Well of Sorrows (20 page)
Authors: Benjamin Tate
Colin shook his head, catching his breath. “I don’t know. But Paul’s hurt.”
Tom thought about the rag doll figure he’d seen fly from the front of the wagon as it rolled and felt ropes tighten around his chest. He pushed away from Colin, heard Arten’s feet pounding the ground behind him, but his eyes were on the wagon. Men had climbed into the traces, were calming the horse that lay on its side, still kicking, nostrils flared, head thrashing, as they tried to cut it out of the tangled reins and harness. Its teammate lay beneath it, not moving.
The women had gathered on the grass to one side of the wagon.
“Let me through,” Tom shouted as he pushed the thought of the loss of the horse from his mind and slowed. The women parted, and Tom saw Ana and the priest, Domonic, kneeling at Paul’s head, another woman standing to one side, Paul’s arm cradled in both hands. Paul’s rounded face was ashen, his lips almost blue, his eyes watery and wide, breath coming in short, harsh gasps.
Before Tom could speak, Ana said, “Ready?”
Paul swallowed and nodded.
And then the woman kneeling on Paul’s opposite side pulled the smith’s strangely angled arm out straight and
wrenched
.
wrenched
.
There was a sickening sound from Paul’s shoulder, like gristle being chewed, followed by a tortuous click that sent shudders into Tom’s gut.
Paul roared, his body arching up from the grass as Ana, Domonic, and two other women tried to hold him down. The woman who’d pulled his shoulder back into its socket was thrust backward, stumbled and fell with an undignified oomph.
Paul’s roar died down into barely controlled panting. Tears and sweat streaked his face, and he appeared even paler than he had when Tom arrived. His arm lay curled against his chest, held there gingerly.
“Careful,” Ana said as the other woman picked herself up and brushed stalks of grass from her dress.
“It’s fine,” Paul murmured in a weak voice, repeating it over and over. “It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Is he going to be all right?” Tom asked.
“Ah, it bloody fucking
hurts
!”
hurts
!”
Ana glanced up, her expression black with anger and disgust. “He’s fine.”
Tom turned toward the wagon, cast one last look at Paul as Domonic gently helped him to sit upright and Ana held out a skin of water, then stepped over the smith’s legs.
“Sam! What happened?”
Sam spun. “We’re not sure, but we’ve lost one of the horses. Korbin’s checking out the wagon now.” One of the men cried out in triumph as a tie snapped beneath his knife. The entire wagon lurched as the surviving horse rolled away from the traces that had held it on its side, stumbling to its feet. Men surrounded it, hands raised to calm it down, its eyes white. It snorted, danced back and forth, trying to escape its wranglers, but Tom could see it calming even as he watched.
Sam must have seen it as well; he turned his back to the wagon. “How’s Paul?”
“He’ll be fine.” The tension in Sam’s shoulders relaxed. “Where’s Korbin?”
“On the other side of the wagon, looking at the undercarriage.”
Tom rounded the wagon, careful to steer away from the spooked horse. He found Korbin leaning over one of the wagon’s wheels. Korbin was a full hand shorter than Tom, thin, and younger by nearly ten years. A wheelwright, he’d come to New Andover on the same ship as Tom with his new and newly pregnant wife, Lyda.
Tom took in the splintered wood of the wheel, the cracked spokes, and grimaced. “What’s the damage, Korbin?”
The young man glanced toward Tom, pushed his glasses farther up onto his nose, then sighed as he stood up straight. “Wheel’s broken, but that’s easy to fix. I made certain replacements were packed. The real problem is going to be sorting out the traces and the damage to the axle and tongue.”
“How long to fix it, do you think?”
Korbin shrugged. “A few hours at least.”
The sound of thundering hooves approached, and Tom turned to see Walter, Jackson, and the escort of guardsmen pulling up near the overturned wagon, clods of dirt and grass thrown up by the horses’ feet. Walter’s horse pranced as he maneuvered it closer to the group crowded around the wagon’s base.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Something spooked the horses,” Tom said. “They bolted and overturned the wagon.”
“It was the air that spooked them.”
Both Walter and Tom shifted their attention to Paul as he rounded the back of the wagon, Ana and Arten at his side. Ana had put his arm in a sling made from someone’s apron to keep it immobile, but Paul still winced as he walked. Some color had returned to his face, but he appeared haggard, his clothes stained with mud and grass from the fall.
“What do you mean it was the air that spooked them?” Walter asked, the words twisted with derision.
Paul frowned at his tone. “It was the air. Just before the horses reared up and bolted, I felt the air get heavy, as if someone had laid a blanket across my shoulders. It became harder to breathe, and the hairs on my arms prickled.” A few of those around the wagon nodded in agreement. “I was about to whistle for a halt.”
Walter snorted. But many of the men and women who had been near the wagon before the horses bolted were mumbling to themselves.
Tom thought about the distortion he’d seen from the ridge. He caught Arten looking at him and wondered if the commander had seen it. Cutter had said something about the air as well. He almost mentioned it, but after a glance at the uneasiness in everyone around the wagon, he decided to keep quiet, at least for now. He wouldn’t be able to later. Rumors would spread, and someone would remember Cutter’s story; they hadn’t tried to keep anything the squatter had said quiet.
