Walk a Lonesome Road

by Ann Somerville

  Walk A Lonesome Road

  Ann Somerville

  ‘Walk a Lonesome Road’ Copyright © 2007 by Ann Somerville

  ‘Second Thoughts’ Copyright © 2007 by Ann Somerville

  Cover image © OlegDoroshin - Fotolia.com

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For more information please visit my website at http://logophilos.net

  Smashwords Edition 1, June 2011

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Published by Ann Somerville

  Contents

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 1

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 2

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 3

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 4

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 5

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 6

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 7

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 8

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 9

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  Walk A Lonesome Road: 20

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 21

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 22

  Second Thoughts

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 1

  Dek wakes with his heart pounding out of his chest, mouth open in a silent scream, his arms rigid at his side and his hands clawing at the sheets. It’s one of the bad dreams again. One where he’s choking, suffocating, legs held down by chains in the dirt. Where he’s drowning in his own blood, and a white-hot sun above him sears the skin from his face. In the quiet darkness of his own bedroom, he can still hear the crackle and hiss of scorched flesh as it peels back along his cheekbones. He fights back the nausea and stares at a crack in the ceiling until it’s no longer curtained by fire and floating ash of human bodies, and the metallic sweetness of burning blood fades in his nostrils. One of these days he’s sure he’s going to wake up dead from a heart attack.

  He has no idea what triggered it this time. Maybe nothing did. The days he thinks consciously about the things that really scare the crap out of him, are actually the nights he sleeps the best. But if his head made sense to anyone, then he’d still be in the army. He’s not so crazy that he doesn’t know that much.

  His body’s stiff, but it always is in the mornings, and once he gets moving, his leg will loosen up a bit. It’s still dark—it’s an early start even for him, but setting the traps will take him a week if the weather doesn’t turn foul, and he could do with the meat if not the pelts. He makes a big batch of thick porridge and lets the remainder cool outdoors while he eats his breakfast. The glutinous slab goes into a sealed tin and, eaten cold, will save him wood out on the trail. The rest of the food—the water, jerky, dried berries and fruit, hard bread, and his one luxury from his summer stores, a wax skin bottle of thick, dark honey—was packed last night. All he has to do is change his shirt, relieve himself and clean up, then check the brace on his leg is comfortable. He carefully extinguishes the stove fire, makes sure all the shutters are sound and tightly shut, then, as pre-dawn struggles unenthusiastically into real daylight, picks up his pack and heads out into the cold.

  Snowed again last night, he notes, and the path is covered. No matter—he knows his way like he knows how to button his shirt in the dark. He’s the only one crazy enough to go trapping this time of year this far north, but to him, this is as close to true peace as he’ll ever find, and he welcomes the biting temperature, the slide and crunch of the snow under his limping footsteps, like old friends. He heads to the barn, decides Jesti is the animal for this trip, scritches the woolly heads of the other two and tells them he’ll be back soon. Not in so many words, of course. Urtibes don’t need language or meaningless assurances. They just want food and water and a firm hand, and somewhere to sleep out of the snow if it’s offered, though in all but the bitterest weather, they prefer to be outdoors where their shaggy coats insulate them perfectly from the vicissitudes of existence. Dek wonders why humans never developed something like that. A hide thick enough to protect him against needing to be in contact with the world—that’d be the thing for him.

  As he swings clumsily up into the saddle, Jesti complains a little, grunting and hawing and scratching the ground with one hairy foot, but it’s only for show, and soon she’s plodding carefully down the rough path to the forest level. Her snorting, the white smoke of her breath, the dull crunch of her solid steps are all that disturb the perfectly still air. It’s thirty below freezing, the snow is crisp and unmarred under their feet and on the grey bark and deep green needles of the gnarled trees, and they’re the only living things moving in the landscape under a sullen sky. To Dek, this is paradise.

