by Mick Farren
“Is he about his business?”
Reinhardt nodded. “Thank the Deities he’ll be away until late. Something to do with barges.” He looked down at the welts on Jesamine’s buttocks as he unlocked the collar. “He really laid it on you good, didn’t he, girl?”
“Good isn’t the word I’d choose.”
Kahlfa rose from the bed. “I think I’ll make myself scarce.”
Jesamine quicky grasped her by the hand. “No, stay.” She looked up at Reinhardt. “Do you have something there for me?”
“I thought you might need a little something after the whipping you took.”
Jesamine reached up and quickly patted his cheek, but only after checking that Ravenna or any of the other women were not looking. “You’re so sweet and thoughtful.”
She quickly unwrapped the bundle, revealing that it contained two pockets of pita bread, with lamb kebab chunks and salad, a clay oven—cooked half chicken, a honey cake, and two thin, dark cheroots. At the sight of the food, Jesamine flashed the servant a dazzling smile, and Kahlfa made no more moves to leave. “Thank you, Reinhardt. You are my benefactor and my only true friend. I will share these with Kahlfa.”
Reinhardt lowered his voice. “Then I’ll expect the two of you to meet me later.”
Jesamine held her smile fixed. It was a chore, but she had been with him for much less. “You know we will.”
Reinhardt looked quickly around. “So, the usual place?”
“Down in the willows where no one can see us.”
“At sunset.”
“We’ll be there.”
He nodded, then turned and hurried out of the tent. Kahlfa was already tearing off a piece of chicken. “So, we have to do him later?”
Jesamine picked up one of the petas. “Isn’t it worth it not to have to eat slave slop?”
Kahlfa chewed and nodded, speaking with her mouth full. “I guess so.”
“You can kiss him and tickle his asshole while I suck him off. Isn’t it worth it? You know how fast he is.”
“One day we’ll be caught.”
“One day we’ll be caught doing something.”
“I’d rather it was later than sooner, though.”
“Then leave that damned chicken alone.”
Kahlfa continued to chew. “Don’t worry. I’ll be there, kissing and tickling.”
They ate quickly and in silence. When they were finished, Jesamine stretched. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
“Again?”
“Almost every night.”
Kahlfa, who had been sniffing one of the cheroots, looked around, apparently more worried by Jesamine’s dreams being overheard than by the coming illegal assignation with Reinhardt. “About the young men again?”
“The same ones.”
Kahlfa gestured to the entrance to the tent. “Let’s go and smoke these outside. I don’t want to talk dreams in here.”
TWO
ARGO
Argo Weaver had no experience of freedom. He had often roamed the woods with Will and Jason, but they had always returned to their homes to sleep and eat. To be out on his own with no place of shelter to which to return was something else entirely. He had fled with a bag of food, a blanket, his stepfather’s pistol and ammunition, but only the most nebulous of plans. Argo had been out for three days, and no matter how he tried to husband his scant stolen rations, they were rapidly dwindling to nothing. He had also learned that a wool blanket was of little use for sleeping in the woods, and now the thing was little more than a large damp rag, and he was sorely tempted to discard it as a useless sodden burden. His boots, though, were proving sound and watertight, something he did not like to admit since they were the handiwork of his stepfather, although, after just the first three days and nights, the significance of Herman Kretch, his mother, and his sisters was rapidly diminishing and taking on a shadowy quality. Where once the four of them had dominated his life, they were fast becoming a part of a past to which there was no possible return. Argo was also learning just how abysmally ignorant he was about anything beyond the narrow confines of Thakenham. In some respects, it was just as well that he had made no concrete plans because, if he had, he would have been forced to radically revise them.
