“Naw,” he said presently. “It ain’t broke.”
“Well, that’s all right, then,” Hawkeye said. “Let’s just get the harness off. We can let him loose for his dinner, and then sit down to enjoy ours. Have I used that correctly? Dinner?”
Elim struggled to think through the headache pulsing through his whole body. “Yeah. Breakfast, dinner, supper. Works for horses and people both.” He did not bother to correct ‘let him loose’.
“I see. I’ll remember that.”
Which was fine for him, but Elim was more concerned with figuring out how that strap had come undone in the first place. Had Hawkeye not buckled it right? Had Elim not checked?
Had he just been so hell-bent on getting out of his own skin that he hadn’t cared whether it was done right at all?
His fingers trembled as they worked to loosen the rest of Ax’s sweaty leathers, and not only from exhaustion and hunger. It was frightening to think how fast he’d forgotten his duty. Horrifying to realize how readily he’d neglected the trust lent him by Boss, and Will, and that Azahi of theirs – even by that wolf-mouthed lady-sheriff who’d kept him kenneled, and extracted a promise without one word between them.
Not for the first time, Elim thought back to his other self – the one who was at home now, fit and dressed and probably working up a good clean sweat as he filled holes and mended fences in the north pasture, with a pan of biscuit and a pail of milk waiting for him under the mesquite tree. He was a good fellow. Careful. Reliable. You wouldn’t catch him getting sloppy with the tack.
Elim’s fingers curled around the coarse root of Actor’s mane, holding fast to the hot, damp hair. How did the horse keep his perfect sameness when everything around him was new and awful? How did he keep from being infected by change?
Ax’s only answer was a brief, curious blast of air at Elim’s ankle. Then he was back to grazing the goldenbrush, equal parts forgetful and content.
“It gets better,” Hawkeye said.
Elim looked up at him over Ax’s hollow withers. A few stray hairs had pulled loose from the tie behind Hawkeye’s neck, but otherwise he was perfectly composed: his soft, unbloodied face innocent of everything but perspiration, his old plain clothes free of rips or holes or ground-in dirt, his manner as iced-tea-and-peaches as ever.
What did he know about anything?
“Hold them shafts,” Elim said, and limped on ahead, walking the horse free of the wagon.
No, that wasn’t right. He was going off wrong-footed again. His job was to stay alive – to do everything in his power to go home again – and spitting in the blindfolded eye of his one plain-speaking warden wasn’t going to do him any favors.
No, he’d better... well, he’d just...
God Almighty, whatever they were cooking smelled divine.
Elim flinched as another sudden spate of sharp-voiced nonsense pierced the air behind him, but did not dare turn to look. Not another argument. His nerves couldn’t take it.
Hawkeye passed the long side of Actor’s cinch over the saddle, and lifted his chin at something over Elim’s shoulder. “Your dinner’s waiting,” he said. “Why don’t you go sit down? I’ll call you if I need any help here.”
Nothing would convince Elim to go anywhere near the gale-force anger that Bootjack always seemed to be brewing around him... except food.
Bootjack was there all right – as was the knife in his hand and the glower on his face. But he was sitting with a bowl in front of him, and the knife was not doing anything more dangerous than carving up a squash, and in that moment, he looked less like a man contemplating murder than a cook peeling potatoes. He jerked his head at the blue marbled pot on the ground.
It was hard to see the contents, and harder still to mind. With one eye on Bootjack and the other on Way-Say – who was hunched over as if to make his own shade, and fully occupied with something in his lap – Elim let his rusty knees give out and dropped to the ground.
Oatmeal. Easily a gallon of oatmeal, with half a slab of cheese dropped in the middle. And mixed in with the rest – he squinted closer – were those peas?
And it smelled amazing.
The pot was much too hot to touch, and there was nothing so civilized as a spoon, but Elim didn’t let that slow him down for a minute. He went down on his left side, propping himself up with one elbow like an old pagan prince at his feasting-couch, and made a scoop of the cheese.
