And this, ofttimes, is fate’s greatest cruelty: that for all creatures born of blood-watered earth, brought forth in that light, the infinite freedom between birth and death only reveals the most horrifying price of all.
Choice . . . and its consequences.
They walked carefully, picking their way ’cross a gathering litter of beach-smooth stones, while the oil fire fell behind. Oona turned her ankle once, and swore; Chess slipped an arm ’round her waist and braced her, playing human crutch, ’til she could limp on her own. And though neither of them thought to acknowledge — let alone thank — the other, it made for a moment of truce, warming in this cold wind.
“Missus Kloves said for me to tell you she can’t see you plain, which is why she had to send me down,” Hosteen told Chess. “Might be ’cause you ain’t really dead as such, might not — but one way or t’other, she’s been waiting on you a sight longer than I have, and things are gettin’ hot. So she wants to point you out an exit, before you and your Ma here ramble all over the rest of Creation’s underbelly.”
“That’d’ve been bloody welcome, a few turns of the road back,” Oona pointed out.
“And it’s just as welcome now, Kees,” Chess hastened to add, “thank you kindly. So — where next?”
Hosteen paused a moment, regarding Chess narrowly. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard you say ‘thanks’ for nothin’ before,” he said.
Yeah, well, stick around. Might be I’ll start apologizing again, and we’ll
both
fall over.
“Two of you like some time alone, then?” Oona asked, waspish.
“Ma!”
“No, ma’am, I don’t think so. But then again, I don’t think you get to make those sorts of calls on his behalf — not anymore.”
“Ah. So ’e’s told you about our old . . . arrangement.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Chess cast her a side-eye, wondering if she at least had the grace to look shamed, but his angle was off — and as she stood there, face hidden behind her hair, he decided he didn’t much care. Better to remember the way she’d acted over this journey, rather than dwell on old times.
My Ma, all right. Half of me, with the other quarter-or-so this Malcolm Devesstrin, whoever the hell
he
was; no better, and probably much worse. And the rest . . .
The rest was him: hex, pistoleer, sodomite. A flesh-bound god cast down, wrung out of god and flesh alike but alive, still, even here in death’s grip. Alive, and free.
Nothin’ she can do to me, now. Nothin’ she ever could.
“Go on, Kees,” Chess said, feeling an odd surge of affection toward them both. “Don’t mind her.”
The old Hollander sighed. “Missus Kloves says you’re t’go far as you can, climb up ’til you can’t see the top of things, and then she’ll find you.”
“We’ve already been climbing a while.”
A shrug. “Well, I can only suppose there’s more to go. But as to how much, damn if I know.”
“That’s . . . quite the riddle.”
“All you got, though, ain’t it? So I guess it’ll have to do.”
Once more, they walked on in silence, covering what seemed an interminable distance, ’til at last the way began to slope upward, first shallowly, then steeper. Dark peaks rose slowly, scoring the skyline ahead like teeth. The rocks grew craggier, crowding ’til they had no room to slip beneath either Chess’s boot-soles or Oona’s bleeding feet. Stepping wrong, she went down on one knee with a strangled groan, only to rise up again with Chess pulling on one wrist, Hosteen the other.
“Might be one of us should carry you,” Hosteen said, to which she shook her head and spat, not ungratefully.
“I’m in me prime, son,” she scoffed. “Back at the very ’eight of strength and ’ealth. Day I can’t stomach a trawl like this, you can lay me out an’ frow dirt in my face.”
“You promise?” Chess muttered.
For his jibe, Oona punched him in the biceps, knuckles twisting painful — after which they laughed, long and loud, while Hosteen stood there amazed.
“Jesus,” he said, at last. “You
two
.”
Aw, you love it,
Chess was about to say —
a mean little man and the bitch who made him; what’s better entertainment than that?
Except it was that exact moment when the Dead Posse’s tumult rose up again, ululating hoarse and rage-filled from one compass-edge to another, causing Hosteen himself to flatten ’gainst the rising cliff face like it was a battlefield trench wall. “Shit’s
that
?” he hissed, feeling for his own no-longer-holstered gun.
Chess warned him silent with a headshake and a finger-corked
shush
, and was happy to see himself obeyed. He stared ’round, scanning what was left of the horizon, while Oona wrung his hand. “You see ’em?” she asked.
“Not yet . . . but they’re comin’. I feel it.”
“Me too, God piss on it,” she said, softly.
