimbik, smoothing his hair down with a licked finger and straightening his sash, which had devolved into a greasy tatter of indeterminate colour. ‘Finding us a path to glory?’

‘Ah, a drink, a drink, a drink…’ Cosca took a long and flamboyant swig from Temple’s bottle. ‘Did I not tell you all? Wait long enough and things have a habit of returning to their proper place. Having lost my Company, I was for some years a penniless wanderer, buffeted by the winds of fate, most roughly buffeted, Sworbreck, make a note of that.’ The writer, whose hair had grown considerably wilder, clothes shabbier, nostril rims pinker and hands more tremulous since last they met, fumbled for his pencil. ‘But here I am, once more in command of a band of noble fighting men! You will scarcely believe it, but Sergeant Friendly was at one time forced into the criminal fraternity.’ The neckless sergeant hoisted one brow a fraction. ‘But he now stands beside me as the staunch companion he was born to be. And you, Temple? What role could fit your high talents and low character so well as that of my legal advisor?’

Temple hopelessly shrugged. ‘None that I can think of.’

‘Then let us celebrate our inevitable reunion! One for me.’ The Old Man took another hefty swig, then grinned as he poured the smallest dribble of spirit into Temple’s glass. ‘And one for you. I thought you stopped drinking?’

‘It felt like a perfect moment to start again,’ croaked Temple. He had been expecting Cosca to order his death but, almost worse, it appeared the Company of the Gracious Hand would simply reabsorb him without breaking stride. If there was a God, He had clearly taken a set dislike to Temple over the past few years. But Temple supposed he could hardly blame Him. He was coming to feel much the same.

‘Gentlemen, welcome to Crease!’ The Mayor came sweeping through the doorway. ‘I must apologise for the mess, but we have—’ She saw the Old Man and her face drained of all colour. The first time Temple had seen her even slightly surprised. ‘Nicomo Cosca,’ she breathed.