He was already awake. He had started waking before dawn, lately, ready the moment his eyes came open.
‘That’s right. Get up. You’re wanted.’
‘I’ve always had that effect on women. It’s a curse.’
‘For them, no doubt.’
Temple sighed as he started to roll up his blanket. He was a little sore, but it would wear off. He was getting hard from the work. Tough in places that had been soft a long time. He had been obliged to tighten his belt by a couple of notches. Well, not notches exactly, but he had twice shifted the bent nail that served for a buckle in the old saddle-girth that served for a belt.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘I’m riding drag.’
‘No. Once you’ve led the Fellowship in prayer, Lamb’s lending you his horse. You’re coming hunting with me and Sweet today.’
‘Do you have to taunt me like this every morning?’ he asked as he pulled his boots on. ‘What happened to make you this way?’
She stood looking at him, hands on hips. ‘Sweet found a stretch of timber over yonder and reckons there might be game. If you’d rather ride drag, you can ride drag. Thought you might appreciate the break is all, but have it your way.’ And she turned and started to walk off.
‘Wait, you’re serious?’ Trying to hurry after her and pull on his other boot at the same time.
‘Would I toy with your feelings?’
‘I’m going hunting?’ Sufeen had asked him to go hunting a hundred times and he had always said he could not imagine anything more boring. After a few weeks with the dust, had he been the quarry he would have dashed off laughing across the plains.
‘Calm down,’ said Shy. ‘No one’s fool enough to give you a bow. Me and Sweet’ll do the shooting while Crying Rock scares up the game. You and Leef can follow on and skin, butcher and cart. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to grab some wood for a shitless fire or two either.’
‘Skinning, butchering and shitless fires! Yes, my Queen!’ He remembered those few months butchering cattle in the sweltering meat district of Dagoska, the stink and the flies, the back-breaking effort and horrible clamour. He had thought it like hell. Now he dropped to his knees, and grabbed her hand, and kissed it in thanks for the chance.
She jerked it free. ‘Stop embarrassing yourself.’ It was still too dark to see her face, but he thought he could hear a smile in her voice. She slid her sheathed knife from her belt. ‘You’ll need this.’
‘A knife of my own! And quite a large one!’ He stayed on his knees and thrust his fists into the sky. ‘I’m going hunting!’
One of Gentili’s venerable cousins, on his way shambling past to empty his bladder, shook his head and grumbled, ‘Who gives a fuck?’
As the first signs of dawn streaked the sky and the wheels of the Fellowship began to turn, the five of them rode off across the scrubby grass, Leef on an empty wagon for carrying the carcasses, Temple trying to persuade Lamb’s horse that they were on the same side. They crested the edge of what passed for a valley out here but would barely have qualified as a ditch anywhere else, some ill-looking trees huddling in its base, browned and broken. Sweet sat slumped in his saddle, scanning those unpromising woods. God only knew what for.
‘Look about right?’ he grunted to Crying Rock.
‘About.’ The Ghost gave her old grey a tap with her heels and they were off down the long slope.
The lean deer that came bouncing from the trees and straight into Sweet’s bolts and Shy’s arrows were a different prospect from the big, soft oxen that had swung from the hooks in Dagoska’s stinking warehouses, but the principles came back quickly enough. Soon Temple was making a few swift slits with the blade then peeling the skins off whole while Leef held the front hooves. He even took a sprinkling of pride in the way he got the guts sliding out in one mass, steaming in the chill morning. He showed Leef the trick of it and soon they were bloody to their elbows, and laughing, and flicking bits of gut at each other like a pair of boys.
Soon enough they had five tough little carcasses stretched out and glistening in the back of the wagon and the last skinned and headed, the offal in a flyblown heap and the hides in a red and brown tangle like clothes discarded by a set of eager swimmers.
Temple wiped Shy’s knife on one of them and nodded off up the rise. ‘I’d best see what’s keeping those two.’
‘I’ll get this last one gutted.’ Leef grinned up at him as he dragged himself onto Lamb’s horse. ‘Thanks for the pointers.’
‘Teaching is the noblest of callings, Haddish Kahdia used to tell me.’
‘Who’s he?’
Temple thought about that. ‘A good, dead man, who gave his life for mine.’
‘Sounds like a shitty trade,’ said Leef.
Temple snorted. ‘Even I think so. I’ll be back before you know it.’ He pushed up the valley, following the treeline, enjoying the turn of speed he got from Lamb’s horse and congratulating himself that he was finally making some progress with that boy. A hundred strides further on and he saw Sweet and Shy watching the trees from horseback.
‘Can’t you sluggards kill any faster?’ he called at them.
‘You finish that lot already?’ asked Shy.
‘Skinned, gutted and eager for the pot.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ grunted Sweet, ivory-stocked flatbow propped on his thigh. ‘Reckon someone who knows the difference better check up on the lawyer’s handiwork. Make sure he hasn’t skinned Leef by mistake.’
Shy brought her horse around and they rode back towards the wagon. ‘Not bad,’ she said, giving him an approving nod. It might well have been the first he had received from her, and he found he quite liked having one. ‘Reckon we might make a plainsman o’ you yet.’
‘That or I’ll make snivelling townsfolk of the lot of you.’
‘Take stronger stuff than you’re made of to get that done.’
‘I’m made of pretty weak stuff, all in all.’
‘I don’t know.’ She was looking sideways at him, one appraising brow up. ‘I’m starting to think there might be some metal under all that paper.’
He tapped his chest with a fist. ‘Tin, maybe.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t forge a sword from it, but tin’ll make a decent bucket.’
‘Or a bath.’
She closed her eyes. ‘By the dead, a bath.’
‘Or a roof.’
‘By the dead, a roof,’ as they crested the rise and looked down towards the trees, ‘can you remember what a roof—’
The wagon came into view below, and the heap of skins, and next to them Leef lying on the ground. Temple knew it was him because of his boots. He couldn’t see the rest, because two figures knelt over him. His first thought was that the lad must have had a fall and the other two were helping him up.
Then one turned towards them, and he was dressed in a dozen different skins all patchwork-stitched and carried a red knife. He gave a hellish shriek, tongue sticking stiff from his yawning mouth, high and heedless as a wolf at the moon, and started to bound up the slope towards them.
Temple could only sit and gawp as the Ghost rushed closer, until he could see the eyes bulging in his red- painted face. Then Shy’s bowstring hummed just by his ear, and the arrow flickered across the few strides between them and into the Ghost’s bare chest, stopped him cold like a slap in the face.
Temple’s eyes darted to the other Ghost, standing now in a cloak of grass and bones, slipping his own bow off his back and reaching for an arrow from a skin quiver tied to his bare leg. Shy rode down the hill, giving a scream hardly more human than the Ghost’s had been, tugging out that short-sword she wore.
The Ghost got his arrow free, then spun around and sat down. Temple looked over to see Sweet lowering his flatbow. ‘There’ll be more!’ he shouted, hooking the stirrup on the end of his bow over one boot and hauling the string back with one hand, turning his horse with a twitch of the other and scanning the treeline.
The Ghost tried to lift his arrow and fumbled it, tried to reach for another, couldn’t straighten his arm
