“Strangers came and ye welcomed em in!” she cried in her rusty crow’s voice.
“Welcomed em and gave em bread to eat, and it’s ruin they’ve fed ye in return!
The deaths of those ye loved and depended on, spoilage to the time of the harvest,
and gods know what curses upon the time to follow fin de ano!”
More murmurs, now louder. She had touched their deepest fear: that this year’s evil would spread, might even snarl the newly threaded stock which had so slowly and hopefully begun to emerge along the Outer Arc.
“But they’ve gone and likely won’t be back!” Rhea continued. “Mayhap just as well—why should their strange blood taint our ground? But there’s this other… one raised among us … a young woman gone traitor to her town and rogue among her own kind.”
Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper on this last phrase; her listeners strained forward to hear, faces grim, eyes big. And now Rhea pulled the pallid, skinny woman in the rusty black dress forward. She stood Cordelia in front other like a doll or a ventriloquist’s dummy, and whispered in her ear … but the whisper travelled, somehow; they all heard it.
“Come, dear. Tell em what ye told me.”
In a dead, carrying voice, Cordelia said: “She said she wouldn’t be the Mayor’s gilly. He wasn’t good enough for such as her, she said. And then she seduced Will Dearborn. The price of her body was a fine position in Gilead as his consort . . .
and the murder of Hart Thorin. Dearborn paid her price. Lusty as he was for her, he paid gladly. His friends helped; they may have had the use of ‘er as well, for all I know. Chancellor Rimer must have gotten in their way. Or p’rhaps they just saw him, and felt like doing him, too.”
“Bastards!” Pettie cried. “Sneaking young culls!”
“Now tell cm what’s needed to clarify the new season before it’s sp’iled, dearie,”
Rhea said in a crooning voice.
Cordelia Delgado raised her head and looked around at the men. She took a breath, pulling the sour, intermingled smells of gray and beer and smoke and whiskey deep into her spinster’s lungs.
“Take her. Ye must take her. I say it in love and sorrow, so I do.”
Silent. Their eyes.
“Paint her hands.”
The glass gaze of the thing on the wall, looking its stuffed judgment over the waiting room.
“Charyou tree, ” Cordelia whispered.
They did not cry their agreement but sighed it, like autumn wind through stripped
trees.
3
Sheemie ran after the bad Coffin Hunter and Susan-sai until he could literally run no more—his lungs were afire and the stitch which had formed in his side turned into a cramp. He pitched forward onto the grass of the Drop, his left hand clutching his right armpit, grimacing with pain.
He lay there for some time with his face deep in the fragrant grass, knowing they were getting farther and farther ahead but also knowing it would do him no good to get up and start running again until the stitch was good and gone. If he tried to hurry the process, the stitch would simply come back and lay him low again. So he lay where he was, lifting his head to look at the tracks left by Susan-sai and the bad Coffin Hunter, and he was just about ready to try his feet when Caprichoso bit him. Not a nip, mind you, but a good healthy chomp. Capi had had a difficult twenty-four hours, and he hadn’t much liked to see the author of all his misery lying on the grass, apparently taking a nap.
“Yeee-OWWWW-by-damn!” Sheemie cried, and rocketed to his feet. There was nothing so magical as a good bite on the ass, a man of more philosophic bent might have reflected; it made all other concerns, no matter how heavy or sorrowful, disappear like smoke.
He whirled about. “Why did you do that, you mean old sneak of a Capi?” Sheemie was rubbing his bottom vigorously, and large tears of pain stood out in his eyes.
“That hurts like . . . like a big old sonovabitch!”
Caprichoso extended his neck to its maximum length, bared his teeth in the satanic grin which only mules and dromedaries can command, and brayed. To Sheemie that bray sounded very like laughter.
The mule’s lead still trailed back between his sharp little hoofs. Sheemie reached for it, and when Capi dipped his head to inflict another bite, the boy gave him a good hard whack across the side of his narrow head. Capi snorted and blinked.
