by David Drake
He reached out once more. The mockingbird got to the berry first and twisted his neck quickly to pluck it.
"Git on with you!" the cunning man said in irritation. He prodded with his rifle muzzle. The bird flew to the top branches of a dogwood growing up beside the cleared field.
Old Nathan scowled, mostly at himself. He hadn't needed the berry . . . and the bird was right, his best call was as pretty as anything on earth. Finer 'n a nightingale, said the English beau who'd heard both.
Purple juice squirted from both sides of the mockingbird's beak. It lifted its throat and swallowed, keeping one sharp black eye on Old Nathan.
"Tsk!" the bird repeated. "Don't know why you carry thet old smoke-pole anyhow. You don't hunt."
Old Nathan found a ripe berry and twisted it off the vine. He popped it into his mouth instead of the bucket. Sweet and tart together, and gritty from the tiny seeds. Better 'n the all-sweet of honey, lessen you had a perticular notion for sweet.
"Don't eat meat," the cunning man corrected. "Thet don't mean I choose t' find a bear in my own patch and hev nothin' to go on but a bear's good natur."
The mockingbird trilled merrily at the ridiculous notion of a bear having a good nature. "Tain't no bears hereabouts," the bird sang. "There's a couple folk up t' your cabin though, waitin' you. People's worse nor bears, most times."
Old Nathan glanced north reflexively, in the direction of his cabin. There was nothing to be seen through the heads of his grain and the swell of the ground. Even if he'd been in a treetop like the bird, he didn't guess he'd have been able to tell much. His old eyes were sharp enough still, at a distance; but he wasn't a mockingbird for vision, no more than he was a bull for strength.
"Reckon I better go see 'em, thin," the cunning man muttered. "Reckon they've come t' consult me, not t' raise trouble."
But he checked the priming of his long rifle first; because what the mockingbird had said about humans and bears was pretty much Old Nathan's opinion too.
* * *
When the cunning man came up to the back door of his cabin, past the greetings of his two cows and the mule, the visitors were standing, but they hadn't been on their feet long. The cane-bottom rocker still tapped back and forth, and the straight chair had been moved to a corner where a man sitting in it could face out with solid logs behind him.
The man who'd gotten up from the rocker was Bascom Hardy. Hardy might not be the richest man in the county as he claimed, but he was right enough the richest man who'd made his money here.
"Earned his money" was another matter. Hardy dealt in loans and land—and in the law, to enforce those dealings.
Old Nathan couldn't put a name to the other man, but the type was frequent enough. The fellow had smallpox scars on the left side of his face and a knife-track trailing from below his right ear across his nose. From his hair and features, he was a half-breed.
No sin in that. White women had been mighty thin on the ground when Europeans settled the Tennessee Territory. Old Nathan himself had Cherokee blood. There was good and bad in any race, though, and the scarred man standing in the corner didn't appear to have been fortunate in the mixture he'd gotten from his parents.
The half-breed wouldn't meet Old Nathan's eyes, but his fingers played with the stock of his short-barreled caplock musket while he looked sidelong at the cunning man. Old Nathan figured the weapon was loaded with buck and ball, several heavy shot wadded down on top of a ball the size of the barrel's diameter. A wasteful load for hunting.
Unless you were hunting men.
Another time, the cunning man would have pulled the charge from his flintlock as soon as he came in the door. This time he did not, and he leaned the long rifle against the wall instead of hanging it over the chimney board where it would be closer to the half-breed than to its owner across the room.
Not that he figured there'd be that sort of trouble.
"Hope you don't mind me waiting for you here," said Bascom Hardy, saying and not asking, and talking as if the half-breed didn't exist at all. "I reckon you know who I am."
Old Nathan dipped a gourd of water from the barrel on the back porch. He drank some and splashed the rest over his face and neck. The cool liquid soaked the front of his shirt and dripped onto the puncheon floor with the irritated sound of frying grease.
"You're a man needs my he'p," the cunning man said. "Thet's why you're here."
He kneaded his face with strong, sinewy fingers. Another time he'd have gotten a dipper of buttermilk from the jug cooling in the creek; but that would mean offering some to his visitors, and just now he didn't care t' do so.
