by Rod Duncan
But not Elias. When his time came, he’d found the means of it.
He woke to an eerie silence and the memory of being dumped in the mud outside the inn. At first he thought it must still be night, but he could make out the silhouette of his hand when he held it in front of his face. Pushing the layers of straw aside, he clambered out from the muggy warmth of his sleeping place. The smell and cold of fog hit him. One of the horses snorted as he climbed down the ladder from the hayloft. There was no one below to give trouble, though scores could have been standing a few paces out and he wouldn’t have been able to see them. Stepping into flat greyness, he trailed his hand on a damp wall and began to skirt the yard. The back door of the Salt Ray Inn was locked,
as was the front.
He rapped his knuckle against it, then waited, picking straw from his hair and brushing it from the shoulders of his cloak. The spyhole cover pulled back. The owner’s brown eyes stared out.
“What?”
“I was here last night.”
“I saw it,” she said.
“Can I come in?”
“Why?”
“I left something.” When she didn’t answer, he added, “I’ll do any work you want to give me. A trade.”
All he needed was for her to open the door. A promise meant nothing.
“What work can a man do who’s no thumbs?” she said.
He could have made a joke of it or crafted a wise answer to shoot back. But she was right. The spyhole cover thudded closed. Then he heard the bolts slide within.
“I thank you,” he said, when the door was open.
She shook her head. “Don’t.”
The fire was out, the ashes cold. A dozen or so of his playing cards lay scattered around the hearth. Those that had fallen closer to the fire were singed at the edges. Three had burned half away. Sifting the ash, he found more. Some had blackened but seemed whole until he picked them up, whereupon they crumbled to dust. All told, he gathered twelve full cards, three that were half or less and six odd corners. He’d hoped for more. Laying them on the flagstones, he found more clubs than anything. He might have been able to draft the missing ones, copying from what was left. He’d had a way with a likeness once.
“Here,” said the owner, holding out a hearth brush. “There’s a shovel and bucket in the scullery.”
He took it, holding the handle in that clumsy grip between fingers and palm.
“I lost half a night’s trade thanks to you,” she said. “I want you gone in an hour.”
He’d been planning to walk away there and then with what was left of his pack. But few enough inns were safe for him. Making an enemy of the mistress of the Salt Ray wasn’t something he could afford. And her case was fair. So he set to work, shovelling out the ash pan. He found the pit at the back of the stable block and then returned to wipe down the flagstones where he’d been made to kneel the night before, and the glazed wall tiles of the edging.
By the time the mistress came back, he’d got the place looking good, to his own eye at least. She gave his work a token glance then marched away. Some reward, he thought. His knees were black. But as he scrubbed his hands in the scullery, the dark-haired barmaid came to him with a wooden bowl of barley soup. “From the mistress,” she said.
“Thank you.”
He lifted it two-handed, feeling the heat in his fingers and mouth. And then in his belly. A man can bed himself so deep in hunger that he no longer knows the feeling for what it is. But as Elias drank, he did know. He’d been stocky when he fled from Newfoundland. His broad shoulders still made him seem that way. But opening his cloak revealed the truth. The weight had fallen from him.
The barmaid cocked her head, watching as he drank. “What will you do?” she asked, pointing to the pile of singed playing cards on the floor.
“Buy a new pack,” he said. And then, more gravely, “Has the mistress a flat file I could use? A saw maybe?”
The barmaid didn’t know. She refilled the bowl before going to ask.
Newfoundland was a great place to buy a longbow, a blunderbuss, a mace or all manner of edged and spiked weapons. If one had money – which one day he would. But not a silk shirt or a book, not glassware nor the kind of finery they made over the border in the Gas-Lit Empire. And truly not a pack of playing cards.
Her question had been a good one. What was he going to do? His eighteen months were up. He’d returned from his outlawing with a task and limited time to do it. For two weeks he’d been hanging around in unaligned bars, treading water so to speak, gathering news. He needed to know the gossip of the clans: who was up, who was down, what battles had been fought. He needed to map the births, alliances and deaths that were the warp and weft of Newfoundland’s ever-shifting power games.
The irony was that before his exile, the knowing of all this had been in his hands. But he’d had no interest in it. He’d lived the life of wealth. When his Patron said fight, he’d fought. Other than that, he’d been happy to drink and play. But with the task before him, life rested on the knowing of things.
The barmaid came back, lugging a heavy toolbox. “The mistress says you can use it. So long as I’m here to watch.”
Ash wasn’t the only thing Elias had seen at the back of the stable block. On this second visit, he knelt and put his hands in among the filth. First he pulled out a piece of yellowed bone that squirmed with maggots, the jaw of a hog, he thought. There was no part of it thick enough in any case. He threw it aside and sifted the dregs of the pit until he found the leg bone of an ox. It had been smashed open to get at the fatty marrow. But the joint was whole. In size it was like Elias’s clenched fist. And it was old enough that all flesh had rotted away.
