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Back at the inn, in the fort, the men were busy forgetting, and swigged huge jugs of Aynesbrew. But some couldn’t quite forget, and couldn’t count out the cards they were dealt in distracting hands of bridge, poker, or solitaire without seeing in the place of the joker a mockery made of all they held to be their own and known by them; in aces the overbearing presence of their future deaths; in the kings the unsightly command nature held over their every action; in a queen the lost woman they’d failed to love; in the knaves the lucky souls that would be born and persist after their time, whom they begrudged the small fortune of life after death; and in each pair, a four and a three, they’d see the year they got married, the days their love is fertile, the wages they’d spent on drink. The room was quickly divided into: the drunk, lucky in cards and in some ways happy; and the drunk, losing money fast and terrorised to the bone by what those who’d black out later were to finally make it away from.
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