Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  “Will you be studded with gaudy jewels as well?” He had leaned back, listening to the unexpected pleasure of her rambling.

  “Indubitably.”

  He had almost laughed out loud at that, but he hadn’t wanted to break the flow.

  “I will have to,” she had gone on, “to be sure they recognize me.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, they’ll all say to each other, it’s that woman from the statues, she must be very important. And they’ll do whatever I say, because they don’t want to find out what happens when they don’t. And they’ll bring me whatever I want. And I won’t have to spend a penny ever again.”

  He had started laughing before she did, but only by a second.

  Now she stood stony-faced, staring down the crowd. For their part, they all ignored her. They only had eyes for him.

  “You can all hear me?” he checked again. None of the people who couldn’t hear him heard the question, so there was no response. He hadn’t really been expecting one. He was stalling again.

  “Erm…” he started. He should have written something down. But he’d put that off too. Until it was too late. Until it was now.

  “So, it’s come to my attention,” he went on. It was how his father had started all his stern lectures.

  So, it has come to my attention that you punted a chicken halfway across the yard.

  So, it has come to my attention you’re unable to tell your arse from your elbow.

  So, it has come to my attention your mother caught you investigating your burgeoning manhood.

  Yes, that was exactly what he needed to be thinking about…

  “So, it has come to my attention”—he tried to strengthen his voice, his resolve—“that some of you are under the impression that I am a prophet. That I killed Mattrax. That—”

  His words were lost in a hail of cheering and whooping. People leapt up and down in front of him. They were screaming. He could literally see a man crying. Hands reached out toward him, and the crowd pressed in at the base of the wagon. He took anxious steps back from the edge, stumbling on the sacks of gold. A piece of white cloth sailed out of the crowd and landed on his face. He tugged it off. It was a pair of women’s underwear.

  “What are you doing?” he asked them. They ignored him completely.

  “Stop!” he yelled as loud as he was able. “You have to listen to me.”

  They did not. They went on for another full five minutes before they calmed enough to hear his cries. He looked at Lette—she had taken a step back behind Balur’s protective bulk. She was right. He had left this for far, far too long.

  “I said,” Will said, his voice hoarse from yelling, “that you thought that I killed Mattrax.”

  Another wave of whooping broke out through the crowd. Will held up his hands, desperate for silence.

  “We don’t just think,” broke out a voice from the crowd. “We know.”

  “Why we’re here,” shouted another.

  “Prophet! Prophet! Prophet!” The chant broke out in isolated pockets throughout the crowd. Will hung his head.

  “I am not a prophet,” Will said as loud as he could, voice full of frustration and disgust. He stared at his own feet. Dust and mud flicked up from the road had spattered his shoes. The wooden boards beneath them were worn and chipped.

  Silence fell upon them. He looked up.

  Oh, now they chose to bloody hear him.

  The gaze of the crowd had changed. It was no longer the stare of a girl gazing into her young lover’s eyes; rather it was the gaze of that girl discovering her young lover with his pants down and her sister knelt before him.

  Will swallowed hard. In the crowd, a murmur of discontent arose, drifting off into the autumnal sky. It brewed and bubbled, gaining in volume.

  Will cleared his throat, and failed to think of something else to say. He checked for escape routes. Surrounded on all sides, they did not appear to be plentiful.

  “No,” arose a voice from the middle of the crowd. “He ain’t no prophet.”

  The crowd echoed this dissension. The murmur becoming physical, a shudder running through the bodies surrounding him.

  “What you say?” A voice from elsewhere. It threatened violence.

  “He ain’t a prophet,” insisted the dissenter.

  “Well…” Will started.

  “He’s a god!” shouted the dissenter.

  Will’s jaw dropped. He tried to get out the word “no!” but was unable to do it before the crowd erupted.

  “No! No!” he screamed too late, but the crowd had gone back to not listening again. He looked down at Lette. She was shaking her head. Balur was massaging his forehead. Quirk just stared, utterly perplexed.

