South

by Frank Owen

  He squeezed her shoulders. ‘They’re soldiers, Vida. Soldiers come to murder innocent people. Sick people. They don’t care! God, they aren’t even soldiers. They’re, they’re, executioners!’

  ‘Look. I got the same anger you do. I do. But it’s a big decision. Feel like we ought to take a minute. Think about the consequences.’ For our immortal souls, she wanted to add.

  He let go of her and they turned around like dogs, trying to sit down somewhere comfortable. They quietened down, each hunched over their separate struggle. Vida felt her heart hammering. Sometimes life gave you a clear and predictable set of choices, and this was one of those times, wasn’t it? Her stepfather Evert had once told her that everyone makes their decision – what to have for breakfast, who to marry, whether to blast someone’s head off – in ten seconds, straight off. Less. Everything after that is time spent justifying the action to yourself.

  ‘Minute’s up, Washington. What do you say?’

  ‘Fuck Renard. And the horse he came in on.’

  ‘That’s my girl. You know it’s the right thing. Now let’s see if we can hunker down here; try and get some sleep before the whole fucking circus comes to town again. There isn’t long to go.’

  Vida and Dyce curled up in the tunnel, warm and familiar, and tried to doze.

  Sunrise came with the sounds of industry, of camping breakfasts and nervous jibes and smoking. Always the smoking. When it was Vida’s turn to look, she spied a giant pot of porridge from which each man, tottering stiff from his night on the hard ground, scooped a bowl. They sat in clusters, eating and talking. A blond man stood apart, haloed by authority. He was holding his head in the breeze like a dog sniffing for clues. As Vida watched, he put a hand to his face and stroked his neat beard. God, that’s dedication, she thought. What must it take to keep a goatee clipped like topiary during a war?

  With breakfast done, the blond man started harrying his men to get going. Obedient, they turned their full attention to the horses, laying the blankets on the withers, overlaying them with the saddle. Maybe it made you less nervous, Vida thought, if you had to do the same number of things each time: adjusting the cinch, folding the loose straps away, tying them off. When they were done, the men led them each to a space at the river to drink, like a baptism. If the horses drank before they were saddled, you fell off: their stomachs bloated.

  The preparation of Renard’s men was no less complicated: underwear, long white socks, pants, and boots that swallowed up the pants cuffs. Then their shirts, tucked in and belted, weighed down with leather pouches. Extra ammunition, Vida bet. She was pleased to note that no man took a flask with him – another unnecessary attachment for a battle so close. They would drink their fill before they left and be back to celebrate before lunch.

  After the belt came the jackets – some plain, some decorated with pins and flashing with gold – and then the rifles hung over shoulders. The morning prep summed up the difference between North and South, the same way there was in the South African War a century back, or the Civil War before then. There was still ritual among Renard’s men, even in battle. Especially in battle.

  The old rituals had never served the South, and now they were gone, outmoded and unmourned. There was no pretence that there was a difference between the living and the dead.

  When the men began to hook their boots into their stirrups, Vida crawled back into the tunnel. The soldiers made no show of trying to be quiet: their approach was supposed to terrify the people who heard them coming. She and Dyce felt them thunder off, the tunnel shaking some, like there was a minor quake. The roof showered them with grit.

  When the sound died, Dyce led the way up and out of the tunnel, watching carefully for the camp guards, a couple of men left to keep an eye on things. They saw no one.

  The two of them kept low, anyway, out of habit and because it was smart. They made their way through the bush and slid down the talus. In the camp itself, fires still smoked inside their rings of stones; dirty dishes leant in towers; clothes were heaped in small piles outside the tents of their owners. Vida sniffed. Bizarre. Over all there was a miasma of aerosol deodorant, like a locker room. Beneath that the place smelt like porridge oats and horseshit and woodfire smoke, with the occasional waft of human excrement: the morning ablutions had happened somewhere upwind, in a rocky dip. Vida could see the strips of white toilet paper littering the ground there, stuck to the stems of low grasses.

  Jeez, toilet paper. I remember that stuff.

  ‘They could have just burnt it.’ Dyce was next to her.

