Bone Trail

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Bone Trail Page 12

by Paul Stewart


  Garth Temple was at the head of the crowd, his eyes wide with astonishment. More greywyrmes. He could scarce believe it. Solomon Tallow had been as good as his word. Those harpoon gangs of his had indeed been busy and now a second convoy had arrived.

  And what a second convoy!

  The proprietor of the new stockade raised his spyglass to his eye. There must be a hundred of the creatures. At least.

  He looked round, searching the crowd for any sign of Solomon or his men. Or Nathaniel Lint, for that matter.

  The young merchant had kept himself to himself since the first greywyrmes had arrived, hardly leaving his room in Garth’s quarters. And for Garth Temple himself – whose time was taken up tending to the poor mistreated creatures – this had suited him just fine.

  The convoy came closer. Garth called to his head stockman, Ebenezer, who came hurrying over, the burnt side of his face and neck still wrapped in salve-soaked bandages.

  ‘Prepare the corral,’ he instructed.

  Ebenezer nodded, and he and the other stockmen headed over to the corral, where they set to work forking straw and shifting hay bales, and laying down the heavy planks of wood over the trenches that led into the stalls. Garth realized his heart was racing.

  One hundred greywyrmes! Enough for the great journey! The money would come pouring in from settlers eager to secure their places. And then, of course, there was his lucrative sideline – all that flameoil to be tapped.

  It occurred to Garth that he would have his hands full. It was all he could do to tap the eleven wyrmes from the first convoy. Clearly he would need help – though only from those he could trust . . .

  He looked round again. There was no sign of either Solomon Tallow or Nathaniel Lint, and he wondered at it. Surely they must have heard the commotion the incoming convoy of wyrmes was causing.

  And then he saw them.

  The pair of them were standing over by the well. Tallow had his back to him, but his brawny shoulders and shaven scalp were unmistakable. The young merchant was frowning, shaking his head. The pair of them were deep in conversation.

  And Garth Temple’s heart raced a little bit faster.

  ‘I figured you’d been avoiding me,’ Solomon said, his casual drawl belied by the intensity of his gaze. That, and the tight grip he had on Nathaniel’s arm.

  ‘Avoiding you?’ Nathaniel said innocently.

  ‘Avoiding me,’ Solomon repeated.

  It was true. Nathaniel had been avoiding Solomon Tallow. The fact was, despite Tallow’s casual manner and easy smile, Nathaniel found the gangmaster intimidating. He’d been a fool to get drunk with him and his men that night in the tavern, and he bitterly regretted it.

  Since then, the young merchant had spent most of his time holed up in Garth Temple’s quarters, hiding. He would have slipped away and returned to the low plains if he could. But the lightning storms had started up, and Nathaniel Lint was even more frightened of lightning than he was of Solomon Tallow and his gang.

  But now there were more greywyrmes coming in. Nathaniel had ventured out of his room and headed across the new stockade, hoping to find Garth Temple – only to run into Solomon Tallow himself.

  ‘I believe you and me had a deal,’ he told him, his tone a shade light of gruff. ‘And a deal’s a deal.’

  ‘In . . . indeed it is,’ said Nathaniel. Unable to meet the kith’s penetrating gaze, his eyes darted around uneasily. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve . . .’

  He fell still, knowing that appealing to ill health – head-pain, belly-ache, fever; excuses that would have worked down on the plains – would not cut it here. Not with this pitiless kith from the high country.

  ‘Thing is,’ said Solomon, ‘it would be bad for business to scare the settlers. We agreed that, didn’t we?’ He thrust his face into the young merchant’s, but his voice remained calm, quiet. ‘This has got to be handled . . . ­delicately,’ Solomon went on. ‘And someone utterly above suspicion has to handle it.’

  Nathaniel trembled at the words.

  Solomon frowned, and when he spoke again his voice was low, almost intimate. ‘And we talked about how to achieve our ends, did we not? You remember?’

  And Nathaniel did remember. It came back to him, cold and clear and real, like a bucket of cold water being dashed in his face. Solomon’s proposal, spoken the morning after that drunken night in the tavern. Words whispered through an open window; words he had listened to and had failed to contradict.