Those furious phantom hoofbeats rising up through the “earth,” rumbling like the Enemy’s Fifth World gone to quake and ruin. Following the sound’s echoes, Chess managed to sight in on what he thought might be their hunters, a blurred, shadow-black, vast roil of movement only barely perceptible by the shear and swirl of the dimly gleaming grass around it. And — something else as well, dragged twisting in their wake, a piece of snared prey scraped along the unforgiving terrain, twisting in its harness like a steer. Chess didn’t need a clear view to know who
that
probably was.
“Think they got the Sheriff with ’em,” he told Oona.
“What the ’ell
for
?”
“’Cause they ain’t got us, and that’s his fault, in their eyes. Now shut up, and let me — ”
“Gettin’ mighty tired of being told that,
boy
,” Oona growled. “You were the one said t’
me
, ‘You a ’ex, or ain’tcha?’ Never occurred to you I could back you up? Or is that only for when you got no other choice?”
Chess drew breath to shout, only to be interrupted yet again, this time by Hosteen. “Chess, if she’s anything like as strong as you were, or even the Rev — ”
“She ain’t,” Chess snarled back. “But then again, down here, neither am I. Nothing Goddamn
takes
in this place.” He kicked a rock in frustration, peevish. “Like goin’ fist to fist with Love all over again — everything I threw at him, he just soaked up. How the hell do you beat something you can’t hurt, Kees?”
“You never did like to deke around a fight, I recall. But we did it, sometimes, when the Lieut told us to — built blinds to hide in, took the bluebellies unawares. Ain’t there no way to do something like that?”
“Shit, I dunno. The one time I did try a glamour, the whole thing backfired on Ed’n me.”
“That’s why you need me, then,” Oona said. “’Cause if there’s one thing I ever ’ad any knack for, it was glamour.” As if to demonstrate the concept, she sidled up, toying with Chess’s top shirt button, fair cooing in one ear: “’Less the ’igh and mighty Private Pargeter’s too proud to take aid from ’is
mother
, that is. . . .”
So
wrong, on every level. But Chess was used to her tricks, even if Hosteen wasn’t. He caught her wrist and smiled back at her, their lips furling just alike, grim and charmless.
“Hell, I’ll take it, all right,” he replied. “But it ain’t gonna be no one-way thoroughfare. I ask and you give, on damn command. Fair enough, Ma?”
“Fair enough.”
If Ash Rook had been there, he’d’ve had a whole page of Holy Writ to trot out, quoting high and low ’til the dim air sparkled with hanging print, and reality itself warped to fit his words’ likeness. For Chess, however — and Oona too, assuming she’d kept hold of her hexation long enough to develop such technique — the mechanics were far rougher, silent and deep, wrenched up from within like the bloody flux.
Acting on impulse, they found an accord so quickly it seemed choreographed: knit right hand to left, then threw opposite arms ’round Hosteen before the old Hollander could even think to extricate himself, and knit those ten clawed fingers like-a-wise. Over Hosteen’s shoulder, Chess could already see dust kicking up in front of the Dead Posse like an evil cloud, rushing toward them with all the fell force of its transit. So he shut his eyes tight ’gainst the grit and laid his cheek to Oona’s, beard-rough to reborn-smooth, folding tight together to poor Kees — while, at the very same time, the oldest tune he knew came pouring out through his mouth all unsummoned, a flood of bile and honey borne on somebody else’s breath.
As they walked down to the water’s brim,
Bow we down —
As they walked down to the water’s brim,
Bow and balance to me;
As they walked down to the water’s brim,
the oldest pushed the youngest in.
For I’ll be true to my love,
If my love will be true to me.
And here he heard Oona’s voice in his ear again, murmuring, without her even opening her mouth. Saying:
My own Ma used to sing it different, though — in more of a country way, p’raps, ’stead’a the tune I always ’eard from those in the Clock-’ouse. Or maybe ’cause she died well content wiv what she ’ad, little as that might’ve been; us kids, ’er man, my useless Pa wiv ’is tricks, drinkin’ all she worked for away at the week’s end, and never fankin’ ’er for the use of it, neither.
Always wantin’ t’make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, was my Ma. Just like that ’arper in the song . . .
Her father’s knight came riding by
And this maid’s body chanced to spy.
Oh he took three locks of her yellow hair
And with them strung a bow so fair.
And what did he do with her breast-bone?
