Medicine for the Dead

by Arianne Thompson

  Shea stared at his dark marbled face, her courage failing fast. “Please take me with you,” she said. “Please, please don’t leave me here alone.”

  He glanced up, and his expression made no promises. “Where you trying to go?”

  Anywhere. I’ll go anywhere you want. But that wasn’t right – that was the ugly, lonely thing in her head talking, and she pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead to smother it. What should she ask for?

  He could take her north, following the Etascado River. The two of them on a horse would easily outpace Jeté’s slow, ponderous crawl, and then when his cohort caught up to her, she could...

  ... no, she couldn’t count on them for anything. Even if they didn’t kill her, they could just as easily leave her again, and she would have no chance of crossing the long, dry stretch to the Limestone River alone.

  No, if she wanted to save Yashu-Diiwa before the a’Krah put him to death, she would just have to do it herself – metaphorically speaking.

  Shea glanced up at the man, mentally tracing river-veins in the colored borders of his face. “Take me to Limestone Lake,” she said. “Just that far, and I’ll swim the rest.”

  He exhaled through his nose, and gathered up his papers. “That ain’t ‘just’. That’s thirty miles of rough country, and you don’t look fit to last ten.”

  Shea’s eyes narrowed; her hand clenched wet sand. “Bourick, I’ve been ‘lasting’ since before you were a sweaty nickel stuffed down your mama’s garters. You tell me how much you’re willing, but don’t you ever presume to judge my able.”

  He swore and shook out his pants legs. “Coo – you screw like a woman and y’nag like one too. All right. I’ll take you as far as we can get before sundown. After that, I drop you in the first puddle I see,” and here he shot her a look and an index finger, “and nothing you do to me or my peeshwank gonna change that. Ain’t no sex or money worth getting caught gallivanting around after dark.”

  Shea smiled, privately relieved. Even here, when he was all hard-talk and sternness, he’d let slip that hidden promise, that unspoken pledge that he would not leave her to dry out and die in the middle of nowhere. She backed into the water to soak up what she could while he dressed. “Fair enough,” she said. “But if you can get me all the way to the lake, I’ll do anything you want to either one of you when we get there.”

  His only reply was a barely-audible string of curses. But as he rolled up to his feet and set about brushing the sand from his patchy backside, Shea caught him glancing from his horse to the sun overhead, and decided to interpret that as a sign that yes, he would be giving her offer all due consideration.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THIRST

  “VICHI! WAKE UP, Vichi!”

  Vuchak could not have said where his free-soul had been while he was asleep, but it was tremendously reluctant to return to his body-soul. Dragged up through weariness, headache, and bleary-eyed confusion, the two of them finally merged enough for him to open his eyes, and make out Weisei’s upside-down face.

  He looked horrible – sickly and sweaty, the shadows under his eyes prominent even in the dark – but his expression was beatific, almost ecstatic. “Vichi, wake up! Do you see me?” His breath was soaked in bile.

  In an instant, worry pulled tight around Vuchak’s neck, and dragged him upright. “I see you,” he said, but twisted around under the tent-skin to do a better job of it. “Have you been sick?”

  “No! Well, yes, but that’s not important – he’s sent us a sign, Vichi! Come look!” And he was gone in a heartbeat.

  Vuchak did not need to ask who Weisei was speaking of. He crawled out from under the skin, hardly knowing what to hope for.

  Outside, the night was growing old: there was no light yet in the east, but the moon had long since set, leaving the thousand eyes of Marhuk to keep watch over the earth. Weisei stood a few paces away, eagerly beckoning Vuchak to his side. He was wearing his hue’yin, and as Vuchak came closer, he noticed too that Weisei had smeared earth over the backs of his hands, in the manner of someone truly blessed.

  “There,” he said, pointing skyward with his chin. “Do you see it, between Agakai and Shu’ne?”

  Vuchak did not. Truthfully, he was hard-pressed even to find Agakai and Shu’ne. His education had taught him the bow, the spear, and the gun; accounting, and the reading of the ghiva; Marín, and the customs of the various peoples he might need to speak it with; diplomacy, to present his marka well and avoid wasteful conflict; discipline, to manage the behavior of the people below him, and carry out the wishes of those above. The workings of the spirit world were Weisei’s domain.

