Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘We treat whole men like rubbish, why not their hair?’

  Lamb sighed. ‘I guess you’ve got the right of it.’

  Faukin gave the razor a good slapping on the strap. Clients usually appreciated a flourish, a mirror flash of lamplight on steel, an edge of drama to proceedings.

  ‘Careful,’ said the Mayor, evidently in need of no extra drama today. Faukin had to confess to being considerably more scared of her than he was of Lamb. The Northman he knew for a ruthless killer, but suspected him of harbouring principles of a kind. He had no such suspicions about the Mayor. So he gave his blank, bland, professional bow, ceased his sharpening, brushed up a lather and worked it into Lamb’s hair and beard, then began to shave with patient, careful, hissing strokes.

  ‘Don’t it ever bother you that it always grows back?’ asked Lamb. ‘There’s no beating it, is there?’

  ‘Could not the same be said of every profession? The merchant sells one thing to buy another. The farmer harvests one set of crops to plant another. The blacksmith—’

  ‘Kill a man and he stays dead,’ said Lamb, simply.

  ‘But… if I might observe without causing offence… killers rarely stop at one. Once you begin, there is always someone else that needs killing.’

  Lamb’s eyes moved to Faukin’s in the mirror. ‘You’re a philosopher after all.’

  ‘On a strictly amateur footing.’ Faukin worked the warm towel with a flourish and presented Lamb shorn, as it were, a truly daunting array of scars laid bare. In all his years as a barber, including three in the service of a mercenary company, he had never attended upon a head so battered, dented and otherwise manhandled.

  ‘Huh.’ Lamb leaned closer to the mirror, working his lopsided jaw and wrinkling his bent nose as though to convince himself it was indeed his own visage gazing back. ‘There’s the face of an evil bastard, eh?’

  ‘I would venture to say a face is no more evil than a coat. It is the man beneath, and his actions, that count.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Lamb looked up at Faukin for a moment, and then back to himself. ‘And there’s the face of an evil bastard. You done the best a man could with it, though. Ain’t your fault what you’re given to work with.’

  ‘I simply try to do the job exactly as I’d want it done to me.’

  ‘Treat folk the way you’d want to be treated and you can’t go far wrong, my father used to tell me. Seems our jobs are different after all. Aim o’ mine is to do to the other man exactly what I’d least enjoy.’

  ‘Are you ready?’ The Mayor had silently drifted closer and was looking at the pair of them in the mirror.

  Lamb shrugged. ‘Either a man’s always ready for a thing like this or he’ll never be.’

  ‘Good enough.’ She came closer and took hold of Faukin’s hand. He felt a strong need to back away, but clung to his blank, bland professionalism a moment longer. ‘Any other jobs today?’

  Faukin swallowed. ‘Just the one.’

  ‘Across the street?’

  He nodded.

  The Mayor pressed a coin into his palm and leaned close. ‘The time is fast approaching when every person in Crease will have to choose one side of the street. I hope you choose wisely.’

  Sunset had lent the town a carnival atmosphere. There was a single current to the crowds of drunk and greedy and it flowed to the amphitheatre. As he passed, Faukin could see the Circle marked out on the ancient cobbles at its centre, six strides across, torches on close-set poles to mark the edge and light the action. The ancient banks of stone seating and the new teetering stands of bodged-together carpentry were already boiling with an audience such as that place had not seen in centuries. Gamblers screeched for business and chalked odds on high boards. Hawkers sold bottles and hot gristle for prices outrageous even in this home of outrageous prices.

  Faukin gazed at all those people swarming over each other, most of whom could hardly have known what a barber was let alone thought of employing one, reflected for the hundredth time that day, the thousandth time that week, the millionth time since he arrived that he should never have come here, clung tight to his bag and hurried on.

  Papa Ring was one of those men who liked to spend money less the more of it he had. His quarters were humble indeed by comparison with the Mayor’s, the furniture an improvised and splinter-filled collection, the low ceiling lumpy as an old bedspread. Glama Golden sat before a cracked mirror lit by smoking candles, something faintly absurd in that huge body crammed onto a stool and draped in a threadbare sheet, his head giving the impression of teetering on top like a cherry on a cream cake.

