The Outlaw and the Upstart King

by Rod Duncan

  In the morning they took him to where the Patrons had gathered and pushed him to his knees. Men came then, to tell what they’d seen. Each swore Elias had been crooked in his dealing of the cards. After the fifth had spoken, Patron Locke called it to an end.

  “Who will witness for this man?”

  No one came. Not even his own kin.

  “Patron Protector Calvary, one of your blood has shamed the Reckoning. You must pay the price of it.”

  But his great uncle stood and shook his head. “He’s no more of my blood. He’s no more under my protection. Last night I cast him out. I have men to swear it.”

  Patron Locke failed to cover his disappointment.

  “Then this Elias is of no affinity. He is severed. Let it so be marked. And let him be put beyond the law.”

  “Aye,” said each of the other Patrons in turn.

  It was a grim mark, the tattoo they gave him: the likeness of a rope wrapping his arm high above the elbow. But there was no one to speak for him. No one to argue his case that it be inked on some less needed limb. The oath-wright worked with jabs of the needle. It took all the day to finish.

  Through the hurt of it, Elias was planning the way of his escape. Outlawed, he’d be given a warrant of eighteen hours to put miles between himself and the many who’d want the sport and pride of slaying Patron Calvary’s great nephew. None could shelter him without suffering the same forfeit. Nor could any give him aid.

  Most would reckon he’d flee down the road to New Whitby, where a boat might be stolen. A few, knowing the way his mind worked, might think he’d turn south to the end of the track and hope to be more swift than them over the rough land beyond.

  But whichever way he turned, they’d snare him soon enough. They would have horses and dogs, weapons and food. He’d have only his wits, his feet, his hands and such clothes as he was wearing.

  A narrow spur of rock connected the Island to the cliffs of the mainland. If he followed that, the hunting dogs would pick up the smell of him. But he knew another way across: down a scree to a little cove then around the base of the cliffs, wading to the mainland when the sea was low, climbing the cliffs on the other side. He’d done it as a child, hunting for seagull eggs.

  If he did it unseen, the dogs wouldn’t know where to pick up his scent. He could make a wide circle and then cut north with scant chance of being followed.

  Then to leave Newfoundland. There was the rub. But Fitz knew a way. Fitz could get things brought in from Labrador and Nova Scotia. Things no one else could get. The pistol had been one of them, a beautiful weapon with a snakeskin pattern acid-etched into the barrel and the same design picked up by a dark wood inlay in the walnut stock. It was too lovely to have seen but not held.

  “You must never tell where it came from,” Fitz had said.

  “I wouldn’t!”

  “I smuggled it. You know the trouble we’d be in.”

  “How did you smuggle it?”

  “I’ll show you one day. I promise. But swear now never to tell. On your life.”

  So the oath was sworn. On the honour of the Calvary name.

  Now was the time for Fitz to show him the secret of how the gun was smuggled, which might also be a means for him to leave Newfoundland. Fitz would help. They’d been like brothers. Even when wealth and standing had taken them apart, they still found ways to see each other from time to time. Fitz would save him. He always did.

  All at the Reckoning came out from their tents for the sport of seeing him brought low. They lined the sides of the track and jeered as he was dragged through. None had the right to do him harm until the eighteen hours were spent. But they could pelt him with rotting food. They cheered when a boy ran from the crowd and reached up to rub filth in his face.

  The women whose eyes the night before had offered pleasure, now whistled and spat. The truth, laid plain by the morning light, was that they too had been plotting his downfall. And every other player around the table. The Patrons hadn’t just happened to be passing when the fifth king was upturned. He’d been the only one who hadn’t known the play in which he acted. Yet he’d spoken his lines to the letter.

  He clamped his jaw tight, cursing his own dull wits, inwardly vowing to never trust long odds again. He would get away. Somehow. He’d see his enemies weeping. After eighteen months of exile in Labrador, he’d come back stronger. They would fear him in the end.

  “Wait!”

  Everyone turned. A man was marching down the track: Aaron Weaverbright, eldest son of Patron Weaverbright.

