Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

‘Well, that’s the thing about righteousness,’ murmured Cosca, ‘everyone has their own brand. Gold, on the other hand, is universal. In my considerable experience, a man is better off worrying about what is good for his purse than what is simply… good.’

A man has to choose what matters and leave everything else to the dogs. Worry about all of it and you’ll do no good at all.

you should laugh every moment you live, for you’ll find it decidedly difficult afterward.

Sometimes she hated her husband, with his grinding ignorance of her struggles, and his chafing assumptions of what was woman’s work and what was man’s. Like knocking in a fence-post then getting drunk was real labour, but minding a crowd of children all day and night was fun to feel grateful for.

‘Our time’s better spent getting ready for what’s coming than running from it.’

‘Who are you?’ she said. He looked up from his blades for a moment. ‘You know me.’ ‘I know a big, soft Northman scared to whip a mule. I know a beggar turned up to our farm in the night to work for crusts. I know a man used to hold my brother and sing when he had the fever. You ain’t that man.’ ‘I am.’ He stepped across the gap between the wagons, and he put his arms around her crushing tight, and she heard him whisper in her ear. ‘But that’s not all I am. Stay out of my way, Shy.’

‘Everyone’s got plans,’ said Shy, ‘and everyone thinks theirs are good. It’s when one set of good plans gets tangled with another things tend to slide downhill.’

‘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 ba...

The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are.

Folk she’d known to be big on religion had tended to use it as an excuse for doing wrong rather’n a reason not to.

Once the Gathering has debated the arguments and spoken its judgement there is no place for regrets, and yet she had kept hers, as often checked and polished and as jealously guarded as any miser’s hoard. Something of her own, perhaps.

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.

Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.

Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier.

She hunched her shoulders and wriggled her spine and all the countless sores and grazes and bruises niggled at her like a choir of ugly little voices.

‘Say one thing for me… say I’m a survivor.’