A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

she was misreading him.
    To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable
every way in, until no openings remained and the soul
hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its
railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness.
Hardness without created hardness within.
    Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could
be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an
illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to
assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little
more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness
in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the
only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed
to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if
the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the
proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged
round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.
    Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness
often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of
escaping it, in durhang, she'd known that such an escape was
simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She'd
just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such
feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.
    Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear.
All conditions of being.
    Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity,
and in so doing revealed their own hardness of spirit,
and more than a little malice.
    The taproom stank of blood, shit, piss and vomit. Blend
was recovering in her bedroom upstairs, as close to death as
she'd ever been, but the worst was past, now. Barathol and
Chaur had gone down to the cellars below to help Picker
and Antsy bury the bodies of their comrades. The blacksmith's
grief at the death of his new friend, Mallet, was too
raw for Scillara to face – he was in no way a hard man and
this jarred her frail assembly of beliefs, for he should have
been. Yet had she not seen the same breathless vulnerability
when he'd struggled to bring Chaur back to life after the
huge simpleton had drowned?
    'He is . . .' Duiker began, and then frowned, 'a remarkable
man, I think.'
    Scillara blinked. 'Who?'
    The historian shook his head, unwilling to meet her
eyes. 'I should be getting drunk.'
    'Never works,' she said.
    'I know.'
    They were silent again, moments stretching on.
    We just stumbled into these people. A crazy contest at a
restaurant. We were just getting to know them, to treasure each
and every one of them.
    Mallet was a healer. A Bridgeburner. In his eyes there had
burned some kind of self-recrimination, a welter of guilt. A
healer tortured by something he could not heal. A list of
failures transformed into failings. Yet he had been a gentle
man. That soft, oddly high voice – which they would never
hear again.
    For him, Barathol had wept.
    Bluepearl was a mage. Amusingly awkward, kind of
wide-eyed, which hardly fit all that he'd been through,
because he too had been a Bridgeburner . Antsy had railed
over the man's corpse, a sergeant dressing down a soldier
so incompetent as to be dead. Antsy had been offended,
indignant, even as anguish glittered in his bright blue eyes. 'You damned fool!' he'd snarled. 'You Hood-damned useless
idiotic fool!' When he'd made to kick the body Picker had
roughly pulled him back, almost off his feet, and Antsy had
lurched off to slam the toe of one boot into the planks of
the counter.
    They looked older now. Picker, Antsy. Wan and redeyed,
shoulders slumped, not bothering to rinse the dried
blood from their faces, hands and forearms.
    Duiker alone seemed unchanged, as if these last deaths
had been little more than someone pissing into a wide,
deep river. His sadness was an absolute thing, and he never
came up for air. She wanted to take him in her arms and shake the life back into him. Yet she would not do that, for
she knew such a gesture would be a selfish one, serving only
her own needs. As much, perhaps, as her initial impulse to
embrace him in sympathy.
    Because she too felt like weeping. For having dragged
the historian out into the city – away from what had happened
here the past night. For having saved his life.
    When they'd first arrived back; when they'd seen the
bodies on the street; when they'd stepped inside to look
upon the carnage, Duiker had shot her a single glance, and
in that she had read clearly the thought behind it. See what
you took me away