“Elim,” Sil said, with a blistering heat on his bloodless lips, “what the devil is the MATTER with you?”
Elim could have answered that on the spot. You look like death and smell like hell, and I can’t hardly get within ten paces of you without wanting to sick up my insides. But that was unkind, and Sil couldn’t help it, and Elim knew that he was imagining it worse than it was: that after a week of hauling Do-Lay’s rotting box and then all that mess with the fishman’s corpse and the drowned people and Ax – God, he could still see the hole where that poor horse had been eating himself – the lingering death-stench in Elim’s nose had him imagining it other places too.
So he took a deep breath – through the mouth – and steadied his aim. “I’m cursed, Sil. I think we both are. And I don’t expect it’s gonna get any better for either of us until we finish what’s started, and go own up for killing D – for killing that boy.”
Sil rose to his feet, plainly astonished, and for a moment Elim was dumb enough to imagine that that meant he was really thinking about it – that he might actually see reason.
But then, Elim never had been the brightest brass knob.
“I don’t believe you,” Sil said in a hoarse whisper. “I came all this way – I was HANGEDtrying to get you out of this mess – and you’re telling me you want to go right on forward as if I’d not bothered with any of it? As if none of that matters?”
“No!” Elim said, stung to the core. “I’m so glad you came – I need you, Sil – I can’t do it by myself, I just –”
“Good,” Sil said. “Then I’ll see you shortly.” And he turned east and set off walking.
But the neat turn of his heel reminded Elim of the neat turn of his horse, of the way Sil had up and absconded on that last morning at the fair – of the arrogant, casual blackmail that had dragged them into all this mess in the first place – and Elim’s jaw clenched at the presumption of it all.
“No,” he said, “you won’t. I’m going to go finish what I started, with or without you. And if you get home before me, you can tell Boss that I went where you didn’t care to go, and you weren’t any master of mine to make me do otherwise.”
Sil stopped and turned, incredulity growing in his ghastly mismatched eyes. “Why, you audacious son of a bitch. You really mean to do it.”
Elim folded his arms over his poncho. “I do. And I sorely wish you’d join me, even though it ain’t your debt to settle.”
Sil locked eyes with him for a moment. Then something broke inside him. “For God’s sake, LOOK at me, Elim – do I look like I have that kind of time?”
Elim flinched, taken aback by the strangled terror in Sil’s voice... but when your horse got spooky, you had to stay calm. “No,” he said. “You look about to die, Sil, and that’s exactly why I want you with me. Use your brains: it’ll take us days to walk back to Sixes, and days more if you go bad and I have to carry you, and you and I both know you ain’t going to last that long.” Elim nodded up at the mountain. “We know there are people up there, and they’re a hell of a lot more likely to know what’s wrong with you than I do, and you don’t – and it’s not you they’re holding a grudge on.” He looked back at Sil, and weighted his voice to sink. “Come on, Slim. Let’s do it right this time.”
Sil didn’t answer straightaway. He put a puffy white hand to his face and closed his eyes, like a man sapped by days and nights of the most exhausting pain. “... I don’t want to die, Elim. Honestly, that’s all I can think of right now.”
Me too. “I know, buddy. Trust me, I’m familiar.” But there was no more time for selfishness or doubt, and Elim kept his mind firmly fixed on his partner. “Let’s go get you fixed up.”
Sil stood there a little more, as if gathering his nerve. Finally he sighed, took off his jacket, and reached down to pick up the remainder of the grouse. By the time Elim caught up with things, he was looking at a cheaply-tailored carry-sack for their rations, which Sil defended with a sharp up-and-sideways-stare. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said on his way past. “I’m not having you whine at me about how you’re oh-so-hungry again in half an hour’s time. Honestly, Elim, it’s like I can’t take you anywhere...”
Well, that was probably about right. Duly chastised, Elim fell into step next to Sil – upwind of him, specifically – as they headed back to the crow mountain’s sprawling foot, and whatever might wait for them at its peak. No, there was no safeguarding shadow walking behind Elim this time – but he was powerfully glad for the plain and irritable one beside him.