  As usual, however, Weisei seemed to think that any thought or discovery that alighted in his mind must be blindingly obvious to everyone else. “Is it very bright?” Vuchak asked, hoping to forestall any futile star-finding exercise.

  “Yes!” Weisei said. “And I had a dream, you see. Grandfather showed me Yaga Chini, and so many people there waiting for us, and when the great lady comes, she will save us all! We will rest and be clean, and Dulei will be peaceful, and everything will be well. And then I woke up, and it was there above us: Grandfather has opened a new eye to guide us there!”

  Vuchak could not see any such thing. But he could follow Weisei’s gaze, south and west, and know that that was the direction of Yaga Chini, and remember what he’d said yesterday morning about Grandfather wanting them to meet other people there... and perhaps believe that there was something in the sky that had not been there before.

  And he did so want to believe.

  “Which lady?” Vuchak asked. “The Deer Woman? The Silver Bear?” He felt a sudden, wild surge of hope for the latter: Aiyasah, the Deer Woman and protector of travellers, had been nursing a grudge against Marhuk for the last thousand years, but O-San was friendly, and sometimes appeared to pilgrims in need. Piety pleased her, and mercy, and what could be more pious or merciful than a funeral pilgrimage?

  “I think so!” Weisei said. “About O-San, I mean – Grandfather didn’t show her to me clearly, but I don’t see why not. Ylem would be so lucky to see her!”

  Vuchak forgot the sky and looked over at Weisei. “Ylem? Why?”

  Weisei returned him a quizzical expression, as if he had asked where babies came from. He tilted his head back towards the camp. “Vichi, look at him. Who else could he belong to?”

  Vuchak looked back, past the tent and the wagon and Hakai’s sleeping form, to where the half lay stretched out on his serape. He’d never thought about it, really. Who cared where he came from, when what he was and what he’d done were so much more important? “How should I know? He could be Ikwei, with all his hard-footed stupidity, or Ara-Naure, as fixated as he is on that horse.”

  Weisei made the sign of a jesting god. “Now you’re just being silly. When have you ever heard of an Ikwei or an Ara-Naure of that size? And I know you’ve noticed how he rolls that wagon aside as if he were nudging a toy cart. And when was the last time you saw a man of any color who couldn’t make hair on his face? Be serious, Vichi: anyone with an eye in their head can see that he belongs to the Washchaw – probably with some royal blood in him, too – and if he’s what’s bringing O-San to us, we should give praise and be thankful. Now what did you do with my water-skin?”

  Vuchak felt his thoughts hauled out of one uncomfortable crevice and dropped into another. That water-skin was empty. Everything was empty. But the sheen of fever-sweat over Weisei’s skin made Vuchak’s thirst feel guilty and wasteful by comparison.

  He glanced up at the sky again. No, it wasn’t morning yet – but it would be soon. “I’ll get you some of mine,” he said. “But first help me with the camp. I want to be ready to leave by the time it gets light enough for those two to see.”

  Weisei frowned, and pulled his cloak more closely around him. “What, now? I was only coming to wake you for your turn to watch. I didn’t mean that we should –”

  “I know,” Vuchak said, hard-pres
sed to contain his anxiety. “But it’s – it’s inspiring, your dream and the new eye, and I would rather start now and be sure that we don’t keep the great lady waiting. Come on: you can hold the horse, and I’ll clean him.”

  Weisei looked like he might have objected, but finally walked on. “I’m glad you’re excited, Vichi,” he said, and smiled in spite of his awful complexion. “I like it when we can share the same pleasant expectation.”

  Vuchak followed, and did not correct him. Water would be good, yes. But it was not pleasant to look over at the half’s rope-scorched wrists and blister-crusted back and imagine what O-San would think of the people he was travelling with. And it was still less pleasant to think about how much of their expectation was coming from a thirsty, feverish, semi-heretical mind, and how much Weisei might have forgotten, invented, or misunderstood.

  Well, regardless: dawn was coming, and Yaga Chini was only a few miles away. One way or another, they would discover the truth today.

