Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “I don’t think I could stand the wriggling.”

  “Well, it wasn’t still alive. Daddy’d fried it. He bet me I wouldn’t do it.”

  “What he bet you?”

  “I don’t know. He just bet me.”

  “What was it like?”

  “A little baconish.”

  “Bull,” said Callum.

  “Honor bright.”

  “Huh,” said Callum.

  That didn’t sound half as bad as it should have.

  That night they camped in a dense grove of sycamores that clouded a hill high above a creek. The trunks branched hydralike low to the ground, so that every tree was like many, an open head of branches whose dead yellow leaves whispered drily in the breeze, walling them in. Perfect cover from searchers. They led the horse into the maze of limbs and tied him off, then crackled down into a makeshift bedding of dead leaves and blankets as a cold breath came skulking across the ground. Ava was shaking some, more than Callum thought was good, and he held her close from behind, his body a shelter for hers.

  The cold, he thought. It kept coming. They were heading south, away from the worst, but the season was sweeping rapidly toward winter. He knew the trees they’d left in the mountains were naked now, wintry and dead-seeming, and the seasonal flaming of the land through which they rode as ephemeral as fire itself. Their days-long ride within its ken an unnatural protraction, the land darkening behind them. Dying. Toward the coast the world changed, he knew. There were trees that held their leaves the year long, evergreen, and could provide better cover and shelter to those in flight from the wintering lands, from the furred riders who roamed them on smoking horses. And before falling asleep, he wondered if given something fast enough, a machine or beast heretofore unfathomed, a man might outride the night itself, racing apace with the sun under a sky of eternal light. Never lost, never cold.

  He was drifting to sleep. Down in the creek bottom below them, the windows of a small cabin flickered from the burning heart of its woodstove. The porch pillars were made of tree trunks, the branches amputated to six-inch nubs.

  * * *

  Midstream of the crossing one of the horses spooked, a lightning-strung mare stolen from some stable of former privilege. She was chest-deep in the river, her chestnut shoulders bolding and articulate, when she went suddenly walleyed at some shadow of fish or snake darting under the surface. She reared for the near bank, screaming, charging the horses behind her. Three of them were knocked from their feet. They rolled into the slate current with their riders atop them, a mess of legs and teeth and hooves and screams that careened downstream, rock to rock, until all of the screaming stopped. The record of anything out of the ordinary lost altogether in the river’s voice, jagged-toothed and sweet.

  The slave hunter sat his horse, safe already on the far bank with a tracking dog slung sleepily over his knees. He watched the majesty of channeled stormwater swallow the panic so quickly. So absolutely. Then he turned and rode on into the trees.

  Twice that day they lost the trail, the scent. Both times the slave hunter would not be thwarted. He wrangled the path right out of the wild, cutting for sign with bent spine, labored breath, prodding the earth with the same hand that held his horse’s reins. He could tell the Colonel’s stolen horse by the stamp its iron shoes left in soft ground. One of the front shoes did not match the other. It was slightly out of shape, hammered in place of a thrown original, and did not carry the mark of a former cavalry unit as the other did. He could tell the tall horse by the head height of its riders as they broke trail branches and stripped foliage through the woods. He could identify the horse’s stool by sight, his dogs the same by scent. He knew the distinct patterns of fire-making the riders used. The way they built their architecture of kindling and kicked their fire to ashes. The way the boy pissed a zigzag over the smoking coals. All these things they did not know they did—the hunter knew.

  But in the swampy glades the trail was easily lost, hoofprints hidden beneath a sheen of opaque water. They pushed on along the corduroy roads, pushing far past nightfall. Nowhere to stop, this slop no place for bedding down. The men rode slumped on their horses, single file, bitching over their shoulders in hushed voices. They were saddle-sore, hungry, cold. Sleep had been scarce, pickings scarcer. The ones who did not bitch slept. Some did both, grumbling into their bearded chins, the words profane or inarticulate. But the charred land through which they rode these long days, charred or yet still smoldering, seemed only to fuel them. The razed homesteads and mutilated stock. The dead-faced whites and white-smiling blacks. All these signs like the revelating Horsemen of the Book might leave, judgment come early upon this kingdom. And in the wake of this loss, the bounty of the boy’s head was only of greater import, for men such as them would have little place in the world that stood scorched and remnant before them.

