by Mick Farren
Couples fornicated on the sand between the domes, right alongside the sprawled figures of those who had either been pummelled unconscious or had passed out from some alarming combination of drink and drugs. They made no attempts at modesty and appeared to have no sense of shame. The air was filled with a cacophony of screams and grunts. Women shrieked and giggled, there were roars of laughter and bouts of drunken singing. Somewhere someone was bawling mindlessly. Someone else was crying. When the drovers had a party they took it all the way to the limit.
They had hit town in the late afternoon, just before sunset. The herd had thrown up a massive cloud of dust that must have been visible for miles around. When the animals were secured in the pens on the edge of the town, the drovers had come in looking for whatever good times Wad-Hasa Wells had to offer. Even weary, sweat stained and dirty from their trek across the desert, they presented a wild and crudely romantic image. They came into the town with the swagger of an invading army. They strutted in their high-heeled boots as though they owned the land. Hard watchful eyes peered from beneath the drooping brims of their wide hats. Heavy blasters and wicked, curved knives hung from their wide, decorated leather belts. The weapons were in easy reach, an unarguable back-up to each man's nomad bravado. Like most wandering peoples, a drover's wealth was ostentatiously displayed on his person. Jewellery glittered. Gold seemed to be a particular favourite. It hung from their ears in heavy hoops, around necks in chains or medallions, it decorated the hilts of knives and the butts of blasters and weighted down hands and arms in the form of rings and bracelets.
The drovers came from no particular tribe or nation. Their weatherbeaten, often scarred faces ranged from deep mahogany to blue black. There were equine faces with high foreheads and prominent noses, there were broad, flat featured faces with slanting almond eyes. The drovers came from all over the world. What held them together was the loneliness and hardship of their work and a fierce pride in their freedom and individualism.
As they made their way into Wad-Hasa, their short, brightly coloured cloaks or ponchos swirled behind them, and their loose, flowing trousers flapped in the light desert breeze. Determined to make an impression, they strode like princelings rather than men who, in reality, performed a dirty menial job and spent their lives smelling of animal dung and stale sweat.
This picture of the primitive invading army was enhanced by the long lance that each man carried. These too were decorated to the individual's taste but were not, in fact, weapons; they were the main tool of the drover's trade. The little tingler unit set in the tip of each lance was the most efficient way of goading the stubborn and bellicose veebes into a semblance of movement.
As the drovers got the first few drinks inside them and began to move around flirting with the girls, Phaid decided he had seen his chance to profit from the invasion. He had pulled out a deck of cards and attempted to get a game started. The drovers couldn't have reacted worse if he had committed open blasphemy. Later he learned that there was an almost universally held belief that a man had only a limited amount of luck in his life and it was considered close to a crime to go squandering it on a game of chance. He had only diverted the wrath of the drovers by quickly claiming that he was a fortune-teller, not a gambler. This, however, had put him in trouble with the Deemer's men. Fortune-telling was illegal in Wad-Hasa and only a lot of fast talking by both him and Dorrie had saved him from a flogging.
A few fights had broken out while it was still daylight. These had been minor affairs, though. Pairs of drovers settling trail grudges and individuals arguing over the price of a bottle or a woman were easily quelled by the Deemer's men using a firm hand and occasionally resorting to the flexible clubs that seemed to be their favourite weapons.
Even through the garish, blood red desert twilight the combination of the Deemer's men and the seemingly indefatigable townswomen kept the drovers in check. Once darkness, however, spread over the little oasis, the belligerence of the now hopelessly drunk herdsmen began building towards the point where nothing would be able to hold it.
The breakout had started with a chair swinging, glass shattering brawl inside the sink. It had apparently been sparked off by an evil tempered giant who answered to the name of Murf. Murf had decided that the proprietor of the sink was simultaneously raising the prices and reducing the measures of the booze. In a towering rage of customer indignation, he had attempted to dismantle the place single-handed. His companions, deciding that wrecking the sink was too much fun for Murf to have all to himself, had joined in the destruction with a will. The proprietor had summoned the Deemer's men to save what was left of his property, and the confrontation was on.
Phaid watched from the shelter of the locked and barred entrance dome of a nervous citizen's home. A large squad of the Deemer's men had charged into the sink, but after only a short pause, filled with yells and muffled crashings, they had emerged again, retreating before a crowd of angry drovers hurling glasses, bottles, debris and any other missile that came to hand. The Deemer's men had failed to hold the line, and anarchy flared like a conflagration all through the town. Pitched battles spread over the sand in and around the domes, and the darkness was filled with tangles of grunting, fighting men.
It was at this point that Phaid decided to make himself scarce. He could scarcely believe the run of events in which he seemed to be trapped. There had to be an easier way to get back to civilisation than the tortuous route that he was travelling. No matter how he wracked his memory, he couldn't fix on an incident that could have caused this almost supernatural run of ill luck.
