Dek won’t, not like this, but it’s a fucking hard battle to stop him. Dek hangs onto him hard, fighting him down, to stop him trying to claw his way through the roof of the shelter and outside into the killing weather. When the flashbacks end, after far too long a time, Ren clings to him, whimpering and crying, helpless as a child and adrift in his mind. When he finally falls asleep, Dek lies in the dark and tries to calm his breathing. The worst of it is, it won’t be the last time he’ll have to make a snow cave for them. That’s a certainty. Somehow, Ren will have to deal with the memories because turning back’s no longer an option for him.
The howling wind has dropped to a stiff breeze by the time Dek digs them out the following morning. The urtibes rise like shaggy boulders from their snowy rest, and snort their displeasure at their encrusted fur. Dek doesn’t waste time trying to build a fire—they’ve got melted snow for their own use and the animals, and the sooner they get on their way the better. Ren doesn’t question the decision. In fact, Ren’s silent all day, white-faced and nervy and refusing to eat with nauseated shakes of his head. He doesn’t mention his freakout until Dek’s raising the tent for the evening. “I...uh...don’t know if that’ll happen again.”
“Probably will,” Dek says.
“Yeah. Look....”
“It help you, me being there?” Ren, surprised, nods at him. “You do what you have to. I do. Won’t think less of you if you cry.”
There are crystals on his face, maybe snow, maybe tears, making his eyelashes sparkle in the lantern light. With his pale skin he looks like he’s made out of snow, but his problem is that he’s not. His heart’s too warm for what’s he’s been through. “I’ll try not to.”
“Do what you have to,” Dek repeats. Ren needs psych counselling and probably drugs but there are none to be had for thousands of pardecs in any direction they choose to look. Dek can’t help him except by being there. For now Ren can only do what Dek does, which is to endure. Works about fifty percent of the time. Dek figures that’s good enough.
That setback aside, the trip is going a lot smoother than he’d dared hope. He knows this territory moderately well from his summer hunting, has been across the border twice on this route during his army days and he’s got excellent maps, but there’s no overestimating the danger of what they’re attempting. He’s got absolutely no complaints about Ren’s conduct on the trail—he follows orders and instructions with perfect obedience and good instincts, and if he questions anything Dek says, he does so intelligently, twice saving them both from a near catastrophic mistake. Dek revises his initial assessment about what kind of soldier Ren would have made, but he still would have got rid of him because Ren really wouldn’t have been happy in the army, and Dek had only wanted soldiers who liked the job. Like he had before he went crazy.
Two weeks in and they’ve started to climb into the mountains for real. Going is slow and dangerous now, and the riding takes real effort, real concentration. Freezing fog plagues them, forcing them to halt, unable to see, barely able to breathe as the frigid air steals all the warmth from their lungs. Dek almost prefers the blizzards. It’s been a week and a half since they saw the sun, or sky that wasn’t burdened with snow and sleet cloud.
The trail they’re following is relatively snow-free, sheltered as it is by the looming black rock mountains, but that only means they’ve swapped one danger for another since the path and almost every surface is covered in ice at depressingly frequent intervals. The animals hate it but they’re adapted for this too, fortunately, and can walk confidently where a man would break a leg as soon as he set foot to ground. Even so, their speed has dropped to under a pardec an hour—slower than Dek can crawl, not that he’s any intention of doing so. He has to force himself not to stare over the side towards the certain death that awaits the unwary.
They’re barely creeping along a dangerously narrow and exposed part of the trail, when Jesti snorts and Dek looks up, peering at the rocks and the snow and the ice ahead, trying to decode the images. He holds his hand up for Ren to halt. “What?” Ren asks quietly, but then he sees them too—a small group of people huddled under a ledge, a five hundred or so midecs ahead of them. Dressed in brown and black, their faces hidden, they seem almost part of the rocks themselves. “What the hell?”
“Febkeinze.”
