The Incorruptibles

by John Hornor Jacobs

  I had to smile at the elder Cornelian son’s spluttering. Even Secundus was grinning.

  ‘Face it, brother, today was just not your day.’

  ‘I should have him whipped! No. Crucified!’

  I didn’t much care for the look in the man’s eye, I can say that for certain.

  Fisk stared at him, white-faced. ‘If you don’t want your pap to die, I suggest you get him back to the Cornelian pronto. We’ll tend to the beasts.’ He waved a hand at the dead bears.

  Gnaeus stomped off to reclaim his horse but not before giving us a deadly look. Secundus approached, holding his mount’s bridle, and looked up at Fisk.

  ‘A word of caution.’ Secundus slid his carbine into a leather holster on the rump of his mount, hooked his foot into a stirrup, and lifted himself onto horseback. The mare turned as he mounted. When he was of a height with Fisk, his smile faded and his young features clouded with a sombre expression.

  Even though this young man showed great sense and a pleasant demeanour, he clearly was not overly distressed by his father’s grievous wound. But Rumans are a strange bunch, the nobles concerned with their desires and not much else. They just don’t jump the same way as normal folk.

  ‘He’s petty, my brother,’ Secundus said. He sighed and rubbed at his jaw. I noticed a scar there, faint and small, but silver in the golden slanting light of endday. ‘He’s spiteful and selfish. But should anything happen to my father, Gnaeus will become the patriarch of the Cornelian family and he’ll want to make an example of you. He doesn’t like being thwarted.’

  ‘I reckon that’s something he’ll need to get used to out here. It’s a big, hard land with no concern for what he might desire.’

  Secundus nodded, but didn’t smile. ‘It is that, Mr Fisk. But he’s brought a bit of civilization with him, my father has. Be wary of Gnaeus.’

  I couldn’t help but ask. ‘And you? What will become of you, should the worst happen to your father?’

  ‘I shall obey my brother. He’ll wed as quickly as possible, breed even faster, and by some manner get me out of the way in order to preserve his children’s rights. That’ll be the way of it.’ He smiled then, a rogueish grin. ‘Maybe I’ll take up farming out here.’

  I laughed.

  ‘No, Mr Cornelius the Second,’ Fisk grinned, ‘you certainly ain’t got the look of a sodbuster. You sit that mount too well.’

  Fisk held out his freshly rolled cigarette to the young man, who took it, smelled the tobacco, and lit it from a match he took from his vest pocket.

  ‘Shoe, you reckon Marcellus out of New Damnation could use a new scout?’

  ‘Always need good riders, sure enough.’

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ Fisk joked. ‘You’ll be riding with us.’

  It felt good to laugh, and Secundus won me over then, when he stuck out his hand in mock agreement. Fisk and Secundus gripped forearms, as if completing a deal. Then he turned to me, and did the same.

  The legionaries completed the travois with Banty sternly watching them in their labours and barking orders without deigning to sully his hands. Senator Cornelius blistered the air with curses and calls for his flask.

  ‘Shoe, I reckon we better get to skinning this bear, looks like.’

  ‘Looks like.’

  Fisk dismounted stiffly, favouring one leg, and we set to work with our longknives. Bear meat isn’t a favourite of mine, but we took great care to preserve all the sweetmeats and delicate bits of offal for the highborns to sample. And, of course, the trophy parts: the paws, the fur, the full head. The cub we slung on the back of a pony that shied and nickered at the stink of bear.

  The sun disappeared behind the mountain rim, the sky and land took the washed-out colours of twilight, and it had turned cold by the time we were finished. We hied back toward the Big Rill before the mountain lions came down from their high reaches, drawn by the smell of blood.

  The Cornelian was lit up when we returned, like a jewel shining on the waters. As its stacks pushed smoke into the sky, the whole world smelled of brimstone and blood. The lascar camped on the shore helped us with the meat and the skin, which we set to soaking.

  It was only when it was fully dark that one of the soldiers asked, ‘Where’s Orrin?’

  And when no one could answer him, all eyes turned toward Fisk and me, and then back to the darkening mountains.

