They had the horse back. By Marhuk’s unfathomable grace, there was that much at least.
But there was no room for any more foolishness – not from Weisei or the half-man or even and most especially Vuchak himself. They had water enough for two days. That was enough to get them back home to Island Town, and endless sorry disgrace. But the All-Year River was still three nights away – four, if the roads were bad – and Limestone Lake was a four-night detour in almost exactly the wrong direction. They would have to find something else. Something that had not dried up or stagnated or been poisoned to lifelessness, something that was not being actively sat on by broken men or bribe-hungry squatters.
Vuchak returned to the present. “Weisei, do you want us to turn back?”
Weisei stopped his packing and looked at Vuchak with the most profound confusion – as though he could not fathom why he should be asked for his opinion. Then he turned to the sun and dropped to a squat, folding his arms between his knees and chest as if he would pack himself neatly away with the baggage. Vuchak followed him down to his knees, though he was careful to do it at an angle that would let him keep an eye on the half-man.
“No,” Weisei confided from behind the curtain of his hair, his eastward face and low voice crafted to be sure that the treacherous West Wind would not hear what he said. “But I don’t know how to go forward.”
Vuchak kept a tight grip on his eagerness, and rationed his words like end-of-winter corn. “Well,” he said, “we still have some food, even if it doesn’t go very well together, and my bow will help us add to it. We have the horse back, and room enough in the wagon for what the mule left behind. So all we need now is water.”
He stopped there, waiting for Weisei’s thoughts to catch up, and then to take the lead. What Vuchak intended would never work by his own suggestion: Weisei would have to return to that unwelcome mind-space on his own.
By the way his doe-like eyes drifted down to watch his yellow-beaded moccasins, he was there already. “I haven’t been fasting, you know.”
“I know,” Vuchak replied.
Weisei did not look up. “And he might not – he doesn’t like me very much, you know.”
“I know,” Vuchak replied, but only because it was futile to argue. ‘Like’ had nothing to do with it: Grandfather Marhuk was a good parent, and a good parent still loved an incapable or disappointing child, even a defiant one. But in at least one crucial respect, Weisei was not living the way of the a’Krah, and until he did, he would not have full use of his gifts.
Weisei threaded his fingers up into the hair above his ears, as if his private thoughts might leak out without his consent, and frowned at the dirt. “So you can’t be angry with me when it doesn’t work.”
Vuchak’s gaze wandered again, back to where the half-man was tending the horse, stiff-legged and limping. Vuchak had been so anxious to keep him in his place yesterday – to prove to himself, as much as anyone else, that he could handle everything on his own...
“Weisei,” he said, “I have no room to be angry with anyone but myself.”
And he was not finished yet – not at all. The results of Vuchak’s last poor judgment were hardly cold in their ashes, and already he could feel his irrationality throwing sparks again – desperate to go forward, willing to do almost anything to avoid turning around, going back to Island Town, and publically admitting that his wits could not last even a single night outside the city’s crowded torchlit womb.
This, now, would be a better way. They could put the decision to a higher power, and follow its judgment faithfully. All they had to do now was solicit Grandfather Marhuk to make his wishes known.
Vuchak’s attention returned, unable to recall why this was not already being done, and found Weisei still squatting there, staring at the indifferent earth.
“So...” Vuchak ventured.
Weisei sighed, pressed his aquiline nose between his steepled hands, and finally laced them behind his head. “Bring me my cloak.”
“Yes, marka,” Vuchak said, and all but bounded up to his feet. By all the still-living gods, their task might yet be salvaged.
BRUSH THE FLANK. All he had to do was brush the flank.
Elim worked the curry comb over Actor’s side, every stroke provoking a fresh puff of dust. Then he’d do his belly. Then they’d celebrate being half finished by having a second handful of corn and a good hard back-popping stretch, respectively. Elim had made no promises about anything after that.
He heard footsteps approaching from the other side, and caught a glimpse of those same plain-and-tired moccasins from yesterday. They stopped a few feet away from Actor’s right. “Do you need any help?” Hawkeye asked.
