Fours was, of course, the last person anyone should want to arrange their festivities. But the Dog Lady was partial to Día and Shea, and they in turn were partial to Fours, and that was as good a diplomatic connection as the Azahi was likely to get. It wasn’t perfect – but for now, it would do.
“I’m sure I have a flag or two somewhere in stock. Let’s see what we can find.” And it was nothing short of a pleasure to rise and help the First Man of Island Town to his feet, one sullied hand in solidarity with another as the two of them set to it. After all, they’d reinvented the town before – what was one more new world order between friends?
IT DID MAKE quite the spectacle. Even Día had to admit it. She watched from the loft of Fours’ barn as night returned to Island Town – and so did the Dog Lady.
She came striding in through the western gate, already so immense that she had to duck to fit under, and trailing around and behind her was a parade of her own making: every dog within twenty miles had followed her into town, along with an assortment of sheep, goats, and one volubly enthusiastic donkey. She seemed to draw them to her like little furry needles to a holy lodestone: even as Día watched, the tame creatures of Island Town leapt fences and dug under pens, every bit as anxious as their human caretakers to celebrate the great lady’s return.
And it was a celebration. Feast-fires blazed on the roofs of the Moon Quarter to the north and all over the great pueblo to the south, thickening the air with the aroma of mesquite-roasted squash and corn-cakes and the savory flesh of those creatures who had been selected to honor U’ru with their lives. The Azahi would not let her be seen choosing favorites, of course, but arranged for her to come and hold court in the great town square, near the crossroads in the center of town, where both the day and the night people converged on the festivities, competing to see who could bring the best gifts, drink the most wine, dance most outlandishly. And all the while, U’ru held Hakai as if he himself were the guest of honor, garlanding him, feeding him a bite at a time, letting him complete this peculiar new iconography: the return of the lost goddess, the blessing of the wounded native man in her arms, and the rejoicing of both the land and its people.
And U’ru loved it. Día could feel her own heart beating faster with the strength of someone else’s delight, as if she herself were the patron-saint of that mad menagerie outside – as if she were the queen-reveler in all that fantastic chaos.
Puppy! came the raucous, inevitable thought. Come and play!
Día was nothing of the kind, of course. Her domains were books and study and the honoring of the dead. She wouldn’t have the first idea how to behave at a party.
Still, there wouldn’t be a better opportunity to learn. I will, she promised, with a reflection of U’ru’s own enthusiasm. In a little while.
And as that ecstatic second-mind temporarily consented to leave hers, Día likewise turned away from the window, giving her attention and her company to the one person who would not be welcome at the feast.
“It sounds like a good time,” Halfwick said. He was sitting at the opposite end of the loft, his knees drawn up, his back to the wall. In the deepening twilight, Día could look at his pale, drawn face and believe that he was still an ordinary, living person – that he was only somewhat ill.
He had already assured her otherwise.
“Yes,” she said, and seated herself under the window. “I’m glad for that. It’s been a long time since we had anything much to celebrate.”
“You don’t need to stay,” he said – though of course she did. Halfwick would be gone tomorrow, at least if Elim had his way, and Día had far too many questions to leave unanswered.
“Neither did you,” she said, “but it was kind of you to do it.” Día had little memory of that night on the mountain – most of it was a painful blur – but she knew that he had done that much for her, and that soon it would be his turn to press on and leave her behind. “And I was hoping you could do me one more kindness, and – and tell me what He said to you.”
Halfwick might have heard her invoking the holy pronoun, but he didn’t return it. “What makes you think he said anything?”
“He must have!” Día cried, leaning forward to press her hands into the hay-strewn floor. “He did – I know he did. What did he tell you?”
There was a little too much silence from the other side of the loft. “That he loves you,” Halfwick said at last. “That you’ve been good and faithful, and passed every test. That you glorify him by doing his work, and will be rewarded for it.”
Día sat back. “You don’t need to lie to me.”