Bascom Hardy's face stiffened. "I don't need no man," he said sharply. "You'd best remember thet."
Hardy was a tall, hollow-cheeked man, near as tall as Old Nathan himself. He wore good store-bought clothes, but he seemed to have wizened up after the garments were fitted; now they hung loose. A gold chain with several gold seals swung across Hardy's narrow chest to a pocket of his waistcoat.
Old Nathan looked his visitor up and down. There were those who accused the cunning man of hating all mankind; but there were sure-God some folk easier t' hate than others.
"Thin I guess," Old Nathan said, "thet you kin leave, for I druther have your space thin your presence."
The cat sauntered in, licking cobwebs from his fur. He'd hidden under the cabin when the strangers arrived, showing that he didn't care any more for the folk than his master did.
"Wouldn't mind a bowl of milk," the cat yowled. "Seein's as you won't fetch me a dollop of good bloody meat."
Old Nathan bent sideways to scratch the ears of the big yellow tom. He kept his eyes on the human visitors and didn't answer the animal.
For a moment, the two men were all stillness and silence. Then Bascom Hardy shook the tension loose with a laugh and said, "Didn't mean to start off on the wrong foot. My name's Bascom Hardy, and I've come t' make a business offer t' you. Ned"—he didn't look around at the half-breed—"whyn't you set on the porch while me 'n Mister Nathan, here, we talk business."
"No more juice to either of 'em thin woods rats," the cat remarked scornfully. "Though they might be fun t' kill, specially"—he eyed the half-breed slouching onto the porch as ordered—"the squatty one."
"Set, then," the cunning man said grudgingly. He gestured his visitor to the straight-backed chair and sat in the rocker himself. "What is it you come t' see me for?"
Hardy lifted the offered chair closer to the table in the center of the single room. He glanced around with a false smile as he seated himself.
The cabin had few amenities, though they were all the owner required. Two chairs—the rocker to set in, and the straight chair by the table for when he ate, wrote, or did figures. Chests along one sidewall with stored clothing and a handful of personal items—nothing that would tempt a thief. On the table, an alcohol lamp; and on the chimney board above the walk-in fireplace, five fine porcelain cups, a plate, and a few knickknacks of less obvious purpose.
Hardy focused again on the cunning man's hot green eyes. "Waal," he said, "I guess you're a man wouldn't be feared of a spook, now, would ye?"
He thought nothing of the sort. His voice cajoled, encouraging Old Nathan to create a fearless self-image which would agree to do whatever the rich man wanted done—but feared to do himself.
"Say yer piece," Old Nathan said flatly. The chair rocked minutely beneath him, scritch-scritch; the high pine back moving no more than an inch at a stroke.
A pair of titmice, blue-gray with a black tip to their crests, flew in the cabin's open front door and perched for a moment—one on the underside of a roof pole and the other on the muzzle of the cunning man's rifle.
"My brother Bynum died over t' Maury County nigh three months ago," Bascom Hardy said. "A day past the new moon. He was a rich man, rich as rich."
"Tsk! There's a cat here," chirped one of the titmice as it fluttered from the gun to the roof, then out the back door in concert with its companion. "Tsk
! But he can't ketch us!"
"Like you are yerse'f," Old Nathan stated flatly. He knuckled his beard, black despite his age, with his knobby right hand.
The cat's head turned to watch the birds. His tail beat twice. The second time it made a soft thump against the puncheon floor. The big tom got up from beside the rocker and walked toward the visitor's chair with an evil look in his eyes.
"That's true, I am," Bascom Hardy said. His tone was half between irritation at being interrupted and pride at what he took for flattery. "But that's not a speck t' do with my brother, and my brother Bynum's the reason I'm here."
He glanced around again, unable or unwilling to keep his lip from lifting in a sneer.
The cat rubbed firmly against the visitor's ankles, leaving a track of hair against the fabric of the black trousers. Hardy squawked, jerking his legs aside as though his boots had slid him into a cesspool.
"Cat!" Old Nathan snapped, coming up off the rocker. "You git back from there!"
The cat lifted his nose. "Hmpf," he said. "That un don't half hate cats, don't he?"
The cunning man's left index finger pointed. A spark of static popped in the air between Old Nathan and the animal.
