Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “Big pistol,” he said. “You ever use it?”

  “You stole our horse, supplies, food. We’ll die without them.”

  Giff pushed his hat back and sniffed.

  “And?”

  “And I want them back.”

  Giff smiled again.

  “You do, do you?”

  “That’s all I want.”

  “Oh,” said Giff, “you’ll get you more than that.”

  He went for his gun. Callum shot Giff dead in the heart. The stove-hatted man screamed and clutched his ear; the man to Callum’s right lifted his pistol. Callum cocked and fired. The man flew backward, out of the light.

  The Walker was empty.

  Callum reached down and yanked the deafened man’s revolver from its holster and stood over him, aiming left-handed at the man’s face. The man lay there powder-burned and blood-eared, moaning. His hat had come off and the top of his head was shiny and bald. He looked up at Callum.

  “Mercy,” he said.

  Callum looked down at him a long moment. He was breathing hard, and he could feel the blood thundering through him. He could feel it beating in his fingertips. Thump, thump, thump. His finger wanted to pull that trigger. To be done with it. He looked away a moment.

  The saber caught him on the inside of his left thigh. He screamed. The man let go of the sword and made a grab for the pistol, and Callum stepped back and pulled the trigger right in his face.

  It was not like the others. Not something you could unsee. The man’s body crumpled before him, the head blasted into the darkness beyond the close halo of firelight.

  Callum stumbled backward, dragging the handle of the saber in the dirt. Blood ran down the blade and wetted the pommel; it made indecipherable scribbles on the ground. Callum watched the blade fall from his leg, and it did not hurt, not yet. Still he dropped the pistols he was holding and reeled. The pond circumscribed a clear opening to the sky, treeless, and the stars were bright and high, seeing and cold. They saw what wreckage. They had seen from aeons back, those stars, and he wondered with what all they had seen were they surprised. They did not look surprised.

  He looked down at himself, his open palms, his blushing pant leg. The Walker was lying at his feet, empty, and he picked it up and stuck it through his belt. He saw on the leader’s hands a pair of fine riding gauntlets. He took these and donned them and took the jar from the fire. He hid the jar back inside a saddlebag, not intending for Ava to know what he’d stolen, not yet. He should have already told her, and now it was too late. He unbuckled the man’s gun belt as quickly as he could, his fingers fumbling, and stuffed this into a saddlebag as well. He rifled the men’s pockets for currency and found some and tucked it into his coat uncounted. He took up the stove-hatted man’s satchel, heavy and clanking with sundry items and a good four pounds of hard bread, and slung it over his shoulder.

  He saw two horses standing nervously at the edge of the trees, the rest gone. He knew he should run them down and rope them in, but he wanted to get out of the light. The impulse to run was like a scream inside him.

  He swung into the saddle of the black horse and crashed away in the direction of the road, following the creek downward through the wood, the branches whipping blood in streaks across his face. He broke from the trees and struck the road at a gallop, only to stop, disoriented, after some fifty yards. He called Ava’s name. Called and called. He needed to quit calling if he was to hear her call back to him, but he called several more times before he could stop himself. He heard her call back from northward on the road, it sounded like. He yanked the horse around and rode in that direction. Slower now, fearful of running her down.

  She was on the side of the path a half minute up the road. She climbed into her old spot behind him and he gave her the satchel. He yanked the reins around again and rode hard to the south, descending. He rode the horse hard enough that Ava could not speak to him or him to her, the horse putting long strides between them and the wreckage left in the woods.

  They were still riding when the neighboring ridges rose sheer-limned out of darkness, dawning as if for the first time, a cataclysmic upthrust from the ground. Still riding when the sun shot sideways through the forest, and the trees whirled past like black-charred columns in a forest on fire, everything a blur in the violence of flight.

