‘Damn ’em, say I, and hot water, too! You can strike off south to the Empire and ask old Legate Sarmis for a bath if that’s your style. Or trek back east to the Union and ask the Inquisition.’
‘Their water might be too hot for comfort,’ she muttered.
‘Just tell me where a body can feel as free as this!’
‘Can’t think of nowhere,’ she admitted, though to her mind there was something savage in all that endless empty. You could come to feel squashed by all that room.
But not Dab Sweet. He filled his lungs to bursting one more time. ‘She’s easy to fall in love with, the Far Country, but she’s a cruel mistress. Always leading you on. That’s how it’s been with me, ever since I was younger’n Leef here. The best grass is always just past the horizon. The sweetest water’s in the next river. The bluest sky over some other mountain.’ He gave a long sigh. ‘Afore you know it, your joints snap of a morning and you can’t sleep two hours together without needing to piss and of a sudden you realise your best country’s all behind you, never even appreciated as you passed it by, eyes fixed ahead.’
‘Summers past love company,’ mused Lamb, scratching at the star-shaped scar on his stubbled cheek. ‘Seems every time you turn around there’s more o’ the bastards at your back.’
‘Comes to be everything reminds you of something past. Somewhere past. Someone. Yourself, maybe, how you were. The now gets fainter and the past more and more real. The future worn down to but a stub.’
Lamb had a little smile at his mouth’s corner as he stared into the distance. ‘The happy valleys o’ the past,’ he murmured.
‘I love old-bastard talk, don’t you?’ Shy cocked a brow at Leef. ‘Makes me feel healthy.’
‘You young shrimps think tomorrow can be put off for ever,’ grumbled Sweet. ‘More time got like money from a bank. You’ll learn.’
‘If the Ghosts don’t kill us all first,’ said Leef.
‘Thanks for raising that happy possibility,’ said Sweet. ‘If philosophy don’t suit, I do have other occupation for you.’
‘Which is?’
The old scout nodded down. Scattered across the grass, flat and white and dry, were a bumper harvest of cow-leavings, fond mementoes of some wild herd roving the grassland. ‘Collecting bullshit.’
Shy snorted. ‘Ain’t he collected bullshit enough listening to you and
Lamb sing the glories o’ yesteryear?’
‘You can’t burn fond remembrances, more’s the pity, or I’d be toasty warm every night.’ Sweet stuck an arm out to the level sameness in every direction, the endless expanse of earth and sky and sky and earth away to nowhere. ‘Ain’t a stick of timber for a hundred miles. We’ll be burning cow flats ’til after we cross the bridge at Sictus.’
‘And cooking over ’em, too?’
‘Might improve the flavour o’ what we been eating,’ said Lamb.
‘All part o’ the charm,’ said Sweet. ‘Either way, all the young ’uns are gathering fuel.’
Leef ’s eyes flickered to Shy. ‘I ain’t that young.’ And as though to prove it he fingered his chin where he’d started to lovingly cultivate a meagre harvest of blond hairs.
Shy wasn’t sure she couldn’t have fielded more beard and Sweet was unmoved. ‘You’re young enough to get shitty-handed in service of the Fellowship, lad!’ And he slapped Leef on the back, much to the lad’s hunch- shouldered upset. ‘Why, brown palms are a mark of high courage and distinction! The medal of the plains!’
‘You want the lawyer to lend you a hand?’ asked Shy. ‘For three bits he’s yours for the afternoon.’
Sweet narrowed his eyes. ‘I’ll give you two for him.’
‘Done,’ she said. It was hardly worth haggling when the prices were so small.
‘Reckon he’ll enjoy that, the lawyer,’ said Lamb, as Leef and Sweet headed back towards the Fellowship, the scout holding forth again on how fine things used to be.
‘He ain’t along for his amusement.’
‘I guess none of us are.’
They rode in silence for a moment, just the two of them and the sky, so big and deep it seemed any moment there might be nothing holding you to the ground any more and you’d just fall into it and never stop. Shy worked her right arm a little, shoulder and elbow still weak and sore, grumbles up into her neck and down into her ribs but getting looser each day. For sure she’d lived through worse.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Lamb, out of nowhere.
Shy looked over at him, hunched and sagging like he’d an anchor chained around his neck. ‘I’ve always thought so.’
‘I mean it, Shy. I’m sorry. For what happened back there in Averstock. For what I did. And what I didn’t do.’ He spoke slower and slower until Shy got the feeling each word was a battle to fight. ‘Sorry that I never told you what I was… before I came to your mother’s farm…’ She watched him all the while, mouth dry, but he just frowned down at his left hand, thumb rubbing at that stump of a finger over and over. ‘All I wanted was to leave the past buried. Be nothing and nobody. Can you understand that?’
Shy swallowed. She’d a few memories at her back she wouldn’t have minded sinking in a bog. ‘I reckon.’
‘But the seeds of the past bear fruit in the present, my father used to say. I’m that much of a fool I got to teach myself the same lesson over and over, always pissing into the wind. The past never stays buried. Not one like mine, leastways. Blood’ll always find you out.’
‘What were you?’ Her voice sounded a tiny croak in all that space. ‘A soldier?’
That frown of his got harder still. ‘A killer. Let’s call it what it is.’
‘You fought in the wars? Up in the North?’
‘In wars, in skirmishes, in duels, in anything offered, and when I ran out of fights I made my own, and when I ran out of enemies I turned my friends into more.’
She’d thought any answers would be better than none. Now she wasn’t so sure. ‘I guess you had your reasons,’ she muttered, so weak it turned into a wheedling question.
‘Good ones, at first. Then poor ones. Then I found you could still shed blood without ’em and gave up on the bastards altogether.’
‘You got a reason now, though.’
‘Aye. I’ve a reason now.’ He took a breath and drew himself up straighter. ‘Those children… they’re all the good I done in my life. Ro and Pit. And you.’
Shy snorted. ‘If you’re counting me in your good works you got to be desperate.’
‘I am.’ He looked across at her, so fixed and searching she’d trouble meeting his eye. ‘But as it happens you’re about the best person I know.’
She looked away, working that stiff shoulder again. She’d always found soft words a lot tougher to swallow than hard. A question of what you’re used to, maybe. ‘You got a damn limited circle of friends.’
‘Enemies always came more natural to me. But even so. I don’t know where you got it, but you’ve a good heart, Shy.’
She thought of him carrying her from that tree, singing to the children, putting the bandages on her back. ‘So have you.’
‘Oh, I can fool folk. The dead know I can fool myself.’ He looked back to the flat horizon. ‘But no, Shy, I don’t have a good heart. Where we’re going, there’ll be trouble. If we’re lucky, just a little, but luck ain’t exactly stuck to me down the years. So listen. When I next tell you to stay out of my way, you stay out, you hear?’
‘Why? Would you kill me?’ She meant it half as a joke, but his cold voice struck her laughter dead.
‘There’s no telling what I’ll do.’
The wind gusted into the silence and swept the long grass in waves and Shy thought she heard shouting sifting on it. An unmistakable note of panic.
‘You hear that?’
Lamb turned his horse towards the Fellowship. ‘What did I say about luck?’
They were in quite the spin, all bunched up and shouting over or riding into each other, wagons tangled and dogs darting under the wheels and children crying and a mood of terror like Glustrod had risen from the grave up ahead and was fixed on their destruction.
‘Ghosts!’ Shy heard someone wail. ‘They’ll have our ears!’