He had imagined that he would find the woods to be an uninhabited wasteland once he was beyond the familiar tracks and trails a day’s walk out from the village where he had grown up. Almost immediately he discovered this to be a long way from the truth. Although he had yet to encounter any living people, either friend, foe, or impartial, something for which, so far, he was profoundly glad, the signs of human traffic were plain to see beside the main trails and even along more hidden paths and the sheltered banks of streams and gullies. The ashes and charred wood of campfires, the bones, rinds, and paper packaging left where food had been eaten, items of discarded clothing, old and yellowing broadsheets, a single, cast-off boot, all combined with footprints, blazes on the trunks of trees, and broken branches to bear testimony that the woods were neither empty nor untraveled. Argo’s most disturbing find had come in an otherwise pretty glade where the animal-scattered bones of two corpses with ominous bullet holes in the back of each skull lay amid the sunlit ferns. Argo had no idea of who the dead might have been, or why they had been shot, and he did not especially want to guess, but the remains were enough to set him hurrying on, watchful and ready to jump at the slightest sound or movement.
Constant vigilance, when coupled with what was little more than an endless trudging boredom, all too easy slipped away. The woods, of course, offered an infinite variety of sights, but after days on his lone march, Argo started to see it as an infinite variety of the same thing, and his prevalent emotion became one of nagging worry. He worried about his food, now all but gone. He worried about his navigation, rudimentary in the extreme. He was fairly confident that he was going roughly north, and he presumed he would see some advance warning signs before he actually reached the Mosul lines, but, beyond that, his best direction-finding technique was to point his right shoulder towards the rising sun, and if, when the sun set, it was to his left, assume he was doing approximately okay. He knew the geography of Virginia would not allow him to go too far wrong. If he veered too far to the west, he would see the mountains, and if he strayed to the east, he would ultimately run into the sea. He was not pressed for time, so detours did not bother him. Food was his major concern. He might have been raised in the country, but he placed little reliance on his trapping skills. He might, with some trial and error, trap a bird or rabbit, but that would require staying in one place, and Argo definitely didn’t want to do that. The other alternative was to risk approaching human habitation to beg, steal, or, since he had his pistol, commit armed robbery if sufficiently driven to desperation. Images of village stores packed with goodies, and hot apple pies cooling on cottage window ledges, floated into his mind, but he realized these were fantasies of a lost past. Precious few pies cooled on window ledges under the Mosul occupation, and the stores were empty of their peacetime goods. He supposed it might be possible to bring down a deer with his pistol, but so far he had not seen anything like a deer, and even if he did, to fire a shot would be a long-range advertisement of his presence.
Every so often, a panic of birds would clatter into the air from the overhead canopy of leaves and branches, maybe spooked by a predator or by Argo himself. These eruptions of noise served as regular reminders to keep watching his back and not fall into the negligence of a trudging, introspective, hungry daydream. On the afternoon of the fourth day, he had his first contact with anything except the birds and the trees and the constant uneven ground under his feet. He was crossing a shallow ravine when a pack of wild dogs appeared out of nowhere, above and behind him. The dogs stopped and Argo stopped, and the canines and the boy stared silently at each other. The pack was made up of eight or nine mutts of assorted shapes and sizes, and their leader, the alpha male, seemed to be a black-and-white, wall-eyed, half-breed collie. They might
once have been domesticated pets, but their lolling tongues and watchful eyes told how they had long since reverted to the wild. Argo’s hand went slowly to the butt of his gun. He had plenty of ammunition, but, as with his earlier deer-hunting fantasy, he was aware that to fire a shot would be foolhardy, guaranteed to attract the attention of any Mosul patrol that might be in the vicinity. On the other hand, the dogs could be as hungry as he was, and a shot might turn out to be the only way to save his life. Perhaps just a single bullet would work. To kill or even wound one dog, preferably the big collie, might be enough to scare off the others. Despite the tension of the confrontation, he also wondered if he could eat a dog. Could he cook the carcass in such a way that he would not betray himself by the smoke of his fire, or would he have to eat it raw? Before he could make a decision, however, the dogs turned and loped away, perhaps deciding he was not worth their trouble. They were gone as suddenly and silently as they had appeared, but, for the rest of the afternoon, he could not shake the feeling that he was being followed, and that possibly the dogs were trailing him at a distance, waiting for a moment when he could be taken unawares. As it turned out, though, it was something else entirely that took him by surprise.
