The world changes. People don't.
The news reached them before those officially carrying it did. Rumors always had ways of jumping between fields, with a great deal of careful effort going into keeping what few lines of communication existed open. But what had passed down those lines had always been rumors and oh, how all that crystallized desperation had flown down the rows. They're winning. They're losing. They are a mile or two away and whatever you thought they would do, it's going to be so much worse. Rebel: this is the time. No, side with the familiar: the enemy is coming. But...
...those had been rumors.
This was news. And somehow, everyone had known the difference. Everyone.
The reactions were... varied.
If he listens closely, he can hear some of the ongoing ones.
Several have gone into the abandoned house. (The family fled. No one seems to have seen them leave or has any idea where they headed, much less exactly when. He would have given much for a chance at last words, and it ran away with them.) The practical are scavenging. They are searching for valuables which are relatively small, fairly portable, and -- the important part -- can be easily hidden away. They will take what they can, secure it in spots hoped to be overlooked, and then return later when the mass outbreak of what's not quite insanity dies down a bit. A new life requires new funds, and a hastily-abandoned trinket or two could buy those first crucial months.
Most of the angry are in the house as well. They have been waiting to lash out for so very many years, longing for the chance to strike against anything in a way which could bring punishment for things where no amount of vengeance could ever do more than set up a future generation of revenge to come -- and now there is no one to strike. And so their rage is exerted against furniture, plates, lamps and toys and anything which might make an interesting noise when it dies. They are not happy with the practical. Not at all. Some noises indicate a conflict of philosophies in progress.
The celebratory have carved out a place in the fields. They are dancing, shouting, letting the sheer wonder of the moment suffuse them while giving very little thought to what might be coming next. They feel there will only be a single moment like this, and so the future can wait its turn. They sing their joy into the firelight and try not to look at the shadows cast by a looming clock.
And the broken cower in their huts, confused eyes shut in a final line of defense against a world they no longer understand, and wait for someone who will tell them what to do.
The practical, the angry, the celebratory, and the broken. He can hear all of them if he tries. But he is standing with none. And in these first moments of a new world, he does not know what it makes him.
Some to the house, others to the fields, those lost in all ways but breath hide in the lie they called home. And he...
...went to the toolshed.
He is standing in front of it now, right hand outstretched towards the door handle. Not quite making contact. Unable to grip.
He has never been inside before. The things within always came to him. Generally in quantity.
It was a joke, the sort where no one could laugh because of who had originally found it funny. Toolshed: the place where you keep the things which make work flow just as smoothly as exposed blood. In reality, it's a little house, not much higher in quality than the huts, only a tiny amount larger and truly raised only by the idea that in theory, this place could be left behind at will by what's not even remotely its owner. Wood planks and ugly leaning stovepipe, a few glass panes which are the pride of the resident, some in every wall and he scrubs them, just about the only work they see him do. He wants the ability to see what's going on outside at all times, will not trust them to clean the exterior in case they broke something (the thought has not crossed minds so much as set up residence) and certainly would never allow them within for unsupervised work on that surface, lest the threat of breakage be added to that of something going missing.
Although some did wind up inside. Those were typically pushed through the doorway. Some screamed before they entered, continued their ignored pleas throughout the night until their voices finally shattered. Many of them left as the broken.
But not him. He didn't qualify, at least for that.
He used those panes, looked inside from every possible angle. This too has been abandoned. And yet he cannot go inside --
-- the hell he can't.
His hand closes on the handle. The door opens, and he steps inside.
And there they are.
He ignores the shoddy bed, set too low to the ground for comfortable morning exit and nowhere near truly large enough for two. Pays no real attention to the poorly-molded stove which must leak heat from every near-cracked surface, a stove set far too close to the wall, waiting for a chance to burn a little too strongly and cook everything within and without. (Part of him notes that it's still radiating a good deal of warmth, but he doesn't pay much attention to the thought.) Doesn't really bother with the pile of dirt-encrusted clothing thrown across an unsteady table or the filthy dishes or all the other little indicators which would tell a less focused mind that most of the improvements between these living conditions and his own are cosmetic ones, because the true difference dividing former occupant and those outside is also cosmetic and thus assigned far too much importance.
What he's paying attention to is the tools.
They are on a long table, one of noticeably higher quality. They are mounted on hooks and brackets along a wall. The wall next to the bed. Some are set low enough to prospectively grip from a mostly-prone position, but only for the one on top.
