bludgeoned backside. He badly wanted to weep but refused to give Shy the satisfaction. Not that anything satisfied her.
He stood, sore and miserable, choking down cold water and half-raw meat that had been buried under the fire the previous night. Around him men readied themselves for the day’s labours and spoke in hushed tones, words smoking on the dawn chill, of the gold that awaited them at trail’s end, eyes wide with wonder as if, instead of yellow metal, it was the secret of existence they hoped to find written in the rocks of those unmapped places.
‘You’re riding drag again,’ said Shy.
Many of Temple’s previous professions had involved dirty, dangerous, desperate work but none had approached, for its excruciating mixture of tedium, discomfort, and minute wages, the task of riding drag behind a Fellowship.
‘Again?’ His shoulders slumped as if he had been told he would be spending the morning in hell. Which he more or less had been.
‘No, I’m joking. Your legal skills are in high demand. Hedges wants you to petition the King of the Union on his behalf, Lestek’s decided to form a new country and needs advice on the constitution and Crying Rock’s asked for another codicil to her will.’
They stood there in the almost-darkness, the wind cutting across the emptiness and finding out the hole near his armpit.
‘I’m riding drag.’
‘Yes.’
Temple was tempted to beg, but this time his pride held out. Perhaps at lunch he would beg. Instead he took up the mass of decayed leather that served him for saddle and pillow both and limped for his mule. It watched him approach, eyes inflamed with hatred.
He had made every effort to cast the mule as a partner in this unfortunate business but the beast could not be persuaded to see it that way. He was its arch-enemy and it took every opportunity to bite or buck him, and had on one occasion most memorably pissed on his ill-fitting boots while he was trying to mount. By the time he had finally saddled and turned the stubborn animal towards the back of the column, the lead wagons were already rolling, their grinding wheels already sending up dust.
Oh God, the dust.
Concerned about Ghosts after Temple’s encounter, Dab Sweet had led the Fellowship into a dry expanse of parched grass and sun-bleached bramble, where you only had to look at the desiccated ground to stir up dust. The further back in the column you were, the closer companions you and dust became, and Temple had spent six days at the very back. Much of the time it blotted out the sun and entombed him in a perpetual soupy gloom, landscape expunged, wagons vanished, often the cattle just ahead made insubstantial phantoms. Every part of him was dried out by wind and impregnated by dirt. And if the dust did not choke you the stink of the animals would finish the job.
He could have achieved the same effect by rubbing his arse with wire wool for fourteen hours while eating a mixture of sand and cow-shit.
No doubt he should have been revelling in his luck and thanking God that he was alive, yet he found it hard to be grateful for this purgatory of dust. Gratitude and resentment are brothers eternal, after all. Time and again he considered how he might escape, slip from beneath his smothering debt and be free, but there was no way out, let alone an easy one. Surrounded by hundreds of miles of open country and he was imprisoned as surely as if he had been in a cage. He complained bitterly to everyone who would listen, which was no one. Leef was the nearest rider, and the boy was self-evidently in the throes of an adolescent infatuation with Shy, had cast her somewhere between lover and mother, and exhibited almost comical extremes of jealousy whenever she talked or laughed with another man, which, alas for him, was often. Still, he need not have worried. Temple had no romantic designs on the ringleader of his tormentors.
Though he had to concede there was something oddly interesting about that swift, strong, certain way she had, always on the move, first to work and last to rest, standing when others sat, fiddling with her hat, or her belt, or her knife, or the buttons on her shirt. He did occasionally catch himself wondering whether she was as hard all over as her shoulder had been under his hand. As her side had been pressed up against his. Would she kiss as fiercely as she haggled…?
When Sweet finally brought them to a miserable trickle of a stream, it was the best they could do to stop a stampede from cattle and people both. The animals wedged in and clambered over each other, churning the bitter water brown. Buckhorm’s children frolicked and splashed. Ashjid thanked God for His bounty while his idiot nodded and chuckled and filled the drinking barrels. Iosiv Lestek dabbed his pale face and quoted pastoral poetry at length. Temple found a spot upstream and flopped down on his back in the mossy grass, smiling wide as the damp soaked gently through his clothes. His standard for a pleasurable sensation had decidedly lowered over the past few weeks. In fact he was greatly enjoying the sun’s warmth on his face, until it was suddenly blotted out.
‘My daughter getting her money’s worth out of you?’ Lamb stood over him. Luline Buckhorm had cut her childrens’ hair that morning and the Northman had reluctantly allowed himself to be put at the back of the queue. He looked bigger, and harder, and even more scarred with his grey hair and beard clipped short.
‘I daresay she’ll turn a profit if she has to sell me for meat.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past her,’ said Lamb, offering a canteen.
‘She’s a hard woman,’ said Temple as he took it.
‘Not all through. Saved you, didn’t she?’
‘She did,’ he was forced to admit, though he wondered whether death would have been kinder.
‘Reckon she’s just soft enough, then, don’t you?’
Temple swilled water around his mouth. ‘She certainly seems angry about something.’
‘She’s been often disappointed.’
‘Sad to say I doubt I’ll be reversing that trend. I’ve always been a deeply disappointing man.’
‘I know that feeling.’ Lamb scratched slowly at his shortened beard. ‘But there’s always tomorrow. Doing better next time. That’s what life is.’
‘Is that why you two are out here?’ asked Temple, handing back the canteen. ‘For a fresh beginning?’
Lamb’s eyes twitched towards him. ‘Didn’t Shy tell you?’
‘When she talks to me it’s mostly about our debt and how slowly I’m clearing it.’
‘I hear that ain’t moving too quick.’
‘Every mark feels like a year off my life.’
Lamb squatted beside the stream. ‘Shy has a brother and a sister. They were… taken.’ He held the canteen under the water, bubbles popping. ‘Bandits stole ’em, and burned our farm, and killed a friend of ours. They stole maybe twenty children all told and took them up the river towards Crease. We’re following on.’
‘What happens when you find them?’
He pushed the cork back into the canteen, hard enough that the scarred knuckles of his big right hand turned white. ‘Whatever needs to. I made a promise to their mother to keep those children safe. I broken a lot of promises in my time. This one I mean to keep.’ He took a long breath. ‘And what brought you floating down the river? I’ve always been a poor judge of men, but you don’t look the type to carve a new life from the wilderness.’
‘I was running away. One way and another I’ve made quite a habit of it.’
‘Done a fair bit myself. I find the trouble is, though, wherever you run to… there y’are.’ He offered out his hand to pull Temple up, and Temple reached to take it, and stopped.
‘You have nine fingers.’
Suddenly Lamb was frowning at him, and he didn’t look like such a slow and friendly old fellow any more. ‘You a missing-finger enthusiast?’
‘No, but… I may have met one. He said he’d been sent to the Far
Country to find a nine-fingered man.’
‘I probably ain’t the only man in the Far Country missing a finger.’
Temple felt the need to pick his words carefully. ‘I have a feeling you’re the sort of man that sort of man might be looking for. He had a metal eye.’
No flash of recognition. ‘A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There’s a song in there somewhere, I reckon. He give a name?’
‘Caul Shivers.’
