Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  Then he walked the horse slightly sideways and looked over his shoulder: a pair of lights on the road behind them. Lanterns. He squinted. The flames were slender and tall in their globe-shaped housings of glass. He turned the horse fully sideways and stopped to watch. The twin coronas of light shone bodiless in the black tunneling of trees, dancing in the motion of their progress as though they constituted the gaze of some creature come yellow-eyed and slinking from the darkness below.

  “How far, you think? Half mile?” asked Ava.

  Callum nodded. “Maybe less.”

  “Drovers?”

  The lanterns were of uncommon brightness. Not candlelit like most.

  “I don’t think,” said Callum. “You got to burn whale oil or kerosene to get them that bright.”

  “Or be a haint.”

  He gave her a look.

  “Army, then?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Callum. “And I don’t want to wait to find out.”

  He turned to look up the rise of the road. Cresting that rise they would be silhouetted against the night sky, starkly exposed, surely spotted. He looked to the woods alongside the road. The land rose steeply here, like a riverbank. No choice. He urged the horse off the shoulder of the road and into the trees. The horse climbed until Callum reined him on a flat outcropping of rock some twenty yards above and beyond the road.

  They climbed off the horse and lay prone on the rock, watching the lights come toward them. Callum swallowed hard. He reached up and drew the rifle from its scabbard. When he lay back on the rock, Ava looked at him.

  “What kind of tracks were we leaving on that road?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The moonlit dust of the road looked pure as new-fallen snow from where they lay, no prints to betray them. Truth or a conspiracy of moon and dust, he wasn’t sure. He thought of what Ava had said, of what spirits might be upon them. Men or ghosts of men—he didn’t know which was worse.

  The two lights were getting closer now, flickering through the trees below them. Callum aimed the rifle at them and sighted down the barrel. Through a break in the canopy of limbs he glimpsed two riders on horseback. Men. They had their lanterns held low, and Callum realized they were tracking something in the road.

  “Shit,” he whispered. “Shit.”

  Ava looked at him, wide-eyed. He looked back down the barrel and endeavored to sight the riders, but the rifle began to tremble in his grasp. Subtly at first but worsening. He tried to steady his aim but failed. He didn’t know what was happening. His mind seemed good, unbroken, but the trembling wouldn’t stop. It was like the world was coming apart, breaking open.

  Ava said, “You feeling that?”

  He looked at her, his eyes wide, his head nodding stupidly on his neck.

  He looked back at the riders. They had stopped short of where he and Ava and the horse had left the road. They started moving to the far shoulder, not quite opposite the outcropping of rock.

  Ava grabbed his shoulder and pointed to the crest of the road. A cloud of dust rose curling against the sky, and through that dust emerged a horned animal, a steer. Then another and another, each with thick dark shoulders and white horns, and then a whole mass of them came, wild-driven and mob-hooved, down the road like a flood. Drovers appeared on horseback alongside them at intervals. They had long staffs from which lanterns swung in flaming arcs above their heads. The cattle descended the road at a growing pace, churning the dust to a mess of hoofprints, thundering underneath the high outcropping of rock that held the boy and girl, erasing any tracks that might have betrayed them.

  They watched the herd pass underneath them, a dark muscling of beasts that seethed and roiled like an angry river. Callum raised his eyes from the long shouldering of flesh to the two lantern-bearers watching from the far side of the road, their faces like jack-o’-lanterns above the fires they carried. The shorter of them was rotund, his grip the weaker, his lantern light shaky at best. He leaned in the saddle and spat on the ground, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and Callum saw that it was Swinney.

  Callum looked to the taller man, who held his lantern high above the herd, and it did not shake. He was taller than the Colonel in the saddle but narrower, scarecrowlike, with a face so long-jawed and hollow-eyed, he might have seemed to some a punishment for the prenatal sins of his father or mother. At first Callum thought the man was reaching behind himself to scratch his back. Then he turned to speak to Swinney. The left sleeve of his coat was pinned at the shoulder, empty. Swinney nodded at the words of the one-armed man, deferent, his head bowed. Taking orders. Then he looked into the darkness on the road behind them and made a gesture of some kind.

  The one-armed man watched the great current of flesh pass by him, as if from some darkened shore. The horse he sat was pale in color, like ash or smoke. The last of the cattle passed, the last drover, too, and as they did, long shoots of flame erupted from the edges of the road into the middle of the herd. Gunfire. The cattle broke into stampede, moaning. The poled lanterns of the drovers fell into the hooved maelstrom like sudden-wrecked ship masts, the drovers churned under alongside their instruments. The herd charged away down the road, mindless, and in the wake of settling dust came the whoops and screams, the silvery arcs of cutting implements, the fallen hulks butchered for feast.

  Chapter 7

  Ava’s chin hovered an inch above the bare surface of the rock. She had her arms tucked underneath her chest for support, her prone body huddled close to Callum’s. She had her eyes on the pair of lantern-bearers across the road. She kept them there even as she spoke to Callum, her voice a whisper.

  “That round man who I think it is?”

  Callum nodded.

  “I thought Swinney looked out for you, took you in after the wreck?”

  “Looking seems about right.”