It wasn't quite clear who was the first to use a blaster. Afterwards, the drovers claimed that it was one of the Deemer's men who fired first. Those nearest to the incident told how the law officer and a lanky young herdsman had set about each other and when the drover seemed to be getting the best of things, the lawman had drawn his weapon and burned his opponent down. A girl who had been caught in the middle of the melee thought the drover might have had a knife in his hand, but this was hotly disputed by his companions.
Whatever the truth might be, once one shot had been fired, everyone got in on the act. The night was split by the white, jagged crackle of fuse tubes and the roar of blasters. Phaid ducked low as the stink of burned flesh and superheated sand reached him.
Phaid was relieved to find that the fire fight didn't last as long as he'd feared. The Deemer's men appeared to have given the decision to the drovers, at least for the duration of the night. The town was split, the drovers had the surface and the townspeople, with the exception of some very independent women, had retreated to the safety of their underground dwellings. Most locked up tight, but some, backed by teams of heavily armed relatives and neighbours, still sold liquor and dog gold from a handful of open doorways.
The uproar went on long into the night. All through.
Phaid did his best to make himself as invisible as possible. This wasn't a total success. Despite Makartur's stated intention to keep his head down, the big man had mingled with the drovers and then proceeded to get as aggressively drunk as possible. He had even, for a while, struck up a stumbling, staggering companionship with Murf, the hulking oaf who had initiated the first fight in the sink. Unfortunately, they had spotted Phaid creeping around the edge of a dome and attempted for a while to get him as drunk as they were. Although, on the surface, Makartur was aggressively boisterous and jovial, Phaid could sense a layer of hostile distrust beneath the backslapping. It disturbed him. Drunken warriors could be lethally unpredictable.
After a while the two of them got bored with trying to force booze on Phaid and they moved off in not very efficient pursuit of three local women who had given them the sign as they lurched past. Their effort to get Phaid drunk hadn't been completely unsuccessful. He found himself reeling and no longer worrying so much about his self preservation. He even started to tentatively join in the spirit of the drovers' crude partying. Somewhere along the line someone had given him a twi
st of dog gold. A few minutes after that the hallucinations had begun. From then on, Phaid had wandered through the chaos of the small desert town in a soft cocoon of extreme, if somewhat blurred, well being. The scattered fires became sources of swirling and undulating colour. Rainbows flashed where the light was reflected from sweating skin or the polished blade of a knife. The figures around the fires and those moving unsteadily through the darkness were twisted into grotesque and jumbled shapes that were all part of some weird, wild and not quite human dance. Even the domes seemed to take on animated life. They appeared to throb and pulse like bubbles of energy trying to break loose from the ground and float up and up into the wild night sky. Phaid felt as though he was walking around the inside of some giant boiling cauldron.
If, under more normal circumstances, half of these things had happened to Phaid they would have driven him at least part way out of his mind. He would have feared for his sanity and fled before the distortion of his senses. The joy of dog gold, however, and the reason its users sang its praises so loudly, was that, no matter how fearsome the hallucinations might appear, or how fast they might bear down on the unwary user, anyone in the grip of the drug was also soothed and lulled into a state of simply not giving a damn. Phaid felt he was drifting effortlessly, a few inches off the ground. He was invincible. Nothing could touch him. There was a bottle in his hand. He could hardly remember his name.
A familiar face swam into his field of vision. Red lips moved into the shape of a smile. They parted slightly.
'Lords, dearie. You look well out of it.'
Phaid stood for a moment, staring stupidly. At first the name refused to come.
'Dorrie!'
The face looked concerned.
'Are you all right, love?'
Phaid realised that the face was expecting him to come up with an answer, but once again his mind only turned over with the greatest of difficulty.
'Yeah . . . I'm . . . fine.'
'You've been at the dog gold, haven't you, dearie? You got to watch that stuff. It'll rot your brain.'
Phaid held out his bottle. It was the best he could do.
'Would you . . . like a ... drink?'
A body joined the face and a hand stretched out to take the bottle. While Dorrie drank, Phaid found himself staring transfixed at her ample breasts. All manner of disconnected but very voluptuous images chased each other through his head. Dorrie held out the bottle, regarding Phaid with a raised eyebrow.
'What d'you think you're looking at?'
'I'm . . . looking ... at you.'
Dorrie laughed and shook her head. 'I know what's going through your mind, all you dog gold fiends are the same. One look at a woman and everything except sex is gone with the wind.' She struck a pose. 'Well, dearie, do you like what you see?'
'Y . . . yeah.'
'Is that all you've got to say?'
She came closer to him. Her hand was stroking his cheek. He could feel those full, wonderful breasts press against him. Then Dorrie let out a gasp and Phaid's world exploded into brutal, blinding, bright orange pain. He had one clear thought. He had been hit very hard over the back of the head with something very solid. Maybe a blaster or maybe the butt of a lance; then he sagged down into merciful blackness.
Sadly, the blackness didn't last forever. All too soon the pain ebbed back. It wasn't any ordinary pain. It wasn't even a singular pain. The pain that Phaid was experiencing came on multiple levels and in a variety of forms. Sunlight was trying to drill its way through his eyelids. His stomach was twisted into a leaden, acid knot. Every muscle ached and, over and above it all, there was the scarcely thinkable throbbing at the back of his skull. It felt as though it had be.en caved in. Just to make matters worse, someone kicked him in the ribs.