  This time, he thought they would break the cart. It creaked under the pressure of the hysteria. Much like his sanity. He looked out at them, hopeless. “I’m not a god,” he said quietly. “I’m just an idiot who got himself arse deep in all of this shit.”

  A small boy had worked his way to the front of the crowd. He stood at the edge of the cart staring up at Will. And despite the chaos all around him, he alone had caught Will’s words. As Will stared down, the boy stared up and their eyes met. Will watched those eyes as all the hope and joy drained away. He saw those eyes fill with horror and despair.

  He glanced away, looked to Lette. She was shaking her head, staring at the crowd in disgust.

  Will look back at the boy. The child’s bottom lip was quivering now. Will forced a smile from somewhere deep in the back of his throat up onto his face.

  “No,” he breathed and shook his head. “It’s okay. I’m a prophet if you need one.”

  The boy hesitated, then grinned. Will looked away.

  29

  Aftermath

  “Well,” said Lette, “that went about as well as sticking your balls in a fire pit.”

  Will hung his head. It struck him as a fairly accurate description. But… “You saw them,” he said. “What was I supposed to do? They’re at the point where if I shatter their dreams, they’ll shatter me right back.”

  “You are being fucking deserving of it,” rumbled Balur.

  They were still all gathered around Quirk’s thaumatic cart. The crowd had dispersed, small groups wandering off chatting among themselves. At least they all seemed happy for now. They’d probably go on being happy right up until a dragon shat all over their life expectancy.

  “Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing.”

  They all looked at Quirk. She shrugged. “I mean,” she said, “what harm can hope do?”

  “Well,” said Lette, “I suppose it depends on how utterly futile it is, and how many dragons you have chasing you.”

  “Imagine if it had worked,” Quirk said. “Imagine you managed to rip all their hope from them. How much would that really help?”

  “Well,” Lette said, clearly deciding to ignore Quirk, “now we know that our options are to die at the hands of the dragons, or to die at the hands of an angry mob.”

  “Dragons,” Balur said with a nod. Silence greeted this. Balur looked around, a slightly wounded expression on his face. “That was being the question, was it not?”

  This wasn’t right. Will just wouldn’t accept it. They had killed Mattrax. They had the gold.

  “There has to be another option,” Will said.

  “Why?” Quirk looked genuinely interested.

  “Because both of those options are shit.”

  The smallest smile Lette could make ghosted across her lips. “The farm boy has a point.”

  Will knew he did. He pressed it. “What could hide us? I mean truly hide us. Get us away from the crowd, the Consortium. Bury us where they would never look.”

  Balur grunted. “Bury is not being the best word, I am thinking.”

  “Shut up,” said Will, who was surprised by his own bravado. Balur must have been too, because instead of removing Will’s head from his spine, he did actually shut up.

  Lette and Quirk reg
arded him in equal, skeptical silence.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  Lette looked at the others, then back at him. She shrugged, quirked a half smile. “Money,” she said.

  Will threw up his hands. “We have a whole truckload of money.”

  “A rapidly diminishing truckload of money,” said Lette.

  “How can we not have enough money?” asked Will. He peered over his shoulder back at the wagon, sack piled upon sack. It was, he felt, a more than legitimate question.

  “I don’t think you fully conceive the Consortium’s resources.” Lette had a belligerent, lecturing tone. “You keep complaining that no one knows anything about Kondorra—well there’s one thing that everyone outside of Kondorra does know. It’s that the dragons are richer than the gods. That volcano you said they hang out in. I swear to you that it must be full to overflowing with gold. They can’t just track us to the end of the world. They can afford to build extra worlds to search on.”

  “We are being so fucked.” Balur had apparently decided that it was time for more color commentary, “that a madam would be telling us that we had been earning out at her brothel.”