  “What about that one-arm son of a bitch?”

  Callum wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  But even as he said he didn’t, the dimmest knowing stirred in him—his gut—like the fragment of an unremembered dream. He kept the rifle leveled on the pair of them, the fat man and the tall, as they urged their horses into the settling dust of the road, their lanterns smoldering in the risen smoke like the very engines of its creation. Their horses trotted back down the road, toward where the rest of the war party was hunched over the dead cattle that littered the ground, busily disassembling them with knives and belt hatchets, joint by joint.

  Callum knew they would eat themselves jolly on such a boon. Feast and famine—their way. His, too, for many months. He could even remember fondly some of those times, like the moonless night the Colonel and two others had strode into an enemy encampment in purloined uniforms, replying “Hundred and Sixth New York” whenever challenged. They’d ridden away before dawn with two horses each, a mule loaded with stew meat and hardtack, and various bottles of spirits confiscated from men on picket duty, taking the time to dress them down for their unkempt uniforms and sleep-red eyes.

  Callum watched the men begin to light their cookfires in the woods below, splitting their number to each side of the road to allow converging fire should anything of opportunity or threat happen along its course. The game animals were growing fat in the mountains for winter, and slow, but riding in hard pursuit they would not have had much time to hunt. Callum knew the men down there must be hungrier even than their custom. Ornerier, too. So he was surprised when a group of riders detached from the butcher work and came back up the road at a hard gallop, the one-armed man in the lead. They thundered past Callum and Ava’s rock and continued onward, cresting the rise of the road as a single dark shape, buoyant-looking and spiny with armament. They disappeared on the other side. Swinney was not among them.

  Callum let the hammer down on the rifle and got to his knees. He looked at Ava.

  “Let’s get out of here while we still got some dark left.”

  �
��Out of here where?” she asked him.

  Callum looked at the mountains behind them. The slopes dark, unreckonable. No place he really wanted to go.

  “You serious?” she said.

  Callum nodded.

  “I don’t see as how we’re gonna find anything up there to keep that wound from infecting.”

  “Don’t see as how we got much choice in the matter.”

  Ava, wordless, got first onto her knees, then her feet. Callum slid the rifle back into the saddle scabbard. He took the horse by the reins and started up the slope, perpendicular to the droving road. Ava stepped forward and took hold of the reins.

  “You go first,” she said. “Find the quietest way. We’ll follow.”

  He nodded and they started to climb.

  It was not steep enough to go on all fours, but close. Callum plumbed the darkness with open hands. Before long his fingertips touched a waist-high maze of leafless underbrush and branches, fallen limbs dead-handed from the ground with the slimmest bonelike branches to snag and break. Other bushes whiplike and thorny enough to draw blood, to leave spoor. And everywhere leaves already fallen, too dry for stealth. They would have to push through it. There was no other way. Even if they could slip through, the horse couldn’t.

  He looked down on the campfires, the feasting men. They were too far to hear. He looked to the east, the way the one-armed man had ridden. He thought he saw a paleness low in the sky. Not much time. They had to be safely distant come daylight. Distant from the men, the road. The alternative, if they weren’t, as unthinkable as it was certain.

  Callum pushed his slouch hat off the back of his head so that it hung from his neck by the chin strap, and then he pressed forward into the underbrush, Ava following with the horse, the forest crackling in protest. The sound seemed to carry farther through the unleafed trees, the cold air. It grated him. After a while he cocked his bad ear forward and wished for something to stuff into his good one.

  They climbed and climbed, the way steep and dark. He kept his eyes slitted to protect them from naked thorns the size of cockspurs that seemed to haze his every move. Soon he was breathing hard, his face on fire, the stabbing replayed with each step. He looked back at Ava.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded.

  “You?”

  He turned around as if he hadn’t heard her. A deaf ear was good for that.

  The wind was out of the west and brought them the faint scent of burning cattle flesh, something newly vicious to Callum in the smell. He thought of the skinless slabs of muscle over the flames, the red engines of beasts fired black. Fat sizzling along the striations, the pop-pop of gristle. Hard men would be watching, wet-mouthed to feed. Their tongues yellow-coated, slick as worms along their lips.

  Fever, he thought.

  He tripped on something. His hands hit the ground. Dead leaves, cold and browning. He exhaled and tried to stand and couldn’t. He sank to the ground and looked at the sky. The stars were bleeding like so many comets. He snorted and got up. Ava put her hand on his back, but he was already climbing again, all grace gone from his movement, thrash-limbed for progress.

  “Callum,” he heard behind him. “Callum!”

  He kept on. He knew they were cutting a swath through the forest, twigs and limbs pale-broken in their wake—a trail the ineptest could track. But their pursuers would have to strike upon it first. He doubted that, but the thought of the one-armed man wouldn’t leave him. The way he took that detachment down the road. The Colonel’s men wouldn’t follow just anyone—no one they didn’t fear—especially with new meat on the fire.

  There was wetness down his leg, piss-warm. He found his hands on the ground, clawing upward. He snuck a look behind him. Ava’s head was down, her legs pistonlike, her hands on the reins. The horse was calm. The moonlight fell jagged on his big shoulders as he climbed.

