A God of Many Tears (Hawker's Drift Book 4) Read online

  Hawker’s Drift

  Book Four

  A God of Many Tears

  Andy Monk

  Copyright © 2017 Andy Monk

  All rights reserved.

  The Rancher

  Gramps hadn’t wanted to get up, which was unusual for him. He’d never been a one for lazing about when there was work to be done, and, on a small homestead, that was one thing there was never a shortage of.

  Not that she’d refer to it as a homestead in front of Gramps. She knew better, unless she was in the mood to be shouted at anyway. It was a ranch. They were ranchers. Not farmers. Gramps had always been very particular about that. And a touch sharp with anyone who got it wrong. Dorry had never much cared one way or the other. Although she wasn’t entirely sure how many cattle you required to technically qualify as a ranch, she suspected it might be more than the ten or so currently carrying the Coll brand.

  She’d made porridge and there was fresh bread in the oven, which was just about the best smell in the world to start your day with, but she’d still had to call Gramps three times before he’d roused himself. The third time she’d hesitated outside his room and wondered if he might be dead.

  From the way he’d cussed after she’d finally rapped her knuckle on the door, she’d decided he probably wasn’t.

  “You feeling ok?” She asked once he’d eventually shuffled into the kitchen.

  “Fiddlin’ fine,” he wheezed, between phlegmy coughs.

  He didn’t look fiddlin’ fine to Dorry. He looked like shit, truth be told.

  The last couple of winters had taken a lot out of him and the summer didn’t seem to be putting much of it back. He’d dropped weight and gained a stoop. He looked old. Really old.

  The thought kept creeping into her mind that she might soon be living out here on her own with only a handful of cows and steers, plus a single old bull who was even more bad-tempered than Gramps, for company.

  Then she might have to find herself a husband.

  “How come you ain’t married yet, girl?” was one of Gramps’ regular demands. The others usually revolved around his dinner, though those had become less frequent recently.

  “Cos I’m married to you,” she’d usually shoot back, though only when they were alone in case people got the wrong idea.

  “Pretty girl like you stuck out here with an old goat like me… ain’t fitting, ain’t proper…”

  That was usually about the time she’d find an excuse to be elsewhere. She didn’t think she was pretty and she was damned sure she didn’t want a husband. Men were fools, Gramps included, but he was blood, so that was that.

  This morning, however, Gramps didn’t have much to say about her lack of a husband or anything else. He just huddled over his coffee ignoring the porridge in front of him.

  He was fading away. Shrivelling and diminishing like a flower in the frost. She stared at him in silence before taking her bowl and going outside. Sometimes it broke her heart too much to even look at him now.

  He’d always been old. Of course, not actually always, she just couldn’t imagine him being anything else. His craggy face and white hair were one of her earliest and clearest memories. But he’d always been strong with it, tall and straight and carrying muscle few men thirty years his junior could better. Now the muscle was gone, the strong was a memory and even the tall was shrinking as if all the troubles he’d carried on his shoulders through his long life had finally become too much to bear.

  She’d never known her mother. Catherine Coll had died bringing her into the world and Dorry had come close to joining her in the family plot to the south of the ranch. Gramps had used to talk about her all the time, painting a picture so vivid she could almost see her mother sitting with them. Now, he would just say something like “She was real beautiful…” and Dorry thought maybe his eyes had got too distant and cloudy to see his memory of her clearly anymore.

  Her father had slowly drunk himself to death over the following years, she remembered him, but only vaguely. A quietly morose man who’d only ever looked at her with resentment in his eyes. It had been Gramps who’d raised her. Who’d cared for her, and fed her and picked her up when she’d fallen. Who’d ruffled her tawny hair, wiped away her tears and tickled her till she’d screamed. He’d done all he could to be both her parents and she loved the grumpy old fool beyond words.

  The morning was bright, though the east was smeared with hazy cloud. She stood on the stoop spooning her porridge. She’d nearly finished the bowl before it dawned on her it wasn’t cloud greying the eastern sky at all, but columns of smoke.

  Odd.

  “Gramps!”

  She licked her spoon clean while she waited for him. She thought she’d have to call a couple of times, but he proved easier to get out of the kitchen than his bed.

  “Yeah?” he brought his coffee with him while trying to pat his thin silver hair down into some kind of order.

  “Something’s burning?” She waved her spoon towards the east.

  The sun was only an hour or so up the sky and still low enough to make them squint despite the haze of thin grey smoke. She could trace it down through several dissipating columns to the ground. The most clearly defined and darkest seemed to be coming from the direction of the Loughery’s place.

  The youngest Loughery boy, Matthew, had, at one time, gotten some fool notion about courting her into his thick head. It had been a notion Dorry Coll had quickly dissuaded him of. Still, despite that, and the fact they raised sheep, the Lougherys were decent enough neighbours all told.

  Gramps peered at the smoke. His eyes weren’t too good anymore, but what he could see was enough to make him cuss, spit and straighten his back.

  “Burning back the grass?”