  * * *

  The slave hunter dismounted and led his horse toward the black stain of smoking coals, the ring of bodies outburst as if from an explosion. It was dawn. Cupped in his palm was a small pouch, draw-strung, which the men had watched him worry between his fingers as he rode. It made a soft rattle in his hand, like stones maybe, or the toyed satisfaction of rosary beads. It gave them chills. A sound like frictive joint bone—a popping ruined knee, or the crackle of a once-broken jaw. It would be in his great white hand, worried, and then gone again, quick as magic. The mystery of its contents garnered no end of rumor. The pouch disappeared from his hand as he approached the scene.

  One of the men toed the head of a dead man that lay beside him. There was a neat hole in the forehead, penny-size, the insides blown clear out the rear.

  “Hell of a mess,” he said.

  The mindless wake lay sprawled several feet behind the head.

  The slave hunter glanced in that direction. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  The men watched him squat before a stray saber. The edge was blooded but dry. Nearby lay a frantic scrawl-work in the dirt. His long-boned index finger unscrolled to a point. It touched the grit that coated the pommel, traced the strange glyphs in the ground. He seemed to cipher them right to left, as one might the strange languages of desert people, until reaching spotted blood coins that punctuated the message like crazed ellipses. He prodded them lightly and touched his finger to his tongue. He stood. He walked to where the prints of a heavy-shoed horse ran parallel to those of a man, the right boot print straight-streaked in ruts, the left toe-struck, until the footprints disappeared and hoofprints lengthened to those of a horse at a gallop. He squatted down and placed his hand into the hoofprints.

  Behind him, three of the men were roping in the loose horses. Others were staring at the eviscerated trophy of mountain cat. And the rest were already dismounting, spreading out their bedrolls for a few hours’ rest. The slave hunter stood and cleared his throat. The men looked at him, their faces hangdog and coon-eyed. “Back on the horses,” he said. “This was him. He’s hurt. Bleeding.”

  Somebody stuck a tired palm in the hollow of his eye socket. Nobody wanted to keep on, not without a round of shut-eye. “How bad’s he bleeding?”

  The pouch was again in the slave hunter’s hand, popping between his fingers. “Bad enough,” he said. He eyed the men and spat. “Best square those bedrolls. I don’t mean to share my cut with some bunch of laggards.”

  Backbones stiffened across the clearing, those of men unaccustomed to such umbrage, audacity. But no one acted on pride. They mounted their horses, their mouths clamped shut, their greed the better of them. After all, this boy—he would make them rich.

  Chapter 6

  Come midmorning, Callum grew light-headed and cold, colder even as the sun spun white-burning into a pewter sky. His leg throbbed now, a growing hammer beneath the flesh.

  The road had forked before them three times in the night, and Callum had always taken the leftmost path, easterly, making no effort to disguise his tracks. They had been descending for some time when the tunnel of trees broke into a meadow of high grass, browned and dry. The long blades rustled in the wind. They left the path for a small knoll, where a leafless tree twisted toward the sky. They rode past the tree, just down the far side of the knoll. They did not want to be seen from the road.

  Callum had not looked at the wound in his thigh, as if ignoring it would help. He slipped off the side of the horse, blood-slick, and lay flat in the grass. The ground was uncertain underneath him, undulant. Ava leapt off the horse. He’d hidden the wound from her for most of the night; she’d only just discove
red it. She looked at the horse’s side and the leg of his trousers, dark from hip to hem.

  “Goddammit, Callum.”

  She knelt down next to him.

  “What happened?”

  “Saber.”

  “Take off your trousers.”

  Callum nodded and fumbled at his buckle. She brushed his hands away and unbuckled him and unbuttoned the fly and peeled the pants down to his ankles. He looked up and saw the upreaching tree silhouetted against the sky, the manifold branches like some insidious fracturing of the heavens. He did not look down at his leg.

  Ava lifted his leg and bent the knee. The intake of his breath was sharp, sudden, like the thrust of a knife.

  “You’re lucky,” she said.

  “Lucky?”

  “Missed the artery. Whoever stuck you knew his business, but he missed.”

  He heard her tearing scraps of fabric.

  “What in the hell happened up there?”

