by Chloe Garner
“Sometime,” she said. “Probably not soon, but sometime.”
He nodded to himself, then realized, feeling silly that he hadn’t noticed before, that he wasn’t wearing a shirt any more.
“You mind finding something for me to wear?” he asked. “I’m going to bake.”
“You got it,” she answered, pointing him at a boulder where he should go sit in the shade. Leaning his head against the warming stone, he remembered that she hadn’t slept any more than he had, and she’d been the one who had actually taken injury from a plinth, not him. And yet, he was the one sitting here with worn-out knees and a back that was numb in places from exhaustion.
She put him to shame.
He closed his eyes, tipping his hat down over them.
He could live with that.
*********
The arrival was spectacular.
Palk wasn’t excited about that, but it seemed that everyone else was, and he hated to rain on the parade, so to speak.
The men had skinned one of the plinth.
He had no idea why, not really, but they’d done it, and they draped it across Biscuit’s back half the morning that they set out to arrive at the ranch.
“Go with it,” Starn had warned him.
“It’s gross,” Palk had answered, feeling bad for Biscuit. The hide was uncured, barely cleaned, and it was heavy and smelled of plinth. The other kalt kept a healthy distance, but to Palk’s surprise, Biscuit didn’t seem to mind the blanket, even with the gross and the heat.
A few of the men ran ahead and while Palk’s instinct was to stop them, Starn held him back again. By the time they got to the ranch, the entire staff was assembled out front waiting.
“Be gracious,” Starn whispered as she peeled Babe off to the side and let him ride in on his own. He cursed under his breath, words that he only knew in his own language.
He didn’t want this.
Celebrity.
It was stupid.
There was clapping and cheering and people said things to him over and over again, things that meant nothing, but that came from smiling faces that meant it. Biscuit started to act up under the constant touching and jostling, and Palk just let him go, assuming he’d find his own way back to the barn and his well-deserved manger full of grain. Palk hoped the stable boy would understand and forgive him for not escorting the kalt back in himself.
It seemed, in that moment, that the stable boy and his potential disdain over how Palk returned Biscuit was his only lifeline of reality, and he clung to it, until the boy turned up, shiny faced and smiling, hopping up and down and saying the same things as everyone else, just in a higher pitch and with more enthusiasm.
Finally, Palk waved them off.
“I am tired and I am hungry,” he said. “I’d like to go sit with the men and have a real meal, and then go sleep on something other than rocks.”
There was laughter, as if he’d made an intentional joke, but he finally escaped inside, where Rosie was waiting to greet him.
“You really killed all three of them?” she asked.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Not you, too.”
“Then it’s a lie,” she said, eyes not changing all that much. “Just like it always is.”
“No,” he sighed. “There are three dead plinths back there. I can’t take all the credit, but we hunted them down and we killed them all.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes, really,” he told her. She shook her head.
“That’s amazing. You really are sent by the gods to watch over us.”
There it was, one of those sets of words. He wasn’t sent by anyone, and he wasn’t watching over anyone. He went out and pulled a trigger, then used a knife and took the life out of two pretty impressive bodies, but there was nothing any more celestial about it than that.
“My father was killed by a plinth,” she said.
Oh.
That was a new one.
His attitude did an about-face and his heart softened.
“I’m sorry,” he said. She shrugged.
“I never met him. He brought mama here when she was pregnant, and got himself killed a few weeks later. Mama worked in the kitchen, and then so did I. I’m just glad one of the men finally evened out the score a couple. And stopped lying to us about it.”
“How do you know they were lying?” Palk asked.
“Everyone does,” she said, leaning against the table as he sat down. “It’s why they had such a turnout for you coming back. No one has ever come back from a hunt and had people come out to celebrate, even though they all say they killed plinth while they were out.”
They did all know.
“I was the only fool who didn’t know,” he said. She gave him a tiny grin.
“No one talks about it. You just kind of figure it out, and then you know. It’s part of the story.”
He sighed.
“Starn figured it out. I never did.”
“Good thing, too,” Rosie said. “Elsewise you might not have ever done it.”
He looked up at her, even more tired, and she laughed.
“Let me go get you some lunch. The boys will be in soon, and everyone’s going to want to talk to you. I told them not to let anyone in for a few minutes, to buy you some time to eat.”
And a few minutes of peace.
“Thank you,” he said, reaching exhaustion as he spoke. She waved at him as she walked away.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s less than you deserve.”
*********
He slept hard. When he woke up, the world was different.
People knew who he was.
He’d stood out from the beginning, being as pale as he was, but now they moved to one side as he went by.
Galp was nice to him.
And then Tiedmont called him into his office.
“Sit, sit, boy,” the man said as Palk entered. He noticed the bronzed kalt ears on the man’s desk that Starn had referenced. How strange.
“Yes, sir,” Palk said, taking one of the chairs. The man was one of the blue race, with skin that sagged in more places than it didn’t. He had greenish eyes that might have been yellow, depending on how you took them, and stubby fingers that he tapped against each other under his chin as Palk sat.
