Joe Abercrombie - Sharp Ends

Gorst sighed. What difference does it really make, anyway? Would he be any less dead if it had been a Northern sword that split his head? He found himself reaching out, pressing at the dead man’s face, trying to make it register a more dignified expression, but however he kneaded the flesh it returned to that red-speckled leer.

Should I not be choked with guilt? The little fatherless boy? The penniless widow? The family all clustered around to hear happy news from the front, then weeping over the letter? Howling and beating their breasts! Verns, Perns, Smerns, will never come back for the winter festival! Gorst puffed out his cheeks. He felt nothing but mild annoyance, the constant background hum of his own disappointment and some slight uncomfortable sweatiness beneath his armour. What kind of monster am I, that a little sweat upsets me more than a murder?

Gorst frowned at the last few fleeing Northmen disappearing into the woods. He frowned at the men desperately trying to beat out the flames now wreathing several of the wagons. He frowned at a Union officer, belt hanging undone and trousers sagging, brandishing one bloody fist. He frowned more deeply still, over towards the small house near the top of the field, and its slightly open door. He stood, worked his fist around the grip of his long steel and started to trudge towards it.

Looked like the fight was done, best Tinder could tell from peering around the doorframe. Who’d won, it was hard to say. In his experience, and he’d more’n enough to tell, rare were the fights after which it was easy to say who’d won. Reasonably rare were the fights anyone in particular did actually win, for that matter. There were a few dead men around, he could see that, and quite a few more wounded, he could hear them. Dying horses, too. More than one of the wagons was on fire, burning hay-stalks fluttering down all around. The Northmen were driven off, the last of ’em shooting a lazy arrow or two from the treeline. But it seemed Tinder had come through it without anyone burning his house down-

‘Shit,’ he hissed between his teeth. The big Union man was walking towards the house. The one with the silly voice. The one called Gorst. Striding towards the house with his head down, heavy sword still held in one fist, heavy jaw clenched like a man with some black work in mind. ‘Shit.’

A thing like this turned men mean. Even men who might be decent under decent circumstances. Thing like this made men look for someone to blame, and Tinder knew there was no one better placed for that than him. Him and his children.

‘What’s happening?’

Tinder caught his daughter’s arm and started to guide her towards the back, only just forcing words out through the fear clamping his throat up. ‘Listen to me, Riam. You get by the back door, and ready to open it. You hear me shout, run. You run, d’you understand? Just like we talked about. You run over to Old Nairn’s house, and I’ll join up with you later.’

His daughter’s eyes were wide in her pale face. ‘Will you?’ By the dead, how much she looked like her mother.

‘Course I will!’ he said, touching her cheek. ‘I said it, didn’t I? Don’t cry, you got Cowan looking to you.’

She caught a hold of him, and he felt tears coming, too, as he pushed her off and towards the back door, and she clung to him and wouldn’t let him free, and he had to start prising her fingers away but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

‘You got to go,’ he whispered at her, ‘you got to go right-’

The door was flung open, banging hard against the wall and sending a shower of dust down from the rafters. The Union man was there, a great shadow framed in the bright square of the doorway. He took a quick step into the house and Tinder was facing him, jaw clenched and axe in one hand, Riam held back behind his body with the other. Gorst stopped still, face in shadow, brightness down the edge of his heavy jaw, and his armour, and his sword, spots of blood gleaming on all three.

There was a long, still silence. Tinder could hear Riam’s breathing, fast and scared, and Cowan’s, faintest edge of a whimper in it, and his own, growling in his throat, and he wondered with each one whether it would be his last.

Felt like an age they stood there, then finally the Union man spoke, that strange high voice again, horribly shrill in the silence. ‘Are you … all right?’

A pause. Then Tinder gave the slightest nod. ‘All fine,’ he said, surprised how firm his voice sounded with his heart going like a busy smithy.

‘I’m … very sorry.’ Gorst looked down, seemed to realise he had a sword in his hand, moved to sheathe it, then, maybe seeing it was bloody as a slaughterman’s knife, didn’t. He stood, posed awkwardly, sideways on. ‘About … this .’

Tinder swallowed. The axe-handle felt slippery with sweat in his palm. ‘Sorry about what?’

Gorst shrugged. ‘Everything.’ He took a step back then, just as Tinder was allowing himself to relax, stopped in the doorway, reached out and put something down on the corner of the table. ‘For the milk.’ Then he ducked under the low lintel and hurried down Tinder’s creaking steps.

Tinder closed his eyes and breathed for a moment, revelling in the feeling of having no fatal wounds. Then he stole over to the door, easing it nearly closed with his fingertips. He picked up the coin the Southerner had left. A disc of silver, edge gleaming in the shadows, heavy in his palm. A hundred times what that cup of milk had been worth. A thousand times. Enough to replace all Tinder’s lost chickens and maybe even some of his lost crops into the bargain. He slowly closed his fist around it, hardly able to stop himself from trembling now, then wiped his eyes on the back of his sleeve.

He turned to his children, both staring at him from the shadows. ‘You’d best get in the back,’ he said softly. ‘And stay out of sight.’

He narrowed his eyes against the brightness as he peered around the doorframe again. The big Union man was walking away, head down, trying to wipe his sword clean with a rag much too small for the task. Beyond him it looked like they’d already started digging graves. Digging ’em right in the middle of Tinder’s field, of course, and ripping up what was left of his barley doing it. Tinder set his axe gently down on the table, and shook his head, and spat.

Then he stood in his doorway, and watched the Union ruin his crop.

Talins, Autumn 587

Shev propped her elbows on the parapet, shoulders hunched around her ears and her fingers dangling, and gave a soft whistle. ‘You’ve got quite an audience for it, anyway.’

She was about as well travelled as any woman in the Circle of the World. As well travelled as only a woman who’d spent half her life running can be. But even she’d rarely seen such a crowd. Maybe in Adua, at the presentation of the firstborn son and heir of the King of the Union, though her mind had been more on her empty belly than his full streets. Maybe at the execution of Cabrian when she passed through Darmium, though she’d passed through in too much pain and far too much haste to be sure. Definitely at the Great Temple in Shaffa, when the Prophet Khalul himself had come down from the mountains to speak the prayers at the new year pilgrimage, and even Shev had felt just the tiniest bit pious, if only for a moment.

But she’d certainly seen nothing like it in Styria.

The whole of Talins was down there and plenty more besides, a multitude so vast and so tight-pressed it hardly looked as if it could be made up of individuals, but had become a single formless, mindless infestation. The steps of the ancient Senate House seethed and the great square boiled over into the adjoining streets, every window packed with faces, every roof lined with onlookers. On the Ringing Bridge, and the Bridge of Gulls, and the Bridge of Kisses, and the Bridge of Six Promises, you couldn’t have fitted one more person without squeezing another off into the water. A couple had dropped in already, only to drag themselves out downstream and force their dripping way back to a spot where they could witness the ceremony.