by Chloe Garner
There were no more trees. The tallest trees were below them.
“This is where the king of the world lives,” Jimmy mused.
“You never came out this far, did you?” Sarah asked. He shook his head.
“Pa talked about it, sometimes. He and Grin hated it. Said there wasn’t a reason to claim land out this far, because no one had any more luck than closer.”
“You ever wonder how far they go?” Sarah asked.
“Hmm?”
“The mountains. Bloody great rocks in the way of everything. They have to stop, somewhere. Turn back into ocean.”
“Another couple hundred miles,” Jimmy said. “You know that. We have maps.”
She shook her head.
“You’re missin’ my point. What stops something like this? You sit up here, and… It’s forever, no matter how far you look. Makes you wonder what’s got the force of will to subdue it all.”
Jimmy smiled with a quiet laugh.
“The desert, on our side.”
“Exactly,” she said. “There are cities on the other side, you know?”
“Buy some of our best seafood from them,” Jimmy agreed. Sarah shook her head.
“But they don’t go up in ‘em. Just us, from our side. Why?”
“Because it’s hard,” Jimmy said. “All of the minerals are on our side, but… The other side is covered in plains. They graze herds of everything. It just stops at the mountains because that’s where the easy ends. We do it on this side because it’s hard.”
“Dumber than pickled hobflowers,” Sarah said. Jimmy laughed.
“You’re welcome to go found your own town on the other side and show them what they’re missing.”
“Toddville?” Sarah asked. “No, I’m Lawrence, through and through. Just don’t make no sense. Why would Eli Lawrence pick this side of the rocks?”
“Because it’s where everything is,” Jimmy said. “Fair or not, the things that are worth getting are usually the hardest to get to. And that’s how it is, here.”
“You’re saying this ought to be the best claim of all,” Sarah said.
“If only it were that easy,” Jimmy said. “Are we planning on riding through those clouds?”
Ahead, the ground sloped up again, losing itself in a layer of cloud.
“Ought to turn down before that,” Sarah said. “If it were down this low, we’d go back and camp where we had lunch and try again tomorrow.”
“You won’t ride through the cloud?”
“Only if I want to die before I get home,” Sarah said, twisting to look at him. “What’s got into you?”
“An excellent massage and not having to worry about everything for a couple of days.”
“What, ‘cause now it’s my problem?”
“Because there’s nothing I can do about it,” he said. “We’re just out here. The equipment is going to show up. Clarence will figure out how to get it set up, how to get the professionals what they need to get started, or he won’t. The homesteaders will stage a coup in my absence… or they won’t. It isn’t my problem, right now.”
“You sayin’ maybe you don’t want to go back to it?” Sarah asked. He laughed, and she glanced back once more, but he was just watching the valley far, far below.
“If it weren’t back there, I’d have no reason to enjoy being here,” he said. She frowned at this, hearing the sense to it and still finding it entirely foolish.
“Dumber than a five-legged cow,” she muttered.
She checked her map once more, then set Gremlin down the side of the mountain, watching hard for signs of a camp, but she didn’t see one, yet. The claim wrapped a long way around the mountain, so it wasn’t surprising to her.
Gremlin stumbled and she was up on her toes, trying to help him keep his balance as the ground shifted underneath him.
He regained his footing and shook his mane, snorting.
“Don’t do that,” she warned.
Frowned.
“Jimmy?” she asked.
“Still here,” he answered.
“You smell smoke?”
There was a pause.
“As you say it.”
She frowned hard.
“It’s near impossible to set light to things on accident, over here,” she said. “Everythin’ just stays too wet all the time. Rains every damned day.”
“It’s too much smoke to be a cooking fire, if we can smell it and not see it,” Jimmy said, and she nodded. A wind swirled around the mountain toward them, bringing more of the smoke. She couldn’t see it yet, but it was almost that thick. She looked back at him.
“Bringin’ in outsiders,” she said. “We can’t go no faster than this.”
“Take your time,” he said. “We’ll react when we get there.”
Another quarter of an hour passed on the treacherous ground, and the smell of smoke grew thicker and thicker.
“Ain’t enough air up here to burn anything. And ain’t nothing up here to burn,” she complained. “Nothin’ but moss, and it don’t burn ‘cept…”
“Except what?” Jimmy asked.
“They used it for building,” she said.
As she said it, finally, the crested a small ridge down the side of the mountain and saw it.
“A sod house,” Jimmy said.
That he recognized it was only because she’d said something. Otherwise, it would have looked like a smoke signal or a pyre of some kind. A solid block of rolling, red flame, setting the hill around it alight.
She saw two men scrambling around, trying to contain the flames, but they didn’t have the tools to do it. The moss was disintegrating under their feet, and the ring of embery flame around the hut continued to spread.
Just beyond the hut, maybe a dozen feet, was the crevasse that Sarah had known would be around here somewhere, even if it wasn’t marked on her map. Maybe a dozen feet across, she’d looked down into it, before. A split in the rock, like something deep down had tried to press its way out and the mountain itself had broken, it went down beyond even midday sunlight.
