The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “Brought him back here?” sang Isern, in a voice leaking mockery. “Put a string on him like a puppy? How d’you keep a king o’ the Union secret? He’d have drawn trouble like a ram’s arse draws flies, d’you see. And folk here would’ve blamed you for that trouble and called you a selfish bitch thinking with her quim and said this is what you get when you’re fool enough to put a woman in charge, and they’d have been right. Selfishness and folly. All we’ve worked for would’ve done like cake in a hailstorm and turned to soggy shit. This way you’ve got peace. And not just for you. Peace for all.”

  The same arguments Isern had whispered in her ear that morning, while Orso lay sleeping in her bed, helpless, all his trust put in her. She’d been right then, and she was right now, and Rikke knew it, and it only made her grind her teeth harder.

  “I know that,” she snapped. “Said there was nothing else I could’ve done, didn’t I?”

  “Then why d’you look like you ate a thistle?”

  “I know it with my head.”

  “But what? Your heart hurts? Told you to make a stone of it, didn’t I?”

  “You might’ve uttered the phrase a time or two,” growled Rikke.

  Isern didn’t notice her bubbling anger or, more likely, didn’t care. “We need to get back to Skarling’s Hall.” And she planted her hands on her hips and frowned at the garden like it was a midden. “That’s where the big choices are made. That’s where Skarling turned down a crown and Bethod took one up. Where Black Dow stole the North from the Bloody-Nine. Where you stole it from Stour Nightfall. Every corner of the place, covered in great men’s footsteps.”

  “No.”

  Rikke was shocked, almost, that she said it. But the moment she made the choice, she was sure of it. “The only place those great men’s footsteps lead is round and round in circles of blood,” she said. “The only history there is violence and betrayal. Send to Hardbread and the rest. Tell ’em I’m staying here.”

  “The North is ruled from Skarling’s Chair.”

  “Same thing goes for great men’s arses as great men’s feet. It’s just a chair.”

  “The North is ruled from Carleon,” grumbled Isern, jutting her lip out in a mighty frown.

  “It was. Now it’ll be ruled from Uffrith. Close to the sea where we can reach out to other lands and I can take a paddle when I’m in the mood.”

  “Paddle, by the dead. Shivers, tell her.”

  But all Shivers did was shrug. “Great folk are great ’cause they plant new footsteps. Not ’cause they blunder through the same mistakes some other bastards made.”

  Isern made a long hiss of disgust. “Folk won’t like it. Won’t understand it.”

  “That’s their lookout,” said Rikke, waving it angrily away.

  “It’s a mistake.”

  “It’s mine to make.”

  “You don’t know what you—”

  “Enough!” snarled Rikke, standing up tall and facing Isern, fists clenched. “I’m Black Rikke and I’m the one with the Long Eye! I’m the one killed Stour Nightfall. I’m the one beat Black Calder. I make the choices. Not you. Me!” She snarled it in Isern’s face and stabbed at her chest with a finger. “If I choose to rule the North from a midden sitting on a piss-bucket, that’s how it’ll be. If I choose to follow the footsteps my father left in this garden, that’s how it’ll be. If I choose to make o’ my heart a bleeding fucking sponge, then, by all the dead, Isern-i-Phail, that,” and she spat the word like a curse, “is how it will be!”

  There was a long silence, then. Just the gulls calling, and the sea rolling in, and the faint pulse of angry blood in Rikke’s head. The smile started as a crinkle at the corners of Isern’s eyes, then it spread to her mouth, to her cheeks, till it was right across her face. “Finally! I’d a worry you’d never get there.”

  Rikke closed her eyes. “So that was a bloody lesson, too, was it?”

  “Aye, a little bit.” Isern grinned as she offered out a chagga pellet. “With any luck the last you’ll need.”

  Shivers slapped his thighs and stood with a grunt. “You really going to rule sitting on a piss-bucket?”

  “Maybe I will,” said Rikke, taking a breath and looking out to sea. “But tell Hardbread to bring Skarling’s Chair down here, just in case.”

