God, he was hurting. His head felt like a melon someone had taken a hammer to. God, he was cold. He could hardly have been colder if he had died in the river. God, he was weak. His knees trembled so badly he could hear them flapping at the insides of his wet trousers. Just as well he had Shy to lean on. She did not feel like she would collapse any time soon. Her shoulder was firm as wood under his hand.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and meant it, too. ‘Thank you so much.’ He had always been at his best with someone strong to lean on. Like a flowering creeper adorning a deep-rooted tree. Or a songbird perched on a bull’s horn. Or a leech on a horse’s arse.
They struggled up the bank, his booted foot and his bare foot scraping at the mud. Behind them, cattle were being driven across the river, riders leaning from saddles to wave their hats or their ropes, yipping and calling, the beasts swarming, swimming, clambering one over another, thrashing up clouds of spray.
‘Welcome to our little Fellowship,’ said Shy.
A mass of wagons, animals and people were gathered in the lee of a wind-bent copse just beyond the river. Some worked timber for repairs. Some struggled to get stubborn oxen into yokes. Some were busy changing clothes soaked in the crossing, sharp tan-lines on bare limbs. A pair of women were heating soup over a fire, Temple’s stomach giving a painful grumble at the smell of it. Two children laughed as they chased a three-legged dog around and around.
He did his best to smile, and nod, and ingratiate himself as Shy helped him through their midst with her strong hand under his armpit, but a few curious frowns were his whole harvest. Mostly these people were fixed on their work, all of them aimed squarely at grinding a profit out of this unforgiving new land with one kind of hard labour or another. Temple winced, and not just from the pain and the cold. When he’d signed up with Nicomo Cosca, it had been on the understanding that he’d never come this close to hard work again.
‘Where is the Fellowship heading?’ he asked. It would be just his luck to hear Squaredeal or Averstock, settlements whose remaining citizens he rather hoped never to be reacquainted with.
‘West,’ said Shy. ‘Right across the Far Country to Crease. That suit?’
Temple had never heard of Crease. Which was the highest recommendation for the place. ‘Anywhere but where I came from suits well enough. West will be wonderful. If you’ll have me.’
‘Ain’t me you got to convince. It’s these old bastards.’
There were five of them, standing in a loose group at the head of the column. Temple was slightly unnerved to see the nearest was a Ghost woman, long and lean with a face worn tough as saddle-leather, bright eyes looking straight through Temple and off to the far horizon. Next to her, swaddled in a huge fur coat and with a pair of knives and a gilt-sheathed hunting sword at his belt, a smallish man with a shag of grey hair and beard and a curl to his mouth as if Temple was a joke he didn’t find funny but was too polite to frown at.
‘This here is the famous scout Dab Sweet and his associate Crying Rock. And this the leader of our merry Fellowship, Abram Majud.’ A bald, sinewy Kantic, face composed of unforgiving angles with two careful, slanted eyes in the midst. ‘This is Savian.’ A tall man, with iron grey stubble and a stare like a hammer. ‘And this is…’ Shy paused, as though trying to think up the right word. ‘Lamb.’
Lamb was a huge old Northman, slightly hunched as if he was trying to look smaller than he was, a piece missing from his ear and a face that, through a tangle of hair and beard, looked as if it had seen long use as a millstone. Temple wanted to wince just looking at that collection of breaks, nicks and scars, but he grinned through it like the professional he was, and smiled at each of these geriatric adventurers as though he never saw in one place such a collection of the beautiful and promising.
‘Gentlemen, and…’ He glanced at Crying Rock, realised the word hardly seemed to fit but had entirely backed himself into a corner. ‘Lady… it is my honour to meet you. My name is Temple.’
‘Speaks nice, don’t he?’ rumbled Sweet, as though that was a black mark against him already.
‘Where did you find him?’ growled Savian. Temple had not failed at as many professions as he had without learning to recognise a dangerous man, and he feared this one straight away.
‘Fished him out of the river,’ said Shy.
‘You got a reason not to throw him back?’
‘Didn’t want to kill him, I guess.’
Savian looked straight at Temple, flint-eyed, and shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t be killing him. Just letting him drown.’
There was a moment of silence for Temple to consider that, while the wind blew chill through his soaked trousers and the five old worthies treated him each to their own style of appraisal, suspicion or scorn.
It was Majud who spoke first. ‘And where did you float in from, Master Temple? You do not appear to be native to these parts.’
‘No more than you, sir. I was born in Dagoska.’
‘An excellent city for commerce in its day, rather less so since the demise of the Guild of Spicers. And how does a Dagoskan come to be out here?’
Here is the perennial trouble with burying your past. Others are forever trying to dig it up. ‘I must confess… I had fallen in with some bad company.’
Majud indicated his companions with a graceful gesture. ‘It happens to the best of us.’
‘Bandits?’ asked Savian.
All that and worse. ‘Soldiers,’ said Temple, putting it in the best light possible short of an outright lie. ‘I left them and struck out on my own. I was set upon by Ghosts, and in the struggle rolled down a slope and… into a gorge.’ He pressed gently at his battered face, remembering that sickening moment when he ran out of ground. ‘Followed by a long fall into water.’
‘I been there,’ murmured Lamb, with a faraway look.
Sweet puffed up his chest and adjusted his sword-belt. ‘Whereabouts did you run across these Ghosts?’
Temple could only shrug. ‘Upriver?’
‘How far and how many?’
‘I saw four. It happened at dawn and I’ve been floating since.’
‘Might be no more’n twenty miles south.’ Sweet and Crying Rock exchanged a long glance, grizzled concern on his part, stony blankness on hers. ‘We’d best ride out and take a look that way.’
‘Hmm,’ murmured the old Ghost.
‘Do you expect trouble?’ asked Majud.
‘Always. That way you’ll only be pleasantly surprised.’ Sweet walked between Lamb and Savian, giving each of them a slap on the shoulder as he passed. ‘Good work at the river. Hope I’m as useful when I reach your age.’ He slapped Shy, too. ‘And you, girl. Might want to let go the rope next time, though, eh?’ It was only then that Temple noticed the bloody bandage around her limp arm. He had never been particularly sensitive to the hurts of others.
Majud showed off a gold front tooth as he smiled. ‘I imagine you would be grateful to travel with our Fellowship?’
Temple sagged with relief. ‘Beyond grateful.’
‘Every member has either paid for their passage or contributes their skills.’
Temple unsagged. ‘Ah.’
‘Do you have a profession?’
‘I have had several.’ He thought quickly through the list for those that were least likely to land him immediately back in the river. ‘Trainee priest, amateur surgeon—’
‘We’ve got a surgeon,’ said Savian.
‘And a priest, more’s the pity,’ added Shy.
‘Butcher—’
‘We have hunters,’ said Majud.
‘—carpenter—’
‘A wagon-man?’
Temple winced. ‘House-builder.’
‘We need no houses out here. Your most recent work?’
Mercenary usually won few friends. ‘I was a lawyer,’ he said, before realising that often won still fewer.
Savian was certainly not one of them. ‘There’s no law out here but what a man brings with him.’
‘Have you ever driven oxen?’ asked Majud.