  Ring stood at the window just as the Mayor had, his big fists clamped behind his back, and said, ‘Shave it all off.’

  ‘Except the moustache.’ Golden gathered up the sheet so he could stroke at his top lip with huge thumb and forefinger. ‘Had that all my life and it’s going nowhere.’

  ‘A most resplendent article of facial hair,’ said Faukin, though in truth he could see more than a few grey hairs despite the poor light. ‘To remove it would be a deep regret.’

  In spite of being the undoubted favourite in the coming contest, Golden’s eyes had a strange, haunted dampness as they found Faukin’s in the mirror. ‘You got regrets?’

  Faukin lost his blank, bland, professional smile for a moment. ‘Don’t we all, sir?’ He began to cut. ‘But I suppose regrets at least prevent one from repeating the same mistakes.’

  Golden frowned at himself in that cracked mirror. ‘I find however high I stack the regrets, I still make the same mistakes again and again.’

  Faukin had no answer for that, but the barber holds the advantage in such circumstances: he can let the scissors fill the silence. Snip, snip, and the yellow cuttings scattered across the boards in those tantalising patterns that looked to hold some meaning one could never quite grasp.

  ‘Been over there with the Mayor?’ called Papa Ring from the window.

  ‘Yes, sir, I have.’

  ‘How’d she seem?’

  Faukin thought about the Mayor’s demeanour and, more importantly, about what Papa Ring wanted to hear. A good barber never puts truth before the hopes of his clients. ‘She seemed very tense.’

  Ring stared back out of the window, thick thumb and fingers fussing nervously behind his back. ‘I guess she would be.’

  ‘What about the other man?’ asked Golden. ‘The one I’m fighting?’ Faukin stopped snipping for a moment. ‘He seemed thoughtful. Regretful. But fixed on his purpose. In all honesty… he seemed very much like you.’ Faukin did not mention what had only just occurred.

  That he had, in all likelihood, given one of them their last haircut.

  Bee was mopping up when he passed by the door. She hardly even had to see him, she knew him by his footsteps. ‘Grega?’ She dashed out into the hall, heart going so hard it hurt. ‘Grega!’

  He turned, wincing, like hearing her say his name made him sick. He looked tired, more’n a little drunk, and sore. She could always tell his moods. ‘What?’

  She’d made up all kinds of little stories about their reunion. One where he swept her into his arms and told her they could get married now. One where he was wounded and she’d to nurse him back to health. One where they argued, one where they laughed, one where he cried and said sorry for how he’d treated her.

  But she hadn’t spun no stories where she was just ignored.

  ‘That all you got to say to me?’

  ‘What else would there be?’ He didn’t even look her in the eye. ‘I got to go talk to Papa Ring.’ And he made off up the hall.

  She caught his arm. ‘Where are the children?’ Her voice all shrill and bled out from her own disappointment.

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘I am. You made me help, didn’t you? You made me bring ’em!’

  ‘You could’ve said no.’ She knew it was true. She’d been so keen to please him she’d have jumped in a fire on his say-so. Then he gave a little smile, like he’d though
t of something funny. ‘But if you must know, I sold ’em.’

  She felt cold to her stomach. ‘To who?’

  ‘Those Ghosts up in the hills. Those Dragon fuckers.’

  Her throat was all closed up, she could hardly talk. ‘What’ll they do with ’em?’

  ‘I don’t know. Fuck ’em? Eat ’em? What do I care? What did you think I was going to do, start up an orphanage?’ Her face was burning now, like he’d slapped her. ‘You’re such a stupid sow. Don’t know that I ever met anyone stupider than you. You’re stupider than—’

  And she was on him and tearing at his face with her nails and she’d probably have bitten him if he hadn’t hit her first, just above the eye, and she tumbled into the corner and caught a faceful of floor.

