Страница 48 из 110
So why didn’t his wife drive or ride guard in the cab? Guil wondered, and remembered—he was more practiced at it than this morning—that the guard didn’t remotely know what he wondered, no horses being near.
He was even moderately curious what the guard thought, after his experience with townsmen. He wondered to a greater extent than he ever had just what went on in townsmen minds—so much so that, on a further thought, he troubled to ask his question aloud.
“Yeah, but all those village girls… with my wife along?” the guard asked him in return, and laughed and elbowed him in the ribs as if he should understand.
But he wasn’t sure he understood the guard’s logic. He still felt dull and deaf to townsman cues… and he didn’t understand ‘wife,’ he suspected, or at least, didn’t understand Anveney expectations of wives and husbands.
But before he could ask into that odd remark, or try to figure where he and Aby had fit against that pattern in their own arrangement, they’d reached a turn-around at a fork in the dirt road.
The truck stopped, and the driver said that was as far as they were supposed to go.
So he climbed down—sore from head to foot, with a miserable headache and a spot on his temple that hurt like hell when he frowned into the evening sun. The stink was all around them, or he’d imagine it for days, and it clung to everything he’d gotten in Anveney.
But he wished them both a safe trip back, got information from them where the forks led, one to Anveney West Road—he’d thought he was right—and one to a mining pit he didn’t want to visit.
They turned around and drove off in a cloud of dust, and he slung his new-bought belongings to his shoulder and walked, a little dizzy, limping, decidedly with more load than he had the strength to carry for very long or very far.
By stages and resting a bit he could, he told himself, walk to the junction of roads and the rider stone—he didn’t know how he’d have done without the lift, but he was glad he didn’t have to try, the more so since a bank of cloud was moving in, just the gray edge advancing from off the mountains over the foothills, promising weather before dark—cold rain down here and undoubtedly snow in the high country last night, he said to himself. A cold, damp wind, blowing off the peaks of the Firgeberg, fluttered the fringes of his jacket. Its occasional gusts bent the flat brim of his hat.
Before he’d reached the next hill the temperature had dropped several degrees.
Which said he’d better hurry, as much as he could.
Various parts of him might hurt—but he hadn’t even marked down a grudge against the bank: thanks to Cassivey, who’d yanked strings on everybody including the bank, the marshal’s office, and the town judge, he’d no record of any wrongdoing, he’d been able to buy everything he remotely needed in the way of supplies, money was, by arcane townsman miracles, back in the bank, under a new number with a new card that had only his name on it and no next-of’s to enable anyone to rob him.
So Cassivey assured him, Cassivey having full confidence, Cassivey said, in the men he’d sent to make things clear to the woman at the bank. Cassivey’d paid the fine, the business was off, as townsmen called it, the books. All of which was, at the moment, more help than he’d remote interest in comprehending—if he survived the winter he’d be very interested.
But that was on the other side of winter.
He still wasn’t sure if the bank business was going to work. He personally suspected it was a way contrived for townsmen to cheat riders, and the bank still held they’d been justified in dealing Aby’s funds out to Hawley.
Which confused him—and which was the one reason he was remotely interested, right now, in what was the law with the bank. On one level he knew that he was right and that Hawley was wrong. But, town law holding to the contrary, and things having worked out in some kind of justice, by town law and townsman generosity—two words he hadn’t thought possibly fit together—it left him in enough doubt about the right and wrong of what Hawley had done that he wasn’t sure he’d even mention the transgression to Hawley, though he’d recently sworn he was going to get it out of Hawley, and then beat Hawley into horse-food.
He didn’t, now, know how much fault was Hawley’s and how much was because the bank women had suggested it to him. Hawley wasn’t damn bright in certain matters, smart enough on the trail, as far as staying alive, but he could have let his wants and what the bank told him get ahead of his common sense.
He could understand that. He knew Hawley with all his faults.
But it would still be a good idea if Hawley and both his partners were out of Shamesey before he got back next spring. It would be a good idea if they just happened to find jobs elsewhere, but on roads he traveled, for a couple of years. A couple of years might be enough to let him cool down enough, and enough to let him figure what he thought about what Hawley had done—
Right now, still damn him to bloody hell.
Damn Shamesey and Lyle Wesson, too, who could have been a lot more helpful—a lot more forward getting his belongings to him outside Shamesey gate, for one thing. Getting his belongings was why he’d gotten shot, and getting shot was why he’d not had a chance to talk to Hawley and his partners.
And Hawley and Jonas and Luke hadn’t been damn forward, either, to round up what was his and get it outside the gates, and maybe to signal there was more to tell him, and maybe, just maybe, like friends, to just camp outside the walls that night and make themselves available for talk, for errands, for whatever a man needed who wasn’t steady enough to go into the largest camp in the settled world. Put themselves out? Make themselves available?
Hell, no, they headed for the bar and warm beds.
Nobody’d been a damn lot of help, once he started adding up what certain people should have done and hadn’t. There was enough blame to go around in the situation as far as he was concerned—a lot of people in the class of riders that he wasn’t damned happy with, which was whythe business at the bank in Anveney had sunk away into cool indifference. Townsmen could be fools all they liked and you expected it. But ridershad screwed him, people he dealt with, people with a history with him, and that made him damned mad.
Only Aby…
He knew, dammit. He knew the woman and he’d been the one to fail, thinking she’d changed. He didn’t know what the debt was—he didn’t have to know. She’d have paid it. If silence was what the man asked, regarding those shipments, and she owed Cassivey—
She’d done all she could to get him into Cassivey’s employ, cajoled, pleaded. Truth be told—he’d refused to go up to Anveney for many more reasons than the smell on the money. He’d offered his own proposal: Come down to Malvey.
Why’s it always your way? he’d asked, he thought, reasonably. They’d quarreled. He’d been mad. Aby’d gone off mad—and hurt, he’d picked that up in the ambient.
But nothing of her reasons. Aby could throw that anger up like a wall. And had.
They’d thought there was forever.
But she’d owed a man. And, damn, the woman he knew never betrayed a trust. Never. Hehad.
A sudden apprehension came shivering its way through his consciousness that he’d just slipped into Aby’s last set of motions, working for the same man, following the same route—retracing, in short, everything Aby’d done down to leaving Anveney in Cassivey’s employ, exactly where Aby’d wanted him to be when they’d had their last quarrel.
So he’d just taken that job Aby had wanted him to take—more, heowed Cassivey. It was her job he inherited, her obligation, her promises.
He wasn’t superstitious like the preacher-men, but he kept thinking about that first step they kept talking about, the one on the slide to hell. He’d failed Aby; she’d have lived if he’d been there. He wouldn’t have been riding at the rear, leaving Aby on point at the worst damn turn on the mountain. He’d sent her off to partners who’d failed her. He’d sent her off to die; and maybe, in the economy of the preachers’ God, maybe he was going up where he was somehow supposed to have been in the first place.