Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (34 page)

Mara watched the bird dive off the side of the bluff, weaving through
the rocks and brushy twigs of the high desert scrub. It dropped low and out of
sight, somewhere in the talus pile below. Mara worried her lip with her teeth and
started down the path, watching the ground in front of her, perfectly alone.

She saw the first branch of lightning stretch soundlessly across the
river, and held her breath until the thunder came.

M
ara refused a rifle when Keera
offered her one, though when they were young she had been the better shot. “I'm not
coming along to do any killing,” she said. “Just to watch for trouble.”

“If trouble came along,” Keera said, “you'd be more use with a gun than
without.”

“I'd be more like to shoot myself in the foot.”

“Your eyes are better now, aren't they?” Keera handed one of the rifles
to her husband, Rey, and he shouldered it.

“Good enough to watch for trouble,” Mara said.

Keera shrugged and took up her own rifle. “There won't be none. Didn't
the vulture say there was two of them? She's not been wrong before.”

“No.” Mara stepped out onto the front porch of her sister's house and
marveled at the way golden motes of dust swam in the sunlight slanting through the
hole in the roof. Such detail in life, if you could appreciate it.

She had wanted to take the rifle. It would have been like taking her old
life back. But that wasn't her life anymore, and the seeing never lasted. While she
had it, she would go with them and keep watch, but taking up a gun again would be
too much. Bad luck. She still carried a thick-bladed hunting knife in her boot. That
would have to be enough.

The two of them joined her on the porch, and Keera latched the door
behind them. “It's good to have you with us,” Rey said, and smiled his dimpled
smile. Mara didn't smile back. Once she would have, maybe, but not now.

“Did the vulture tell you what time these harvesters are supposed to
appear?” Keera asked.

“Midday.”

“That's fine.” Keera studied the sky, the early-morning pale brightness
of it, still pink-tinged at the horizon. “It'll take us about an hour and a half to
get there, but we'll beat them if they're not early.”

“Hope they're not.” Rey stepped down to the beaten dirt path, crooking
his fingers at them. “We'll miss them for sure if we keep standing here.”

They walked three abreast while the path allowed it. At first, it was
flat and straight, and their boots kicked up puffs of fine dust, faintly greasy
where it landed on their cheeks. Rey and Keera chatted amiably as they walked; Mara
spoke when spoken to but found her mind on the task ahead. Her mouth was awash with
something bitter, something that tasted like bile, like fear—and she felt ashamed.
She'd been trained for this, born to this. Protecting the town from those who would
harm it. Her nerves had gone soft with her eyes.

“Mara?” Keera said. “You all right?”

Mara started and realized she'd stepped off the path, kept going
straight on as it narrowed. It was greener, here, closer to the water. “Yes. I'm
fine.”

“Sure.” Keera tapped Mara's elbow with her elbow as she passed. The
familiarity of the gesture was soothing.

The river road stretched for miles, long enough that no one in the
Goldwater had ever ridden its entire length. No one even knew how long it really
was, for that matter, or what other places might lie alongside it—no traders ever
ventured to the Goldwater. The only ones who rode that way were the harvesters.

“It's pretty out here,” Keera said.

This time of year the river was sluggish, lapping shallowly over the
rocks. In some places, it was low enough that the bigger rocks stuck out and dried
on top, almost enough of them to form steppingstones to the other bank. Long-legged
bugs stepped over the stagnant pools behind downed trees, mincing and delicate. Mara
agreed, “It is pretty.”

They set their ambush in a copse of trees near a rise in the road,
crouching behind a downed log. Keera and Rey propped their rifles over their knees
and waited, squinting against the sun.

“S'almost midday,” Rey said, after a time. He sounded bored. “Anyone see
anything?”

“No,” Mara said, staring down the road to where it faded into the
horizon.

It was remarkable how far she could see.

Keera said nothing for a time, but then brought her rifle to bear, her
expression firm. “There,” she said. “Dust.”

Mara swiveled to look and at first saw nothing. But after a moment, it
appeared: a cloud of dun-colored dust, rising in the distance like the trail of a
snake.