  ‘You mad bitch!’ She started to push herself up, all groggy, that familiar pulsing in her face, and he was touching his scratched cheek like he couldn’t believe it. ‘What did you do that for?’ Then he was shaking out his fingers. ‘You hurt my fucking hand!’ And he took a step towards her as she tried to stand and kicked her in the ribs, folded her gasping around his boot.

  ‘I hate you,’ she managed to whisper, once she was done coughing.

  ‘So?’ And he looked at her like she was a maggot.

  She remembered the day he’d chosen her out of all the room to dance with and nothing had ever felt so fine, and of a sudden it was like she saw the whole thing fresh, and he seemed so ugly, so petty and vain and selfish beyond enduring. He just used people and threw them away and left a trail of ruin behind him. How could she ever have loved him? Just because for a few moments he’d made her feel one step above shit. The rest of the time ten steps below.

  ‘You’re so small,’ she whispered at him. ‘How did I not see it?’

  He was pricked in his vanity then and he took another step at her, but she found her knife and whipped it out. He saw the blade, and for a moment he looked surprised, then he looked angry, then he started laughing like she was a hell of a joke.

  ‘As if you’ve got the bones to use it!’ And he sauntered past, giving her plenty of time to stab him if she’d wanted to. But she just knelt there, blood leaking out her nose and tapping down the front of her dress. Her best dress, which she’d worn three days straight ’cause she knew he’d be coming.

  Once the dizziness had passed she got up and went to the kitchen. Everything was trembling but she’d taken worse beatings and worse disappointments, too. No one there so much as raised a brow at her bloody nose. The Whitehouse was that kind of place.

  ‘Papa Ring said I need to feed that woman.’

  ‘Soup in the pot,’ grunted the cook’s boy, perched on a box to look out of a high little window where all he got was a view of boots outside.

  So she put a bowl on a tray with a cup of water and carried it down the damp-smelling stair to the cellar, past the big barrels in the darkness and the bottles on the racks gleaming with the torchlight.

  The woman in the cage uncrossed her legs and stood, sliding her tight-bound hands up the rail behind her, one eye glinting through the hair tangled across her face as she watched Bee come closer. Warp sat in front at his table, ring of keys on it, pretending to read a book. He loved to pretend, thought it made him look right special, but even Bee, who weren’t no wonder with her letters, could tell he had it upside down.

  ‘What d’you want?’ And he turned a sneer on her like she was a slug in his breakfast.

  ‘Papa Ring said to feed her.’

  She could almost see his brain rattling around in his big fat head. ‘Why? Ain’t like she’ll be here much longer.’

  ‘You think he tells me why?’ she snapped. ‘But I’ll go back and tell Papa you wouldn’t let me in if you—’

  ‘All right, get it done, then. But I’ve got my eye on you.’ He leaned close and blasted her with his rotting breath. ‘Both eyes.’

  He unlocked the gate and swung it squealing open and Bee ducked inside with her tray. The woman watched her. She couldn’t move far from the rail, but even so she was backed up tight against it. The cage smelled of sweat and piss and fear, the woman’s and all the others’ who’d been kept in here before and no bright futures among ’em, that was a fact. No bright futures anywhere in this place.

  Bee set the tray down and took the cup of water. The woman sucked at it thirstily, no pride left in her if she’d had any to begin with. Pride don’t last long in the Whitehouse, and especially not down here. Bee leaned close and whispered.

  ‘You asked me about Cantliss before. About Cantliss and the children.’

  The woman stopped swallowing and her eyes flickered over to Bee’s, bright and wild.

  ‘He sold the children to the Dragon People. That’s what he said.’ Bee looked over her shoulder but Warp was already sitting back at his table and pulling at his jug, not looking in the least. He wouldn’t think Bee would do anything worth attending to in her whole life. Right now that worked for her. She stepped closer, slipped out the knife and sawed through the ropes around one of the woman’s rubbed-raw wrists.

  ‘Why?’ she whispered.

  ‘Because Cantliss needs hurting.’ Even then she couldn’t bring herself to say killing, but they both knew what she meant. ‘I can’t do it.’ Bee pressed the knife, handle first, into the woman’s free hand where it was hidden behind her back. ‘Reckon you can, though.’

