Still, a gun was a gun.
Barely surviving the crossing of the saltpan, he saw the Inland before him in all its sunburnt glory. Far ahead, a haze and maybe the shape of movement near that shimmer. Lanyard cursed his bleary eyes. He headed for what could be a mirage, praying for water, knowing what would happen if he was wrong.
Even here, at the edge of things, the maddest of the settlers kept their holdings miles back and on the other side of the Range. The moment he fell, he was done. His body might never be seen by human eyes, and the sun and moon would fight over his bones until they were splintered, buried in the Inland dust.
The front wheel of the skiff caught in a drift of powder, and Lanyard hauled it out and onto firm ground. Not for the first time, he considered abandoning the wind-car.
My luck, I’d die five miles on, and the winds would blow over my carcass just to mock me, he thought. Gritting his teeth, he plodded onwards.
The heat-haze turned into a soak, a patch of clay that ran with moisture. It had been freshly dug out, and a small group of people squatted by the waterhole, watching his approach.
Crooked folk, perhaps a dozen. Lanyard noticed their patched outfits, necklaces of finger-bones, vests of braided human hair. A bicycle lay sprawled and rusting on the ground nearby, and a pair of riding birds knelt by the soak, lapping at the trickle of water.
The crooked mobs ate man-flesh when they could get it, and Lanyard felt the weight of their stares. A woman spun a pair of clicker-sticks on a string. The birds ceased their guzzling, their legs unfolding to bring them up to their full height. Their bony crests brought them to almost ten feet tall.
“Man,” one of the birds croaked. The other laughed at him, a sound that was somewhere between a kettle boiling dry and the hissing of a snake.
Eyeing the water, Lanyard stepped forward cautiously, leaving the skiff where it was. None of the crooked folk moved against him, yet, but he made note of the rusted gun leaning against a rock, of the crossbow made from truck springs and inner tubes resting across one man’s lap. Homemade knives swung from every belt.
“It’s ours,” a man said, rising from his haunches and putting himself between Lanyard and the water. He was heavy with fat, patches of hair sticking out from a pate covered in scabs and scars. The grease-streaked remains of a suit jacket hung loose around his gut, the buttons long gone. He wore a kilt that might have once been sackcloth.
“A sip and I’ll go,” Lanyard croaked. The fat man shook his head. Lanyard noticed that the other crooked folk were circling around him, still keeping caution and distance, wary of the Jesus gun.
“Spent an hour digging that out,” he told Lanyard. “I’m King Jollylot, and that water is on my land. Want a drink, you’ll have to buy one.”
Nodding once, Lanyard pointed to the skiff. Jollylot looked it over and shook his head.
“Buggy’s so broken it’s hardly worth fixing. How’d it get into such a state?”
“Ran into some bad people,” Lanyard managed, and Jollylot smiled, showing a graveyard of teeth.
“That you did,” the crooked man said. “Bad people everywhere these days. Gimme a look at the gun.”
“No,” Lanyard said.
“Seems to me you’re carrying the kit of a Jesusman,” Jollylot said. “Man carries that, makes you wonder how he came by it.”
Keeping perfectly still, Lanyard sensed the crooked mob slowly pushing in on him, felt the moment just before the rush. He’d get one or two of them, sure, and this shabby pack of man-eaters knew that too. But numbers would always tell.
I was meant to die like this, Lanyard realised and held himself ready. For a moment, he considered jamming the god-cannon underneath his chin, evaporating his skull in a final act of defiance.
No.
In one movement, he slipped the leather cord over his shoulder and swung the shotgun up. Lanyard held the muzzle level with Jollylot’s nose. Blinking into the double throat of the gun barrels, the big man stepped back, holding up his hands.
“Cut him up, Jol,” the birdwoman cried. “Birds are hungry.”
“Quiet,” Jollylot said.
“Water,” Lanyard demanded, the word cracked and desperate.
King Jollylot noticed the wavering of the shotgun, the way that Lanyard could barely stand. He scoffed, lowered his hands.
“You’re dead already,” he told Lanyard. “Take the trade, stranger, or Slopkettle here will whittle you up for the pot, one toe at a time. And we’ll take your kit, anyways.”
