The Half-Made World (11 page)

The
Child’s History
was apparently the work of one General Orlan Enver, of the Red Valley Republic—the severe-looking uniformed gentleman who glared from the frontispiece. It was written in tones of stiff enthusiasm. It alternated between accounts of battles, which Liv found dull, and advice regarding exercise and cleanliness, which she found duller. It struck Liv as a well-meaning but unsubtle piece of propaganda—when she skipped impatiently to the final chapter, she learned that the Red Valley Republic had established peace and liberty and democracy, forever and ever, that the last holdouts of irrationalism and oppression and vice would soon learn from the example of young men and women of virtue and decency, that the turbulent history of the half-made world was at an end, and that the West was now made whole and ready to take its place among civilized nations.

But of course, she reminded herself, with hindsight everything seemed absurd; no doubt her own publications would look comical to later generations.

She tried to read chapter 1, “The First Colony at Founding,” but quickly fell asleep.

She woke and washed her face with water from the jug. There was no mirror, so she looked blearily in the window for her reflection; and she screamed. The jug fell and shattered and cut her bare foot but she hardly noticed, because the white face suddenly at the narrow window pressed up against the glass and—

For a moment the face had reminded her of that madman’s face from her most terrible memories, that face as it came running through the willows, and she had been transported back to childhood. But that face had been round and sweating and spectacled, and this was angular and jagged; and the eyes were ruby red; and though the killer’s face had been pale, it was nothing next to the inhuman chalk whiteness of the face at the window; and what hung around that face was not the green branches of the willows, but a filthy black mane of hair.

It was one of the men of the hills, she realized, one of the aboriginal people of the West, who had lived in the land when it was still formless and unmade.

The expression on the face was solemn, still.

She calmed her breathing. Her foot started to sting.

She was in her underclothes—but then the figure at the window was apparently naked, under his mane, and it seemed silly to stand on ceremony. She said, “Good afternoon.”

He reached out a hand. The arm—beneath that black mane—was long, stick thin, and oddly articulated. The fingers were like a necklace of bones. With one black fingernail it began to tap on the glass.

Perhaps the expression was not
solemn,
exactly, but simply unreadable—stiff as a crudely carved statue. Now she noticed that his jaw and the protrusions of his throat were quivering, as if with tremendous excitement. She wondered if he was able to speak.

The black fingernail drummed a rhythm on the glass. It was not simple tapping; it had the quality of music, or language, or ritual. It grew quickly faster and faster and more complex, and a second nail joined it, developing surprising polyrhythms. Then it stopped; then it began again. The red eyes continued to watch her. The sound was oddly lovely. A song, always repeating. She stepped closer to the window. The finger struck a hard beat, and the glass cracked—

She shrieked and jumped back. In the same moment, a big man in a white shirt came into view and struck the Hillman on the back with a stick. “Hurry up! Move on! You leave her alone!” He yanked on the Hillman’s chain and dragged him stumbling away from the window. “Sorry, ma’am.” He tipped his hat. “Won’t happen again.”

They moved away, and the rest of the Hillfolk gang came into view, half a dozen of them, and almost at once she lost track of which had been the one at her window.

What had he wanted from her?

The golden pocket watch ticked quietly on her bedside table, where it sat on top of her copy of the
Child’s History
and beside her flask of nerve tonic. She picked it up, more for comfort than for anything else, and was shocked to see that the whole strange communication had taken place in a matter of moments. It had felt like hours.

Negotiations with Mr. Bond went poorly.

He was a big man, aggressive, with a bald and sunburned head and a boxer’s body stuffed into braces and a sweat-stained shirt, and he looked entirely out of place sitting at a desk in a little warehouse office doing bookkeeping, but that was how Liv found him. He barked:

“Don’t need passengers. Going to be a hard trip. Where do you think you are?”

“Yes, Mr. Bond, everyone tells me the journey is dangerous. That fact has been more than adequately impressed upon me. I can pay.”

He named a sum that was quite outrageous, and when her face fell, he laughed.

“They say you’re a doctor—know anything about horses?”

“No.”

“Can you set a broken bone, at least?”

“I’m not that kind of doctor, Mr. Bond.”

“Then we don’t need you.”

Maggfrid was waiting outside Bond’s warehouse. He looked so downcast when he saw Liv’s face that she laughed and impulsively hugged him. “Smile, Maggfrid! Mr. Harrison says good things come to those who keep smiling.”