  “I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world.” Lette’s face was as open and honest as he had ever seen it. “But if there is, then it’s about our only option. Buy ourselves a hole deep enough to hide in.” She shrugged sourly.

  Silence fell on them. Because what else could you do when the future was that bleak.

  And then, despite it all, Balur’s face split open with a wide grin. Sharp glinting tooth after sharp glinting tooth put on display in the dying afternoon light.

  “What?” Lette asked him.

  “More money, you are saying?” he said.

  Lette looked at him curiously. “Yes.”

  Balur’s grin widened even farther. He clapped his hands. “We,” he said, “are totally going to be killing us another dragon.”

  30

  Never Say Never

  “No.” Will fought against the rising bile in the back of his throat. He would not do that again. Never. Ever. Again.

  Lette stood, paced around the group, a short, tight circle. She looked from Balur to Will, back to Balur. She stopped behind Balur, put a hand on his massive shoulder. “He’s right,” she said to Will with the slightest of shrugs. Almost an apology. Almost. But not quite.

  Will threw up his arms. “How can he be right?” He stood up too, pointed back in the direction they had come. “How can that sort of death toll possibly be right?”

  “Actually,” said Quirk, “from a purely academic standpoint, I thought the death toll was remarkably low.”

  “That’s because you’re trying to assuage your guilt for killing the most of them!” shouted Will. He was reaching his breaking point. “Because Mattrax didn’t actually kill anyone! It was just us. Us and our continual fuckups. And now I’m responsible for all of these people. Me. Not you.” He pointed at Quirk. “No matter how much you pretend that you are. They’re all looking at me. And you’re all asking me to lead them to their deaths. At our fucking hands. Well, no. I won’t do it. I’m not doing it. You all can fuck right off.”

  There was a pause. Birds wheeled and called in the sky. Branches rattled in trees. A few people who had not wandered far turned and looked to see what their prophet was raving about. Will didn’t care. Screw them too.

  Quirk examined her hands. Balur scratched the back of his head. Lette reached up, stretching her arms above her head, staring off into the middle distance.

  The time, Will decided, had come to walk away. He turned his back on them.

  “You know how to do it, don’t you?” Lette said to his back. “You and Firkin talked about that too, didn’t you?”

  Will walked faster.

  31

  Shovel Loads of Straw and Shit

  It had been the day before Will turned seven years old. He had been mucking out Bessie’s sty, flicking glances at Firkin between shovel loads of straw and shit.

  “You’re being awful quiet there, Will,” Firkin said after ten silent minutes.

  Will didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Firkin went on, “about the problem with drugging the villagers with Fire Root in the morning when we only get the Snag Weed into Mattrax in the evening—”

  “My da says your plans go to shit,” Will blurted. Suddenly he could keep it in no longer. The pressure of betrayal was too great. And it wasn’t exactly how his da had said it, but it’s how Firkin would have said it, and it was how Firkin would understand it, so why not just say it that way?

  “Ah,” said Firkin. Then again. “Ah.” He nodded. He scooped up another shovel load and carted it to the wheelbarrow. “You told him then?”

  Will just shrugged. That wasn’t exactly it. But he didn’t want to explain. He wanted Firkin to be the one explaining.

  Firkin just went on shoveling. Will had thought he might feel better if he just said it, but now he didn’t. The pressure just kept building and building inside him until he thought he was going to break apart with anger and disappointment. He could feel a scream, or a yell building inside him, and he was terrified he was going to cry. He didn’t want Firkin to see him cry.

  Then Firkin stopped, and leaned on his shovel. “I suppose they do,” he said nodding to himself. “I suppose they do.”

  And then all the pressure was gone, and the sense of deflation and loss was even worse.

  “So it was all…” Will tried to find a word for it. “Lies?” he finished, because he did not yet know the vocabulary of betrayal.

  Firkin shook his head with vehemence. “No, Will. No. That’s not it. And what your da said…”

  “My da’s no liar,” Will said, with a loyalty that surprised him.

