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

“See they’re fed and watered,” Miller told Zeke, “then bind em up for the night. They’ll be going to the Host tomorrow, with Sargent Cave.”

  Cave, the other man Sye hadn’t seen before, was expressionless, but his narrow eyes flitted from one woman to the next as the wind tugged at his wispy fair hair.

  “What about tonight, sir?” Trench ventured, “some of the boys have been wondering…”

  “Wondering?”

  “The women, sir?”

  “They’re for the Host, Trench, the Old Man’s orders, we need more Brides.”

  “Pickin’s have been slim out here, some of the boys ain’t come back, guess maybe tomorrow a few more won’t…”

  A look that might have been contempt flickered over Miller’s face, but by the time he’d turned to Horowitz it was gone.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Always helps with morale to have some Brides around, and we can send a couple back with the next batch…”

  “Very well,” Miller nodded and sighed, “take two, but not her…” he pointed at Sally, “…or her,” and Laura. “Keep plenty of sentries posted and we’ll move at first light, this is as close as we’ll get to Hawker’s Drift for now, so we’ll skirt around the town and see what else there is to be cleansed.”

  With that he turned on his heels and headed back to the camp, Horowitz a pace behind.

  “Asshole,” Trench spat as soon as the men were out of earshot. Keaton sniggered, though when Cave and Zeke both shot him looks he bit down on it.

  It was Trench’s turn to look over the prisoners, he was grinning wide enough to reveal his blackened teeth again. Despite himself Sye couldn’t drag his eyes away from Trench’s teeth, black and stinking with rot. In the golden light of the early evening there was something both fascinating and dreadfully familiar about those black teeth.

  What… have you done to me?

  The same words had been echoing around his head, but like his fascination with Trench’s teeth, nothing solid would form around them.

  “Fuck you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  Trench spat at his feet then crouched down in front of him, “I don’t fuckin’ like you boy. Had my way your skin be in my saddlebag now.”

  The man had looked mean enough without a broken his nose; with two black eyes and dried blood still caked around his nostrils and flecking his stubble he looked downright evil.

  “Got anything to say for yourself?”

  He shook his head.

  “You know what gonna happen when you get back to the Host?”

  He shook his head a second time.

  “You be given a chance to join the Scourge farm boy, but we don’t take just no one. You gotta fight in the cage, man to man with another recruit. The man that walks out gets a black sash and a chance to build the New Nation, the man that don’t, he be crow meat… I reckon you too soft. Too weak. You’re going in the ground and before you do I’m gonna piss on your dead face…”

  He wondered if it had been Trench who’d gunned down his Ma.

  “You better hope that’s the case…” he whispered, his eyes still fixed on Trench’s black teeth.

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because if I get out alive, I’ll be coming for you with a hammer too…”

  “Piece of shit!”

  Trench managed to get one good kick in before Zeke pulled him off.

  Cave shook his head before grabbing two of the women and hauling them to their feet, one screamed and tried to shrug him off, the other looked too dazed to even know her own name.

  “Where are you taking them?” Sally demanded.

  Cave shoved the docile girl at Trench, who caught her and promptly forgot all about Sye. Cave pushed the other one towards the main camp as he shouted back.

  “Gonna introduce them to their new lives…”

  He listened to the girls pleading fade into the distance as Cave and Trench took them over to the main camp.

  Later he spent hours listening to their screams.

  *

  Sally wanted to make a run for it during the night.

  Once they’d been given some cold beans and water their feet were tied and another couple of guards relieved Zeke and Keaton. The young man had raced away from Zeke in the direction of the laughter and screams coming from the main camp.

  They were lying face to face next to each other, hands trussed behind their backs. One of the other young women, Nicole, was close enough to hear their whispers and watched with wide glistening eyes, but didn’t say anything. The younger girl, Laura, was a little further away with Cailyn McKenna. He’d asked her to dance at a cookout last summer. Laughing couples had whirled around under the stars as the Coby brothers had thrashed their fiddles. She hadn’t been much taken with the idea, as he recalled.

