The Golden Cut
Page 16
She ran until the night turned grey. The homunculi followed at her heels. In the pre-dawn she stopped where twin boulders shouldered the sky. The Directrix’s face loomed pale and shiny above her. Its little legs dangled below its rocky perch at the top of the cleft.
“The plan worked, then,” it called down to her. “Where’s that whining horse of yours?”
A storm cracked and snapped in the distance.
“Come down from there and join us, Directrix.”
Its wooden legs clattered as it rolled down the boulders. After a few moments its head burrowed up from the dirt beneath the rocks. It moved with difficulty through mud that reached and clung and bubbled around its body. The homunculi sagged, waterlogged and wary.
The Directrix stopped struggling. “I still don’t see Cowhead.”
“Yeah,” said TJ, “about that.” Raindrops turned to black feathers as they landed at her feet. “Cowhead’s just one of a few things I don’t have. In fact, far as I’m concerned, two’s a bit too much more than company right now.”
The Directrix swivelled its eyes. “The Mouth of Hypatia restored to the Star gang. That was our agreement.”
“That was what you wanted. Turns out it wasn’t really what I wanted.”
“So what the hell do you want?”
“Can’t you fucking guess?” TJ sneered.
The Directrix launched itself at her. It slammed into TJ’s jaw with the hard dome of its head and TJ fell backwards with a grunt. It climbed onto her chest and kicked her in the face.
Homunculi surged over them. They plucked up the Directrix and tossed it high into the air. It landed on its back but immediately jumped back to its feet.
TJ tottered upright. She punched the Directrix to the ground. It clacked and screeched. Wet black feathers filled its mouth.
She ground her boot into its body. A sharp crack. A burst of splinters. She laughed into its face, then winced and spat out a broken tooth. Rainwater smeared blood across her chin.
“Hey,” she told it, “I never thanked you for helping me escape.” She picked it up by one foot and hurled it against the boulders. “Adios.”
She turned towards the homunculi, staggering as she went.
34.
At last she fell and could not get up again.
The ridge flowed beneath her like milk and sounded a low, resonant note. It was the sound of refracted particles, the chant of flame triangles below ground. TJ wept and let herself be lulled by the singing sands.
When she opened her eyes the homunculi were standing around her in a circle. She was back in the field of petroglyphs, but the field was transformed. Torrential rain pelted onto rocks that writhed beneath the impact, alive with the violence of water. She got to her feet and squinted into a sky that gave no clues as to hour or direction. The homunculi, now grown tall and broad, stepped aside to let her through. She walked out onto the seething plain.
Lashing elements brought the handiwork of the Invisibles to life. What once had been intricate rock carvings were now elaborate organisms of three and more dimensions, dancing on planes that intersected only tangentially with her own. Trees sprouted in proliferating loops, tangling into an arbour. A twistor wrenched the arbour into the sky, where its countless facets span and shimmered. Huge animals galloped and groaned, swallowed themselves by the tail and gave birth to themselves through gaping mouths. Elongated humanoids lived and died on the animals’ backs. Lifetimes passed in the blink of an eye, or else insignificant moments stretched into aeons, while the humanoids harvested the animals’ hair, mined their hides for fuel and profit, and gazed in wonder at the droplets of sweat that glowed like heavenly bodies and fell from the animals’ flanks. Diaphanous membranes flowed by in vast geometric shapes, spirals and triangles rendered in ideal configurations that drew shadows where the petroglyphs had lain. TJ stopped bothering to move her feet and was carried along in the sweep of it all.
***
Many sunrises came and went while she travelled on the shoulders of the homunculi. The desert rolled away beneath the creatures’ feet, keeping time with the clouds and stars that rolled above their heads. The rain had stopped once they had left the field of dancing glyphs. It was replaced by a dry wind that never let up. It shredded TJ’s clothes, and grazed her face and hands when the sand whipped across them.
The homunculi were a posse, slow but implacable. At first they had been wet with rainwater that caught in the hollows of their strangely moulded bodies. TJ would occasionally stop, dismount, and beckon to one or other of them to kneel before her so that she could sip from its eyes or mouth. But now, after days of hot dry wind, their bodies were dull and leathery. TJ’s lips were cracked and her tongue swollen; the sky was as cracked as her lips. Mirages hung there like split seams in a shiny costume, glimpses of supple waterfalls and green banks. Twice she saw the hacienda itself high above her, dappled with blossom and cool shelter, the stable block quiet and empty, a flock of birds rising from the paddock behind and swooping towards her before disappearing in the spooling light.
Another sunrise brought another vision: a strip of low trees on the horizon. They were brown and scorched-looking but surviving, with a smear of darkness at their heart. This time the vision did not dissolve on the wind, but instead thickened into solidity as TJ approached. A real patch of scrubland, with perhaps a real pool inside it. She urged the homunculus beneath her to move faster.
