The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (219 page)

‘Glama Golden!’

Shy saw the big man flinch a moment, and his shoulders hunch, then he slowly turned. A young man stood in the street behind. A big lad, with a scar through his lips and a tattered coat. He had an unsteady look to him made Shy think he’d been drinking hard. To puff his courage up, maybe, though folk didn’t always bother with a reason to drink in Crease. He raised an unsteady finger to point at them, and his other hand hovered around the handle of a big knife at his belt.

‘You’re the one killed Stockling Bear?’ he sneered. ‘You’re the one won all them fights?’ He spat in the mud just near their feet. ‘You don’t look much!’

‘I ain’t much,’ said the big man, softly.

The lad blinked, not sure what to do with that. ‘Well . . . I’m fucking calling you out, you bastard!’

‘What if I ain’t listening?’

The lad frowned at the people on the porches, all stopped their business to watch. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, not sure of himself. Then he looked over at Shy, and took one more stab at it. ‘Who’s this bitch? Your fucking—’

‘Don’t make me kill you, boy.’ Golden didn’t say it like a threat. Pleading, almost, his eyes sadder’n ever.

The lad flinched a little, and his fingers twitched, and he came over pale. The bottle’s a shifty banker – it might lend you courage but it’s apt to call the debt in sudden. He took a step back and spat again. ‘Ain’t fucking worth it,’ he snapped.

‘No, it ain’t.’ Golden watched the lad as he backed slowly off, then turned and walked away fast. A few sighs of relief, a few shrugs, and the talk started building back up.

Shy swallowed, mouth suddenly dried out and sticky-feeling. ‘You’re Glama Golden?’

He slowly nodded. ‘Though I know full well there ain’t much golden about me these days.’ He rubbed his great hands together as he watched that lad lose himself in the crowd, and Shy saw they were shaking. ‘Hell of a thing, being famous. Hell of a thing.’

‘You’re the one standing for Papa Ring in this fight that’s coming?’

‘That I am. Though I have to say I’m hopeful it won’t happen. I hear the Mayor’s got no one to fight for her.’ His pale eyes narrowed as he looked back to Shy. ‘Why, what’ve you heard?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, trying her best to smile and failing at it. ‘Nothing at all.’

Blood Coming

I
t was just before dawn, clear and cold, the mud crusted with frost. The lamps in the windows had mostly been snuffed, the torches lighting the signs had guttered out and the sky was bright with stars. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, sharp as jewels, laid out in swirls and drifts and twinkling constellations. Temple opened his mouth, cold nipping at his cheeks, turning, turning until he was dizzy, taking in the beauty of the heavens. Strange, that he had never noticed them before. Maybe his eyes had been always on the ground.

‘You reckon there’s an answer up there?’ asked Bermi, his breath and his horse’s breath smoking on the dawn chill.

‘I don’t know where the answer is,’ said Temple.

‘You ready?’

He turned to look at the house. The big beams were up, most of the rafters and the window and door-frames, too, the skeleton of the building standing bold and black against the star-scattered sky. Only that morning Majud had been telling him what a fine job he was doing, how even Curnsbick would have considered his money well spent. He felt a flush of pride, and wondered when he had last felt one. But Temple was a man who abandoned everything half-done. That was a long-established fact.

‘You can ride on the packhorse. It’s only a day or two into the hills.’

‘Why not?’ A few hundred miles on a mule and his arse was carved out of wood.

Over towards the amphitheatre the carpenters were already making a desultory start. They were throwing up a new bank of seating at the open side so they could cram in a few score more onlookers, supports and cross-braces just visible against the dark hillside, bent and badly bolted, some of the timbers without the branches even properly trimmed.

‘Only a couple of weeks to the big fight.’

‘Shame we’ll miss it,’ said Bermi. ‘Better get on, the rest of the lads’ll be well ahead by now.’

Temple pushed his new shovel through one of the packhorse’s straps, moving slower, and slower, then stopping still. It had been a day or two since he’d seen Shy, but he kept reminding himself of the debt in her absence. He wondered if she was out there somewhere, still doggedly searching. You could only admire someone who stuck at a thing like that, no matter the cost, no matter the odds. Especially if you were a man who could never stick at anything. Not even when he wanted to.

Temple thought about that for a moment, standing motionless up to his ankles in half-frozen mud. Then he walked to Bermi and slapped his hand down on the Styrian’s shoulder. ‘I won’t be going. My bottomless thanks for the offer, but I’ve a building to finish. That and a debt to pay.’