  “No… there’s too many of them.”

  “I don’t want to sit around and wait for my turn,” she hissed back at him, jerking her head back towards the main camp. It was full dark now and the screams were becoming less frequent.

  “They’re sending us somewhere tomorrow, they’ll be fewer guards. We’ll have a better chance.”

  Sally didn’t look impressed with his logic and carried on worrying her bindings.

  Some people just needed to be doing something, however futile. There were fifty armed men with horses, even if they could get themselves untied and away from the two guards pacing in listless circles around them, they wouldn’t get far, even at night. Tomorrow they would go to the Host, whatever that was, and then there would only be Cave and a few others. If they got lucky they could get away, if they got real lucky maybe they could overpower them. Didn’t seem likely he and four abused girls would be able to overpower anyone, but he thought it was high time some luck got sent his way.

  “Damn it…” Sally finally hissed, throwing her head back and blinking at the stars, “…I can’t get anywhere with these ropes.”

  She was panting, like a small trapped animal caught in a snare.

  “Sally Lumiere…” he whispered, “…I remember you now.”

  “It was nothing personal.”

  His Ma, as she had with most of the single women in the region, had tried to get Sye and Sally “introduced” but the word had come back Sally thought him too young for her even though they were almost the same age. He’d put it down as yet another woman who thought he was too poor a catch to bother with and had hurriedly moved on to the next disappointment.

  “Hardly matters now.”

  “No… nothing much matters anymore...”

  They lay in silence for a long time, other than the occasional rustle of grass as one or other of them attempted to find a less uncomfortable position there wasn’t much to hear as the main camp settled down for the night. He watched the two guards whenever they passed into his line of sight, they looked bored and disinterested. Now and again they would talk in low voices, one or other of them would chuckle or snort.

  He thought about ways he could kill them, like he’d killed Hector, save maybe slower. It was better than thinking about his Ma dead on the ground or the emptiness yawning inside him.

  “I heard you were getting married?”

  He looked up with a start. Sally had been quiet and still for so long he’d thought she must have managed to drift off to sleep.

  “Married? Me?” He would have laughed, but he wasn’t sure that was something he knew how to do anymore.

  Sally lifted her head to stare at him, her long blonde hair hung about her face and he could only make out the two glistening points of her eyes in the starlight.

  “The new girl from the saloon. The singer?”

  It turned out he could still laugh after all.

  “Cece Jones? I’ve never even spoken to her!”

  Her head slumped back down, “Yeah, didn’t think it sounded particularly likely...”

  *

  They were roused at dawn.

  Their hands were untied and they were given water and so
me biscuits that tasted of absolutely nothing. Cave and three other men came and watched them as they were allowed five minutes to hobble around and try and get the circulation back into their limbs.

  He looked towards the main camp for the two girls who’d been taken over the night before, but he couldn’t see any sign of them amongst the men and horses being readied for whatever bloody business the Scourge had planned for the day.

  In the early morning light, his fellow prisoners looked like apparitions as they shuffled in a circle; pale as ghosts in their torn and bloodied dresses, with wild hair and vacant red eyes.

  Cailyn had thrown an arm around Laura’s shoulders, but neither girl said anything. He smiled thinly at them, but they both looked right through him and limped past.

  Maybe he was the ghost.

  *

  They walked all day.

  He’d expected they’d be put on horses, but either there were none to spare, they didn’t think they merited one or walking for hours in the savage heat with a rope around your neck was part of the Scourge’s recruitment process.

  Fire makes you stronger.

  He kept hearing the phrase over and over. Sometimes a thrown away line, sometimes with burning fervour, sometimes with a roll of the eyes. He tried thinking about what it meant, but after a few hours he could only concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and watching his guards.

  And thinking about how he was going to kill them.

