The Outlaw and the Upstart King

by Rod Duncan

  Elias had little fear of being recognised in his present state, but waited till dusk anyway before walking that last mile. The outcrop that he and Fitz used to sit below. The stream where they tickled fish from under rocks. After that it was too dark to see, but he remembered the places anyway.

  He clambered onto the boatshed’s slipway, feeling the sharp barnacles on the edge. The building smelled as it had always smelled. His hand found the ladder from memory. Food and drink had been left for him, and a tinderbox next to the storm lantern. He lit it on such a low wick that it would barely show in the window. And only if the watcher was looking for it.

  He’d eaten a cold sausage and a hunk of bread when the door creaked below. Salt in the food had made him thirsty, but he hadn’t touched the wine.

  The trapdoor swung up and Fitz climbed through, a pistol in one hand. He had aged, Elias thought. Perhaps it was the low light, but his cheeks seemed to have hollowed and there were dark moons under his eyes. He seated himself so that the food and drink lay between them.

  “What happened to your face?” Fitz asked.

  “You care?”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “You didn’t carry a gun last time we met here.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t see it,” Fitz said, placing the pistol on the boards next to him. It was still in reach, Elias noted. And still cocked.

  “You betrayed me,” he said.

  “You’re alive thanks to me.”

  “You sold me into slavery.”

  “But here you are. A free man.”

  “You believe that? They’ll only give me more glycer-fortis if I do what they say. I’ll never be free.”

  “Then you’d rather I’d turned you away?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Fitz uncorked the bottle then poured. There was only the one cup. Elias watched him take a drink, their eyes locked all the while.

  “Not poisoned, see?”

  Elias accepted it but didn’t drink. “I’ve brought the Patron.”

  “Where?”

  “Over the hill.”

  “How many men?”

  “Three.”

  “I said two.”

  “He’s a long way from home. You can’t blame him for wanting protection. You have him hooked or he wouldn’t have risked coming this far.”

  “We’ve all of us come a long way,” said Fitz.

  “He wants you to come to his camp.”

  “I’ll see him here. You can bring him. No other.”

  “Then what?”

  Fitz’s teeth showed, seeming yellow in the lamplight. It was a smile of sorts. “When it’s done, you’ll get your reward. Enough of the drug to keep you alive.”

  “You have the glycer-fortis here?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think me stupid?”

  “It’s coming. You have my word.”

  “I’m down to my last few days. You know I’ll die without it.”

  Fitz’s smile had disappeared. “Bring the Patron. If he’s willing to take the shipment, there’ll be enough glycer-fortis for all your life and more to spare.”

  Elias suppressed a shudder. The control and the chill of Fitz’s voice had touched him like an icy finger on the nape of the neck. This was more than the negotiation of the end of a contract.

  Fitz held out his hand and took back the wine cup. He stared at Elias as he drank. Elias tried to hold the gaze, but couldn’t stop himself from glancing at the gun. It was a mere flick of the eyes but he knew it had been seen. How easily were his thoughts betrayed.

  Their childhood friendship had been uneven. Elias was of the Blood. Fitz, a commoner, reaped the benefits. Often he sat at the high table, eating rich food his parents could never have tasted. The two boys were tutored together, learning letters, shooting and swordplay. When Fitz ran with him, they could go where they liked. No one could turn them away. They rode horses from the Patron’s own stables.

  The drifting apart had seemed natural. There’d been no argument or sudden break. It was just that they each had other things to do, the duties of adult life.

  “There’s one more thing I need,” Elias said.

  Fitz refilled the cup and offered it. “How can I help?”

  This time Elias took a sip. It was good wine. Expensive. “There’s a woman,” he said.

  “She’s your lover?”

  “No.”

  “Is there no room for love in your life, my friend?”

  “I owe her a favour, that’s all. She helped me get the message to you. Without her you wouldn’t have Jago here. I said I’d introduce you. She needs…” He hesitated, trying to find a less harmful way of saying it. “She wants to help someone get across the water. If I brought her here, would you see her?”

