The Half-Made World (13 page)

“And the hospital itself,” the other man said, “poses additional strategic complexities. Listen, Lowry. . . .”

CHAPTER 7

THE LONG ROAD WEST

The sun was fierce all day, every day, and unrelenting, and Liv was glad of her broad-brimmed hat, though its whiteness and floral pattern seemed out of place in this dusty country.

The caravan worked its slow way up and down the rocky hills, and she rode alongside.

“Can you ride?” That had been Mr. Bond’s first question to her. She could—up to a point—at least, she’d had a horse as a child. She’d used to go riding in the woods behind the Academy. That changed after her mother’s death—but she saw no need to tell Bond that sad story. She was happier riding than sitting in the wagons. The caravan was slow and the horses placid, but she was all bruises anyway.

“Can you cook? Can you sew?” Less welcome questions. The answer was no. She was a scientist, not a homemaker. She had never lived without servants. Her mother, who had been Emeritus Professor of Psychology, had had many virtues, but domesticity was not one of them.

“Huh.” Bond had shaken his head. “Not looking for a husband, then?”

“I had a husband, Mr. Bond. He was a Doctor of Mathematics in Koenigswald. He died two years ago, of a heart attack. He was, incidentally, a man of roughly your size and age.”

“Huh. Can’t cook, can’t sew, can ride a little. A scientist, is that right? Can you count?”

“Of course I can count, Mr. Bond.”

“I used to have a lawyer, but he got himself shot in a duel. Can you read a contract?”

“I expect so. I can certainly endeavor not to be shot.”

. . . so she rode into Monroe Town alongside Bond, and a week later into Barrett, and helped him haggle over the sale of animal bones and pelts and silver, and the purchase of food, water, credit. They negotiated in smoky rooms with local merchants in mustaches and battered top hats and threadbare waistcoats. Bond blustered and shouted and banged tables with his great ham fists; Liv was patient and polite. It seemed to unnerve the opposition. Bond declared that she was good luck. He offered to pay her; she declined. He squeezed himself into a suit and took her to the best restaurant in Monroe, where he bought her the best steak and the least vulgar wines Monroe could offer. “A business dinner,” he said. “To business,” clutching a wineglass in his huge hand as if to crush it. “To a fruitful partnership.” In Barrett Town a week later, they closed a deal at a very favorable percentage, and in the afternoon he showed her the sights, which were a shooting gallery, a boxing ring, some big black horses of apparently exceptional quality. . . . And when, two days out of Barrett, the caravan reached the top of yet another nameless hill, and the rolling plains were spread out below, in all their dusty rugged beauty, he came up beside her and said, “Gonna be sorry to see you go.”

She lowered her fan and looked at him in surprise. “We’re not there yet, Mr. Bond. Are we?”

He pointed west, down the valley of a meandering stream. “Just one day more to Conant. See?”

She didn’t see what he was pointing at. Everything in this country looked the same to her.

“Conant,” Bond said. An odd note of apology in his gruff voice. “Last stop. Then we turn back.”

“And Maggfrid and I go on to Gloriana.”

Bond spat. “Fucking Line.” He looked over to where Maggfrid—who couldn’t ride—sat on the back of a wagon, eyes closed, head resting drowsily on his chest. “Sorry to lose that one, too. He’s earned his passage.”

Bond’s men had at first not taken to Maggfrid—some of them teased him, some of them considered him bad luck. But then Maggfrid distinguished himself in defense of the caravan against Hillfolk attack, and after that they adored him; the more superstitious crewmen kept shaking his hand for good luck, which he thought was a great game. . . .

The attack had come when they were two days out of Monroe Town, as the caravan made its way down a high-sided valley that was strewn not only with rocks and brambles, which were bad enough, but also with bales of old rusted barbed wire, scattered like a mockery of vegetation.

“Linesmen leave it,” Bond said. “The wire. There was a battle here some thirty years ago. They put this stuff round their camps, for defense. Then it just rusts, forever.”

“Thirty years ago. That was when the Line was fighting the Red Valley Republic?”

The
Child’s History of the West
was full of lengthy accounts of the Republic’s battles against the Line—a progression of victories that Liv doubted were so glorious or so easy as the General made them sound. She couldn’t keep the details straight.

Bond shook his head. “That was south of here, and west. Republic never got out as far as us. This here was just some stupid local thing. Conant declared for Gun; Line came out here to show them what that meant. That was when they built Gloriana.”

“Who won?”

“Who do you think? Line always wins.”

The coils of wire had to be moved off the trail with long poles and ropes before the caravan could safely pass. They drifted slowly but ceaselessly back into place as if some fragment of the Engines’ relentless will still was in them. It was hot and frustrating work. The hands of Liv’s golden watch turned slowly.

The Folk attacked at sunset, while the men were still working.

There were half a dozen of them, tall angular shapes suddenly standing on the hillside, charging helter-skelter down, long legs springing and bending in odd ways. They didn’t speak or call out. They rustled and clattered. Their black beards and manes streamed out behind them as they ran. They threw stones and scared the horses, and one of Bond’s men fell backwards, screaming into a tangle of wire. Shouting “Form up, form up, wake the fuck up!” Bond drew his pistol and fired. . . .

