Dangerous Women Part 3. Джордж Р. Р. Мартин
nice little evening among cultured company. They’d no need to hurry. They knew she was here, and they knew she was going nowhere, and they knew she was getting no help, and so did she.
“Bastards,” Shy whispered, cursing the day she ever took up with them. But you have to take up with someone, don’t you? And you can only pick from what’s on offer.
Jeg stretched his back, took a long sniff and a comfortable spit, then drew his sword. That curved cavalry sword he was so proud of with the clever-arsed basketwork, which he said he’d won in a duel with a Union officer, but that Shy knew he’d stolen, along with the best part of everything else he’d ever owned. How she’d mocked him about that stupid sword. She wouldn’t have minded having it to hand now, though, and him with only her eating knife.
“Smoke!” bellowed Jeg, and Shy winced. She’d no idea who’d thought that name up for her. Some wag had lettered it on the bills for her arrest and now everyone used it. On account of her tendency to vanish like smoke, maybe. Though it could also have been on account of her tendencies to stink like it, stick in folks’ throats, and drift with the wind.
“Get out here, Smoke!” Jeg’s voice clapped off the dead fronts of the buildings, and Shy shrank a little further into the darkness. “Get out here and we won’t hurt you too bad when we find you!”
So much for taking the money and going. They wanted the price on her too. She pressed her tongue into the gap between her teeth and mouthed, “Cocksuckers.” There’s a certain kind of man, the more you give him, the more he’ll take.
“We’ll have to go and get her,” she heard Neary say in the stillness.
“Aye.”
“I told you we’d have to go and get her.”
“You must be pissing your pants with joy over the outcome, then, eh?”
“Said we’d have to get her.”
“So stop pointing it out and get it done.”
Dodd’s wheedling voice. “Look, the money’s here, we could just scrape this up and get off, there ain’t no need to—”
“Did you and I really spring from between the same set o’ legs?” sneered Jeg at his brother. “You are the stupidest bastard.”
“Stupidest,” said Neary.
“You think I’m leaving four thousand marks for the crows?” said Jeg. “You scrape that up, Dodd, we’ll break the mare.”
“Where do you reckon she is?” asked Neary.
“I thought you was the big tracker?”
“Out in the wild, but we ain’t in the wild.”
Jeg cocked an eyebrow at the empty shacks. “You’d call this the highest extent of civilisation, would you?”
They looked at each other a moment, dust blowing up around their legs, then settling again.
“She’s here somewhere,” said Neary.
“You think? Good thing I got the self-described sharpest eyes west of the mountains with me, so I don’t miss her dead horse ten fucking strides away. Yes, she’s here somewhere.”
“Where do you reckon?” asked Neary.
“Where would you be?”
Neary looked about the buildings and Shy jerked out of the way as his narrowed eyes darted over the tavern.
“In that one, I reckon, but I ain’t her.”
“Course you ain’t fucking her. You know how I can tell? You got bigger tits and less sense. If you was her, I wouldn’t have to fucking look for her now, would I?”
Another silence, another dusty gust. “Guess not,” said Neary.
Jeg took his tall hat off, scrubbed at his sweaty hair with his fingernails, and jammed it back on at an angle. “You look in there, I’ll try the one next to it, but don’t kill the bitch, eh? That’ll half the reward.”
Shy eased back into the shadows, feeling the sweat tickling under her shirt. To be caught in this worthless arsehole of a place. By these worthless bastards. In bare feet. She didn’t deserve this. All she’d wanted was to be somebody worth speaking of. To not be nothing, forgotten on the day of her death. Now she saw that there’s a sharp balance between too little excitement and a huge helping too much. But like most of her lame-legged epiphanies, it had dawned a year too late.
She sucked air through the little gap between her teeth as she heard Neary creaking across the boards in the common room, maybe just the metal rattle of that big axe. She was shivering all over. Felt so weak of a sudden she could hardly hold the knife up, let alone imagine swinging it. Maybe it was time to give up. Toss the knife out the door and say, “I’m coming out! I’ll be no trouble! You win!” Smile and nod and thank ’em for their betrayal and their kind consideration when they kicked the shit out of her or horsewhipped her or broke her legs and whatever else amused them on the way to her hanging.
She’d seen her share of those and never relished the spectacle. Standing there tied while they read your name and your crime, hoping for some last reprieve that wouldn’t come while the noose was drawn tight, sobbing for mercy or hurling your curses and neither making the slightest hair of difference. Kicking at nothing, tongue stuck out while you shat yourself for the amusement of scum no better’n you. She pictured Jeg and Neary, up front in the grinning crowd as they watched her do the thief’s dance at rope’s end. Probably arrayed in even more ridiculous clothes secured with the reward money.
“Fuck them,” she mouthed at the darkness, lips curling back in a snarl as she heard Neary’s foot on the bottom step.
She had a hell of a contrary streak, did Shy. From when she was a tot, when someone told her how things would be, she immediately started thinking on how she’d make ’em otherwise. Her mother had always called her mule stubborn, and blamed it on her Ghost blood. “That’s your damn Ghost blood,” as though being quarter savage had been Shy’s own choice rather than on account of her mother picking out a half-Ghost wanderer to lie with who turned out—no crashing surprise—to be a no-good drunk.
Shy would be fighting. No doubt she’d be losing, but she’d be fighting. She’d make those bastards kill her and at least rob ’em of half the reward. Might not expect such thoughts as those to steady your hand, but they did hers. The little knife still shook, but now from how hard she was gripping it.
For a man who proclaimed himself the great tracker, Neary had some trouble keeping quiet. She heard the breath in his nose as he paused at the top of the steps, close enough to touch if it hadn’t been for the plank wall between them.
A board groaned as he shifted his weight and Shy’s whole body tensed, every hair twitching up. Then she saw him—not darting through the doorway at her, axe in his fist and murder in his eyes, but creeping off down the balcony after the bait of bloody footsteps, drawn bow pointed exactly the wrong way.
When she was given a gift, Shy had always believed in grabbing it with both hands rather than thinking on how to say thank you. She dashed at Neary’s back, teeth bared and a low growl ripping at her throat. His head whipped around, the whites of his eyes showing and the bow following after, the head of the arrow glinting with such light as found that abandoned place.
She ducked low and caught him around the legs, shoulder driving hard into his thigh and making him grunt, her hand finding her wrist and clamping tight under Neary’s arse, her nose suddenly full of the horse-and-sour sweat stink of him. The bowstring went, but Shy was already straightening, snarling, screaming, bursting up, and—big man though he was—she hoisted Neary right over the rail as neat as she used to hoist a sack of grain on her mother’s farm.
He hung in the air a moment, mouth and eyes wide with shock, then he plummeted with a breathy whoop and crashed through the boards down below.
Shy blinked, hardly