  SEVEN

  There was nothing for it except to go back up the mountain in the dark. Fisk cursed, and I had to shush him, something that doesn’t happen often.

  ‘Pard, you ain’t in any condition to go back up, hate to say. Go on. Get back to our horses and send me Sharbo and we’ll find this Orrin fellow.’

  ‘Shoe, we both know the damned soldier ain’t lost. A stretcher done him in, most like.’

  ‘Most like. But you just been arrow-shot yesterday. I need a partner, and you need off that leg. Send me Sharbo. I can take care of myself.’

  He unslung his gun belt. ‘Here. Take them. You’ll need ’em.’

  I laughed. ‘You know my opinion on that, old friend. No.’ I shook my head and held open my hands. ‘Matter of fact, I’m gonna do this the opposite way.’ I gestured at a legionary to give me a gunnysack.

  I began unlimbering my longknives, shortknives, and various pointy things I keep on my person for occasions of need. One of the legionaries whistled, and Fisk snorted.

  ‘Didn’t know you was half porcupine.’ Everybody got a good laugh at that, but by the time I’d stripped all my weapons, some of them looked at me a tad different. Maybe with more respect, maybe not.

  ‘Hell, Shoe, I understand what you’re doing, just not why in the blazes you’d want to do it.’

  ‘Ain’t going up the mountain with that taint on me. The stretchers would be sure to sense me.’

  ‘You don’t know that. And what if they sense you anyway and you ain’t got shit to protect yourself?’

  There wasn’t much to say to that. I’d just have to trust to Ia.

  Fisk left and returned shortly with Sharbo, who, once he figured out my intent, shook his head and flatly refused to go with me.

  ‘I’m not gonna die today, dwarf. You can go on your own.’

  I’d figured it would be so. Therefore, without any more jabbering, I took an unlit lantern and a box of matches, the pony, and an extra mount, in case Ia had preserved the soldier Orrin’s life.

  Alone, I headed back up the mountain.

  It was a moonless night but the stars, like bright grains of sand, innumerable and distant, lay strewn against the inky black sky and wreathed the mountaintops. A cold wind skittered down the mountain skirts, whipped the pony’s mane, and brought tears to my eyes.

  It was slow going in the dark. Footholds that in the day were easy for the animals were hard to find now, and my pony kept mis-stepping and catching her balance. We had to stop to rest; despite the wind and cold, she was developing a froth on her shoulders and flanks. Exhaustion was close, it being the second time she’d made the mountainous trek that day.

  When we neared the gulley where we took the bears, I began leading both ponies, not wanting to tax them beyond endurance. Both had made the trip up-mountain once today. I was hoping they’d each have a rider later. I didn’t keep too much hope, but some.

  I tied the ponies a short distance away – the bears’ blood darkening the white stones near the gulley’s mouth made them skittish – and, pulling my hat down and taking up the lantern, I forced my way into the bramblewrack and up the gulley.

  At night, on the mountainside, subject of the stars and Ia’s whims, a mind does strange things. The brush and brambles pressed close, and animals shared the space with me – there were rustles and scratches and the soft hooting of an owl. It was then that my mother’s gift, that queer working in the blood, came to me. I blinked once, a long blink, my eyelids
heavy and gummy. And when I opened my eyes again the gulley was just as dark, but somehow that dvergar part of me that I always push back, tamp away, came to the fore and I could see the night and felt at home, safe, pressed close to the bosom of the mountain. My eyes saw the inhabitants of the dark, the squirrel scurrying along the rocks, the wrangrell family roosting in the bramblewrack. I felt heavier and lighter all at once, as though my feet were rooted deep in the mountain but my spirit had expanded to fill it. As I moved up the gulley, I spied below the track made by the soldiers through the tight brush where they had beat the bears into the open.

  I climbed, up and up, scrabbling from rock to rock, and it felt good to be here, untainted and with the mountains, the great expanse of air and the sigh of the trees on the breeze. But when I spotted the narrow den opening in a great cracked boulder, something made me stop, check the ground, the bramble, the sky.

  I pulled a little of the brush from the opening, and it rattled like a wicker-basket seller in the market.