  Nathaniel nodded meekly.

  ‘Good,’ said Solomon, his eyes thin dark strips as he stared into the young merchant’s face. ‘Then see to it. I swear I ain’t fixing to remind you again.’

  ‘Watch and learn,’ Garth told Ebenezer and the other stockmen when they had joined him in the stall.

  Garth demonstrated how to attach the leather pouch round a greywyrme’s neck, and where to make the ­incision for the tapping-pipe. Then he stood back and watched as, first Ebenezer, then the others, tried the ­procedure for themselves.

  They found it difficult. The wyrmes were wary, jittery, and though they were muzzled, the blows from their powerful swaying necks sent stockmen sprawling more than once.

  ‘Excellent,’ Garth conceded when the last of them had successfully attached a pouch and spigot to a wyrme. ‘I want the whole herd tapped by sundown,’ he added, turning away.

  The rest of the huge creatures shuffled in their stalls, and the air in the corral was thick with their warm loamy odour. Muffled grunts and groans seeped from their muzzled jaws.

  Garth left the greywyrmes and the stockmen who were seeing to them. He crossed back over the yard of the corral, and was surprised to see Nathaniel Lint ­loitering at the split-rail fence. The young merchant was deep in thought, and when Garth greeted him, he looked up, the expression on his face oddly shifty, Garth thought. Nathaniel raised a hand in acknowledgement, only to turn away immediately afterwards and hurry off, back hunched and head down.

  Garth frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged. The young merchant was an odd one, all right.

  He paused at one of the troughs, unhooked a dip-ladle and plunged it into the water. He drank long and deep, satisfying his thirst, then returned the ladle to its hook and strode over to the store-shack for an empty earthenware pot. He hurried across to the line of wyrmestalls on the far side of the corral where he had put the first arrivals.

  The greywyrmes there looked magnificent now. Sleek, vigorous and well-fed, they bore no sign of the rigours of the arduous journey they’d endured from the high plains, driven on by the callous kith ­wyrmehandlers.

  ‘Not a moment too soon,’ Garth muttered to himself as he observed the bulging leather pouch at the neck of the first creature.

  He tipped the contents of the pouch into the pot, taking care not to spill a single drop. The flameoil sloshed about satisfactorily. He moved on to the second wyrme.

  The creatures were used to him now. There was no more rolling of eyes or scratching at the dust with their claws. Instead, with the flameoil constantly draining away, they were left placid and malleable. Content, even.

  ‘That’s it, my beauty,’ Garth murmured softly. ‘That’s the way.’

  At the sixth wyrme in the line, Garth hesitated, puzzled. He reached out and cupped the leather pouch in both hands. There was barely anything in it. He checked the pouch for any sign of a split in the leather, and the dusty ground beneath, to see whether any of the precious flameoil had dripped away.

  The wyrme juddered and swayed, and Garth looked up to see that its eyes had darkened to a deep fiery red.

  Then he noticed the spigot.

  His heart gave a lurch. The little wooden tap had been screwed down, closing off the tapping-pipe and ­preventing the flameoil from draining away.

  The greywyrme leaned forward, its long neck craning. A yellow-white plume of searing flame billowed from its
yawning mouth.

  Garth’s screams were extinguished in an instant as the flames enveloped him. He crumpled to the ground in a ball of fire. And when, half an hour later, Ebenezer found him, it was too late. Garth’s curled-up body was charred and smoking and quite quite dead.

  Nathaniel Lint found Solomon Tallow standing outside Garth Temple’s quarters. He looked up, his dark eyes filled with sorrow.

  ‘Terrible accident,’ he observed, and his mouth twitched into something that looked almost like a smile.

  Nathaniel’s stomach was churning. His head spun. The kith gangmaster reached out and gripped him by the shoulders­.

  ‘Y’all right?’ he said.

  Nathaniel nodded dumbly.

  Solomon’s eyes narrowed against the glare of the late afternoon sun.

  ‘Guess these quarters belong to you now.’ He paused. ‘Since you’re now the proprietor of the new stockade.’

  Nathaniel lowered his head – only for Solomon to put his fingers beneath his chin and lift it again, till the two of them were staring at one another.