  Papa Ring fidgeted at the ring through his ear, an old habit went right back to his days as a bandit in the Badlands, his nerves rising with the rising noise in a painful lump under his jaw. He’d played a lot of hands, rolled a lot of dice, spun a lot of wheels, and maybe the odds were all stacked on his side, but the stakes had never been higher. He wondered whether she was nervous, the Mayor. No sign of it, standing alone on her balcony bolt upright with the light behind her, that stiff pride of hers showing even at this distance. But she had to be scared. Had to be.

  How often had they stood here, after all, glaring across the great divide, planning each other’s downfall by every means fair or foul, the number of men they paid to fight for them doubling and doubling again, the stakes swelling ever higher. A hundred murders and stratagems and manoeuvrings and webs of petty alliances broken and re-formed, and it all came down to this.

  He slipped into one of his favourite furrows of thought, what to do with the Mayor when he won. Hang her as a warning? Have her stripped naked and beaten through town like a hog? Keep her as his whore? As anyone’s? But he knew it was all fancy. He’d given his word she’d be let go and he’d keep it. Maybe folk on the Mayor’s side of the street took him for a low bastard and maybe they were right, but all his life he’d kept his word.

  It could give you some tough moments, your word. Could force you into places you didn’t want to be, could serve you up puzzles where the right path weren’t easy to pick. But it wasn’t meant to be easy, it was meant to be right. There were too many men always did the easy thing, regardless.

  Grega Cantliss, for instance.

  Papa Ring looked sourly sideways. Here he was, three days late as always, slumped on Ring’s balcony as if he had no bones in him and picking his teeth with a splinter. In spite of a new suit he looked sick and old and had fresh scratches on his face and a stale smell about him. Some men use up fast. But he’d brought what he owed plus a healthy extra for the favour. That was why he was still breathing. Ring had given his word, after all.

  The fighters were coming out now with an accompanying rise in the mood of the mob. Golden’s big shaved head bobbed above the crowd, a knot of Ring’s men around him clearing folks away as they headed for the theatre, old stones lit up orange in the fading light. Ring hadn’t mentioned the woman to Golden. He might be a magician with his fists but that man had a bad habit of getting distracted. So Ring had just told him to let the old man live if he got the chance, and considered that a promise kept. A man’s got to keep his word but there has to be some give in it or you’ll get nothing done.

  He saw Lamb now, coming down
the steps of the Mayor’s place between the ancient columns, his own entourage of thugs about him. Ring fussed with his ear again. He’d a worry the old Northman was one of those bastards you couldn’t trust to do the sensible thing. A right wild card, and Papa Ring liked to know what was in the deck. Specially when the stakes were high as this.

  ‘I don’t like the looks of that old bastard,’ Cantliss said.

  Papa Ring frowned at him. ‘Do you know what? Neither do I.’

  ‘You sure Golden’ll take him?’

  ‘Golden’s taken everyone else, hasn’t he?’

  ‘I guess. Got a sad sort o’ look to him though, for a winner.’

  Ring could’ve done without this fool picking at his worries. ‘That’s why I had you steal the woman, isn’t it? Just in case.’

  Cantliss rubbed at his stubbly jaw. ‘Still seems a hell of a risk.’

  ‘One I wouldn’t have had to take if you hadn’t stole that old bastard’s children and sold ’em to the savage.’

  Cantliss’ head jerked around with surprise.

  ‘I can add two and two,’ growled Ring, and felt a shiver like he was dirty and couldn’t clean it off. ‘How much lower can a man stoop? Selling children?’

  Cantliss looked deeply wounded. ‘That’s so fucking unfair! You just said get the money by winter or I’d be a dead man. You didn’t concern yourself with the source. You want to give me the money back, free yourself of its base origins?’

  Ring looked at the old box on the table, and thought about that bright old gold inside, and frowned back out into the street. He hadn’t got where he’d got by giving money back.

  ‘Didn’t think so.’ Cantliss shook his head like stealing children was a fine business scheme for which he deserved the warmest congratulation. ‘How was I to know this old bastard would wriggle out the long grass?’