Everyone had stopped, gathering around to hear the conclusion of the story. Ryan wasn’t a natural-born liar, and he struggled to keep the tale as short and as simple as possible.
“Stooped over it, skinning knife in my right hand. Been a bad chem storm and it was dark, under some trees. Bent low. Fucker wasn’t near dead, and it kicked out at me. Hooked this eye out from its socket neat as a stone from a plum. Gouged this down me at the same time.” He touched the jagged cicatrix that seamed his cheek from eye to mouth on the right side of his lean face.
“Coney blinded you!” The villager called Tom laughed. “If that don’t take the biscuit! A coney spoiled the stranger’s looks.”
Ryan turned slowly and stared at the man, the moon catching his good eye, giving it a glint of ferocious anger. It checked the laughter so quickly that Tom nearly choked on his tongue.
“No harm meant, Master Thursby,” he stammered out, taking a stumbling half step back, stepping on the toes of the man behind him.
“No harm done, friend.” Ryan smiled.
“there’s strange fruit, lover,” Krysty whispered as they came within sight of the hamlet of Shersville, a quarter hour later.
175
Ryan looked where she pointed. Ahead of them, fring-ing the road, were five corpses. Three had been hanged and two had been crucified on crude crosses.
“Baron Harvey’s orchard,” one of the older men with them cackled.
“Pour encourager les autres,” Doc Tanner muttered.
“How’s that, Doc?” Jak asked.
“It means, my dear boy, that the baron believes in vis-ible lessons to those who might consider crossing him.”
Ryan stopped in front of the first of the bodies. It was a woman, naked, aged around fifty by the look of the dried, wrinkled flesh. There wasn’t enough left of the face to be more certain. Strands of ragged, graying hair still clung to the gnarled bone of the skull. The lower jaw had become detached and fallen to the earth. The eyes were long gone, pecked out by the crows that they’d seen near where they had parked the wag. The hempen rope around the scrawny throat was stained black with ancient blood.
The next dangling corpse was a man. But it was only by the torn ribbons of breeches and jerkin that you could guess it. The body had obviously hung there longer than the old woman; the flesh had turned to crisp leather, tanned and gleaming in the bright moonlight. The hands were bound behind the back, and the ankles were also tied together. One foot was missing.
The third body was smaller, younger and fresher. The eyes were missing, as well as the lips and part of the soft flesh of the cheeks. It was a teenage boy, flaxen-headed and slightly built. Both hands were gone, obviously cut off before the lynching. Smears of thick tar around the stumps showed where a crude effort had been made to stop the lad from bleeding to death before he could be strung up.
176
“Found a boar with broken legs out in the wild Shens, south of here,” Nathan Freeman said, voice as cold as death. “Beast was done and he slit its throat and took a haunch for food for his family. Liv e on the edge of Shersville. Someone leaked word to the baron and…” The sentence drifted away into the silence of the night.
Both of the crucified corpses were men.
“See this on every road around Front Royal,” Tom mumbled almost apologetically, as though he needed to give the six strangers some sort of an explanation for the horrors.
“Been up for weeks, them two,” added the oldest of the villagers. “Both gotten catched hoarding food meant for Lady Rachel’s horses.”
“That’s a high price,” J.B. said, staring up at the tor-tured corpses.
“Bad way t’go,” Nathan commented. “The hunk of wood for your feet makes it longer. Ropes around the wrists and ankles. Baron wanted nails used, but Lady Rachel said nails made it quicker. Through the tendons and bones at wrist and ankle. Ropes is more cruel, she said. So it was ropes.”