The sun was setting, making it almost as dark as night where the trees grew most thickly, while, in other spots, the last red rays were almost blinding as they lanced through gaps in the foliage. Argo was glumly contemplating another restless, uneasy night on the hard ground, huddled in his damp blanket, when a voice seemed to come out of nowhere. “You’re no woodsman, Argo Weaver. I’ve been following you for maybe three hours, and you never even suspected.”
The voice was that of a woman, a young woman, and she seemed to know him. Something was familiar about her voice, but Argo could not put a name to it. At first he simply froze in his tracks, uncertain of the direction from which the words had come.
“You look like you’re hungry. Do you want an apple?”
Now he spun round, pulling his pistol from his belt. The speaker seemed to be behind him. He cocked one of the hammers. “Don’t make any sudden moves.”
“Is that all the thanks I get? I offer you an apple, and you pull a gun on me?”
“Why don’t you show yourself?”
“You’re really not up to this, Argo. If I was a Mosul, you’d have been dead meat five minutes ago. You know that some of those devils are cannibals?”
“Just show yourself, damn it.”
“Are you saying you don’t recognize me?”
Branches moved in a shadowy thicket, and a figure ducked from cover, emerging into the open. But whoever she was, she stood between Argo and the fading light and was only an indistinct silhouette. Argo cocked the hammer on the second barrel of his pistol. For all he knew there might be more than one of them. “Just come ahead slow and easy. I could still shoot you.”
“You really are a babe in the woods. You ought to get yourself back to Thakenham.”
The woman came slowly towards him, and, as she approached, he was able to make out more details. She was dressed in a ragtag collection of bits of uniform, mostly covered in a long, dirty duster coat. On her head she sported the kind of officer’s kepi that had been favored by the men of the Southland Alliance, with a square of fabric in back that protected the wearer’s neck from the sun. Argo was not sure what you called the thing. “Who are you?”
“You really don’t know me? It hasn’t been that long.”
She reached up and pulled off the cap. A shock of unkempt blond hair tumbled out. Argo was suddenly looking at a face that had once been familiar. “Bonnie? Bonnie Appleford?”
“Finally, he remembers me.”
The Appleford family had farmed a modest spread just outside of Thakenham, mainly raising dairy cattle and sturdy plough horses that Old Tom Appleford had traded at the market in Bridgehampton. Argo hadn’t known Bonnie well, but he had known her. She had been two, maybe three years older than Argo, a wide gulf when the boy is ten or eleven years old and the girl fourteen or fifteen. Her father had been killed when he had attempted to prevent the Mosul from confiscating his horses, and Bonnie had disappeared shortly after that. She had been a shapely, good-looking girl, what the older boys had called “a piece of ass.” Even before the Mosul conquest, she had gained herself a reputation for wildness and going to parties in the deep woods beyond the Bridgehampton Road with the other almost-grown kids, the rowdy and rebellious ones who scandalized Christians and Wiccans alike, drinking wine and ’shine and dancing round a fire to the dirty four-four.
“We thought you’d been taken by the Mosul.”
“Those devils will never take me.”
“You ran?”
“Fucking right I ran.”
“And you’ve been out here ever since?”
“I’ve been a lot of places, kid. I’ve been a whole lot of places. There are more people in the bush than you know, Argo. Partisans, refugees, moonshiners, and aborigines; the strange ones that have gone feral, and the ones we don’t even talk about. The Mosul try hard, but the bastards can’t catch all of us.”