  * * *

  A scream woke them, curdling through the morning dark. They did not jolt or straighten, by instinct. The dead crackle of their bedding could betray them. Instead, their eyes flicked wide at one another, pale halos at the whites. The sun was not yet up. Slowly they flattened themselves beneath their mounding of quilts, blankets, and coats—slowly, slowly—and crept to the edge of the grove, the protest of fallen leaves drawn out to the thinnest sound, broken and unpatterned. Callum eyed Reiver over his shoulder. The horse had gone still, one eye hunting the bottomland for the next stab of sound. They looked through a dense clutch of branches to the dark string of the creek scrawled below them, the rusted cabin roof. The door of the place stood open, as did the door of the woodstove inside, a stovepiped iron with a belly of fire. The cabin pulsed with inner flame. The light spilled down the front steps and into the yard, a red pool in the mist.

  There was a large laurel oak in the front yard, dead, its naked branches twisted outward into a broad crown. Shadowy figures swarmed beneath the penumbral gloom, their shapes mottled by the play of firelight. Callum squinted, his eyes adjusting. They were in ragged uniform, their shell jackets blue, their heads covered in plug hats and kepis. Foragers. Maybe ten of them, some with burning pine knots. One of them threw a dark coil of rope over a low-hanging branch and noosed the end. There was a scream again, then a strangled gurgle. A girl’s voice, clamped shut at the throat.

  She was on her knees by the mules and wagon, held in place by a skinny soldier with no beard. Callum looked back underneath the tree. There was an old man trembling there in pajamas, his feet bare. One button was undone at the trapdoor seat of his pants, one half globe of bare ass revealed. One side of his face hung slack; a thin strand glistened from his mouth. They looped the noose over his turkeyed throat.

  “Where’d you hide the horses?” asked one of them, their leader, his voice eerily clear in the predawn stillness. “The stables are empty.”

  The old man shivered and shook. A big globule of spittle gleamed on his mouth. He said nothing. An old barn slouched to the side of the cabin, black inside. Empty.

  The leader took the loose end of rope, coiled it twice around his forearm, and pulled. The hemp tightened. The old man’s bare feet went dainty, to the toes.

  “The horses!”

  The girl broke free for a moment. “They’re gone!” she said. “The first lot of you goddamn bluecoats took ’em not two days back.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe you’re telling the truth?”

  “We had to shoot the ones they traded us for. They was jaded. Dead on legs. Bodies is out in the south pasture. That’s the truth. You wanna go look?”

  When she said south, the leader didn’t look the right way. So they were lost. A foraging party separated from the main column, trying to find their way back in the night.

  The soldier looked down at his boots. He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “What about food, then? What have you to eat?”

  “They took our whole store of sweet potatoes. That and the molasses, the corn. Our two hogs. Burned all our wood, too. Hell if I know how me and Granddad
dy’s supposed to last the winter.”

  The soldier let go of the rope. The old man crumpled to the ground. The soldier cocked his head and watched him writhe, as he might a worm on hot stone.

  “Reckon you aren’t,” he said. He turned to the other men. “Boys, mount up. They got nothing for us.”

  The men turned and began shuffling toward their mules like sleepwalkers. The animals had their heads down, some hobbled at the front legs. One of them tried to hop away. Its forelegs collapsed; it plowed into the ground headfirst. Their mules were broke-down, dying, pushed too hard for too long.

  “’Nother body walking,” said one of the men, chuckling.

  “Damn you,” said a second, squatting down to cut the fallen animal’s throat. He straightened up from the work and his head exploded, atomized in red mist. There rose the blood shriek of myriad voices, murder-tongued, and bolts of blue flame intersected the yard at all angles. Men clutched themselves and fell.

  Callum knew that sound.