“Sorry,” Halfwick said. She couldn’t see much of his face, but he seemed sincere. “You sounded like you’d had too much of the truth already.”
Día’s eyes filled, unbidden, and she hurried to wipe them clear. She’d cried more in the past two weeks than she had in the past ten years, and was beginning to despair of the well ever running dry. “And what truth is that?”
“That none of us knows what we’re doing,” came the rough-edged reply. “That nobody has all the answers, and anybody who claims otherwise is deluded or selling you something. That we’re all making it up as we go along, and the most you can hope for is a pocket of confidence big enough to hold some of your doubts, but not deep enough to stuff yourself in. And that if you’re anything like me, and have spent your life running around with a – a bloody bag over your head, it’s going to hurt when someone snatches it away.”
Día couldn’t argue with that. Winshin had made sure of it. “But you’re His favorite,” she said, her voice small in her own ears. “He loves you. He saved you.”
Halfwick leaned forward, into the faint radiance of torchlight and stars beaming through the empty window. Even in the dim light, it was impossible to miss the red-purple rope bruise appearing around his neck, or the greenish rot slowly eating through his youthful features. “Do you really think so?”
“Well, what else am I to understand?” Día said, exasperated. “Think past what you look like and consider what you’ve done: He’s obviously chosen you to be the worker of His miracles!”
Halfwick actually smiled at that, and leaned back into the shadows. “Funny,” he said. “I was just thinking the same about you.”
Día found nothing funny about it. “That’s not remotely true. I didn’t – nothing I did was any good. God saved you, and the Dog Lady saved Elim. I could have stayed home.” She sorely wished she had.
“True,” said the clotting voice in the shadows. “Except that Elim wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t kept him alive here in town – if you hadn’t brought him help and water after I let him be strung up in the street. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near him if you hadn’t helped me get out of here. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you had something to do with that fire in the desert – the one Elim says kept the whole lot of them from being eaten alive.”
There was a little tap-sound as Halfwick let his head rest back against the weathered wooden wall. “Think of it, Día. I might have instigated this whole mess, but you’re the one who made something out of it. You cut me down when they hanged me. You woke me up before you buried me. And even though I don’t pretend to understand what I might have been granted, I can promise you this: I never would have had the humility to ask for it if I hadn’t been constantly eclipsed, humbled, just – in every way outshone by someone I considered completely beneath me.”
It took Día a moment to realize that he was talking about her. It took a moment more to swallow the lump in her throat.
By then, Halfwick had carried on. “So... I’m sorry that I don’t have any great revelations for you. But you should – I think you ought to go and enjoy the party out there, or at least credit yourself for it, because in a world without you – without every one of your efforts – I fail, and Elim dies, and none of this happens. God didn’t need to choose you. You chose yourself.”
For a man with no great revelations, he was doin
g a lousy job. Dumbstruck, grasping at the edges of an idea whose full shape she couldn’t begin to imagine, Día had no hope of framing a suitable reply. “Thank you,” she said at last. “I don’t... I’ve been struggling with that.”
That earned her a moldering snort. “I know the feeling.”
Her first thought was a disgusted How could you possibly?
Her second, more public expression was considerably kinder. “How so?”
There was a shifting in the darkness opposite, and her first whiff of what was fast becoming Halfwick’s trademark smell. “I expected to die,” he said. “I thought I would save Elim, make up for things by getting him pardoned, and then I would die. But I didn’t, and I haven’t: it was the Dog Lady or Marhuk or both that cleared the debt for him. And now... now I’m at a bit of a loose end.” He might have shaken his head. “Scratch that – I AM a loose end. I haven’t – this can’t be a reward or a punishment, as I haven’t done anything good or bad enough to deserve it. I haven’t really done anything at all.”
Día would have liked to help refute that. She would have liked to take that beautiful copy of the Verses that Winshin had given her, flip expertly open to the correct page, and read him something that would clear things right up – find a nice bit of prophecy to tie up everything.