‘Since when do you pay your debts?’

‘Since now, I suppose.’

Bermi gave him a puzzled look, as if he was trying to work out where the joke might be. ‘Can I change your mind?’

‘No.’

‘Your mind always shifted with the breeze.’

‘Looks like a man can grow.’

‘What about your shovel?’

‘Consider it a gift.’

Bermi narrowed his eyes. ‘There’s a woman involved, isn’t there?’

‘There is, but not in the way you’re thinking.’

‘What’s she thinking?’

Temple snorted. ‘Not that.’

‘We’ll see.’ Bermi hauled himself into his saddle. ‘I reckon you’ll regret it, when we come back through with nuggets big as turds.’

‘I’ll probably regret it a lot sooner than that. Such is life.’

‘You’re right there.’ The Styrian swept off his hat and raised it high in salute. ‘No reasoning with the bastard!’ And he was off, mud flicking from the hooves of his horse as he headed out up the main street, scattering a group of reeling-drunk miners on the way.

Temple gave a long sigh. He wasn’t sure he didn’t regret it already. Then he frowned. One of those stumbling miners looked familiar: an old man with a bottle in one hand and tear-tracks gleaming on his cheeks.

‘Iosiv Lestek?’ Temple twitched up his trousers to squelch out into the street. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Disgrace!’ croaked the actor, beating at his breast. ‘The crowd . . . wretched. My performance . . . abject. The cultural extravaganza . . . a debacle!’ He clawed at Temple’s shirt. ‘I was pelted from the stage. I! Iosiv Lestek! He who ruled the theatres of Midderland as if they were a private fief!’ He clawed at his own shirt, stained up the front. ‘Pelted with
dung
! Replaced by a trio of girls with bared bubs. To rapturous applause, I might add. Is that all audiences care for these days? Bubs?’

‘I suppose they’ve always been popular—’

‘All finished!’ howled Lestek at the sky.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ someone roared from an upstairs window.

Temple took the actor by the arm. ‘Let me take you back to Camling’s—’

‘Camling!’ Lestek tore free, waving his bottle. ‘That cursed maggot! That treacherous cuckoo! He has ejected me from his Hostelry! I! Me! Lestek! I will be revenged upon him, though!’

‘Doubtless.’

‘He will see! They will all see! My best performance is yet ahead of me!’

‘You will show them, but perhaps in the morning. There are other hostelries—’

‘I am penniless! I sold my wagon, I let go my props, I pawned my costumes!’ Lestek dropped to his knees in the filth. ‘I have nothing but the rags I wear!’

Temple gave a smoking sigh and looked once more towards the star-prickled heavens. Apparently he was set on the hard way. The thought made him oddly pleased. He reached down and helped the old man to his feet. ‘I have a tent big enough for two, if you can stand my snoring.’

Lestek stood swaying for a moment. ‘I don’t deserve such kindness.’

Temple shrugged. ‘Neither did I.’

‘My boy,’ murmured the actor, opening wide his arms, tears gleaming again in his eyes.

Then he was sick down Temple’s shirt.

Shy frowned. She’d been certain Temple was about to get on that packhorse and ride out of town, trampling her childish trust under hoof and no doubt the last she’d ever hear of him. But all he’d done was give a man a shovel and wave him off. Then haul some shit-covered old drunk into the shell of Majud’s building. People are a mystery there’s no solving, all right.

She was awake a lot in the nights, now. Watching the street. Maybe thinking she’d see Cantliss ride in – not that she even had the first clue what he looked like. Maybe thinking she’d catch a glimpse of Pit and Ro, if she even recognised them any more. But mostly just picking at her worries. About her brother and sister, about Lamb, about the fight that was coming. About things and places and faces she’d rather have forgotten.

Jeg with his hat jammed down saying, ‘Smoke? Smoke?’ and Dodd all surprised she’d shot him and that bank man saying so politely, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you,’ with that puzzled little smile like she was a lady come for a loan rather’n a thief who’d ended up murdering him for nothing. That girl they’d hanged in her place whose name Shy had never known. Swinging there with a sign around her twisted neck and her dead eyes asking,
why me and not you?
and Shy still no closer to an answer.