A nameless dread prickled Elim’s spine at the sound of his voice, though it took a good minute more to rummage through his brains and find a reason for it.
We will take him to infect the children of Marhuk in their own home, and begin a new plague.
“Uh, not just yet,” Elim said, mindful to keep his eyes on his work. “I only got the one comb, see.”
Did Hawkeye know Elim had overheard him last night? He must – surely he must – because you’d’ve had to be deaf or decomposing to have slept through all of what came before it. Maybe he was feeling Elim out. Deciding whether he’d make trouble.
“But I’d – I’d be much obliged,” Elim hurriedly continued, “if you could help me get his harness on after I clean him up. Four hands beats two any day.”
There was no immediate answer – just a slight shifting of the wind, and then a sweet, peculiar smell. When Elim looked up, Hawkeye was standing there, drawing on a long, straight wooden pipe – like if somebody had pulled the longest piece off a pan-flute and squashed the business end flat. Whatever he’d loaded in there was not tobacco.
“Certainly,” Hawkeye said, the word spilling out as a mouthful of smoke. “But what about his foot?”
Confusion and worry creased Elim’s mind sharp. “Which foot?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, but stooped and leaned into Actor’s knee. The horse obediently lifted his left foreleg, presenting the underside of his hoof for Elim’s inspection.
“The other one,” Hawkeye said. Elim paused just long enough to check that there was nothing improper in the earth-caked steel of Ax’s left shoe before he worked his way around to the right one.
Ax picked up his right foot, but this time there was no silvery gleam under the dirt – just packed clay, springy frog-flesh, and a shallow, ragged edge where one of his shoe-nails had torn off a chunk of his hoof on its way out.
“God damn it.” Elim turned around and hunkered over, trapping Ax’s ankle between his own closed thighs. He dropped the comb, pulled the hoof pick from his pocket, and set to carving out the dirt, cleaning the foot at least well enough to see the full extent of the damage. “What have I told you about kickin’ off your shoes, huh? You think we got nothing better to do than keep you fresh and fashionable?”
“Apparently not,” Hawkeye said.
Yeah – well spotted, bucky. Elim spit on his thumb and worked it oh-so-carefully over the ragged part of the hoof wall, feeling into the little crannies with his thumbnail, locking his knees in anticipation of the flinch... but there was nothing. Not even a tail swish.
So that was something, then. If the hoof wall hadn’t broken or cracked deep enough to expose the quick, he might still be all right. “Reckon it’ll grow out,” Elim said absently. He gave Ax his foot back and straightened, putting a hand to the small of his aching back before he remembered how deep he’d fried the skin back there. He settled for an arm stretch instead, and threw out a second handful of corn. “We’ll just fit him with one of the spares we brought. He’s always had them thin, shelly kind of feet, you know what I mean?” Because Will Halfwick was about as fine a horseman as you could ask for – spared no expense, really – but you couldn’t tell him he was feeding wrong. He figured what was good for the goose was good for the gander, and if said gander cou
ldn’t hold a shoe on account of his flaky feet, then it must’ve been because God had made him that way. He didn’t believe diet had anything to do with it.
“No,” Hawkeye said. Elim did not bother to explain or ask permission as he clambered up over the wagon seat and into the bed. Bootjack and Way-Say were about fifty yards off, having hauled the coffin out there for who knew what kind of peculiar pagan purpose, and if Bootjack wanted to storm back here and holler at him for getting in the baggage, Elim would be glad to cost him the time and shoe-leather.
But as he fished around and finally lifted Sil’s saddlebag, he was met with no objection save the lump in his own throat. Elim swallowed hard, not allowing himself any hesitation or delicacy as he reached in and rooted through the boy’s things. His spare handkerchiefs, meticulously rolled and folded. Sale papers for the yearlings. His little tin cup and plate.
No shoes.
Elim pulled the flap open wider, angling for better light. Had he misremembered? Had something been left behind? God only knew where Ax’s tack and saddle had ended up – probably swapped for the harness back in town – and of course none of the Sundowners would have thought...
