The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘What difference?’

  Hardbread snorted. ‘Aye. Look after yourself, anyway.’ And he stomped down the steps and out into the gathering dark.

  Craw looked after him for a moment, wondering whether he was happy the thumping of his heart was softening or sad. Weighing his sword in his hand, remembering how it felt to hold it. Different from a hammer, that was sure. He remembered Threetrees giving it to him. The pride he’d felt, like a fire in him. Smiled in spite of himself to remember what he used to be. How prickly and wild and hungry for glory, not a straight edge on him anywhere.

  He looked around at that one room, and the few things in it. He’d always thought retiring would be going back to his life after some nightmare pause. Some stretch of exile in the land of the dead. Now it came to him that all his life worth living had happened while he was holding a sword.

  Standing alongside his dozen. Laughing with Whirrun, and Brack, and Wonderful. Clasping hands with his crew before the fight, knowing he’d die for them and they for him. The trust, the brotherhood, the love, knit closer than family. Standing by Threetrees on the walls of Uffrith, roaring their defiance at Bethod’s great army. The day he charged at the Cumnur. And at Dunbrec. And in the High Places, even though they lost. Because they lost. The day he earned his name. Even the day he got his brothers killed. Even when he’d stood at the top of the Heroes as the rain came down, watching the Union come, knowing every dragged-out moment might be the last.

  Like Whirrun had said – you can’t live more’n that. Certainly not by fixing a chair.

  ‘Ah, shit,’ he muttered, and he grabbed his sword-belt and his coat, threw ’em over his shoulder and strode out, slapping the door shut. Didn’t even bother to lock it behind him.

  ‘Hardbread! Wait up!’

  Acknowledgements

  As always, four people without whom:

  Bren Abercrombie, whose eyes are sore from reading it.

  Nick Abercrombie, whose ears are sore from hearing about it.

  Rob Abercrombie, whose fingers are sore from turning the pages.

  Lou Abercrombie, whose arms are sore from holding me up.

  Then, my heartfelt thanks:

  To all the lovely and talented folks at my UK Publisher, Gollancz, and their parent Orion, particularly Simon Spanton, Jo Fletcher, Jon Weir, Mark Stay and Jon Wood. Then, of course, all those who’ve helped make, publish, publicise, translate and above all sell my books wherever they may be around the world.

  To the artists responsible for somehow making me look classy: Didier Graffet, Dave Senior and Laura Brett.

  To editors across the Pond: Devi Pillai and Lou Anders.

  To other hard-bitten professionals who’ve provided various mysterious services: Robert Kirby, Darren Turpin, Matthew Amos, Lionel Bolton.

  To all the writers whose paths have crossed mine either electronically or in the actual flesh, and who’ve provided help, laughs and a few ideas worth stealing, including but by no means limited to: James Barclay, Mark Billingham, Peter V. Brett, Stephen Deas, Roger Levy, Tom Lloyd, Joe Mallozzi, George R. R. Martin, John Meaney, Richard Morgan, Mark Charan Newton, Garth Nix, Adam Roberts, Pat Rothfuss, Marcus Sakey, Wim Stolk and Chris Wooding.

  And lastly, yet firstly:

  She who wields the Father of Red Pens, which cannot be drawn without being blooded, a fearless champion on the battlefield of publishing, my editor, Gillian Redfearn. I mean, someone’s got to do the actual fighting …

  For Teddy

  And Clint Eastwood

  But since Clint probably ain’t that bothered

  Mostly Teddy

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I: TROUBLE

  Some Kind of Coward

  The Easy Way

  Just Men

  The Best Man

  All Got a Past

  The Stolen

  II: FELLOWSHIP

  Conscience and the Cock-Rot

  New Lives

  The Rugged Outdoorsman

  Driftwood

  Reasons

  Oh God, the Dust

  Sweet’s Crossing

  Dreams

  The Wrath of God

  The Practical Thinkers

  The Fair Price

  III: CREASE

  Hell on the Cheap

  Plots

  Words and Graces

  That Simple

  Yesterday’s News

  Blood Coming

  The Sleeping Partner

  Fun

  High Stakes

  Old Friends

  Nowhere to Go

  IV: DRAGONS

  In Threes

  Among the Barbarians

  Bait

  Savages

  The Dragon’s Den

  Greed

  V: TROUBLE

  The Tally

  Going Back

  Answered Prayers

  Sharp Ends

  Nowhere Fast

  Times Change

  The Cost

  Last Words

  Some Kind of Coward

  Acknowledgements

  Some Kind of Coward

  ‘Gold.’ Wist made the word sound like a mystery there was no solving. ‘Makes men mad.’