They can hardly ride past, so Dek dismounts. One of the people detaches themselves from the group and walks slowly towards him. “Greetings,” Dek says politely in Febkeinze.
The man stops short and stares as if Dek’s descended from the skies. He begins to babble so fast that the only words Dek can make out are ‘help’, ‘lost’ and ‘food’. He holds his hands up. “Slowly—I don’t speak Febkeinze that well.” Behind him, he can almost hear Ren’s impatient curiosity, but no way is he letting Ren deal with this.
The man explains, and it’s a depressingly familiar story—he and his family have come over the border, but are now lost and out of supplies. Ren gets bored with waiting, and before Dek can stop him, he’s walked over to the group and hunkered down, smiling at the women, and patting the kids reassuringly. All without speaking a word of the language.
“Please, can you help us?” the man asks.
He’s just a kid, Dek realises. An underfed, undersupplied, under-informed infant in a harsh, lethal landscape that’s brutally unforgiving of stupidity, and there’s fuck all Dek can do about that. “Sorry, friend, we’re going the other way.”
The man’s hands flutter helplessly in front of him. Dek wishes these people would get themselves some decent gloves before they attempted the impossible—they never do. All of them underestimate the mountains. “My wife...please, she’s pregnant.”
Marra’s putrefying testicles. “I’m sorry. We can’t do anything about it.”
Ren, still crouching with the group, turns. “Dek?”
“They’re lost and hungry, what a surprise.”
“We have food.”
“Yeah—enough for us. We share, we all die. Fact of life.”
Ren gets to his feet, smiles at the toddler—fucking hell, what are these people thinking of to bring children this small out in this—and walks over, still smiling, but his eyes aren’t smiling at all. “There are three children here, Dek. And a pregnant woman.”
“And you’re a pregnant man, so what’s the difference between her dying of cold and starvation and you doing that?”
Ren bares his teeth but it’s not a smile. “No one dies at my expense. Give her my share.”
“And the next one? Because there will be more, Ren. I warned you about this. People come across these mountains all the fucking time, and most of them die. We’ll probably die too, but it’s a certainty if we split our supplies.”
“Can’t we give them the game? Some of the furs? They could give you information about the war. Please, Dek. We’ve got more than we absolutely need.”
“No, we don’t. Now get on your animal, smile nicely and we’re leaving.”
Ren folds his arms and plants his feet firmly. “You’ll have to shoot me.”
“That’s always an option.”
The man, who clearly speaks not a word of Pindoni, knows they’re arguing but not about what, and now he plucks at Dek’s arm. “Please. At least take my children back with you. We made a mistake but you don’t know what it’s like.”
Dek does, that’s the problem. He knows exactly what they’re running from, more than Ren does. “We don’t have supplies to spare,” he says. “We have to get across the mountains, and he’s sick,” he says, pointing at Ren. “Cancer,” he lies because it’s close enough to the truth.
“But we’re starving. For the children, if not for me. Please.”
Dek hates this, he really hates this. He’s being manipulated into a pointless act which endangers them all, and these people will still die, he knows that. “Ren, get on Wuzi.”
“No, Dek.”
Dek thinks about using his gun on the group—it’d be a kinder death
than the mountains offer—but only for a second. “We can give you a small amount,” he says, every word like acid in his throat. “And give you directions to where you can find shelter. That’s all.”
The man’s face breaks into a smile, and Ren, realising what’s happened, grins too. Dek’s hand itches from the need to belt the stupid sod.
They waste nearly four hours with these idiots, giving them hot food, Ren checking the children and mother for frostbite and illness, telling the woman in great detail about what food they can forage, and what to avoid. Dek hands over a couple of gunheis he caught the day before, half a parkig of dried fruit, and a quarter parkig of fat, as well as some khevai grains. All things they will almost certainly need in the coming days and weeks, he thinks bitterly, and nothing like enough to keep these people alive. Ren gives the woman some of the sleeping furs and she clutches them to her with tears streaming down her cheeks, which he kisses while saying soothing things she won’t understand. It’s all maudlin and stupid and what makes him sick to his stomach is knowing none of it will make any difference at all. It’s Denebwei all over again, only with snow.