  IN THE DREAM, she was brushing his hair. He sat in front of her chair, feeling the towel draped over his bare shoulders and her soft skirts tickling the small of his back, and waited for the gentle pull and snip of the scissors.

  But the brush got rougher, and the hair-pulling got worse, and when he looked back to see why, Lady Jane was gone. There in her place was Easy-Hey, the Sundowner who worked at Watt’s tannery, and he wasn’t trimming: he was pulling and cutting down to the scalp, as he did the manes of the dead horses that got hauled in, and so there was nothing to do but to push back and stand up to get away.

  But his bare feet were horribly sore, and it was all he could do to stagger forward, and all the while the face in the sky watched him, her eyes dripping angry white tears.

  Elim woke with a start, clutching the brand on his arm. It was still dark out. What was he frightened of? He rolled over to check the coffin again – but no, it was still there. Way-Say was gone.

  He sat up, dry-mouthed and empty-headed. The warming purple smudge in the east said that morning was in the mail – but that didn’t explain why one of the Sundowners was holding the horse while the other was pulling up stakes. Elim squinted at the black silhouettes against the pre-dawn light, guessing that the one with the lead rope was Way-Say. What the dickens did he need the horse for?

  Elim stood up and started over to find out – and tripped over a body.

  He staggered forward, his clumsiness punctuated by a ground-level groan. “¿Kién es?”

  Elim struggled to right himself and apologize. “Hawkeye – sorry, buddy, I didn’t even see you. You okay?” There was no telling where he’d kicked him, except that it almost-definitely hadn’t been in the head.

  “Yes, sir,” Hawkeye said, and rolled over.

  But now that the damage had been done, Elim was sorely tempted to take advantage of it. He dropped to one knee. “Wait, Hawkeye – what’re they doing over there? How come they’re packing up?”

  Hawkeye did not move. “I’m sure I don’t know, sir. Perhaps we’ll be leaving soon.”

  Well, whatever those two were doing, it was keeping them busy – and as Elim recollected his resolutions from the day before, he realized that he’d literally tripped over his golden opportunity. “Okay, but how ’bout yesterday? How come Bootjack came unhinged like that?”

  Hawkeye sighed: a faint, fetid breeze. “He thinks you’ve infected his prince with one of your plagues. And I’d like to finish my sleep, so –”

  “I can’t, though!” Like ice on a rotten tooth, the idea rattled Elim to his core. “I ain’t sick, and I never been sick, so whatever he’s got ain’t any of my doing, and –”

  Hawkeye rolled onto his back. “So nobody in your village has ever gotten milk fever.”

  Elim didn’t move, and yet he felt himself stumbling again. “What? No, of course they do. Hell, there was thirty people sick and half a dozen dead just this summer, and Nancy Greenlee STILL ain’t right.”

  Hawkeye folded his hands behind his head, as if he were meditating on the fading stars. “So did they set out to kill themselves, or do you-all have a tradition of poisoning your neighbors?”

  Elim didn’t have to understand why Hawkeye was suddenly so desperate for a smash in the mouth to know that he’d better not oblige him. “You better make your point real damn quick,” he growled.

  Hawkeye sighed again, as if explaining to a child. “If the milk-cow looked sick, nobody would drink from her. And if you understand that bad milk can come from healthy-looking animals, you should be able to grasp that SEEMING harmless and BEING harmless are two different things.”

  Elim’s kneeling posture crumbled to a haphazard sit. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t. For one thing, he wasn’t an animal, and nobody was drinking his anything. But the tired, snide tone in Hawkeye’s voice was as caustic as soap-maker’s lye, and burned straight through Elim’s indignant certainty. “Am I?” he said at last.

  Hawkeye didn’t turn his head. “Are you what?”

  Elim nodded over at Way-Say’s feather-draped figure, which was even then bolting off for the bushes, and couldn’t get the question out until he’d made up his mind not to believe the answer. “Am I – did I do that to him?”