In this dirty little one-room house which barely has any floor to it, where leftover food is left to openly rot, clothing only cleaned (never by the former occupant) when the joints might no longer bend, where the bloodstains on the bedding are displayed as badges of personal honor -- the tools are polished. They are oiled. They are displayed in the same way with which the man of the family shows his hunting trophies: with pride.
He takes a step forward. His right hand reaches out again. And that is the moment when he realizes that this is but a dream, that he is only reliving what was and cannot change a second of it. Not what came before, and not what is coming next. And there is a flicker of something in his heart, something both exhilaration and horror, for he does not want to.
His hand reaches out --
-- there is something in it.
There was nothing there before. Not yet.
He slowly brings his hand up, regards the object resting on his palm.
It's a toy soldier. Not the flat cutout of tin which was dismissed as being too low-quality for the boy of the family all those years ago. Breadth to go with height and width. Lead, from the weight of it, just like all the finer pieces conducting their wars in the special place put aside for such battles, conflicts which never showed the blood. He knows about toy soldiers. He has held more than a few, moved several and always, always lost. (Except for the time he both won and lost.) He knows uniforms and garrisons and every possible strategy which will end in deliberate disaster. At twelve, he could lose a war faster than any West Point graduate, with decidedly more casualties thrown away for less glory and no chance of promotion. He can determine nationality, rank, assignment, and chance of survival (pretty much none) on a casual glance. Useless skills.
But he doesn't/does know this one.
Doesn't: the uniform is completely unfamiliar. For starters, it's gold, and the weight also suggests a tiny chance of that being real. The torso is armored, fully encased in the close-fitting metal. There is a helmet with a strange center crest to it. The legs are protected, with the arms left fully free to move -- oddly so: the armor stops dead just before the shoulders, without even the extension of spaulders to shield vulnerable joints. It's a strange lack in a protective configuration otherwise intended towards the unfashionable idea of having the rank-and-file live through a fight. As if the designer didn't know what to do with arms.
Does: the face under the brim of the helmet is his own.
"I thought you would relate to this."
The voice is female. It's a little bit deep and slightly too high in volume. There's a heat in it which has nothing to do with the stove (which was too hot, why hadn't he seen it was too hot?) accompanied by a chill no winter has ever brought him, a banishment of all things warm which teaches him about snow and glacier and frostbite in a single second before extending his extensive education on the subject of death. And that is the least of what's wrong with it. There is something else in that voice, something he can't identify on a conscious level yet, and it makes him want to run --
-- but all he can do is turn and face her. Because she wants him to.
The woman is darkly elegant. The finest gown, one reserved for the kind of parties which even the family could barely find invitations to. The edges of it drape the floor in shades of frost, and the ice crystals are slowly spreading outwards from where she stands. Eyes of moonless night, pupils barely visible within irises. Skin to match his own. Features which should be beautiful and aren't: there's a harshness to her which slices through perfect lines and provides them with edges meant to cut.
Her hair is long and dark and flowing. It flows on its own. It reaches for him and never quite gets there.
"You have to listen," she tells/orders him. "You have to understand. Whatever you think is happening here -- the truth is in your hand. You know what soldiers are for. Generals go to war -- but generals seldom die. Pawns are sacrificed so that queens survive --" and the smile is sudden, bearing the snideness of a private joke being enjoyed in the total security that no one else will understand the punchline "-- not that there are any queens involved here..."
She laughs. There is something buried inside that laugh. Another sound, and he realizes it's been there all along, a constant undercurrent to her words, an undertow trying to drag his attention in, he can't quite make it out, he can't move his feet, no part of him will respond to the need, the urge, the screaming in his head to run.
"...but it's the principle of the thing, really," she continues. "She will sacrifice you in a heartbeat if she thinks it'll get her what she wants -- and as far as she's concerned, what she wants is right. That war, the recent one -- how many soldiers thought they were fighting for what was right? Pretty much all of the ones from your part of the homeland, I'm sure. They went into every battle convinced they were doing exactly what was necessary for the right to prevail, that every broken body, lost limb, and surrendered heartbeat was worth it because they knew they were fighting for the right -- and aren't you glad that the right lost?"
Another laugh, both merrier and darker. He can almost make out what's within it. One more could do it, if he can even stand to hear another.
No more. Let me speak, let me move, let me run...