  The Moment

  Clover took a deep breath and thumped on the damp green copper with his fist. He waited. He knocked again. He became wetter and wetter in the mist from the river. He raised his arm to knock again. A narrow hatch snapped open, and a pair of rheumy eyes stared at him coldly from between thick bars.

  “Who’s this now?”

  “Jonas Clover’s my name.”

  “Jona-you-what?”

  “Clover!” called Clover over the noise of rushing water. “I was sent for.”

  “Why?”

  Clover wondered if he might’ve somehow come to the wrong place. “To teach sword-work, I was told. That’s what I do. Teach sword-work.” Well, that and betray employers, but that probably wasn’t something a potential employer needed to hear.

  “And what was the name again?”

  “Jonas Clover!” he bellowed at the slot. Then added, quieter, “Used to be Steepfield.”

  “Steepfield, is it? You should have said.”

  Bolts clanked and the door creaked slowly open. An old man, bent under an old-fashioned suit of armour, frowned at him from the other side. He had a long sword far too heavy for him, point wobbling wildly as he strained to keep it level.

  Clover held up his hands. “I surrender.”

  The ancient gatekeeper was not amused as he wrestled the door shut and fumbled with the bolts. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

  He made quite the performance of sheathing his sword then led Clover past a set of strange houses half-dug into the steep rocks, up a narrow valley and out into a wide yard. Three great, tapering towers were built into the mountainside ahead, joined at their bases but separating higher up, covered in dark ivy. They looked old. So old you might’ve thought the mountain had been built about them, rather’n the other way around.

  “Quite a building to find all the way up here,” said Clover.

  “It’s the Great Northern Library,” grunted the gatekeeper. “Never seen a library before?”

  “Honestly… no.”

  Folk were busy with everyday chores in the yard. A thin woman was washing clothes in a tub. A thickset old man was splitting logs with practised swings of an axe. A mass of books were heaped and spread on a table where a girl with a mop of blonde curls flicked at an abacus with quick fingers. No one really looked like they had a pressing need for instruction with the blade.

  “Anyone ask for a sword teacher?” called Clover, hopefully.

  “I did.” The woodcutter neatly split one more log and left his axe buried in the block. He turned towards Clover, slapping dust from his hands. He looked maybe sixty but heavily built, with a strong face, deeply lined, and a close-cropped grey beard.

  “By the dead,” said Clover, finally placing him. “It’s the First o’ the Magi.”

  “None other.” The afternoon sun shone brightly off Bayaz’s tanned pate as he stepped forwards, took Clover’s right hand in both of his and pressed it warmly. “Welcome to the Great Northern Library, Jonas Steepfield. I understand there is no man alive who knows more about sword-work.”

  Clover raised his brows. “That was a long time ago. Call myself Clover these days.”

  “Ah. I fear I am out of date in all manner of ways.” And Bayaz smiled. A broad, white, beaming smile. His face lit up with friendly creases, but a hardness lingered around his eyes, deep-set and glistening green. Clover grinned back, but the conclusion he’d come to in Currahome—that Bayaz would be a bad enemy to have—was only reinforced. “The world moves along so quickly one can scarcely keep up.”

  “That why you keep the young folk around?” asked Clover, watching the blonde girl lick a finger and leaf frowning through one of the books.r />
  “What is the point of gathering knowledge if one does not pass it on? What is the point of growing old if one does not try to shape the future?”

  “That what you’re doing here? Shaping the future?”

  “Struggling to do so.” The wizard sighed. “I confess it has not been easy lately. People, Master Clover, make wretched building material. People and their restless whims, and their wilful intransigence, and their petty ambitions.” Bayaz bared his teeth, and Clover had to fight a strange desire to back away. “They simply refuse to see what is best for them. Imagine bricks that pounce on every opportunity to defy the architect and run off their own way.”

  “Frustrating,” murmured Clover.

  “But I never stop trying. Doing better next time, after all, that’s what life is.”