Liv crouched under a wagon and watched. The Folk closed on the caravan at once. They didn’t seem at all afraid of Bond’s pistol. Most of Bond’s men were armed with shovels or poles or picks, and they swung wildly at the attackers, whose emaciated bone-white bodies were like springs; they bounced and spun and dodged. The shadows concealed them; the dust they kicked up blurred Liv’s vision. She saw long arms snap out and snatch picks from Bond’s men’s hands, she saw long white fingers close around Bond’s pistol and tear it away. Their bodies were painted or perhaps etched in glittering bloodred designs—abstract, mathematical—spinning and whirling. They kicked and lunged and knocked men in the dirt. On spiderlike legs, one of them crouched down by Liv’s hiding place, and then deep red eyes were staring into hers, steady, unblinking, as if fascinated by her.

She froze. Beneath the red eyes there was a long nose, oddly angled, as if not broken but formed according to a looser plan. Beneath the nose there was a wide mouth, which opened wider, as if it was about to say something to her. It seemed that it must be a communication of such great importance that every word had to be chosen with utmost care, or else there might be some error that could never afterwards be mended. . . .

With a great roar, Maggfrid appeared behind the Hillman’s shoulder and pulled him away, yanking him by his mane. Maggfrid held a shovel in his hand and he swung it like a bat and the Hillman’s head cracked open.

Still roaring, Maggfrid charged into the midst of the caravan’s attackers. They dodged. He caught one on the elbow, and bones broke; he shattered another’s kneecap.

They scattered as quickly and as silently as they’d come, and Maggfrid was left turning in circles, mouth working soundlessly, still tightly clutching the bloody shovel.

Liv approached Maggfrid slowly, whispering to calm him. She took the shovel from his hands.

No one was badly hurt except the man who’d fallen in the wire.

One of the attackers lay dead in the brambles. It was the one Maggfrid had hit in the head—the one that had nearly, it seemed,
spoken
to Liv. She knelt to study him. His brains, she noticed, looked like any other person’s.

“It won’t last,” Bond said. His shirt was torn, and his broad face was red with exertion and anger.

“What won’t?”

“They come back. They get up again.”

“So I’ve heard. I’d like to see it.”

“Well, I don’t plan on waiting around.”

The body looked nearly weightless. The long limbs were like a bundle of sticks. She found it terribly moving, and tears pricked her eyes.

“They didn’t hurt anyone,” she said. “They didn’t even have weapons.”

“Sometimes that’s how it is. Sometimes they have spears, and they kill every fighting man and torture the rest for days. Sometimes they have some real nasty tricks with the wind and the stones. But then again I know a man who swears on his mother’s soul that a pack of ’em found him injured on the trail and brought him water and set his leg and carried him home.”

“Why?”

“They’re not like us, Doctor. They do things that don’t make sense. Sometimes they bring storms, floods, hurricanes, dust storms. You’ll call me superstitious, but it’s true. They were here first, and if you ask me, they’re just waiting for us to fuck off, and this is how they play in the meantime.”

“It seemed he was about to speak to me.”

“They don’t speak. And look at ’em—would you understand ’em if they could?”

At last he saw the expression of pity on her face, and his voice softened. “There are worse things than these, though. And what do I know anyway? I’m just a businessman.”

“I understand, Mr. Bond.” She turned away from him. Her hands shook as she reached into her case for her nerve tonic.

He called after her. “Hey—your big friend there did well, that was one hell of a job.”

She looked where he was pointing. Maggfrid was pacing back and forth with his head in his hands. . . .

There was hardly a single mention of the Folk in the
Child’s History
. One faded illustrated plate showed representative scenes from the West: an Engine slumbering on its tracks, twisted wind-carved rocks, and a Hillman perched on a craggy peak, obsidian spear in hand. And the Folk appeared also in the first chapter of the book, which told the story of the first colony, at Founding. A handful of sentences:
Relations between First Governor Samuel Self and the aboriginal Folk of the Woods were uneasy, and not always honorable.
 . . .

Otherwise, the Folk were effaced from the history of their country. Perhaps, Liv thought, if they’d fought more battles . . .

Most of Bond’s men were illiterate. One night, one of them asked what she was reading, and soon Liv was reading to all of them. They were a rough lot, bearded, yellow toothed, broken nosed, but they listened to her like children. Most of them knew less of the history of their own world than she did.

Chapters 2 through 22 were a litany of disasters and battles. Founding was abandoned—lost years, a hard winter, plague, bad omens. The colonists spread west and south. Line rose in the south, where the colonists struck oil, and where the first Engines were built to travel between the outflung cities of the dry plains, and men quickly realized that they had built something larger and more terrible than could be comprehended on any human scale, something that had its own mind and its own will to expand. . . . Gun rose in the ragged West, among exiles, drifters, criminals fleeing the law. They hated each other at once. They were defined by their hatred. Line spread relentlessly, with its Engines and its machines and its speed and its masses of men. Gun cheated and schemed and poisoned and blackmailed and ambushed; it raised armies of mercenaries, mobs of deluded peasants. . . . And Bond was right: Gun was always losing. Three hundred years of defeat and bitterness. Why did they bother?

The
Child’s History
condemned the Line as tyrannical and the Gun as anarchistic, and solemnly proclaimed the virtue of the Red Valley Republic—by whose Department of Universal Education it had been printed. The virtues of the Republic were Democracy, Reason, Self-Government, Property, and Ordered Liberty. There was a brief homiletic chapter devoted to each.

The Republic had arisen on what was then the edge of the world—a new idea. A loose alliance of freetowns and border states, that had become an Alliance, then a Federation, then, with the signing of the Charter on the banks of the Red Valley River, some forty years ago, a Republic. There was an illustration: several dozen dignified old men standing on the banks of a river, brandishing papers and pens, delivering speeches. The Charter itself appeared to be something intermediate between a code of public law and a sacred text, and in the illustration, a shaft of heavenly light fell upon it.