The only thing that redeems the situation is that he gets up-to-date information about the civil war from the man, who’s a teacher, and not a total moron, just unused to this harsh environment. Dek gives him detailed instructions and draws him a map in one of the notebooks Dek’s brought with them, their cobbled together cover of being two amateur botanists and rock hounds becoming useful a lot sooner than he was expecting. Dek also repairs their crappy tent and tells them how to make it warmer and drier, and shows the man how to make simple snares, with advice as to what he can hope to catch.
There’s a better place for the group to camp for the night if they can move on another pardec, and Dek and Ren watch them make their tortuous way down the path. “You realise all we’ve done is delay the inevitable,” Dek says.
Ren’s smile disappears. “Yes, I do. But it might be enough. You could say that’s all you’re doing for me—delaying the inevitable.”
“You, I agreed to help. Not the entire world. And tonight when your back’s killing you from the cold and you can’t sleep, you just think about those furs you gave away—which, by the way, didn’t even belong to you.”
Ren gives him a lopsided smile. “Oh, I’ll think about them. I’ll be thinking about that little girl’s face when she got some hot soup inside her, and the hope we might have given them, and I’ll be thinking that after four years in prison, I might have just saved a life. Which is all I ever wanted to do.”
Dek shakes his head in disbelief. “That’s the last time you pull that stunt. Do it again, and I’m leaving you here. You can fend for yourself.”
“All right.” But Dek knows that Ren will pull it again, if he thinks he has to, and Dek can only hope he’s got the balls next time to force Ren onto his mount and get him out of the situation. They just can’t save everyone. Only time will tell if they can even save themselves.
Walk A Lonesome Road: 10
Dek is completely right about the result of giving away the furs, and when Ren develops painful constipation as a side effect of the pregnancy for which the donated dried fruit would have been a perfect solution, the desire to say ‘told you so’ sits heavy and tempting on Dek’s tongue. But he doesn’t, and not just because Ren’s miserable in a way that Dek could never have dreamed up as a punishment for stupidity. He’s still shitting mad at the idiot, and determined not to be bounced into acting against his judgement again, but at the back of his mind is a grudging respect—envy even—that even with all Ren’s been through, he’s hung onto more humanity than Dek had even before he went crazy, let alone now.
Four days later, they meet more refugees, but fortunately these are better provided for, and all they want is confirmation of directions. Maybe Ren has really learned a thing or two, because he stays quiet the whole time. Dek’s just intensely relieved to have got past a potentially tricky situation without conflict, and glad they’ll be across the mountain range in just over a week, if all goes well.
He should know better than to tempt fate by thinking such things, he really should. The day’d been going so well too. The weather has remained calm despite some threatening clouds and early rising wind that disappeared almost as soon as they broke camp. Ren’s difficulty has improved rather suddenly after some seeds he’d collected in the foothills for this purpose (and which he’d been hoarding because he’d been expecting the problem) have finally worked their magic. Perhaps because of that, and the unexpectedly still and pleasant conditions, he’s even been a little more chatty than usual. The trail has widened out again, much to Dek’s relief, and it’s covered with crisp snow which the animals are crunching through with every sign of enjoyment. It’s not exactly the same as spring being in the air, but there’s a bounce in their footsteps, at least for a little while.
As they ride side by side under a leaden sky, they talk about the hot pools that Dek knows are about a day’s ride along their path—a slight deviation that he considers well worth it for the benefit they’ll both get from it. “I visited the Nuri Inn once, while I was on leave from the army one time, “ Ren tells him. Dek’s heard of the resort—everyone’s heard of it. “I didn’t want to check out.”
“What is it, a thousand a night?”
“Two thousand. There were eight of us in the one room. One of the guys was getting married—his last fling before he had to behave himself.” Ren sighs and sounds almost happy. “The food was....” He stops abruptly, straightens up in the saddle. “Company,” he says.