CHAPTER SIX
UNBURIED ALIVE
AH CHE, A child of eight winters, lay dying.
It had been ten days since Ah Set lay down, and did not get up. Three days since the baby stopped crying. Now it was Ah Che’s turn to cry – harsh, gulping screams that only served to inflame the blisters in his throat.
The world was being swallowed, one vital piece at a time. First to go was the outdoors: it shrank to a strip of light under the door-curtain, too bright and painful to look at. Then it was gone. Then the indoors, the pots and clothes and white earthen walls eaten away in a fever dream. Then Mama.
She lived in the dream-world now – the one place that had not yet been eaten – and doted on him as lovingly as she ever had. But the body she’d left was ripening, and her dream-self could not bring him water.
So Ah Che thrashed and cried and sucked on his sweat-drenched blanket as reality contracted around him – as the world worked to un-birth him. He would go gladly, he promised Mama, if she would just pull him in, as she’d once pushed him out. He would go bravely, if she would just help him out of his stiff-necked and shivering self. He would –
Something jostled the ground – a clunky, rhythmic intrusion. Faintly familiar. Coming closer. Ah Che fell silent as the world expanded to include the sound of heavy, ugly boots.
WHEN DÍA WOKE, she opened her eyes to the dull-eyed stare of a dead squirrel.
Or more accurately, to its head and the better part of its spine, and to the fresh raw meat-smell clinging to both, and in the time it took Día to flinch and sit up, she’d solved the mystery: she was back at the little stone valley again, and there was Miss du Chenne again, busy hacking apart a lizard with a knife – Día’s knife, she realized with a hand to her side – and the mound of bloody skin and bones that had greeted her eyes’ first opening looked to be the remainders of the old mereau’s grisly breakfast. “What... what is this?”
Miss du Chenne glanced up. Not for the first time, Día wished she would either clothe herself or leave off that obscene squat. “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said. “What sort of hour do you call this, young lady?”
Día blinked. It was daytime, well on towards noon. She had survived the night, been removed from the mountain, and the Dog Lady was nowhere in sight. For that matter, neither was Elim. It was chilly there in the shadows, and Día had apparently been sleeping on the bare ground, and yet she felt wonderfully rested, just as she had back when...
Día sat up straighter and clutched her stomach, interrogating her palate for any telltale milky aftertaste. “Please tell me she didn’t...”
Miss du Chenne snorted. “Nurse you? No, and you can thank me for that: I told her that you would prefer to eat with your teeth. Better get to it.” She pointed to a peculiar pile at Día’s feet.
There was the body of a horned frog and a blue-gray bird, a cluster of berries and a hare whose fur had been mangled by rough teeth and slobber, three dirt-streaked leathery eggs, a big pinecone, some kind of grass snake... Día stared at the morbid cornucopia, recalling U’ru’s loving, smothering, uncomprehending delight at having initiated Día into the family – one whose matriarch was near-universally reviled as a murderer.
And there to prove it was a thoughtful little collection of deaths for her breakfast.
Día hunched forward and rubbed her face. She cupped her hands around her forehead, keeping her gaze fixed on the soft, familiar black-fabric
folds in her lap. “Miss du Chenne,” she said, “I’m sorry for being so rude to you yesterday. I didn’t mean to be thoughtless or careless. I didn’t mean to leave home at all. I just” – no, she couldn’t even begin to explain about the Halfwick boy – “I got caught out in the sun, and then I got lost, for I don’t even know how many days now, and I’ve been so frightened, and the Dog Lady – she was just a friendly mother dog, and I was so glad for her company, and I thought – by the time I realized that she wasn’t...” Día’s voice thickened with disappointment: she’d spent all this time thinking of the dog as a gift from God, as a holy companion given especially to her, and now...
She swallowed. “I would very much like to go home.”
At first, there wasn’t any answer. When Día looked up, Miss du Chenne had set down the knife and was staring off at something only she could see. “You weren’t wrong, you know,” she said at last. “About her, I mean. She used to be so splendid – so alive, all glory and grandeur. You would have loved her.”
