Eventually, he got fed up with the whole performance, and the next time the young man prodded his shoulder he took his arm and twisted it and forced the youth to the sand and held him there for a while, twisting the arm in its socket just enough – he hoped – to avoid breaking anything but with sufficient force to disable the fellow for a minute or two while he took up his cart again and trundled it slowly away over the dunes.
It seemed to work.
Two nights later – the night after the regular woman had come and he’d told her about the terrible battleship and the two sisters and the man who was not yet forgiven – the girl came knocking at his door. The pet seabird with the clipped wings jumped and squawked outside while the cried and told him she loved him and there’d been an argument with her father, and he tried to push her away, but she slipped in underneath his arm and lay weeping on his bed.
He looked out into the starless night and stared into the eyes of the crippled, silent bird. Then he went over to the bed, dragged the girl from it and forced her out of the door, slamming it and bolting it.
Her cries, and those of the bird, came through the gaps in the planks for a while, like the seeping sand. He stuck his fingers in his ears and pulled the grimy covers over his head.
Her family, the sheriff, and perhaps twenty other people from the parktown, came for him the next night.
The girl had been found that evening, battered and raped and dead on the path from his shack. He stood in the doorway of the hut, looking out into the torch-lit crowd, met the eyes of the young man who had wanted the girl, and knew.
There was nothing he could do, because the guilt in one pair of eyes was outshone by the vengeance in too many others, and so he slammed the door and ran, across the shack and straight through the rickety planks on the far side and out into the dunes and the night.
He fought five of them that night and nearly killed two, until he found the young man and one of his friends searching unenthusiastically for him back near the track.
He clubbed the friend unconscious, took the young man by the throat. He gathered up both their knives, and held one blade to the throat of the youth as he marched him back to the shack.
He set fire to the shack.
When the light had attracted a dozen or so of the men, he stood up on the tallest dune above the hollow, holding the youth with one hand.
The parktown people gazed up at the stranger, lit by flames. He let the boy fall to the sand, threw him both knives.
The boy picked up the knives; charged.
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.