He was the best man in the Company, and he was treated with scorn. Given the smallest command, the worst jobs, the meanest share of the plunder. He jerked his threadbare uniform smooth, produced his comb and rearranged his hair, then strode from the scene of his shame and out into the street with the stiffest bearing he could manage.
In the lunatic asylum, he supposed, the one sane man looks mad.
Sufeen could smell burning on the air. It put him in mind of other battles, long ago. Battles that had needed fighting. Or so it seemed, now. He had gone from fighting for his country, to fighting for his friends, to fighting for his life, to fighting for a living, to… whatever this was. The men who had been trying to demolish the watchtower had abandoned the project and were sitting around it with bad grace, passing a bottle. Inquisitor Lorsen stood near them, with grace even poorer.
‘Your business with the merchant is concluded?’ asked Cosca as he came down the steps of the inn.
‘It has,’ snapped Lorsen.
‘And what discoveries?’
‘He died.’
A pause. ‘Life is a sea of sorrows.’
‘Some men cannot endure stern questioning.’
‘Weak hearts caused by moral decay, I daresay.’
‘The outcome is the same,’ said the Inquisitor. ‘We have the Superior’s list of settlements. Next comes Lobbery, then Averstock. Gather the Company, General.’
Cosca’s brow furrowed. It was the most concern Sufeen had seen him display that day. ‘Can we not let the men stay overnight, at least? Some time to rest, enjoy the hospitality of the locals—’
‘News of our arrival must not reach the rebels. The righteous cannot delay.’ Lorsen managed to say it without a trace of irony.
Cosca puffed out his cheeks. ‘The righteous work hard, don’t they?’
Sufeen felt a withering helplessness. He could hardly lift his arms, he was suddenly so tired. If only there had been righteous men to hand, but he was the nearest thing to one. The best man in the Company. He took no pride in that. Best maggot in the midden would have made a better boast. He was the only man there with the slightest shred of conscience. Except Temple, perhaps, and Temple spent his every waking moment trying to convince himself and everyone else that he had no conscience at all. Sufeen watched him, standing slightly behind Cosca, a little stooped as if he was hiding, fingers fussing, trying to twist the buttons off his shirt. A man who could have been anything, struggling to be nothing. But in the midst of this folly and destruction, the waste of one man’s potential hardly seemed worth commenting on. Could Jubair be right? Was God a vengeful killer, delighting in destruction? It was hard at that moment to argue otherwise.
The big Northman stood on the stoop in front of Stupfer’s Meat House and watched them mount up, great fists clenched on the rail, afternoon sun glinting on that dead metal ball of an eye.
‘How are you going to write this up?’ Temple was asking.
Sworbreck frowned down at his notebook, pencil hovering, then carefully closed it. ‘I may gloss over this episode.’
Sufeen snorted. ‘I hope you brought a great deal of gloss.’
Though it had to be conceded, the Company of the Gracious Hand had conducted itself with unusual restraint that day. They put Squaredeal behind them with only mild complaints about the poor quality of plunder, leaving the merchant’s body hanging naked from the watchtower, a sign about his neck proclaiming his fate a lesson to the rebels of the Near Country. Whether the rebels would hear the lesson, and if they did what they would learn from it, Sufeen could not say. Two other men hung beside the trader.
‘Who were they?’ asked Temple, frowning back.
‘The young one was shot running away, I think. I’m not sure about the other.’
Temple grimaced, and twitched, and fidgeted with a frayed sleeve. ‘What can we do, though?’
‘Only follow our consciences.’
Temple rounded on him angrily. ‘For a mercenary you talk a lot about conscience!’
‘Why concern yourself unless yours bothers you?’
‘As far as I can tell, you’re still taking Cosca’s money!’
‘If I stopped, would you?’
Temple opened his mouth, then soundlessly shut it and scowled off at the horizon, picking at his sleeve, and picking, and picking.
Sufeen sighed. ‘God knows, I never claimed to be a good man.’ A couple of the outlying houses had been set ablaze, and he watched the columns of smoke drift up into the blue. ‘Merely the best in the Company.’
All Got a Past
The rain came hard. It had filled the wagon ruts and the deep-sucked prints of boot and hoof until they were one morass and the main street lacked only for a current to be declared a river. It drew a grey curtain across the town, the odd lamp dimmed as through a mist, orange rumours dancing ghostly in the hundred thousand puddles. It fell in mud-spattering streams from the backed-up gutters on the roofs, and the roofs with no gutters at all, and from the brim of Lamb’s hat as he hunched silent and soggy on the wagon’s seat. It ran in miserable beads down the sign hung from an arch of crooked timbers that proclaimed this leavings of a town to be Averstock. It soaked into the dirt-speckled hides of the oxen, Calder proper lurching lame now in a back leg and Scale not much better off. It fell on the horses tethered to the rail before the shack that excused itself for a tavern. Three unhappy horses, their coats turned dark by the wet.
‘That them?’ asked Leef. ‘Those their horses?’
‘That’s them,’ said Shy, cold and clammy in her leaking coat as a woman buried.
‘What we going to do?’ Leef was trying to hide the tense note in his voice and falling well short.
Lamb didn’t answer him. Not right away. Instead he leaned close to Shy, speaking soft. ‘Say you’re caught between two promises, and you can’t keep one without breaking the other. What do you do?’
To Shy’s mind that verged on the whimsical, considering the task in hand. She shrugged, shoulders chafing in her wet shirt. ‘Keep the one most needs keeping, I guess.’
‘Aye,’ he muttered, staring across that mire of a street. ‘Just leaves on the water, eh? Never any choices.’ They sat a moment longer, no one doing a thing but getting wetter, then Lamb turned in his seat. ‘I’ll go in first. Get the oxen settled then the two of you follow, keeping easy.’ He swung from the wagon, boots splashing into the mud. ‘Unless you’ve a mind to stay here. Might be best all round.’
‘I’ll do my part,’ snapped Leef.
‘You know what your part might be? You ever kill a man?’
‘Have you?’
‘Just don’t get in my way.’ Lamb was different somehow. Not hunched any more. Bigger. Huge. Rain pattering on the shoulders of his coat, hint of light down one side of his rigid frown, the other all in darkness. ‘Stay out of my way. You got to promise me that.’
‘All right,’ said Leef, giving Shy a funny look.
‘All right,’ said Shy.
An odd thing for Lamb to say. You could find meaner lambs than him at every lambing season. But men can be strange that way, with their pride. Shy had never had much use for pride herself. So she guessed she could let him talk his talk, and try and work up to it, and go in first. Worked all right when they had crops to sell, after all. Let him draw the eyes while she slipped up behind. She slid her knife into her sleeve, watching the old Northman struggling to make it across the boggy street with both boots still on, arms wide for balance.