  “I’ve a complaint against Elias! I demand he pay me back for what he’s taken by trickery.”

  It was the claim of a simpleton. Elias might have laughed.

  “He was found out,” said Patron Locke. “He’s being punished.”

  “He’s being punished for last night. But last year he won gold from me. And the year before. Now we know him as a cheat. Let him pay me back for those times.”

  Patron Locke turned to Elias. “Will you pay him what you owe?”

  To be outlawed was to be cast loose with nothing. The Patron would know he couldn’t pay. Everyone would know.

  “I note your silence,” Locke said. “Therefore the plaintiff must take settlement in flesh.”

  Elias fought like a wild thing, though there was no chance of escape. In the end, they lifted and carried him to the fire. His great uncle among them.

  “Stay still or you’ll lose your whole hand.” He spat the words.

  Elias never saw the man who did it. Dread had overwhelmed his reason. There was a blur of angry faces and the pincers, crystal clear, pulled red hot from the fire. He closed his eyes after that.

  Shards of the ordeal would afterwards flash in his mind unbidden: the blades clamping over the base of his left thumb, not knowing if it was hot or freezing cold, the stink of burning flesh, the hiss of boiling fat. He’d no wits left when they pulled his other hand across and strapped it down. It seemed they’d got it wrong because he sensed both thumbs, as if they were numb but still attached. He couldn’t scream. There was no breath left in his lungs.

  As the crowd cheered for a second time, the truth hit him that this too had been part of the play. The pincers had been ready for him, waiting in the fire.

  Chapter 4

  With bone dice cut and marked and stowed in the pocket at his belt, Elias No-Thumbs, returned outlaw, stepped from the Salt Ray Inn. Three door-bolts scraped shut behind him. The morning fog had melted away, leaving a blue sky bright enough to hurt the eyes. Newfoundland could span four seasons in one morning.

  Squinting against the light, he scanned the houses that made up New Whitby: weather-sanded timbers and fading paint, stilts holding shacks flat over rocky ground, here and there a square of glass catching the sun. It wasn’t much of a place compared to the towns of Québec and Labrador. It sprawled round the bay and over the low hills, with no clear end or beginning, its angles wayward.

  But under the sun, with low billows rolling into the bay, the place kindled something in his heart. The scent of childhood perhaps. The sting of home that only a wanderer can know. However bad the way of things, however low he’d sunk, his feet were standing on Newfoundland soil. If he had to die, and he owned that all men did, then it was here his bones would bleach. One way or another.

  But not yet.

  A scattering of men and women were out working the shoreline, gathering the gifts of the last high tide. Seaweed and small pieces of driftwood for the most part. But on the other side of the bay a horse had been roped to lug something large from the beach. It seemed to be a tamarack, complete with roots and branches. Who knew how such a tree could have come to land in the bay and where it might once have grown.

  The ocean was a mystery, both curse and blessing. It gifted the food that for the most part kept the peasants alive. It made the rock of Newfoundland into a fortress that no attack could breach. But it also stopped the Patrons from getting the things their hearts were set on.

>   Scanning the eastern sweep of the bay, Elias at last found what he was looking for. Not trouble, exactly, but a hint that it would come. A boat had tied to a jetty two furlongs distant. The crew were unloading casks.

  Elias had stayed hidden since coming back, biding time, gathering news. His face and frame, now lean, had been their own disguise. But Jago had found him out. And Jago had given him a week. That had shrunk to six days and a few hours. He’d no choice but to act.

  Setting off on the path at the top of the shoreline, his long legs carried him towards the jetty. Eyes were always watching in New Whitby. But it still surprised him how quickly a crew could arrive to rummage through the boat and its cargo. Cantering hooves clattered the stones behind. He stepped off the track but didn’t turn to face them. Three riders passed, and then a small pack of powder dogs. He held his breath, but they gave him neither look nor sniff. The horses bore the brand of the Locke clan. Elias shuddered. He’d caught a glimpse of the same mark inked across the cheekbone and ear of the rearmost rider.