  ‘Bet it’s two-ply too.’

  ‘Three-ply. Nothing’s too good for the holy asses of the North.’

  ‘Come. I want to show you something. And I need another pair of eyes.’

  Vida led Dyce to the river where the ground had been churned up into mud by the horses. It wasn’t deep: she crossed over on shallow stones. A little way up the river she bent to peer at the water hemlock there.

  ‘Leaves are a little like a tomato plant. But look for the flower.’

  At the top of the stem radiated about a dozen smaller stalks. Tipping each was a white compound flower, a frothy nosegay.

  ‘Careful when you touch these. Whole plant is poisonous, roots especially. It’ll give you seizures until your heart can’t take it, or your lungs give out. Use a cloth when you pull it out.’

  Vida demonstrated, untying her mask from around her neck and covering her hand with it.

  ‘As many of these as possible. We’re not going to find death camas or locoweed around here, but we might find larkspur. Those two together ought to do the job.’

  She carried on up the river and Dyce followed. Things were different when you were looking at them up close: the detail could make you crazy.

  Vida was bending down next to a scrawny shrub. ‘Not the best example, but this is larkspur. They can get tall pillars of real pretty purple flowers, but this one’s young. But that’s good for us, I think: more toxic. Get a good look at those leaves.’

  ‘Sure, I got it. Kind of maple-leafy.’

  ‘I suppose. Same as before. Pull them up, roots and all. I’m going to get these back to camp. Bring what you find. And be careful. ’Cause I’m not carrying you again.’

  ‘Ah, you loved it. Fell right into my trap.’ Dyce winked.

  Vida put her arms around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. ‘You got me. I’m a sucker for the pathetic ones.’

  She turned and made her way back to the camp, and knew that he was watching her as she went.

  She hunted down a cleanish pot and went to fill it from the river. The water was clear and fast-moving: it looked okay, and she was going to boil it, anyway. ‘Just like old times,’ she muttered. She rinsed the plants, loosening the last clods from the roots. At the stone circle she got the fire going again and set the pot over it. They hadn’t even put the knives away properly. She set herself to slicing the plants on a flat log.

  Dyce returned: two more water hemlock, but no larkspur.

  ‘I can go look some more.’

  ‘It’s fine. I think we have enough.’

  The poison was a pale-green soup that smelt like nothing at all. Dyce had expected something out of Macbeth, but it just looked like that disgusting tea his dad had tried to get them to drink, said it was good for longevity: antioxidant. Look how that had turned out.

  He found a couple of metal cups lying beside an empty pack and they scooped the infusion into each one, like dippers in medieval wells. Then they went from tent to tent, methodical and matter-of-fact, starting at one end of the camp and making a clean sweep. They untwisted every canteen and flask lid they could find and poured a teaspoon’s worth into every one. They made sure to wipe the rims of the chlorophyll residue. Dyce found cigarettes too and dropped the concentrate into the tobacco. The cutlery they tainted, handle to tip, as well as all the rations they found – then combs too, toothbrushes and dental floss and mouthwash. And other things, that Vida and Dyce d
idn’t recognize, even.

  By the time they were done, they’d gone over the entire camp, item by item, as if it were a murder scene in reverse. They emptied the pot at the foot of a birch tree. Dyce covered the green dregs with dirt, and then regretted it. What if the horses got to it? It was too late now. Vida replaced the pot and the knife, same as she’d found them.

  After almost two hours of work, they washed themselves in the river, head to toe. It was the cleanest they had been in weeks.

  ‘Careful where you hang your clothes,’ said Dyce, and Vida smiled.

  They retreated to their burrow, and there they waited in the dark.

  52

  When the first volleys of gunfire came, like the breaking of boughs, Tye Callahan was gutting a walleye, throwing the strings of red and purple innards to his bird. He hadn’t expected Renard’s army to be there so fast.

  But fast was good.