"She thinks she's right. And she's not," comes the voice. (The hair is getting closer to him now, one elegant arm is starting to come up and forward, a hand radiating the mist of deep cold reaching towards his left cheek.) "But you still have time. You don't have to be part of this war -- certainly not on the losing side. You could just leave her right now. Walk away --" another smile, but no laugh "-- all right, so there's a problem there. But leave her and you will walk. I can promise that. She can't. She's so weak here, so laughably weak, even if she's trying to play tricks with timing --"
She stops. All of her stops. The hair halts its movement, the motionless hand held still within air gone to a new kind of frost. She might have even stopped breathing, except that he's not sure she ever was.
And then she shrugs. "Or you could side with the winner," she tells him, and the soldier in his hand becomes lighter as the armor takes on new hues, dense gold shifting to soft silver. "And then you might not even have to fight at all. But if you did... you would win. And you would live. Again, something she can't promise. Something you should be thinking about. Because there's a crucial difference between all those little toy wars you used to lose and what's happening here. When one of your old soldiers went down -- why, you just pushed it over, waited for that particular defeat to wrap up, and then -- look! A miracle! You picked it up again! Every wound healed! Fragile soul back in the metal shell! And it was all ready to die just as many times as necessary until the fun was over!"
She laughs.
Part of him hears what are very nearly her last words. They are "That won't happen here."
But the toolshed is vibrating, pulsing, rippling in waves of fear and he can move now, he turns, just barely spotting the shock in her face before he starts to run and the final thing is a scream of "WAIT!", but he is moving, he can move and
he heard it
the thing inside the voice
was another voice
a young woman
screaming within words
"letmeoutletmeoutletmeoutletmeoutletmeoutletmeout"
the sound of nightmare
-----------------------------------------------------------------
He would have jerked all the way upright. Would have gone from seated to standing and then possibly running if his body allowed it. But he couldn't. Because there was a partially curled-up horse resting the chin of her massive head on his right leg, just below the arrow, and her coat once again seemed to glisten in the just-risen sun. Her purple eyes, which had been squeezed shut in what almost appeared to be deep concentration, briefly pried open. The closer one regarded him. And then she went right back to using him for a makeshift pillow.
She had a very heavy head.
"Damn it, Sunbutt..." Blasphemy once again justified. How long would it take for that leg to get any circulation back? And if her head had shifted during her own sleep, impacted the arrow... "Thanks. Really. On top of having that dream, I'm going to be trying to get on you with a foot made out of wood. Which just might wind up being practice if I've left this arrow in too long..."
...and that was a possible explanation, although it was one which made everything that much worse.
Those equine eyes partially opened, blinked at him, closed again -- then opened all the way. Her head lifted, turned until she was positioned to stare at him directly. The nicker seemed to have a note of worry in it.
"Fever dream?" he wondered aloud, and brought the back of his right hand up to check his forehead. Sweat, not that he'd been expecting anything else after that... but he didn't seem to be running any hotter than usual. A careful prodding of the injured leg failed to locate extra-swollen flesh, and he pulled down his pants just enough to discover a total absence of inflammation lines spreading from the wound (while figuring that wasn't enough exposure to somehow offend the mare). "Okay, maybe not... but Jesus --" prayer this time "-- what was that about?"
She whinnied this time, and whatever element of worry he was (falsely?) perceiving within the sound seemed to be echoed in her face.
"Just a bad dream," he told himself as much as her. "A weird bad dream..." It would fade: he hardly ever remembered a dream for more than an hour or so after waking -- and as such, it was time to start actively dismissing the thing, if only to accelerate the process. "Nothing to worry about." He briefly wondered if horses dreamed, then felt grateful that this one hadn't experienced anything which would have made her jolt out of sleep. Her head right next to the arrow... "And I'm not a pillow, okay? Not while this thing is still in place. And that's the agenda for today. We get up, head back to the river, grab a drink and maybe some breakfast for both of us if we're extra-lucky, then it's either people by noon or I'm going to have a really interesting experience. Ready to go?" Followed by, because it seemed to be the word that worked, "Friend?"
She continued to regard him for a few seconds, time during which he couldn't make his imagination stop seeing concern -- but then she shifted her body, straightened out and assumed the pre-mount position. It took three tries before he could get on, tingling foot interfering all the way. The mare stood up, and the journey north resumed.
