The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,207

about the fighting. But Murezin had also fallen in the river when the bridge collapsed, along with several others. A couple had washed up drowned on the bank, but of Murezin there was no sign.

Suval had said it was just as well the Gurkish Legion would not have to fight because he had never fought in his life and was not Gurkish and, indeed, barely even spoke their language. But it could not be worse than living in the slums in Adua where no one would hire you if you had a dark face. He had been a scribe in Tazlik, where the sea breeze had cooled his clean little office. He had copied religious texts, mostly, with some accountancy work, which was all very boring but paid well. How he prayed now that he might live to be bored again. He hunched down at another ear-splitting crack somewhere over on the left. God, that was a different life, and had happened to a different man in a different world from this one. A world that was not exploding and on fire. A world that smelled of salt sea and blossom rather than smoke and terror.

“God help us,” he whispered again. There were a lot of men praying. A lot of men crying. A lot of men screaming. One sat silent, in the dappled shade of the trees, looking exceedingly surprised, blood streaming down his face. Suval knew him a little. He had been a tailor in Ul-Khatif. No sense of humour. But senses of humour were not at a premium here.

He turned over and shuffled through a slurry of fallen fruit to a twisted tree trunk where several other Kantics were sheltering, along with a Union man in the oddest uniform, half-green, half-brown. He realised as he got close that the man was dead, and the brown half was blood from his arm, which was utterly mangled. He pushed the corpse away with his shoe and wriggled into the place it had occupied, and did not even feel ashamed at his mistreatment of the dead.

He could ask God for forgiveness later.

Someone offered him a flask and he drank gratefully, handed it back. Smoke wafted across the river. Some men had rafted over and now they were huddled trembling on the far bank with one spear between them, one of them pale and bleeding, the raft come apart and its timbers drifting away. Now and again a body would float past, face up or face down, turning gently with the current.

Furious shouting behind them, the sound of terrified horses. They were driving wagons through the carnage. They had rolled one into the river already. Trying to make a bridge, so they could get across. And what? Fight? Madness. All madness. A man they had all thought dead gave a gurgling scream as a wagon’s wheel crunched over his leg.

“God help us,” whispered Suval, but God was not listening. No more than He had been when the riots started in Tazlik and his office was robbed and set on fire and he and his family spent all they had on passage to the Union. Another crash, and he wriggled back against the tree as bits of leaf and twig rained down.

Something spattered his face. Was it blood? Was he wounded? Oh, God, was this the end? He held his trembling fingertips up before his eyes.

Just plum pulp. Just rotten fruit. He wanted to laugh. But he also wanted to cry. His helmet fell off and he jammed it on again, back to front.

There was a big fat man in a big red uniform heavy with golden ropes. The one who had smiled from horseback as they set off a week before. A thin man with combed-back black hair was shouting something at him, stabbing a finger at the broken bridge, at the wagons. He wanted them to cross. But how could they cross with the world on fire? How could they even think of moving? He might as well have demanded they fly to the moon.

Suval was no soldier. He copied texts. He had a lovely hand, everyone said so. Had taken great care over his manuscripts.

“I’m not sure… that is to say… I don’t see how…” Barezin stared about at the ruins of the legion he had been so very proud of, mouth mindlessly opening and closing like that of a fish jerked from the river. “My Gurkish Legion—” And he twisted around as another cannon-stone crashed through the trees