  “I reckon.” Honestly, Clover was somewhat troubled by the tone, along with the memory of Black Calder’s nervous hand-wringing around the man. But then he’d been serving dangerous bastards all his life. A master no one fears won’t take you far, and men who make the worst enemies, after all, can make the best friends. “I… er, have something for you.”

  “For me?” asked Bayaz.

  “Black Rikke didn’t want it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with it, but I thought…” And Clover drew out the chain that Stour Nightfall once wore, that Scale Ironhand once wore, that Bethod once wore, gold gleaming in the afternoon sun. “Maybe you would.”

  “Why, Master Clover,” breathed Bayaz as he took it, eyes fixed on the dangling jewel. “A gift fit for a king indeed! I know just the place for it, in good time.”

  Clover humbly shrugged. He was out of friends. If this bought him a safe place to sit, he’d consider it well worth the price. “Would’ve been poor manners to turn up empty-handed.”

  “Oh, we are of one mind!” said Bayaz, clapping a palm down on his shoulder and leading him across the yard towards the library. “Manners might be out of fashion in the North, but I want you to know that I appreciate them. Aided by people with good manners and good judgement, there is nothing that cannot be achieved. This promising young lady, for example, has but recently joined me.” Gesturing towards the blonde girl as they passed. “She proves to have a humbling work ethic and a marvellous facility with numbers, so I am teaching her the mysteries of finance.”

  “What’s that? A kind of magic?”

  “A very powerful kind. The magic of money. Which do you think rings better—Hildi dan Valint or Hildi dan Balk?”

  “What?”

  “Magic and money are two things I know a little about,” Bayaz was saying as he slipped Bethod’s chain into a pocket. “Kings, also, are an area of some expertise. But I must confess that when it comes to sword-work, I have always relied on others.”

  “Lucky for me, I guess. Who’s the student?”

  Bayaz led him down a set of steps worn almost to a ramp by time, through a low archway and out onto a paved shelf on the mountainside. It had only a crumbling wall for a parapet and a grand valley was spread out beyond it, the lake stretching away like a grey mirror, forest and mountains reflected in its still surface.

  A black-haired boy stood at the brink, framed by the view, scarred mouth fixed in a frown, arm up high, sword out straight, sinewy shoulders shining with sweat. He didn’t move a hair. Not a quiver. Like a boy carved from wood. Clover got the sense he’d been there, still, for a very long time.

  “I know this lad,” he murmured, though you might’ve called him a young man, now. “Black Calder had him around. Who is he?”

  “It is not so much who he is that interests me,” said Bayaz, “as who he might become.”

  “Shaping the future, eh?”

  “Precisely so.” There were a few training posts set up about the little yard, and Bayaz rubbed thoughtfully at the deep blade-gnawing on the nearest one. “To my unpractised eye, he seems a more than passing swordsman already.”

  “I’ve seen him spar and never saw more promise at the business. The dead know I could use the work, but I’m not sure how much I’ve got to teach him.”

  “Oh, I think you know far more than you pretend to. I need him to learn not only how to use the sword, but when. I want you to teach him the warrior’s lessons that his half-brother refused to learn. This is Jonas Clover!”

  The lad slowly lowered the sword, and shook out his shoulders, and wiped sweat from his brow, and flicked it away, and finally looked over. “I remember.”

  “I have brought him here to teach you sword-work.”

  The lad didn’t laugh, at least. Just gave Clover a long look with those pale eyes, like he was the master and Clover the pupil he was thinking of taking on.

  “I will leave the two of you to get acquainted.” Bayaz leaned close and gave Clover’s shoulder a parting pat. “Dinner in an hour.”

  They stood there, in silence, for a while, and the wind came up from the valley and stirred the grass in the cracks between the stones. Then Clover planted his hands on his hips and grinned out towards the lake. “Quite the view. I could look at that all day.”

  The lad didn’t speak.

  Clover wandered to the wall of the library, so ancient and lichen-covered that it looked to be one with the mountainside, put his back to it and slid down till his arse hit the ground. “What should I call you?”

  The lad shrugged.

  “You’ve got a scarred lip,” said Clover, settling himself back against the old stones, warm from a day in the sun. “I could call you shit-mouth. How about that?”