He checked the sun again -- a sun which shone down upon them and practically nothing else. There were thick, dark clouds filling the sky in every direction, and he heard the first crack of thunder in the distance only a split-second after seeing the blue-white streak cross the sky. Thunderstorms, likely harsh ones. Back in his former part of the East, an early-morning blow like this would have been unusual, but not completely out of the question. For the Territory -- who knew?
They were under the last remaining clear patch. At some point, that was going to change. The two of them could expect to get very wet, which might help a little with wound-washing and could even make it slightly easier to try brushing her mane, assuming he could spot anything approaching a brush.
Brushing her mane. As if he was taking care of her. Like she was his horse. Another thought which could so easily get him in trouble.
Still, it couldn't hurt for now, other than from the explosive splintering death of any defeated comb.
They traveled, and it seemed as if his luck was holding beyond all reasonable expectations, for the wind was blowing at exactly the right speed and direction to match Sunbutt's pace, keeping them under the clear patch at all times. Rain surrounding them, lightning striking the grasslands (and hopefully not igniting any unused tinder), thunder interrupting far too many words -- but through the grace of an oddly attentive Providence, they remained dry.
The dream did not fade.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Fresh water. Discovered fruit (still her) and nibbled grass (just her). Well-trained toiletries. Moving forward under the June sun, regularly checking on the ascent with a deep dread he had normally reserved for the knowledge that a quota was about to come up short and no amount of desperate labor could push away the inevitable. The ticking clock counting down towards a fresh form of agony, and this one all the worse because he would be doing it to himself --
-- actually, that sort of felt like it would beat the other option...
"Could be worse," he said, and got what was becoming a very familiar sound back, one that seemed to request more words, an equine 'Go on.' "Well, I can think of a lot worse places they could have shot me. Heart, eye... I'm not calling it mercy, Sunbutt. Maybe they were going for the slow death. Let me limp around out here until I fell over on my own. Or maybe it was just payment for services rendered. Thanks for being our hostage, we won't kill you, but you're going to need something to remember us by. The funny thing is that they thought any cavalry would have come to rescue me in the first place..." The fatalistic grin materialized in acknowledgment of the dark humor within the next sentence. "It's better odds that every stagecoach from that point on would have made sure to carry just the right extra temporary passenger. It's the Toll Of The West: throw out the door and go!" Which triggered an equally tombstone-filled laugh. "Probably not a paying position, mind, but if you can limp back to the depot on your own, I'm sure they'll take you on for a second run. I could apply for that if I wanted to. I'm a man with job experience. Everyone else has to line up behind me. And for all my knowledge of what the job takes, my time spent mastering it, I'd need extra compensation. So -- two arrows?"
No amount of injury would allow him to convince himself that the noise she made was any form of snicker. Basic equine not-funny, maybe...
"You need a sense of humor," he told her: she tossed her head and then rotated her ears forward, as if ignoring him. "Trust me, I've got worse than this waiting to come out." Another check of the sun, which was still visible through their roaming safety zone. "Getting close to noon now..." Back to surveying the landscape.
River. Grass.
Road.
The speed of his body's turn nearly sent him off her back, but she shifted at him again and once he was stabilized, they both stared at the path.
It wasn't much of a road, really. Practically none of them were out here: cobblestones were far too much to expect, the full smoothing-down of dirt from thousands of passages was a few thousand travelers short, and removal of any moderate trouble spot rocks was generally left behind for the next person to worry about. But it was a road. Wide enough for a stagecoach and then some, with furrows indicating where one had gone through. And that wasn't all: there were footprints in the dirt. Shoes. He had no Western lore-based way of telling exactly how old they were, but it had stormed in this area a little while before they'd reached it and the fact that the markings had been imprinted into fresh mud was a good sign.
"Well, that's it," he grinned, and the surge of joy was sincere. "If someone's walking down the side of this, then either they're just as lost as we are or there's something within walking distance. We officially have a chance, Sunbutt." Possibly a chance to be accused of horse thievery, but that still left her okay and potentially on the way back to her home. "Can I talk you into following the road? It's more or less going north, so that's on your way, right?"
She looked at it -- then stepped into the mud and began squelching along, following the oddly-pointed toe of the footprints.
They were getting close to people. He had to be just about out of miracles, had probably already used up a lifetime's worth, but now everything ahead was starting to fall under semi-reasonable expectations. A homestead, possibly several. Some chance for a town. Alcohol to use as disinfectant. Possibly a barber, maybe even a doctor. Bath: a hot one. Help...