  Callum looked off to one side, toward the farther ranges in their wake. He thought he saw the spiraling of dark flecks in the sky. Carrion birds tiny-ranged, still-hung.

  “I got the horse back. And our food.”

  Ava prodded the edges of the wound with her fingers.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, gasping.

  “I heard shots,” she said.

  He cut his eyes at her.

  “I did what I had to.”

  She stood and looked down at him. She was tall against the sky.

  “You had to shoot somebody.”

  Callum had begun to breathe hard with the pain.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She sniffed. “That wound infects and you’re gonna be a dead boy.”

  “Just let’s bandage it and we’ll find something.”

  “You get anything else from them? Spirits?”

  She turned to check the saddlebags. She turned to the one with the jar.

  “I didn’t get anything off them like that,” he said.

  She unclasped the flap and lifted it.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  “What all you got hidden in here?”

  The horse was too tall even for Ava to peer inside the bag, so she dug her hand inside and started sifting. Her hand stopped; her face went slack. Slowly, she lifted the jar from the bag by the lid. She held it against the sun, the shape inside newly distorted by the heat-crazed glass.

  “My brother,” she said.

  “Brother?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “But—”

  “Miscarried. You took him from my daddy’s study.”

  “I did.”

  “I couldn’t find him before we left. I thought somebody’d stole him.”

  “Somebody would of. Would of took him off to a carnival show.”

  “How dare you,” she said. She squeezed the jar between her hands.

  He felt a long way off from her, and cold. She looked away.

  “They were gonna cook him,” he said.

  She looked at him.

  “What?”

  “Last night. The men. They were gonna boil him. Over the fire grate.”

  Ava’s eyes became rimmed with whiteness. She knelt slowly at Callum’s side, the jar on her knees, and he could feel her fury. He was acutely aware of his thin white legs, his lost blood.

  “You killed them,” she said.

  Callum nodded.

  “How many?”

  He swallowed. “Three.”

  She ran her tongue across her teeth, slowly, as if testing their sharpness.

  “You did good, then.”

  He looked away.

  “Callum.” She took his chin. “You did good.”

  Callum looked into her eyes, her pupils haloed by blue irises. They glowed with some newly crazed electricity. Good was not the word.

  “What I had to,” he said.

  “What you had to,” she said. He started to look away, but she held his chin. She looked into his eyes. “What you had to, Callum.”

  He nodded.

  Ava put down the jar and tied a long scrap of her quilt around the wound on his leg and applied pressure. Blood blossomed on the white fabric. Then she got out what was left of the side of meat after the riders’ depredations and started to eat. She offered Callum some; he couldn’t. The pain had begun to hit him, a long wail from the wound. He thought it would stop but it didn’t. It got bigger inside him. Louder. Wailing through his whole body. He arched his back and drove his shoulders into the ground. He clenched fistfuls of grass and ripped them out and clenched fistfuls of dirt. Ava swallowed her food. She put her hand on his forehead, and it felt cool against his skin.

  “Any higher and we’d be putting a tourniquet on your leg at the hip. You’d be lucky to keep the leg. But we got to disinfect. Before it starts to discolor.” She bent over the bandage and sniffed. “And to smell.”

  “Water,” said Callum.

  She dug in the saddlebags and found their beef bladder: drunk dry.

  “We got to get on,” she said. “We got to find something somewhere to disinfect with.”

  He was breathing hard now, the pain like an enemy underneath his skin. To deny its existence the only thing. He gasped for air, not strong enough. It was there, there, there. Pounding. He rolled his head against the ground and searched the heavens, the sun a pale and watery orb in the grayed-over sky. It seemed distant, no help, jealous of its own warmth or shine.

  He rolled his head the other way, his eyes white-bulbed, searching.