'Up, you!'
'Wha?'
One of the Deemer's men was standing over him with a less than pleasant expression on his face. It was morning.
'Up!'
Fighting back nausea, Phaid scrambled to his feet before the heavy boot could get in another kick. All around him, other drovers were being woken in a similar manner. The Deemer's men seemed to be getting even for their defeat of the night before. The sleepy, hungover drovers found themselves herded at weapon-point into a sullen group near the animal pens. Makartur was among them. Phaid edged up beside him.
'What's going on? What are they planning to do to us?'
Makartur regarded Phaid through bleary, bloodshot eyes.
'Why don't you piss off, manny, and let me suffer on my own.'
'Don't all these weapons being pointed at us worry you at all?'
Makartur shook his head and winced. 'Not as much as this headache.'
'Suppose they start shooting?'
Makartur glowered. 'There'll be no shooting so long as we don't start anything. Everyone knows the rules.'
'The rules?'
'Aye, the rules. We're being thrown out of town. It always works that way in these hick towns. The drovers come in, they spend their money, get a bit out of hand and find themselves thrown out in the morning.'
Phaid gingerly explored the back of his head with his fingertips. There was a lot of swelling and his hair was matted with dried blood.
'Somebody slugged me.'
Makartur sniffed. He didn't seem too interested.
'Was it your woman or your bottle they were after? Or did you aggravate someone?'
'Woman, I guess, although she was scarcely mine.'
Makartur glanced briefly at the back of Phaid's scalp.
'It looks like they used the butt end of a blaster. You ought to get that cleaned up.'
He pointed to where drovers were clustered around a line of wooden tubs.
'There's water over there. You'd best dunk your head in it.'
The cold and not too clean water came as a quite considerable shock. After two or three dips below the surface he started to feel a little better. He was cleaning the worst of the blood out of his hair when the drover beside him nudged him in the ribs and pointed past the watching guards. A short man with a tendency to waddle was coming towards the pens, flanked by what looked like his own personal guard. He wore a much more resplendent version of the standard white uniform.
'Will you look there. It must be the boss of the whole damn town.'
'The Deemer himself.'
'He's probably looking for an extra payment for last night's trouble.'
'They cover every angle, don't they.'
The drover shrugged. 'They got a living to make.'
'I've noticed.'
Phaid watched while two drovers were let through the cordon of guards. They went into a huddle with the Deemer and his two assistants. Phaid glanced at the man beside him.
'What's going on now?'
'They're figuring the extent of the damage.'
'Who are those two?'
'The drive boss and the drovers' representative.'
'Representative?'
'The drive boss works for the herd owner. The representative looks after the drovers' interests. That way nobody gets to put anything over on anyone else. At least, that's the theory, but once the bribing gets down . . . well, you can work it out for yourself. Our drive boss is called Shako. He's a mean bastard, but he's fair when he's sober. The rep, Graudia, he's something else again. If you've got a gripe, he's the last one you want to go to. By all accounts the owners have got him right in their pockets.'
After what looked like a good deal of haggling, a price must have been set for the night's rampage, because money changed hands, the Deemer's men lowered their weapons and suddenly the drovers were going about their business. Amid the hustle and bustle, Phaid relocated Makartur.
'Are you going with them?'
Makartur nodded. 'Aye, I hired on already.'
'What about me?'
'What about you? I'm not your keeper.'
'Can I hire on too?'
'You best go and check in with Shako, the drive boss, he's . . .'
&n
bsp; 'I know which one he is.'
Phaid had had about enough of Makartur's attitude. He made his way to where Shako was standing, bellowing orders and generally turning the hungover drovers into a cohesive working unit. Just as the drover at the tub had described, he was a mean bastard. Tall and rangy, he had cold, pale green eyes and the features of a hawk. Without any preamble, he looked Phaid up and down and apparently didn't like what he saw.
'You want to sign on?'
That's right.'
'You've worked a herd before?'
'Of course I have. It ain't been for a long time, but I worked on a drive before.'
Phaid lied glibly, but Shako wasn't convinced.
'You don't look like no drover.'
'Appearances can be deceptive.'
'Show me your hands.'
Phaid held out both hands, palm upwards. He was acutely aware that they lacked the horny callosity that was the mark of a true drover. He had the soft, well cared for hands of someone who rarely touched anything more rugged than a deck of cards. Shako sniffed.
'It must have been a very long time ago indeed.'
Phaid dropped his hands.'Yeah, well . . .'
'Personally, I think you're a damned liar, but I had three men killed last night so I can't be choosy who I take.
You're hired.' He waved his arm at Makartur who was standing around waiting for an assignment. 'You, hill man, get over here.'
Makartur scowled and moved towards them. Shako nodded in Phaid's direction.
'He's driving for you.'
Makartur's eyes narrowed.
'Him?'
'You're both new so you're partnered together.'
'I'd rather it wasn't him.'