  He’s not expecting much from this trip but even a couple of animals will make it worth his time—his store of pelts is respectable and will bring a good price when he takes them to Osiwen in the spring. Not that he needs the money but it’s the principle of the thing. He’s hoping for a good size qurka—he’s in need of new boots, and qurka leather make the best ones. Line them with gemil fur and he’d get no finer in Vizinken. It’s a little game he plays in his head, working out how much better he lives than the city folk, how jealous they’d be of the quality of the handmade goods he creates. In the back of his non-crazy mind he knows it’s ridiculous that anyone would envy him this harsh, dangerous life and his minimal comforts, but Dek’s mostly crazy, so he likes to think he lives like a king, and defies anyone to argue with him. No one ever does. There’s hardly a soul around to hear him out in the first place.

  He’s planning a seventy pardec circuit, which in the summer is a trivial distance, and, in deep winter, all he’s prepared to risk, travelling on his own and with just the one animal. His plan is to let Jesti trudge at her own pace until around noon, or when he comes to a decent place to set up camp, lay his traps out in the afternoon. Then he’ll only have to wait until morning to check them before moving on. The trapping’s less important than the experience of being out here, just him against nature, in the stillness and solitude and the dangerous perfection of the frozen landscape. He can imagine himself the only man on earth out here, and the thought scares and comforts him at the same time, because though, intellectually, he knows he needs other people to survive, his gut tells him there’s not a person on the planet who can make his life any happier or easier. He wouldn’t want there to be. He has his knife and his gun and relying on them is a lot safer than people any day.

  For him, such trips are a way of reconnecting with the land, his territory, and he can’t understand why the southerners think the north is boring, because every day is different. The first night he camps by a frozen lake near the foot of Mount Meninwen, the steam rising from geysers on its slopes wreathing it in a luminous mist. The second he spends in a forest where he hears the fogels howl all night in the tree tops, and the third in a snowfield which glows white under a gibbous moon. His tr
aps remain empty, which he’s philosophical about. But at his fourth camp, he has better luck, and in the morning, one of his snares has a nice fat harwe entangled in it, its pure white fur luxurious and thick. Though they bring a good price down south, Dek thinks he might keep the pelt on this one for himself, and looks forward to the meals he’ll make from the meat. If he can catch another harwe this time, then the trip out will have been well worth it. He slits the animal’s throat neat and clean, guts it and tosses the steaming mess towards the trees for the small scavengers to feast upon, then slings the heavy carcass across his pommel.

  He breaks camp and sets off, hoping to reach Tarik creek that day because there were gemils nesting there in the summer and their deserted nests are often used for winter shelter by muimuis. Muimui quills also fetch good prices, but he likes to catch a couple of the animals a year mainly because they’re handy in their own right. The shirt he’s wearing is closed by black quill toggles and he likes them better than buttons any day.

  He sees not another living thing that morning. Even the fogels are silent, and he suspects the harwe might be all he’ll get this time—it’s the hardest winter he’s seen since the first one he went through, six years ago. He reaches Tarik creek at noon. The creek’s frozen of course, so the water Jesti needs has to be made by melting snow and a few of the long icicles hanging from trees growing at the creek’s edge. He tethers her to a tree and setting about collecting wood, to get the fire going. The woodland here is rather scanty—it was logged about twenty years before and unlike a lot of the area around here, not reforested. It’s mostly clumps of scrubby trees and hardy bushes in the winter, poking out through the heavy snow. In the summer, it’s a carpet of grass and purple flowers, and long rushes that grow in the middle of the stream. Dek sometimes likes to come to watch the gemils playing in the creek. But there aren’t any gemils around now.