And some of the oats had scorched, and the peas were still bullet-hard, and it was the best thing he’d ever eaten. By the time the cheese melted, Elim didn’t even need it anymore: he kept right on at it with his own filthy hand, shoveling the hot savory mess into himself as fast and desperately as a runty piglet who’d finally found the tit, depriving his mouth just long enough to make sure that not a single blob fell to perdition in the folds of his poncho.
By the time he got down to the burnt skin at the bottom, Elim already had a plan: he pulled the hoof pick from his pocket, gave it a cursory wipe on a clean patch of his pants, and sat up to start scraping out the dregs...
... and belatedly realized that Bootjack was watching him with a smug, satisfied smile.
Elim’s overfull stomach contracted in horror.
Poison.
The hoof pick slipped from his fingers; the cooling pot rolled out of his lap.
And Bootjack crowed in triumph. “Nankah, weisei! Hagai ene suhani ika?”
Way-Say glanced back at the empty pot, his fine features darkening in disapproval, and then chucked a wad of something light and soft at Bootjack’s delighted face. “Veh’ne eihei, vichi!”
Was it too late? Could he still save himself with a finger down his throat? Elim twisted around, cotton-mouthed, desperate to understand. “Hawkeye, what’s – what’re they saying?”
Hawkeye, sitting backwards on the wagon seat, paused with a water-skin in his lap. “The prince ordered his knight to cook for you,” he said, though it took a moment for Elim to remember why it was smarter not to be heard using their given names. “Then he scolded him, saying he’d made too much – that you wouldn’t be able to eat it all. The knight answered that you were a gluttonous mongrel of the Starving God, and would devour anything put before you. And now I believe he’s just won the bet.”
Elim looked back, stupid, uncomprehending, as Bootjack tossed the whatever-it-was was back at Way-Say, who threw up his arm with a bright peal of laughter.
Not poison. A joke. Two young men horsing around like a pair of rambunctious farmboys.
“Regardless,” Hawkeye said, “it’s good for us that they’re friends again. Here, catch this.”
Elim instinctively put up his hand, though it took two to keep from dropping the sudden, awkward weight.
It was a canteen, but not the one they’d given him yesterday. This one was a wool-jacketed tin bottle, and Elim knew it even before he glimpsed the initials burned into the cork.
WCH
Willen Corwald Halfwick.
He would probably be minding the counter, if he wasn’t still at his dinner. He might be doing the books, seeing as it was getting on towards the end of the month, or straightening the stock, or maybe helping Nillie clear the dishes. But whatever Will Halfwick was doing right now, he was not doing it with the least suspicion that his little brother’s head might be bagged up and heading west with the man who’d been supposed to be minding him. Didn’t these roughhousing Sundowners know that?
“Keep that, and be more moderate this time – that’s all you’ll get until tomorrow.”
Elim stared at the scorched cork, rubbing the tin through its woolly green pocket. Then he put the mouth of the canteen to his lips and took a slow, measured drink. And presently he lay down with it, pulling the hood of his poncho over his face and drawing his knees up to help safeguard the full, vital weight of this new responsibility. There was no telling about anything else, but at least – at last – he had a job too simple to botch.
SOMETHING DRAGGED OVER his ankle.
<
br /> Elim bolted awake, instinctively kicking at whatever venomous little horror was about to violate his flesh.
“Hsst – trankilo, Ylem!”
Elim looked up – and then down. Way-Say crouched by his knees, and pulled the empty cloth sack back over the tops of Elim’s feet. He smiled, his hair hanging like a black drape down the left side of his wide, fine-boned face... but his eyes were red-rimmed and watery, and he could not seem to open them to more than the barest pained slits. Beside him was the biggest pair of moccasins Elim had ever seen.
Bleary-minded as he was, it took a minute to put things together. The new, masterfully-made soft leather shoes – too nice for putting on bare, filthy feet. The feet – Elim’s only exposed flesh – one of which would burn faster than the other in the afternoon sun. The sun, which Way-Say had spent the better part of an hour staring at this morning, now apparently getting even with his eyes. Where was his blindfold?
“Gras – grese,” Elim said. He could not remember the Marín word for eyes, and passed his hand back and forth to mime a blindfold. Then he caught sight of the black cloth wrapped around his own wrist, and guiltily dropped his gaze. Way-Say, kind soul that he was, had made him a bandage of it, and Elim, helpless dumb-ass that he seemed to be, had already forgotten about it.