  They were heading east. Towards the Host. Nobody had told him them what the Host was, but he guessed it involved more of these murdering bastards.

  In fact, they’d told them nothing. They were beneath the notice of the guards, save for when they occasionally stopped to give them a little water.

  There were four of them, the ropes each of the prisoners had around their necks was tied off on one or other of the guard’s saddles, save for the sergeant who rode a little in front of the others.

  Cave, Shelton, Magaine, Gabb.

  He knew their names. He knew how they carried themselves. Knew what weapons they had. Knew their voices and mannerisms. And he knew each of them had a little piece of themselves missing. Maybe they’d been born without any humanity in them, maybe they’d lost it on their way through life, maybe the Scourge had cut it out of them. But none of them had any pity or compassion or decency in them.

  Just a rancid empty pit where their souls should have been.

  His rope was tied to Shelton’s saddle while his hands were bound in front of him. The noose wasn’t tight enough to choke him, but it rubbed and chafed with every stride. Not a lot, but over the hours more than enough to scrape his skin raw. By the end of the first day his neck was stinging with the salt from his sweat.

  He focussed on Shelton’s back and the damp patches spreading across his shirt as the day wore on. Every now and then his new best friend would swivel around in his saddle to look at him. He was constantly chewing on tobacco, his heavy square jaw worrying and moving and now and occasionally spitting black gobs into the grass.

  Every time Shelton looked around he dropped his eyes, but as soon as his back was turned again he went straight back to staring, to imagining putting a knife clean between his shoulder blades or taking a hammer to his head like he had with good ol’ Hector.

  He knew his name. He knew how he carried himself. Knew what weapons he had. Knew his voice and mannerisms.

  But what he really wanted to know was what his scream sounded like.

  There were several smears of smoke on the horizon as they trudged east, a couple of times he noticed buzzards circling in the distance, but he saw no other riders or signs of life. That wasn’t unusual out here, especially as they were riding away from what passed for roads and the further you got from Hawker’s Drift the thinner the ring of farms and homesteads became, but he couldn’t shake the feeling the Scourge had washed the rest of the world clean of life.

  They finally came to a halt about ninety minutes before sundown. Sye collapsed to his knees and watched his sweat drip into the grass. When he looked up he saw the women were all doing much the same. He was young and life working on a farm kept you fit, but he still felt ready for his grave. None of the women would be as strong as him so he couldn’t imagine how they must feel. He hadn’t been raped either.

  Dinner was beef jerky and more dry biscuits. Strangely they tasted a damn sight better than they had that morning.

  The five of them sat in silence. Sally closest to him, Nicole, Cailyn and Laura together, a little further away. The few times he’d tried to speak to them they’d ignored him.

  “They think you’re the same as them,” Sally explained nodding towards their guards.

  “I’m nothing like them!”

  She shrugged and worked the leather-dry jerky around her mouth some more.

  “Guess they think you’re something like them… that’s why you’re still alive. Unlike all our menfolk.”

  “I’m nothing like them… I’ve never hurt a woman in my life and I never will.”

  What… have you done to me?

  He tossed his head as if he was being bothered by a fly. Why did those words keep buzzing around his head?

  Sally kept chewing and staring at him, “Maybe that’ll change. Maybe if it’s a choice between being like them and being dead…”

  “I’d take being dead…” he glanced towards their captors. Cave and Magaine were deep in conversation, but Shelton and Gabb were staring intently at the girls, their feral eyes shining with hunger, “…I got no idea what makes a man be like them and I ain’t planning on finding out.”

  “I’m not going to let them make me be one of their Brides,” Sally’s voice dropped.

  “What does that mean anyway? They going to marry you off?”

  She snorted and gave him a look like he was the dumbest idiot in the world.

  “We’re going to be the same as the girls they took away last night. We’re going to be whores, except we ain’t gonna be paid nothin’ for our troubles.”

  Not for the first time in his life when he’d tried to talk to a girl, he was lost for words.