She’d read Harrison’s pamphlet in her hotel room that afternoon. It didn’t take her long—the print was large and the thoughts it expressed simple to the point of vacuity. It was titled
Samson Smiles’ Commonplace Book, Or, The Book of the New Thought.
Mr. Smiles himself, pictured in black-and-white on the frontispiece, was a well-dressed and muttonchopped gentleman whose face bore an expression of almost holy serenity. His
Commonplace Book
consisted of short repetitive maxims on the virtues of confidence, enthusiasm, perseverance, self-help, and moral character.
Hope is the mother of success, for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.
Liv had found it inane.
The world smiles on a man who smiles!
Was this what passed for thought out here?
Seize the day!
Was this what passed for religion?
The world is what we make it.

She’d tried to think of something nice to say about it, should Harrison ask; she’d decided she could more or less honestly say, “Charming!”

Now she walked with Maggfrid through the town and watched the teams of men at work, digging up their town, rerouting its streets, erecting new walls, and driving new canals, all of them sweating and red-brown with mud, and she thought:
The world is what we make it
. The notion was at once intimidating and encouraging.

“Smile, Maggfrid! We’ll find a way.”

She walked down by the bend of the river, where half a dozen men swung their picks in ditches, waist deep in muddy water. The river was slow, placid and sleepy—hard to imagine danger waited along it.
It was meant to be peaceful
, she thought.
It—

“Fuck are you smiling at, lady?”

She started. One of the workmen had lowered his pick and was watching her with a vicious grin.

“You want to get down here with us? You want to get wet?”

Another of them laughed and shouted, “Harrison sent us a whore! Come on, get down here.”

The chant went up: “Harrison sent us a whore! Harrison . . .”

She turned away. “Maggfrid, come away. Back to the hotel—”

Maggfrid let out a tremendous bellow of rage and leapt down into the ditch. Muddy water splashed and the diggers fell back in shock as Maggfrid reached out and struck the first man to speak hard on the side of the head. He tore the pick from the hands of the second man and hit him in the gut so that he doubled over in the water. He wrestled with a third man and a fourth; they thrashed in the mud and he threw them aside. The shaft of a spade hit his back with a terrible dull smack and he didn’t seem to notice. Roaring, he held a man’s head under. . . .

“Maggfrid!
Maggfrid!
Stop at once. Maggfrid,
please
!”

At the sound of her voice he stopped. He turned to her with an uncertain smile on his face. “Maggfrid, that’s enough.” She held out a hand to him, and he pulled himself dripping and filthy out of the ditch. The other men crawled away, moaning. “Oh, Maggfrid. You’re not a violent man. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here, Maggfrid. Oh . . .”

She heard a slow clapping behind her. She turned to see Mr. Bond, shirtsleeves rolled up, clapping as he came briskly down the hill. Two of his employees followed behind him.

“This one yours, Doctor?”

“Yes, Mr. Bond. This is a friend of mine, and a patient. I apologize for any injuries to these men, if they were your men, but they—”

“Fuck ’em. Not mine. Harrison’s. Your big friend got a name?”

“His name is Maggfrid.”

“He gave them what for, all right. One hell of a show, that was. He’s a fighter, your friend.”

“He’s not a fighter, Mr. Bond.”

“Strong, too. Fierce. I could use a man like that when we go west.”

She shook her head. “He’s not a fighter, Mr. Bond.” He
could
have been a fighter, she thought; he could have been a monster. He had been prone to rages when she’d first found him. Years of work had made him gentle.

Bond looked Maggfrid up and down. “Well, why don’t we let him decide that?”

Maggfrid met Liv’s anxious eyes, then looked away. Then he smiled broadly and nodded his great head.

“Maggfrid,” Liv said, “Are you—?”

“Course he’s sure,” Bond said. “Excellent.” Bond clapped Maggfrid on the shoulder. Big as Bond was, Maggfrid towered over him. A great eager-to-please smile split Maggfrid’s white moon of a face. It made Liv uneasy. But she saw no alternative.

Bond rubbed his hands together. “Let’s talk about your fare, Doctor.”

“First let’s talk about my friend’s wages, Mr. Bond.”

“That’s the spirit, Doctor. Let’s talk business.”

CHAPTER 6

KINGSTOWN

Lowry looked out the window once on his journey west from Harrow Cross to Kingstown, and regretted it immediately. He was used to the Southeast, and the lands around Angelus, where the Line’s grip was strongest, where the landscape was properly shaped by industry. Out on this farthest western extremity of the Line, there was nothing to be seen for a hundred miles across flat plains and rolling red hills but meaningless empty sky and dirt. A formless land, waiting to be built. The matchstick figures of a pack of Hillfolk loped along a ragged hillside and lifted their heads as the Engine passed by. . . . Awful. Lowry shuddered, closed the blind, sat in the gloom of his passenger car, and waited.