Conspiracy of Ravens

by Lila Bowen

  “Do you want to…bury him?”

  Cora shook her head sadly. “That’s not our way. This is merely sand, and it must return to the earth so new plants can take root. I wish I could lay him to rest on a hillside in Yerba Buena. Or in his home village, far away. Grandfather loved the sea. But he will return. Even without burning the paper and reciting the holy books, he will return. I wonder what form he will take.” A smile played at her mouth. “In forty-nine days, he will be reborn. I only hope his karma was good enough for a better life than this one.”

  “Reborn?” Rhett said. “Like, from that sand?”

  With a light laugh, Cora pressed the corner of the blanket to Rhett’s chest. His fingers closed reflexively around it as she stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. When she pulled away, the blanket fell open, and the sand caught on the wind in a soft cloud. Rhett closed his eye almost all the way, watching through his eyelashes as the sand dispersed in a soft cloud, glittering in the morning sun.

  “No,” Cora said. “His spirit will take a new form. Everyone has been born before, and everyone will be born again. Such is life.” She took the blanket back from him and folded it neatly as if it were just another piece of cloth. To her, now, maybe it was.

  “He seemed like a good man,” Rhett said softly.

  Cora nodded. “He was. He considered it his duty to help others. I inherit this duty from him. He grew angry here. Angry at Trevisan, at himself, at me. He said we would never get Meimei back, that a fisherman never expects to take back his minnow whole and still wriggling. Perhaps he was right. But then again, he stayed anyway. And I never thought of my sister as a minnow.” Walking to the wagon, she tossed the blanket on top of the rug and cocked her head at the seat. “Do I ride up there or walk?”

  Rhett shook his head like he was trying to clear out the cobwebs. “That’s it? You’re ready to go? Just like that?”

  Looking around the camp with her hands on her hips, Cora shrugged. “Here isn’t here anymore. We will go, and I will help your friend.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, we shall see.”

  Rhett had figured Cora would tear at her hair and cry and wail and maybe yank a bonnet down over her head. He didn’t have much knowledge of women with grief, aside from Regina and Mam, both of whom he considered soft in the head and foolish. It was right peculiar to him, sitting up on a wagon-box by Cora as she quietly commented on the prairie they passed and asked him questions about the various sights. They purposely strayed from the train’s path, set a hundred miles ahead by surveyors and graders, a red-dirt mound pushing endlessly west. Instead, they headed south, back the way Rhett had come. His only real worry was running into Haskell or his Rascals. That, or finding Meimei’s bloody jacket fetched up against a prickly pear. So long as they headed south, Rhett reckoned they’d find his friends again, eventually.

  As they moved, his senses told him they were headed in the right direction. He considered turning into the bird and scouting farther ahead, but the thought of leaving Cora alone in the wagon caused fear to burn up his throat like stomach acid. Sure, she was a dragon, but she was still a dainty little thing, and they didn’t even have a gun between them. There could be Lobos out here, or even a ragtag group of railroad workers with their minds set to mischief. If there was one thing Rhett had realized since leaving Gloomy Bluebird, it was that no matter how many peculiar and dangerous creatures he met on the road, there were still more waiting to be discovered, in the form of both monsters and men.

  His thighs ached for the saddle and his hips felt light without a holster, and sitting in the wagon made him feel slow and useless and plodding. No wonder Winifred had refused driving. It didn’t help that the donkey ponied alongside would occasionally take up braying for no good reason, further cementing his dislike of donkeys. He’d only really brought it along in case of catastrophe, and maybe to mess with Earl, when they found him again. When life got rough, you could always eat the donkey.

  “Shut up, you ass!” he hollered after at least an hour of screeching.

  He snapped the reins to hurry the wagon horse along, and Cora wrapped her hands around his arm, pillowing her head on his shoulder. “Is it strange that I think you were more at home working in that camp than you are in fleeing it?”

  Rhett shook his head as if to dislodge a fly but made no attempt to dislodge the girl. “I’d rather have work to do. I don’t do well with empty hands. I need something to aim at, or I get all ornery. That whole time in the camp, I was just waiting for my shot at Trevisan.”

  “Not every moment.”

  He chuckled. “No, not exactly.”