  Fitz seemed interested. “Then she does mean something to you. If not love, what would you call it? Pity?”

  “Honour,” Elias said.

  “I’ll see her, then. But I’m sorry you’ve still found no love. You bedded so many girls when we were young. Always the ones that I had an eye for.”

  “That’s not true,” Elias said.

  “Then your memory is different from mine.”

  A man who can’t live without whisky may blame himself. If he’d die without medicine, he’ll blame the gods of chance. But if he comes to need a lie, he may never know, for it’s the nature of that disease to hide itself.

  Picking his way back along the road from Short Harbour by the light of the stars, Elias replayed the conversation. Other people may have seen them as the child of a Patron and the child of a commoner. But they’d seen no such difference. They’d shared everything: toys, clothes, he even thought he might once have been laid down to sleep next to Fitz in a cot. But that seemed unlikely, since the child of the memory was little more than two years old. Perhaps he’d been told about it. The point was, he couldn’t think of a time when they weren’t helping each other.

  Yet there’d been a bitter tang of poison in Fitz’s words.

  It was true that they’d fought. But only as young men do. Each time they’d made up, swearing oaths of friendship. Blood and honour. Perhaps they had gone after the same girl from time to time. It was true that Elias often won those battles. Or his Blood won them. He tried to picture the faces of the girls they’d courted, searching for one among them for whom Fitz might have had a special fondness. None came to mind. Or they all did. It was years ago and there was no telling any more. From such shared whispers as he could recall, they’d both lusted after most of the girls and women who walked the Calvary lands.

  A childhood grudge couldn’t still be a thorn in Fitz’s skin. Their friendship hadn’t ended in an explosion of rage. It just withered as they grew apart.

  The track out of Short Harbour had reached the top of a ridge. Dropping down the other side, he lost sight of the ocean and the few lights of the village. The hill behind him was black edging to the Milky Way. Crouching in the dry ditch to be out of the wind, he struck his flint and steel, catching a spark in the tinderbox. With cupped hands, he lit the stub of a candle in his shuttered lantern. Even such little light as the candle gave made his footfalls sure. But more important was to be seen. More friends had been knifed than enemies on dark nights in Newfoundland.

  He couldn’t see the camp. But he smelled the remains of a fire doused with coffee dregs. Knowing he was close, he waved the light slowly over his head, three times back and forth.

  A call came from the black. “Are you alone?”

  “I am.”

  He waited, hearing nothing but the wind passing through dry grasses. Then a light appeared, revealing an edge of rock some forty paces ahead, and Jago’s face next to it. If there’d been a doubt about how well the trap had worked, this alone would have calmed it. The Patron had come himself to guide Elias in.

  Close up he saw that Jago had put on a sneer. But eagerness was betrayed in the slight forward tilt of his body, the focus of his eyes. Elias made his own shoulders slump l
ower and put on an expression of regret, as if he’d failed.

  He couldn’t see Elizabeth. She would be in the tent, he thought, listening.

  “Speak!” Jago said.

  Elias glanced at the gatherers. The Patron waved a hand to send them away.

  “Well?”

  “Bad news,” Elias whispered. “He won’t come here.”

  “But he will meet?”

  “Not as you asked. It must be only you and I and the girl. The men are to stay here.”

  “Why the girl?”

  “He knows my message was sent through the mistress of the Salt Ray. I suppose he wants to question Elizabeth.”

  It was too dark to see whether the lie had been believed. But Jago’s stillness suggested that he was pondering.

  “I told him you wouldn’t go without your guard,” Elias whispered, even quieter than before.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “This land is Calvary clan. If you were caught on your own…”

  There was a long pause before Jago spoke again, a whisper little louder than a breath. “I know what you’re doing, No-Thumbs. If another man tried to twist me like this, he’d only do it once.”

  “All I’ve said is true.”