But the book was still sitting back at her church, unopened... because although Día could have read whatever was written therein, she didn’t trust herself to understand it. How could she, when she couldn’t even make sense of what she’d seen with her own eyes? All those things she’d taken for signs, miracles: Halfwick’s resurrection, the body she’d pulled from the oasis, the plum that had sprouted overnight, which she had buried somewhere in the desert. Día desperately needed an interpreter, a fellow human being to help make sense of it all… and Halfwick seemed to know even less than she did.
So she reached back to the last Penitent authority in her life, her hand curling around the fabric of her cassock where her dreadlocks used to be. What would he tell her? What had he known?
“Well,” she said at last, “I don’t think I’ve told you, but my father was the sexton here. He was only supposed to dig the graves, but sometimes when someone died in shame or sin – suicides, for example – and the priest didn’t want to conduct a service, Father and I would have one in secret. He told me that we should always pray for that person’s soul, no matter what they’d done. The priest said that the person went to their final reward as soon as they died, but Father said that because God exists outside time, the things we did for them after they died were just as important as the things they did when they were alive.”
Día couldn’t tell whether Halfwick’s silence was reflective or simply confused. Was she making any sense at all?
“So we could… that is, their fate wasn’t set in stone,” she continued. “We offered prayers for the dead not to try to change God’s mind about what to do with their soul, but to reach back through God, to touch the person they were back when they were still alive. We hoped – we believed that what we did in the present could change the past.”
“Not bloody likely,” Halfwick muttered.
“But if it were true, how would you know?” Día countered. A past life would change, and the present world would be changed in turn. It would happen instantly, imperceptibly.
“Anyway,” she said. “What I mean to say is that... you know, maybe what you are now isn’t about what you’ve already done. Maybe it’s about what you WILL do. And regardless... whether or not you can find anything in your past that justifies your present, your present certainly is the root of your future. Perhaps it would be healthier to start thinking of what you mean to accomplish with what you’ve been given – you know, what you can do now that you couldn’t before.”
And on reflection, perhaps Día would do well to take some of her own advice. She’d been thinking of that over the past week, during the trip home. On the surface of it, she hadn’t acquired much but an extra measure of courage and a pile of unanswered questions – but underneath that, a spark of envy was kindling. Seeing all those beautifully dark a’Krah – even being mistaken for one of them – and watching the way Fours and Miss du Chenne shared a siblings’ embrace, and feeling how the Dog Lady cared for Elim... all of it had engendered an unbearable thirst for kinship, a wish to share in that priceless, effortless similarity. Día had little idea about the world east of the border, but she knew it included people like her – and she desperately wanted to meet them.
“Well,” Halfwick said presently. “Perhaps I will. In the meantime, I can think of at least one thing you can accomplish on my behalf.”
Día glanced up. “What’s that?”
There was a little hint of whiteness back there in the shadows – perhaps a postmortem smile. “You could stop hanging about with rancid barn-dwelling vagrants and go enjoy yourself.”
Honestly, Día didn’t feel like it. Everyone out there would be noisy if not drunk, and she would be jostled and stepped on and endlessly pressed to drink.
But the return of a living goddess was far beyond a once-in-a-lifetime occasion... and if she were thinking with Halfwick’s pragmatism, being seen in public as one of U’ru’s favorite foster-puppies would almost certainly cut down on nervous looks and closed doors.
Día sighed, and tried to muster some enthusiasm. “I suppose I should. But I’ve enjoyed our time, and I’ll look for you again before you leave.”
Halfwick shifted again in the dark. “I’d like that.”
Something had gone unsaid just there, but it might be impolite to linger and ask. So Día reluctantly climbed down from the loft and went out – to see and be seen, to present herself as a confident, contented young lady, and to hope that someday she would be one.
