Vuchak nocked a second arrow and drew it back, squinting, waiting.
Then he let the string go slack, and finally promised himself a drink.
Then he looked down.
A STRANGLED CRY echoed from the north side of the cliff, catching Elim’s breath in his throat.
“Vichi?” Way-Say looked up, his dreamy expression melting into fear.
“No, don’t –” Elim said, but the Crow prince had already clambered over the side of the wagon and dropped to the ground.
“Paika, vichi! Ne kui’ agat ene!” And he was off and running for the trees, with a quickness Elim would never have guessed he still had in him.
Still, Elim didn’t have to guess to know that that was an abysmally stupid thing to do. Anything bad enough to get hold of Bootjack was going to make mincemeat out of Way-Say, and Elim would have been scared for him even if he hadn’t been told that his own life was hanging by the hairs on Way-Say’s head. He clutched Ax’s lead tighter, forcing himself to keep the horse at an even walking pace. “Hawkeye, what do we do?”
He was still holding to the side of the wagon, forcing Elim to turn to see him. Behind the blindfold, his face looked grave. “I don’t know.”
“What d’you mean, you don’t know?” Elim replied, his surprise souring fast. “Ain’t you the smartest fella on this trip? Ain’t you always lording it over the rest of us, how much you know?”
“I never said that,” Hawkeye retorted, obviously rattled.
“Well you sure as hell act like it!” Elim said. “All telling me ‘the horse ain’t got any shoe, and by the way don’t bother yourself looking for it, just take my word.’ Well, if you’re so all-fired sharp that you can see –”
“I CAN’T see,” Hawkeye snapped, though they were practically within spitting-distance of the cliff now – close enough that Elim could make out Bootjack emerging from the trees, stalking straight for them with Way-Say clinging and pleading behind. “And if I knew what –”
Hawkeye trailed off, and when Elim looked back at him again, he was stiff as a board.
“What? What is it?” Elim glanced from the two Crow men ahead to their blindfolded manservant behind.
The wagon’s side edge ran through Hawkeye’s fingers as he stood there, and it was impossible to tell whether he was squinting, listening, or just too plumb amazed to move. When the tail-gate bumped his hand on its way past, he roused himself back to a walk. “... we should go,” he said, his voice small and ashen.
A sliver of fear jabbed up through Elim’s chest, jangled and splintered at the sight of Bootjack’s arm-waving ‘go-back’ gestures.
No. Absolutely not.
“Like hell,” he said, his voice hollow in his own ears. “Here, take him.”
He didn’t wait to see whether Hawkeye would or not, because it didn’t hardly matter: Ax had long since smelled water, and was plowing forward on the trail like a champion farm-ox. His head was a compass for the water-hole hidden behind those trees, and Elim went straight for it.
“Alto, alto!” Bootjack swore at him, making push-gestures with his hands, his face gray with anger and panic. “Stop – you stop!” He lunged into Elim’s path, but he’d dropped whatever weapons he had, and Elim was finished with listening. He pushed Bootjack aside, into Way-Say’s beseeching grasp, and broke into a run.
It would be there. It had to be.
Elim ducked and bulled his way through the trees, stumbling once as one of his shoes caught a stone. He ignored the etches and scribbles festooning the cliff walls, and the birds that took flight as he ran, and the shouting behind him. There was water. There would be water.
A blue glimmer caught his eye, right where the trail ended. Elim went for it, his urgency inflamed by that sweet, cool scent in the air. It was there: a beautiful shady blue-green pool, fresh and clear and...
... full.
Elim stopped, confused. In the shadow of the cliff, they looked like enormous river-weeds at first: great big brownish-red things blooming in the water. But as he looked closer, he realized that those upward-stretching tendrils were fingers.
Hands.
Arms.
Elim’s breath died in his chest as he looked into the pool, and found seven still faces looking back at him.
They must have been there for days – weeks, maybe – to get that color. They were Sundowners, all of them, livid and naked and apparently tied somehow – or at any rate, something down there was weighting their feet, leaving their bloat-swollen arms and faces to bob and wave, reaching for the sun or the sky or Elim himself without ever breaking the water’s surface.