"All right, all right," the cat grumped. "Keep yer britches on." He padded across the floor, then disappeared out the back door in a single fluid bound.
Bascom Hardy settled himself again in his chair. "That's better," he growled. He indicated the roof poles with a lift of his clean-shaven chin. "If thet dirty beast comes up t' me again, I'll kick him right through yer shakes."
Old Nathan remained standing. "Did you hear thet I don't eat meat, Bascom Hardy?" he asked.
Hardy raised an eyebrow. "I heard thet," he said. "I don't see how it signifies."
"But," the cunning man rasped, "ye never heerd I was a Quaker as wouldn't larrup a man to an inch of his life ifen he kicked my cat in my home. Did ye now?"
He grinned at his visitor. His eyes flashed like sparks of burning copper.
"I beg your pardon," said Bascom Hardy. His voice was sincere, at least in its undertone of fear.
Old Nathan relaxed and walked again to the water barrel. "Tell yer tale, Mister Hardy," he said. "Tell yer tale."
"I reckon Bynum knew his time or purty close to it," Bascom Hardy resumed. "For nigh a month, he'd been sellin' his notes and his land holdins—at a discount to shift 'em fast, like he'd gone out of his head!"
Hardy's voice lowered from its tone of shrill disbelief. He bent forward and added, "But he turned it into gold, all his paper and land into gold; and there must 've been a mort of it, rich as Bynum was!"
Old Nathan felt his skin tingling. There was nothing he could put a name to, no image or echo from the words his visitor had spoken; but there was something here waiting, and mayhap waiting for the cunning man himself. . . .
Old Nathan saw the image of gold coins tumbling across the surface of the rich man's mind, as though the brown eyes were windows to Hardy's thoughts. "Go on," he said. "Tell yer tale, Bascom Hardy."
The rocker still nodded from the vehemence with which the old man had risen from it; back and forth, a skritch and a squeal against the wear-polished pine floor.
Hardy blinked and returned to the present moment, but his voice was husky with memory as he said, "Bynum 'n me, we didn't git on, never had from childhood. We split Pappy's holdings when he died, and I don't mind tellin' ye that Bynum would hev cheated me on the settlement—but I was too sharp fer him!"
"You were full blood kin, you and your brother?" Old Nathan asked suddenly.
Bascom Hardy blinked again. "Eh?" he said. "The same mother, you mean? Thet's so, but I don't see how it sig . . ."
His voice trailed off as he heard it echoing previous words.
Old Nathan reached into the air above and behind his head. His eyes were open but fixed somewhere far beyond the solid log walls of his cabin. He felt . . . and it was there, his fingers closing on the bone-scaled jackknife as they always did when he twisted them just right.
He wasn't sure where the knife was or how he found it; but he did find it, this time and each time before, and perhaps the next time as well.
His visitor's eyes narrowed. Hardy was sure that the knife had come from Old Nathan's sleeve, or perhaps had been hidden all the time by the cunning man's long knobby fingers . . . but it looked as though—
Old Nathan handed the knife to Hardy and said, "Take it, take it. There's no magic t' this."
No more was there; but wherever the knife had been was cooler than the late-August air of the cabin.
Bascom Hardy frowned as he took the knife. It was an ordinary two-blade jackknife, with German-silver bolsters and scales of jigged bone. The shield in the center of one yellow scale was the only thing to differentiate it from thousands of other knives brought into the territory in peddlers' packs. The inset was true silver, which Old Nathan himself had hammered from a section of ten-cent piece and fixed to the knife by a silver rivet.
"Rub the silver plate with yer thumb 'n hand it back to me," the cunning man directed. Hardy obeyed, but he frowned both at the brusque tone of the command and his inability to tell what the older man had in mind.
"Tell your tale, Bascom Hardy," Old Nathan repeated quietly. He held the knife with the shield facing him. When he whispered a few words under his breath, the silver became a clouded gray.
"When I heard the discounts Bynum was takin', I rid right over to him," Hardy said. "Fust time I'd seen him since we settled Pappy's estate, but blood's thicker 'n water."
"And gold's thicker nor both," the cunning man muttered, his eyes on the shield.