“You brought us a plinth pelt,” the man said. Parlance Tiedmont. Son of Terrance Tiedmont. He’d inherited the ranch from his father, and somewhere in the house there was a woman who called herself his wife, though she rarely made an appearance. No one knew if they had children.
“I did,” Palk said. “No one told me it wasn’t possible.”
“Obviously it was,” Parlance said. “We just had to find the right man.”
“Yes,” Palk said. “Apparently so.”
Parlance nodded, continuing to tap the stubby ends of his fingers against each other.
“There are going to be rumors, now,” he said. “The boys are going to talk. They always do.”
“I gather,” Palk said. Parlance smiled a cold smile at him.
“The other ranchers are going to be jealous. What you’ve done is something of an accomplishment, see, and they’re going to want to own the man who did it.”
“I don’t have an owner,” Palk said. “Just an employer. Sir.”
The cold smile grew.
“Yes, I see. You don’t have a daddy or an uncle who worked for me or my daddy. You don’t have any brothers you’d like to see employed. You’re just a wanderer with an odd set of skills.”
“I think that’s accurate,” Palk said. He wanted to push the man to get to the point faster, but for now he let him take his time.
“So I have nothing to offer you,” Parlance said. “Nothing you want more than anything.”
Palk waited.
“You have no loyalty to me, as far as I can see, and part of me says the thing to do, here, is to throw you out.”
“Sir?” Palk asked, surprised. Tiedmont nodded.
“See, I
thought that might come as a shock to you. You’ve got some celebrity coming, sure, but if you can’t feed yourself and that pretty wife of yours in the meantime, there’s no opportunity to capitalize on it, is there? You move on, and I avoid a bidding war.”
It actually made sense, in a very cold way.
“They say your breedstock is the best in the district,” Palk said, feeling his way through the argument as he made it. Parlance’s face shifted to contemplative and he nodded.
“I do.”
“Because you know who to keep around and who to sell.”
The man smiled, expecting the obvious, but Palk zagged.
“You don’t have any of that feel for your men, do you?”
They looked at each other for a long moment, and Palk shrugged.
“Gamm is a good man, and Elli seems competent enough. Galp is loyal as anyone I’ve seen, and granted that’s a short list so take it for what it is, but he is amazingly loyal. After that, though, you don’t seem to put anything near the care into grooming your ranch staff that you do into your livestock. And it’s a shame. There are some very good people doing work for you right now.”
“You being one of them,” Parlance guessed. Palk shrugged.
“Like you said, I’m not that loyal to anyone. That doesn’t make me a stellar employee, and neither one of us needs to dance around it. But you need to think about who does what job and whether they’re really great at it, great the way you expect your bloodlines to be, if you want the ranch to run well.”
Tiedmont sat back in his chair.
“Help me out, boy. I fail to see how this is relevant.”
This was the leap, the one that he wasn’t sure he could bridge.
“You can be a heartless bastard, and you’ll get some good staff and some bad staff. You pay them enough, give them the right perks, they stay. You don’t? They leave. Or you can figure out how to endear yourself to them, look at them the way you do your livestock, as a long-term, multi-generational investment, and maybe you don’t have to look at me as a bidding war in the waiting. Maybe I’m already your man.”
Tiedmont folded his arms across his wide chest.
“So apart from the free advice from a man with a memory going back three weeks, what’s your point, son?”
“You pay me what’s fair, I don’t have any interest in leaving. I like your people. My wife has a job and seems to be happy with it. We could make a home here, for as long as it lasts. But I’m easy. You’ve got to find a way to earn the loyalty of all of your other star performers or, like you say, the Dandys and the Plangows will snatch them from under your nose. Same as you do to them, I bet.”
There was a fraction of a smile again, this time genuine, if calculating.
“And what would you consider fair?” Tiedmont said.
“Thirty kennar a week, plus a budget to Galp to start increasing the arms your men carry. If you expect me to ever go out there again, it’s going to be with men with guns who know how to shoot them.”
“That’s a big multiple of what I pay you now,” Tiedmont said.
“It is,” Palk answered, “but last week I was a wanderer that Gamm took a risk on because I knew what a gun was. Today, I’m something quite different.”
Tiedmont narrowed his eyes.
“How much budget to Galp?” he asked.
“I won’t go out again without a gun for every man I’m traveling with,” Palk said. “I won’t send men out against an enemy that they have no hope of beating. You shouldn’t either.”
Tiedmont heaved a huge breath, then nodded and stood.
“I’ll meet your terms. Tell your wife that my Margette is interested to see her latest contraption.”
Contraption? Palk didn’t ask.
“Sir,” he said, shaking hands firmly and then letting himself out of the office.
Maybe with the raise, he could talk Starn out of making him wear the stupid hat.
*********
He found her at chow after his meeting with Tiedmont.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“Got what I wanted,” he told her, sitting down with his food. “What contraptions?”