  There: a V of migratory birds, white-flying against the bruised sky. They were geese. He watched them, the gentle working of their wings, long-feathered for wind riding, and the neatly tucked pairs of webbed feet. The bottle-shaped contour of necks and bodies so sleek cutting through the sky, and hollow-boned, like something God-made of the truest reckonings. They flew with military precision, uniformly spaced, formation unbroken. There would be shots to come, lead pellets swarm-blasted from marshes and thickets, some of their number lost, wing-shot, fallen broken from the sky, twist-turning toward the end they all feared. But the wedge would hold, its logic true.

  Callum felt tidings white-hatched in his blood, rising, and he wanted so badly to follow them south. Fly past this cold and hard-ridged land and reach some lowland lake or pond. Sun-silvered. Warm. The fall endured.

  “Callum. Callum, wake up.”

  A hand on his face. Gentle, then firmer.

  “Callum.”

  A slap.

  He opened his eyes to the gray sky, empty. He looked down. Ava. Her face was dark against the sky. Worried.

  “Lost you for a second there. You got to fight it.”

  He nodded.

  Ava helped him to stand. He pulled up his trousers. The fabric was blood-caked and stiff. He walked to the right side of the horse and put his right foot in the stirrup and mounted that way, no pressure on his left leg. But the punctured thigh had swelled and did not like the saddle at all. Ava was working on one of the saddlebags. She was arranging things neatly for the jar. She finished, and he shucked one foot from the stirrup so she could use it to mount. She put her hands in his coat pockets for warmth, like she sometimes did.

  They topped the knoll, heading back toward the path, and stopped a moment. The crests of neighboring mountains broke from a sea of cloud, small sharp-pointed hills levitating in the sky. In the foreground lay the path, a narrow strip of black dirt through the meadow. Callum traced the line of it northward, the way they’d come, to the dark-tunneled trees where the woods gave on to the field. It was all quiet save the dry whispering of the grass. It had taken them days to get back the horse. Anyone pursuing them on horseback would have made great strides in overtaking them.

  He listened closely for the rumor of hooves on the wind from the north. Listening so hard for danger seemed only to invite the hearing of it. There was the faintest thunder he may or may not have heard. He first thought it was coming downwind f
rom the way they’d come, but the wind was swirling in the meadow and it could have come from the direction they were heading. Or it could be nothing.

  He took to the trail, and for the first few minutes he didn’t know how he could keep riding for the pain. Each jolt in the saddle stole a breath from his lungs. He tried to go somewhere in his mind. He tried to go to that stratum of quiet sky again, high enough to map a world, all its meanness grown small underneath him. The trying helped, but barely. He could not keep his head above the pain. It was with him every step, insistent. A brother that carried him along, his slouch hat bobbing over the saddle as he rode.

  The trail dropped them onto a wider droving road a few hours later. He thought it was the one that went into Asheville. They rode all day with the hope of a farm or cabin where something for the wound could be borrowed or bought or stolen. There was nothing, and Callum had begun to feel a chill crawling up his spine, a flush burning in his face. A slippage between two worlds, like he’d felt the day he was shot. He said nothing to Ava.

  Dusk coming, she reached around and put an ungloved hand on his forehead the way his mother had once done. He had the slouch hat pulled low and she had to lift the brim to do it. She drew her hand away after a moment. She didn’t say anything.

  They kept riding past dark. The moon was out. The wind had moved the fallen leaves to one shoulder, and the white dust of the road glowed with an otherworldly paleness broken only by the fissurelike shadows of the overhanging trees. The leaves had been falling constantly, a slow showering of fire. Many of the trees were nearly naked now. They looked lonely, reaching for the sky.

  Now and again he and Ava saw the yellow-lit windows of cabins on the steep hillsides to either side, but they could not find the paths that led up to them. They never saw any. Whether they were hidden by man’s disguising or the thick-wooded nature of the country, they didn’t know.

  They rode a long time into the night. Callum’s thigh was thundering and he was cold and his mind was mostly black. They were heading up a long and gradual rise when he felt eyes on him. Eyes like he’d felt with the lion. He thought it could be the fever. The pain. Nevertheless, he scanned the sides of the trail. Nothing.