...and then he heard the singing.
It wasn't in English. There was a strange lilt to the foreign words, although it was hard to make out when the sounds were being produced by the single most off-key voice he'd heard in his life. But it was joyous, dedicated and, rather unfortunately, extremely loud. It also carried, and traveled with them at the same pace as their clear patch. Sunbutt's ears were pressed tight against her skull in what seemed to be a desperate attempt to substitute for sound-blocking hands -- not that they would have been much of an improvement, because both of his had instinctively come up and they were doing nothing.
But it was still one of the best sounds to ever reach his ears.
"We're okay," he whispered, paying no real attention to the 'we'. "We're actually going to be okay..."
The mare accelerated, moving towards the noise, went around two curves and one outright bend necessitated by a huge sight-blocking boulder which no one had cared to move --
-- and there she was.
Bright red curls sticking out in all directions from underneath a ridiculously fancy hat, one which had bows, ribbons, tiers, layers, and possibly natural-growing fruit. Hands gripped onto her dark green skirt, holding it just clear of the mud splashes and giving him a look at equally overdone boots. Very slightly chubby: even from behind, with no real view of her face, she gave off the impression of someone who had just physically crossed into full adulthood while forgetting to leave the last few pounds of puppy fat at the border. And she was completely unaware of his presence, totally locked within her song as she half-strode, half-skipped down the road.
For sheer welcomeness of presence, she was the single most beautiful woman he hadn't quite entirely seen.
"Miss?" No notice, not of his voice or the impacts of hootsteps into the mud as Sunbutt grew closer. It was quite possible that she couldn't hear him over her song, or that her ears had learned to shut down as a self-defense mechanism. "Pardon?" And still no attention was paid, with the change to what he was now starting to spot as a chorus pure coincidence.
Sunbutt softly snorted, then picked up her pace just enough to get directly behind the woman, who still hadn't registered any sonic sign of their presence.
On the other hand, it was a lot harder to ignore a horse muzzle nudging against the back.
The woman -- no, girl, or standing on that absolute border, he could see the youth in her pretty round-cheeked face now -- turned. Large blue eyes stared at the giant mare. Slowly moved up to the rider.
He tried out his best disarming smile. "I'm sorry to bother you, but as you can see, I'm a little hurt here, and I was wondering if you knew where I could find --"
She gasped, a huge intake of breath which threatened to rupture any inadequate corset from within.
And then he was looking at her back again as she sprinted down the road, skirts held higher than ever, enough to let him get the most momentary glimpse of leg before she vanished around the next bend.
His right hand slowly came up, covered his eyes with his thumb under the brim of the fashionable hat.
"I," he muttered, "make a lousy first impression."
He sighed. All right. Foreign words in the song. Possibly an immigrant who didn't speak a single word of English, and -- well, if she was from some part of Europe, it was possible that he was the very first --
-- no, none of that was making him feel any better about the experience, but the attempt at logic-based soothing had been worth a shot.
Sunbutt snorted, slowly shook her head, glanced back at him.
"Well," he told the mare, "best-case, she's got to be running to something, right? So --" presuming she wasn't rallying any potential townspeople for another kind of greeting, which felt like a really dismal presumption just then "-- we might as well follow."
Another one of those almost-nods, and she went back to her trot, following what were now considerably deeper footprints. Minutes passed. The road twisted here and there, slanted up for a while as the air struggled to find ways by which it could become even thinner and succeeded admirably. Then they crested the rise --
-- he shouted. He couldn't help it, and multiple heads in the little town below turned towards the sound.
It wasn't much of a town. It barely qualified for street. Virtually every building in the valley could be described with a single word, and that term was 'incomplete'. All the lumber was fresh, lacking a single sign of true weathering, and the majority of the buildings didn't have enough of the stuff yet. Typically, the first floor would be more or less finished, at least towards the front: some sort-of-fully enclosed rooms, curtains hung where glass would eventually wind up. Doors were pretty much in place. Porches, somewhat less so. Go higher and find open sides, total lacks of second ceilings, poorly-propped false fronts showing where a third level would never go. Several men were hammering and sawing in the wet exposed areas, trying to get some extra work in before the storm returned, and many of them had turned upon hearing the shout.