Dek tugs on Jesti’s reins to make her stop, and then he takes a good look at the newcomer. It’s a tall, heavily armed man on an urtibes, and Dek knows right away this is no refugee.
“Poacher,” he murmurs under his breath for Ren’s benefit. “Hi,” he says more loudly.
“Well, you don’t see many folks going thisaways,” the man says with a grin. He’s heavy set, about fifty, with a grey-grizzled beard poking out from under his thick scarf. His outer gear is tanned leather and pelts, homemade and rough looking, and Dek suspects the guy spends very little time in civilisation. Across his pommel is a dead tjuwai cub—worth a lot of money for its beautiful red pelt and claws, and completely illegal to hunt. Dek carefully doesn’t stare at it.
“Got business on the other side,” Dek says. “And I don’t want to be unfriendly, but we need to get moving.”
“Sure. Weather’s looking nasty, don’t want to get stuck out here. You don’t have any grub to spare, do you? I’m getting low.”
“Sorry, no. We’re low ourselves. Been helping refugees,” Dek says with a significant roll of his eyes at Ren, who contrives to look a little soft in the head, smiling rather inanely at them both. “Told him we’d run short, but would he listen?”
“Green, is he?”
“A bit,” Dek says, casually shifting so that his rifle is more visible and his thigh holster’s clear.
“He’s right here,” Ren says indignantly, and the stranger laughs at his offended tone.
“Don’t mind us, boy, tagging the young’uns is good clean sport.”
Dek forces a grin. “We’ll be moving on, then. Good hunting.”
The man nods and rides past them—Dek notes the other furs and rolled up skins, and the brand-new Markeg rifle holstered near the stirrups. He wonders if the rifle was a ‘donation’.
“Get ahead of me,” Dek subvocalises. As Ren does as he asks, Dek filters out the sounds of their own animals and their harness, strains his ears to listen for the pad and thunk of the man’s heavier urtibes, the clink and jingle of reins being tugged to make an animal stop and turn.
It comes barely a minute later, the click of the stirrup holster being unfastened, the slide of metal against oiled leather amazing loud in the perfectly still air. The man’s voice sounds harsh as a fogel call as it bounces off the steep cliffs across the gorge. “Actually, gentlemen, I think I really do need your supplies. Turn a
round, and don’t try anything—I’ve got a gun pointed at you. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.”
Dek’s got his hand on his own gun, but he doesn’t hesitate—he doesn’t want the animals spooked by a warning shot—and turns Jesti around. The guy has the Markeg aimed right at him. He gestures at Ren’s back. “You too, young’un.”
Ren’s strangely clumsy as he attempts to obey, Guteb apparently being fractious, groaning and wheezing, as Ren tries to turn him. “Sorry, Guteb. Easy there. Dek, watch out, Guteb’s...!”
There’s a squeal of an outraged urtibes, the barrel of the rifle wavers as the guy’s distracted by the misbehaving animal, but even as Dek has his pistol half out of his holster, there’s a startling loud crack and the guy falls back. The poacher’s urtibes skitters off down the trail and Dek struggles to get a startled Jesti under control. Once he’s got her tightly reined in, he turns to look at his companion. Ren still has his handgun aimed at the poacher. His voice is a harsh whisper, his eyes tight and hard. “Is he dead?”
“Cover me,” Dek says, dismounting, and then handing Ren Jesti’s reins. Holding his pistol straight-armed in front of him, he advances cautiously, expecting the guy to leap up and shoot at him. But the poacher’s leaping days are over—Ren’s shot took him clean in the forehead, killing him instantly. That’s one hell of a shot with a pistol at that distance, from the back of a bucking urtibes.
“Clear.” Dek brings his gun into the rest position, takes a breath, lets it out slow, before he turns around. “Quick thinking.”
“He was heading towards those other people,” Ren says, his voice shaking. He’s still got his pistol pointed at the corpse. “He would have robbed them too.”
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