A whip of a girl crept forward, eyes mad and wide, tickling at the dozens of flensing knives that hung from her bandolier. A distraction. From the corner of his eye, Lanyard saw another cannibal, wrestling with the action of the pig-gun.
“You want this?” Lanyard said, and Jollylot nodded. Turning the gun over in his hands, he held it by the barrel and offered it to the crooked man. Jollylot bared his rot-tooth smile, and that was the moment Lanyard darted forward, swinging the gun like a club.
King Jollylot went down with his head stoved in, dying with a squeal and an almighty fart. Lanyard kept moving, clearing the body and splashing through the soak, dodging the beaks of the birds, driving them off with one round from the gun. The mob drew short as he broke through their closing circle, turning around to cover them all with the shooter.
“You’re mine now,” Lanyard Everett said. He fetched another shell from his pocket, quickly feeding it into the break action of the gun. Kneeling down in the mud, he scooped up a handful of the water, savouring that brackish muck. The outlaws watched him, sullen and fearful.
Then a wind began to blow, and he smiled.
Lanyard dreamt of the old man again. Perhaps the enemy was still close enough to touch his dreams. Perhaps he’d been out in the Waste for too long and had simply lost his mind.
In the dream he was younger, still the prentice of a man named Bauer. The grey traveller held court over their cookfire, and Lanyard looked down to see the jag of stone cradled in his hands, the same one he’d driven into the face opposite him, many years and miles ago.
“Can’t escape what you are,” Bauer said, and then Lanyard murdered him again, like he always did. He pried the holy gun out of that dead grip.
Lanyard held the god-cannon for a moment and it felt cold and mean. Then terrible things came out of the darkness and into the light of the fire, monsters beyond measure, and he realised that a Jesusman’s gun made little difference.
He died a hundred deaths before he woke.
Lanyard saw beyond their savage façade and knew that Jollylot’s mob were scared and hungry. So he made their lives a misery. He handed out beatings and insults, taking the best of their food.
They needed a bossman, someone more terrifying and brutal than they were. Lanyard decided that he fit the bill.
This mob had just lost a clan war, and a squad of bailiffs out from Price had their trail, hounding the outlaws until they ran. They’d given up any claim on their old turf, and newer, stronger mobs had taken over. There was nowhere left for them to go.
King Jollylot had been licking his wounds out on the very edges of the Inland, contemplating a push across the saltpan when Lanyard found them. This mob was as dead and lost as Lanyard was. They had a greypot but nothing to put in it, a barrow full of animal skins and shovels, and not much else. Everything else had been tossed or burnt in a desperate gamble to travel light and fast.
His new tribe, loyal only so long as they feared him. Strength was the only law in these in-between places, and mercy was a concept that never left the town-walls. Those who survived out here had forgotten all but the cruel religion of Papa Lucy and the Boneman, and everything else was meat.
The first attack came in the small hours of that first morning. They sent a boy with a fuzz of beard, creeping towards the fire that Lanyard claimed for his own. The wretch pulled out a knife, a sharpened jag pried from a car, handle wrapped in a strip of canvas.
He only had a moment to learn that the n
ew bossman slept lightly and moved as fast as a snake. Lanyard snatched the boy’s ankle, pulling his feet out from under him. A moment of struggle ended when Lanyard wrestled the knife from his hands. Terror in his young eyes, wide with the knowledge that he was at his end. Kneeling down on the boy’s chest, Lanyard opened his throat in one slice.
“Put this in your pot if you want to eat.” He snarled, knowing that those feigning sleep around the fire were watching intently. Eyes downcast, Slopkettle bent to her work, her flensing knives dancing across the body of the lad who’d drawn the short straw.
Bone knives, finger-lengths of old steel. Junk. Lanyard handed the dead boy’s knife to the flenser, and she found a place for it on her bandolier.
“You hoped to be running your knives all over me,” Lanyard said. Slopkettle did not try to deny it.
Lanyard never knew the dead boy’s name and didn’t ask. In the grey of the pre-dawn, the riding birds hovered over the leftovers, gnawing on the bones and offal that Slopkettle tossed over her shoulder.