He made it a fiddle to play upon.
And what did he do with her veins so blue?
He made fiddle strings to play a tune.
And what did he do with her fingers slight?
He made little pegs to hold them tight.
And the only tune that the fiddle would play
Was oh, oh, the wind and rain —
And the only tune that the fiddle would play
Was oh, the dreadful wind and rain.
Make a corpse into music, a mermaid, a swan. Make your ’eart’s desire into your own death. Make your sister’s love into your husband. Make her grave your marriage bed.
Make —
— two men and an old/young woman into one more shadow on a heap of shadows, a blank spot blending into the outcropping, livid grey on grey. Nothing that would stand out far enough to be seen, even as the Dead Posse howled by and Hosteen trembled between them.
The Posse’s train tore up and down, back and forth, with Love staggering headlong after at the point of a rope. Sometimes he tripped, fell and was pulled, scraping himself on the stony soil, only to rise up once more covered with fresh wounds, his mouth set; though they offered no quarter, he asked none. Sometimes Chess thought he saw his bitter lips move, as if he might be praying.
And that procession went on a while, far longer than Chess had thought it would — Chilicothe and the rest, the Lieut, the bluebellies; Sadie and her beau riding two to a mount, him firm-set, her hugging him side-saddle. Yet more followed after, like every man or woman killed within Chess’s eyeshot these last three years was making up the bulk, called to follow after by the promise of whatever impermanent vengeance ghosts might wreak on ghosts.
Oona pressed closer still, so she could say — voice dropping to a cautious whisper, as she did — “Damn, son. You really
’ave
killed a lot of men, just like you said. But
not
more’n I’ve fucked, as it ’appens.”
Sliding back to their final living conversation, in the “hospital” under Selina Ah Toy’s, as though all the intervening incidence counted for nothing.
Chess snorted, and shook his head. “Boast on, why don’t you,” he replied.
’Round and ’round, in and about and out once more, cutting patterns in the desolate waste with their hooves, ’til eventually the Posse drew to a shuddering stop, apparently stymied. The Lieut leaned to cut Love free and kick him sidelong in almost the same motion, while the rest looped back, turning their rides for the ’Hold, the crossroads, War-Heaven, Gehenna . . . anywhere but here.
You can walk back, preacher
, Chess thought he heard the dead man say, into his high-muffled shell-coat’s collar.
I’ll count it as toll for slowing us down, since we might’ve caught him yet, were it not for your interference.
Love stood up slow and dignified, re-ordering his bloody rags while the Posse gave one shared, heaving sigh and dispersed with a moan of hungry hate unfulfilled, leaving nothing behind but ache.
Turning his back on their trail — even the part of it he’d contributed to, just as it began to fade — Love said: “You may safely reveal yourselves now, I believe — Pargeter, ma’am. Since I can tell you’re here.”
“Funny, that,” Chess replied, letting slip his mother’s grip, so’s to make himself take shape once more. “How
you
can but they couldn’t, is what I mean.”
“No great trick to it. It’s like you said, before — ”
“God told you?”
“Indirectly, yes, through simple intuition — God-given, like all other things. Yet I live . . . subsist, rather . . . in hope.”
So easy to mock Love’s ridiculous gimcrack faith, his sideshow humbleness. Once again, however, an unwanted sympathy scoured Chess’s insides, making him feel small, raw. Almost as skin-bare as Love looked, at least for now.
“Well . . .” he said, at last, “fun as it’s been, we’d better be movin’ on. Good luck with your penitence, Sheriff.”
He went to turn, only to see Love raise a hand, less in command than entreaty. “Wait but one moment more. I — there’s something I’d say, if you’ll hear it.”
Chess scowled. “Like what?”
Love hesitated, studying the dirt below as though he hoped it’d give him clues, advice on how best to phrase what he so didn’t want to say. “You’ve done wrong all your days, I know you won’t deny it; that you take a certain perverse pride in the truth of it, even. But Mister Pargeter — Chess — your due fall’s already done with, deservedly harsh, and sudden. Which means now you’ve been weighed, you have another chance, as I do.” His nod took in Oona, even Hosteen, whom he seemed to recognize, perhaps from the first face-off at Bewelcome. “Remember what I told your Reverend, once? How grace is resistible, yet available for all? What I’m saying is, Chess — forgiveness isn’t an impossibility, even for such as you. And much as you like a fight, perhaps it’s time you ceased resisting.”