  I entered into the den and the rich smell of bear filled my nostrils, the thick clean musk of them. But also something more. I followed the den back, into the living rock.

  Folks say blood stinks of iron, and some say copper, but I’ve never got that from the smell of blood. Blood smells like the body that gave it up, and the mood that was on them at the time. Blood can smell like terror, pure and unadulterated.

  And the den, this humble bear den, stank of it.

  I was further inside, and the light of the stars filtering through the brush had disappeared. It takes light to see, even for dvergar.

  I pulled a match, whispering a prayer to Ia that this taint not be so great as to attract attention, and filled the small cave with the smell of sulphur and brimstone while I lit the lantern. The yellow light was like a prolonged lightning flash to my light-starved eyes and I was struck blind, like a man with angelis fever, burning eyes and all.

  At first it looked like the carcass of another baby bear, denuded of skin and fur, cleaned of liver and tongue and backstraps, deprived of skull and hands. But the feet told all. It was a man, bloody, raw, and more naked than the day he was born.

  A flurry of bloody scraps and ripped clothing bore testament to the corpse’s origin. Orrin, a man of the fifth legion out of New Damnation, had met his end here.

  This was no bear mauling. This was the work of vaettir. Like Fisk said, they were playing with us.

  I made my way back to the entrance of the bear-cave, dousing the lantern’s flame. I sat on a rock and twisted a smoke, but didn’t light it. I just sat in the dark, listening to the night sounds, the rustle of the gulley and the echoes of the mountain, waiting for my eyes to regain their dvergar dim-sight. But they didn’t. They couldn’t.

  The night had become darker and I watched as shadows, pieces of night blacker than the darkness, moved swiftly through the bramblewrack, up the gulley, toward me, silent and swift. I had no doubt what they were. Who they were.

  So I kept still, sitting on a rock, my heart hammering in my chest like a farrier at a fire, terror tucked away. And they came.

  They flowed up and stopped in front of me, three shadows, as tall and willowy as aspens writhing on the heights. Try as I might, I could not make out their features. They remained parts of the sum of night, greater than the whole.

  I waited.

  No movement – for a long while, and I tried to keep my eyes on them, but their shadows blended with the darkness of the bramblewrack. And as I stared, I became unable to make out one figure from the other until finally I couldn’t see anything other than gulley and bramble and rock.

  ‘Come on, then, you bastards. Do it, then.’ There was nothing for it but to accept what was in store. I wished I’d kept my knives on my person, instead of arriving here like some defenceless babe abandoned on the mountainside. Damnation. Me and the Ia-damned taint. It seemed I was sullied enough already that the stretchers could sniff me out.

  Then I heard a sighing sound, felt the wind rattling the bramblewrack. And my eyes saw bramble and boulder. There was nothing more. No stretchers. No indigines. Just shadow.

  I left the corpse in the cave and made my way back down the mountain.

  EIGHT

  Livia scowled at her father as he gestured wildly with his cup, lolling on a divan in the stateroom on the Cornelian, his wounded leg raised on a pile of bloodied pillows. She applied raw cotton wads to the gore coming from the remains of his calf, and I saw the vial of tersus incendia resting on the tabletop nearby. Cornelius was as drunk as ten prancing lords, slurring his words, foaming at the mouth, and as furious as only an intoxicated and wounded patrician can be.

  ‘Where is the dratted hide of that beast? I want to see it! ‘

  ‘Tata. Tata. Listen to me.’ Her voice was hard, cold, but not devoid of love. ‘There’s no time to waste. We have to take off your leg.’

  He ignored her and, after swigging the last from his cup, peered into its empty depths. Then he stared around the great room, be-wildered. Blank expressions answered him.

  Cimbri bristled nearby, and two lictors glowered at Fisk and me standing in the doorway. I had descended the mountain, bearing news of Orrin’s carcass in the bear cave and remained upright and awake long enough to inform Sharbo and Horehound of what I found. The next morning, a contubernium of Cimbri’s legion had gathered us up. Now we were forgotten at the back of the room. Carnelia, huddled on a nearby divan, sipped at a dainty crystal glass of claret, while Secundus remained by his older sister, his stern face matching her own. Gnaeus stood glowering, still in his hunting clothes, six-gun at his waist. He had sneered when he saw us.