Breakfast came later. When the sun rose, the greypot bubbled over the coals, sending the smell of people-meat across their rude camp. As bossman, Lanyard was offered the first bowl of stew, but he declined, chewing on a heel of bread as the crooked folk quietly ate one of their own.
The mob suffered his rule in silence, and none rose to challenge him after that night. That will come later, Lanyard decided. When they are stronger, they will turn on me.
Mutch and Dogwyfe were the bird-riders. The pair were heart-bound, scarified and marked for life, the closest thing to marriage under the old laws of Cruik, by those who followed that bastardised rite of Papa Lucy. They both wore a motley of badly tanned animal skins, with the occasional pale or tattooed square marking a man-kill. Mutch was older than his bride, and his hair was starting to go thin on top, with grey streaks running through the tangle of his beard.
On the promise of a bird and safety with King Jollylot’s mob, Dogwyfe had long ago used her braid to strangle her first husband in his sleep. Divorce was not an option for the heart-bound.
Their birds were named Gog and Magog, a pair that Mutch had raised from stolen eggs. Lanyard had always thought the giant birds were equal parts hungry and stupid, there was no denying their usefulness. Their feathers formed a dusty coat of grey and brown, necks curving up to a honking crested head, scanning about with a permanent beady eyed stare. A bird was just as likely to tear out a man’s throat as listen to him, and any bird rider worth his salt wore a map of many scars.
While these two birds would never amount to much on the racing circuits of Rosenthrall and Langenfell, Mutch did a reasonable job of breaking them in. He had repurposed a lot of scrap and rubbish, using it to craft harnesses and tack for their birds. It was ugly but functional, much like the bird master himself.
They would bear riders, obey most commands, and, most importantly, would go on the attack when prodded. They could disembowel an enemy with their talons and their beaks could take off a man’s hand.
Dogwyfe taught Magog a few words, mostly profanities or the names of people who were now dead. Sometimes, Magog would hum to herself, the words of some nursery rhyme slipping from her beak, and Lanyard could picture the bird’s mistress crooning over it as a hatchling. Dogwyfe held more love for her bird than for her man, and Lanyard marked this well.
Gog was the male of the pair and a much larger riding bird, Mutch’s steed and a brute, who never took to the man-tongue. He understood the threats of his master well enough though, and his crest and neck were scarred from whip and knout.
Lanyard held a parley with the bird-riders. He offered them a third-share of any loot found by the mob, double what Jollylot had promised them. He needed the birds and they knew it. The deal was acceptable and a trade-stone from Jollylot’s kit was brought out, kissed by the three of them to seal the trade.
“We’ll all end up as rich as Neville, you’ll see,” and this brought Lanyard the smiles. Those two were the only true threat here, Lanyard thought and knew he would sleep safer that night.
Two birds, a bicycle, and a handful of savages as likely to kill him as anyone else. Lanyard knew he had enough to make a beginning.
At the edge of the Inland the pickings were lean. Badlands for miles in every direction, with little to see but red dust and flies, but even here a clever pair of hands could survive. Under his direction the mob gathered and laid away a store of bush tucker, grubs and roots, and bitter seeds to grind into flour for damper. The cannibals were slow students at foraging, better at stealing food than finding it. Lanyard persisted, beating those who worked too slowly or who came back to camp with too little food to show for their time.
If I hadn’t come along, you lot would have eaten each other. One more month, there’d have been nothing but bones around a waterhole, Lanyard thought, stowing waterskins and sacks of provisions into the skiff. His ribs no longer showed and he felt strong enough to walk for miles.
“Enough hiding,” Lanyard declared over supper that night. “We’ve enough food to do what needs doing.”
He thought of the saltpan to the west, of his sworn enemy on the far side. He could lead this mob there, with the birds at the forefront, the rest all howling and rushing in with their crude weapons. He knew he could easily throw these people into a certain death. Their sacrifice might give him the grace to do what Bauer had taught him, in that place where the veil between worlds was thin, where the true monsters had stepped through.
It was his sworn duty, and now he had the guns that he’d prayed for, the means to go west and put things right.
You’ll fail, he told himself. You’ll walk back into their lair, and they’ll kill you, oh so slowly.
