Bitter Gold Hearts (11 page)

My woodcraft was no longer what it had been in my Marine days, but it took no forest genius to follow either of the trails leading deeper into the woods. The first I tried split after about a third of a mile, heavy traffic having turned eastward suddenly. It looked like four or five ogres had been on Saucer head’s trail when they were recalled by their buddies. The other trail ran down into the woods east of where I stood.

I didn’t need to follow Saucer head to know where he’d gone. I turned east.

Five hundred yards along I paused, planted the back of my lap on a fallen tree trunk, and told my brain to get to work. I knew what I would find if I went on a little farther. I could hear the flies buzzing and the wild dogs bickering with the vultures. Much closer and I would smell it, too. Did I
have
to look?

Basically, there was no getting out of it. There was maybe one chance in a hundred that I was wrong and the centerpiece of that grisly feast was a woods bison. If I was right, chances were ten to one against me finding anything that would split things wide open. But you can’t skimp and take shortcuts. The odds are always against you until you do stumble across that one in ten.

Still, dead people who have been lying around in the woods for days aren’t particularly appealing. So I spent a few minutes considering a spider web with dew gems still on it before I put my dogs on the ground and started hoofing it toward a case of upturned stomach.

Five years in the Marines had brought me eyeball to eyeball with old death more times than I cared to remem­ber, and my life since has provided its grisly encounters, but there are some things I can’t get used to. Conscious­ness of my own mortality won’t let me.

The conclave of death was being held at the downhill end of an open, grassy area about twenty yards wide and fifty long. Patches of lichened granite peeked out of the soil. I collected a dozen loose chunks of throwing size and cut loose at the wild dogs. They snarled and growled but fled. They have grown very cautious around humans because bounty hunters are after them constantly. Espe­cially farm kids who want to pick up a little change for the fair or whatever.

The buzzards tried to bluff me. I didn’t bluff. They got themselves airborne and began turning in patient circles, looking down and thinking,
Someday, you too, man.
In the pantheon of one of the minor cults of TunFaire, the god of time is a vulture.

Maybe that’s why I hate the damned things. Or maybe that’s because they’ve become identified with my military service, when I saw so many circling the fields of futility where young Karentines died for their country.

So there I stood, a great bull ape, master of the land of the dead. Instead of pounding my chest and maybe forc­ing myself to inhale some tainted air, I moved as upwind as I could and started looking at what I’d come to see.

There wasn’t a woods bison in that mess.

I muttered, “I ought to remember Saucer head’s tend­ency to exaggerate.”

I counted up enough parts to make at least seven bodies. Four or five he said he’d taken. Even torn apart they remained ogre ugly. They’d been buried shallow beneath loose dirt, leaves, and stones. The lazy way, I might call it, but I look at comrades differently than ogres do. They don’t form bonds the way humans do. For them a dead associate is a burden, not an obligation.

No doubt they were in a hurry to quit the area, too.

You do what you have to do. I got in and used a stick to poke around, looking for personals, but it took only a minute to figure out that the living hadn’t been in too big a hurry not to loot the dead. Even their boots had been taken. That wasn’t the behavior of a band expecting to be in the big money soon. But with ogres you never know. Maybe their mothers had taught them the old saw, “Waste not, want not.”

I circled the burial site three times but could find no sign of comings or goings other than by the route I’d followed, and that the second group had taken down from the road. In places the soil was very moist from ground-water seepage. Such places sometimes hold tracks. I started looking those over, trying to cut the trail of a guy on crutches or one who wore his feet backward; something that would stick out if I happened to be hanging around with a bunch of ogres and one of the bad guys showed up. I didn’t expect to find anything, but luck doesn’t play for the other side all the time. Got to keep looking for that ten to one.

I found the nothing I expected, though not exactly because there was nothing to be found. It was one of those cases of suddenly deciding you ought to be investi­gating something somewhere else. I heard a stir in the woods behind me. Not much of one. Thinking some of the dogs had gotten brave, I turned with the stick I still carried.

“Holy shit!”

