The Silver spike (3 page)

Or maybe the worst was the blisters on his feet. Those started
practically before they got out of sight of Oar. Even though he did
everything Old Man Fish told him to do, they just kept getting
worse. At least they didn’t get infected. That jerk Timmy
kept telling cheerful little tales about guys in the army who had
had blisters that had gotten infected and they’d had to have
their feet or legs chopped off. Dipshit.

Fourth night in the woods he had no trouble sleeping. In fact,
he was getting to that point where he could sleep whenever he
stopped moving. The old man observed, “You’re starting
to toughen up. We’ll turn you into a man yet,
Smeds.”

Smeds could have killed him then, but it was too much work to
get out of his pack straps and go over and do it.

Maybe the pack was the worst part of it. He had to lug eighty
pounds of junk on his back, and what they had eaten of the food
part hadn’t lightened the load a bit.

They reached their destination shortly after noon eight days
after they departed Oar. Smeds stood just inside the edge of the
forest and looked out at the Barrowland. “That’s what
all the fuss was about? Don’t look like shit to me.” He
sloughed his pack, plopped down on it, leaned against a tree, and
closed his eyes.

“It ain’t what it used to be,” Old Man Fish
agreed.

“You got a name besides Old Man?”

“Fish.”

“I mean a front name.”

“Fish is good.”

Laconic bastard.

Timmy asked, “That our tree out there?”

Tully answered, “Got to be. It’s the only one there
is.”

Timmy said, “I love you, little tree. You’re going
to make me rich.”

Tully said, “Fish, I think we ought to rest up some before
we go after it.”

Smeds cracked an eyelid and glimmed his cousin. That was as
close as his cousin had come to complaining since the expedition
had started. But Tully was a big-time bitcher. Smeds had wondered
how long he would hold out. Tully’s silence so far had helped
Smeds keep going. If Tully wanted it bad enough to take what he had
been, then maybe it really was as good as he talked.

The big hit? The one they had been seeking all their lives?
Could it be? For that reason alone Smeds would endure.

Fish agreed with Tully. “I wouldn’t start before
tomorrow night. At the earliest. Maybe the night after. We have a
lot of scouting to do. We’ll all have to learn the ground the
way we learn the geography of a lover.” Smeds frowned. Was
this no-talk Fish? “We have to find a secure place to camp
and establish a secondary base for emergencies.”

Smeds could not keep quiet. “What the hell is all this
shit? Why don’t we just go out there and chop the damned
thing down and get out of here?”

“Shut up, Smeds,” Tully snapped. “Where the
hell have you been for the last ten days? Get the shit out of your
ears and use your head for something besides keeping them from
banging together.”

Smeds shut up. His ears were open, suddenly, and they had caught
a very sinister undertone in Tully’s voice. His cousin had
begun to sound like he regretted letting him in on the deal. Like
maybe he was thinking Smeds was too dumb to be left to live. Right
now he had on that same contemptuous look Fish wore so often.

He closed his eyes, shut out his companions, let his mind roll
back over the past ten days, picking up things that he had heard
without really hearing because he had been so busy feeling sorry
for himself.

Of course they couldn’t just strut out there and chop the
damned tree down. There were soldiers watching the Barrowland. And
even if there weren’t any soldiers there was the tree itself,
that was supposed to be big mojo. Sorcery there great enough to
have survived the dark struggle that had hammered the guts out of
this killing ground.

All right. It wasn’t going to be easy. He would have to
work for it harder than he’d ever worked for anything in his
life. And he would have to be careful. He would have to keep his
eyes open and his brain working. He wasn’t going to give the
Kimbro girls music lessons out here.

That day and night they rested. Even Old Man Fish said he needed
it. Next morning Fish went to scout for a campsite. Tully said,
“You got blisters up to your butt, Smeds. You stay here. Take
care of them the way Fish said. You got to get in shape to move if
we got to move. Timmy, come on.”

“Where you going?” Smeds asked.

“Gonna try getting close to that town. See what we can
find out.” They went.