  Shy nodded. ‘Those that ain’t mad already.’

  They sat in front of Stupfer’s Meat House, which might’ve sounded like a brothel but was actually the worst place to eat within fifty miles, and that with some fierce competition. Shy perched on the sacks in her wagon and Wist on the fence, where he always seemed to be, like he’d such a splinter in his arse he’d got stuck there. They watched the crowd.

  ‘I came here to get away from people,’ said Wist.

  Shy nodded. ‘Now look.’

  Last summer you could’ve spent all day in town and not seen two people you didn’t know. You could’ve spent some days in town and not seen two people. A lot can change with a few months and a gold find. Now Squaredeal was bursting at its ragged seams with bold pioneers. One-way traffic, headed west towards imagined riches, some charging through fast as the clutter would allow, some stopping off to add their own share of commerce and chaos. Wagon-wheels clattered, mules nickered and horses neighed, livestock honked and oxen bellowed. Men, women and children of all races and stations did plenty of their own honking and bellowing too, in every language and temper. It might’ve been quite the colourful spectacle if everywhere the blown dust hadn’t leached each tone to that same grey ubiquity of dirt.

  Wist sucked a noisy mouthful from his bottle. ‘Quite the variety, ain’t there?’

  Shy nodded. ‘All set on getting something for nothing.’

  All struck with a madness of hope. Or of greed, depending on the observer’s faith in humanity, which in Shy’s case stood less than brim-full. All drunk on the chance of reaching into some freezing pool out there in the great empty and plucking up a new life with both hands. Leaving their humdrum selves behind on the bank like a shed skin and taking a short cut to happiness.

  ‘Tempted to join ’em?’ asked Wist.

  Shy pressed her tongue against her front teeth and spat through the gap between. ‘Not me.’ If they made it across the Far Country alive, the odds were stacked high they’d spend a winter up to their arses in ice water and dig up naught but dirt. And if lightning did strike the end of your spade, what then? Ain’t like rich folk got no trouble.

  There’d been a time Shy thought she’d get something for nothing. Shed her skin and step away smiling. Turned out sometimes the short cut don’t lead quite where you hoped, and cuts through bloody country, too.

  ‘Just the rumour o’ gold turns ’em mad.’ Wist took another swallow, the knobble on his scrawny neck bobbing, and watched two would-be prospectors wrestle over the last pickaxe at a stall while the trader struggled vainly to calm them. ‘Imagine how these bastards’ll act if they ever close hands around a nugget.’

  Shy didn’t have to imagine. She’d seen it, and didn’t prize the me
mories. ‘Men don’t need much beckoning on to act like animals.’

  ‘Nor women neither,’ added Wist.

  Shy narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Why look at me?’

  ‘You’re foremost in my mind.’

  ‘Not sure I like being that close to your face.’

  Wist showed her his tombstone teeth as he laughed, and handed her the bottle. ‘Why don’t you got a man, Shy?’

  ‘Don’t like men much, I guess.’

  ‘You don’t like anyone much.’

  ‘They started it.’

  ‘All of ’em?’

  ‘Enough of ’em.’ She gave the mouth of the bottle a good wipe and made sure she took only a sip. She knew how easy she could turn a sip into a swallow, and the swallow into a bottle, and the bottle into waking up smelling of piss with one leg in the creek. There were folk counting on her, and she’d had her fill of being a disappointment.

  The wrestlers had been dragged apart and were spitting insults each in their own tongue, neither quite catching the details but both getting the gist. Looked like the pick had vanished in the commotion, more’n likely spirited away by a cannier adventurer while eyes were elsewhere.