She glanced at him.
“You leave me here, bored, and expect me not to do anything.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m just messing around, and the blacksmith is a good guy. He’s actually quite clever.”
“What contraptions?”
She sighed and put her spoon down.
“Okay, so, like, your shirt.”
He looked down.
“No, the one that you were wearing. The one you can actually read.”
“Okay, what about it?”
“It’s strange, right? Like our shoes are strange.”
“Right.”
“So I was looking at it, and I realized that the stitching on it wasn’t done by hand.”
“What does that mean?”
“When you sew by hand, you put the needle through, you draw it tight, and then you put it back through to the front. This was actually a very clever design where you sew with two pieces of thread, one on each side of the fabric, so that you save complexity. You can do it with a machine.”
He blinked, and she nodded.
“It’s very clever. Well, it’s clever. You can’t say it’s very clever until you see the design that they had to work from. It might not be very clever, because the design before that was also a bit clever, and so was the one before that.”
“Starn.”
She sighed.
“So I made one.”
“What?”
“A machine that sews. You just spin a wheel, and it pushes thread around and it sews. I showed up to one of the quilting events and I finished a whole quilt. Everyone wants one.”
He waited, watching her.
“Okay, and cloth is this big, labor-intensive piece of work. That’s part of why they quilt. To have something to do with the scraps. That’s why everything you’re wearing is made out of animal. It takes less time and energy for an animal to grow your clothes than it does to make fabric. So I have a design drawn and I’ve got a couple of the men working on making the pieces for me, and I’m going to try it out… well, I would have tried it yesterday, but I was kind of distracted. So I’m probably going to put them all together tonight, and I’ll try it tomorrow.”
He waited some more. There was more. Her eyes were too active for that to be it. She sighed again, pushing at her spoon with her finger.
“It’s all this knowledge, Palk. Things I know, that if I can just make them, I don’t have to remember them anymore. It’s poking around inside my head and just finding things. You don’t feel that way?”
He didn’t have the same sense of energy that she did, but he could at least recognize the sense that there was a lot of stuff that, if he could just lay eyes on it, he could identify it and how it functioned. It was distracting, all the time, the list of things that only half made sense because he was too busy trying to remember them.
“Maybe,” he said. “What else?”
She shrugged.
“It’s like with the gun. You say you need lighter and more accurate. I start putting together a design that will do that. You know what else you need? Something that shoots more than once. I’m going to run the blacksmith out of iron. There are better materials for what I’m trying to do, but that’s a memory, not a knowledge. I can’t just tell him what they are or how to get them, and that’s driving me nuts. But he’s going to run out of iron at this rate. We’re going to have to find more, but the opportunities for this are…” she shook her head, bewildered. “They’re endless, Palk. I could walk out of here today with the blacksmith and we’d be running the planet in six months, if we wanted, but neither of us really want that. I mean, I don’t want to be in charge. I just want to build things, you know?”
“Have you thought about whether or not this is even what you should be doing?” Palk asked.
&nbs
p; She took another breath, looking down at her stew.
“See, that’s what I knew you’d say. No,” she said, holding up a hand as he started to defend himself. “No, it’s not that you’re wrong. It’s that I knew you’d think about it, and for some reason, that’s the one thing I can’t think about. I just can’t. I don’t know why. And I knew you’d ask. You’d be reasonable.”
He frowned harder.
“What’s going on?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know. There’s a monster in my brain, and I don’t know what it wants or why it’s there. I can’t help but try to figure things out, and then build them. I don’t know why. And I’m very, very hard to kill. I wonder if this is why we blanked ourselves and became wanderers. If it wasn’t you at all, but if you came with me because I did something terrible and unforgivable, but if that’s what happened, then I didn’t even manage to save myself, like this.”
She sighed, turning back down to her stew again.
“You’re going to be okay,” Palk said. “You told me that, and I believe you. You’re going to be fine.”
“I keep so many secrets, Palk,” she said. “Stuff I’m so excited about, and then, just… because. I can’t tell you, I can’t tell anyone. I have to keep it a secret. All of this stuff inside my head, and I have to keep it there because that’s how I am. It’s what I want. The men don’t even know what it is they’re helping me build. Everyone was just so impressed with the machine for sewing that they’re going along with it, just to see what happens. It has to be this big reveal, or else it’s no fun at all.”
He waited again, this time just to see what else she might say. The rush of words was shocking and out of character, and he didn’t want to interrupt it, if he didn’t have to.
She ate her stew.
“I’ll have a gun for you to try in a couple of weeks,” she said after a bite or two. “If you spin the projectile, you should get much better performance out of it for accuracy, and getting a new projectile loaded shouldn’t be that hard, seeing how much energy there is rolling around inside the gun already. You just have to mechanically harness it. The trick is going to be combining the propellant and the projectile into a unitary package. I’ll put together some drawings and see if I can find someone who will make it for me.”