“Dumber than sand soup,” Sarah said, looking back at Jimmy. “Need you to take Gremlin.”
“What are you planning?” he asked.
“Gonna get ‘em out of there.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You aren’t going to stop it?”
“Only thing that’s gonna stop it is a heavy load of rain,” she said. “It’ll burn itself out eventually as the hut dies off and stops drying out all of the moss around it.”
Jimmy nodded. They rode for a little while longer, then Gremlin threw up his head and refused to go any further into the sulphuric smoke. She dismounted, holding Gremlin firm as Jimmy came to take his reins. She pointed.
“At the tree line,” she said. He nodded and started downslope, angling away as Gremlin and Jimmy’s mount started trying to nip each other, acting out of frustration and fear at the smoke and the flames. She hoped none of them fell.
She walked across the soft ground, feeling the moss slide under every step. A minute later, the ground turned crunchy. The dry air wicked moisture by nature, but the healthy moss could keep it down, the way it was designed. The fire, though, was casting waves of heat out that pulled water out and the moss was going from a field of sopping sponge to dry, greedy tinder. The line of burn wasn’t more than a couple yards ahead of her. On the other side, the moss was black, speckled with red where the slow burn under the surface peeked through, sealing itself off again from the air and continuing to smolder, peeking through elsewhere. She shook her head.
Fool’s mission to walk on that. Treacherous as the moss was, by itself, falling on that was going to cook you like a vegetable buried in a campfire.
She stopped, watching as the men fought the fire. Neither of them had noticed her yet; they were trying to throw moss onto the fire in hopes that the wet moss from outside of the burn ring would extinguish the twenty-foot high flames, but it was the type of foolishness that happened
when you were too busy being terrified to think clearly.
“Stop,” she yelled. “Just stop.”
One of the men heard her. The other started for the burn line again, stumbling and falling to his knees, just to get up and keep going. The man who had heard her stared, unmoving.
“Dammit,” she muttered, stepping over the line of active flame and walking as quickly and smoothly across the ember field as she could. She grabbed the first man by the scruff of the neck and pointed where Jimmy was still headed downhill.
“You go there,” she said. “Walk, don’t run. Do whatever he says, when you get there.”
She saw the black on his hands, knew he’d fallen any number of times, too, but she didn’t have time to deal with it right now. She went after the other man, who was scrambling on hands and knees through the embers again.
What could be in that damned hut to make him that determined to put it out?
She looked back, making sure the first man was headed downhill, then went after the second man. He scooped up dry moss from outside of the burn ring, turning to face her with two armloads of it pressed against his chest.
“Who are you?” he yelled.
“Put it down,” she said. “It ain’t helping nothing.”
He shook his head.
“Who are you?”
She caught up to him, feeling the heat of the ground through her boots. She grabbed his elbow and dragged him over the burn ring out, uphill, toward where the moss was still wet. She threw him to the ground, looking back at the hut.
“What were you thinking?” she demanded. “There’s nothin’ about that with any smarts to it at all.”
He just sat there, on his hands and knees, his head hanging. She sighed, squatting in front of him and pulling his shoulders up.
“Let me see your hands,” she said. He held them out, complacent and there at the tail end of an emergency, the way Sarah had seen it so many times before. Someone else was here. He wasn’t able to cope any more.
She brushed the green and black moss off of his palms, shaking her head. His knees were likely worse, but his hands were bad enough even Doc might not be able to make them work again. Cooked through.
“Stand,” she said, pulling him to his feet. He sagged against her, and she pulled his arm across her shoulders, taking a couple of steps and changing her mind, turning and putting her shoulder against his waist and just lifting him.
“You wiggle, I’ll just leave you up here to dry out,” she said, walking with painstaking care around the burning hut and down the mountainside after Jimmy and the other man.
Downhill was harder than uphill by a lot. Her boots weren’t made for this kind of terrain, and the soles had burnt off ‘em in the fire, leaving ‘em glass slick. She couldn’t take a step no bigger ‘n her own feet, most of a quarter mile down steep, with no air to make up for it. By the time she got to the tree line, she was out of air and madder than she could remember. She set the man down at the foot of a tree. They didn’t grow big, up this high, but it would be big enough to hold him up. She looked back up at the hut.
“What the hell were you thinking?” she asked, going to Gremlin and taking out her medkit.
“All of our supplies were in there,” the first man said. The one she’d carried down the hill was near comatose, from the look of him.
“You built your damned shelter just a few steps away from the biggest drop I ever seen in my life,” Sarah said. “What kinda special idiots are you two?”
“We thought we’d sample the crevasse and see what the makeup was…” the first man said, then looked at his hands as Sarah squatted in front of him and started to work.
Sarah didn’t carry burn cream, but she did have a steroid that helped things heal and that tended to keep them from drying out, so she used that, wrapping the man’s hands and then cutting his pants up to the knee to see what had happened there. It wasn’t that bad - the burn had blackened the skin, and the fabric of his pants was burnt into it, but it mostly just needed time and opportunity to heal. She medicated it and wrapped it, then motioned at Jimmy.