There was a long mud-shielding-in-theory run of planks in front of those structures-in-progress which currently only allowed for interesting games of hopscotch, assuming any players could leap ten-foot gaps. Most of the people in the barely-street were ignoring it, choosing to take on the mud instead. Women lifted skirts, men splashed about (with the courteous trying to avoid the women while doing so). A number of them were staring at him as well, and they were too far away to have any chance at reading their expressions. But there was no sign of the girl, either visually or in a group stance which would say they'd been expecting him.
No wind-blown string of hanging bloody rags in front of any building, so there might not be any barber -- at least, not one who was currently enjoying a productive day of work. But a large side-hanging sign reading SALOON told him getting alcohol wouldn't be a problem, and there were people...
Sunbutt glanced back at him and for once, it was an equine expression he felt he knew. To him, it was the first time she'd shown any true horse skittishness. She was okay with him now. Whoever had trained her also was in her good graces. But there were a lot of strangers down there, and the mare took a breath deep enough to shift his legs before starting her trot into the valley.
He was grinning. He couldn't help that either. He'd made it. Sacrificed, abandoned, left to die, needing a full string of miracles -- but miracles had been granted. And there was even a local coming up the slope towards him, a burly man with the clean-shaven appearance of someone who took far too much time with a razor every day and sacrificed still more hours to the proper sharpening of the abused tool, heading up with forceful steps to find out what was going on because certainly that kind of pace was just hurrying him along to find out what was the matter with this stranger and provide help quickly, it certainly wasn't the march of an angry man who had seen something hated and was out to stop it before the invasion could fully reach the town...
But he didn't have a fever. He was only reasonably low on blood. And there were limits to what he could talk himself into believing.
Sunbutt pulled up, her nose about a yard away from the man whose clothes were somehow too clean. The tiny dark eyes ignored her. Their owner was fully focused on her rider.
Furious words spoken in an accent he had so hoped to leave behind: "What are you doing here, boy?"
Go West. Find your fortune. Seek a life in the unexplored, the unsettled, the new. Carve out a fresh path where no tracks have been laid and make them lead where you most want to go.
Or... go West, because you can't stand what's happening in the East and you want to see if you can make yourself comfortable somewhere else. Go West and carve out a new riverbed to keep the hate flowing, because there are dams on your property and you can't knock them down with so many fresh eyes watching.
Go West because the world has changed. And you haven't.
Why did I ever think I'd be the only one who would come here?
His mother had always told him that he was a little too attached to the sound of his own voice...
...but now he was allowed to speak. And if everything ahead was just like this... if no help was available at all... why, then there was nothing left to do but make sure his death would be especially interesting.
He looked around, making a show of it. Checked part of the path behind him, the bits of road off to the sides (but never taking his eyes completely off the unwelcome piece of home). Visibly found nothing, then turned back and shrugged. "Sorry," he lied, "but... who are you talking to?"
The little eyes widened, at least as far as they could, and the clean-shaven face made it easy to see the skin flushing with blood. "...what..." Soft fury, the weight of disbelief holding down volume. "...what did you say...?"
"'Boy'," he told the other man, noticing that none of the other townspeople were approaching. "I'm twenty-three. So either they grow up slow out here or you were speaking to someone else. Is it that first one? You know, I heard that Arizona Territory was supposed to be where you went if you had consumption -- something about the air making it easier to live a while longer. Sounded kind of special to me. But if Idaho is where you can head if you want to age slower and still be thought of as a boy at twenty-three... why, this place should be more packed than New York City. News still spreading?"
The man blinked. His face took on a familiar expression, one which couldn't be missed from the lofty position on Sunbutt's back: that of someone who was desperately waiting for the world to correct itself and if that didn't happen, why, then someone was just going to have to show that world how it was supposed to act.
"I want you," the man hissed, "to look behind me. What do you see?" And without waiting for an answer. "I'll tell you what you're seeing: nothing that looks like you, boy. Just pure, clean, white faces, all free of original sin. There's only one of you here -- maybe just one in the whole Territory. You're alone. Singular. A rarity." His face twisted into an amused snarl as he repeated the word, deliberately drawing it out. "Rahr-it-tee. You are a stain in a sea of clean skin and if I scrub you out right now, not a single human being here will do anything but thank me --"
He should have died when the Indians took him. Fallen to the grass without ever having stumbled across Sunbutt. There was still a chance he was on the way to death from raging infection. And as for the times before that... well, put it all together and it could feel awfully freeing, knowing that something unstoppable was coming and the best thing you could do was enjoy the last bits...
So he cut the man off.
