Best Served Cold

The idea of a smoke stuck in her mind like a bone in her craw. Each day the need crept up on her earlier. More time spent sick, sore and twitchy, counting the minutes until she could creep off and be with her pipe, sink back into soft, warm nothingness. Her fingertips tingled at the thought, tongue working hungrily around her dry mouth.

“Always worn it long. Always.” She turned back into the room. Shivers was wincing like a torture victim as tufts of cut hair tumbled down and built up on the polished boards under the chair. Some men clam up when they’re nervous. Some men blather. It seemed Shivers was in the latter camp. “Guess my brother had long hair and I went and did the same. Used to try and copy him. Looked up to him. Little brothers, you know… What was your brother like?”

She felt her cheek twitch, remembering Benna’s grinning face in the mirror, and hers behind it. “He was a good man. Everyone loved him.”

“My brother was a good man. Lot better’n me. My father thought so, anyway. Never missed a chance to tell me… I mean, just saying, nothing strange ’bout long hair where I come from. Folk got other things to cut in a war than their hair, I guess. Black Dow used to laugh at me, ’cause he’d always hacked his right off, so as not to get in the way in a fight. But then he’d give a man shit about anything, Black Dow. Hard mouth. Hard man. Only man harder was the Bloody-Nine his self. I reckon-”

“For someone with a weak grip on the language, you like to talk, don’t you? You know what I reckon?”

“What?”

“People talk a lot when they’ve nothing to say.”

Shivers heaved out a sigh. “Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I’m one of those… you’ve got a word for it, don’t you?”

“Idiots?”

He looked sideways at her. “It was a different one I had in mind.”

“Optimists.”

“That’s the one. I’m an optimist.”

“How’s it working out for you?”

“Not great, but I keep hoping.”

“That’s optimists. You bastards never learn.” She watched Shivers’ face emerging from that tangle of greasy hair. Hard-boned, sharp-nosed, with a nick of a scar through one eyebrow. It was a good face, in so far as she cared. She found she cared more than she’d thought she would. “You were a soldier, right? What do they call them up in the North… a Carl?”

“I was a Named Man, as it goes,” and she could hear the pride in his voice.

“Good for you. So you led men?”

“I had some looking to me. My father was a famous man, my brother too. A little some of that rubbed off, maybe.”

“So why throw it away? Why come down here to be nothing?”

He looked at her in the mirror while the scissors clicked round his face. “Morveer said you were a soldier yourself. A famous one.”

“Not that famous.” It was only half a lie. Infamous was closer to it.

“That’d be a strange job for a woman, where I come from.”

She shrugged. “Easier than farming.”

“So you know war, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Daresay you’ve seen some battles. You’ve seen men killed.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve seen what goes with it. The marches, the waiting, the sickness. Folk raped, robbed, crippled, burned out who’ve done nought to deserve it.”

Monza thought of her own field burning, all those years ago. “You’ve got a point, you can out and say it.”

“That blood only makes more blood. That settling one score only starts another. That war gives a bastard of a sour taste to any man that’s not half-mad, and it only gets worse with time.” She didn’t disagree. “So you know why I’d rather be free of it. Make something grow. Something to be proud of, instead of just breaking. Be… a good man, I guess.”

Snip, snip. Hair tumbled down and gathered on the floor. “A good man, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“So you’ve seen dead men yourself?”

“I’ve seen my share.”

“You’ve seen a lot together?” she asked. “Stacked up after the plague came through, spread out after a battle?”

“Aye, I’ve seen that.”

“Did you notice some of those corpses had a kind of glow about them? A sweet smell like roses on a spring morning?”

Shivers frowned. “No.”

“The good men and the bad, then-all looked about the same, did they? They always did to me, I can tell you that.” It was his turn to stay quiet. “If you’re a good man, and you try to think about what the right thing is every day of your life, and you build things to be proud of so bastards can come and burn them in a moment, and you make sure and say thank you kindly each time they kick the guts out of you, do you think when you die, and they stick you in the mud, you turn into gold?”

“What?”

“Or do you turn to fucking shit like the rest of us?”

He nodded slowly. “You turn to shit, alright. But maybe you can leave something good behind you.”

She barked empty laughter at him. “What do we leave behind but things not done, not said, not finished? Empty clothes, empty rooms, empty spaces in the ones who knew us? Mistakes never made right and hopes rotted down to nothing?”

“Hopes passed on, maybe. Good words said. Happy memories, I reckon.”