“Could be animals,” she said.

“It's not.” Keera and Rey moved up behind the log, rifles readied, no
tension in their faces. Keera looked back at Mara and nodded. Mara nodded in return
and shifted in the copse, coating herself in shadows.

They waited silently. Mara scratched an itch on her nose; Rey shook his
head fiercely to dislodge a fly.
It's too long,
Mara
thought.
They're taking too long. They must have seen
us.

Keera lifted a hand, never taking her eyes from the road. “Scythes,” she
whispered. Rey nodded and readied himself. Mara counted the seconds, lips moving
silently—one, two, three, four, five, six—

Keera fired, shuddering back with the recoil, then Rey fired. The shots
were deafening in the little copse, the shock of them traveling through Mara's blood
and leaving her shaky. She saw Keera's trigger hand go to the bolt on her rifle and
tense, then relax. The men were dead.

“Easy,” Keera said, pulling back the bolt to release the spent
cartridge. A curl of smoke and the smell of gunpowder wafted out and disappeared
into the warm air. Keera's hand shook a little, like it always did after she killed.
Rey clapped her on the shoulder and she smiled at him.

Mara scrambled forward to the downed log, hooking her elbows over the
top and peering out into the road. “They were harvesters?”

“Scythes on their backs,” Rey said.

Mara hesitated. “We've got to do something with the bodies.”

“Leave them for the birds,” Rey said, and chuffed something like a
laugh.

“We'll pull them into the woods.” Keera got to her feet. “No harvester
deserves a burial—the animals will take care of them.”

They stepped out of the copse and onto the road, sunlight flooding
Mara's eyes and making her blink.

The bodies lay half on, half off the trail, heaped in careless piles.
Two men in rough-spun and denim. One wore a black hat that had slipped back when he
fell and cradled the back of his skull where it lay on the ground. A gray horse
stood away from them with its head down.

Both men were headshot, as Mara and Keera had been trained to do. One
had a round dark hole in the middle of his forehead, like a bloody third eye. The
other shot had nearly missed—the second man's face was blown off from cheek to ear,
a red ruin with the white of bone and broken teeth standing out.

“Wait,” Keera said. Mara turned and saw her face was pale. “Where are
their scythes?”

Neither man carried anything like a scythe. They were empty-handed, in
fact; the horse was laden with supplies, but the men had nothing but their own blood
in their hands.

“I saw them,” Keera said, her voice ticking higher.

Mara looked to Rey.

“I saw them, too.” Rey's hand closed convulsively on the stock of his
rifle. “They had them on their backs; they reflected the sun. I
saw them
.”

“All right,” Mara said, softly. “It's fine.”

She knelt down by the body of the man who'd been neatly shot and tipped
its head so its neck was not so unnaturally crooked. Its eyes were open, but she
didn't bother closing them. They wouldn't have stayed. She picked up its right hand
and examined it, running her thumb over the palm and the mounts of the fingers,
feeling for calluses. The hand was as smooth as a preacher's.

“It's no matter,” Keera said. “No one comes this way if they don't mean
us harm.”

“You're right.” Mara pressed the dead hand back to its chest, lying
across the heart. “The Lady said they were harvesters, anyway.”

Ray said, “We still have to move them.”

“I'll get the horse,” Mara offered, and left them standing quiet in the
road. Her sister and her sister's husband. The two dead men.

The horse had gotten tangled in brush, its long split bridle reins
wrapped around the branches. She stooped to untangle them, saying quiet nonsense to
the horse to settle it. The reins were tacky with blood all along their length. She
thought it might try to run as soon as it was free, but it didn't. It stood next to
her and leaned into her touch. She stroked its neck and then led it away. Its gray
coat was spattered with red.

She tied the horse short to a tree limb, so it wouldn't run. Sacks of
grain lay across its back, she saw, and supplies enough for a pair of travelers. She
riffled through the packs, wondering. They seemed to be traveling heavy for men
planning to raid and kill. Then she closed everything back up and tried to put it
from her mind. She went back to help with the bodies.