“You had that coming, mean old Capi,” Sheemie said. “I’ll have to shit from a squat for a week, so I will. Won’t be able to sit on the damned jakes.” He doubled the lead over his fist and climbed aboard the mule. Capi made no attempt to buck him off, but Sheemie winced as his wounded part settled atop the ridge of the
mule’s spine. This was good luck just the same, though, he thought as he kicked the animal into motion. His ass hurt, but at least he wouldn’t have to walk … or try to run with a stitch in his side.
“Go on, stupid!” he said. “Hurry up! Fast as you can, you old sonovabitch!”
In the course of the next hour, Sheemie called Capi “you old sonovabitch” as often as possible—he had discovered, as many others had before him, that only the first cussword is really hard; after that, there’s nothing quite like them for relieving one’s feelings.
4
Susan’s trail cut diagonally across the Drop toward the coast and the grand old adobe that rose there. When Sheemie reached Seafront, he dismounted outside the arch and only stood, wondering what to do next. That they had come here, he had no doubt—Susan’s horse, Pylon, and the bad Coffin Hunter’s horse were tethered side by side in the shade, occasionally dropping their heads and blowing in the pink stone trough that ran along the courtyard’s ocean side.
What to do now? The riders who came and went beneath the arch (mostly white-headed vaqs who’d been considered too old to form a part of Lengyll’s party) paid no attention to the inn-boy and his mule, but Miguel might be a different story.
The old mozo had never liked him, acted as if he thought Sheemie would turn thief, given half a chance, and if he saw Coral’s slop-and-carry-boy skulking in the courtyard, Miguel would very likely drive him away.
No, he won’t, he thought grimly. Not today, today I can’t let him boss me. I won’t go even if he hollers.
But if the old man did holler and raised an alarm, what then? The bad Coffin Hunter might come and kill him. Sheemie had reached a point where he was willing to die for his friends, but not unless it served a purpose.
So he stood in the cold sunlight, shifting from foot to foot, irresolute, wishing he was smarter than he was, that he could think of a plan. An hour passed this way, then two. It was slow time, each passing moment an exercise in frustration. He sensed any opportunity to help Susan-sai slipping away, but didn’t know what to do about it. Once he heard what sounded like thunder from the west . . . although a bright fall day like this didn’t seem right for thunder.
He had about decided to chance the courtyard anyway—it was temporarily deserted, and he might be able to make it across to the main house—when the man he had feared came staggering out of the stables.
Miguel Torres was festooned with reap-charms and was very drunk. He approached the center of the courtyard in rolling side-to-side loops, the tugstring of his sombrero twisted against his scrawny throat, his long white hair flying. The front of his chibosa was wet, as if he had tried to take a leak without remembering that you had to unlimber your dingus first. He had a small ceramic jug in one hand. His eyes were fierce and bewildered.
“Who done this?” Miguel cried. He looked up at the afternoon sky and the Demon Moon which floated there. Little as Sheemie liked the old man, his heart cringed.
It was bad luck to look directly at old Demon, so it was. “Who done this thing? I ask that you tell me, senor! Por favor!” A pause, then a scream so powerful that Miguel reeled on his feet and almost fell. He raised his fists, as if he would box an answer out of the winking face in the moon, then dropped them wearily. Corn liquor slopped from the neck of the jug and wet him further. “Maricon, ” he muttered. He staggered to the wall (almost tripping over the rear legs of the bad Coffin Hunter’s horse as he went), then sat down with his back against the adobe wall. He drank deeply from the jug, then pulled his sombrero up and settled it over his eyes. His arm twitched the jug, then settled it back, as if in the end it had proved too heavy. Sheemie waited until the old man’s thumb came unhooked from the jughandle and the hand flopped onto the cobbles. He started forward, then decided to wait even a little longer. Miguel was old and Miguel was mean. but Sheemie guessed Miguel might also be tricky. Lots of folks were, especially the mean ones.