  He’s barely walked a thousand midecs when he sees the roughly made shelter tucked under a large, leafless bush a little upstream. He hides behind a twisted turfel tree and crouches, mindful of his bad leg, and peers across the snow, trying to make out how many people are camped there. He can’t see any movement from here, but there’s bound to be someone around. He draws his knife, cursing that he’s been foolish enough to leave the rifle on Jesti and the pistol in his pack. No one comes up here in the winter, and no one camps here for pleasure even in the good season. Maybe it’s poachers. Maybe his traps have been robbed, not just unlucky—but no, he’s seen no tracks, and he’s too good at this to have missed them.

  He creeps forward—no sound, no movement comes from the shelter. Under the dragged together brush, there’s some kind of tent, bright orange, and way too light for the conditions—looks like the kind of thing they pack in flyers and airships as part of the emergency kit. But they’re a thousand pardecs from an airfield, and not on any flight path, so Dek has no idea how this has come to be here.

  He risks straightening up, hiding a groan as his leg complains. There’s a dead fire, neatly laid out, with at least some of the night’s snow overlaying it. There are no footprints outside the tent, and as he edges around it, he can see more snow on its roof—if there’s anyone inside, they’ve not emerged all day. He picks up a handful of snow, packs it into a hard ball, tosses it against the side of the tent. Nothing. “Hey,” he calls. No reaction. He tries again with the same result.

  He unfastens the flaps and unzips the opening—the air coming out isn’t more than about five degrees warmer than the outside. Someone’s lying inside, wrapped up in a couple of blankets, and he can see the silvering of a thermal one just poking out from under the wool. “Hey,” he tries again, and pokes at the presumed foot of the stranger with his boot. Nothing. Either dead or in trouble then. He sheathes his knife, and gets awkwardly to his knees. He carefully peels back the blankets, revealing a man’s pale face. When he touches it with his ungloved hand, the skin’s as cold as the snow outside, but when he leans in, he can feel the slow puff of barely warmed air against his cheek. So, alive, but sick. Shivering, barely, which is a good sign, but the lack of consciousness, not so much.

  For a few moments he considers leaving the stranger to his fate—not his job any more, he tell himself, to look after feckless civilians—but then he’s ashamed he’s sunk so low that he’d think of walking away from someone in need, whatever the reason for their presence in this territory. He needs the rest of his gear, and Jesti, so he wraps the guy up again, seals the tent and hurries back to his own campsite.

  The saddle blanket is the most warmed covering he has to hand so he takes it off Jesti and wraps it around the man. Then he has to finish collecting the wood and build the fire in the stranger’s fire pit. It’s just as he would have laid it—a scraped depression in the ground to concentrate the heat, maximum result for minimum effort. He’s dealing with military of some sort—but which army, he doesn’t know. They’re close enough to Febkeinzian that the question isn’t straightforward even if the guy doesn’t look Febkeinze, but right now, it’s not that important.

  While the fire’s getting hot, Dek takes the time to hang the harwe high up in the tallest tree he can find near the campsite because, sick stranger or no sick stranger, he doesn’t want to lose a catch that valuable. He also collects more wood because he knows he’s going to need it. By the time he goes back into the tent, the stranger has begun to shiver a little bit more, but he’s still deeply unconscious. The stranger’s chances aren’t good, he knows. Dek has none of the specialised equipment they use in the medical centres to treat hypothermia, and if the man is too far gone, nothing Dek can do will make much of a difference. He might be hanging around only to make sure the man gets a decent burial, but they’re not there yet.

  At least the man’s clothes are dry, and when Dek removes the gloves to check his hands, they’re in good shape and so are his feet, though one arm is splinted and obviously broken. The gloves, like the rest of the clothing and the boots, are all brand new and top quality—which makes the tent even more anomalous. The man has a black paranormal tattoo on his hand, which explains the military training, though Dek doesn’t recognise the pattern. Pity the poor sod isn’t a pyrokinetic, Dek thinks, though he’s not sure if a sick PK can make enough heat to warm themselves. The subject never came up with his brother, Tik, funnily enough.

