And then his knees failed him, then his guts, then his bladder, then the audiences. The playwright smirking as he suggested a younger man for the lead—but still a worthy part in support for him, of course, just while he gathered his strength. Lurching on stage, stuttering his lines, sweating in the glare of the stinking lamps. Then the manager smirking as he suggested they part ways. Such a wonderful collaboration for them both, how many years had it been, such reviews, such audiences, but time for them both to seek new successes, to follow new dreams…
‘Oh, treachery, thy noisome visage shown—’
The wagon lurched and the miserable dribblings he had laboured the last hour for slopped from the can and over his hand. He scarcely even noticed. He rubbed at his sweaty jaw. He needed to shave. Some standards had to be maintained. He was bringing culture to the wasteland, was he not? He picked up Camling’s letter and scanned it once again, mouthing the words to himself. He was possessed of an excessively ornamented style, this Camling, but was pleasingly abject in his praise and appreciation, in his promises of fine treatment, in his plans for an epoch-making event to be staged within the ancient Imperial amphitheatre of Crease. A show for the ages, as he put it. A cultural extravaganza!
Iosiv Lestek was not finished yet. Not he! Redemption can come in the most unlooked-for places. And it was some while since his last hallucinatory episode. Definitely on the mend! Lestek set down the letter and boldly took up prick once again, gazing through the window at the slowly passing ruins.
‘My best performance is ahead of me…’ he grunted, gritting his teeth as he squeezed a few more drops into the can.
‘Wonder what it’s like,’ said Sallit, staring wistfully at that bright-coloured wagon, The Famous Iosiv Lestek written along the side in purple letters. Not that she could read it. But that was what Luline Buckhorm had told her it said.
‘What what’s like?’ asked Goldy, twitching the reins.
‘Being an actor. Up on stage in front of an audience and all.’ She’d seen some players once. Her mother and father took her. Before they died. Of course before that. Not big-city actors, but even so. She’d clapped until her hands hurt.
Goldy scraped a loose lock of hair back under her battered hat. ‘Don’t you play a role every time you get a customer?’
‘Not quite the same, is it?’
‘Smaller audience, but otherwise not much different.’ They could hear Najis seeing to one of Gentili’s old cousins in the back of the wagon, moaning away. ‘Seem to like it, might be a tip in it.’ At least there was the chance it would finish quicker. That had to be a good thing.
‘Never been that good at pretending,’ Sallit muttered. Not pretending to like it, anyway. Got in the way of pretending not to be there at all.
‘Ain’t always about the fucking. Not always. Not just the fucking, anyway.’ Goldy had been around. She was hellish practical. Sallit wished she could be practical. Maybe she’d get there. ‘Just treat ’em like they’re somebody. That’s all anyone wants, ain’t it?’
‘I suppose.’ Sallit would’ve liked to be treated like somebody, instead of a thing. Folk looked at her, they just saw a whore. She wondered if anyone in the Fellowship knew her name. Less feeling than for cattle, and less value placed on you, too. What would her parents have made of this, their girl a whore? But they lost their say when they died, and it seemed Sallit had lost her say as well. She guessed there was worse.
‘Just a living. That’s the way to look at it. You’re young, love. You’ve got time to work.’ A heated bitch was trotting along beside the column and a crowd of a dozen or more dogs of every shape and size were loping hopefully after. ‘Way o’ the world,’ said Goldy, watching them pass. ‘Put the work in, you can come out rich. Rich enough to retire comfortable, anyway. That’s the dream.’
‘Is it?’ Sounded like a pretty poor kind of dream to Sallit. To not have the worst.
‘Not much action now, that’s true, but we get to Crease, you’ll see the money come in. Lanklan knows what he’s about, don’t you worry on that score.’
Everyone wanted to get to Crease. They’d wake up talking of the route, begging Sweet to know how many miles they’d gone, how many still to go, counting them off like days of a hard sentence. But Sallit dreaded the place. Sometimes Lanklan would talk about how many lonely men were out there, eyes aglitter, and how they’d have fifty clients a day like that was something to look forward to. Sounded like hell to Sallit. Sometimes she didn’t much like Lanklan, but Goldy said as pimps went he was a keeper.
Najis’ squealing was building to a peak now, impossible to ignore.
‘How far is it still to go?’ asked Sallit, trying to cover over it with talk.
Goldy frowned out towards the horizon. ‘Lot of ground and a lot of rivers.’
‘That’s what you said weeks back.’
‘It was true then and it’s true now. Don’t worry, love. Dab Sweet’ll get us there.’
Sallit hoped he didn’t. She hoped the old scout led ’em round in a great circle and all the way back to New Keln and her mother and father smiling in the doorway of the old house. That was all she wanted. But they were dead of the shudders, and out here in the great empty was no place for dreams. She took a hard breath, rubbed the pain out of her nose, making sure not to cry. That wasn’t fair on the rest. Didn’t help her when they cried, did it?
‘Good old Dab Sweet.’ Goldy snapped the reins and clucked at the oxen. ‘Never been lost in his life, I hear.’
‘Not lost, then,’ said Crying Rock.
Sweet took his eyes off the coming rider to squint up at her, perched on top of one of the broken walls with the sinking sun behind, swinging a loose leg, that old flag unwrapped from her head for once and her hair shook out long, silver with a few streaks of gold still in it.
‘When have you ever known me to be lost?’
‘When I’m not there to point the way?’
He gave a sorry grin at that. Only a couple of times on this trip he’d needed to slip off in the darkness on a clear night to fiddle at his astrolabe and take a proper bearing. He’d won it off a retired sea-captain in a card game and it had proved damned useful down the years. It was like being at sea, sometimes, the plains. Naught but the sky and the horizon and the moaning bloody cargo. A man needed a trick or two to keep pace with his legend.
That red bear? It was a spear he’d killed it with, not his bare hands, and it had been old, and slow, and not that big. But it had been a bear, and he’d killed it, all right. Why couldn’t folk be satisfied with that? Dab Sweet killed a bear! But no, they had to paint a taller picture with every telling—bare hands, then saving a woman, then there were three bears—until he himself could only disappoint beside it. He leaned back against a broken pillar, arms folded, and watched that horseman coming at a gallop, no saddle, Ghost fashion, with a sour, sour feeling in his gut.
‘Who made me fucking admirable?’ he muttered. ‘Not me, that’s sure.’
‘Huh,’ said Crying Rock.
‘I never had an elevated motive in my life.’
‘Uh.’
There was a time he’d heard tales of Dab Sweet and he’d stuck thumbs in his belt and chin to the sky and tricked himself that was how his life had been. But the years scraped by hard as ever and he got less and the stories more ’til they were tales of a man he’d never met succeeding at what he’d never have dreamed of attempting. Sometimes they’d stir some splinter of remembrance of mad and desperate fights or tedious slogs to nowhere or withering passages of cold and hunger and he’d shake his head and wonder by what fucking alchemy these episodes of rank necessity were made noble adventures.