Elim stumbled back a step, dumbstruck. Then he looked down, and realized what he was stumbling over.
There was – had been – all manner of life around the little pool. Here, though, it was like someone had dropped those poor souls into so much boiling vinegar: the grass was dead in a splash-pattern three feet deep around that morbid pond, and everything that still clung to life had gone horribly wrong. Overgrown cattails bent nearly to the greasy surface of the water, their dense brown fluff growing like so many huge, misshapen furry sausages. Little buttercup flowers were being choked by white mold, and the overhanging branches of the nearest tree opened raw green pine-cones to drop rotted black seeds.
Elim backed away, afraid even to be caught in its shade. He stepped over a bow – Bootjack’s bow, he realized, and a lonely arrow beside it. Which he must have dropped when he saw this same god-awful sight, and thought Elim’s same god-awful thoughts: they’d found water, all right, but it promised to be a hell of a drink.
“YOU STUPID PIG-EATING rape-child – I said come BACK!”
But the half-man ran on and disappeared into the trees, paying no mind to any of Vuchak’s shouted curses. So there was nothing to do but to take off after him, fighting Weisei’s entreaties all the way.
“Vichi, just LISTEN – just slow down long enough to listen –”
But Vuchak had listened for days, paid close and faithful attention to his marka’s every word. Now there was no time for slowing down, or listening, or doing anything but getting out of here before that idiot half or anyone else succumbed to temptation.
“Vichi, stop! I ORDER you to stop! I...” Weisei’s voice trailed off along with his footsteps. He wobbled, dropped to his knees, and leaned forward to vomit again – and of course he did. He’d been led straight to the festering heart of an evil so atrocious that it had already polluted everything within two days’ walk.
But Vuchak did have to stop then, and to leave off his self-reproach at least long enough to be sure that his marka would not choke or collapse. So he stood guard over Weisei’s hunched, heaving figure, and shouted ahead at the half. “NO DRINK!” he called in his clearest Ardish.
Vuchak’s eyes were not the best in daylight, but he was sure that the half looked over at him and nodded – and given how he’d backed away from the pool, there was room to hope that he had already come to the same conclusion. Vuchak looked down at the hand clutching at his leggings.
“Please,” Weisei gasped, his sunken eyes pleading. “We have to pull them out.”
If he could have seen himself then, he would not have asked. He was ashen, perspiring like dirty slush melting in the sun, and his only color was the string of bloody saliva at his lips. “Weisei, we can’t,” Vuchak said, using the last of his gentleness to help his marka to stand.
It was not appreciated. “We can, though!” Weisei protested, his eyes pleading, his words reeking of bile. “We have a strong horse, and the four of us together –”
“We have a LAME horse,” Vuchak corrected him, “and one of us is too ill to walk, and another of us is a nearsighted bureaucrat who’s never pulled anything heavier than his mother’s tit, and NONE of us can afford to waste another minute in finding water!”
“It’s RIGHT THERE!” Weisei shouted, obscenely pointing at the pool. “All we have to do is get them out, so the great lady can make it pure!”
&nb
sp; “What great lady?” Vuchak snapped. “Which one? Where is she?”
Weisei had no answer for that. “I – we have to have faith, Vichi –”
Vuchak had had faith, though. He’d had faith that his marka’s vision was correct – that the half was the source of Weisei’s sickness – that Grandfather Marhuk would guide them wisely. “No, we SHOULD have faith. What we DO have are seven dead Ikwei – not Washchaw, not builders, not anything else – and if the Lady of the House is so lazy that she expects a couple of parched a’Krah to walk two days out of their way to retrieve her drowned idiot children –”
Weisei slapped him, but not nearly hard enough to matter. “Don’t SAY that,” he hissed. “Grandfather gave us a vision –”
“Grandfather gave YOU a vision,” Vuchak replied. “And I hate him for it.”
