Joe Abercrombie - The Heroes

They stopped in the long shadow of one of the stones, and Wonderful set her shield down against it and took a careful look around. Folk had their own worries though, and no one was paying ’em any mind.

She reached into her coat, pulled something out and slapped it into Yon’s hand. ‘There’s yours.’ Yon even had something like a grin as he closed his big fist around it, metal clicking inside. She slipped another into Scorry’s hand, a third for Flood. Then she offered one to Beck. A purse. And with plenty in it too, by the way it was bulging. He stood, staring at it, until Wonderful shoved it under his nose. ‘You get a half-share.’

‘No,’ said Beck.

‘You’re new, boy. A half-share is more’n fair—’

‘I don’t want it.’

They were all frowning at him now. ‘He don’t want it,’ muttered Scorry.

‘We should’ve done …’ Beck weren’t at all sure what they should’ve done. ‘The right thing,’ he finished, lamely.

‘The what ?’ Yon’s face screwed up with scorn. ‘I hoped to have heard the last of that shit! Spend twenty years in the black business and have naught to show for it but scars, then you can preach to me about the right fucking thing, you little bastard!’ He took a step at Beck but Wonderful held her arm out to stop him.

‘What kind of right ends up with more men dead than less?’ Her voice was soft, no anger in it. ‘Well? D’you know how many friends I lost the last few days? What’s right about that? Dow was done. One way or another, Dow was done. So we should’ve fought for him? Why? He’s nothing to me. No better’n Calder or anyone else. You saying we should’ve died for that, Red Beck?’

Beck paused for a moment, mouth open. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t want the money. Whose is it, even?’

‘Ours,’ she said, looking him right in the eye.

‘This ain’t right.’

‘Straight edge, eh?’ She slowly nodded, and her eyes looked tired. ‘Well. Good luck with that. You’ll need it.’

Flood looked a patch guilty, but he wasn’t giving aught back. Scorry had a little smile as he dropped his shield on the grass and sank cross-legged onto it, humming some tune in which noble deeds were done. Yon was frowning as he rooted through the purse, working out how much he’d got.

‘What would Craw have made o’ this?’ muttered Beck.

Wonderful shrugged. ‘Who cares? Craw’s gone. We got to make our own choices.’

‘Aye.’ Beck looked from one face to another. ‘Aye.’ And he walked off.

‘Where you going?’ Flood called after him.

He didn’t answer.

He passed by one of the Heroes, shoulder brushing the ancient rock, and kept moving. He hopped over the drystone wall, heading north down the hillside, shook the shield off his arm and left it in the long grass. Men stood about, talking fast. Arguing. One pulled a knife, another backing off, hands up. Panic spreading along with the news. Panic and anger, fear and delight.

‘What happened?’ someone asked him, grabbing at his cloak. ‘Did Dow win?’

Beck shook his hand off. ‘I don’t know.’ He strode on, almost breaking into a run, down the hill and away. He only knew one thing. This life weren’t for him. The songs might be full of heroes, but the only ones here were stones.

The Currents of History

Finree had gone where the wounded lay, to do what women were supposed to do when a battle ended. To soothe parched throats with water tipped to desperate lips. To bind wounds with bandages torn from the hems of their dresses. To calm the dying with soft singing that reminded them of Mother.

Instead of which she stood staring. Appalled by the mindless chorus of weeping, whining, desperate slobbering. By the flies, and the shit, and the blood-soaked sheets. By the calmness of the nurses, floating among the human wreckage as serene as white ghosts. Appalled more than anything else by the numbers. Laid out in ranks on pallets or sheets or cold ground. Companies of them. Battalions.

‘There are more than a dozen,’ a young surgeon told her.

‘There are scores,’ she croaked back, struggling not to cover her mouth at the stink.

‘No. More than a dozen of these tents. Do you know how to change a dressing?’

If there was such a thing as a romantic wound there was no room for them here. Every peeled-back bandage a grotesque striptease with some fresh oozing nightmare beneath. A hacked-open arse, a caved-in jaw with most of the teeth and half the tongue gone, a hand neatly split leaving only thumb and forefinger, a punctured belly leaking piss. One man had been cut across the back of the neck and could not move, only lie on his face, breath softly wheezing. His eyes followed her as she passed and the look in them made her cold all over. Bodies skinned, burned, ripped open at strange angles, their secret insides laid open to the world in awful violation. Wounds that would ruin men as long as they lived. Ruin those who loved them.

She tried to keep her eyes on her work, such as it was, chewing her tongue, trembling fingers fumbling with knots and pins. Trying not to listen to the whispers for help that she did not know how to give. That no one could give. Red spots appearing on the new bandages even before she finished, and growing, and growing, and she was forcing down tears, and forcing down sick, and on to the next, who was missing his left arm above the elbow, the left side of his face covered by bandages, and—

‘Finree.’

She looked up and realised, to her cold horror, that it was Colonel Brint. They stared at each other for what felt like for ever, in awful silence, in that awful place.

‘I didn’t know …’ There was so much she did not know she hardly knew how to continue.

‘Yesterday,’ he said, simply.

‘Are you …’ She almost asked him if he was all right, but managed to bite the words off. The answer was horribly obvious. ‘Do you need—’

‘Have you heard anything? About Aliz?’ The name alone was enough to make her guts cramp up even further. She shook her head. ‘You were with her. Where were you held?’

‘I don’t know. I was hooded. They took me away and sent me back.’ And oh, how glad she was that Aliz had been left behind in the dark, and not her. ‘I don’t know where she’ll be now …’ Though she could guess. Perhaps Brint could too. Perhaps he was spending all his time guessing.

‘Did she say anything?’

‘She was … very brave.’ Finree managed to force her face into the sickly semblance of a smile. That was what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Lie? ‘She said she loved you.’ She put a halting hand on his arm. The one he still had. ‘She said … not to worry.’

‘Not to worry,’ he muttered, staring at her with one bloodshot eye. Whether he was comforted, or outraged, or simply did not believe a word of her blame-shirking platitudes she could not tell. ‘If I could just know.’

Finree did not think it would help him to know. It was not helping her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, unable even to look at him any longer. ‘I tried … I did everything I could, but …’ That, at least, was true. Wasn’t it? She gave Brint’s limp arm one last squeeze. ‘I have to … get some more bandages—’

‘Will you come back?’

‘Yes,’ she said, lurching up, not sure if she was still lying, ‘of course I will.’ And she almost tripped over her feet in her haste to escape that nightmare, thanking the Fates over and over and over that they had chosen her for saving.

Sick of penance, she wandered up the hillside path towards her father’s headquarters. Past a pair of corporals dancing a drunken jig to the music of a squeaky fiddle. Past a row of women washing shirts in a brook. Past a row of soldiers queuing eagerly for the king’s gold, gleaming metal in the paymaster’s fingers glimpsed through the press of bodies. A small crowd of yammering salesmen, conmen and pimps had already gathered about the far end of the line like gulls about a patch of crumbs, realising, no doubt, that peace would soon put them out of business and give honest men the chance to thrive.