A woolly mammoth stood at the edge of the woods, and from where I was it looked about ninety-three hands high at the shoulder. How the hell it had come up so quietly is beyond me. I didn’t ask. When it cocked its head and made a curious grunting noise, I put the heels and toes to work according to the gods’ design. The beast threw a trumpet roar after me. Laughing. I paused behind a two-foot-thick oak and gave it a stare. A mammoth. Here. No mammoth had come this close to TunFaire in the past dozen generations. The nearest herds were four hundred miles north of us, up along the borders of thunder-lizard country.

The mammoth ambled out of the woods, laughed at me again, cropped some grass a couple of bales at a time while keeping one eye on me. Finally convinced that I was no fearless mammoth poacher, it eyeballed the vul­tures, checked the dead ogres, snorted in disgust, and marched off through the woods as quietly as it had come. And last night I’d been unconcerned because no wolf-man had been seen since I was a kid.

Like I said, luck is not always with the bad guys.

It was time to stop tempting it with the one out of ten and hike on back to my rig before the horses got wind of that monster and decided they would feel more comfort­able back in the city. Too bad Garrett had to ride shank’s mare.

__XVIII__

I sat on the buggy seat, beside the crossroads obelisk, and watched a parade of farm families and donkey carts head up the Derry Road. I didn’t see them. I was trying to pick between Karl Junior’s farm prison and Saucer head’s witch. The decision had actually been made. I was putting the thumbscrews on myself trying to figure if I was going to the farm first just to delay the pain skulking around the other place. No matter that I had to head the same direction to reach both and the farm was nearer. You don’t alter the past, turn the tide, or change yourself by brooding about your hidden motives. You will surprise yourself every time, anyway. Nobody ever figures out why.

“Hell with it! Get up.”

One of the team looked over her shoulder. She had that glint in her eye. The tribe of horses was about to amuse itself at Garrett’s expense.

Why do they do this to me? Horses and women. I’ll never understand either species.

“Don’t even think about it, horse. I have friends in the glue business. Get up.”

They got. Unlike women, you can show horses who is boss. The bout with introspection rekindled my desire to lay hands on the people responsible for the human equiva­lent of sending Amiranda to the glue works. The exit to the farm was up on a ridgeline where the ground was too dry to hold tracks, and hidden by under­growth. I passed it twice. The third time I got down and led the team, giving the bushes a closer look, and that did the trick. Two young mulberry trees, which grow as fast as weeds, leaned together over the track. Once past them the way was easy to follow, though it hadn’t been cleared since Donni’s departure. I had to go through a half mile of woods, not a mile. It was dense in there, dark, quiet, and humid. The deerflies and horseflies were out at play, and every few feet I got a faceful of spider silk. I sweated and slapped and mut­tered and picked ticks off my pants. Why doesn’t every­body live in the city?

I ran into a blackberry patch where the berries were fat and sweet, and decided to lunch on the spot. Afterward I felt more disposed toward the country, until the chiggers off the blackberry canes started gnawing. The track through the woods showed evidence of re­cent use, including that of the passage of at least one heavy vehicle. I had a feeling that, no matter what suspicions haunted me, I wouldn’t unearth one bit of physical evidence to impugn Junior’s version of what had happened. I kicked up a doe and fawn near the edge of the wood. I watched them bound across what once had constituted considerably more than a one-family subsistence farm, though now the acreage was wild and heavily spotted with wild roses and young cedars. The grass was waist high and some of the weeds were taller. A trampled path led down slope to what had been a substantial house. There were no domestic animals in sight, no dogs bark­ing, no smoke from either chimney, nor any other sign that the place was occupied.

Still, I remained rooted, giving the wildlife time to grow accustomed to my presence and return to business. The Boga Hills loomed indigo in the distance. The most famous Karentine vineyards are up there. This coun­try was close enough to have some of the magic rub off, but hadn’t been turned into vineyards. I wondered if someone hadn’t gotten that idea and had abandoned the place when they found out why. Then I recalled Donni Pell. A girl who came from some kind of money who went to work for Lettie, on contract, supposedly because she liked the job. A girl who now supposedly owned a place that, a few years ago, had been in satisfactory shape for a quick sale to TunFaire’s land-hungry lords. I doubted it was part of the problem at hand, but it might be interest­ing to unravel the whys. Ten minutes of pretending I was scouting for the com­pany left me impatient to get on with it. I tied the horses, got down low, and started my downhill sneak.