  Callum tried not to think of his punctured leg. Couldn’t help it. His mind was running a course of its own. He had been witness to infection, a man’s limb turned green-rotted and foul as that of a fairy-tale monster’s, the badness creeping slowly into other parts of him, corrupting him, until he was like the bad place carved out of a piece of fruit.

  Callum did not want to end that way, had never thought he would. He tried to disbelieve this newly cauled reality being thrust upon him. To hold instead to an image of hearth fire, Ava beside him, the tidewater of the coast calm outside a fancy set of French doors. Maybe a storm coming inland from the sea. Maybe they would welcome it. Run together to some nearby canning shed, with a tin roof, and await its music.

  He stumbled again on something—a dead tree—and pitched forward. His palms struck the ground. His right hand hit the leaves, his left something else: dirt, hard-packed. He turned to Ava.

  “There’s a trail here.”

  “Game?”

  “Wider.”

  Callum started up the path, making headway. Before long he could open his eyes wide without fear of catching a thorn or branch. The forest to either side seemed canted toward him, the leaves and branches just grazing the edges of his coat and trousers. Tree roots crisscrossed underfoot, a gnarled stairway of the sort that wood elves might shape out of the mountains for their own secret commerce. Later the path began to zigzag up the slope, lessening the grade. At a treeless overlook, Callum stopped to rest. He sank to his knees, then his backside. His face burned; his leg thundered.

  Ava squatted down beside him, near his good ear, the reins held loosely in one hand. They had put good distance between themselves and the road. Callum looked down upon the fires of the Colonel’s men, grown smaller but no less threatening. He blinked at them. From this height it looked like the encampment of some heathen tribe, ravenous and fire-crazed. He felt like a hunted animal, treed, the world of his knowing and that of his worst imaginings converged beneath him, an underworld he could not perch above forever. Enemies within him, enemies without.

  He thought of how the slightest cut could give portal to disease and rot, as if the world beyond a man’s own bodily sanctum was swarming with opportunistic hordes, flesh-hungry, not blighted but blight itself. Like the men down there. Their eyes enlightened by the sight of blood, their bodies affixed with glittering implements of the kill, hands bladed or fire-spitting. He could see them down there, teeming, fire-glazed organisms small as worms from such vantage.

  He wished he could be something more than he was, something wicked and biblical. Something that could come through them in the dead of night. End them. Then they could worry him no longer. Worry him about how they might steal away what was good in his world, what he loved. And thinking of what he would do to them, what secret butchery, he wondered if something mean had slipped into him. Something vicious. For the first time, he touched the pale worm of scar growing along the side of his head, still tender above his dead ear. He ran his finger along the raised luster of flesh.

  Ava reached around and stilled his hand.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t play with it.”

  He dropped his hand away and nodded, grim-lipped.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked him.

  He looked at her. “I don’t know.”

  She put her hand on his forehead.

  “You got a little fever going. That’s what. Come on. You don’t want to sit here and let it go wild and sick in your head. I can see it happening.”

  “I don’t know if it’s just the fever.”

  She stood up and tugged at his arm.

  “It’s what the hell I say it is, Callum. Now get on your feet and quit ruminatin’.”

  He kept his seat on the rock.

  “I ain’t ruminatin’.”

  “Like hell you ain’t.”

  “I just don’t feel too good about what we got ahead of us.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  He flung his hand toward the valley. “Look at them down there. Why the hell do they got to come after us? I didn’t even kill the son of a bitch.”

/>   “They don’t know that.”

  “If I’d of thought of it, I’d of pinned a note on him saying I didn’t.”

  “You really think that of helped?”

  Callum shook his head. “You like to think that people, in general, and I mean on the scale of generations, are learning from their mistakes, getting better. But with what all I seen, I don’t know if I could believe that.”

  Ava nodded and stilled herself. She let go of his arm and squatted down next to him, then actually sat on her rear, her arms clasped around her knees.

  “My daddy, he used to read the writings of this naturalist in England. You know what a naturalist is?”

  Callum gave her a look.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “this naturalist, Darwin, he’s traveled all over the world, studying creatures of all kinds, some extinct, and you know what he says?”

  Callum shook his head again. “No, but I bet you’re gonna—”

  “He says individuals with traits most profitable for survival are the ones that end up surviving—most the time anyway—so every species of creature is always evolving, passing its traits down the line.” She pressed her thumbnail into the leather of the reins once, twice. “Kindly makes you wonder what type of creature we’re evolving into, what with so much war. Takes a different sort of person to thrive under such conditions.”

  Callum felt a meanness well up in him. He didn’t know why.

  “Sounds awful queer to me. I think I might of preferred your ghost stories.”

  “You know what else he said?”

  “Not real sure I want to.”

  “He says that shines light on the origin of man, his history.”

  “Is that so,” said Callum.

  “It could be there’s no real gap between us and the animals, nothing unbridgeable. It could be we all come from a single common ancestor.”

  “Like from Adam?”

  “Like from monkeys.”

  “He said that?”

  “People have.”

  “And your daddy believed in this Darwin character?”

  “He was open to the man’s ideas.”