  Gramps shook his head, “The Lougherys don’t burn back their grass. Not in my seventy-seven years anyhow, and Joel Loughery’s never been one for doing a different thing even if there was a good reason for it. Looks more like buildings afire to me…”

  She raised her hand, spoon and all, to shield her eyes.

  “But… there are half a dozen of em... all over the place...?”

  “Yep…” Gramps sighed, “…better go get our rifles…”

  Dorry dropped her spoon into the bowl and stared at him.

  “…we got some troubles coming…”

  *

  The trouble turned up an hour or so later.

  “How many you make?” Gramps was peering out of one of the small upstairs windows.

  “Ten,” she replied.

  “Nice round number,” Gramps nodded, worrying at his bottom lip with what was left of his teeth.

  “That makes a difference?”

  “Easier to keep count of them.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, my numbers have never been great. Would be a royal pain in the ass to have to take my shoes and socks off to keep track of the buggers,” he looked across the room at her and then winked.

  She didn’t see much to smile at, but forced one onto her face all the same.

  “You recognise any of em?”

  She peered through the slit in the storm shutters again, rifle cradled against her chest. The riders were still a way off, cutting across the grass from the east. All the ranch’s outbuildings were on the western side of the house, so they had an unobstructed line of sight. The men were riding abreast in a ragged line, approaching the ranch in no obvious hurry.

  “No…”

  “Sure they’re not townies?”

  She shook her head, the only riders likely to come in such numbers were deputies from Hawker’s Drift patrolling the grass for trouble-makers, but they always wore long c
anvas coats even on the hottest of days. These men wore an assortment of clothes, none of which were long canvas coats, though, even at this distance, they had the look of clothes that had seen a lot of miles.

  Gramps sighed and shook his head, “Hoped I’d seen the last of this shit.”

  “Last of what?”

  “Raiders… used to happen from time to time when I was young, that’s why this place has thick doors, small windows and these shutters, but ever since the Mayor took over in Hawker’s Drift they’ve stayed away from here.”

  There was something threatening in the riders’ slow steady approach. And something inexorable. A dark tide washing towards their home; a home that had been spared the chaos engulfing the rest of the world for so long.

  “Maybe they’re drifting cattlemen looking for work?”

  Gramps looked like he wanted to spit, but he’d always been particular about not doing that in the bedrooms.

  “Go check out the back.”

  “You think there might be more of them?”

  “Dunno… but best they don’t figure there’s only two of us in here. If it comes to shooting, keep moving from window to window, room to room. I’ll stay here. You run faster than me these days.”

  She clutched her rifle tighter, “It won’t come to shooting, will it?”

  “Not if they’ve got any sense. Once they know we’re prepared for em, they’ll move on. These assholes ain’t usually interested in folk who can shoot back.”

  Dorry nodded and resisted the urge to look at the column of smoke rising from the Loughery land again. Or think about the fact the Loughery’s had four strapping sons and a couple of hands to defend their farm…

  *

  She checked the upstairs windows in turn. Each storm shutter had a couple of slits in them. She’d never thought about why. During her life they’d only ever been used when the weather got bad enough. They were heavy and awkward to pull into place, but Gramps had always insisted they keep the hinges well oiled for a reason.

  There were six rooms upstairs, Gramps and hers were at the back looking west, two were kept, somewhat optimistically, for guests and two were empty save for assorted family junk collected over the years. The Coll family had once been much bigger, but, like many, it had shrunk considerably over the generations.

  Nothing seemed to be moving amongst the ranch’s outbuildings that shouldn’t have been, nor in the fields beyond. Their little herd of cattle were specks out on the grass, there was nothing else to see.

  There were no smoke columns to the west of the house. Whoever was doing the burning was coming from the east and they didn’t seem to have gone beyond Coll Ranch. Not yet anyway.

  She waited at each window to make sure she hadn’t missed anyone getting sneaky. Once she was sure there were no more riders she hurried back to Gramps. The way he was standing rigidly by the window, eyes pressed to the storm shutter’s slit, suggested the riders hadn’t ambled peaceably by.

  There were three small windows in the room, two looking east, the other south, but when she moved towards the second one Gramps waved her away.

  “Go next door,” he said, not looking away from the window.

  She wanted to stay with him, but he was right, if it came to shooting it would be best to be firing from different places.

  Spare rifles and shells were laid out on the bed and she scooped up one and a couple of boxes.

  “We gonna shoot first?” She asked from the doorway.

  “Don’t wanna kill anyone we don’t have to…”

  Dorry nodded and hurried into the next room. For the second time that morning she wondered if she’d ever see Gramps alive again.

  *

  They said they were looking to buy supplies.

  She might have been reassured if they hadn’t looked like the kind of men who’d steal teeth from a corpse.

  They were strung out in a line in front of the house. As unappealing a bunch of lowlifes as one could have the misfortune to meet; each and every one of them was butt-ugly and armed with about as much shooting iron as a man on a horse could carry. Otherwise, the only point of note about em was that they all wore a black sash across their chests.

