The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,212

near dead as made no difference, head flopping sideways with his helmet skewed across his face and his eyes rolled back and his tongue hanging out and a great crimson drool of blood down his chin.

Be a man.

Then everything jolted. Lake never saw why. There was a terrible pain in the side of his face. So terrible and so sudden he vomited. Spat sick. Something in his eye. Coughed and spluttered and groaned. His helmet had fallen off. He was on the ground. How’d that happen? The pain in his face. Boots kicking at him.

He started crawling through a forest of shuffling and stomping legs, light flickering, sound muffled. He pulled his glove off with his teeth, felt at his face with trembling fingers. Sticky. Was he wounded? Cries and snarls and yells. He clutched at a leg. Dead men down here. The pain of it. Was he wounded? Was it bad? He couldn’t see. Tried to open his eye but he couldn’t see.

“Help,” he whimpered. No one could hear him. Be a man.

He clutched at the mud, dragged himself back. Through the boots, through the legs. Something thudded into his ribs, rolled him over, a boot caught the side of his face as it came down and he shoved at it, punched at it, dragged himself on through the feet and the mud and the corpses.

Be a man. What did that even mean?

“Help!” he squealed, hands clutched to his bloody face, and he felt himself caught by the wrists and dragged back.

It took all her strength to pull him out from there. Grown men are heavy, let alone armoured ones. Ariss gritted her teeth and heaved on his wrists as hard as she could. This was no time to be gentle. Then her foot slipped and she went down in the mud with him half on top of her. Hardly mattered, she was filthy as a miner already, her apron spattered with dirt, spotted with blood.

“Up we get,” grunted Scalla, pulling the wounded man off her and dumping him onto the stretcher. She’d almost complained when she first saw how rough he was with them. Like he was hefting sacks of coal. She’d soon learned that delicacy did no one any good. She stumbled to the foot of the stretcher, caught hold of the handles. Scalla had undone the buckle on the wounded man’s helmet and tossed it bouncing away, turned around to grab his handles and looked over his shoulder to meet her eye. “One, two…”

She growled as she lifted the foot end and off they went, bones jolting, teeth rattling, shoulders burning with the effort as they jogged towards the outskirts of town. Chaos here, messengers dashing, other stretcher-bearers stumbling back and forth, boys scrambling with armfuls of flatbow bolts.

Ariss had wanted to do something before she married. Wanted to do something real. Something to be proud of. Her uncle had fought in Gurkhul, long ago. He’d tried to warn her.

“So a battle’s no place for a woman?” she’d snapped at him.

“A battle’s no place for anyone,” he’d said, and she’d walked out.

Now she forced herself to look at the man on the stretcher. There was a great long slash down his face to his throat. She couldn’t really see how bad it was for all the blood. She didn’t really want to see how bad it was. But the blood was not a good sign. It was pouring out of him. Pooling in the stretcher around his head. Soaking through the canvas. Dripping to the dirt where her feet mashed it into the mud. So much blood. You’d be amazed how much a man holds.

He made this long, dull groan with every outbreath. Not even pained. Half-witted. Mindless.

“Shush,” she crooned, but it came out panicked and jolting with her footfalls.

She’d fondly imagined a woman’s voice might help calm them, the way it had in Spillion Sworbreck’s book about that dauntless frontier girl that she’d found so inspiring. But nothing calmed them. Nothing but death, anyway. She’d pictured dabbing sweaty brows, and water gratefully received, and binding the odd wound. Discreet wounds. Neat wounds. Nicks and scratches. Instead she saw bodies peeled open, hacked into, bent backwards, leaking their contents. Bodies that could never heal. Bodies that hardly looked like bodies any more.

Her uncle had been right. She’d made a terrible mistake.

They came to the garden where the wounded were laid out, sending up an awful chorus of pain and despair. Better than the wet screams coming