He moved, let the boy go past, disarmed him. He gathered both knives; threw them hilt down in the sand in front of the boy. The youth struck out again, knife in each hand. Again — hardly seeming to move — he let the youth crash past, and slipped the knives from his grasp. He tripped the youth, and while he was still lying on the dune's top, threw the knives, sending them both thudding into the sand a centimetre on either side of his head. The youth screamed, plucked both blades out and threw them.
His head hardly moved as they hissed by his ears. The people watching in the flame-lit hollow moved their heads, following the trajectory the knives had to take, to the dunes behind them. But when they looked back again, wondering, both blades were in the stranger's hands, plucked from the air. He tossed them to the boy again.
The youth caught them, screamed, fumbled blood-handed to get them the right way round, and rushed again at the stranger, who dropped him, whacked the knives from his hands, and for a long moment held one of the young man's elbows poised over his knee, arm raised, ready to break… then shoved the boy away. He picked up the knives again, placed them in the open palms of the youth.
He listened to the boy sobbing into the dark sand, while the people watched.
He got ready to run again, glancing behind him.
The crippled seabird hopped and fluttered, clipped wings beating on air and sand, to the top of the dune. It cocked one flame-bright eye at the stranger.
The people in the hollow seemed frozen by the dancing flames.
The bird waddled to the prone, sobbing figure of the boy on the sand, and screamed. It flapped, shrieked, and stabbed at the boy's eyes.
The boy tried to fend it off, but the bird leapt into the air and whooped and beat and feathers flew and when the boy broke one of its wings and it fell to the sand, facing away from him, it jetted liquid shit at him.
The boy's face fell back to the sand. His body shook with sobs.
The stranger watched the eyes of the people in the hollow, while his shack caved in and the orange sparks swirled up into the still night sky.
Eventually the sheriff and the girl's father came and took the boy away, and a moon later the girl's family left, and two moons later the tightly bound body of the young man was lowered into a freshly picked hole in the nearest outcrop of rock, and covered with stones.
The people in the parktown would not talk to him, though one trader still took his flotsam. The brash and noisy home cars stopped coming down the sandy track. He had not thought he would miss them. He pitched a small tent near the blackened remains of the shack.
The woman stopped coming to him; he never saw her again. He told himself he was getting so little for his haul that he could not have paid her and eaten as well.
The worst thing, he found, was that there was nobody to talk to.
He saw the seated figure on the beach, way in the distance, five moons or so after the night he'd burned his shack. He hesitated, then went on.
Twenty metres from the woman, he stopped and carefully inspected a length of fishing net on the tideline, the floats still attached and gleaming like earth-bound suns in the low morning light.
He glanced at the woman. She was sitting, legs crossed, arms folded across her lap, staring out to sea. Her simple gown was the colour of the sky.
He went up to the woman and put his new canvas bag down at her side. She did not move.
He sat beside her, arranged his limbs similarly, and stared out to sea, like her.
After a hundred or so waves had approached and broken and slipped away again, he cleared his throat.
'A few times,' he said, 'I had the feeling I was being watched.'
Sma said nothing for a while. The seabirds pivoted inside the spaces of the air, calling in a language he still did not understand.
'Oh, people have always felt that,' Sma said, at last.
He smoothed away a wormcast in the sand. 'I don't belong to you Diziet.'
'No,' she said, turning to him. 'You're right. You don't belong to us. All we can do is ask.'
'What?'
'That you come back. We have a job for you.'
'What is it?'
'Oh…' Sma smoothed her gown over her knees. 'Helping to drag a bunch of aristos into the next millenium, from the inside.'
'Why?'
'It's important.'
'Isn't everything?'
'And we can pay you properly this time.'
'You paid me off very handsomely the last time. Lots of money and a new body. What more can a chap ask for?' He gestured at the canvas bag at her side, and at himself, clothed in salt-stained rags. 'Don't let this fool you. I haven't lost the loot. I'm a rich man; very rich, here.' He watched the waves roll up towards them, then break and foam and fall away again. 'I just wanted the simple life, for a while.' He gave a sort of half-laugh, and realised it was the first time he'd even started to laugh since he'd come here.
'I know,' Sma said. 'But this is different. Like I said; we can pay you properly, now.'
He looked at her. 'Enough. No more being cryptic. What do you mean?'
She turned her gaze to him. He had to work hard at not looking away.
'We've found Livueta,' she said.
He stared into her eyes for a time, and then blinked and looked away. He cleared his throat, looking back out to the glittering sea, and had to sniff and wipe his eyes. Sma watched as the man moved one hand slowly to his chest, not realising he was doing it, and rubbed at the skin there, just over his heart.
'Mm-hmm. You're sure?'
'Yes, we're sure.'
He looked out over the waves after that, and suddenly felt that they were no longer bringing things to him, no longer messengers from the distant storms offering their bounty, but instead had become a pathway; a route, another distant sort of opportunity, beckoning.
That simple? he thought to himself. A word — a single name — from Sma and I'm all ready to go, take off, and take up their arms again? Because of
He let a few more waves roll up and down. The seabirds wailed. Then he sighed. 'All right,' he said. He pushed one hand up through his tangled, matted hair. 'Tell me about it.'
Four
'The fact remains,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw insisted, 'that the last time we went through this rigmarole, Zakalwe fucked up. They froze his ass in that Winter Palace.'
'All right,' Sma said. 'But it wasn't like him. Okay, so one time he gets it wrong… we don't know why. So maybe now he's had time to get over it, he'll actually want a chance to show he can still do the business. Maybe he can't wait for us to find him.'
'Good grief,' sighed the drone. 'Wishful thinking from Sma the Cynical. Maybe you're starting to lose your touch too.'
'Oh shut up.'
She watched the planet swing towards them on the module screen.
Twenty-nine days had passed on the
As an ice breaker, the fancy-dress party had been a crushing success. Sma had woken up in a cushion-filled alcove of the rec area, birth-naked and in a tangle of assorted equally nude limbs and torsos. She had extricated one arm carefully from under the voluptuous sleeping form of Jetart Hrine, stood shakily, and gazed round the softly breathing bodies, appraising the men in particular, and then — treading very carefully, nearly over-balancing several times on the plump cushions, her muscles all complaining and trembly — tip-toed her way between the slumbering crew to the welcome solidity of the red-wood floor. The rest of the area had already been tidied. The ship must
