Barker, Clive – Imajica 01 – The Fifth Dominion. Part 4

At midday, with his unease of the previous night allayed not one jot, Pie ‘oh’ pah had suggested to Theresa that they should leave the encampment. The suggestion wasn’t met with enthusiasm. The baby was sick ‘with sniffles and had not stopped wailing since she’d woken; the other child was feverish too. This was no time to be going away, Theresa said, even if they had somewhere to go, which they didn’t. We’ll take the trailer with us, Pie replied; we’ll just drive out of the city. To the coast, maybe, where the children would benefit from the cleaner air. Theresa liked that idea. Tomorrow, she said, or the day after, but not now.

Pie pressed the case, however, until she asked him what he was so nervous about. He had no answer to give; at least none that she’d care to hear. She understood nothing of his nature, nor questioned him about his past. He was simply a provider, someone who put food in the mouths of her children and his arms around her at night. But her question still hung in the air, so he answered it as best he could.

“I’m afraid for us,” he said.

“It’s that old man, isn’t it?” Theresa replied. “The one who came to see you? Who was he?”

“He wanted a job done.”

“And you did it?”

“No.”

“So you think he’s going to come back?” she said. “We’ll set the dogs on him.”

It was healthy to hear such plain solutions, even if—as now—they didn’t answer the problem at hand. His mystif soul was sometimes too readily drawn to the ambiguities that mirrored his true self. But she chastened him; reminded him that he’d taken a face and a function and, in this human sphere, a sex; that as far as she was concerned he belonged in the fixed world of children, dogs, and orange peel. There was no room for poetry in such straitened circumstances; no time between hard dawn and uneasy dusk for the luxury of doubt or speculation.

Now another of those dusks had fallen, and Theresa was putting her cherished ones to bed in the trailer. They slept well. He had a spell that he’d kept polished from the days of his power, a way of speaking prayers into a pillow so they’d sweeten the sleeper’s dreams. His Maestro had asked for its comfort often, and Pie used it still, two hundred years later. Even now Theresa was laying her children’s heads upon down suffused with cradle songs, secreted-there to guide them from the dark world into the bright.

The mongrel he’d met at the perimeter in the predawn gloom was barking furiously, and he went out to calm it. Seeing him approach it pulled on its chain, scrabbling at the dirt to be closer to him. Its owner was a man Pie had little contact with, a short-tempered Scot who brutalized the dog when he could catch it. Pie went down on his haunches to hush the creature, for fear its din brought the owner out from his supping. The dog obeyed but continued to paw at Pie fretfully, clearly wanting to be loosed from its leash.

“What’s wrong, buster?” he said to it, scratching behind its war-torn ears. “Have you got a lady out there?”

He looked up towards the perimeter as he spoke and caught the fleeting glimpse of a figure stepping into shadow behind one of the trailers. The dog had seen the interloper too. It set up a new round of barking. Pie stood up again. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

A sound at the other end of the encampment claimed his attention momentarily: water splashing on the ground. No, not water. The stench that reached his nostrils was that of petrol. He looked back towards his own trailer. Theresa’s shadow was on the blind, her head bowed as she turned off the nightlight beside the children’s bed. The stench was coming from that direction too. He reached down and released the dog.

“Go, boy! Go! Go!”

It ran barking at a figure slipping out through a gap in the fence. As it went Pie started towards his trailer, yelling Theresa’s name.

Behind him, somebody shouted for him to shut up out there, but the curses were unfinished, erased by the boom and bloom of fire, twin eruptions that lit the encampment from end to end. He heard Theresa scream, saw Same surge up and around his trailer. The spilled fuel was only a fuse. Before he’d covered ten yards the mother lode exploded directly under the vehicle, the force sufficient to lift it off the ground and pitch it on its side.

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