Día would have to take her word on that. “Do you think she can be that again?”
Miss du Chenne’s black eyes lost their fog of nostalgia. They sharpened to the present, and their calculating attention slid over to Día. “Can you do what I tell you to?”
She would have preferred explanation before promises. “Yes.”
Miss du Chenne nodded. “Have you finished being headstrong and hysterical?”
Día bristled at the question. Then she reminded herself that she was talking to her first, best chance of fixing all this, of getting home with body and soul intact. “Yes.”
Miss du Chenne arched a hairless eyebrow. “And will you put aside your childish piety and petty sensibilities, making allowance for the fact that I’m a cantankerous shrew with no tact or patience, and that she’s a grief-stricken child who doesn’t understand what she’s done?”
Día strongly suspected that one of those things was well within Miss du Chenne’s power to affect. Honor thy father and mother, she thought to herself. Tolerate thy selfish old not-even-a-mother just long enough to get home to thy poor long-suffering father. “Yes.”
The old schoolteacher might have read her thoughts, or at least her face. She returned a withering look. “We’ll see about that.” But she picked up a lizard-leg and grimaced as her sharp teeth tore its tough, scaly flesh. “Now eat,” she said, gesticulating with the bloody knife – which was to say, Día’s knife – at the mini-massacre by her feet. “You can have the fruit if you’re squeamish, but at least handle the meat so that she smells it on you when she gets back. She’s decided you’re her new puppy, and you’re going to act like it.”
Well, Día was certainly spoiled for choice. Those red berries looked like the ones Weisei had told her about. That might do for a start.
Then she glanced back at Miss du Chenne, who sat there expectantly, just waiting for her to admit her timidity and take the berries, or challenge her and ask for the knife back. Waiting to see whether they were going back to the old schoolroom hierarchy, or the new, pointless antagonism.
Día picked up an egg, tore open the leathery shell with her teeth, and squeezed its contents into her mouth in one runny burst. She kept her gaze fixed and her face straight as she chewed, working hard not to give Miss du Chenne the satisfaction of watching her gag at the squishy, stringy texture. Whatever-it-was had already made a respectable start on growing a spinal column.
Then she swallowed, wiped her mouth on her forearm, and cast the eggshell into the pile of remainders. “What’s the plan?”
SIL STILL DIDN’T much like the idea. Even if the two of them managed to find their way to the crow city without guidance or supplies, even if the a’Krah didn’t haul off and execute Elim on the spot, even if they knew some real medicine... why on earth would they share it? Sil had no money and no connections and his only bargaining chip was this two-colored rube here – the one he absolutely could not scheme or swap or barter with.
But it wasn’t as if Sil had any better ideas.
So he followed along as Elim led them back to the mountain’s foot, back the way they’d come yesterday. He kept his pace up and his temper down. He walked well downwind while Elim polished off the rest of the grouse along the way. And when Calvert’s mule stopped at the creek, Sil didn’t protest the delay.
Still, it was a hard thing to watch. As Elim knelt to drink and wash, Sil privately burned with envy: at the big man’s huge, hardy appetite – at his hay-hauler’s physique and farmboy’s tan – at the perfect ease with which he moved, equally ignorant of his body and clothes. He was effortlessly more than Sil had ever been, and now, as Sil struggled to avoid seeing or touching or thinking about any part of his own unbearable person, a vain, frightened despair welled up inside him, like so much putrid mucus pooling in his lungs.
Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe when he got back home, if he spent more time outdoors... took some regular exercise, the way Nillie was always nagging him to... made himself eat properly for a change, before he finished his growth. Yes. That was infinitely easier to imagine than the string of miracles he would need just to make it back to Hell’s Acre, and Sil hung his hopes there like a castaway clinging to a driftwood plank: he would just muddle through this next bit, and when he was home and finally on the mend, he’d make a fresh start of everything.
“Here, get you some.” Elim straightened and jerked his head at the creek.
Sil didn’t want any. By every god, he didn’t want to try stuffing anything else into his swollen stomach.
