Джо Аберкромби - A Little Hatred - Book One (The Age of Madness)

‘Lovely. You can get back to your pissing now, Clover.’

‘That’s all right. Won’t need another for a while, I reckon.’

Rikke heard soft footfalls moving away. Perhaps she should’ve been frozen with fear. The dead knew she’d a right to be. But what she felt instead was a boiling fury. A fury that warmed her through despite the icy water frothing to her chin. A fury that tempted her to slip from the stream with her knife between her teeth and cut the bloody cross in Stour Nightfall right then and there.

Rikke’s father had always told her vengeance was a waste of effort. That letting it go was the strong thing, the wise thing, the right thing. That blood only led to more blood. But his lessons seemed far away now, meant for a warmer place. She clenched her jaw, and narrowed her eyes, and swore to herself that if she lived out the week, she’d make it her business to see Stour Nightfall fucked by a pig.

‘I’ll be honest, Wonderful,’ came the man’s voice, the one called Clover, speaking soft like he was sharing a secret, ‘I’m finding that bastard increasingly troubling.’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘Took it for an act at first, but I’m starting to think he’s everything he pretends to be.’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘Guts in a box? With herbs?’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘He’ll be king one o’ these days, will guts-in-a-box over yonder. King o’ the Northmen. Him.’

A long pause, then a weary grunt. ‘It’s a thing no right-thinking person could look forward to.’

Rikke could only agree. She thought she saw a hint of their reflections, dancing among the black branches in the water.

‘You see something down there?’

She stiffened, numb fingers curling tight around the grip of her knife. She saw the jaw muscles clench on the side of Isern’s face, blade of her spear sliding from the water, smeared with pitch so it wouldn’t catch the light.

‘What? Fish?’

‘Aye. Worth getting my rod, d’you think?’

The sound of Wonderful hawking up, then a glob of phlegm came spinning over from above and plopped into the water. ‘Nothing in this stream worth catching, I reckon.’

It Was Bad

The sun was setting when he came home, just a pink glimmer over black hills. The valley was in darkness but Broad could’ve walked the way blindfold. Knew every rut in the track, every stone in the tumbledown wall beside it.

All so familiar. But all so strange.

After two years away, you’d think a man would run headlong towards a place he loved, the people he loved, with the biggest smile his cheeks could hold. But Broad trudged slow as the condemned to the scaffold, and smiled about as much, too. The man who left had feared nothing. The one coming back was scared all the time. He hardly even knew what of. Himself, maybe.

When he saw the house, huddled among those bare trees, lamplight showing around the shutters, he had this strange urge to walk on. This strange thought he didn’t belong there any more. Not with what he’d seen. Not with what he’d done. What if he trod it in with him?

But the path leading past was a coward’s path. He clenched his aching fists. Gunnar Broad was no coward. Ask anyone.

Took all the courage he had to knock on that door, though. More than it had to climb the ladders at Borletta, or lead the charge into those pikes at Musselia, or even carry those men dying of the grip in the long winter after. But he knocked.

‘Who is it?’ Her voice, beyond the door, and it made him wince worse than the points of those pikes had. Till that moment, he’d been afraid she wouldn’t be there. That she’d have moved on. Forgotten him. Or maybe he’d been hoping she would’ve.

He could hardly find any voice at all. ‘It’s me, Liddy. It’s Gunnar.’

The door rattled open, and there she stood. She’d changed. Not near as much as he had, but she’d changed. Leaner, maybe. Harder, maybe. But when she smiled, it still lit the gloomy world, the way it always had.

‘What are you doing knocking at your own door, you big fool?’

And he just started crying. A jolting sob first that came all the way from his stomach. Then there was no stopping it. He fumbled his eye-lenses off with a trembling hand and all the tears he hadn’t shed in Styria, on account of Gunnar Broad being no coward, came burning down his crushed-up face.

Liddy stepped forward and he shrank away, hunched and hurting, arms up as if to fend her off. Like she was made of glass and might shatter in his hands. She caught him even so. Thin arms, but a hold he couldn’t break, and though she was a head shorter than him, she held his face against her chest, and kissed his head, and whispered, ‘Shhhh, now. Shhhhh.’

After a while, when his sobs started to calm, she put her hands on his cheeks and lifted his head so she was looking straight up at him, calm and serious.

‘It was bad, then, was it?’ she asked him.

‘Aye,’ he croaked out. ‘It was bad.’

She smiled. That smile that lit up the world. Close enough that even without his lenses he could actually see it. ‘But you’re home now.’

‘Aye. I’m home now.’ And he set to crying again.

The thunk of the axe made Broad flinch. He told himself it was the sound of honest work done well. He told himself he was home, safe, far from the battlefield. But maybe he’d brought the battlefield home with him. Maybe the battlefield was whatever dirt he stood on now. He tried to hide it under a joke.

‘I still say chopping wood is man’s work.’

May set another log on the block and hefted the axe. ‘When the men sod off to Styria, it all becomes women’s work.’

When he left, she’d been boyish, quiet, awkward. As if her skin didn’t fit her. She was bony still, but there was a quick strength in the way she moved. She’d grown up fast. She’d had to. Another thunk and two more neat pieces of wood went tumbling.

‘I should’ve stayed here and sent you off to fight,’ said Broad. ‘Maybe we’d have won.’

May smiled at him, and he smiled that he could make her smile, and wondered that someone who’d done all the bad he’d done could’ve had a hand in making something as good as she was.

‘Where’d you get the lenses?’ she asked.

Broad touched a finger to them. Sometimes forgot they were even on his face, till he took ’em off and everything beyond arm’s reach became a smudge. ‘I saved a man. Lord Marshal Mitterick.’

‘Sounds fancy.’

‘Commander o’ the army, no less. There was an ambush, and I happened to be there, and, well …’ He realised he’d bunched his fists trembling tight again and forced them open. ‘He thought I’d saved him. But I had to admit I’d no clue who he was till after the business was done, since I couldn’t see further than five strides. So he got me these as a gift.’ He took the lenses off, and breathed on them, and wiped them carefully with the hem of his shirt. ‘Probably cost six months of a soldier’s pay. Miracle o’ the modern age.’ And he hooked them back over his ears, and into the familiar groove across the bridge of his nose. ‘But I’m grateful, ’cause now I can appreciate my daughter’s beauty even halfway across the yard.’

‘Beauty.’ And she gave a scornful snort but looked just a bit pleased at the same time. The sun broke through and was warm on Broad’s smile, and for a moment it was like it had been before. As if he never went.

‘So you fought, then?’

Broad’s mouth felt dry of a sudden. ‘I fought.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Well …’ All that time spent dreaming of her face and now she was looking right at him, it was hard to meet her eye. ‘It was bad.’

‘I tell everyone my father’s a hero.’