  ‘Gold surely can turn men mad,’ muttered Wist, all wistful as his name implied. ‘Still, if the ground opened and offered me the good stuff I don’t suppose I’d be turning down a nugget.’

  Shy thought of the farm, and all the tasks to do, and all the time she hadn’t got for the doing of ’em, and rubbed her roughed-up thumbs against her chewed-up fingers. For the quickest moment a trek into the hills didn’t sound such a mad notion after all. What if there really was gold up there? Scattered on some stream bed in priceless abundance, longing for the kiss of her itchy fingertips? Shy South, luckiest woman in the Near Country . . .

  ‘Hah.’ She slapped the thought away like a bothersome fly. High hopes were luxuries she couldn’t stretch to. ‘In my experience, the ground ain’t giving aught away. No more’n the rest of us misers.’

  ‘Got a lot, do you?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Experience.’

  She winked as she handed his bottle back. ‘More’n you can imagine, old man.’ A damn stretch more’n most of the pioneers, that was sure. Shy shook her head as she watched the latest crowd coming through – a set of Union worthies, by their looks, dressed for a picnic rather than a slog across a few hundred miles of lawless empty. Folk who should’ve been satisfied with the comfortable lives they had, suddenly deciding they’d take any chance at grabbing more. Shy wondered how long it’d be before they were limping back the other way, broken and broke. If they made it back.

  ‘Where’s Gully at?’ asked Wist.

  ‘Back on the farm, looking to my brother and sister.’

  ‘Haven’t seen him in a while.’

  ‘He ain’t been here in a while. Hurts him to ride, he says.’

  ‘Getting old. Happens to us all. When you see him, tell him I miss him.’

  ‘If he was here he’d have drunk your bottle dry in one swallow and you’d be cursing his name.’

  ‘I daresay.’ Wist sighed. ‘That’s how it is with things missed.’

  By then, Lamb was fording the people-flooded street, shag of grey hair showing above the heads around him for all his stoop, an even sorrier set to his heavy shoulders than usual.

  ‘What did you get?’ she asked, hopping down from the wagon.

  Lamb winced, like he knew what was coming. ‘Twenty-seven?’ His rumble of a voice tweaked high at the end to make a question of it, but what he was really asking was, How bad did I fuck up?

  Shy shook her head, tongue wedged in her cheek, letting him know he’d fucked up middling to bad. ‘You’re some kind of a bloody coward, Lamb.’ She thumped at the sacks and sent up a puff of grain dust. ‘I didn’t spend two days dragging this up here to give it away.’

  He winced a bit more, grey-bearded face creasing around the old scars and laughter lines, all weather-worn and dirt-grained. ‘I’m no good with the bartering, Shy, you know that.’

  ‘Remind me what it is y’are good with?’ she tossed over her shoulder as she strode for Clay’s Exchange, letting a set of piebald goats bleat past then slipping through the traffic sideways-on. ‘Except hauling the sacks?’

  ‘That’s something, ain’t it?’ he muttered.

  The store was busier even than the street, smelling of sawn wood and spices and hard-working bodies packed tight. She had to shove between a clerk and some blacker’n black Southerner trying to make himself understood in no language she’d ever heard before, then around a washboard hung from the low rafters and set swinging by a careless elbow, then past a frowning Ghost, his red hair all bound up with twigs, leaves still on and everything. All these folk scrambling west meant money to be made, and woe to the merchant tried to put himself between Shy and her share.

  ‘Clay?’ she bellowed, nothing to be gained by whispering. ‘Clay!’

  The trader frowned up, caught in the midst of weighing flour out on his man-high scales. ‘Shy South in Squaredeal. Ain’t this my lucky day.’

  ‘Looks that way. You got a whole town full o’ saps to swindle!’ She gave the last word a bit of air, made a few heads turn and Clay plant his big fists on his hips.

  ‘No one’s swindling no one,’ he said.

  ‘Not while I’ve got an eye on business.’

  ‘Me and your father agreed on twenty-seven, Shy.’

  ‘You know he ain’t my father. And you know you ain’t agreed shit ’til I’ve agreed it.’