  He was too far away to hear the challenge when they arrived at the jetty. But he saw the captain bowing. The powder dogs sniffed around for a moment then leapt into the boat. Two riders had jumped down and were knocking on the barrels, testing them by sound. The third rider, Elias knew: Nathaniel Grimundson, who was married to Patron Locke’s great niece. He wasn’t of the Blood himself, or he wouldn’t have been doing such menial work.

  Closer now, Elias could hear the voices.

  “I don’t care. Open the barrel or I stave it in. Not that one. This one! This one, idiot!”

  The boat captain said something to his mate and tools were brought. He’d begun to drill a hole in the top of the cask by the time Elias drew level. The dogs, having done their work, leapt back to the jetty, tails wagging. One of them, some kind of lurcher, bounded towards him. It nosed around the hem of his cloak then jumped up to smell the tote slung from his shoulder.

  “You,” said Nathaniel, from the saddle of his horse. “What do you carry?”

  There was no recognition in the man’s eyes. But then, Elias was a ghost of the warrior he’d once been.

  “Clothes,” he said. “And food and soap.”

  The dog was still sniffing. It hadn’t sat, which would have been the sign of contraband. But it was there, moving around him, bothered by some smell.

  Nathaniel swung himself down, landing double booted in the shingle. As he stomped closer, Elias raised his hands, gloved for disguise, to show he held no weapon. Nathaniel circled him, head cocked, eyes narrowed.

  “Empty the bag.”

  So Elias did, spilling his things onto the path. There was little enough: a few rags to wrap himself in should the weather turn colder, strips of dried meat, a scratched pewter bowl, a tin with his last few rubbings of tobacco. Nathaniel used a boot to spread the scanty treasures.

  “What’s your clan?” he asked.

  “I’m unaligned.”

  Nathaniel’s lip curled in a sneer.

  The dog was getting close to the strips of dried meat. Elias stooped to grab them; it was a good enough excuse to break the man’s gaze.

  “What’s that?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Mipku,” Elias said, holding the meat above the dog’s reach.

  “Speak English, damn your eyes!”

  “I don’t know another name. It’s dried caribou.”

  There’d once been great herds on Newfoundland. But they’d been hunted out a generation before.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “On the mainland.”

  The dog had found a small jar, which had rolled free from the rest of Elias’s things. It shifted its body first to the left then the right, but always with the button of its nose pressed against the wide cork, sniffing. Nathaniel picked it up and peered through its dull green glass. A bean of something rolled within. It could have been a roughly formed ball of clay. Elias tensed as Nathaniel shook the jar next to his ear, then pulled out the stopper. It came away with a quiet pop.

  “It’s medicine,” Elias said, too quickly.

  Nathaniel sniffed, recoiling with an expression of disgust. “What manner of medicine?”

  “They call it glycer-fortis.”

  “Well, the dog doesn’t like it. I want to see you use it. Show me.”

  Elias drew the long pin from his cloak and with great care dipped it into the jar, which Nathaniel was still holding. A greasy crumb of the contents came out, stuck to the pin’s tip. Elias wiped it off on the underside of his tongue. A familiar chemical buzz and heat filled his mouth, flowing down to his chest. For a moment he felt light headed.

  “What’s it for?”

  “My heart.”

  “It makes you strong?”

  “Yes,” said Elias.

  “Then I should take some for myself.” The man seemed set to dip his little finger into the jar.

  “No!” Elias blurted the word.

  “No?” There was an edge in Nathaniel’s voice.

  “It might kill you,” Elias said. “Even a touch of it on the skin would make you sick.”

  “You saying you’re stronger than me?”

  “No. It’s the way of this medicine to make a strong man weak, but to keep a weak man alive.”

  For a moment Nathaniel Grimundson seemed interested. Then a call came from the jetty. The hole had been drilled in the cask, as ordered. Inside was merely salt. The dogs jumped and yowled, sensing it was time to run once more. He took a last look into the green glass jar, then replaced the stopper and seemed about to thump it down. Elias clenched his teeth. But instead, Nathaniel tossed it in the air. Elias grabbed at it like a drowning man snatching for a rope. It jumped from his grip and looked set to fall, but he grabbed again, and this time pulled it to his chest.