Fish came back an hour later.

“That was quick. Find a place?”

“Not a very good one. River’s moved some since I was
up here. Bank’s two hundred yards over there. Not much room to run.
Let me look at them feet.”

Smeds stuck them out. Fish squatted, grunted, touched a couple
of places. Smeds winced. “Bad?” he asked.

“Seen worse. Not often. Got some trenchfoot getting
started, too. Others probably got a touch, too.” He looked
vacant for a moment. “My fault. I knew you was green and
Tully was as organized as a henhouse. Shoulda not let him get in
such a big hurry. You get in a hurry you always end up
paying.”

“Decided what you’re going to do with your cut
yet?”

“Nope. You get to my age you don’t go
looking that far ahead. Good chance you might not get there. One
day at a time, boy. I’m going to get some stuff for a
poultice.”

Smeds watched the straight-backed, white-haired man fade into
the forest silently. He tried to blank his mind. He did not want to
be alone with his thoughts.

Fish returned with a load of weeds. “Chop these into
little pieces and put them in this sack. Equal amounts of each
kind.” There were three kinds. “When the sack is
stuffed close it up and pound on it with this stick. Roll it over
once in a while. All the leaves got to get good and bruised.”

“How long?”

“Give it a thousand, twelve hundred whacks. Then dump it
in this pot. Put in a cup of water and stir it up.”

“Then what?”

“Then do another sack. And stir the pot every couple
minutes.” The old man faded into the woods without saying
where he was going.

Smeds was pounding his third sack when Fish returned. He
sniffed. “Guess you can do a job right when you want.”
He settled, took the pot. “Good. That sack will be
enough.”

He turned Smeds’s oldest shirt into bindings for his feet,
packed them with soggy, mangled leaves. A cool tingle began
soothing his pains.

Fish made the others treat their feet, too. He did his own.

Smeds leaned against his tree, troubled. He did not think he was
hard enough or bad enough to kill the old man.

“There between sixty and eighty people still living over
there,” Tully said. “Mostly soldiers. But we heard them
talking like a big bunch would be leaving in a couple days.
Wouldn’t hurt to wait them out on that. We could finish up
our scouting.”

Scouting the Barrowland started after sunset, by the light of a
quarter moon. The village was dark and silent. It looked a good
time to prowl the open ground.

Out the four went in a loose line abreast barely in sight of one
another, Tully guiding on the tree. It was not much of a tree by
Smeds’s estimation. Right then it looked like a fat-trunked
silver-bark poplar sapling about fifteen feet tall. He could not
see anything remarkable there. Why the reputation?

He reached a point where the angle was right, caught a glint of
moonlight off silver. It was real! And having gotten that one
glance, he began to feel the throbbing dark power of it, like it
was not metal at all but an icicle of pure hatred.

He shuddered, forced his gaze away.

It was real. The wealth was there to be had. If they could take
it.

He hurried forward. A long, low, stony ridge barred his path.
Odd that such a thing should be there, but he did not connect it
with the dragon that was supposed to have devoured the infamous
sorcerer Bomanz before being slain itself. Maybe if there had been
more light to reveal what his hands and feet exposed as they
disturbed the masking dirt . . . 

He was near the top when he heard the sound. Like an animal
snuffling. And another sound beneath it, like something scratching
at the earth. He looked for the others. He could see no one but
Tully, who was staring at the tree from ten feet away. There was
something odd about the tree. The tops of its leaves glimmered with
a faint bluish ghost light.

Maybe it was a trick of the rising moon.

He got up where the footing was good, stood, glanced at the tree
again. Definitely something weird going on there. The whole thing
was glowing.

He looked down in front of him. His heart stilled.

Something stared back at him from fifty feet away. It had a head
the size of a bushel basket. Its eyes and teeth shown in the tree
light. Especially its teeth. Never had he seen so many sharp teeth,
or so big.

It started toward him.

His feet would not move.

He looked around wildly, saw Tully and Timmy headed away from
the tree at a dead run.

