A Rope of Thorns (6 page)

She is right, of course
, it said.

Chess crab-scrabbled backwards so the fire was between ’em, anything to get away. Then glanced down himself, all unthinking, and screamed out loud.

“Seemed nothin’ out of the usual, when we went to bed,” the man—Yancey Colder thought his name might be Frewer, but wasn’t sure—began, eyes kept careful on the teacup he held balanced on one skinny knee. “I mean . . . sure, that business with Dentist Glossing, earlier, but—everything’d been already took away, street swept clear of bad rubbish. Was warm and fine that night, red skies for a clement morning, not one cloud on the horizon. . . .” He trailed away, head shaking slightly. “And then . . .”

“Then?” Yancey’s Pa encouraged.

“My woman woke me, ’round about four of the clock. Said she heard this sound like something tearing, off in the distance. But when I went to take a look out the window, I couldn’t get the shutters open, ’cause they were weighted down with all sorts of . . .
bugs
, and other awfulness—grasshoppers, chiggers, furry-winged moths. Devil’s darning needles the size of pie-plates, rubbin’ ’emselves together ’til the hum went up too loud to yell over.”

“How long’d this-all go on?” asked Sheriff Haish from his place in the corner, leaning back in his chair. Up ’til now, he’d seemed far more interested in his chaw of tobacco than in Mister Frewer’s story, but Yancey guessed that was mainly for show.

“A goodly piece after dawn.” The cup trembled between Frewer’s long hands, thin china squeaking dangerously. “We just sat there with our arms ’round the children, hangin’ on for dear life. Noise got so loud near the end, by God, it like to’ve drove us mad.”

Pa and the Sheriff exchanged a glance, but seemed to agree to let him set his own pace.

“When I
was
able to wedge the door,” Mister Frewer said, at last, “the street was
gone
, all of it. Like it’d never even been. Nothin’ left but this low rut through a tangle of roots, and every other house just slick with crawler-juice, and this
smell
in the air—Christ Almighty, like when that whole farm died of Yellow Jack in high summer, but nobody twigged ’til a week and a half later. All it lacked was for maggots.”

He took a shallow breath. “Happened to glance east then, where the tooth-pull shop used t’stand, and it was one big green knot, like kudzu. ’Cept for it had little red bell-flowers hung on it every-which-where, gaped wide, like snappin’ mouths.”

“I never heard tell of Weed grown up that fast,” a fresh voice—Mister Mergenthal, Hoffstedt’s Hoard’s only butcher—piped up, nearer to the room’s back end, where Yancey had made sure the half-open door blocked Pa from any sudden view of her eavesdropping. “So . . . what’d y’all
do
?”

Frewer shrugged, hapless. “Might’ve come about from them hexes havin’ a shoot-out in the middle of Main Street, I s’pose, the day before—”

“Who and who?”

“One was Doc Glossing, the dentist, like I already said—not that most’ve us knew he was hexacious before that, at least not for sure. And the other was that new-turned ’slinger, Reverend Rook’s boy—”

Sheriff Haish scowled, and let fly into the spittoon. “Chess damn
Pargeter
shot up your town, and you didn’t think anything would come of it?”

“Well, he left, right after. So . . . no, we didn’t. Not like
that
, anyways.”

Pa frowned too, but refrained from expectoration. “Hold up, though. Pargeter’s a pistoleer only, I’d always heard.”

“Don’t know why the Doc would’a tried to take a pull on ’im in the first place, he wasn’t good for the effort. And believe me . . .” Frewer shook his head again, as though to clear it. “Seemed like Pargeter gave just as good as he got, in that direction.”

Haish blew out a breath. “Well,
that
ain’t good news. Damn little redheaded . . .
creature
was touched enough, back when he was only humanish. And how’d two mages get cleft together in the first place anyhow, even with one of ’em not yet at full effect? ‘Don’t meddle,’ my ass.”

The other conclavists looked each-to-each, equally unhappy. “Maybe it really
is
catchin’,” Mergenthal suggested.

“Highly unlikely, I’d think,” Pa began, in reply, colliding headlong with Haish’s: “Goddamn, man, shut your hole! Think we most’ve us all know a happy load’a horseshit, when we hear it. . . .”

“As it turns out—yes.”

Marshal Uther Kloves normally spoke so deadpan that most folks tended to suspect him of jesting, whatever he said. It was one of the things most endeared him to Yancey, but it did make for difficulty in terms of figuring out exactly where he was headed, in public addresses.