  Nathaniel mounted his horse. “Glycer-fortis,” he said with a sneer. He pointed down to Elias, as if his fingers were a gun. Then he kicked in his heels and was thundering away, followed by his men and the dogs, back along the coast path the way they’d come.

  The boat captain began to spike the hole he’d been forced to drill. His mallet made a dull drum of the cask. The sound echoed from a low rise of rocks to the east, while waves scoured the shingle below the jetty.

  Chapter 5

  Glycer-fortis. Elias had first tasted it in the time of his outlawing. There’d been ten of them working in the factory, servants of the chemist’s glassware. Three stirred the oily liquid in the flasks. Three added fuming aqua-fortis, a few drops at a time. Three brought snow and ice to pack around the cooling tubes. And one kept watch on the thermometers. That job went with rank, they said. Not to the oldest, but to whoever had been longest in the job: months perhaps, but seldom years.

  They walked a knife edge. Too cold and nothing happened. But the reaction made heat. The hotter the flasks, the quicker the chemicals did their magic, making more heat yet. Too hot and it ran away with itself, they said. Though no one who had seen it happen had lived to tell.

  Given a knock, or a spark, glycer-fortis would blow like gunpowder. But more than gunpowder. A thimbleful could take the door off a safe. A cup would turn a house to splinters. That’s why they made it. Not to treat a sickness of the heart, but to detonate, to shatter, to destroy.

  Standing in front of the overseer’s hut for the first time, Elias had turned a full circle, taking in the vast white valley. Everything seemed outsized. The mountains, the trees, the Yukon River itself, icebound below. Escape in winter would be impossible. But paths might come clear when the snow was gone. The camp and the factory had been built on a terrace some sixty feet above the river, safe from spring floods. South looked to be the best way out. Forest cloaked the lower slopes. There would be places to hide.

  The overseer told him about punishment, seeming bored with the words he was speaking. When the lecture was done, he walked Elias to a low heap of rocks and earth, his mood darkening as they climbed to the top. It was the rim of a crater, Elias saw, perhaps twenty pace
s across. Snow had drifted in the hollow, but only on one side, so he could see the true depth.

  “Think about it,” the overseer said. “This was the last glycer-fortis factory. We couldn’t find anything of them that worked it. There was nothing to bury. So you listen to the thermometer man. He says stop, you stop. He says stir, you stir. He says pack ice faster, then that’s what you do. Understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Elias had already learned to say sir or feel the overseer’s baton.

  “You want to live?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Then stay wakeful, you hear? And watch the others. One of them closes his eyes, you shout. And if you start to thinking one of them’s tired of life, you let me know. Got that, boy?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The new factory was a wooden shack with earth heaped round, so that from the outside all Elias could see was its sloping roof. If they made a mistake, the explosion would be directed upwards, not out at the surrounding huts. When it blew. That was the one sure thing. It would happen. The only goal worth holding was being alive at the end of a shift. One day at a time.

  The others, three men and six women, were thin and dressed in rags. A sickly yellow light came from storm lanterns on the walls. At first, Elias didn’t see that the other workers were themselves coloured yellow, each to a different shade. For some the yellowness was in their fingers only. But the thermometer man had it in his lank grey hair as well and it tinged the whites of his eyes.

  On stepping out into the daylight after that first shift, Elias saw it properly. He must have made some sound of dismay because the old man laughed.

  “You should be so lucky,” he said.

  “Lucky?”

  The man touched a hand to his hair. “This takes time.”

  Packing the ice was gruelling work. It froze the hands until the fingers were numb. Within an hour Elias’s back was aching. But when he slowed or knelt on the earth floor to catch some rest, the others shouted at him. At least he got to leave the hut, to fetch more ice. There he could breathe deep and try to get rid of the acid fumes from the bottom of his lungs.