  “Once we get to where they’re heading, we’re done for. I’d rather one of these bastards put a bullet in my back trying to run away than live through that…” she glanced at the other girls. They weren’t talking, but he was sure they were listening, “…can’t speak for the rest, but I ain’t planning on seeing this Host. One way or the other.”

  “What are you planning?”

  “They’ll tie us up for the night, bind our feet and put our hands behind our backs, like they did before. We turn our backs to each other and try and work each other free. We keep at it all night till one of us is free, they untie the others. Then we kill the bastards.”

  He swallowed. Then nodded. So did Cailyn and Nicole. Young Laura just stared off into the distance with watery eyes.

  They finished what passed for their meal in silence. As soon as they were done all four of their guards came over, Shelton and Magaine were carrying more rope.

  “Time to put you kids to bed for the night…” Cave grinned, “…so be nice and roll onto your tummies.”

  “All of em?” Shelton’s eyes flicked between Cave and the girls.

  “For tonight, they’ve had a long day. Maybe tomorrow we'll have a little party, but they needs some rest.”

  Shelton hawked a stream of tobacco juice onto the grass, but didn’t say anything else.

  Cave shrugged, “Best we get em back in one piece, y’know how much the Old Man values his Brides.”

  “Any of em gonna be strong enough?” Magaine asked, running dirty fingers through his scratchy blonde beard.

  “Only one ways to find out,” Shelton pressed.

  “Not tonight,” Cave snapped, “Now tie em up!”

  Still grumbling the men passed through the prisoners, He winced as Gabb hog-tied him, trussing his wrists to his ankles as he lay on his belly.

  “You can’t leave us like t
his all night!” he protested.

  Gabb straightened up and moved around to stand in front of him. He pushed the scuffed toe of his boot against Sye’s cheek and rubbed it back and forth.

  “Boy, we’re the Scourge. We do what we fuckin’ like. You survive it, then you’ll be strong enough to be part of the future. We got a New Nation to build, can’t do that with no fucking weaklings, can we?”

  One of the girls cried out. He twisted around to see Shelton binding Nicole, the grin on his face inching wider each time she cried out as he tightened the ropes. When he was done he whispered something in her ear that made her sob before squeezing her backside and straightening up.

  “I’m liking this one,” he grinned, before picking up his rope and moving on.

  He looked at Sally, he didn’t need to say anything, her eyes told him what he already knew. He couldn’t even move his hands the way they were tied.

  There was no way they were getting out of these ropes tonight.

  *

  The next day passed much the same as the previous one.

  It just hurt more.

  His feet, ankles, wrist, neck, back and head all either ached, were cut or chafed raw. He’d tried for hours to work his ropes loose during the night as Laura had sobbed quietly in the darkness, but he hadn’t been able to get them to budge an inch. He’d done a fair job of scrapping more of his skin off though.

  In the end, despite the discomfort of the ropes and the dry prickly grass tormenting his skin, he’d somehow managed to fall asleep, too tired to even dream. Which was one mercy at least.

  He awoke to pain and it hadn’t left him all day.

  He’d tried to speak to Sally after they were untied and given water and biscuits, but she’d only said one word in reply.

  “Tonight.”

  So, he’d walked. Wincing with the pain of each step and squinting into the fierce sunlight as he followed the fat swaying rump of Shelton’s mare. He saw a couple of distant riders, but they didn’t come their way, otherwise it was the same as the previous day; smoke, buzzards and grass. Nothing else. No one was going to come to their aid.

  Things like this weren’t supposed to happen here. He’d heard the stories about the horrors the rest of the Broken Union suffered of course, they all had. But not here. Except this was more than some group of transient desperados looking to steal cattle and make easy gold. There were too many of them for a start and they were organised. Brutal and callous maybe, but they knew exactly what they were doing. And there were more of them out there, somewhere over the ruler-straight eastern horizon.