“Water,” she said. “Water for both of ‘em.”
He got water out of their supplies and Sarah turned to the second man.
“Who are you?” the first man asked.
“Jimmy Lawson,” Jimmy said, holding a canteen for the man to drink. “That’s Sarah Todd, my wife. You met my brother, Peter.”
“You’re the law, here,” the man said, and Jimmy nodded. Sarah looked around. The second man was fading, but mostly it was shock. So long as he wasn’t losing blood from anywhere, she could dope him up on painkillers, patch up his hands and his knees as best she could for the time being, and he ought to come round the next morning, at least mentally.
“Where’s your livestock?” she asked.
“What?” the first man asked.
“Horses,” Jimmy said. The man shook his head.
“They were tied to the hut.”
Sarah looked over at him.
“The one you done lit on fire from puttin’ a cookin’ fire inside a hay bale?”
“It didn’t burn,” the man said. “It was impossible to burn.”
“Till you dry it out,” Sarah muttered. “Took about, what, a week?”
“We’ve been here eight days,” the man said. Jimmy left the canteen resting against him and went to look out at the open space again.
“How long ago did they run off?” he asked.
“What?” the ma asked.
“The horses,” Jimmy said.
“Um,” the man said. “They were gone when we found the fire going.”
“Where were you?” Jimmy asked.
“Over the edge. Heard them making some strange noise…”
“You were both danglin’ from ropes at the time?” Sarah asked.
The man didn’t answer. She shook her head.
“Dumb like that don’t deserve rescuin’.”
She stood. The man would wake up tomorrow. Beyond that, she wasn’t ready to make any promises.
She sighed, going to stand next to Jimmy and putting her hands on her hips.
“They ain’t got no supplies, they ain’t got no horses, and they ain’t got no sense. I say we put a bullet to both of ‘em, dump ‘em over the edge, and go on our way. Tell everyone we never found ‘em.”
The man’s eyes bugged.
“We’ll get them back to Lawrence,” Jimmy said, going to sit with his back against another tree.
“How in hell do you suppose we’re gonna do that?” Sarah asked.
Jimmy looked coolly at her, his fingers playing a pattern on his knee. She pulled out her bag of gremlin, absently rolling a cigarette and lighting it. He reached up to take it.
“How long would it take to walk out from here?” he asked, his eyes on the conscious man, not Sarah.
“Week, at least,” Sarah said. “We ain’t got the provisions for that. Not for four of us.”
“We could make it work,” Jimmy said.
“Come home starvin’,” she said. Jimmy shrugged.
“Then do something about it.”
“You want me to magic ‘em home?”
He looked up at her, now.
“You need to understand, she meant what she said. That is the way the world is, out here. She would kill you to ensure she makes it home alive. That’s the cost of stupidity in Lawrence.”
She blinked, knowing there was more coming. Because he was talking to her.
“You are going to find their horses.”
She stared at him.
He did not blink.
The cigarette in his hand dangled from relaxed fingers that hung over his knee, and he did not blink.
“Wait,” she said. “Let me go get my other magic wand.”
There was just a hint of a smile, there at the corner of his eye, too fast for anyone else to have ever seen it, then he shrugged, taking a draw of the cigarette.
“How is she supposed to do tha
t?” the man asked. Jimmy shrugged again.
“She’s Sarah Todd. She doesn’t like it when I tell her how to do anything.”
She gave him a withering look then went to take in the mountain top. No way the horses had gone uphill. Even as treacherous as downhill was, they’d want cover.
It wasn’t impossible that she’d be able to track them on the moss, either. Likely, they’d been sliding all the way down the hill. If they’d gotten their minds back as they came out of the open, they might have even stayed together.
She went to get Gremlin, taking out the cooking utensils and looking around.
“We’re gonna get wet here, tomorrow,” she said. “No avoidin’ it.”
“We’ll make do,” Jimmy said. “Go find the horses.”
He hadn’t moved but to take another slow draw on the cigarette, and she shook her head, tossing the tripod, kettle, and pan at his feet, then getting out meat, dried roots, and the bag of beans, tossing those into his lap.
“Dinner’s your problem,” she said, climbing up onto Gremlin’s back and starting toward the crevasse.
She stayed below the treeline most of the way around the mountain, only going up onto the moss when she needed to, in order to find the hoofmarks in the moss.
That were there.
Damn.
She’d been half hoping she wouldn’t pick up a trail at all, and she could go back to Jimmy and tell him what a fool he was, but for now, she had them, and she followed.
They’d gone through the first section of the woods at speed, leaving a crashing hole through the trees, if you knew what to look for, but when the panic had finally left them, they got harder to follow, until Sarah was just riding downhill, hoping they hadn’t changed directions. The crevasse had closed maybe an eighth of a mile back, and the trees were getting thicker. The cloud cover accumulated around the mountain had broken, but it was still dim under the leaf roof, and while she could hear things moving around her, nothing sounded as big or as careless as a horse.
