Joe Abercrombie - The Heroes

Still Yesterday

The blue skin stretched as the steel slid underneath it, paint flaking like parched earth, stubbly hairs shifting, red threads of veins in the wide whites near the corners of his eyes. Her teeth ground together as she pushed it in, pushed it in, pushed it in, coloured patterns bursting on the blackness of her closed lids. She could not get that damned music out of her head. The music the violinists had been playing. Were playing still, faster and faster. The husk-pipe they had given her had blunted the pain just as they said it would, but they had lied about the sleep. She twisted the other way, huddling under the blankets. As though you can roll over and leave a day of murder on the other side of the bed.

Candlelight showed around the door, through the cracks between the slats. As the daylight had showed through the door of the cold room where they were kept prisoner. Kneeling in the darkness, plucking at the knots with her nails. Voices outside. Officers, coming and going, speaking with her father. Talking of strategy and logistics. Talking of civilisation. Talking of which one of them Black Dow wanted.

What had happened blurred with what might have, with what should have. The Dogman arrived an hour earlier with his Northmen, saw off the savages before they left the wood. She found out ahead of time, warned everyone, was given breathless thanks by Lord Governor Meed. Captain Hardrick brought help, instead of never being heard from again, and the Union cavalry arrived at the crucial moment like they did in the stories. Then she led the defence, standing atop a barricade with sword aloft and a blood-spattered breastplate, like a lurid painting of Monzcarro Murcatto at the battle of Sweet Pines she once saw on the wall of a tasteless merchant. All mad, and while she spun out the fantasies she knew they were mad, and she wondered if she was mad, but she did it all the same.

And then she would catch something at the edge of her sight, and she was there, as it had been, on her back with a knee crushing her in the stomach and a dirty hand around her neck, could not breathe, all the sick horror that she somehow had not felt at the time washing over her in a rotting tide, and she would rip back the blankets and spring up, and pace round and round the room, chewing at her lip, picking at the scabby bald patch on the side of her head, muttering to herself like a madwoman, doing the voices, doing all the voices.

If she’d argued harder with Black Dow. If she’d pushed, demanded, she could have brought Aliz with her, instead of … in the darkness, her blubbering wail as Finree’s hand slipped out of hers, the door rattling shut. A blue cheek bulged as the steel slid underneath it, and she bared her teeth, and moaned, and clutched at her head, and squeezed her eyes shut.

‘Fin.’

‘Hal.’ He was leaning over her, candlelight picking out the side of his head in gold. She sat up, rubbing her face. It felt numb. As if she was kneading dead dough.

‘I brought you fresh clothes.’

‘Thank you.’ Laughably formal. The way one might address someone else’s butler.

‘Sorry to wake you.’

‘I wasn’t asleep.’ Her mouth still had a strange taste, a swollen feeling from the husk. The darkness in the corners of the room fizzed with colours.

‘I thought I should come … before dawn.’ Another pause. Probably he was waiting for her to say she was glad, but she could not face the petty politeness. ‘Your father has put me in charge of the assault on the bridge in Osrung.’

She did not know what to say. Congratulations. Please, no! Be careful. Don’t go! Stay here. Please. Please. ‘Will you be leading from the front?’ Her voice sounded icy.

‘Close enough to it, I suppose.’

‘Don’t indulge in any heroics.’ Like Hardrick, charging out of the door for help that could never come in time.

‘There’ll be no heroics, I promise you that. It’s just … the right thing to do.’

‘It won’t help you get on.’

‘I don’t do it to get on.’

‘Why, then?’

‘Because someone has to.’ They were so little alike. The cynic and the idealist. Why had she married him? ‘Brint seems … all right. Under the circumstances.’ Finree found herself hoping that Aliz was all right, and made herself stop. That was a waste of hope, and she had none to spare.

‘How should one feel when one’s wife has been taken by the enemy?’

‘Utterly desperate. I hope he will be all right.’

‘All right’ was such a useless, stilted expression. It was a useless, stilted conversation. Hal felt like a stranger. He knew nothing about who she really was. How can two people ever really know each other? Everyone went through life alone, fighting their own battle.

He took her hand. ‘You seem—’

She could not bear his skin against hers, jerked her fingers away as though she was snatching them from a furnace. ‘Go. You should go.’

His face twitched. ‘I love you.’

Just words, really. They should have been easy to say. But she could not do it any more than she could fly to the moon. She turned away from him to face the wall, dragging the blanket over her hunched shoulder. She heard the door shut.

A moment later, or perhaps a while, she slid out of bed. She dressed. She splashed water on her face. She twitched her sleeves down over the scabbing chafe marks on her wrists, the ragged cut up her arm. She opened the door and went through. Her father was in the room on the other side, talking to the officer she saw crushed by a falling cupboard yesterday, plates spilling across the floor. No. A different man.

‘You’re awake.’ Her father was smiling but there was a wariness to him, as if he was expecting her to burst into flames and he was ready to grab for a bucket. Maybe she would burst into flames. She would not have been surprised. Or particularly sorry, right then. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Well.’ Hands closed around her throat and she plucked at them with her nails, ears throbbing with her own heartbeat. ‘I killed a man yesterday.’

He stood, put his hand on her shoulder. ‘It may feel that way, but—’

‘It certainly does feel that way. I stabbed him, with a short steel I stole from an officer. I pushed the blade into his face. Into his face. So. I got one, I suppose.’

‘Finree—’

‘Am I going mad?’ She snorted up a laugh, it sounded so stupid. ‘Things could be so much worse. I should be glad. There was nothing I could do. What can anyone do? What should I have done?’

‘After what you have been through, only a madman could feel normal. Try to act as though … it is just another day, like any other.’

She took a long breath. ‘Of course.’ She gave him a smile which she hoped projected reassurance rather than insanity. ‘It is just another day.’

There was a wooden bowl, on a table, with fruit in it. She took an apple. Half-green, half-blood-coloured. She should eat while she could. Keep her strength up. It was just another day, after all.

Still dark outside. Guards stood by torchlight. They fell silent as she passed, watching while pretending not to watch. She wanted to spew all over them, but she tried to smile as if it was just another day, and they did not look exactly like the men who had strained desperately to hold the gates of the inn closed, splinters bursting around them as the savages hacked down the doors.

She stepped from the path and out across the hillside, pulling her coat tight around her. Wind-lashed grass sloped away into the darkness. Patches of sedge tangled at her boots. A bald man stood, coat-tails flapping, looking out across the darkened valley. He had one fist clenched behind him, thumb rubbing constantly, worriedly at forefinger. The other daintily held a cup. Above him, in the eastern sky, the first faint smudges of dawn were showing.