“Repair the wagon as best you can,” Walter finally snapped. “We’ll rest here.” He scanned those gathered, then tugged the reins of his horse, the animal dancing to the side before heading back toward the front of the wagon train, the rest of Walter’s escort following behind.
“What should we do about the dead horse?” one of the men asked.
Tom grimaced. Korbin had already gone back to work on the wagon.
“Butcher it. We may need the meat.”
Colin found Karen sitting on a small stool, milking the goats. He shuddered.
“What was that for?” Karen asked. “Am I that hideous? I know the sun’s been harsh, but . . .”
Colin smiled. “No. It was for the goats. I don’t like them, their bristly hair, their skeletal faces . . . but most especially their awful, yellow, hourglass eyes. They aren’t natural.” He shuddered again.
Karen laughed, still milking as she glanced at the goat in question. It ripped some of the grass free beneath its feet where it was tied to the back of the wagon and chewed contentedly, ears flicking away flies. “They are rather ugly, aren’t they?” she finally said, then shrugged. “But they’re easier to bring along than cows.”
As Colin settled down to the grass behind her, the goat turning to watch, bits sticking out of its mouth in all directions, she asked, “What’s going on with the wagon?”
“Korbin is almost finished. They’re trying to figure out how to rig it so a single horse can pull it. They thought about using some of the guardsmen’s horses, but they aren’t workhorses. They’re a few hands shorter, and they don’t think they’d have the endurance. So some of the supplies are being redistributed to other wagons to decrease the weight, and Korbin is altering the hitch and harness. We should be moving again shortly.”
“Good. I’m tired of waiting. We’ve been sitting here for three hours already.” She tilted her head, squeezing a last few drops of milk from the goat’s udder, then sat back, one arm reaching to massage the opposite shoulder. Shoving the goat aside, she picked up the half-full bucket and turned to where Colin stood, brushing grass from his breeches.
Before he knew what had happened, she’d backed him up against the wagon and kissed him. Her free hand fell against his chest, where the crescent moon pendant rested against his skin. He could hear children playing on the plains somewhere close by, tossing a stuffed leather ball about, their laughter ragged with the wind. A twinge of worry pulled in his chest that someone would see them, that they’d be caught, but here in the wagon train this was as private a moment as they were likely to get until nightfall, so he let the worry slip away.
When Karen finally backed off, he said, “You smell like goat.”
She slapped his upper arm, harder than he’d expected, but she couldn’t hide her grin.
Someone cleared his throat, and both he and Karen spun, guilt already burning up Colin’s neck. But when he saw Walter, he froze. The anger that he’d buried so deep during the night in the penance lock, that he’d buried again after his mother told him to stay away from the Proprietor’s son on the trek, flared up. He’d managed not to run into Walter for the entire journey so far, at least alone. His father had always been present, Colin in the background, so that they didn’t have to interact. But now the anger burned, suffused his skin with a tingling hatred, and it took everything he had to control it, to remain rigid and motionless, hands squeezed tight.
Karen took a small step forward, placing herself between the two, but to one side. Her eyes were narrowed, her face set. She didn’t seem embarrassed at all, merely angry. “What do you want, Walter?”
Walter’s gaze didn’t leave Colin’s face. Colin couldn’t read what he saw there, it was too controlled. Even his voice was bland.
“Korbin says the wagon is ready. We’re leaving.”
“Good.” When Walter didn’t move, she said tightly, “Was there something else?”
Walter’s eyes shifted toward Karen, glanced up and down, taking in her rumpled dress, her bare feet, the bucket of goat’s milk, then returned to her face. He almost smirked, but something he saw in Karen’s face stopped him. He frowned instead, the tension in his shoulders relaxing. “No. Nothing else.”
He began moving away. Colin watched him, jaw clenched, breathing through his nose. Before he rounded the end of the wagon, he shot Colin and Karen a thoughtful look . . . and then he was gone.
Karen turned toward Colin, sighed in exasperation when she saw his face, his clenched fists and tightened jaw. “Ignore him, Colin. He’s not worth it.”
“I didn’t like the way he looked at us when he left.”
“So what? It was just a look. Now come on, I want to ditch this milk before we get started.”
“What do you think, Arten? Can we make it?”
“Yes, we can,” Walter answered, voice heavy. He shifted with impatience.
Tom ignored the Proprietor’s son and turned to the commander of the Armory. To the east, the shortened cliffs of the Bluff—over a thousand hands high at the Falls, a mere seven hundred hands high here—were broken by a huge landslide. Tons of stone had slipped free and crashed down when the cliffs had given way at some point in the past, and now a scree of rock and dirt and brush formed a rough pathway from the rumpled valley below to the heights above, a mound of dirt that narrowed to a crack in the Bluff itself about a hundred hands down from the top before opening up again on the far side, forming a cusp to the heights.
Arten shook his head uncertainly. “It’s hard to say. It’s definitely the best option we’ve seen for reaching the upper plains since the Falls. The only option, truthfully.”
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