Rey took one body by the armpits and dragged it away himself. Mara and
Keera managed the one with the ruined face, each taking an arm. They dragged it to a
low spot with tall grass and spreading trees and left it lying next to the other
one. The razor grass folded around them and hid them from view, and it sliced at
Mara's arms and ankles as she knelt to lay the body down, then stepped away.

Rey closed the dead eyes and put flat river stones over the lids to
weigh them down.

“Let's go,” Keera said. She had folded her arms across her chest, elbows
in tight to her sides. “We've spent too much time here already.”

They left the bodies and returned to the path. The razor grass left long
red scratches wherever their skin was bare, but no one complained. Keera went ahead
to gather their things, Rey stepping quickly after. Mara hung back as they knelt
together, slinging the rifles back over their shoulders. Rey said something quietly
to Keera and she shook her head once, very sharply.

Mara untied the horse from its tree and looped the bloody reins around
her fist. It twitched away at the smell and she laid a hand flat on its thin neck,
whispering to it. Then they left: Mara, Keera, Rey, and the dead men's horse. They
walked slower than they had on the way there, and quieter.

Before she got far, Mara turned back to look at the river road. Some big
bird had settled down where they'd left the bodies, pleased for the meal. A big dark
bird with hulking shoulders. It ducked its head and came up with something stringy
and dripping in its beak.

She turned back to the Goldwater road and didn't look back again.

M
ara dropped the horse off in
her little post-and-rail barn that for years now had housed nothing but possums.
Then she took the things it had carried and went up to store them in the house.
Enough provisions in there to keep a pair of travelers for a couple weeks, plus the
sacks of grain. Maybe for trading.

But Keera and Rey both had seen scythes.

She piled the supplies away and thought on it. But every time she got
close to it, she saw instead the dead man's eyes slipped closed, weighted down with
rocks. The ruin that was his face.

By the time she finally made it back to the barn to feed the horse and
rub it down, Rey was already doing it.

“Oh,” she said stupidly, watching him rubbing the horse with a rag in
brisk circles. He had nice hands, long-fingered and deft. She'd liked that about
him, before her sight went cloudy and everything got complicated. “Thanks.”

“It's nothing,” he said. “It's a nice horse.”

“Too thin,” she said.

He shrugged. “That ain't his fault.”

They lapsed quiet. Rey kept rubbing the dirt up out of the horse's coat
and Mara stepped over to pet its nose. The horse had its eyes half closed.

“Your eyes still good?”

“Yeah,” Mara said. “They are. For now.”

Rey nodded, made some approving noise. “That's pretty long, ain't
it?”

“Yeah.”

Mostly the Lady's treatments came and went in a blink, Mara's vision
clearing and then fading within the space of a day. Never long enough to make a
difference. Once it had lasted three days. This time—

“Well, I hope it's for good,” Rey said.

“Me too.” She smiled a hard smile. “Of course, it's a little late now,
right.”

Rey kept silent.

Mara retreated back to sit on the beam between the two tie-stalls,
splintery and slightly too tall for comfort. The tips of her boots just kissed the
ground if she stretched her legs. “You must have known it would be you, even before
our parents arranged it,” she said. “Didn't you?”

Rey stilled for a moment, then returned to his work. His hands found an
itchy spot on the horse's withers and the horse stretched out its neck, wiggling its
upper lip in happiness. “Yeah, I did.”

“And that was all right with you?”

“It was an honor,” he said. “I was the best shot in the Goldwater. I was
chosen to help guard it from harvesters.”

Mara picked at the wood of the rail, peeling back loose, stringy pieces
with her fingernails. “You never had anything else you wanted to do?”

“Nothing that mattered.” He patted the horse on the shoulder and stepped
back, putting the rag aside. “What's this all about?”

She didn't respond. Rey waited, fussing with the horse. “I think
sometimes that it's a sad place we live in, where a little girl gets raised with a
gun in her hand and her husband's picked for her because he's the best at
killing.”