“I’ve had telegrams from all the other Territories,” he explained. “Utah, Colorado—far north as Wyoming, even west of the Colorado River. Always it’s the same: once the Weed gets a foothold, there’s only one thing makes it die.”

“Fire?”

“Blood.”

“
Any
blood?” Mergenthal said, his interest suddenly piqued—he’d his share of back-stores, after all, Yancey knew. And if perhaps there was money to be made . . .

Yancey could imagine Kloves giving that near-imperceptible little shake of his head. “Human. Fresh-spilled.”

A beat of silence, eventually broken by Pa, bewildered: “But . . . that don’t make any
sense
.”

“Hexation’s at the bottom of all this, Lionel,” said Kloves. “Don’t go holdin’ your breath, waitin’ for things to add up square.”

Someone else cleared their throat. “Well, they do say the Weed doesn’t usually grow up so fast as Mister Frewer tells of.” Incongruously light and pleasant, this voice, though Yancey thought she recognized it as belonging to the mysterious Mister Grey, a tall, youngish fellow just starting on a serious walrus moustache, who’d rode into Hoffstedt’s Hoard only a few days ago. “But that may indeed be overspillage from this hex-battle ’twixt Pargeter and—Glossing, was it? The blood part, however, that’s true. I’ve seen it. Bleed a cupped double-handful from, say, five or six folks, spill it over the Weed and it dries up to powder inside of three days.” He paused. “Even heard a few claim their soil was the richer for it, after.”

“That so?” Frewer’s mouth twisted, teacup slipping to thump the thick carpet, thankfully unbroken. “So all’s we have to do is offer up abomination, like the damn Philistines and Pharisees, and hey presto? Good Christ above, let
that
rumour fly free and folk’ll be pulling bad neighbours in off the streets, tellin’ ’emselves it’s better to cut one to save ten! You ever
seen
Weed-infected livestock, Mister?”

Yancey hadn’t—but recalled all too well accounts she’d read, sprinkled over every news-sheet the Cold Mountain Hotel received. A cattle drive coming up through Bisbee had stopped in the wrong place for the night; the cowboys had woken to find their thousand head staggering ’round like they had worms—kicking, falling, dying. And then, once the renderers arrived to do due diligence, they’d found turkey vultures scattered dead every which way, wings and beaks entangled with fibres . . . after which the first tentative cuts had loosed a flood of guts stuffed with Weed, whose blossoms raised themselves up like snails’ stalk-eyes to the sun, seeming to peer ’round for fresher prey.

Excise such places by fire, to the ground, then salt them over as Biblically prescribed, that was the common-held wisdom. Or wait for the government men to do much the same, under strict legality—but people seldom did. Most, like Mouth-of-Praise’s former citizenry, this ragged band of new-made refugees now shivering in Pa’s first-floor saloon-cum-parlour arrangement, simply fled.

“We had to burn near everything, in the end,” Mister Frewer said, at last. “’Fore it seeded. And since blood won’t bring that back, I don’t hold it’d do the rest of us any manner of good, to know we might’ve saved ourselves the trouble.”

A long tick of Pa’s desk clock passed, before Sheriff Haish spoke again. “Mister Frewer, just how many of your fellow townsfolk came with you, after the fire?”

“All of ’em, near as I figure. A hundred and twenty, thirty—fifty? We didn’t take no census.”

Kloves nodded. “Hard to fault you. All the same, Mister Frewer, we
are
going to have to talk this over somewhat. So, your kind permission . . .”

“Yeah—yes. ’Course.” Though stumble-footed, Frewer still made the door fast enough that Yancey barely had time to duck into the linen closet, reduced to watching him stagger back down to where the rest of his delegation waited, through the half-cracked door. Then, soon as he’d vanished, she counted herself safe to take up station outside Pa’s doorway once more.

“. . . can’t just let ’em
in!
” Hugo Hoffstedt, the tobacconist, was saying; a distant cousin of the town’s founding family, he was a coward and a snob, but wealthy. “Am I the only man here not a fool?”

“Now, Hugo,” Pa protested. “Christian charity—”

“Don’t you preach at me, Lionel Colder, with Miss Yancey set to marry and your son-in-law-to-be right here within earshot—
your
family’s jeopardized, just as much as mine! What if the Weed chases after their stink and we have to burn down the Hoard, too?”

Sheriff Haish rolled his eyes. “There’s no proven evidence the Weed
follows
folks—”

“There’s no
proven
evidence it don’t!”