"Lived in a little scrape-hole cabin not so big as this," Bascom Hardy said scornfully. "Bynum never knew thet if money was power, then power was money too. You got to put out to bring in, the way I do. He was the elder by a year, but I'm the one who got the sense."
"Some families," said Old Nathan, "the one child's as big a durned fool as the next." If he had glanced up as he spoke, the comment would have been pointed, but the cunning man continued staring at the knife in his hand.
"He'd took to his bed," Hardy continued. "He knowed he was failin', thet was sure. Didn't own a thing no more but the cabin and a few sticks o' furniture—" The visitor's eyes danced around the room in which he sat. "And gold. He'd sold all thet land and all them notes-of-hand for gold. And he wouldn't tell me where it was he kept the gold."
A figure formed, on the silver shield or in Old Nathan's mind; he couldn't be sure, nor did it matter. A crab-faced man, his skin stained yellow by the lingering death of his liver, lying on a corn-shuck mattress with a threadbare blanket pulled up to his throat. The man was bald and aged by sickness, so that he might as easily have been Bascom Hardy's father as brother.
"He warn't able t' care for that gold!" Bascom Hardy added bitterly. "He warn't able t' care fer nothin, him a-layin' there on the bed and not a servant in the house. Couldn't get up to fetch a dipper of water, Bynum couldn't!"
"Hadn't any neighbors in t' he'p him, then?" Old Nathan asked.
Bascom's voice had caught when he mentioned the dipper of water. The cunning man did not need his arts to imagine the hale brother at the bedside, tempting the sick man with sight of a cool drink that could be his if only he spoke where his wealth was hidden. . . .
"Bynum didn't hold with neighbors pokin' their noses in his business," Bascom Hardy said sharply.
Old Nathan smiled at the silver. "No more do you," he said.
"Thet's as may be!" his visitor snapped. "I told you once, it's not me thet's your affair, d'ye hear?"
"Say on, Bascom Hardy," the cunning man said.
Hardy settled back in his chair, though he couldn't have been said to relax. "He said he'd come back and tell me of the gold whin the moon was new again," Bascom said.
On or through the knife's silver window, Bynum's jaundiced image mimed the words Bascom spoke aloud.
" 'Come back here', that was how he put it," Bascom continued
, "and then he died." Hardy frowned at the memory. "Didn't even ask fer a drink, though I had the dipper right there."
He looked up, his brown eyes full of purpose and as hard as polished chert. "I want you t' set up in Bynum's old cabin when the moon goes in, three nights from now. You listen t' what he says and you won't be the loser fer it, you hear me?"
Old Nathan was in a dream state where all knowledge was bounded by the blurry walls of the tunnel which linked him to the shield on the knife scale. It was broad daylight in the world of the cabin, but formless gray in his mind.
Bascom Hardy's voice penetrated with difficulty to the cunning man's consciousness. The cries of birds and animals going about the business of their lives were lost in the shadows.
"Hit's been nigh three months since your brother died," Old Nathan said. The face on the silver was changing to that of a hard, square man of middle age. His front teeth were missing. "Who did ye put t' setting up afore me?"
"I don't see it signifies," Bascom Hardy grumbled. His host's blurred consciousness disturbed him, though he had no idea of what was going on behind Old Nathan's hooded eyes.
After a moment, Hardy said, "Gray Jack it was. I have enemies, you kin see thet. He looked out fer me, the way Ned does now. I figgered when the new moon come again, Jack could spend a night in the cabin. If anybody come by t' speak—waal, he was a brave man, so he told me."
Old Nathan's lips twisted into an expression that could have been a smile or a sneer, whichever way a man wanted to read it. "You didn't say to him thet it was your dead brother would come t' speak, did ye?" he said. His voice echoed from the gray tunnel of his mind.
"How did I know it was?" the rich man blazed in defensive anger. "Anyhow, Jack didn't ask me, did he? And there's an all-fired mess of gold thet my brother hid somewhur, a mess of gold, I tell ye!"
"There's a well in front of yer brother's cabin," Old Nathan said as images streamed across the silver and through his mind.
"There's nothin' to the well but water 'n a rock floor," Bascom Hardy said dismissively. "D'ye think I didn't try thet the first thing out whin Bynum died?"