“It’s in the other one,” Hawkeye said.
Elim turned, somehow incensed by the casual way Hawkeye just sat and smoked, unreadable behind that damned blindfold. “What’s in what one?”
“The spare shoe,” Hawkeye replied, without looking up. “It’s in your sack – the one with the tongs.”
They were nippers, actually, but nevermind: he was talking about Elim’s gunnysack. “Won’t work,” Elim said, digging through Sil’s bag with a menace now. “That one’s – it ain’t the right size.”
She had magnificent feet – big wide solid ones, like dinner-plates on legs. Kept a shoe like Cinder’s fella, that was what... and one of Molly’s big steel clod-hoppers would never in a million years fit that weak and dainty gelding foot.
“Oh,” Hawkeye said. “Well, it’s the only one we have.”
“No it isn’t,” Elim said, frustration leaking through his voice. No, Sil had definitely held on to Ax’s spares – the bot-knife was still here, and the magnet they’d used to drag for nails at the stockyards, and the packet of fly-itch he’d almost mistaken for tea on their first night out. So where the hell were the shoes?
“Yes, it is,” Hawkeye said.
“Like hell it is!” Elim snapped, hurling the bag down and grabbing for the gunnysack. These ignorant miserable part-timers had put their dirty fingers in everything, that was what – pawed through Sil’s gear all rude and sloppily, probably mislaid half of everything already –
“I’m trying to be helpful to you, sir –” Hawkeye began.
Elim dropped the bag, which fell to the floorboards with a steel-weighted clunk. “Oh yeah? Like how you were helpful last night?”
“Yes, exactly,” Hawkeye said, his voice nothing but smoke and sincerity. “And if your intention is to make sure we can’t enjoy an unsupervised moment to sit still and consider what we’re going to do about the horse, then I would helpfully suggest that you interrupt their ritual by raising your voice even further.”
That was not what Elim had expected to hear. Hit full in the face with a whole passel of words, it took him a minute to untangle them into regular sense. Hush up, before the bosses catch us shirking.
And it took a good minute more to work out what he thought about that. He looked at Actor, his lead rope wrapped around the rein tie in front of the buckboard, diligently cropping the grass down to dry nubs. And Hawkeye, sitting there drawing on the last of whatever he’d stuffed into that pipe of his. And Elim’s own self, perched on the sideboard corner, having contrived to take a load off his feet without him even realizing it. Who knew when he’d get the chance again?
“Believe I take your meaning,” Elim said, more softly now.
They sat in silence for awhile.
Presently, Hawkeye knocked the ash from his pipe and blew it clean. “I think you would feel better if you had something to eat.”
There was sense in that. Even now, the empty screaming in Elim’s gut was only being shouted down by the unbearable heat in his back and arms, and the rusty swollen ache in everything south of his waist.
But that was just the trouble: if he ate, he’d feel better – and he didn’t want to feel anything at all. Worse yet, he’d be able to go on longer. Elim had already decided that this was where things had gone bad with Bootjack earlier: when he’d stuck out his spear, Elim still had strength and sense enough to move himself out of the way. Better by far to just wring himself out as fast and thoroughly as possible. To make sure that the next time Bootjack threatened to skewer his eye, Elim would have no choice but to lie there and give him a look that said well, I guess you better get on with it, cuz I’m stove in.
And when you came at it from that angle – when Sil and the Sundowner boy were dead and Molly was lost and you didn’t have to worry about anything but keeping your sorry carcass comfortable for however many hours or days it would take for the Almighty to throw up His hands and let you die too – then shirking became an immensely sensible decision.
He’d still have to see to Actor, though. He’d go lame if they left him odd-footed like that.
Elim breathed deep, the morning air perfumed with horsey sweat and lingering sweet-pepper smoke. “You sure we got no shoes but this one here?”
“Completely,” Hawkeye said.