The hazy sandstone daylight began to sketch the outline of a horse among the trees. She dismounted and stumbled towards it. It was a grey Shire, saddled and bridled; its reins were caught on thorny bushes. Beyond the bushes lay a curving arroyo as grey as the horse. Patches of darker and lighter sand showed where some stretches had been dried by the wind and others sheltered from it by the twists and turns of a vanished river. The rainstorm had dragged the banks of the arroyo down into its base. TJ made out a blurry human figure down there in the darker sand, almost hidden in a hollow. She watched it for a while, then turned to free the reins of the trembling horse.
“Help,” said the human far below. “Help me.”
TJ looked again. The figure was up to its chest in sand, leaning backwards at an absurd angle. “Why?” she said.
“Quicksand.”
TJ paused. The horse was perfectly calm now. The fallen rider’s bedroll was intact at the canticle. A Winchester was sheathed against the Shire’s flank, and a water canteen hung beside it.
“There’s gold in my pocket,” the fallen rider called up.
“Are you sinking?”
“No. But unless you help me I’m not getting out of here either.”
TJ handed the reins to a homunculus and took the canteen for herself, checking the rifle’s chamber to see it was loaded. “Ok,” she said between mouthfuls of water. “Got a rope?”
“On the saddle.”
She found it, twisted and tied it into a lariat, and tossed down the knotted end. It landed a few inches from the woman’s shoulder. The woman yelled and cursed as she struggled to pull her arms free of the mud. She tipped herself further backwards to angle her arms parallel to the surface. Her long hair splayed out in muddy relief around her head. Several minutes passed before she managed to heave up first her left arm and then her right. She rested a while, gasping for breath, then grabbed the lariat and put her head and arms through it, pulling it beneath her armpits and across her breasts.
“Ready,” she called to TJ.
TJ peered down at the mud-caked lump of the woman’s face, then threw her end of the lariat to the homunculi. Two of them caught it and began to drag it away from the bank through the trees. In a series of shuddering jerks, the woman rose huffing and panting out of the quicksand. Her thighs and elbows gouged tracks in the dirty bank; her body scraped against the dirt, and she howled. With her clothes caked in the brown clay she looked like a golem.
At last she clawed her way over the lip of the arroyo and flopped onto her back at TJ’s feet. TJ aimed the rifle at her.
r /> The woman lay with her hands palm-up on either side of her head and said, “Don’t be a fool, TJ.”
TJ put down the rifle and crouched, pulling gobbets of mud and strands of filthy hair out of woman’s face.
“Don’t you know me?”
TJ’s face was still blank.
“It’s me. Mei-Lin.”
35.
They sat together in the shade while Mei-Lin’s clothes dried on the bushes.
“There was a group of us from the Slits. We got separated in a storm. The Star gang got me.” She hunched her head over her knees. “I wasn’t in good enough shape to get away from them, I guess.” She wiped her face on the back of her hand.
TJ leaned against a tree and gazed at her levelly. “And then what happened?”
“They carried me off to some little one-horse town somewhere. They didn’t really seem to know what to do with me.”
“How did you escape?”
“Wasn’t so difficult in the end. A fight broke out in the camp, and I took my chance to steal a horse. I was going to hide out here in the arroyo bed till nightfall. But then the rain came and the walls fell in on me.”
“Lucky I came along.”
“Yeah. But you’re on your own. You didn’t find Cowhead.”
“You were right about Cantos. He double-crossed me.”
“Somehow it doesn’t feel good to be able to say I told you so.”
TJ smiled at her for the first time. Her six-fingered hand was hidden inside the folds of her jacket. “Do you still have Cowhead’s eye on your thumb?”
“Yeah.” She stared down at her hand. “It doesn’t open very often these days, though. You?”
“Lost it in a gunfight.”
“Let me see.”
“No, the scar is too ugly.”
“Still the same vain old TJ.” Mei-Lin’s voice was sad.
“I did find Cowhead,” said TJ after a pause, “or at any rate, I know where she is. We need to get a posse together to go rescue her.”
“Where? Is she ok?”
“She’s on a big ranch called Alexandria. Took there by horse rustlers, I guess. She’s a pretty fancy girl, after all. We have to hurry before they sell her on.”
“You know where this ranch is?”
“Reckon I can find my way there.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Mei-Lin jumped to her feet and grabbed her clothes, beating them with the flat of her hand to shake the dried mud loose.
“Sure,” said TJ, “let’s go.”
Mei-Lin darted to her and kissed her face.
***
TJ rode on the shoulders of one of the homunculi. Mei-Lin was supposed to be riding behind on the Shire, but before long TJ realised the Shire had come to a halt. She looked round to see it standing a few hundred feet away, Mei-Lin slumped in the saddle with the leathers loose in her fingers. TJ dismounted and walked back to her.
“You’re exhausted, love. Take a timeout and let me hold the reins.”