  The lad shrugged again.

  “I’m not really going to call you shit-mouth. That was a test.”

  “Did I pass?”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s why.”

  The lad frowned down at him, sword hanging from his hand.

  “You look puzzled,” said Clover.

  “A warrior hits first,” said the lad, like they were words he’d learned by heart. “Hits hardest. A warrior has his sword always in his hand.”

  Clover slowly nodded. “I can think of plenty of warriors who’d agree. Great fighters. Famous names. Shama Heartless, you ever hear o’ him?”

  “Aye,” said the lad.

  “Black Dow, or the Bloody-Nine?”

  “’Course,” said the lad.

  “How about Stour Nightfall?”

  The lad narrowed his pale eyes a little.

  “Can you tell me what all those fearsome bastards have in common?”

  There was a pause, then, and a bird nesting somewhere among the library’s roofs tooted gently at the dreamy afternoon.

  “Dead,” said the lad.

  Clover grinned. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to have a quick pupil. The swordsman’s greatest ambition, if you’re asking me, should be not to join those heroes in the mud.”

  “We all meet the Great Leveller.”

  “’Course we do.” Clover sat forwards to shrug his cloak off, the wolfskin cloak Stour used to wear, a touch bedraggled now from hard use, and started rolling it up. “But I’d favour putting him off as long as possible. How about you? Planning to rush at him, trousers down?”

  The lad’s black brows drew in slightly as he thought about it.

  “In the end… the only thing a man can really do… is pick his moment. Watch for the opening, and recognise it when it comes, and seize it.” And Clover snatched at a handful o’ nothing and shook his fist. “Picking your moment. That’s the secret. You understand?”

  The boy nodded, solemn as a grave-guest, and it seemed like all the wisdom Stour wouldn’t take in a hundred tellings this lad sucked straight up like a sponge. “I think so.”

  “I think so, too. Now why don’t you show me your fearsome skills on one o’ them posts?”

  Clover shoved the roll he’d made of his cloak behind his head as a pillow, and he crossed one boot over the other. He watched the lad’s sword darting. He watched the blade flash and flicker. He watched
the evening sun gleam on the lake.

  “That’s good!” he called. “That’s damn good. Pick your moment.” And Clover gave a contented sigh, and closed his eyes. Listened to that bird tooting high above. Listened to the wind whispering in the grass. Listened to the click and scrape of steel on wood.

  Could’ve worked out worse, he supposed.

  A Little Private Hanging

  It was a highly exclusive affair.

  No carnival atmosphere. No crowds of baying commoners. Certainly no tittering whores in attendance. A small cobbled yard behind the House of Questions, rather than one of the wide public squares in the heart of the city. The tone was sombre, one would have to say. But for Orso to lift the mood seemed a lot to ask.

  “I bloody hate hangings,” he said, frowning up at the scaffold.

  The innovations had all been rolled back. No pulleys, no cranes, no machinery. They were gone the way of Risinau, and Judge, and the Commons’ Round, and the People’s Inspectorate, and the Great Change as a whole. Just the gallows, and a rope, and a trapdoor, and a lever to open it.

  And a prisoner to hang, of course. It would be a hell of a poor occasion without one of those.

  A gentle breeze washed through the yard, hardly any smoke on the air, and it tasted sweet. Perhaps your last breaths always do. Orso wasn’t afraid. Not even watching the noose gently swing. But then he’d always had a habit of being brave at the least appropriate times. He had blundered blindly from one mistake to another, buffeted by forces he had barely perceived, let alone understood, like a blind man in a prizefight. There was so much he had failed at. So often he had disappointed. This, at least, he was determined to do well.

  “No point hanging around, is there?” he said, and he left the guards behind him and trotted jauntily up the steps.

  He had tried to do the right thing, he thought, in his own rather ineffectual way, but it was strange how circumstances would rarely let one be the hero, however much one might want to be. However much one might deserve to be. Still, no doubt everyone thinks they are entitled to the prizes. The Young Lion had no doubts about it, that was clear.