  The donkey took up a new tone of angry braying, and Rhett was just about to untie the bastard when he noticed the coyote trotting beside the wagon.

  “Well, of course it’s you,” he muttered.

  “Who else would it be?” Cora said, still thinking they were alone.

  Rhett pulled the horse to a jangling stop and pointed at the critter sitting on its haunches, tongue lolling and fur coated in red dust.

  “Cora, this is my friend Coyote Dan. Coyote Dan, you’re a day late and you’re pissing off the donkey, so you might as well join us.”

  Truth be told, though, he was so glad to see Dan that he forgot to insult him, and that was saying a lot.

  Chapter

  26

  Dan changed, and Rhett nickered at the horse and shook the reins, and then they were moving again. Cora stared at the naked man walking barefoot by the wagon for the briefest moment.

  “Nice to meet you, Coyote Dan,” she said with a nod.

  “Same to you, miss.” He nodded back and focused his eyes on Rhett, who felt like squirming but wouldn’t allow Dan that satisfaction. “Rhett, the camp is gone. What happened?”

  Drawing in a big breath, Rhett told him everything. Not all the boring parts that involved the pickax, and not all the personal parts that involved Cora, but everything he considered important to the topic.

  He finished with, “And now we got to find Meimei, but the Shadow ain’t helping. Goddammit, Dan. Can’t anything ever be easy?”

  Dan snorted. “Nothing important is easy. But you already succeeded in your task. You killed Trevisan and you brought someone who can help Winifred. I’m worried about her. It’s not just the foot now. She’s suffering some kind of sickness. That’s why no one came to help you. I never saw your drawing of the rocks. I stayed behind to help her.”

  Rhett shook his head. “I already succeeded. Huh. It sure as hell doesn’t feel that way.”

  Because something was still tugging at Rhett. There was something he’d missed, somewhere. The camp still called to him, and he wanted to shuck his clothes and dive off the wagon and flap into the sunset, wheeling over the abandoned steel beast and landing like the carrion creature he was to pick through what was left behind until he’d figured out what was wrong.

  Instead, he shook the reins and urged the tired horse on. They weren’t far from the camp, Dan had said, maybe three miles. As the train moved, so had Rhett’s friends. If they hurried, they could make it back in time to sleep by the fire, maybe eat some leftover mule deer, which Sam had recently shot.

  “The Shadow will go where the Shadow must,” Dan said solemnly.

  “What the Sam Hill does that mean, Dan?”

  Dan grinned, patted the cart horse’s flank, and stopped walking. “That it’s your problem,” he said. And then he was a coyote again.

  “I sense great disquiet in you,” Cora said once the coyote had trotted off to lead them.

  Rhett was hunched over, elbows on his knees and back aching from the hard sway and constantly rutty bumping of the wagon, so unlike the natural gait of the horse that pulled it. He almost growled at the girl, but then he pulled off his hat and slammed it down on the seat beside him.

  “I reckon I am. Disquieted something awful. Something ain’t right, and I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

  “Dan is right. You did what you
came to do. You freed hundreds of men from painful servitude and eventual death. You stopped Trevisan from possessing whatever it was he yearned for in Calafia. You should be proud. Is that not enough?”

  Instead of saying it wasn’t damn near enough and she knew it, Rhett slapped at a deerfly and changed the subject. “Why do you talk so fancy, anyway?”

  “My father was a scholar in Hu. Our mother tongue is far more complex and proper than what is spoken here. They taught me well. My parents left to escape a dangerous regime. They raised me to be more, to be all they’d been before and our family’s first Republican here. I often felt like a rose crowded by thorns in the camp. Does it bother you? I can say ain’t and you-all, if you prefer.”

  Rhett got the sense she was teasing him and nudged her in the side with his elbow. “I do feel like a cactus beside a rose, I reckon. As long as my prickles don’t cut you.”

  She snorted a laugh. “I am a dragon. It takes more than a prick to cut me.”

  A mule’s bray carried across the night, their horse bugling in response and their donkey picking back up with his hollering. Rhett grinned. “That’s Blue,” he said. “My old mule. He ain’t much to look at, but he’s loyal and loud, I can say that much with surety. We have that in common, I reckon.”

  “If camp is near, why do you not hurry the horse?” Cora asked.