  “Maybe it is. And maybe you’re leading me into a trap. But I’m thinking that if you’d wanted just to kill me, you’d have tried some other way. What would happen if old man Calvary found you back here?”

  “I don’t know,” Elias said.

  “I’ve been asking myself all along the North Road, if maybe you’re hoping to get back into your great uncle’s favour. Perhaps you think that delivering me into his hands will win you a place back in the clan.

  “But I was there at the Reckoning when he disowned you. I saw your thumbs cut off. I saw you weeping like a baby. You shamed him with your cheating. And by not dying. He’d never deal with you now. Not even if you gave him my head in a sack. If he found you here – if he found us together – he’d kill you himself.

  “I’ll always be an upstart to the likes of him. I’m knit from commoners, from fishermen. But I’m Patron now. And if people start killing Patrons, where would it end? That’s what they ask themselves. That’s why Calvary would ransom me. Just in case one day it falls the other way and he’s the prisoner.

  “But they’re right in one thing. I am different. I’d kill anyone. Blood is blood. Same in a fisherman, same in Patron Calvary, and in all of them. The wind’s veering, Elias. Do you feel it? That’s why we’re going to see your friend in Short Harbour. The air smells of change.”

  Elias’s mind was working hard to keep up with all he was being told. Jago’s openness seemed to have come out of nothing. But there were reasons for everything the Patron did. His face was a black void against a bank of clouds edged by starlight.

  “What about your gatherers?” Elias asked.

  “We leave them here. That’s what your smuggler friend asked for. That’s what we’ll give him.”

  “And Elizabeth?”

  “Elizabeth. Elizabeth. What shall we do with your lovely Elizabeth?”

  “She’s not mine.”

  “You keep saying that. But Firehand tells me you went off together. A midnight walk. Whispers in the dark, eh? Or was it more than that? But if you’re ever tempted to say what she told you… I’m a creative man, Elias. Some say I’m vicious. But torture is just another tool. An artist has his brush. I have pain. Do you understand?”

  Elias did not. “I don’t know what you think she’s told me.”

  “Very good,” Jago whispered. “You keep it like that.” His words were the purr of a tiger. “We’ll leave her with the men. If your friend does want to see her, he can deal through me. Though I’m not so sure that part of your story was true.”

  Chapter 22

  The only sounds had been the flapping of canvas above her and whispered voices just outside the tent. Elias’s words she’d been able to hear clearly enough. And some of Jago’s. Towards the end, the Patron had become so quiet that it was impossible to make sense of what he was saying. But the hushed rise and fall of syllables had given her a sense of his mood.

  When she’d seen him for the first time, tormenting Elias next to the fire in the saloon of the Salt Ray Inn, it had seemed to her that the man delighted in cruelty. The thrashing of the boy’s back over the altar in the corrugated iron church had confirmed it. She’d been appalled but not surprised when Elias was beaten to a bloody mess and thrown onto the dirt. But through the northward journey her opinion had changed.

  The sadistic joy was an act, put on for the benefit of his men and anyone else who happened to be watching. He took no particular pleasure in it, she thought. But neither did the suffering of others disquiet him.

  He might have a man beaten to death with as little compunction as ordering a goose slaughtered for a feast. But in each case, the act would not be for its own sake. Everything was driven by calculations of advantage and disadvantage. He went through the pretence of bedding her every night so that his men might see him as the same as themselves. But once the tent flaps were dropped, she was of no more interest.

  The disturbing thing about Jago’s whispered conversation with Elias was not the meaning of the words. It was their steely focus and excitement: the drive towards a great and terrible goal. He’d spoken more than she’d ever heard before. That, too, seemed an omen. Danger was closing in.

  When Jago’s voice rang clear again, it was to throw insults and threats at Elias. The man was an idiot, he said. No thumbs and no talents. Born with a fortune he was too stupid to keep. A drunk. An impotent. A shit. A boy-lover riddled with lice and pox. In short, this pathetic great nephew of a Patron couldn’t even find Short Harbour when the path led directly to it. Therefore Jago, beneficent Jago, would walk the road himself. And when he returned, he would perhaps have Elias’s fingernails pulled out, to remind him of the lesson.