  ‘Cheer up, Nat,’ he said, fixing him with a stare. ‘The first murder always hits hardest.’ He frowned. ‘If you’re to prosper in the weald, it won’t be your last.’

  Nathaniel Lint the Younger trembled beneath the brutal gaze of the kith gangmaster. Garth Temple had been in the way; the ‘middle-man’ as Solomon had put it – and when an inquisitive settler-boy had provided him with some very useful information about the wyrmes and their flameoil, he had passed it on to Nathaniel.

  And now Garth Temple was out of the way.

  Nathaniel had lost one partner and gained another – a ruthless weald-hardened gangmaster. He had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘We split the settlers’ fares, but I keep the flameoil.’ Solomon flashed that broad white-toothed smile of his. ‘Any objections?’

  He extended his hand to Nathaniel.

  ‘Let’s shake on it,’ he said. ‘Partner.’

  Twenty-Five

  Cara leaned forward, her eyes fixed on the sky. She’d never seen anything like it.

  Jagged forks of lightning, too numerous to count, hissed and crackled down out of the vaulted indigo heavens one after the other. They were still for a moment, like a forest of dazzling stalactites, then ­vanished – only to be replaced by countless more a heartbeat later. Thunder crashed and rumbled in an endless tumult of percussion. The air smelled charred. The curtain of night pulsated and flashed, and when Cara blinked, afterglowed pink and green.

  She looked down at Micah, who was lying on his side, head in her lap, staring up into the sky as intently as she herself had been. Her fingers played idly with his hair, brushing the thick strands back and forwards. She traced the whorls of his ear with her fingertips.

  The pair of them were resting on a spread wyrmeskin pelt, Cara crosslegged, Micah sprawled out. Above their heads was a broad slab of jutting rock. They were high up the north face of a steep cliffside, above the treeline. The cave was shallow, scarcely more than a recess in the rock, but at least it afforded them some shelter from the dry lightning storm that had swept in with such speed and lack of warning.

  ‘It ain’t what we’re looking for long-term,’ Eli had observed. He looked round, head stooped forward so as not to graze his scalp on the low rock. ‘But I reckon it’ll do till this storm eases off.’

  Cody and Ethan had looked at each other, and Ethan had had to stifle a grin. It certainly would do. Very nicely. They’d been travelling without respite through the east mountains and beyond for twelve days now, and any rest was welcome.

  ‘Get a fire going,’ Eli had told them. ‘I’ll fetch some water and then we’ll try to get us some shut-eye.’

  Cody could not sleep. Despite the plentiful supper he’d eaten; despite the lateness of the hour; despite being half-dead on his feet, he was unable to drift off. He wondered whether he was the only one.

  He looked at his younger brother enviously, watching his chest rhythmically rising and falling. And Eli was snoring, a regular throat-rattle and soft whistle that seemed to fill the cave. Micah and Cara were curled up spoonwise, with Micah’s arm draped around Cara’s body. Their breathing came low and even.

  No, he thought. Just me.

  Beyond the cave, the electric storm raged on loud and bright and violent. Cody wrapped an arm round his head.

  He hated lightning. Hated and feared it. Always had, for as far back as he could remember. He crushed his folded arm into his ear. He screwed his eyes shut.

  ‘Let it be over,’ he whispered. ‘Please, make it stop . . .’

  Cody brought his knees up and curled into a tight ball, his arms still wrapped tight and protective round his head. He recalled the greywyrme that Micah had dis­covered in the mountain pass, hobbled and blinkered, its jaws bound with ropes.

  Eli had not said anything at first, but Cody had noted by the way his eyes hardened and his jaw clenched that the cragclimber was disturbed. He’d crouched down and examined the blinkers closely, tugging at the buckles and straps.

  ‘This weren’t made for no ox or mule,’ he’d observed at length. ‘It’s been special designed for a greywyrme. And them ropes, stopping it from running fast or breathing fire. Or drinking,’ he’d added, his voice low, thoughtful. ‘Happen that’s what must have killed it most like. Lest it was the brutality of its treatment . . .’