  ‘I need something stronger. Stronger, I say!’ Cornelius waved his cup around as though looking for a server or slave. Crimson drops, the dregs of his wine, spattered Livia’s dress and Secundus’ tunic. She didn’t bat an eye.

  ‘I need whiskey! Bring me the bottle!’

  ‘Just let him be, sister,’ Gnaeus said. ‘He says it’s just a scratch. So he should be fine.’

  Livia whirled around to face her older brother, her expression furious. ‘Are you addled? Did you fall on your head? Tata is likely to die! Do you not understand?’

  Gnaeus looked at her, gritting his teeth.

  ‘Oh, he knows,’ Carnelia said. ‘He knows very well – don’t you, dear brother? Are you impatient for your fortune?’

  Gnaeus spluttered. He turned first to Livia and then Carnelia before collecting his wits. ‘When he does die, I’ll have your tongue cut out and you married to a Tueton sheepherder, Carnelia.’ He paused and a malicious grin spread across his features. ‘Except, dear sister, you would probably enjoy it. The commoners spoke of a fellatrix at the whorehouse at New Damnation and you were suspiciously absent for much of our time there.’

  Gnaeus poured himself some wine and bit into a slice of cheese.

  Carnelia sipped at her wine and waved a hand. ‘You speak of things you do not understand, Gnaeus. Remember, serving girls talk.’ She pointed her index finger up and then curled it downward, as though it had gone limp.

  ‘Gods, you children are a trial,’ Livia said. ‘Our father is dying. We need to act.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Cornelius warbled. ‘I’ll be fine with more drink. Shape up in a trice.’

  A small woman, hair pulled back in a severe bun, scuttled forward with a decanter. An obedient slave, most likely.

  Hard to believe, but some folks envy slaves their positions. Far in the past the senate, mostly due to a man named Tiro, limited indenture to thirty-five years, and stipulated there should be enough money for a house and servants of their own at the end. So many folks sold themselves away, despite Ia’s will, lured by the promise of future wealth.

  A nice house does have its attractions, especially now that I’m longer in the tooth and still living on the plains and the face of the mountains.


  But, still. They’re slaves, and denied any free will. I ain’t never been tempted.

  In the instant Cornelius’ arm was still, the mousy servant darted forward and poured the whiskey into his cup. A very deft hand, the woman.

  Cornelius spotted her, and lurched left in his cushions. ‘Damnation, Lupina! Don’t mix whiskey with the wine!’ Spittle flew from his lips, caught in the over-bright lamp-light. He drank from the cup anyway.

  Livia slapped it from his hands. The liquor flew and the metal cup clattered across the wooden flooring until the same slave darted forward and snatched it up.

  ‘I say, Livia!’ Gnaeus stepped between her and Cornelius. ‘He is the head of our family. Give him the respect due his station.’

  Livia chilled, clearly disgusted by her brother’s hypocrisy. It was an amazing transformation. Her eyes narrowed and she brought her arms to her side, hands balled into small hard fists. In even tones, she said. ‘You are a coward, brother. If you wish our father dead, take up the Ia-damned knife and plunge it into his breast.’ She moved to Cimbri and had jerked his longknife from his belt before he could react. Turning to her brother, holding out the blade hilt first, she hissed, ‘Go on, Gnaeus. One blow and you will become the pater familias.’

  ‘He will not!’ bellowed Cornelius. He tried to rise, fell back. ‘As long as there’s still strength in these arms, I am a match for any man!’

  ‘Hush, father,’ Carnelia said, taking another drink. ‘Livvie is defending your honour.’ Her words amused her and she tittered, showing teeth gone roan with wine.

  ‘Take it!’ Livia said.

  ‘You are unhinged, woman. I’ll have no part of this,’ Gnaeus said, but he looked at his father, whose dissolute eyes remained focused on his son’s long enough to stir whatever passed for a heart in his chest. Gnaeus turned and left the stateroom.

  ‘He didn’t want …’ Cornelius coughed and slurped his drink. ‘Good lad, Gnaeus. Good lad. Don’t help them!’