“Ai,” Way-Say assured him, and lifted his chin at the black tarp that now stretched from one side of the wagon out to the ground. Judging by the feet sticking out of the nearer end, Bootjack was already asleep there. Hawkeye was nowhere in sight.
Way-Say patted Elim’s knee and stood. “Tlahei achan,” he said, his voice varnished with seriousness and sincerity, and walked off to Bootjack’s tent.
Elim watched him go, too tired to recall when or where he’d heard the words before. Then he hid the moccasins with the canteen under his poncho, their new leather cuffs soft against his stomach, pulled the hood back over his face, and fell asleep clutching his treasures.
VUCHAK WOKE TO an irritable shove. “Move off,” Weisei muttered.
Vuchak obligingly rolled over – and smacked his forehead on something hard.
He opened his eyes to the sight of the dirt-crusted wagon wheel, the daylight blotted out by Hakai’s sleeping form on the other side of the spokes. No, there was no more moving over – he was out of room.
He rubbed his forehead, and shifted to put his back to the wheel. Weisei was sprawled out over three-fourths of the blanket, which was typical for him, and naked except for his breechclout, which wasn’t.
“Roll that way,” Vuchak said, prodding Weisei’s thin shoulder.
Weisei curled at the touch, like an armadillo-bug rolling up in self-defense. “Leave me alone, Vichi,” he mumbled from the other side of his hair. “I have a headache.”
Fear evaporated the last of Vuchak’s sleep. What if he were getting sick? What if the half-man had infected him?
By the time he remembered that Weisei had only sunburned his eyes, it was too late: he was awake.
So Vuchak sat up, wiped his face, and blearily contemplated his own soft, bare stomach, which protruded dishearteningly over the waist-tie of his leggings. Island Town had made him lazy and weak. His legs still complained from the long walk. His gut still wished for Pipat’s fresh-fried chokecherry dumplings.
It was best not to think about Pipat.
So he pulled on his shirt and crawled out from under the black shade, surprised at the dim light outside. Was it sunset already? Had they slept so long?
He pulled off his yuye, amazed and gratified to be so wrong. No, the sun hadn’t descended – but a wall of thick, gray clouds had rolled in from the west, blanketing the sky.
Vuchak still squinted, his eyes sensitive to the hidden light behind the clouds. But he gave thanks to Grandmother Spider, and to the Lightning Brothers, and even to the faithless West Wind. There wouldn’t be rain – he knew better than to hope for that – but there was a cool, gray shield over the earth, and that was enough.
He wouldn’t let it go to waste.
Vuchak thought of waking Weisei to come enjoy the reprieve from angry sunlight, but he was in no mood to appreciate it. He thought of Hakai, but he wasn’t a’Krah. So Vuchak took up his bow and arrows and an empty sack, pausing just long enough to be sure that the half-man was still asleep, and went out to make use of the day.
He walked southwest, facing the wind. The ghostly gray of dead saltbush and dry grass rippled over the plains, and the brittle red earth clung to his shoes in flakes and shards, as if he were walking on a rash.
But as he crested the first small rise, Vuchak spied a promising green ribbon winding through the wastes, and quickened his steps. The broken men had stolen food and medicine, and there before him was the promise of replenishing both.
The stream was gone, its bed as hard and dry as if it would deny ever having had relations with water. But the plants crowded along its banks were the still-living children of a long and fruitful intercourse, and Vuchak hopped down to the stream bed to walk gladly between hardy juniper and deep green creosote, sharp-leaved yucca and flowering yellow rabbitbrush. There was even a cluster of prickle poppy whose brown seed-pods had not yet opened to the wind.
That would do well for Weisei, if his headache was still with him at sunset. Vuchak pulled off his moccasins and made gloves of their doubled soles. The first pod protested, its thorns biting deep into the hard leather. Vuchak left that one alone. But its two siblings were willing and pliable, breaking readily at his touch, and he soon had them in his bag.