  He reached over and pushed Ava flat to the ground. He dropped his own chin to the leaves. Riders, the Colonel’s, catapulted themselves into the yard upon spines of horseflesh, shooting downward into the blue-coated soldiers. Smoke filled the clearing, and screams. The men on the ground threw up their hands in surrender. They were cut down where they stood. Empty-handed.

  * * *

  The sun was beginning to stab through the trees. The riders remounted and disappeared into the pinewood, as if in retreat from dawn. The one-armed man rode point. For a half hour, Callum and Ava lay unmoving, afraid to move, trying to calm their breath. Waiting. Callum tried not to look at what handiwork the Colonel’s men had left beneath the dead oak, but he couldn’t help himself. Ava was holding his upper arm with both hands. He could feel stripes of bruise blooming beneath her grip. Her eyes were wide open, toward the dead.

  They led the horse out of the grove and down the embankment. The old man and his granddaughter sat huddled on the porch, whimpering, their faces shining with tears, snot, spittle. The fallen men of the foraging party had been raised vertical like marionettes. They ornamented the tree like some perverse work of art, a chandelier of the gut-shot, the disemboweled and disfigured. The branches of the oak wept slightly with the weight.

  Callum led the horse amid the dangling feet, many unbooted. Some were missing pants, some coats or gloves. One a finger, a ring still gleaming on the bloody nub. The Colonel’s men had left messages upon the bodies. Some by knife, some by paper and stake. Personal oaths against occupation. On one there was a scrap of parchment driven into the sternum. A message: HUNGRY NOW? The corpse’s cheeks were swollen with viscera, his own or someone else’s. Some of the corpses twisted eastward on their ropes, toward the dawning sun. Their eyes still open, shining with false life.

  Callum stopped the horse before the porch.

  The girl looked up at them, her face twisted to an angry rose. But the sound she made—it was not a cry of pain, as Callum had first thought. As he had expected. It was too harsh and cackling. And her eyes: They were full of light.

  So strange. This girl, she was laughing.

  Her grandfather, too, his slack-sided mouth leaking with the spasms. Wild, crazed laughs.

  Beneath it all, Callum could hear the wind rustling the trophied oak, the scabbards and buckles clinking like wind charms. He turned his head toward Ava, keeping his eyes on the man and girl.

  “Let’s get on,” he said, a whisper from the side of his mouth. He started to tug the reins.

  Ava stayed his arm. “Wait,” she said. Then she leaned out from the saddle, holding his shoulder. “Nothing seems awful funny right about now.” She cocked a thumb behind her. “Not to them, not to me. Not to nobody.”

  The old man wiped his mouth, his eyes, and shook his head. “Fai—!” he said, his words slack-mouthed to a roar. “Fai— in Gaw!”

  Faith.

  “The Sorry Man say,” he said. He nodded. “Foresay.”

  “The who?” asked Ava.

  “The Seer Man,” said the girl. “We heard tell of an army on the march. Went straight to him. He said to have faith. Said evil’d kill evil on our land, and then we’d last many a winter here, Granddaddy and me. But the army come once already, took everything. Nothing to stop them, not evil nor good. So we think, False prophesy, no hope. We think, We’s walking dead. Then these-uns come through this morning.” She jutted her chin toward the dangling corpses. “Get their comeuppins.” She put her arm around her grandfather. “Now we know we’ll live.” She shrugged. “Somehow, anyhow. We will.”

  The old man hooked a crooked finger at them. “Fai—!” he said. “Fai— in Gaw!” He nodded vigorously at himself, his broken words.

  Callum wondered if they were addled. How could they be so goddamn sure? He wanted to go, but Ava squeezed his arm again.

  “This Seer Man,” she said. “So he can read the future?”

  The girl nodded. “Got him a direct conference with the Almighty,” she said.

  “So how do we find him?”

  “Shit,” said Callum.

  Chapter 12

  “I don’t want to go see him,” said Callum. He was digging at a root with a stick. It was dusk. “He could say something ugly’s gonna happen. Something we don’t want it to.”

  Ava sat next to him, her hands clasped around her knees.

  “Least then we’ll know,” she said. She looked around her, and Callum followed her eyes. The close-grown trees, the growing shadows, the empty spot where they made no fire despite the cold.

