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

Gorst’s eye gave the faintest twitch. ‘Ouch!’ called her father. ‘A touch to the lady.’

‘I want to know how it feels to be attacked by a dangerous man who means it.’ Savine set herself again, confident in her stance, confident in her grip, confident in her abilities. ‘Otherwise what’s the point?

Gorst glanced at her father. The Arch Lector pressed his lips thoughtfully together, then gave the faintest shrug. ‘She is here to learn.’ There was a hardness on his face she was not used to seeing. ‘Teach her.’

There was something ever so slightly different in the way Gorst took his mark, the way he twisted his feet into the faintly creaking boards, the way he worked his great shoulders and gripped his notched steels. His flat face hardly showed emotion, but it was as if a door had opened a chink, and beyond it Savine glimpsed something monstrous.

It is easy to smile at the bull you know is chained. When you realise of a sudden the chain is off, and its horns towards you, and its hoof scraping at the dust, the bull looks an entirely different animal.

She half-opened her mouth to say, ‘Wait.’

‘Begin.’

She had been ready for his strength. It was his speed that shocked her. He was on her before she could draw a breath. Her eyes went wide as his long steel whipped down and she had just the presence of mind to sidestep, bringing up her short steel to parry.

She had not been ready for his strength after all. The force of it numbed her arm from fingertips to shoulder, rattled the teeth in her head. She stumbled back, gasping, but his short steel was already coming at her, crashing into her long, ripping it from her numb fingers and sending it skittering across the floor. She flapped blindly with her short, all training and technique forgotten, saw a flash of metal—

His long steel thudded into her padded jacket and drove her breath out in a burning wheeze, nearly lifted her off her feet and sent her tottering sideways. A moment later, his shoulder rammed into her body. Her head snapped forward, her face crunched against something. The blunt top of his skull, maybe.

Was she in the air?

The wall smashed her in the back, the bare room reeled and, to her great surprise, she found herself on hands and knees, blinking at the floor.

Spots of blood pit-pattered onto the polished wood in front of her face.

‘Oh,’ she gasped.

Her ribs throbbed with each snatched breath, sick scalding the back of her throat. Her hand was all tangled up in the basketwork of her short steel, and she flopped it drunkenly around until the sword clattered onto the floor. The backs of her fingers were all grazed. She put them to her throbbing mouth and they came away bloody. Her hand was shaking. She was shaking all over.

It hurt. Her face, her side, her pride. But it was not the pain that really shook her. It was the powerlessness. The total misjudgement of her own abilities. The curtain had been twitched aside, and she saw just how fragile she was. How fragile anyone was, compared to a sword swung in anger. The world was a different place than it had been a few moments before, and not a better one.

Gorst squatted before her, notched steels in one hand. ‘I should warn you that I was still holding back.’

She managed to nod. ‘I see.’

There was no trace of guilt on her father’s face. Constant pain, as he always liked to say, had cured him of that. ‘Fencing is one thing,’ he said. ‘Actual violence quite another. Few of us are made for it. It is healthy to be disabused of our self-deceptions every now and then, even if it hurts.’

He smiled while she wiped the blood from her nose. Savine had given up trying to understand him. Most of the time, she was the one thing he loved in a world he despised. Then, on occasion, he treated her like a rival to be crushed.

‘If you are attacked by a dangerous man who means it, my advice is to run away.’ Gorst stood, offering his broad hand. ‘I expect he will destroy himself before too long.’

When he pulled her up, her legs were jelly. ‘Thank you, Colonel Gorst. That was … a very useful lesson.’ She wanted to cry. Or her body did, at least. She would not let it. She set her aching jaw and stuck her chin up at him. ‘Same time next week?’

Her father barked out a laugh and slapped the arm of his chair. ‘ That’s my girl!’

Promises

Broad lay awake, staring at the ceiling.

There was a crack, next to a yellowed blister on the limewash. Felt like he’d been staring at it all night. Staring at it as the sun crawled up over the narrow buildings, through the washing strung between them and into the narrow street, through the narrow window and into the one-room cellar they were living in.

Felt like he’d been staring at that crack for weeks. Turning things over in his mind. Fretting at them as if they were big choices he had to make. But they were big choices he’d already made, and he’d made the wrong ones, and now there was no changing them.

He took a heavy breath, felt it catch at the back of his throat. That oily scratch on the Valbeck air. That smell of shit and onions the cellar always had, no matter how Liddy scrubbed it. It was in the walls. It was in his skin.

Folk were setting off to work outside, boots tramping through the muck beyond the tiny window near the ceiling, shadows of their passing flickering on the mould-speckled wall.

‘How are your hands?’ murmured Liddy, twisting towards him on the narrow bed.

He winced as he worked the fingers. ‘Always sore in the mornings.’

Liddy took his big hand in her small ones, rubbing at his aching palm, at his throbbing knuckles. ‘May up already?’

‘She slipped out. Didn’t want to wake you.’

They lay there, she looking at him, he not daring to look at her. Not wanting to see the disappointment in her eyes. The worry. The fear. Even if it was only his own disappointment, and worry, and fear reflected back, like in a mirror.

‘It’s not fair on her,’ he whispered at that crack in the ceiling. ‘She should be having a life. Dancing, courting. Not waiting on some rich bastard.’

‘She doesn’t mind doing it. She wants to help. She’s a good girl.’

‘She’s the best thing I’ve done. She’s the only good thing I’ve done.’

‘You’ve done good, Gunnar. You’ve done lots of good.’

‘You don’t know what it was like, in Styria. What I was like—’

‘Then do good now.’ An edge of impatience in her voice, and she gave his hand one last squeeze and let it go. ‘You can’t change what’s past, can you? Only what’s next.’

He wanted to argue but couldn’t find a crack in her obvious good sense. He lay there sullen, listening to the shuffle of boots and the yammer of angry voices and a girl at the crossroads yelling out bad news for coppers. A bread riot in Holsthorm, and a plot to burn a mill in Keln, and unrest in every corner of Midderland, and war. War in the North.

‘It’s my fault,’ he muttered. Couldn’t find a way to attack Liddy, so he ambushed himself. ‘I should never have gone to war.’

‘I let you go. I let the farm go.’

‘The farm was done anyway. That life was done. Would’ve been better for you and May if I’d never come back.’

She put her hand on his cheek, firm. Turned his head so she was looking him straight in the face. ‘Don’t ever say that, Gunnar. Don’t ever say that.’

‘I killed ’em, Liddy,’ he whispered. ‘I killed ’em.’

She said nothing. What could she say?

‘I fucked it all,’ he said. ‘In one moment. Is there a thing I can’t ruin?’

‘There’s nothing can’t be ruined in a moment,’ said Liddy. ‘It all hangs by a thread, all the time. We’ve got to look forward now. That’s what you do. You move on.’