  Tye washed up and wrapped the fish in its basket of rough-woven cattail. He made sure to stamp out his fire properly. The scouts’ scope, retrieved from the hidey-hole, was a neat rubberized tube, with measurements and markings all along its flank that Tye didn’t understand well enough to parse. It belonged to one of the rifles that had been taken, with a small mount on its side that would clip into the stock. Tye had used it to start a fire, just to test whether he could, aiming the wider end at the sun and letting the lenses concentrate the light onto dry leaves like a kid frying ants. It had worked. Now he made sure it was to hand.

  He set off towards The Mouth. He was wary of the Northern soldiers who might mistake him for a returning resident, and he took a wide berth, aiming for a spot some way off along the ridge, a spot from which he would have a good view and put the scope to use. He hurried through the brush, his bird above, fluttering from branch to branch, leading him along the clearest paths. Usually he’d have stopped to rest – his shins ached and his callused toes were rubbing themselves raw and new again in his boots – but the excitement of seeing the town leveled spurred him on, and he only slowed when he crested the rise and caught the distant blossoms of blue gunsmoke lingering in the still air.

  He cleared the rocks from a patch of dirt with his foot and then laid his old body down, groaning. He pulled his pack round in front of him and rested the scope on it, settling his chin on the rest. His bird sat beside him on the bone-white remains of a tree, ignoring the battle, eyeing the fresh stain of fish blood that darkened Tye’s pack.

  Renard’s men had followed his suggestion and positioned riflemen along the valley walls. When the residents had taken cover in the shops and shacks and in the mine, the riders in the cavalry with their flaming torches had broken through the top fence and come galloping through the ponderosas, down the main street, setting fire to the brittle wood structures as they went. Blackened bodies lay in the street, motionless except for the hair or clothes that waved and billowed in the dusty wake of the horses.

  Tye saw three men run from the saloon and try to mount the dead scouts’ horses, but the animals were panicked. The men – one mustached and wheezy, Tye marked, and the other younger, maybe his son – tried to calm the horses and throw a leg over anyway. The creatures shunted and bucked. At the next volley of shots from the hills the two men fell beneath the thrashing hooves and were trampled. Tye watched the hairy one squealing and trying to cover his face.

  The fires were driving the rest of the townsfolk crazy. Most of them looked as if they were trying to get to the mines, but the street was too exposed. They were cut down as they ran, some dead even before they hit the gravel, sliding face-down to twitch and grovel along the main road they had been so proud to stroll along. A couple of riders who felt kindly were passing by each person who had their hands up in surrender and putting bullets into their heads. The mercy shot.

  It took them about half an hour to work their deadly way to the mouth of the mines. The riders saw that there was no logic in wandering into the darkness in search of the few who’d scuttled away. One dismounted and walked to the threshold. Tye saw his hand go to his belt, stacked with grenades like pinecones. The man selected three and pulled the pins as quick as he could before he lobbed them into the tunnel. The rest of the cavalry was already in retreat.

  The blast exploded the wooden struts along with the rock. Debris spewed out from the mouth and the whole structure collapsed in tornadoes of dust, the last breath of the beast.

  With the town burning and the residents dead, the soldiers rode up the main street. They stopped to take the scouts’ horses with them, and Tye cursed them when he saw that. In minutes they were gone over the hill, whooping like frat boys. The snipers, too, were pulling back. They found their own horses and fell back with the rest of the troop. The Mouth lay devoid of life, as though the Lord had struck it down with white-hot bolts from the sky.

  Tye stood up and brushed himself down. He took his pack and then called his bird to settle on his shoulder. She dipped her head towards the fish and Tye said, ‘Later. Later. Work first. You know that.’ He scratched her on the side of her soft head, the way she liked it.

  He followed the ridge along the town, and then past. It wasn’t hard. The hoof prints in the dirt led down and around the westerly ridge of The Mouth, directly to the white triangles of the tented camp. They hadn’t even tried to hide it. Cocky. But why wouldn’t they be? They’d just wiped out an entire settlement.