  Firkin let out a little laugh and reached for his hip flask. “No, Will. That is for sure, and I’d never say he was.” He took a deep draft from the flask. “Your da speaks the truth. I’ve made a lot of plans over the years, and an awful lot of them have gone to nothing but shit. And we are here in a valley ruled by arsehole dragons at least in part because I couldn’t come up with a plan that worked well enough. That’s true.”

  “So it’s all… all…” Will looked around for a word. His eyes landed on the wheelbarrow. “Straw and shit?”

  Firkin laughed. But not his normal laugh. A sad laugh. “I don’t know, Will,” he said in the end. “I don’t know. Some of it probably is. Maybe all of it. I don’t know. I’ve never known with a plan I’ve made. And, yes, a lot of it has gone to shit. But sometimes there have been successes. Maybe not often. Maybe not even enough to say rarely. But they’ve been there. And each one has been a beautiful treasure.” He took another deep swig. “And some… they’ve been beautiful failures, you understand, Will? While they’ve not done what I’ve planned, they’ve done other things. Things that I’m proud of. Does that make any sense?”

  He looked desperate, there in the shadows of the pigsty. He didn’t look like an adult at all. He looked like a worried child. He looked, to Will, like a reflection.

  “Maybe,” Will said, some of his disappointment and anger fading. “Perhaps.” He wasn’t sure if he did, but he wanted to. He didn’t want Firkin to be a liar.

  “Thank you,” Firkin said, and upended his flask. He smacked his lips and tucked it back into his belt.

  “So we can rob Mattrax?” Will said just to be sure.

  Firkin laughed again, loud in the small sty. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. But we can try, Will. That’s the beautiful thing. We can try, and we plan for success, but in the end who knows? Beautiful chaos, Will. Anything could end up happening. Maybe we could even rob them all. I’ve learned about all of them, Will. Mattrax, and Dathrax, and Kithrax, and the whole cursed lot of them. I can tell you about them all. We can make plans for them all. You can make plans. And then…” He smiled, reached for his flask again. “Beautiful chaos.”

  32

  Where There�
�s a Will…

  Lette found Will skulking about in a ditch. She watched him from a distance. He had his knees pulled up to his chest, feet firmly planted in the mud. He had plucked a long stalk of grass, was weaving it into a narrow thread.

  She was sorry for him, she found. He might be a fool, but he was a good fool. At this very moment as many as forty people were watching him, waiting for the slightest command. But he was oblivious to them. Because he wasn’t even looking for people to use. And even if he knew they were there, he wouldn’t think to use them. Because that was—infuriatingly—who he was. A good fool. Gods, he could even be her fool if she wanted him to be.

  Sometimes she thought she did want that.

  But she also wanted to use him.

  She shook herself. This should be simple. She should go, talk to him, make him see things her way, and get rich. That’s what Balur would tell her to do. And he’d be right to tell her so. She was complicating something simple. Complicated would get her killed. The world was a cruel and harsh place. It demanded cruelty and harshness. And that was why it would kill Will.

  It was just that she couldn’t help but wish that the world was a place that would keep him safe.

  She watched as Will glanced down at the elaborate knot of grass he had woven, placed it on the ground, and plucked another strand.

  Lette realized that at some point she had knelt and pulled up a stalk of grass herself. It was a tangled knot in her hands. There was no pattern to its folds, just creases and crumples. She threw it away, stepped toward the farm boy.

  “Will,” she said. He twitched at the sound of her voice, but didn’t turn round. She came closer, placing each foot carefully, as if approaching a rabbit, fearful it would skitter away before she could make it her supper.

  “They’re going to do it,” she told him. “You realize that, don’t you? With or without you. Balur has it in his head now. He’s going to try to rob Dathrax.”

  Will turned around at that finally. He looked her in the eyes. More wounded-puppy bullshit, she told herself.