Then he sat down to brush his feet clean, and to make a plan. Vuchak would be the first to admit he was out of his depth here: he and Weisei were da’kret, city men, for whom hunting was only a rare pleasure. But finding game was as easy as stepping in a hole – that was what Echep always said. Badgers and skunks and prairie dogs dug their houses, and chipmunks and weasels and pocket-owls came and lived in them. One only had to find a burrow or a scrape, or some recent tracks or droppings, and then –
Something moved behind the brush.
Vuchak stopped still, one foot still naked. There up ahead, scarcely farther than he could have thrown the shoe in his hand, a deer had looked up from browsing.
It was a huge, sand-colored buck, of such an improbable size that at first Vuchak thought it might be a royal deer: one of Aiyasah’s sons. That would be rare and special, too holy to kill.
Then it looked away to the south, watching something farther upwind, and Vuchak saw by its leafy ears and forked antlers that it was only an ordinary cottonwood deer... albeit one in astonishingly good condition.
Vuchak’s heart beat faster; his hands itched. Standing there on four innocent hooves was enough meat to feed them all for days – to see them all the way to Atali’Krah. Browsing there in the scrub was the pleasure of walking back to camp burdened by success, and the sound of Weisei’s first sharp, intaken breath of surprise, and every satisfying word that would follow it.
Vuchak would not question his tremendous luck. He would not spoil his chances by being over-hasty. He would only pick up his bow, silently draw himself up to one knee, and wait.
By the time his target returned to browsing, he had the arrow nocked and ready. The deer did not present its body in perfect profile, but was standing a quarter-turn away from him. The depth of the creek-bed meant that its head and legs were hidden behind the still-living thicket, but Vuchak could make out its flecked gray-brown body, and see perfectly the path that the arrow would take as it entered behind the deer’s shoulder, and pierced its heart.
And it would. He held still, and told himself that until he could believe it. Not because he was arrogant – no, he was finished with that. Because he was clever enough to see his own weakness, to regard it clear-eyed and unflinching – not to crash about with fear and ignorance and insecurity hanging off him like sacks of stones tied to a dog’s neck, but to take those things and swallow them knowingly, lovingly, to make them an indistinguishable part of his small but whole-bodied self.
He could succeed now, because he had finally finished with failing.
Vuchak steadied his thoughts, and pushed his plaits behind his shoulders. He drew the string back until the traditional turkey-feather fletching kissed his cheek, linking him with hundreds of generations of a’Krah hunters past. He sighted down the shaft, his taut muscles aligning the modern, hot-forged steel point with the work of the present. Then he let go, sending the arrow forward, into the future.
It hit with a hollow, echoing whunk. The deer kicked out and bolted, as terrified of the wooden lightning between its ribs as of Vuchak’s sudden, ecstatic whoop. “TSAA’!”
In that moment, it took everything he had not to surge forward after his prey. His left hand clutched the bow’s sweaty leather grip, willing it to become a knife; his blood frothed in his veins, clamoring for death.
But Vuchak was not like the half, who lunged for food like a starving animal. He was a man.
So he sat on his heels and waited as a man should. Watching and listening. Tracing shapes of gratitude into the air for the wind to carry out into the universe. Holding vigil, there at the end of a life.
There was no telltale crash, no mortal groan to tell him the time. So he waited until the weight of his buttocks had fully numbed his feet – because the mind was a faithless, anxious reckoner, but the body made a timepiece to rival the stars. Finally, he stood and hobbled out with painful, tingling propriety to find what he had taken.
The smell of blood saturated the air as he approached the mesquite bush where the deer had been standing. That was promising: perhaps it hadn’t gone far.
Or perhaps it hadn’t gone anywhere at all.
As Vuchak climbed up out of the creek bed and looked behind the mesquite, he was amazed to see the deer lying dead on the spot – its throat already torn out and eaten.
No, that wasn’t right. He stood amidst the overpowering smell of raw meat, struggling to tear his gaze from the out-spilled flesh and the gathering flies long enough to prove it to himself. No, that wasn’t his buck. Of course it wasn’t. His had been large and fine, and this one was thin, almost emaciated.
Medicine for the Dead Page 11