There was a slit in the chunk of raw meat. Poking out of it was a green big-bang fuse. Below the fuse, the liver bulged like the stomach of a pregnant woman. The first boy took a sulfur match, stuck it between his protruding front teeth, and lit it.
“He won’t never!” said a third boy, in an agony of hope and anticipation.
“Thin as he is?” the first boy said. “Oh yes he will. Bet ye my deck of cards against yer hosstail.”
The third boy thought it over and shook his head.
The first boy grinned. “It’s a wise child ye are,” he said, and lit the big-bang’s fuse.
“Hey, cully!” he called to the dog. “Want a bite o’ sumpin good? Here ye go!”
He threw the chunk of raw liver. The scrawny dog never hesitated at the hissing fuse, but lunged forward with its one good eye fixed on the first decent food it had seen in days. As it snatched the liver out of the air, the big-bang the boys had slipped into it went off. There was a roar and a flash. The dog’s head disintegrated from the jaws down. For a moment it continued to stand there, dripping, staring at them with its one good eye, and then it collapsed.
“Toadjer!” the first boy jeered. “Toadjer he’d take it! Happy Reap to us, eh?”
“What are you boys doing?” a woman’s voice called sharply. “Get out of there, ye ravens!”
The boys fled, cackling, into the bright afternoon. They did sound like ravens.
7
Cuthbert and Alain sat their horses at the mouth of Eyebolt. Even with the wind blowing the sound of the thinny away from them, it got inside your head and buzzed there, rattling your teeth.
“I hate it,” Cuthbert said through clenched teeth. “Gods, let’s be quick.”
“Aye,” Alain said. They dismounted, bulky in their ranch-coats, and tied their horses to the brush which lay across the front of the canyon. Ordinarily, tethering wouldn’t have been necessary, but both boys could see the horses hated the whining, grinding sound as much as they did. Cuthbert seemed to hear the thinny in his mind, speaking words of invitation in a groaning, horribly persuasive voice.
Come on, Bert. Leave all this foolishness behind: the drums, the pride, the fear of death, the loneliness you laugh at because laughing’s all you can think to do. And the girl, leave her, too. You love her, don’t you? And even if you don’t, you want her. It’s sad that she loves your friend instead of you, but if you come to me, all that will stop bothering you very soon. So come on. What are you waiting for?
“What am I waiting for?” he muttered.
“Huh?”
“I said, what are we waiting for? Let’s get this done and get the holy hell out of here.”
From their saddlebags they each took a small cotton bag. These contained gunpowder extracted from the smaller firecrackers Sheemie had brought them two days before. Alain dropped to his knees, pulled his knife, and began to crawl backward, digging a trench as far under the roll of brush as he could.
“Dig it deep,” Cuthbert said. “We don’t want the wind to blow it away.”
Alain gave him a look which was remarkably hot. “Do you want to do it? Just so you can make sure it’s done right?”
It’s the thinny, Cuthbert thought. It’s working on him, too.
“No, Al,” he said humbly. “You’re doing fine for someone who’s both blind and soft in the head. Go on.”
Alain looked at him fiercely a moment longer, then grinned and resumed the trench under the brush. “You’ll die young, Bert.”
“Aye, likely.” Cuthbert dropped to his own knees and began to crawl after Alain, sprinkling gunpowder into the trench and trying to ignore the buzzy, cajoling voice of the thinny. No, the gunpowder probably wouldn’t blow away, not unless there was a full gale. But if it rained, even the rolls of brush wouldn’t be much protection. If it rained—
Don’t think of that, he told himself. That’s ka.
They finished loading gunpowder trenches under both sides of the brush barrier in only ten minutes, but it felt longer. To the horses as well, it seemed; they were stamping impatiently at the far end of their tethers, their ears laid back and their eyes rolling. Cuthbert and Alain untied them and mounted up. Cuthbert’s horse actually bucked twice . . . except it felt more to Cuthbert as if the poor old thing were shuddering.
In the middle distance, bright sunshine twanged of bright steel. The tankers at Hanging Rock. They had been pulled in as light to the sandstone outcrop as possible, but when the sun was high, most of the shadow disappeared, and concealment disappeared with it.
“I really can’t believe it,” Alain said as they started back. It would be a long ride, including a wide swing around Hanging Rock to make sure they weren’t seen.
“They must think we’re blind.”
“It’s stupid they think we are,” Cuthbert said, “but I suppose it comes to the same.”
Now that Eyebolt Canyon was falling behind them, he felt almost giddy with relief. Were they going in there a few days from now? Actually going in, riding to within mere yards of where that cursed puddle started? He couldn’t believe it …
and he made himself stop thinking about it before he could start believing it.
“More riders heading out to Hanging Rock,” Alain said, pointing back toward the woods beyond the canyon. “Do you see them?”
They were small as ants from this distance, but Bert saw them very well.
“Changing the guard. The important thing is that they don’t see us— you don’t think they can, do you?”
“Over here? Not likely.”
Cuthbert didn’t think so, either.
“They’ll all be down come Reap, won’t they?” Alain asked. “It won’t do us much good to only catch a few.”
“Yes—I’m pretty sure they all will.”
“Jonas and his pals?”
“Them, too.”
Ahead of them, the Bad Grass grew closer. The wind blew hard in their faces, making their eyes water, but Cuthbert didn’t mind. The sound of the thinny was down to a faint drone behind him, and would soon be gone completely. Right now that was all he needed to make him happy.
“Do you think we’ll get away with it, Bert?”
“Dunno,” Cuthbert said. Then he thought of the gunpowder trenches lying beneath the dry rolls of brush, and grinned. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Al: they’ll know we were here.”
8
In Mejis, as in every other Barony of Mid-World, the week before a Fair-Day was a political week. Important people came in from the farther corners of the Barony, and there were a good many Conversationals leading up to the main
Conversational on Reaping Day. Susan was expected to be present at these—mostly as a decorative testimony to the Mayor’s continuing puissance.
Olive was also present, and, in a cruelly comic dumb-show that only the women truly appreciated, they sat on either side of the aging cockatoo, Susan pouring the coffee, Olive passing the cake, both of them gracefully accepting compliments on food and drink they’d had no hand in preparing.
Susan found it almost impossible to look at Olive’s smiling, unhappy face. Her husband would never lie with Pat Delgado’s daughter . . . but sai Thorin didn’t know that, and Susan couldn’t tell her. She had only to glimpse the Mayor’s wife from the comer other eye to remember what Roland had said that day on the Drop: For a moment I thought she was my mother. But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
Olive Thorin was nobody’s mother. That was what had opened the door to this horrible situation in the first place.
There had been something much on Susan’s mind to do, but with the round of activities at Mayor’s House, it was but three days to Reaping before she got the chance. Finally, following this latest Conversational, she was able to slip out of Pink Dress with Applique (how she hated it! how she hated them all!) and jump back into jeans, a plain riding shirt, and a ranch-coat. There was no time to braid
her hair, as she was expected back for Mayor’s Tea, but Maria tied it back for her and off she had gone to the house she would shortly be leaving forever.
Her business was in the back room of the stable—the room her father had used as an office—but she went into the house first and heard what she’d hoped to hear: her aunt’s ladylike, whistling snores. Lovely.
Susan got a slice of bread and honey and took it out to the barn-stable, protecting it as best she could from the clouds of dust that blew across the yard in the wind.
Her aunt’s stuffy-guy rattled on his post in the garden.
She ducked into the sweet-smelling shadows of the barn. Pylon and Felicia nickered hello, and she divided what she hadn’t eaten between them. They seemed pleased enough to get it. She made especially of Felicia, whom she would soon be leaving behind.