That should have earned him another slap, or at least a spitting reproach. But Weisei just stood there, open-mouthed and staring. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” Vuchak said, his headache and dry mouth in perfect agreement now. “I hate that he expects us always to clean up after the failures and weaknesses of these other-people. I hate that he sent us here, knowing what it would do to you, and I hate that he lied about what we would find when we arrived.”
“He didn’t lie,” Weisei growled, “and he didn’t wake me up in the middle of the day to give me a holy task. I beseeched HIM after YOU fell asleep on the watch and let us be robbed by those same other-people you don’t want us to help. And that’s too bad for you, because we’re here now, and we’re going to help.”
Vuchak folded his arms, and looked his marka up and down. His clothes were filthy and his hair was tangled and his complexion was ghastly, but in that moment, he looked perfectly, regally calm. “Because you’re his son?”
Weisei lifted his chin. “Because I am a’Krah.”
Vuchak recognized that for what it was: a moral challenge, one that all but called him a faithless, quail-feathered pretender who served the order of creation with his mouth only. At any other time, he would have been furious.
Here, though, Vuchak was content to catch another glimpse of him – that fearless, splendid man that Weisei was meant to be – and to savor it while he could. It wouldn’t last long.
“Hakai!” Weisei called. Vuchak turned to see that the slave had let the horse walk all the way to the pool, but by the grace of an unfathomable god, the half-man was keeping him back from it. “Untie the horse and make him ready to pull. We’ll use Ylem’s rope.”
Vuchak sighed. In another world, Weisei would willingly immerse himself in that deathly human soup, tie the line around whatever was keeping them down there, and have them pulled out at once. He would not think about how quickly the pollution would kill him, or question how and when some still-living god would arrive to purify the water afterwards. He would do it because it was a good, necessary thing, and because Grandfather Marhuk had asked that it be done.
In this world, however, he still had an atodak whose job it was to think of those things for him, and to guard his life above all others. “Hakai!” Vuchak called. “Turn the horse around. We’re going now.”
Weisei stared at him, the edges of his composure flaking away. “We’re not.”
As it happened, Vuchak had some gentleness left after all. “We are. Because I’m stronger than you.”
And in one graceful movement, Vuchak bent and rushed forward, catching Weisei under the ribs with just enough force to knock the wind out of him, heft him up over one shoulder, and start carrying him back to the wagon.
He would be screaming as soon as he got his breath back. He was already recovering enough to struggle. For now, though, Vuchak had one free arm to use in making the sign of a cruel god, and a small pocket of silence to use in preparing to answer any further objections.
“WHOA – WHOA. BACK up, buddy. Wait.”
Ax was having none of it: he pinned his ears and bulled forward, and it was only a quick step to the side that saved Elim’s foot from the next down-coming hoof.
“WAIT,” Elim said again, and put himself back in front of the horse – louder this time, pushing aside that long black face hard enough to show he meant business. “Boy, I am the boss of you, and I told you to WAIT.”
It was one of the cruelest things he’d ever had to do, but it worked: Ax lowered his head and backed up, pushing the wagon back one step, and then another as Elim pressed the issue. In one more step, he was far enough from the pool to find clean, living grass underfoot, and Elim put enough slack in the lead for him to lower his head and eat.
He wasn’t going to forget about his drink, though – and for that matter, neither was Elim. He glanced over at Hawkeye, and tried not to sound as god-awful anxious as he felt. Bootjack and Way-Say were arguing a stone’s throw away, and Elim didn’t need to understand a word of it to know that these seven deaders weren’t part of the plan. “Hawkeye, what’s going on? What do we do now?”
The man didn’t look away from the carvings on the nearest stone wall. “Are you going to get upset with me again if I tell you that I still don’t know?”
“No,” Elim said, and made the sun wheel to seal the promise. “No, I won’t. I’m sorry I did before. I just, uh – no, dammit, I told you to WAIT – I’m just having a dickens of a time, here, and I’m... I’d be much obliged if you could break me off a piece of your calm.”