“We go east,” Lanyard said after a long moment, a stone twisting in his gut. “I’m taking back what Jollylot let slip through his fingers. We go roving.”
They prowled the tradeways of the Inland, preying on travellers, raiding outposts and holdings. Bailiffs were sent to hunt down Lanyard’s mob, first from Price and then the high walls of Quarterbrook spewed out a posse of coin-hunters, a mixed group of birdmen and bikers.
Lanyard had travelled these parts years ago and still remembered the hiding places his master knew, blind gullies and ruins that few had seen, ways of fused stone from Before that wouldn’t hold a trail.
Each time he gave the hunters the slip and watched as the townsmen tore around the plains, their machines belching smoke and whining in the distance.
Travel became dangerous in the area, and the few who escaped the cookpot told of the growing gang led by a stranger who wasn’t crooked at all. One rumour had it that the leader was actually a Jesusman, others that this Lanyard Everett had killed one and eaten his heart to gain that forbidden knowledge.
Other crooked mobs were being attacked by this new group, and the turf war between the outlaws was vicious enough to be noted with some worry by those huddled behind town walls. They could see the muzzle flashes in the distance, watch furrows of dust flying about as the cannibals warred amongst themselves.
Mere months after arriving from the west, Lanyard Everett looked upon a scene of destruction and nodded with some satisfaction. His mob now numbered over sixty strong, and old enemies of King Jollylot joined up for plunder or fled elsewhere for easier pickings.
The Inland was his.
Three motorcycles cobbled together from parts found in the bleed-throughs. A full brace of bird-riders and enough guns to give anyone pause. A skirmish with a lost posse of lawmen netted them a working buggy, which Lanyard claimed as his own, instantly falling in love with the wheels and the snarl of its engine.
One day his mob ransacked a compound, tearing down the tin barricade with chains and hooks. Pouring into the breach, the outlaws fell on the handful of farmers who had huddled together for protection. The sounds of slaughter were heard within, the only rebuttal to the attack was the pop of a pistol, and that soon ceased.
Lanyard guided the buggy through
the carnage, past the stripping of sheep and pig carcases, and did not blink at the horrors that his people inflicted on the farmers. Life is hard and these people were fools to settle here, he reasoned, watching Slopkettle perform her craft on the man she’d marked for the greypot.
If not us, somebody else would have done this.
Every swaggering step, every bullet fired, every inch of steel he had driven through other men, all of it based on that old comfortable lie. Still, a river of ghosts and blood could not lift him away from his biggest failure. He’d been given meaning once, but he’d lost his way. Underneath everything, he was a coward and a fraud. Worse than a fraud.
An apostate.
He climbed out of the buggy, poking through the buildings for plunder, gun at the ready in case a farmer lay in wait. Lanyard spotted an enamel bathtub in a hut, chipped and rusty, a bed of coals banked in the dirt underneath it.
It was full of warm water, and he picked up the bar of soap, pondering it for a long moment. Before the mob had arrived with guns and slaughter, someone had drawn a bath, someone who even now was likely dead or dying.
“No point wasting this,” he said, peeling off his boots. Hollering out of the door, Lanyard called over Mutch. The birdman trotted over on Gog, the bird’s face and beak splattered with blood.
“Don’t give me that look,” he said, noting Mutch’s frustration at missing out on the looting. “You’ll get your bloody share. Watch this door, I’m having a bath now.”
Lanyard stripped off his clothes, easing into the warm water with a gasp of delight. In seconds a ring of filth appeared around the water’s edge. Ignoring the distant screams, he scrubbed away what felt like years’ worth of dirt and grime.
Lanyard had a tattoo on his chest, the washed out image of a bleeding man bound tightly to a tree, arms outstretched. The man’s hands were clenched into fists but for the index fingers, pointing left and right. BEFORE and NOW were writ under each hand.
The Jesus.
He was always careful to hide this tattoo. It marked him as a Jesusman, and even the lowest crooked man would observe the law and enforce the old pogrom. Nothing but death awaited him should this secret be discovered. Once it was a noble calling, but now, the Jesusmen were outlaws, sorcerers, and heretics.
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 2