The maid told him to scrub it in the yard, and his hands too. When at last she would let him back inside, he knelt gripping a saw between his knees, sliding the bone up and down along the toothed edge. When the cut was through, he turned the bone and began again. White dust gathered in cracks between the flagstones.
The maid talked to him as he worked. For the most part he let her words flow. After a time, the mistress of the Salt Ray stepped into the saloon to watch.
“We open at dusk,” she said.
“I’ll be done in time.”
“But not in an hour?”
“I’ll pay you back,” he said. “When things go better, I’ll find a way.”
She said, “What innkeeper hasn’t heard such promises a thousand times? You’ll need to clean the hearth again.”
“I’ll get Tinker to do it,” the barmaid said.
A look passed between the two women, which Elias couldn’t read. The mistress walked away.
While he worked, the barmaid set kindling and small sticks in the fireplace, then lit them with a taper. He was happy to have the warmth. The flames had grown to a fine blaze by the time he’d carved three small cubes from the bone, and filed the surfaces smooth.
The last part was the hardest. He took a long iron spike from the toolbox and rested the tip in the bed of embers. Sitting on a low stool, he pulled off one of his boots, and then the sock. The sharp point of the iron spike had begun to glow in the fire. Gripping one of the bone cubes between his toes, he pressed the red hot point down into the very centre of its upturned face. He could feel the heat on his exposed skin. One slip and he’d brand himself. A thread of acrid smoke twisted in the air as the iron burned a small black circle in the bone. When the spot was wide and deep enough, he turned a new face up and burned three dots in a slanted line. Four marks done. Fifty-nine to go.
“Why do you gamble?” asked the barmaid.
“I don’t,” he said.
“You had cards. Now you’re making dice.”
“Others will use them. Not me.”
“You’re a bookmaker, then?”
The iron had gone black. Elias returned it to the heart of the fire and looked at her straight on for the first time. She and her mistress had been kind. In fairness he should give back the same. But he’d
left his conscience three thousand bloody miles to the west, frozen in the permafrost of the Yukon alongside the long dead bodies of mammoths and musk ox.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked.
“I’m curious.”
There was something about her that bothered him: her voice or her questions, he couldn’t pin it down.
“Why is it you’re making three dice?” she asked. “Most men gamble with two.”
“Look,” he said. “Thanks for your help. But I’ll make these marks and then I’ll be gone.”
He turned the cube again and began burning more holes. Six dots this time: two lines of three. This face was made from the dense bone at the surface of the joint. A feeling troubled him, that the barmaid might have seen through the trick.
“How did you get away?” she asked. “When they outlawed you, I mean.”
And there was the question again, the one thing everyone wanted to know, from Patron to peasant. But the answer was a coin he could spend only once.
Smoke spiralled from the bone dice as the hot metal faded. “Do you admire my work?” he asked.
Chapter 3
The odds were one in six that two throws would add up to seven. If the dice were true. But there was no way to judge the odds of a smuggling run between Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador.
A faster boat would cut the danger, or a quieter one. The captain could set out after dark on a moonless night, steer by the compass. The lanterns that guided him in could be hooded, casting only narrow slits of light.
It would work, most likely. Nine times out of ten. But on every run, the captain would be thinking about that one other time, which would surely come. A cannon might pick him off, if he was lucky. It would take only a minute to die in the freezing waters of the Strait of Belle Isle. His body would go into shock. He wouldn’t even know it when he breathed water into his lungs.
But if a Patron Protector’s ship caught him, or caught the land crew trying to guide him in, then his family and theirs would die. Only when he’d witnessed his life’s loves passing through every horror would he be allowed to follow them into the fire. Nine cargoes safely delivered could never pay for that.
An oath-bound man could be ordered to do it. But even oaths had limits. Ask a boat captain to take the trip again and he might choose to sever his bonds instead, whatever the cost.
The question that had lurked under the surface of Newfoundland politics for two centuries was this: what if someone found a way to change the odds completely? Would death once in a hundred times be worth the risk? It took a gambler to reckon it. But what if the risk could be so blunted that any cargo might be carried with easy mind? That was the nightmare of every Patron Protector. Unless he could find such a path for himself, in which case it was his fondest dream.
The others would set upon him if they knew, banding together to bring him low. It was easier to defend than to attack in the bare hills. But numbers would tell in the end. They’d surely break him.
The trick would be to keep the secret close. If he could smuggle in a great treasury of powder and weapons before being found, he’d be able to wage war on all of them. He’d be able to win. A crown was the thought that none of the Patrons could abide, though most might dream of wearing it.
Smuggled weapons did turn up from time to time. The year before his outlawing, Elias had found an off-island sword, pulled it from the cold grip of a corpse on the battlefield. The edge cut wonderfully keen. Elias had had no thought for the politics of smuggled weapons. He just wanted to keep it for himself. But his uncle insisted they yield it to Patron Calvary. That had been little more than three years ago. It felt like a different lifetime.