  He’d hoped she wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t jingled the reins at all and that the horse’s slight increase in speed was due only to the tired creature’s longing to be with his own kind again, possibly near water and food. Rhett couldn’t even say, really, why he wasn’t ready to be home. Was it more that he liked the simplicity of being alone with Cora, with her honest curiosity and sweet cleverness? She knew what he was but never teased, never gave a sly wink at his expense. Or maybe it was that he didn’t want to hand the jar of sand to Earl when the donkey’d be expecting his brother alive. Or, if he was honest with himself, which he didn’t much prefer, was it simply that he didn’t want to introduce Cora to Winifred and Sam and further complicate a situation that was already downright uncomfortable?

  Rhett snorted and shook the traces. Let the horse speed up; he wasn’t the type to let fear hold the reins. He wouldn’t be scared of a monster or a witch or even of a little thing like making introductions between three people he’d kissed.

  Soon he was holding out a hand to help Cora down and staring at a sight he’d longed to see every night in the railroad camp. A well-trod clearing by a sweet little stream, a fire crackling merrily with fat strips of meat nearly cooked, the smiling faces of folks he was willing to die for—and one donkey feller he mostly wasn’t. Sam stood and helped Winifred up, and Dan moseyed from behind a screen of trees wearing Rhett’s clothes, and a sleeping donkey woke with a snort and kicked at a moth and hurried behind some rocks to change.

  “This here’s Cora, from the railroad camp. Grandpa Z’s granddaughter. Cora, this here’s Samuel Hennessy from Tanasi; Coyote Dan’s sister, Winifred; and well, you met Dan already, although I admit I like him better when he’s wearing pants.” Cora bowed her head to each of Rhett’s friends, and Earl appeared in his red shirt, barefoot and red as a pepper with excitement.

  “Did you do it, then? Did you bring me brother?”

  Rhett drew a deep breath and pursed his lips, and Earl’s freckled face shattered like the mirror in Trevisan’s car. So much for Rhett’s poker face. He turned to the wagon and pulled the jar from where he’d wrapped it in Grandpa Z’s blanket, nestled in a corner. Walking to Earl, he held it out.

  “I’m sorry, man. It happened the day you left, they said. The scouts caught him. His friends said it was right sudden. Wouldn’t have pained him. I’m…I’m just sorry, is all.”

  Not that there was anything for Rhett to be sorry for. All Earl’s badgering and prodding wouldn’t have made any difference, wouldn’t have gotten Rhett to the camp soon enough to save Shaunie O’Bannon from his fate. And yet Earl’s wet red eyes still said it was Rhett’s fault, and Rhett reckoned that here was a man that for the rest of his days would lay his blame at the feet of whoever might be near enough to take up the burden.

  “I’ll thank you then,” Earl said with great solemnity. “And I’ll be on me way.”

  Cradling the jar to his chest, he stumbled away from the fire, barefoot and hatless in the pitch dark. No one moved. No one said anything. They all looked at Rhett, damn their eyes.

  “Hellfire,” he muttered, staring at his boots. Shaking his head, he snatched up a lantern from the wagon and jogged off after the Irishman. “Earl!”

  But Earl didn’t turn around or pay him any damn heed, so Rhett grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back.

  “Let me go, you bastard! Let me go! He was all I had in the world, me brother Shaunie! Take care of him, me mam said! And did I? Oh, no. I got him killed. My poor wee Shaunie. So I’ll be wandering off in the damn desert to die, if you please. Maybe I can stumble onto a branch of some sort and end it meself.”

  Rhett wanted to tell him to go on and do it, then, if he was a weak-willed milksop who was ready to give up. But instead, he set down the lantern, took both of Earl’s shoulders in his hands, and said, “Don’t be a fool, Earl. What’s done is done. Your dying won’t help matters. It sure won’t make your mam feel any better. So just…keep going. We’ll take you back to a city. Whatever city suits you. But I’m not interested in finding a pile of sand next to this damn jar, twenty feet from camp. Not after you’re the one who made me go kill Trevisan in the first place.”

  Earl turned around, his eyes narrowed. “You did it, then? You killed the bastard?”

  Rhett’s grin was a dark thing. “Slit his throat, sure as shit.”