That wasn’t what Lady Jane would call good Sunday-dinner Ardish, but Hawkeye seemed to get the gist. He straightened, and nodded at the two men beyond the trees. “The prince was called here by a vision from his father, presumably to accomplish something of importance. It isn’t for us to speculate on Grandfather Crow’s purpose... but it consoles me to remember that he has lost many of his children in the last fifty years, and would not lightly sacrifice another one. Even that one.”
Elim followed his gesture, and watched the two of them going at it: Bootjack probably still trying to argue for leaving, and Way-Say presumably – hopefully – talking him out of it.
For the first time, it occurred to Elim that maybe the people he’d been following didn’t know as much as he thought they did.
“So what’s there to argue about? Why don’t we just haul them out and bury ’em, or whatever they like, and then – naw, c’mon, buddy, come eat over here. We’ll have us a drink after we clean out the trough.” Elim coaxed the horse over to a fresh patch and doled out a little more slack in the rope, clinging to it with sweaty-palmed desperation. The crow-god had to mean for them to clear the pool out and drink. He had to.
Hawkeye did not sound nearly so confident. “If you find a man murdered in the road, does burying him give you leave to take his purse and spend his money? Would you cut your meat with the knife you pulled from his back, after you’d wiped it clean?”
“No,” Elim replied, more defensively than he meant to, “but I’m not gonna quit using the road just cuz he happened to die on it.”
Because of course anyone of any color could agree that leaving it – them – in this current state was a special kind of evil... but so was expecting faithful, good-minded people to damn themselves or die of thirst. And nevermind the crow-god anyway: God, the real true God, wouldn’t want any such thing. Elim was good, even if he wasn’t clean, and he’d been doing the right thing – risking his own life to take Do-Lay home and everything – and there wasn’t any point to staying with the Sundowners orrunning away if he was damned no matter what he did.
Elim stared at the pool. Not at the unthinkable part in the middle, but just at the nearest corner, where the pretty blue glass of the water met the shady white stone of the wall. It didn’t look dirty. It looked divine. And pulling those people out would only muddy things up, make the whole thing as rancid and bitter as stirring the yeasty yellow hooch back into your bread dough. The smarter thing would be to just take a little from the edge here, all gentle and respectfully, and then they could dredge and bury and feather-wave until the heathen cows came
home...
“Sir?”
Elim startled at the hand on his shoulder, and looked up at Hawkeye’s soft black-banded features.
“Sir, can you read?”
Elim clambered dizzily up to his feet, the dead grass still clinging to the knees of his pants-legs. He could not have said what he’d meant to do by kneeling there.
But the question grounded him in an instant. Lady Jane had insisted on teaching him, saying that he’d be always at other people’s mercy otherwise. That was the first time Elim had ever heard Boss raise his voice to her. She got her way eventually, though the lessons always had to be at home, and when he was out of the house. Still, Boss had only belted Elim twice in his whole life – and once had been for letting on that he knew how to read.
So he narrowed his eyes, suspicious and maybe more himself than before, and gave a hard eye to the asker. “Who wants to know?”
Hawkeye’s brows furrowed. “I do,” he said, as if he couldn’t understand the question. Then he lifted his chin at a little bit of writing on the cliff wall beside them. “That one looks very recent. Can you read it to me?”
Well, that was a maybe. It was three lines of crisp, neat writing, carved into the rock by somebody who was probably about Hawkeye’s height, and who definitely had time on his hands.
SIMON BLANKOHO ESTO PAR WONA LOA A ETCHO
It went on from there. Elim recognized all the letters and none of the words, except for the number ‘23’ at the end. Which meant that maybe it was Marín, and the best he could do was make a pig’s breakfast out of sounding it out for Hawkeye to translate –
Elim’s thought ended with a long, low groan. He looked over at Hawkeye, but no: it was coming from the left.
From the wagon.
From the box.
From Do-Lay.
Every hair on Elim’s neck stood at stiff attention as the horrible, bellows-creaking sound went on. Elim held stone still, suddenly desperate to know what they’d done with his gun. Ax put his head up from his drink, and Elim wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d torn off in a blind spook. But he only turned his head toward that peculiar sound coming from the load behind him, as if taking a passing interest in his own gut-noises.
Medicine for the Dead Page 23