Red Spikes (15 page)

When every injury had been noted and admired, quiet descended. The greyness crept in at the edges of Leah’s mind.

King pushed his face into the hot breeze. ‘I heard someone say,
It’s so cool out there!
’

‘I heard that too,’ said Tabatha quietly.

‘I heard someone call out,
Water, water!
’ whispered Barto. ‘And you know? For just that moment, I was thirsty.’

Leah’s tongue searched her mouth for that feeling. No, she wasn’t thirsty, not even after all that heat and smoke and running.

‘I didn’t understand anything they said.’ She spoke quickly, while there was still a bit of space in the middle of the encroaching greyness. ‘But what I
saw
. . .’ She tried to remember that screaming Soul’s face well enough to make her stomach churn again. She rubbed her tearless eyes, and saw against the lids a vague bobbing of bald, red heads, waving hands, silent mouths. Nothing that would upset anybody. ‘Aagh.’ The greyness reached the centre of her feelings and winked them out. That was all she would be left with, until next time – that bobbing impression, all the intensity faded to a thin grey knowledge, a small, puzzled struggle to remember – what had been so wonderful?

Tabatha was binding Barto’s burnt foot with a strip torn off her uniform. ‘We must move in and out quicker, next time,’ she said absently. ‘Like a pick-up. This never would’ve happened with a pick-up.’

‘How do they get them out of there, with a pick-up?’ wondered King. ‘Without anyone else escaping?’

‘If you ever get to work there, I guess you’ll find out,’ said Tabatha flatly.

‘You can’t blame us for being curious,’ said King. He must have not quite recovered, thought Leah.

Anyway, ‘curious’ wasn’t the word for it. She followed the others up the stairs, rolled over and dropped into the Outer’s gravitational field, followed them through the bootee-room and down onto the stony red plain. Curiosity was a lame, small-scale thing. What it was, was . . .

She picked her way through the stones towards the lighter regions of the Outer. She tried to think, to search what she thought was her heart. But she was not let see. The Outer’s greyness had her; it walled the thought she was reaching for in fog, embedded the feeling in cloud; it clumsied her toes and fingers and all her finer faculties and left her with only this, the barest inclination to keep moving, in the direction that felt like forward, but might turn out never to be forward, or backward, or any way, anywhere, ever.

{ Mouse Maker

‘Who started this?’
Bet struggled with the women holding her down. ‘That Topsy Strongarm, I’ll be bound! She’ve been looking for her chance.’

‘Let’s shut up that noise, for a start,’ said Pater Bill, and they stuffed one cloth in her mouth and tied another round it.

At least, that is what Darby says. I wasn’t there myself. I would have none of it. It had all happened without me. Honestly, I said not a word to anyone about what I had heard nor seen. But these things get known, gossip or not. However quiet you keep, matters like this, they come out some way.

She lives not far from me, Bet Cransk. The land is arranged so she must walk along my fence-line, in my field, to get to her own place from the road. I am used to her, and maybe people would have left her alone if they had been used to her too. Because most of the time she is harmless, if noisy when you get her going.

‘And handy,’ Dan’s widow said when she was being friendly, when she was thinking maybe she could like me for the sake of picking up my land as well as Dan’s. ‘It don’t hurt to have a salve-woman up your own hill, that you can run to in fever or tummy-rack.’

Which was also true, though I only ever used Bet for that bad sickle-wound I made in my leg, and the one evening where she told my fortune. And a solid fortune it will be. I don’t know how I’m to get to it from here, exactly, but there it is.

There it is
, Bet said.
It’s in the cards and it’s in the cup and
it’s in that oil-and-ink. If all three say it, it’s gold and good
opinion all the way for you, Pedder.

We laughed at that, sitting in her grubby house, that is more burrowed than built into the bank there. Even her dandy-wine was dirty, sediment shifting in it like white smoke. Her cards were so filthy I could barely see the signs on them.

Taking against the mayor was her error. Well, really, she was against the whole town council in the end; well, really, the whole town. But she got it fixed in her head that Pater Mears was the one with the set against her, so she was loudest against him.

‘It’s only a scare,’ I said. ‘Just wait. Be cunning,’ I said. ‘Leave your cards at home a few times; tell in other ways. People still want to know. Some will even come up here, if they want the cards. Laurel Whistler, for one. I don’t mind her using the way.’

But Bet was fretting, there on my doorstep. ‘The cards is the best,’ she said. ‘The cards is what everyone wants. The cards is what people pay for.’

‘Well, the cards is what gives people the wobbles, too,’ I said testily; how long had I been standing there saying and saying?

‘By-laws!’ She spat a big white spit on my path. ‘Coming at me with his papers.
This here,
he says,
it’s my
seal, look at it. It means you have to stop with the weeds and the
divination, or I’ll have you put in the roundhouse a week or two.

It’s law now,
he said – smug pottlehead –
here in this writing.

I told him – Jollyon Mears, young enough to be my granson! I told him he could put his big red mayor’s seal in his big red—’

‘You want to be careful,’ I said. She had already told me all this. ‘They can do what they say, however young they are.’

‘They’re a bunch of scheming souses, taking away a widow’s honest living while they guzzle and chomp in the meeting-house!’

‘Maybe so,’ I said. I was tired. I had been ploughing all day while she was off squabbling. I had just sat down to my bread and tea when she arrived. ‘But you don’t want to get on their wrong side, either.’

The widow thing – I don’t know even if it was true, though she always brought it up when she wanted sympathy. It was well before my time, and no one could tell me who the lucky gentleman had been – but no one could exactly say she hadn’t had him, either. She is not a solid citizen, that you can feel sure of. There’s always this cloud of uncertainties around her, like mist or flies. Some of the time I like that, when the solid citizens are getting up my nose; some of the time it gives me the jinks just as badly as it does everyone else.

Pater Bill had his beadle-stick, Darby says, and he laid the first blow. Which was all the others needed. Women they were, mostly, dealing as they must with a woman; they wanted the beadle’s authority to begin, but once he gave it, he might as well have left Bet’s house right then for all the chance he got at her.

‘It wasn’t like they wanted to kill her,’ says Darb. ‘They just wanted to teach her a lesson.’

‘In which case why they went for her head is mysterious to me,’ I said to him. ‘Why they knocked her senseless so that she could not
hear
their lesson, hm?’

Darby was quiet.

‘And why they kept hitting when she was down and had long ceased to fight them?’

Darby pulled at a scrap of loose skin by his fingernail.

‘They should have put her in the prison,’ I said.

‘They could prove nothing,’ said Darby. ‘It was all rumour and old history and the word of Sarah Slattly and—’

‘Not for punishment,’ I said. ‘For protection.’

At first it was only rushings in the night, very like wind or a passing patter of rain. It was only later that they woke me properly and made me wonder, later when the damage became clear and it looked like we might all bloody starve. That’s them now, I thought. They’re running past my door. And they’ve been coming and coming, a run of them every short while, regular all night, regular every fine night this last while. And I got myself up and when I judged the time to be right I opened my door on the moonlight and stood there wrapped in my blanket and waiting.

And there they came, all running together in a pack, so tiny and yet so many that all their little toenails scraping, all their little paws hitting, made that sound upon the ground, that whisper like wind or rain. They ran so close together they were like a stretch of moss that pulled itself up and went hurrying off. They gleamed with good health and with eyes in the moonlight. I stood on my step and they ran along the front of my house and some fetched up and swirled against the step and some ran across and around my feet. But none ran in my door; every one passed on. They ran straight through my small crop without climbing a single stalk. I saw them flow through like water and be gone.