In those slow, dark hours her head filled with doubts like a rotten rowboat with bog water, going down, going down for all her frantic bailing, and she’d think of Lamb dead like it was already done and Pit and Ro rotting in the empty somewhere and she’d feel like some kind of traitor for thinking it, but how do you stop a thought once it’s in there?

Death was the one sure thing out here. The one fact among the odds and chances and bets and prospects. Leef, and Buckhorm’s sons, and how many Ghosts out there on the plain? Men in fights in Crease, and folk hung on tissue-paper evidence or dead of fever or of silly mishaps like that drover kicked in the head by his brother’s horse yesterday, or the shoe-merchant they found drowned in the sewer. Death walked among them daily, and presently would come calling on them all.

Hooves in the street and Shy craned to see, a set of torches flickering, folk retreating to their porches from the flying mud of a dozen horsemen. She turned to look at Lamb, a big shape under his blanket, shadow pooled in its folds. At the head-end she could just see his ear, and the big notch out of it. Could just hear his soft, slow breathing.

‘You awake?’

He took a longer breath. ‘Now I am.’

The men had reined in before the Mayor’s Church of Dice, torchlight shifting over their hard-used, hard-bitten faces, and Shy shrank back. Not Pit or Ro and not Cantliss either. ‘More thugs arrived for the Mayor.’

‘Lots of thugs about,’ grunted Lamb. ‘Don’t take no reader of the runes to see blood coming.’

Hooves thumped on by in the street and a flash of laughter and a woman shouting then quiet, with just the quick tap-tap of a hammer from over near the amphitheatre to remind them that the big show was on its way.

‘What happens if Cantliss don’t come?’ She spoke at the dark. ‘How do we find Pit and Ro then?’

Lamb slowly sat up, scrubbing his fingers through his grey hair. ‘We’ll just have to keep looking.’

‘What if . . .’ For all the time she’d spent thinking it she hadn’t crossed the bridge of actually making the words ’til now. ‘What if they’re dead?’

‘We keep looking ’til we’re sure.’

‘What if they died out there on the plains and we’ll never know for sure? Every month passes there’s more chance we’ll never know, ain’t there? More chance they’ll just be lost, no finding ’em.’ Her voice was turning shrill but she couldn’t stop it rising, wilder and wilder. ‘They could be anywhere by now, couldn’t they, alive or dead? How do we find two children in all the unmapped empty they got out here? When do we stop, is what I’m asking? When
can
we stop?’

He pushed his blanket back, padded over and winced as he squatted, looking up into her face. ‘You can stop whenever you want, Shy. You come this far and that’s a long, hard way, and more’n likely there’s a long, hard way ahead yet. I made a promise to your mother and I’ll keep on. Long as it takes. Ain’t like I got better offers knocking my door down. But you’re young, still. You got a life to lead. If you stopped, no one could blame you.’

‘I could.’ She laughed then, and wiped the beginnings of a tear on the back of her hand. ‘And it ain’t like I got much of a life either, is it?’

‘You take after me there,’ he said, pulling back the covers on her bed, ‘daughter or not.’

‘Guess I’m just tired.’

‘Who wouldn’t be?’

‘I just want ’em back,’ as she slid under the blankets.

‘We’ll get ’em back,’ as he dropped them over her and laid a weighty hand on her shoulder. She could almost believe him, then. ‘Get some sleep now, Shy.’

Apart from the first touch of dawn creeping between the curtains and across Lamb’s bedspread in a grey line, the room was dark.

‘You really going to fight that man Golden?’ she asked, after a while. ‘He seemed all right to me.’

Lamb was silent long enough she started to wonder whether he was asleep. Then he said, ‘I’ve killed better men for worse reasons, I’m sorry to say.’

The Sleeping Partner

I
n general, Temple was forced to concede, he was a man who had failed to live up to his own high standards. Or even to his low ones. He had undertaken a galaxy of projects. Many of those any decent man would have been ashamed of. Of the remainder, due to a mixture of bad luck, impatience and a shiftless obsession with the next thing, he could hardly remember one that had not tailed off into disappointment, failure or outright disaster.

Majud’s shop, as it approached completion, was therefore a very pleasant surprise.

One of the Suljuks who had accompanied the Fellowship across the plains turned out to be an artist of a roofer. Lamb had applied his nine digits to the masonry and proved himself more than capable. More recently the Buckhorms had shown up in full numbers to help saw and nail the plank siding. Even Lord Ingelstad took a rare break from losing money to the town’s gamblers to give advice on the paint. Bad advice, but still.