  One of the men had left the others to ride towards the house. She didn’t know if that meant he was the leader or the most expendable. Either way, he was probably the ugliest. He’d said his name was Henderson, which seemed an unremarkable name for a remarkably hideous looking man.

  “We got plenty of gold,” Henderson insisted, slapping his thigh as if this in some way indicated he wasn’t lying through his rotting, blackened teeth.

  “We ain’t got nothing to sell!” Gramps shouted back.

  Henderson gave a fulsome smile, “I find that hard to believe. Big house like this, plenty of land, livestock I bet. We don’t need much and we’ll pay a fair price. Why don’t you come outside and do some haggling?”

  There was an old fairy story about a monster trying to lure an old woman out of her house with its golden tongue. She couldn’t quite remember if the story had ended with the monster getting its head chopped off or the granny getting eaten.

  “We ain’t got nothing to sell!” Gramps repeated.

  Henderson gave a weary sigh, hawked up a gob of phlegm and twisted in his saddle to spit it out,

  “You’re a hard man to negotiate with old timer.”

  “Ain’t nothing to negotiate! And I ain’t no fucking old timer neither!”

  Henderson looked over his shoulder and shrugged at his companions.

  When he turned back, he wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “You alone in that big house, old man?”

  Gramps didn’t answer.

  “Guess we’ll be seeing you…” he touched his hat and wheeled his mount around. The other men followed suit and they started riding back the way they’d come.

  She let out a shuddering sigh. Her knuckles had gone white from gripping the rifle so hard. She lowered it and hurried back into the next room.

  Gramps was still peering out of the window.

  “They’re going… maybe they weren’t raiders after all?”

  He gave a snort, “They ain’t going nowhere girl… they just ain’t dumb enough to sit obligingly in front of us so we can shoot em.”

  Dorry’s heart sank. As much as she hated to admit it, Gramps was usually right when it came to the knowing of what people were about. That was why she didn’t play cards with him anymore.

  *

  It didn’t take long for Gramps to be proven right.

  The men rode far enough away to be out of rifle range, dismounted and tied their horses to a water pump out in the untended grass to the east of the house.

  “Why don’t they just go away?” She sounded like a petulant child and cringed at herself.

  “Some men like getting it easy.”

  “But it won’t be easy! We’re ready for em, so why not move on? We ain’t got nothing worth dying for!”

  Gramps gave her one of his looks that suggested he thought she still had a lot to learn about the world.

  The men were gathered in a knot, talking animatedly among themselves. It seemed unlikely they were discussing what a fine water pump the Colls had.

  “What do we do when they come back?”

  “We shoot first…” Gramps shrugged “…gave em a chance to get off our land peaceably. So, it’s on them if they choose to come back.”

  It didn’t take them long to come up with a plan.

  Five men started circling around the house to the south, four went north and one stayed with the horses.

  “No cover to the front of the house,” Gramps explained, “they’re gonna come around the back, through the barns and the yard.”

  “Why the hurry?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, why now? Wouldn’t they be better at night when we can’t see em coming a mile off?”

  “Maybe worried about help coming from town?”

  “Then why bother at all? We
’re just a little nothing ranch. What have we got worth dying over?”

  Gramps looked like he wanted to take exception to her description of his beloved ranch, but settled for sucking distractedly at his teeth and shrugging, “Dunno…”

  She took the south-facing windows to follow the larger group, while Gramps shuffled into one of the rooms with north facing ones.

  “What’d ya see?” Gramps shouted.

  “They’re splitting up and circling us! Coming at us individually from all directions. Yours?”

  “Same…” Gramps voice came back after a pause, “…I think…”

  “How bad are your eyes?”

  “Ain’t what they were when I were a boy…” he shouted back, before admitting in a quieter voice, “…ain’t what they were a year ago neither.”

  “Fuck…”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with my damned hearing mind... don’t you worry Dorry Coll, I’ll just shoot at anything I see moving. Most likely won’t be a cow…”

  *

  Gramps fired first. She’d been tracking one of hers while trying to keep an eye on the progress of the others as best she could. She’d picked her mark, Henderson, solely based on him being fatter than the others. She didn’t have anything against fat folk generally, she just hoped he’d be easier to hit, what with being a bigger target an all.

  He’d been sneaking around the back of the south barn, which was in a sorry state on account of it being not used in decades.

  If he’d come on a little further she was sure she could have hit him. She’d never shot anything in her life besides bottles off a fence and a few varmints, other than an old horse called Mary who’d got careless around a rabbit hole. She’d cried after killing the horse, a sad-eyed old mare, though only when she was out of Gramps’ sight as she didn’t want him thinking she was just a soft-headed girl.

  She didn’t think she’d cry if she killed the fat man sneaking past the south barn, and it wasn’t because he was ugly as sin and had never carried her around on his back when she’d been little. It was because he was looking to steal off them. And maybe worse.

  Trouble had never called on Coll Ranch during her life, but that hadn’t stopped Gramps drumming it into her that the world was full of bad men who wanted to take what was yours and the only people you could ever really trust were your own blood.