Elim nodded out at the rumpled red hills in the distance. “How ’bout out there? His gait ain’t fouled up yet, so he might not’ve threw it too far back.”
Hawkeye paused, long enough for Elim to wonder how much of that he’d understood. “I believe you,” he said at last, “but I can promise that it’s not anywhere within half a mile of our camp.”
A different Elim – even the one from three days ago – would have asked how the dickens he could know a thing like that.
For his present self, however, this was only the latest in a long string of inconvenient facts. He sighed, and wiped his face. “All right. Well, we at least gotta level him off. So maybe you could help me pull his left one, and get any last nails out of his right foot while we’re at it.” He might even do all right barefoot, as long as they kept him at a walk and didn’t overdo it.
Hawkeye nodded at Actor’s deceptively sound-looking hooves. “Now?”
Elim looked out at the strange pow-wow again. Way-Say was lying on his back, spread-armed, and seemed to be staring at the sun. Bootjack was drawing something in the dirt around him with the butt-end of his spear. The square coffin sat off to one side, with a little pile of something heaped in front of it. God only knew what-all that was... or how long it would take.
“Well,” Elim said, “we might ought to wait ’til they get back.” He glanced at Hawkeye. “You know. Just so as we don’t get in trouble, or anything.”
Elim would have sworn Hawkeye lifted an eyebrow at him. “A very wise precaution, sir. They may well have a solution we haven’t considered – and certainly we don’t want to overstep our boundaries.”
Elim reached over and dropped one more handful of corn, before finally easing himself down to sit in the wagon-bed proper. “Hell no we don’t.”
The silence that followed afterward begged him to close his eyes, and Elim was glad to oblige. There were a couple of little sounds after that – flint and tinder, leaves and fingers – and then the smell of hot, sweet smoke again. Here in this little pocket of peace between horrors, a modest whiff of hellfire was positively refreshing.
EVERYTHING WAS CORRECTLY done – Vuchak saw to that.
As Weisei lay down and emptied his mind, Vuchak counted out the corn – one kernel for each of the thousand eyes of Marhuk – and divided it into four piles. Thirty-four for the World That Was, and those who gave their lives to help the people escape the rising waters. Sixteen for the World That Is, and the a’Krah who burned their eyes and feathers to move the sun, so that life could flourish on the earth
. Three hundred and fifty-two, for the sons and daughters of Marhuk who had lived and died in the service of their people. And all the rest – five hundred and ninety-eight – for the World That Was Still To Come, and all those who had not yet been born.
There would come a day when that pile would be empty – when the old ways would be forgotten, and the earth would be cold and exhausted, and women would give birth to stones.
That day was not today.
So Vuchak put the offerings in their proper places: the thirty-four in Weisei’s left hand, the sixteen in his right, the three hundred and fifty-two in two piles above his head – one hundred and fifteen daughters, two hundred and thirty-seven sons – and the rest shared evenly between Vuchak and Dulei, who had not yet received his funeral rites, and therefore still numbered among the living.
And all the while, he chanted.
At my side, you are with me.
At my call, you are with me.
At the hour of my greatest need, you are with me.
At the moment of my gravest doubt, you are with me.
All the days and nights of my life, you are with me.
He turned his spear, and put to earth its peaceful, milk-blessed end, and began to draw the holy shape in the ground. It began just above Weisei’s left foot, and travelled upward, making a fanned tail of his cloak’s hem, and an outstretched wing of his arm, and continued to his shoulder and then above him, where the sons and the daughters in their well-shaped piles became two golden eyes for the head, with its open beak beseeching wisdom, and thereafter watched Vuchak as he guided the line downwards, into another wing and the opposite side of the tail and further downwards, making talons of Weisei’s feet, and ending where it began, closing the shape and centering its power on the one inside it.
And it was full of rightness – full of atleya.
When this was done, Vuchak swallowed his words, continuing the chant in his throat as he took his place beside Dulei at Weisei’s feet, to watch and do reverence as Marhuk’s son slowed his breathing and stared, unblinking, into the morning sun.
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