  The gatherers laughed at first, only becoming agitated when their oath-holder announced that he would walk off into the night without a guard. None of them would dare to question him. That was the genius of his sadistic act. But perhaps its weakness also.

  “We go!” Jago said.

  It was the word “we” that made her heart constrict. Both of the men who might have tried to protect her were walking away.

  “Come, No-Thumbs. Let me help you along the road you couldn’t follow on your own.”

  She heard the impact of a boot hitting a man. She heard a man stumble and fall. Elias groaned. Another kick.

  “Get up!”

  A scrabbling sound. And then Jago’s call, from further away. “Are you too drunk to walk?”

  Elizabeth lay, looking up at the canvas, lit faintly from outside by a lamp, which was being carried on a wide circle around the tent. Saul, the outrider, would be too afraid to hurt her, she thought. He’d see it as damaging his oath-holder’s property. Sour-faced Logan was harder to read. But Firehand’s desire for revenge would surely be too powerful for him to resist, if she gave him any excuse.

  She reached into her boot and slipped her knife from its hidden sheath. The blade was a silhouette in front of her face. Gripping the shagreen hilt, she rolled over onto her stomach propping herself up on her elbows, so as to face anyone who opened the flaps.

  It wouldn’t do. A knife is a fine weapon for surprise. Or to hold while dodging and ducking. If she’d been standing, dancing on the balls of her feet, she’d give him pause, as she’d done before. But not if he was the one choosing the moment, and she lying constricted in a tent.

  Outside, the lamp continued to circle.

  One man would be set to keep watch, posted at a distance from the camp but close to the road. They wouldn’t risk their master returning to find no one alert. Logan had taken his turn earlier in the evening. If it was Firehand next, all would be well for a few hours. The real danger was Saul taking his turn away from the camp and Logan sleeping.

  Still, she would be safe so long as the guard coul
d see the tent.

  The lamp went out. She widened her eyes but couldn’t even see the dark lines of the tent poles. She might still call out, if he came for her. Her voice would carry to the road and beyond.

  Tugging the furs of Jago’s bed into a ridge, she moulded the rough shape of a sleeping figure, then rolled over, bringing herself close under the angle where the canvas met the ground. However much his eyes grew accustomed to the dark outside, the interior of the tent would still be a shadow to him. That would give her a couple of seconds. She could crawl out under the back edge of the tent, bringing the whole thing down on top of him. Or she could bring the knife around and stab into the dark. An inch this way or that could be the difference between a man bleeding to death and a wound that might heal in a couple of weeks. She didn’t know which outcome would be better: a chastened enemy or a dead one and Jago enraged from the loss of his most powerful fighting man.

  Whilst the lamp had been lit outside, she’d not heard any movement. But now, with the darkness so complete that her eyes still couldn’t make out the slightest detail, she began hearing tiny sounds. They weren’t footsteps, nor the whisper that clothing makes when a man tries to move silently. Something was moving around the tent closer in than the lamp had done. She was hearing the touch of grass stems against a boot or shoe. For a giant, Firehand could move with extraordinary stealth. She remembered the way he’d sneaked up on them the night before, following the ditch that ran alongside the track.

  The wind began to gust. Flapping and rustling drowned out all other sounds. Then she heard him again: the slightest stumble just a few feet to the side of where she lay. The next gust was strong enough to make the tent poles creak. A lash of rain hit the canvas. Then another. Then the beat of it was continuous, the noise loud. She crawled to the entrance and pulled the flaps an inch to the side. All was black.

  She’d lived by her wits before ever coming to Newfoundland. Quick choices had mostly turned out well. And now instinct was saying that she should choose her own ground. The drumming of the rainstorm would cover her movements just as surely as it covered his. The dark would hide her.