She was close to him now, and he could see that her duster and the jacket under it were festooned with badges. It seemed like she was wearing the insignia of half the regiments that had fought in the war. He could also see that, despite her strange and ragged clothes and generally unkempt appearance, she had grown into an extremely attractive young woman. He felt a certain stirring that caused him to completely forget that he was still pointing his gun at her. Bonnie, on the other hand, was very well aware of it. “Will you put that piece away? It’s hardly the way to show you’re pleased to see me.”
“I’m sorry.”
He turned away and carefully uncocked the hammers. Bonnie nodded. “That’s better.”
Argo was about to stuff the gun back in the waistband of his pants, but Bonnie stopped him. “Let me see that thing.”
Argo passed the pistol to her without a word. Bonnie examined it for a moment. “Made by George and James Bolton of Jamestown?”
“That’s what it says.”
“A cuckold’s piece?”
“That what my stepfather used to call it.”
Bonnie Appleford raised an eyebrow. “Your stepfather?”
“My mother married Herman Kretch.”
“She must have been desperate. Herman Kretch was a pig, and I can only assume he still is.”
“He still is.”
“Then you’re well away from him.”
Argo grimaced. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“So are you running from the Mosul, or are you running from him?”
“I’m going north to Albany.”
“It took you long enough.”
“I was just a kid.”
Bonnie looked Argo up and down. “But now you’re a man?”
“I’m fourteen.”
Bonnie’s expression was dismissive. “You’re still a kid.”
Argo tried to look older than his age. “You think so?”
She suddenly raised the gun and pointed it at Argo’s head. She cocked both hammers with a deft ease that indicated she had handled a lot of weapons since Argo had last seen her. “You gave up your gun, didn’t you? All I had to do was ask.”
“I trusted you.”
“That’s the first lesson you learn out here. Don’t trust anyone unless you know them really well.”
“I know you.”
Bonnie corrected him. “You used to know me. You have no idea what I might have become.”
“You want to shoot me?”
Bonnie suddenly looked sad. “No, kid, I’m just showing you the way things are out here. You never give up your weapon just because someone asks, and you don’t trust anyone just because you knew them before the war.” She uncocked the pistol and handed it back to him. “And you definitely don’t trust a woman just because she looks like me. There are sluts who’ll slit your throat for the price of meal, or because some Teuton pimp told them to.”
/> Argo had nothing to say. His humiliation was close to complete. He avoided Bonnie Appleford’s eyes as he replaced the gun in his belt. The light was now almost gone, and Bonnie looked around. “We had better find ourselves a sheltered place to bed down for the night. There was a niche between some big tree roots back a-ways that could suit us.”
She turned and walked back the way that Argo had come as though completely confident that he would follow her. Wherever Bonnie Appleford had been, and whatever she had done since she had left Thakenham, she had acquired a definite natural authority. They walked for about twenty yards, and then she indicated a space between the exposed roots of an old oak. “That will do us just fine. It’ll be a comfortable fit, with some protection from the wind, and we’ll be all but invisible if anyone should happen by. Start gathering some dry leaves, okay?”
She slipped out of her duster, and Argo saw that a wide belt was strapped about her hips, supporting the weight of a heavy holstered six-shooter and large sheathed Jones knife. The mystery deepened regarding what Bonnie had been up to since her escape from Thakenham. Argo did not think it was appropriate to comment on the weapons after all his other blunders, so he simply did as he was told, respecting that Bonnie seemed to know infinitely more about life in the wild than he did. Argo started piling leaves into the niche between the roots and packing them down until they were thick enough to provide a layer of insulation between their two bodies and the ground. When was finished, Bonnie covered them with her coat and his blanket and then stood back and inspected the makeshift creation. “That should do.”
Argo was suddenly afflicted with a severe awkwardness. Their makeshift bed might have been out in the great wide open, and fashioned from leaves and old clothes, but it was still a bed, and he was about to share it with a grown and good-looking woman; indeed, a grown and good-looking woman who appeared to know much more than Argo did about practically everything. She noticed his hesitation and looked at him questioningly. “Is there a problem?”