  “I don’t know that I want to know. What if it’s the knowing that makes it happen? The believing. You ever thought of that?”

  Ava nodded. “I thought of a lot of things,” she said. “Not least of them that we need help, bad. Especially when they could be anywhere now. Ahead of us, behind. And we don’t even know if there’ll be a place for us on the coast. If we’ll be taken in.”

  Callum dug harder with the stick. He was thinking she toted around a lot of crazy beliefs: monkeyed ancestors, sea monsters, soothsaying seer men. And, somehow, he found himself believing in much of what she did, these great unknowables that might explain a world he did not understand. And she was right. Their pursuers could be anywhere now. He scanned the dimming world of autumn, its deepening recesses and places to hide, and then he looked at Ava. Her cheeks were seamed with tears, her chin tucked tightly between her kneecaps. She was shaking, and he hadn’t realized how sick she looked, how ghostly pale. He worried it was the thing inside her, consuming her strength, and them with so little to eat. So little peace.

  He crept behind her and put his arms around her arms, his legs around her legs. She was rigid where he touched her. Slowly she softened against him. He could just barely stretch his chin over her shoulder. He set it there.

  “You really think this man could talk to God?” he asked. “Could tell us something?”

  Ava shrugged, her shoulder blades pushed up against his chest. “I’m tired of the not knowing,” she said. “Tired of being afraid. Hoping there’ll be a place for us somewhere.” He felt her ribcage swell underneath him. “So what I say is he damn well better. I intend to get answers from him. Nothing but.”

  He pushed his cheek against her jawbone. She pushed back. He imagined the blades of his own shoulders stretching outward, enveloping them both.

  * * *

  It was noon. They looked upon not a cabin, but the skeletal remnant of one. A structure reduced to flame-licked framing beams and burned-out clapboard. There was too much light flaring beneath a roof that yawned inward over this ill-propped gape of a structure. The wind its probable enemy, the rain. The infinitesimal weight of a cricket or pallid squirt of a crow.

  Callum halted the horse before the cabin. He could see clear inside the wind-lurched hulk. An old man sat beneath the imploded roof, the groaning beams. His boots, cherry red and well oiled, were propped upon the great desk behind which he sat, a claw-footed beast of carved oak filigree
and lioned crests. A halo of hair ringed the bald dome of his head at ear level, and he had a chevron mustache. His hair was the brightest white. His eyes were yellow. A handsome man once, perhaps, his flesh now surrendered like something left out in the rain.

  The old man cocked his head. He lifted his nose and eyed Callum up and down, up and down. His nose climbed higher and higher. His eyelids drooped. Callum felt somehow lacking.

  “We’re looking for the, uh, Seer Man,” he said. “You him?”

  The man pressed the fleshy notch of his upper lip with his thumb. His yellowed eyes were red-lipped, but the blue-black pupils were sharp, light-specked. He cocked his head. A tiny stone glimmered in the lobe of one ear.

  “Infamy,” he said, “is a small price to pay for immortality.”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  “Young man, that does depend.”

  Callum scratched his chin.

  “On what, exactly?”

  The old man clasped his hands behind his head. “I cannot be asked to convene with the Almighty without the proper … antifogmatic.”

  “The what?”

  “A good drop of the strong stuff,” he said. “That’s what I need. Just to smooth up the revelating is all.” He smiled politely.

  Callum rolled his eyes at Ava. She shook her head at him, fetched the half jar of Lachlan’s white liquor from the saddlebag. She handed it to him. They both dismounted. Callum walked toward the door frame bent crazy in midair, no walls to support it. He offered the jar slowly through the door.

  The old man gestured for him to step inside. Callum looked at Ava, then at the man.

  “No disrespect, sir,” said Callum, “but it don’t look real safe.”

  The man’s face darkened. “You don’t think I know when this old bitch’ll come down?”

  “I don’t know what you know.”

  The man leaned back and dug his tongue into his cheek, almost smiling. “But you want to.”

  Callum hesitated. Ava nabbed the jar from his hand and stepped through the door. The floorboards groaned under her boots. Callum leapt in after her. The man took the jar.