  Cody vividly remembered the crisscross of welts cut into the leathery skin of the creature’s back. It looked like it had taken a vicious beating. And he remembered too the scorn in Eli’s voice when he had finally spoken up.

  ‘Kith business,’ he’d said.

  As they’d continued up the valley through the ­mountains, Eli had spotted other evidence of kith. To Cody the place looked untouched, but time and again the cragclimber would point out stuff to them. Rocks set on rocks. Knotted clumps of bluegrass. Scratches in the rock, that looked like they might have been of natural cause but that Eli interpreted as man-made.

  ‘Kith signs,’ he’d said. ‘Someone’s been marking a trail through these mountains.’

  Cody allowed himself to open his eyes. The dazzling lightning display had not abated, and when he shifted his arm he heard the thunder crashing and cracking louder than ever. He raised his head and looked across to where Micah and Cara were curled up together on the wyrmehide at the far side of the low emberglow fire. As the lightning flashed in the sky, it illuminated the pair of them. The curve of their shoulders. Their heads – Micah’s fair hair looking darker than it was; Cara’s hanging in delicate twisting curls. Micah’s arm was folded round Cara’s slender waist, and Cody’s stomach cramped up at the sight of it.

  His gaze lingered on Cara’s body, her face; on the arch of an eyebrow, and the full, soft, slightly-parted lips. She was beautiful. Cody didn’t think he’d ever seen a girl so beautiful.

  He closed his eyes again, shutting out the storm – and shutting out the sight of the two of them nuzzling up close.

  ***

  The storm was still raging at sun-up. Cody had finally dropped off to sleep, and was woken by Eli, who arose as the sky began to lighten, stoked the fire and stirred it back into life.

  ‘We best remain here,’ Eli counselled, ‘and see to our kit.’

  Ethan and Cody washed their clothes in the pool of water at the side of the cave entrance and laid them out to dry, with Cody skittish as a colt as he went about his chores, one eye on the sky. Micah sharpened his hack­dagger on a chunk of powderstone he’d found on the cave floor, while Cara repaired a tear in her wyrmeskin cloak.

  All at once, with a deafening crack that set the floor of the cave quaking, a bolt of lightning struck the jutting slab of rock above their heads. From the shadow-filled recesses of the shallow cave, there came the soft hiss of trickling sand and an ominous rumble. Everyone held their breath.


  The next moment, with an almighty thud and boom and clatter, rocks began to fall. Eli leaped to his feet just in time as a massive boulder crashed down where he had been sitting. Cody and Ethan scrambled forward, out of the dust-filled darkness and towards the opening of the cave, while Micah crouched down over Cara, shielding her protectively. As the noise subsided and the dust settled, the continuing flash and dazzle of the lightning outside illuminated the cave.

  Rocks lay in a jumbled heap. And there, at the back of the cave, was a jagged crack in the rock wall.

  Eli pulled a stubby dip-torch from his backpack and lit it. The flame flickered for a moment, then caught. The cragclimber held the flaming torch before him and approached the dark opening. He climbed up onto a ­displaced slab of rock, then thrust the dip-torch inside the crevice.

  Micah squeezed Cara’s hand, then crossed the cave after Eli, fallen grit and gravel crunching under his boots. Eli disappeared through the hole. Cody watched the flamelight flicker inside, then turned to Cara, who looked set to follow Micah, and he reached out and stayed her with his arm.

  ‘Best stay here,’ he told her softly, ‘till we know it’s safe.’

  ‘See anything?’ Micah called through the hole.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Eli’s voice floated back. It sounded deep and echoey. ‘Come see for ­yourself,’ he said.

  Micah scrambled up the fallen rocks and ­manoeuvred himself through the hole. He jumped down onto the floor on the other side and looked around. Eli was standing on the far side of a vast cavern. There were stalactites and stalagmites to one side, and water trickled down over a jutting overhang. On the other side of the cavern, the wall was studded with half a dozen gaps in the rock, some that seemed to lead into smaller ­chambers; one that twisted up into the ceiling. In the light of the dip-torch flames, motes of dust could be seen coursing down from the vertical hole on an incoming draught of pure sweet air.

  Eli turned to the youth. His face looked more at ease with itself than Micah had seen it in weeks.

 

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