Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

‘No further aliases, I beg you!’ Cosca massaged the sides of his skull as if they pained him. ‘Since suffering a head-wound at the Battle of Afieri I have been cursed with an appalling memory for names. It is a source of constant embarrassment. But Sergeant Friendly has all the details. If your man Conshus—’ ‘Conthus.’ ‘What did I say?’ ‘Conshus.’ ‘There you go! If he’s in the Near Country, he’ll be yours.’

Temple swallowed. He could have left. He could have said he wanted no part of this. Enough is enough, damn it! But that would have taken courage. That would have left him with no armed men at his back. Alone, and weak, and a victim once again. That would have been hard to do. And Temple always took the easy way. Even when he knew it was the wrong way. Especially then, in fact, since easy and wrong make such good company. Even when he had a damn good notion it would end up being the hard way, even then. Why think about tomorrow when today is such a thorny business?

‘This ain’t right,’ said the Keep. ‘How’s you being dead going to make it any righter?’ Lamb’s voice flat and quiet like it was no kind of threat, just a question. He didn’t have to scream it. Those two dead men were doing it for him.

Her brother and her sister, that’s what she’d fix on. They were the stars she’d set her course by, two points of light in

‘Your name hasn’t always been Lamb, has it?’ He looked at her, and then away. Hunching down further. Pulling his coat tighter. Thumb slipping out between his fingers over and over, rubbing at the stump of the middle one. The missing one. ‘We all got a past,’ he said. Too true, that.

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

‘But the seeds of the past bear fruit in the present, my father used to say. I’m that much of a fool I got to teach myself the same lesson over and over, always pissing into the wind. The past never stays buried. Not one like mine, leastways. Blood’ll always find you out.’

‘I was running away. One way and another I’ve made quite a habit of it.’ ‘Done a fair bit myself. I find the trouble is, though, wherever you run to… there y’are.’

The bigger man’s face, by contrast, held a trace of doubt as Camling ushered the two together in the centre of the Circle. ‘Do I know you?’ he called over the baying of the audience. ‘What’s your real name?’ Lamb stretched his neck out to one side and then the other. ‘Maybe it’ll come to you.’ Camling held one hand high. ‘May the best man win!’ he shrieked. Over the sudden roar he heard Lamb say, ‘It’s the worst man wins these.’

This time there was no one else to blame. Not God, not Cosca, certainly not Shy. Lamb had been right. The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are. Temple’s problem was Temple, and it always had been.

‘There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.’