SIL SAT THERE long after Día had gone out. He watched the moon rise, the fires die down, and the festivities disperse. Eventually, he pulled out the little stone in his pocket – the flat one he’d started carving into a portable headstone during that long, strange walk through the desert. The pen-knife scratchings were too faint to make out in the dark, but his softening thumbnail had all but memorized them.
S.A. Halfwick.
1/4/47 – /9/64
He’d left the day blank, waiting for the moment when he finally collapsed from exposure and thirst. Now he considered filling in the last day of his old life – the one that had ended with a noose and a push and a moment of weightless surprise. Or perhaps he ought to just lob the silly thing straight out the window and have done.
In the end, Sil did neither. Instead, he sat back, thinking about what Día had said about having an eye towards future accomplishments – and what he had promised in a moment of mad, unthinking desperation.
Let me live, and I will profit you more than any man ever has.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A DAY NOT PROMISED
IN THE END, it wasn’t any bodily discomfort that drove Elim to wakefulness. Just the opposite: he was so comfortable, and the bed was so pleasant, that he thought he would open his eyes just long enough to see if there wasn’t time for a little bit more of a lie-in before the chore-bell –
– and was amazed all over again to find himself in a stranger’s room.
He wasn’t at home. He was in Fours’ upstairs bedroom. And the morning light promised that he’d been there awhile – that he’d survived one more night in Sixes, this time with no sunburn, no hangover, nothing at all to show for it...
... nothing except for a lone visitor, sitting and looking out the window.
“Hawkeye?” Elim sat bolt upright, hardly able to credit his eyes. The Sundowner fellow was clean and dressed, with no blindfold, no splint, not a scratch on him.
He turned at the sound of Elim’s voice, his face pleasant even as his eyes drifted. “Sir?”
“Thank God, buddy – oh, thank God. I thought you were stove in. I thought you were done for. What happened to you?”
The translator shook his head. “I don�
��t understand.” The words came out faintly slurred, with ominous little gaps in between, as if Hawkeye were having to hand-pick each one of them.
Didn’t he remember it? “The mountain, you know, when you were all so sick. You’d busted your leg, and I carried you, and you got them queer fits, and made the – and they made the rocks crumble up. You recall that?”
The translator’s brow furrowed... the left side more so than the right. “Recall what?”
Elim’s heart sank at the implications. He tried one more time, in his best Sunday Ardish. “Are you all right?”
The left side of Hawkeye’s mouth ticked up in the suggestion of a smile. “I’m okk...” Then he hit a wall, groping for a word that wasn’t there. “Okk...”
Was there anything of Hawkeye left? Did he even know who he was? Elim clutched at the bedspread, suddenly anxious not to be the only still-intact survivor of that whole funeral expedition – desperate to assure himself that he still had a fellow-veteran, a friend in arms. “Okay?” Elim suggested, willing the word to make itself true.
“Okay,” Hawkeye dutifully repeated.
Elim exhaled, long and sorrowfully. He hadn’t made it. He’d wanted so badly to get this one thing right: to save just one person, to beat the odds and keep Hawkeye alive, to prove to himself and the world that he was more than ignorance and a gun, and now...
Well, and now it might be time to put aside his own wants.
“You, uh... you want a smoke?” Elim ventured. “Your pipe?”
Hawkeye brightened at that. “Pipe.”
Elim held his breath and watched as Hawkeye used his left hand to fish out a rusty tin from his left pocket, and a new pipe from his right. Then he reached for the cane beside him, tried and failed to clear the chair, and dropped back down into it.
Elim was on his feet in a hot second. “Do you need...”
But Hawkeye was already back at it – using every bit of his strength to haul himself up to standing, and then to move forward at a heavy, grinding drag: one step forward with his left foot, followed by one awkward pull of his right. He leaned heavily on the edge of Fours’ overcrowded desk, feeling along the drawer-fronts as he went – until one apparently inspired him. He pulled it open and withdrew something, before helping himself laboriously back to a seat.
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