He looked forward again as the monster began its leap, its jaws
opening to snap at his head. He hurled himself backward. As the
monster arced after him a blue bolt from the tree smacked it aside
as a man’s hand swats a flying insect.

Smeds landed hard, but hard did not slow him a step. He took off
running and never looked back.

“I saw it, too,” Old Man Fish said, and that put the
quietus on Tully trying to make like Smeds was imagining things.
“Like he said, it was as big as a house. Like a giant
three-legged dog. The tree zapped it. It ran away.”

“Three-legged dog? Come on. What was it doing?”

Smeds said, “It was trying to dig something up. It was
sniffing and pawing the ground just like a dog trying to dig up a
bone.”

“Damn it to hell! Complications. Why does there always
have to be complications? That for sure means it’ll take
longer than I thought. But we don’t got no time to waste.
Sooner or later somebody else is going to get the same idea I
did.”

“Don’t get in no hurry,” Fish said.
“Take your time and do it right. That is, if you want to live
long enough to enjoy being rich.”

Tully grunted. Nobody suggested they give it up. Not even Smeds,
who had felt the monster’s breath on his face.

“Toadkiller Dog,” Timmy Locan said.

“Say what?” Tully snapped back.

“Toadkiller Dog. There was a monster in the fight up here
called Toadkiller Dog.”

“Toadkiller Dog? What the hell kind of name is
that?”

“How the hell should I know? He ain’t my
pup.”

Stupid joke, but everybody laughed anyway. They needed to.

Raven hardly sobered up for three weeks. One night I came back
to our place, I’d had enough. I’d had to hurt a man bad
that day, a nut who earned it trying to grab my boss’s kids.
Even so I felt bad. Somehow I worked it out that it was all
Raven’s fault I got in a position where I had to hurt
somebody.

He was drunk on his ass. “Look at you, sucking on a
wineskin like it was your mother’s tit. The great and famous
tough guy Raven, so bad he offed his old lady in the public gardens
at Opal. So bad he went head-to-head with the Limper. Laying around
feeling sorry for himself and whining like a three-year-old with a
bellyache. Get up and do something with yourself, man. I’m
sick of seeing you like this.”

In a stumbling, slurred voice he told me to get stuffed, it
wasn’t any of my damned business.

“The hell it ain’t! It’s my damned money
paying for the room here, dipshit. And I got to come home every day
to the stink of old puke and spilled wine and a goddamn soil pot
you ain’t got time to empty yourself. When was the last time
you bothered to change your clothes? When was the last time you had
a bath?”

He cussed me in a cracked-voice scream.

“You’re just about the most selfish, thoughtless
bastard I ever seen. Won’t even clean up after
yourself.”

I went on like that, louder and angrier. But he never really
fought back, which made me think maybe he was about as disgusted
with himself as I was with him. But who can go around admitting
he’s a hopeless, useless hunk of shit?

Finally he ran out of what little fight he had. He got up and
staggered out, without any parting shot. He did not burn any
bridges behind him.

A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with
drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop
trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them
and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where
they can’t do nothing but face the truth because they
aren’t going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They
got to be the ones who believe they’ve turned into dregs and
something has got to be changed.

I didn’t know if I could wait around long enough for Raven
to decide he was a real grown-up man and he was going to have to
face reality. Darling was gone and that was that. There were kids
to be found. That whole past, down in Opal, had to be hooked back
out into the light and made peace with.

Actually, I was pretty sure he would come around, given time.
The kind of guy he was being was the kind he held in deep contempt.
That had to seep through. But it sure was frustrating, waiting him
out.

He came back home four days later, sobered up and cleaned up and
looking halfway like the Raven I remembered. He was all apologetic.
He promised to get straight and to do better.

Sure. They do that, too.

I would believe it when I saw it.

I didn’t make any big deal out of anything. I didn’t
preach. There wasn’t no profit in that.

He hung on pretty good. He looked like he was getting somewhere.
But then two days later I came home and found him so stinking he
couldn’t crawl.