Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

Logen sat alone beside his scrub of a flame, and rubbed gently at his right palm. It was sore, pink, stiff from gripping the rough hilt of the Maker’s sword all the long day, blistered round the joints of his fingers. His head was bruised all over. The cut on his leg was burning some, but he could still walk well enough. He could’ve ended up a lot worse. There were more than three score buried now, and they were putting them in pits for a dozen each, just as Crummock had said they would. Three score and more gone back to the mud, and twice that many hurt, a lot of them bad.

Over by the big fire, he could hear Dow growling about how he’d stabbed some Easterner in the fruits. He could hear Tul’s rumbling laughter. Logen hardly felt like a part of it, any more. Maybe he never had been. A set of men he’d fought and beaten. Lives he’d spared, for no reason that made sense. Men who’d hated him worse than death, but been bound to follow. Hardly more his friends than Shivers was. Perhaps the Dogman was his only true friend in all the wide Circle of the World, and even in his eyes, from time to time, Logen thought he could see that old trace of doubt, that old trace of fear. He wondered if he could see it now, as the Dogman came up out of the darkness.

“You think they’ll come tonight?” he asked.

“He’ll give it a go in the dark sooner or later,” said Logen, “but my guess is he’ll leave it ’til we’re a bit more worn down.”

“You get more worn down than this?”

“I guess we’ll find out.” Logen grimaced as he stretched out his aching legs. “It really seems like this shit used to be easier.”

Dogman gave a snort. Not a laugh, really. More just letting Logen know he’d heard. “Memory can work some magic. You remember Carleon?”

“Course I do.” Logen looked down at his missing finger, and he bunched his fist, so it looked the same as it always had. “Strange, how it all seemed so simple back in them days. Who you fought for, and why. Can’t say it ever bothered me.”

“It bothered me,” said Dogman.

“It did? You should’ve said something.”

“Would you have listened?”

“No. I guess not.”

They sat there for a minute, in silence.

“You reckon we’ll live through this?” asked the Dogman.

“Maybe. If the Union turns up tomorrow, or the day after.”

“You think they will?”

“Maybe. We can hope.”

“Hoping for a thing don’t make it happen.”

“The opposite, usually. But every day we’re still alive is a chance. Maybe this time it’ll work.”

Dogman frowned at the shifting flames. “That’s a lot of maybes.”

“That’s war.”

“Who’d have thought we’d be relying on a bunch of Southerners to solve our problems for us, eh?”

“I reckon you solve ’em any way you can. You have to be realistic.”

“Being realistic, then. You reckon we’ll live through this?”

Logen thought about it for a while. “Maybe.”

Boots squelched in the soft earth, and Shivers walked up quiet towards the fire. There was a grey bandage wrapped round his head, where he’d taken that cut, and his hair hung down damp and greasy from under it.

“Chief,” he said.

Dogman smiled as he got up, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Alright, Shivers. That was good work, today. I’m glad you came over, lad. We all are.” He gave Logen a long look. “All of us. Think I might try and get a rest for a minute. I’ll see you boys when they come again. Most likely it’ll be soon enough.” He walked off into the night, and left Shivers and Logen staring one at the other.

Probably Logen should have got his hand near to a knife, watched for sudden moves and all the rest. But he was too tired and too sore for it. So he just sat there, and watched. Shivers pressed his lips together, squatting down beside the fire opposite, slow and reluctant, as if he was about to eat something he knew was rotten, but had no choice.

“If I’d have been in your place,” he said, after a while, “I would’ve let those bastards kill me today.”

“Few years ago I’m sure I would’ve.”

“What changed?”

Logen frowned as he thought about it. Then he shrugged his aching shoulders. “I’m trying to be better than I was.”

“You think that’s enough?”

“What else can I do?”

Shivers frowned at the fire. “I wanted to say…” He worked the words around in his mouth and spat them out. “That I’m grateful, I guess. You saved my life today. I know it.” He wasn’t happy about saying it, and Logen knew why. It’s hard to be done a favour by a man you hate. It’s hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you’ve had him for long enough.

So Logen shrugged again. “It’s nothing. What a man should do for his crew, that’s all. I owe you a lot more. I know that. I can never pay what I owe you.”

“No. But it’s some kind o’ start at it, far as I’m concerned.” Shivers got up and took a step away. Then he stopped, and turned back, firelight shifting over one side of his hard, angry face. “It ain’t ever as simple, is it, as a man is just good or bad? Not even you. Not even Bethod. Not anybody.”

“No.” Logen sat and watched the flames moving. “No, it ain’t ever that simple. We all got our reasons. Good men and bad men. It’s all a matter of where you stand.”

One of Jezal’s countless footmen perched on the stepladder, and lowered the crown with frowning precision onto his head, its single enormous diamond flashing pricelessly bright. He gave it the very slightest twist back and forth, the fur-trimmed rim gripping Jezal’s skull. He climbed back down, whisked the stepladder away, and surveyed the result. So did half a dozen of his fellows. One of them stepped forward to tweak the precise positioning of Jezal’s gold-embroidered sleeve. Another grimaced as he flicked an infinitesimal speck of dust from his pure white collar.

“Very good,” said Bayaz, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “I believe that you are ready for your wedding.”

The peculiar thing, now that Jezal had a rare moment to think about it, was that he had not, in any way of which he was aware, agreed to get married. He had neither proposed nor accepted a proposal. He had never actually said “yes” to anything. And yet here he was, preparing to be joined in matrimony in a few short hours, and to a woman he scarcely knew at all. It had not escaped his notice that in order to have been managed so quickly the arrangements must have been well underway before Bayaz had even suggested the notion. Perhaps before Jezal had even been crowned… but he supposed it was not so very surprising. Since his enthronement he had drifted helplessly through one incomprehensible event after another, like a man shipwrecked and struggling to keep his head above water, out of sight of land, dragged who knew where by unseen, irresistible currents. But considerably better dressed.

He was gradually starting to realise that the more powerful a man became, the fewer choices he really had. Captain Jezal dan Luthar had been able to eat what he liked, to sleep when he liked, to see who he liked. His August Majesty King Jezal the First, on the other hand, was bound by invisible chains of tradition, expectation, and responsibility, that prescribed every aspect of his existence, however small.

Bayaz took a discerning step forward. “Perhaps the top button undone here—”

Jezal jerked away with some annoyance. The attention of the Magus to every tiny detail of his life was becoming more than tiresome. It seemed that he could scarcely use the latrine without the old bastard poking through the results. “I know how to button a coat!” he snapped. “Should I expect to find you here tonight when I bring my new wife to our bed-chamber, ready to instruct me on how best to use my prick?”