Mei-Lin simply nodded. TJ called the homunculus to her and remounted, keeping the reins of the Shire in her left hand. They forged ahead, TJ leading the Shire behind her.
It was when the great wall of rock pocked with cavemouths came into view that Mei-Lin snapped out of it. “Hey! Be careful, the Star gang’s camp is around here somewhere. Was I this close to Cowhead all along? You can give me the reins now, I’m back in the land of the living.”
TJ pulled up the homunculus and let the Shire draw alongside it. Mei-Lin stretched out a hand to take back the reins.
“Grab her,” said TJ.
The homunculi rushed the Shire. Two of them reached with their sinewy hands and pulled Mei-Lin out of the saddle. She shrieked and struggled. One of them gripped her with its arms around her chest and shoulders. The other clamped her feet together and held them fast. She swung between them, choking, thrashing her head and grinding her teeth. The Shire whinnied and kicked while the other homunculi dodged its flailing hooves. One came around to the front, and TJ handed it the reins.
Mei-Lin glared at her with blazing eyes. “Friendship is sacred.”
“Fuck that. I’m no Eleven Twenty-Three, Mei-Lin. You don’t know from sacred.”
Riding the homunculus’s shoulders, with the captive Mei-Lin weeping and cursing behind her, TJ led the way into Neutrino.
36.
The landscape was ruined. Where once had been lush greenery, sparkling flowers and birds, the earth was brown and dry and littered with bones. The basin of the hot springs was dry too, salt rime the only remains of the bathing pools. The large white stones on which she had lain with Lulu were now populated by the town’s broken children. Two small girls sat in the dry crater. Their bodies looked normal, and their heads were elegantly elongated like those of all Neutrino folk. But on their legs was neither skin nor flesh. The larger of the two girls grabbed her bare bones in her hands and held them up as TJ and her party approached.
“What in hell happened here?” said TJ. The girl shook the bones and mewed. TJ turned to Mei-Lin. “You know anything about this?” Mei-Lin merely glowered in return. She was still held fast by the homunculi.
They rode on into the main street of the little town. The limp row of shacks still stood, but this time there were no eager little boys dancing out to meet them. Shadows twitched behind some of the blanket-curtained windows, but no one answered TJ’s halloo.
The fencing around the gladiators’ corral was toppled and splintered. TJ slid from the homunculus’s shoulders, mounted the Shire and rode towards the corral, squinting in the slanted brown sunlight. A sweet sound drifted to her along the path: the voices of women singing together, borne on the scents of horseflesh and sleeping bodies. She narrowed her eyes and they snapped into focus: four women leaning listlessly against the fenceposts. Five more lay on their backs inside the enclosure, their heads together at the centre, their bodies rayed outwards to form a star. All nine of them sang:
“Durée durée durée d’or, stink of ink on the gunsmith’s breath...”
TJ raised her six-fingered left hand. The homunculi dropped Mei-Lin over the fence into the corral. Mei-Lin sprawled, winded. The singing stopped.
TJ rode the Shire into the corral, dismounted, grabbed Mei-Lin by the hair and said, “Theta, I seem to have a couple of things here that belong to you. Call it a peace offering.”
All nine of Theta were on their feet, pistols cocked.
***
TJ and Mei-Lin were tied back to back with the lariat from the Shire’s saddle. They sat amid the rocks of the dry spring, four of Theta on one side of them and five of Theta on the other. Mei-Lin stared at the ground. TJ was talking fast and bright, her eyes darting between the two groups.
“Don’t you want to know how I know your name? Or how I know that the grey Shire is the Directrix’s mount?”
“What the hell do you know about the Directrix?” said the four Theta in unison.
“They know what they fear. They’re numbers scum,” said the five Theta.
“I’m not with the numbers,” said TJ, “unlike this prisoner, who I’ve brought back to you. But I do know about the Directrix. In fact, it was the Directrix who sent for me. Just take me to it and all will become clear.”
“Lying pig.” Theta kicked TJ in the leg. The homunculi stirred behind the rocks. Almost imperceptibly, TJ shook her head at them. They ducked back down and out of sight.
Mei-Lin gave a short hollow laugh that sounded like a yelp. “You’re so full of shit that even these Star gang bitches can smell it. Their precious Directrix disappeared yesterday. That’s why they’ve been at each other’s throats.”
“Oh,” said TJ to Theta evenly. “So I got here before the Directrix made it back. That’s bad. It must have got trapped somehow.”
“Trapped where?” said the four Theta.
The five lunged and slapped the four. “Don’t talk of the Directrix to these numbers fucks!”
“But if they know something –�
�
“Oh, I do,” said TJ, “I know lots of things. I learned the secrets of dreaming from the Directrix itself. Bind him like an antelope, bind him like an antidote.”
Theta froze. Nobody spoke for a long moment.