  Still clutching the jar to his heart, Earl looked Rhett dead in the eye. “And all the men who labored there—they’re free?”

  “They took off yesterday afternoon. Not much left in the camp, aside from the train itself. Even the handcars are headed back east with a dozen men on ’em.”

  The Irishman’s eyes took on a crafty shine. “What of the gold, then?”

  “Griswold divvied up what we could find as payment for the men’s trouble.”

  “Are you sure, though? Did they search his car?”

  Rhett thought back, remembering Meimei closing the panel with her fat little hand. “Now that you mention it, I don’t reckon anyone did.”

  “We have to go back, then,” Earl said, his smile growing. “Who knows what riches he was hiding? Gold and gems and…uh…things of antiquity. We have to go back quickly, before someone else finds it.”

  “I thought this was about freedom and revenge,” Rhett said, trying to figure out if he had, in fact, been duped.

  “Oh, and so it was. Freedom and revenge,” Earl said. “But if I can’t have me brother, then I’ll at least take the riches he came to the Republic to find. We’d hoped to send something back to me mam, and living well’s the best revenge.”

  “I thought killing bad guys was the best revenge.”

  Earl’s true smile shone through, a glimmer of orange in the lantern light. “Aye, well, then you’ve never had gold.”

  Rhett figured then that he’d never understand the damn donkey-boy. Not ever.

  Before heading back to camp, Rhett made a beeline for the horses, where Blue was happier than a chicken with a tamale to see him. Ragdoll leaned into his scratches and put up with his ministrations as he checked her legs and hooves and fussed with her forelock. Fat little Puddin’ looked up from his grazing with a soft whuffle. Rhett returned to himself a little, then, firmly back in his element. Perhaps because he spent so much time on four legs, Earl didn’t urge Rhett to hurry back to human business, choosing instead to sit on a rock and stare at his brother’s remains.

  When they returned to the fire to spread their plan, Winifred and Cora were already holed up in Winifred’s wagon, working on the coyote-girl’s foot. Rhett knew, when he smelled smoke and burning meat and heard a muttered curse, that Cora wa
s holding up her end of the bargain. If Winifred’s unending pain was actually ended, then Rhett concluded that whatever he’d lived through at the camp had been worth it. What was one little toe he barely missed to Winifred’s whole foot? Sitting by Sam, staring at the fire, ripping venison off a stick with his fully-healed teeth, he reckoned that even if something still felt undone about the whole affair, he’d mostly succeeded.

  “Good to see you back where you belong, other Hennessy,” Sam said.

  Rhett could’ve died and gone to heaven just then, and he turned to punch Sam in the arm.

  “Glad to be back, other Hennessy,” he answered. Then he pulled off his hat and held it out. “And many thanks for the use of your fine hat.” Sam took off his hat, and they exchanged their headgear awkwardly. Rhett’s own hat sat peculiar now, after however many weeks he’d worn Sam’s. But the old hat had lost its Sam-smell, and this hat was just areek with it, so Rhett was content.

  Girlish laughter floated out of the wagon, and all four men looked up in surprise to see Winifred hop down through the small door and land on two feet. Dan jumped up with a jubilant whoop and ran to embrace his sister and twirl her around in a circle. Rhett just about beamed his pride and gladness, his gaze roaming from Winifred’s bare, whole ankles to Cora standing shyly beside her in her beat-up men’s clothes from the rail camp. These two women couldn’t have been more different—in face, in body, in voice, in approach to life, in how they kissed. But Rhett knew them both, intimately, and it was right uncomfortable to know they’d been alone together, possibly talking about him. He couldn’t stop himself from blushing and sought to hide his embarrassment and worry by snatching another spear of meat from the fire.

  Despite the damn celebration, all Rhett wanted to do was go to sleep. To be more accurate, he wanted to settle himself down on his back, his head on his saddle and the sweet comfort of Sam by his side. After some polite conversation that he mostly spent digging holes in the dirt with a charred stick, he finally got his wish. Sam had already brought out Rhett’s bedroll, his holster and buffalo coat draped over it. He gladly put everything just so and sighed as he wiggled his shoulders into his old saddle blanket. Cora stared at him a moment and pulled down the rug from the wagon to make her bed on his other side but seemed to appreciate that snuggling up wasn’t what he had in mind just now.