Before the outlawing, his duties had been to obey Patron Calvary, his great uncle, to fight with the clan when ordered, to practise with sword and pistol, to hone his powers of battle. Beyond that, his needs had been simple. In the way of men who are given most things they want, he desired only to win at everything.
The odds of two thrown dice adding to twelve was one in thirty-six. If they’d been cut true. But the chance of all four kings turning up in a poker hand were smaller than Elias could figure. He should have known better.
Arriving at the Reckoning two years before, still a man of the Blood, whole in body and with blatant wealth, Elias yielded his weapons to the oath-wrights for safekeeping. That was the way of things, custom and practice, which enforced each year a short-lived break from war. He couldn’t have guessed how closely his pistol would be inspected once he was gone. It was a fine thing. He’d been given it freely by Fitz, a childhood friend. There was no cause to think it might be the death of him.
His mind was elsewhere. The Reckoning was a time when he could meet with men from other clans without it being in battle. And girls too, women of the Blood who weren’t his cousins. They strolled in fine clothes, swaying rumps or breasts or whatever else their gifts. It would be a feast for his eyes. And his hands, if he could only find the means to woo them.
They made camp on a promontory projecting from Newfoundland’s northern coast. It had been the site of the Reckoning back to the time of his great, great grandfather. The Island, they called it, though it wasn’t quite. Each of the twenty-three clans took up its old place, forming a kind of map, as if the Island were the wide span of Newfoundland itself. The Calvary tents were pitched at the northwest tip. The Locke clan pitched immediately to the south of them.
As the days of the Reckoning passed, Elias did his best to be seen and heard. He wrestled and drank and showed off and flirted. And he gambled on cards: a skill with which the gods had marked him.
For once, no man of the Blood was playing. That gave him the pride of dealing and the top seat. He thought nothing of it.
He’d always had a feeling for the odds, Elias, and he liked what lay before him. The other players seemed awkward at the game. But they’d no shortage of gold. That should have been a warning. They were only the sons of councillors.
They flashed their money and slapped it down on the oak board. He spread the cards for everyone to see and then flipped them over. The pack whispered to his shuffle. They played and they drank, or pretended to. He won three hands then lost the four that followed, but was still up on the night because he knew when to fold. The others hadn’t the same wit. With his next strong hand, he pushed up the stakes and won more than he’d lost on the previous four.
Some men want their money taking.
A crowd gathered. There’s no sport like watching another man lose. The higher the stakes the better. Among them were two women of the Blood, but rosy-skinned and with arses that drew his eye. Their clans were distant enough that he’d not spoken to them before. Yet not so distant that an alliance would be impossible. Patron Calvary might let him have one of them. As the heap of his winnings grew, they favoured him with their eyes and the angle of their bodies.
He flashed the pack, spreading it one-handed between fingers and thumb, showing off his skill, then made another perfect dovetail shuffle.
When a break was called, Elias made a show of going off to the cliff edge for a piss, staggering as if half-drunk. On the way back he blundered into one of the others, making it seem a mistake. But in the clumsy righting of himself, he’d felt the man’s purse and guessed its weight.
It was going to be a good night.
Then came a hand of three kings. He swapped out the other two cards, hoping they would think it a long-shot at a flush or a straight. In return he drew a five and the final king. A wiser man might not have trusted such a run. But luck can seem the way of things when it’s been a friend for so long. There was gold to be won. There were men to be beaten. And there were pretty girls watching.
Four kings wouldn’t make for a big win. Unless others round the table thought their hands better. He tossed down an American silver dollar, a cagey raising of the stakes. One by one they followed, but with gold. He frowned, as if thinking to give up, hiding the stir of excitement building in his chest.
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The pile of gold and silver grew. So did the crowd. There was so much treasure on the board that the heap of it was taller than the drinking beakers. Such a prize might change even the life of a man of the Blood. The women moistened their lips and flashed their eyes.
When there was no more gold to put down, he laid out his cards; four kings and a five. The crowd clapped, but not wildly. No one likes to see the highborn win. A few cheers had come from men of his own clan.
He looked up, expecting defeat in the other players’ eyes. But one of them was snarling with anger. Down came his cards. A flush of spades; the two, the seven, the eight, the ten and last the king. Five kings lay on the oak board, and he, Elias, had been the one to deal them.
The crowd rushed him, turning the table spilling the treasure on the turf. They had his arms pinned. A fist went into his gut. Another caught him on the side of the head. Then he was on the ground and kicks were coming in from all sides.
There were no guns or knives on the Island. But the boots were hitting hard enough to do the job. He might have died, but a group of Patrons happened to be strolling close by. One of them shouted and the beating stopped.
That night, Patron Calvary came to the place they’d chained him. “What have you done, boy?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You cheated.”
“I did not!”
“There’s eight men standing witness against you.”
“I left the table. Just for a minute. One of them must have changed the pack. It was all set up.”
But the more Elias begged, the darker the Patron’s gaze. “You’re either a cheat or you’ve been played for a fool. Which is worse?”