An argument impossible to pursue, let alone rebut—but the Marshal, often the coolest head in any room, didn’t even try.

“Mister Hoffstedt has a point,” he allowed. “In these disordered times, might be all too easy to think Mouth-of-Praise’s ‘misfortune’ a tad convenient, a good excuse to get ’emselves dug inside our borders, so they could kill us in our beds and take all we have . . . but lookin’ at poor Mister Frewer, how likely does
that
seem?”

A murmur of agreement ran through the room, and even Hoffstedt had the good grace to look a tiny bit ashamed for something he hadn’t actually stated directly. Easy to see how Kloves rose so quickly to his current position, by the relatively young age of seven-and-twenty; he’d parlayed leadership skills hard-won in battle into a peacetime efficacy. Yancey knew all too well he had already impressed her Pa as worthy of every support he could afford . . . including the boon of her own hand in marriage.

He’s a good man, gal. I have to think of your future, what with your Mama gone—don’t want to work my hotel ’til you’re staring at spinsterhood, do you? All I want’s your happiness.

She felt her head dip at the truth of it, automatic. For there were no fairy tales in this life, only patterns of supply and exchange—rules, regulations, methods and manners of payment. And she knew all
that
well enough, too; had the very job Pa thought to save her from, to thank for it.

“No,” Kloves said, “the Weed’s undeniable, as both fact and threat. ’Sides which, you don’t want to back rats into a corner, when they’re desperate . . . not if it’s a whole bunch of rats, armed, and it’s
your
corner.”

Hoffstedt said: “Well, that’s your job, ain’t it? To keep us safe.”

Pa: “Easiest way to do
that
is act like we ought. Right, Sheriff?”

“Right.”

“Then let’s put it to the vote, shall we?” Kloves said. “Just so nobody thinks what I suggest carries—this bein’ a democracy, same’s every other part of these United States.”

You diplomat.
Yancey shook her head, amused despite herself.
Albeit one with a nice shiny tin star, and a gun to back it up.

Seemed that shame counted for just as much as fear, however. The vote was unanimous, letting Mouth-of-Praise’s stragglers stay—for now.

“All right, gents,” Pa said, rising, “I believe we’ll end in the loungerie, with drinks on the house. And Experiance, don’t think I don’t see you there, gal. Gonna be a sight of extra toil to do today, so go finish up with your regular chores, will you? I expect I’ll need your help most of all.”

Flatterer,
she thought;
costs
you
nothing, ties
me
up all day.
But merely said, out loud: “Yes, Pa.”

He snorted, unimpressed by such acquiescence. To Kloves: “Cute little missy, she is—too much so for her own good, or mine. I do believe you’ve got your work cut out for you, Marshal.”

Kloves, meanwhile—Uther—looked full at Yancey, mouth tightening in something which might as well be a smile as a frown.
Am I work
for you?
she felt like asking.

“I know,” the man who would soon be her husband replied, with preternatural aptness—to Pa, supposedly, though Yancey knew better. So she turned away, dropping a little bobbed half-curtsey to them both, yet still unable to avoid smiling a bit herself, as she did.

Oh, she supposed she
did
feel for him, after all, “arrangement” or not. And most ’specially so at times like these.

Then again, wasn’t as though there was any other option.

Hoffstedt’s Hoard had gotten its name from the wealth its founder used to build it, the yield of an early strike of ’48, after ’Frisco’s
California Star
set off what folks now called a Gold Rush by trumpeting the find near Sutter’s Mill. Built around a grouping of strongly fed wells, it formed a natural way-station in the midst of the Gadsden Purchase of ’53, near-exact between Las Cruces and Tucson and close upon the Arizona border. The Cold Mountain Hotel was one of its oldest buildings.

’Course, Yancey herself never had quite gotten a clear answer from Lionel on the question of why a promising young clerk in Boston would suddenly up stakes, hauling his new wife and baby girl clear across the continent and headlong into a vocation she wasn’t even sure
he
derived all that much enjoyment from. But her Mama had let slip some hints, and Yancey’d made some guesses.

Considered closely, Lionel’s claim to Christianity seemed an absentminded, perfunctory thing at best
,
and this skill with finance had often provoked the odd angry mutter about “moneylenders”—mutters she would have disregarded entirely if Lionel himself hadn’t always flushed and changed the subject, and gained context once she’d heard a few sermons from Pastor Cambrell on the Bible’s low opinion concerning usury.