He also didn’t want to hear more of Elim’s hennish fussing.
So he bent and pretended to drink, watching the slimy stones at the water’s bottom in preference to the ghastly reflection rippling on the surface. But the towering shape behind his god-awful face, the one matched by the shrinking shadow on the ground...
Sil glanced back at Elim, simultaneously familiar and strange. He was more native now than he had been. And it wasn’t just the alien geometry woven into his wool poncho, not just the moccasins on his feet and the contrast they made with his worn brown trousers and old Federate rifle. The cold-water wash had turned his hair black and straight, bringing out that indigenous crease in the corner of his eyes until he looked like a trapper or a scout, like the kind of guide you’d hire at a trading post somewhere on the edge of the wild, like... well, like someone who belonged out here.
Elim caught him staring, and turned the spotted side of his face away. “What?”
Not for the first time, Sil remembered leaving Elim tied up and roasting in the afternoon sun, and coming back to find him passed out and grotesquely changed, his spots and patches all covered in fine brown hair. He’d known right then that there was something else living in Calvert’s groom – and Sil meant to see that it stayed buried. “Let’s go.”
So they went back to the place where they’d first met: to the little narrow-mouthed cave and the field of rubble just beyond it. Sil had seen the side of that hill collapse yesterday – from a fair distance, thankfully – and while there was no telling how stable the remainder might be, there was also very obviously a trail buried under all that earth, the only one either of them had seen. If they could just make it over the heap, they’d be well on their way.
It was a disturbing climb. There were strange muddy pockets in the earth – dead fishmen, Sil realized after he accidentally exposed a wizened wet arm – and at least one such pocket had been broken into, leaving an empty grave-like crater and drag marks where the body inside had been hauled away. Sil didn’t care to guess what sort of creature might have done that. He didn’t ask Elim what had happened here, and Elim didn’t offer him a hand up. They moved separately and in silence, the air between them filling with things unsaid.
“Hello?”
Sil glanced up, to where Elim had just crested the top of the landslide.
The big mule called out again, his voice echoing faintly off the hollow hillside. “You okay? Hey, can you hea
r me?”
Well, if whoever-it-was didn’t, someone else certainly would. Sil paused in testing his next foothold. “Elim, don’t –”
“Holy God – wait, hold still!” Elim bolted ahead, disappearing from view – and dislodging a pile of broken stones. Sil had just time to look up before the largest came cracking down on the top of his head. He shrank forward, pressing into the heap as dirt and rocks rained down.
When the dust cleared, Sil wasn’t dead and he hadn’t fallen – no thanks to that blundering clod.
“Hang in there, buddy – wait right there!”
Sil glanced up, but Elim’s voice wasn’t meant for him. Of course not. It was fading away down the far side, as bold and thoughtless as a bawling calf. Sil resisted the urge to put a hand to his head – if it didn’t hurt, then there was no need to go feeling it – and set about extricating himself from Elim’s clumsiness.
By the time Sil made it to the top, Elim was already down at the bottom – and he wasn’t alone. There was someone else there, lying prone, feebly moving, and absolutely caked in red earth.
Elim looked up from where he’d crouched at the man’s side. “Sil, come quick! That way – move that way, so you don’t spill on him.”
Oh, by all means – just imagine what a mess that might make. But Sil bit his tongue and started down, his ire dwindling in the face of curiosity and growing concern. The stranger could be a boon or a huge liability – one Sil and Elim absolutely could not afford.
And he was in terrible shape. As the slope leveled out and Sil passed the last of the rocky ruin, he realized what should have been obvious from first glance: whoever that fellow was, he’d been buried alive.
He might have been native, to judge by his moccasins, but otherwise there was no telling: aside from a few dark patches where he’d bled through the dirt, the man underneath all that earth could have been any color. His long hair was a tangled mess, most of it pulled out of a pigtail at the back of his neck, and his clothes were plain and ordinary, and aside from the blindfold tied over his eyes, his most striking feature was the sickening angle at which his right leg dragged, smashed through the mid-thigh as completely as if he’d grown a secondary sideways knee.
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