  He got something that might have been a shrug. “What makes you think I know? And before you say it: yes, I did use that to our advantage with those men. The thought occurred to me that the best way to talk them out of killing two a’Krah in an instant was the promise of letting you kill a great many more of them, much more slowly and painfully. Whether you actually will or not is no business of mine.”

  “But I don’t want to kill anybody!” Elim said, louder than he should have.

  Hawkeye’s eyebrows lifted behind the black cloth. “Not off to a great start, are you?”

  For five dangerous seconds, the blackness of night tinged red, and Elim could see and hear nothing but the choking, fleshy panic that would erupt as he drove his fist into Hawkeye’s throat, grabbed him by that god-damned blindfold, and started smashing his head into the ground.

  Then he remembered what it had felt like when he gave that other Sundowner a punch in the jaw, all those days ago in Sixes – and how easily the lady-sheriff had walloped him as soon as he did – and how he’d been left to spend the whole day roasting in the sun afterwards, racking up a debt his pan-fried hide was still paying off – and by God Almighty, Elim didn’t have the energy to do all that again. He just didn’t.

  “Why do you have to be such a bastard?” he said.

  Hawkeye seemed to take that as confirmation that the substance of their conversation was over, and rolled onto his side again. “I didn’t realize you cared what your tools thought of you.”

  Elim stared at the contours of the man’s indifferent back, and his first thought was that either Hawkeye had mis-spoke, or Elim had mis-heard.

  But if neither of those were true, the only understanding left was an ugly one... because although Elim could easily recollect at least half a dozen conversations in the last three days, he couldn’t recall even thinking of Hawkeye, much less treating him, as anything but a mouthpiece and a scapegoat. “I don’t,” he said. “But you ain’t a tool. You’re people – and so am I.”

  And as proof of his person-hood, Elim stood up to let Hawkeye get whatever last minutes of sleep he could salvage, and went to go talk to Bootjack himself. Granted, it had been a sorry long time since Elim had had to rub together more than two words of Marín... but if he couldn’t make himself any promises about being harmless, he had sure as hell better get quit of brainless, gutless, and useless.

  VUCHAK HAD NEVER liked horses. They were thin-skinned and fragile, for one thing, and stupid besides: always ready to spook, slip, or eat themselves to death at the first opportunity. So unless you needed to take advantage of that stupidity somehow – say, when riding into a hail of arrows or bullets – the best thing you could do with a horse was to buy a second one, and trade both together for a good mule.

  Sadly, that had s
topped being an option a while ago, leaving Vuchak to do what he could with what had been left to him. As usual.

  So he tied the horse, brushed the dirt from the important parts, and when Weisei inevitably excused himself with a hand over his abdomen, Vuchak took advantage of this quiet moment to put a hand to the horse’s shoulder and make himself clear.

  “Let’s understand each other,” he said to that placid, long-lashed brown eye. “I know this isn’t your fault. It’s his fault,” and he tipped his head toward the half, who was just then entertaining himself by pestering Hakai, “and I respect that you like him well enough to come back when you had the chance. I know you will do your best for us.”

  So far, the horse seemed to be following along: he turned one ear in the direction of Vuchak’s voice, and licked his lips.

  Vuchak took that as an invitation to continue. “But I also know that your foot misses his shoe. I see that he hurts you more when you pull for us. So here is something you can tell him when he’s angry with you.” Vuchak took the horse with one hand, holding him where the front band of the halter went under his mouth, and pointed his head to the Mother of Mountains in the west. From this distance, she was still low to the horizon, her soft slopes still dressed in the last vestiges of night. “That’s where we’re going. If we’re all careful and walk well, we can get there in three days. In two days more, we’ll circle around behind her, to our home. It’s a beautiful place – and when we get there, I’ll have Ghen’in fit new shoes for you, and we’ll make sure you have plenty to eat, and you can rest until all your feet are happy again. Will that please you?”

  Vuchak let go of the horse’s head to see how it would answer him. But it only turned its ears and face to the half, who was striding straight for them.

  That was as surprising as it was strange. Vuchak could not decide what to make of him: his hands were empty, and without his serape, it was clear to see that he was hiding no weapons. His ugly face showed no anger, but the tension in his over-built body tempted Vuchak to reach for his knife.