The place was as empty as a dead shoe. I went for the buggy, turned the team loose to browse while I prowled.

Junior’s report was accurate down to the minutiae. The only things he hadn’t mentioned were that the well was still good and his captors had equipped it with a new rope and bucket. The horses awarded me a temporary cease­fire after I drew them a few buckets.

There was no doubt that a band of ogres — or a mob equally unfastidious — had spent several days hanging around. Days during which they must have eaten nothing but chicken to judge by the feathers, heads, and hooves scattered around. I wondered how they had managed to pilfer so many without arousing the ire of the entire countryside. I did a modestly thorough once-over, with special at­tention to Karl’s lock-up. That room had the rickety furniture, cracked pitcher, filthy bedding, overburdened chamber pot reported. The chamber pot was significant. I concluded that its very existence meant I must surren­der my suspicions of Junior or radically alter my estimate of his intelligence and acting ability. If he had put to­gether a fake, he had done so with a marvelous eye for detail, meaning he had anticipated a thorough investiga­tion despite his getting home healthy and happy, which meant...

I didn’t know what the hell it meant, except maybe that I had my hat on backward.

Why the hell did Amiranda have to die?

The answer to that would probably bust the whole thing open. Conscious that I had a passing duty to Amber as a client, I went over the place again with all due profes­sional care to overlook nothing, be that the tracks of a four-hundred-pound ogre with a peg leg or two hundred thousand marks gold hidden by throwing it down the well. Yes. I stripped down and shimmied down and floun­dered around in the icy water until I was sure there would be no gold strike. My curses should have brought the water to a simmer, but failed. I guess I just don’t have the knack.

Four hours and the risk of pneumonia turned up just one thing worth taking along, a silver tenth mark that had strayed in among the dust bunnies against the wall where Junior’s blankets were heaped and hadn’t been able to find its way home. It looked new but it was a temple coin and didn’t use the royal dating. I’d have to visit the temple where it had been struck to find out when it was minted.

But its very presence gave me an idea. It also gave me a bit of indigestion for not having thought to ask a few more questions while I’d had Junior on the griddle. Now I would have to get the answers the hard way — on the trip home. The hard way, but the answers I got were likely to be square. The sun was headed west. It wasn’t going to rebound off the hills out there. I had a call to make, and if I wanted to get it handled before the wolfmen came out to stalk the wily mammoth, I had to get moving. The horses let the armistice stand. They didn’t even play tag with me when I went to harness them up.

__XIX__

SAUCERHEAD’S directions to his witch friend’s place hadn’t included the information that there was noth­ing resembling a road near her home. In fact, any resem­blance to a trail was coincidental. That was wicked-witch-of-the-woods territory and anybody who managed to stum­ble into her through that mess deserved whatever he got. I had to do most of it on the ground, leading the team. The armistice survived only because they realized they would need me to scout the way back. When we hit the road again all deals would be off.

The last few hundred yards weren’t bad. The ground leveled out. The undergrowth ceased to exist, as though somebody manicured the woods every day. The trees were big and old and the canopy above turned most of the remaining light. Lamplight pouring through an open doorway gave me my bearings. A rosy-cheeked, apple-dumpling-plump little old lady was waiting for me. She stood about four-feet-eight and was dressed like a peasant granny on a christening day, right down to the embroidered apron. She looked me over frankly. I couldn’t tell what she thought of what she saw. “Are you Garrett?”

Startled, I confessed.

“Took you long enough to get here. I suppose you might as well come on inside. There’s still a bit of water for tea and a scone or two if Shaggoth hasn’t got into them. Shaggoth! You good-for-nothing lout! Get out here and take care of the man’s horses.”