  None of the dismounted soldiers paid him much attention as he strode down the slope. They were unsaddling their mounts, dipping their own sweaty heads in the river, pulling off their boots and throwing them every which way. And then came the drinking – that shitty homebrew that everyone was sucking up nowadays. He could smell it from here. Tye shook his head and spat to one side, and his bird flapped up and away from him. ‘Sorry,’ he told her. He didn’t know how they could drink that rotgut: like mixing piss and gasoline. Everywhere the cups were being raised and clinked so hard he thought the metal would buckle and split. The men, sitting in their underwear, were saluting a job well done. At first they just shouted the lines to one another, but it turned into a chant soon enough:

  Here’s to the girl with the bright red SHOES!

  She smokes your cigarettes and drinks your BOOZE!

  She hasn’t got a cherry but that’s no SIN,

  ’Cause she’s still got the BOX that the CHERRY came IN!

  Tye made his way across the camp. He thought he would get there untested, but one man was still sober enough to raise a rifle to him.

  ‘Get lost, old man.’ From his breath, the guy smelt like he was dead already. Little green flecks were caught between his incisors.

  ‘I’m Tye Callahan. Renard’s man. Come to help.’

  ‘Tye fucking Callahan! Why didn’t you say so? Malison! Sir!’

  A blond man, still booted and suited, appeared at the guard’s elbow. He had hangdog eyes, Tye thought, the kind that marked an ex-drinker: a man who had fought the hardest battle of his life with himself. That was the kind you wanted on your side. That type knew what it was to suffer.

  ‘Malison! This here’s Tye Callahan!’

  Tye tried to stand a little taller, wishing for the harrier on his shoulder, but she had made herself scarce.

  ‘Well, now. I am pleased to make your acquaintance,’ said the man slowly. The gold goatee made his lips look wet. ‘We got something for you, brother. A thank-you present from the man himself.’ He turned to the man with the rifle. ‘Go get it.’

  ‘Hope it’s not a fucking toaster oven,’ growled Tye. But the truth was, under the liver spots and the sunburn, his old heart was swelling with a young man’s pride.

  Malison nodded. ‘Sit down. Have a drink.’

  ‘You got anything ’cept that horse piss?’

  The man laughed, hollow. ‘Didn’t have you pegged as a teetotal.’

  Tye smiled. ‘Temperance is my middle name.’

  53

  Unbelievable. The returning soldiers were unscathed, sweaty and dusty, but none
bleeding or even holding a bruise or a pulled muscle. Vida saw the two spare horses and thought for a moment that The Mouth had managed to kill two of Renard’s men – but as she watched the animals draw closer, she recognized them. The scouts’ horses, reclaimed! Dyce tugged on Vida’s leg, and she retreated, happy to let him watch the awful consequences of the thing they’d done.

  Predictably, the men were tying their horses at the river’s edge and then kicking back. From the myriad tents they brought out booze and food and cigarettes. Vida watched as they stood around, laughing and swigging like Vikings from the poisoned canteens, their free hands on hips. Dyce knew the stance, the invisible guns, the revelations of victory that were being lodged in song – first to one another, and then they would go back to Renard, along with the spoils of victory. Some of the men were pulling off their boots; others were stoking the fires, readying themselves for lunch. There was no sign of the ill effects of the poison. Fuck. Dyce retreated.

  ‘Any idea how long this is going to take?’

  Vida fiddled with a braid. ‘I thought it’d be working by now.’

  ‘But you know the plants, right?’

  ‘I’ve never tried killing people, Allerdyce, so this is new.’ She gave an unhappy shrug. ‘I know them to avoid them; never worked with them directly.’

  ‘Kind of wish you’d said that before.’

  Vida gave him the side-eye, but he wasn’t smart enough to stop.

  ‘What if all that boiling broke down the poison or something?’

  Vida relented. ‘Give it time. It’ll work.’

  ‘It better, or we’ve just given them a nourishing supplement to help them exterminate Horse Head.’

  She glared at Dyce. ‘I said we ought to think more carefully about it. This was your idea.’

  ‘Yes. But the execution sucked.’

  He turned, shoulders stiff with anger, to devote himself to crawling back up to the lookout like a giant baby. Vida wanted to put her boot in his ass. Was this the real Dyce? Pissy, childish, looking for a locked door to sulk behind. Vida felt her mama’s voice rising like a sinus headache.