  Pulling the guy’s hood and woollen cap back a little reveals a shaven head, which is definitely unusual—red stubble on his scalp and his cheeks shows the natural colour. Dek revises his assessment from ‘poacher’ to ‘prisoner’—but they’re thousands and thousands of pardecs from the nearest prison. There’s fuck all but hunters and mines and forests and ice fields in this part of Pindone, and absolutely no reason he can think of why a paranormal, possibly escaped prisoner would be wandering around in this region at all. He rummages through the man’s pack—it’s a new piece of kit, and some of the items within it, like a water canteen and utility knife, are decent pieces of equipment, but the rest of it seems to be scavenged. There are no papers, no clue to the man’s identity at all, nothing remotely like proper supplies or hard rations. No food at all, in fact—only water in the canteen which he guesses is new snow melt. He wonders if he’s dealing with hypothermia or outright starvation—either could kill a man out here, and it remains to be seen if they have.

  Dek’s got little choice but to make his camp here for the evening, but he’s not sleeping in this useless tent. He gets to work, putting blankets to warm near the fire, before setting up his own better quality felt and microfibre shelter next to the smaller, crappy one. Now comes the hard part—moving the guy into it. He’s a hell of a tall man, and though he looks underweight for his size, is still probably as heavy as Dek. Dek give him a few minutes to see if the warmed blankets set around him have any effect, but he’s not waking up much, though when Dek moves his broken arm, he moans, tries feebly to get away from Dek’s touch. There’s nothing for it except to move him bodily the short distance between the two tents. Dek’s
knee doesn’t appreciate the manoeuvre and it’s a struggle to keep from slipping on the hard packed snow as he grips the guy under the armpits and drags him like deadweight.

  But finally he’s got him installed on Dek’s own decent sleeping pad, and packed around with all of his spare blankets. The guy’s still out, and his breathing still sounds unnaturally slow to Dek’s ear. Moving him might have been a bad idea but he’d have died where he was. He’d have died for sure if Dek hadn’t taken it into his crazy head to go trapping when no sane person would have contemplated it.

  Somehow he’s got to get this guy warmed up some more, and that means warm fluids, so he goes out to the fire to check on his preparations there. He’s heated enough water that he can mix half of it with snow and give it to Jesti in the leather bucket along with some grain from the saddle bags. He makes khevai for himself and eats some jerky, leaning against Jesti as she snorts and snuffles her way through her food. When he’s done, he mixes about a quarter of the honey with the remaining water, letting it cool a little and pouring it into a flask, before bringing it into the tent.

  To his surprise, the man’s eyes are open just a slit and there’s a little awareness in his expression. He mumbles something incoherent as Dek kneels down—Dek doesn’t ask him to repeat it. He props the guy up on his pack, making him groan, then sits beside him, pouring some of the hot sweet water into a mug. Then, using a spoon, he dribbles a little between the guy’s parted lips. He only risks a few drops, and it seems for a second or two the guy has forgotten how to swallow, but then he slowly licks his chapped lips. “More,” he whispers huskily, and Dek obliges.

  It takes nearly half an hour to spoon a mug of honey water into the man’s eager mouth, and he’s asleep by the time Dek’s done, but Dek thinks he looks just a tiny bit better. If the energy and the warmth aren’t enough, then Dek’s out of ideas and he has to move anyway because his leg hurts like a son of a bitch. He eases up and goes outside to check on Jesti and throw more wood on the fire. He takes a piss, eats a handful of dried berries and some of the porridge, thinking regretfully that he can’t use any of the honey on it because he needs to keep it for the stranger, and wonders how the hell he’s going to get this guy out of here, and what’ll happen if he does. Dek’s still pretty fit and in a fair fight can take on almost anyone, but he’s got this stupid leg, and the guy is taller and with unknown abilities. The hypothermia will keep him under control for now, but Dek’s got rope in his pack and he’ll use it at the slightest excuse if the guy looks like giving him trouble. Still doesn’t know what the hell he’ll do with him.