"-- got a gun?"
Another blink. The man's left hand snaked towards his jacket. "Maybe I do."
He nodded. "Okay. So here's the next question. Can you reach it before the biggest horse in the world kicks you ass-over-teakettle down the road so all those clean white faces can watch you roll by like a greased-up baseball no one fielded in time?"
Somewhere towards the back of his mind, a solitary thought noted that he'd just used the word 'ass' in front of a white man and made a tiny checkmark on an extremely dusty list.
It was a bluff: it couldn't have been anything else. He didn't know the command word which would make Sunbutt attack a human, and there was a good chance that word didn't even exist. It was the last thing he was ever going to say before the man shot him, bold last words answered by an extremely final rebuttal. No treatment in a town which was probably filled with people just like this one, where every cheer at the fatal shot would have that familiar accent attached, a horrible choice for a last thing to ever hear. And there was no way he could have gotten the mare turned around to race out of the valley before a gun went off, little chance to avoid a bullet at this kind of close range (although fortunately too close for any chance of bad aim wounding the horse). All in all, he was just trying to make things interesting.
Except that -- Sunbutt then made things even more interesting.
She snorted, and the man's greasy black slicked-down hair was disturbed by the sheer force of the gust. Her left foreleg stomped against the ground at the exact moment a burst of thunder came from the clouds behind them. Her ears shifted, the tension in her muscles changed, and she gave off every sign of not being a particularly happy horse, one who not only knew exactly what she wasn't happy with, but perceived a ready and simple means of permanently fixing the problem.
The man took a step back. Realized that step had been witnessed, by both those below and the two in front of him, those which the slope put above him. And this expression was also familiar: 'I was always going to hate you. I was always going to do everything I could to hurt you. But now you've gone and given me an extra excuse...'
That face put fear into his heart. But not for himself: there was very little he could have done for his own protection and this was a familiar kind of death, something with no unknown quantity to dread. He was afraid for what could happen to Sunbutt after it happened to him. His mouth was risking more than one life again, something he'd forgotten until it was far too late.
The man recovered, at least physically. Stared up at him, and the hate grew steadily stronger with every extra degree of angle.
"You can call me Sheriff," the man said. "Everyone here does. Keep that in mind." Two steps backwards, rotated, paced down the trail, arms swaying well away from his body. There were no initial motions which indicated reaching in to draw a gun, and none emerged. He simply worked his way through the crowd and went into one of the more complete buildings on the left, leaving a trail of mud across one of the most finished sections of boardwalk.
Sheriff. Of course. Too many miracles, and now you've got to start balancing things out in the other direction.
He wondered how far he could get before the mob was officially rounded up. If Sunbutt was willing to cooperate, that figure was probably centered on 'pretty damn' with a chance for 'are you kidding?' and a head start no one could match. But if every other place he could reach in the Territory was exactly like this...
And now there were two more people coming up the slope.
One was the girl, the edges of her skirt splattered in mud, that almost-impossible hat slightly askew. She was rapidly jabbering to her companion, who was a reasonably tall, thin man balding somewhat from the front, brown hair receding in a smooth wave which was slightly balanced by an extra degree of fall to the back, one which said the already-quashed hopes of reaching a barber would have had none to locate anyway. The man strode easily, even given the close-fitting suit which seemed as if it should have virtually locked his knees on the uphill, keeping the pace while calmly answering the girl in that same strange lilting language as she half-skipped, half-bounced at his side.
"Well," the thin man dryly called ahead, "you're the only one around here who fits her description: male, Negro, riding the biggest horse ever. A man with an arrow shaft sticking out of his leg, one which I'm presuming is still attached to the actual arrowhead -- and if so, that puts you firmly in my jurisdiction. Follow me down, if you're willing to chance it after Sheriff's well-carried greeting, and I'll see what I can do about taking it out before the leg falls off on its own."
It could have been a trick, so very easily: a lure to get him out of sight before anything happened. But a town which had someone willing to shoot him in the open arguably had little need for that deception, the girl was wearing a relieved smile of such innocence that he simply couldn't see it as being faked --
-- and there was a chance he wasn't entirely out of miracles yet. A tiny one, admittedly, but wasn't that still worth chasing?
Without thinking about it (at least not then), with no immediate conscious notice that he'd done so until the word had escaped, "Sunbutt?"
The mare nickered and moved forward, which substituted for advice.
And in that moment, he had no choice but to go with her.