‘My readers will thrill to your heroic exploits!’
‘I’ve certainly thrilled to ’em,’ snorted Shy. ‘The heroic scale of your digestive gases would never be believed back east.’
Temple looked up, and watched the clouds moving. If there was a God, the world seemed exactly the way it would be if there wasn’t one.
‘I must insist on absolute honesty. I will entertain no more exaggeration! Truth, Master Sweet, is at the heart of all great works of art.’
‘No doubt at all. Which makes me wonder—have you heard of the time I killed a great red bear with naught but these two hands…’
Some Kind of Coward
Nothing was quite the way she remembered it. All small. All drab. All changed.
Some new folks had happened by and built a house where theirs had stood, and a new barn, too. Couple of fields tilled and coming up nice, by all appearances. Flowers blooming around the tree they’d hanged Gully from. The tree Ro’s mother was buried under.
They sat there, on horseback, frowning down, and Shy said, ‘Somehow I thought it’d be the way we left it.’
‘Times move on,’ said Lamb.
‘It’s a nice spot,’ said Temple.
‘No it’s not,’ said Shy.
‘Shall we go down?’
Shy turned her horse away. ‘Why?’
Ro’s hair was grown back to a shapeless mop. She’d taken Lamb’s razor one morning meaning to shave it off again, and sat there by still water, holding her dragon scale and thinking of Waerdinur. Couldn’t picture his face no more. Couldn’t remember his voice or the Maker’s lessons he’d so carefully taught her. How could it all have washed away so fast? In the end she just put the razor back and let her hair grow.
Times move on, don’t they?
They’d moved on in Squaredeal, all right, lots of land about cleared and drained and put under the plough, and new buildings sprung up all over and new faces everywhere passing through or stopping off or settling down to all sorts of business.
Not everything had prospered. Clay was gone and there was a drunk idiot running his store and it had no stock and half the roof had fallen in. Shy argued him down to one Imperial gold piece and a dozen bottles of cheap spirit and bought the place as a going concern. Nearly going, at least. They all set to work next morning like it was the last day of creation, Shy haggling merciless as a hangman for stock, Pit and Ro laughing as they swept dust over each other, Temple and Lamb hammering away at the carpentry, and it weren’t long before things got to feel a bit like they used to. More than Ro had ever thought they would.
Except sometimes she’d think of the mountains and cry. And Lamb still wore a sword. The one he’d taken from her father.
Temple took a room over the road and put a sign above the door saying Temple and Kahdia: Contracts, Clerking and Carpentry.
Ro said to him, ‘This Kahdia ain’t around much, is he?’
‘Nor will he be,’ said Temple. ‘But a man should have someone to blame.’
He started doing law work, which might as well have been magic far as most folk around there were concerned, children peering in at his window to watch him write by candlelight. Sometimes Ro went over there and listened to him talk about the stars, and God, and wood, and the law, and all kinds of faraway places he’d been on his travels, and in languages she’d never even heard before.
‘Who needs a teacher?’ Shy asked. ‘I was taught with a belt.’
‘Look how that turned out,’ said Ro. ‘He knows a lot.’
Shy snorted. ‘For a wise man he’s a hell of a fool.’
But once Ro woke in the night and came down, restless, and saw them out the back together, kissing. There was something in the way Shy touched him made it seem she didn’t think he was quite the fool she said he was.
Sometimes they went out around the farmsteads, more buildings springing up each week that passed, buying and selling. Pit and Ro swaying on the seat of the wagon next to Shy, Lamb riding along beside, always frowning hard at the horizon, hand on that sword.
Shy said to him, ‘There’s naught to worry about.’
And without looking at her he said, ‘That’s when you’d better worry.’
They got in one day at closing time, the long clouds pinking overhead as the sun sank in the west and the lonely wind sighing up and sweeping dust down the street and setting that rusty weathervane to squeak. No Fellowships coming through and the town quiet and still, some children laughing somewhere and a grandmother creaking in her rocker on her porch and just one horse Ro didn’t know tied up at the warped rail.
‘Some days work out,’ said Shy, looking at the back of the wagon, just about empty.
‘Some don’t,’ Ro finished for her.
Calm inside the store, just Wist soft snoring in his chair with his boots up on the counter. Shy slapped ’em off and woke him with a jolt. ‘Everything good?’
‘Slow day,’ said the old man, rubbing his eyes.
‘All your days are slow,’ said Lamb.
‘Like you’re so bloody quick. Oh, and there’s someone been waiting for you. Says you and him got business.’
‘Waiting for me?’ asked Shy, and Ro heard footsteps in the back of the store.
‘No, for Lamb. What did you say your name was?’
A man pushed a hanging coil of rope aside and came into the light. A great, tall man, his head brushing the low rafters, a sword at his hip with a grip of scored grey metal, just like Lamb’s. Just like her father’s. He had a great scar angled across his face and the guttering candle-flame twinkled in his eye. A silver eye, like a mirror.
‘My name’s Caul Shivers,’ he said, voice quiet and all croaky soft and every hair Ro had stretched up.
‘What’s your business?’ muttered Shy.
Shivers looked down at Lamb’s hand, and the stump of the missing finger there, and he said, ‘You know my business, don’t you?’
Lamb just nodded, grim and level.
‘You’re after trouble, you can fucking ride on!’ Shy’s voice, harsh as a crow’s. ‘You hear me, bastard? We’ve had all the trouble we—’
Lamb put his hand on her forearm. The one with the scar coiling around it. ‘It’s all right.’
‘It’s all right if he wants my knife up his—’
‘Stay out of it, Shy. It’s an old debt we got. Past time it was paid.’ Then he spoke to Shivers in Northern. ‘Whatever’s between me and you, it don’t concern these.’
Shivers looked at Shy, and at Ro, and it seemed to her there was no more feeling in his living eye than in his dead. ‘It don’t concern these. Shall we head outside?’
They walked down the steps in front of the store, not slow and not fast, keeping a space between them, eyes on each other all the way. Ro, and Shy, and Pit, and Wist edged after them onto the porch, watching in a silent group.
‘Lamb, eh?’ said Shivers.
‘One name’s good as another.’
‘Oh, not so, not so. Threetrees, and Bethod, and Whirrun of Bligh, and all them others forgotten. But men still sing your songs. Why’s that, d’you reckon?’
‘’Cause men are fools,’ said Lamb.
The wind caught a loose board somewhere and made it rattle. The two Northmen faced each other, Lamb’s hand dangling loose at his side, stump of the missing finger brushing the grip of his sword, and Shivers gently swept his coat clear of his own hilt and held it back out of the way.
‘That my old sword you got there?’ asked Lamb.
Shivers shrugged. ‘Took it off Black Dow. Guess it all comes around, eh?’
‘Always.’ Lamb stretched his neck out one way, then the other. ‘It always comes around.’