  Clay cocked an eyebrow at Lamb and the Northman looked straight to the ground, shifting sideways like he was trying and wholly failing to vanish. For all Lamb’s bulk he’d a weak eye, slapped down by any glance that held it. He could be a loving man, and a hard worker, and he’d been a fair stand-in for a father to Ro and Pit and Shy too, far as she’d given him the chance. A good enough man, but by the dead he was some kind of coward.

  Shy felt ashamed for him, and ashamed of him, and that nettled her. She stabbed her finger in Clay’s face like it was a drawn dagger she’d no qualms about using. ‘Squaredeal’s a strange sort o’ name for a town where you’d claw out a business! You paid twenty-eight last season, and you didn’t have a quarter of the customers. I’ll take thirty-eight.’

  ‘What?’ Clay’s voice squeaking even higher than she’d predicted. ‘Golden grain, is it?’

  ‘That’s right. Top quality. Threshed with my own blistered bloody hands.’

  ‘And mine,’ muttered Lamb.

  ‘Shush,’ said Shy. ‘I’ll take thirty-eight and refuse to be moved.’

  ‘Don’t do me no favours!’ raged Clay, fat face filling with angry creases. ‘Because I loved your mother I’ll offer twenty nine.’

  ‘You never loved a thing but your purse. Anything short of thirty-eight and I’d sooner set up next to your store and offer all this through-traffic just a little less than what you’re offering.’

  He knew she’d do it, even if it cost her. Never make a threat you aren’t at least halfway sure you’ll carry through on. ‘Thirty-one,’ he grated out.

  ‘Thirty-five.’

  ‘You’re holding up all these good folk, you selfish bitch!’ Or rather she was giving the good folk notice of the profits he was chiselling and sooner or later they’d catch on.

  ‘They’re scum to a man, and I’ll hold ’em up ’til Juvens gets back from the land of the dead if it means thirty-five.’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘Thirty-five.’

  ‘Thirty-three and you might as well burn my store down on the way out!’

  ‘Don’t tempt me, fat man. Thirty-three and you can toss in a pair o’ those new shovels and some feed for my oxen. They eat almost as much as you.’ She spat in her palm and held it out.

  Clay bitterly worked his mouth, but he spat all the same, and they shook. ‘Your mother was no better.’

  ‘Couldn’t stand the woman.’ Shy elbowed her way back towards the doo
r, leaving Clay to vent his upset on his next customer. ‘Not that hard, is it?’ she tossed over her shoulder at Lamb.

  The big old Northman fussed with the notch out of his ear. ‘Think I’d rather have settled for the twenty-seven.’

  ‘That’s ’cause you’re some kind of a bloody coward. Better to do it than live with the fear of it. Ain’t that what you always used to tell me?’

  ‘Time’s shown me the downside o’ that advice,’ muttered Lamb, but Shy was too busy congratulating herself.

  Thirty-three was a good price. She’d worked over the sums, and thirty-three would leave something towards Ro’s books once they’d fixed the barn’s leaking roof and got a breeding pair of pigs to replace the ones they’d butchered in winter. Maybe they could stretch to some seed too, try and nurse the cabbage patch back to health. She was grinning, thinking on what she could put right with that money, what she could build.

  You don’t need a big dream, her mother used to tell her when she was in a rare good mood, a little one will do it.

  ‘Let’s get them sacks shifted,’ she said.

  He might’ve been getting on in years, might’ve been slow as an old favourite cow, but Lamb was strong as ever. No weight would bend the man. All Shy had to do was stand on the wagon and heft the sacks one by one onto his shoulders while he stood, complaining less than the wagon had at the load. Then he’d stroll them across, four at a time, and stack them in Clay’s yard easy as sacks of feathers. Shy might’ve been half his weight, but had the easier task and twenty-five years advantage and still, soon enough, she was leaking water faster than a fresh-dug well, vest plastered to her back and hair to her face, arms pink-chafed by canvas and white-powdered with grain dust, tongue wedged in the gap between her teeth while she cursed up a storm.

  Lamb stood there, two sacks over one shoulder and one over the other, hardly even breathing hard, those deep laugh lines striking out from the corners of his eyes. ‘Need a rest, Shy?’

  She gave him a look. ‘A rest from your carping.’