The Collected Joe Abercrombie (201 page)

He knelt there, water running down his face, dragging in air. More of them coming at him, and nowhere to go. His leg was hurting, no strength in his arms. His head felt light, like it might float away. No strength left to fight with, hardly. More of them coming at him, one at the front with thick leather gloves, a big maul in his hands, its heavy spiked head red with blood. Looked like he’d already broken one skull with it, and Logen’s would be next. Then Bethod would’ve won, at last.

Logen felt a cold feeling stab at his gut. A hard, empty feeling. His knuckles clicked as the muscles in his hand went rigid, gripping the sword painful tight. ‘No!’ he hissed. ‘No, no, no.’ But he might as well have said no to the rain. That cold feeling spread out, up through Logen’s face, tugging his mouth into a bloody smile. Gloves came closer, his maul scraping against the wet stone. He glanced over his shoulder.

His head came apart, spraying out blood. Crummock-i-Phail roared like an angry bear, fingerbones flying round his neck, his great hammer whirling round and round his head in huge circles. The next Easterner tried to back away, holding up his shield. Crummock’s hammer swung two-handed, ripped his legs out from under him, sent him tumbling over and over and onto his face on the stone. The big hillman sprang up onto the walkway, nimble as a dancer for all his great bulk, caught the next man a blow in the stomach that hurled him through the air and left him crumpled against the battlements.

Logen watched one set of savages murdering another, breathing hard as Crummock’s boys whooped and screamed, paint on their faces smeared in the rain. They flooded up onto the wall, hacking at the Easterners with their rough swords and their bright axes, driving them back and shoving their ladders away, flinging their bodies over the parapet and into the mud below.

He knelt there, in a puddle, leaning on the cold grip of Kanedias’ sword, its point dug into the stone walkway. He bent over and breathed hard, his cold gut sucking in and out, his raw mouth salty, his nose full of the stink of blood. He hardly dared to look up. He clenched his teeth, and closed his eyes, and hawked sour spit up onto the stones. He forced that cold feeling in his stomach down and it slunk away, for now, at least, and left him with only pain and weariness to worry about.

‘Looks like those bastards had enough,’ came Crummock’s laughing voice from out of the drizzle. The hillman tipped his head back, mouth open, stuck his tongue out into the rain, then licked his lips. ‘That was some good work you put in today, Bloody-Nine. Not that it ain’t my special pleasure to watch you at it, but I’m glad to get my share.’ He hefted his great long hammer up in one hand and spun it round as if it was a willow switch, peering at a great bloody stain on the head with a clump of hair stuck to it, then grinning wide.

Logen looked up at him, hardly enough strength left to lift his head. ‘Oh aye. Good work. We’ll go at the back tomorrow though, eh, since you’re that keen? You can take the fucking wall.’

The rain was slacking, down to a thin spit and drizzle. A glimmer of fading sunlight broke through the sagging clouds, bringing Bethod’s camp back into view, his muddy ditch and his standards, tents scattered across the valley. Dogman squinted, thought he could see a few men stood around the front watching the Easterners run back, a glint of sunlight on something. An eye-glass maybe, like the Union used, usually to look the wrong way. Dogman wondered if it was Bethod down there, watching it all happen. It would be just like Bethod to have got himself an eye-glass.

He felt a big hand clap him on the shoulder. ‘We gave ’em a slap, chief,’ rumbled Tul, ‘and a good ’un!’

There was small doubt o’ that. There were a lot of dead Easterners scattered in the mud round the base of that wall, a lot of wounded carried by their mates, or dragging themselves slow and painful back towards their lines. But there were a fair few killed on their side of the wall as well. Dogman could see a stack of muddy corpses over near the back of the fortress where they were doing the burying. He could hear someone screaming. Hard and nasty screams, the kind a man makes when he needs a limb taken off, or he’s had one off already.

‘We gave ’em a slap, aye,’ Dogman muttered, ‘but they gave us one as well. I’m not sure how many slaps we’ll stand.’ The barrels that carried their arrows were no more’n half full now, the rocks close to run out. ‘Best send some boys to pick over the dead!’ he shouted to the men over his shoulder. ‘Get what we can while we can!’

‘Can’t have too many arrows at a time like this,’ said Tul. ‘Number o’ those Crinna bastards we killed today, I reckon we’ll have more spears tonight than we had this morning.’

Dogman managed to put a grin on his face. ‘Nice of ’em to bring us something to fight with.’

‘Aye. Reckon they’d get bored right quick if we ran out of arrows.’ Tul laughed, and he clapped the Dogman on the back harder than ever, hard enough to make his teeth rattle. ‘We did well! You did well! We’re still alive, ain’t we?’

‘Some of us are.’ Dogman looked down at the corpse of the one man who’d died up on the tower. An old boy, hair mostly grey, a rough-made arrow in his neck. Bad luck, that had been, to catch a shaft on a day as wet as today, but you’re sure to get a measure of luck in a fight, both good and bad. He frowned down into the darkening valley. ‘Where the hell are the Union at?’

At least the rain had stopped. You have to be grateful for the small things in life, like some smoky kind of a fire after the wet. You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.

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.’

The Perfect Couple

O
ne 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.