Effigy (21 page)

The air is heady—wafting from the field to where I bob and wonder on this scrubby branch. The light is long. Time to follow the thread of a flight line to the gathering tree, to hail the others, the mate among them, build numbers before carrying on to the roost. For days now I have resisted evening’s draw. I tell myself nothing could be more crow than to be trapped between carrion and curiosity. I lie. The child’s gravity is great. She controls me as my own deepest nature cannot.

My perch affords perspective. A string of humans, Originals and pack members, moves through the scrub close by—near enough that an open-winged glide would bring my claws in contact with scalp. The child’s eyes, if she dared open them, would make out human hooves and legskins flashing between trees. Perhaps even the swing of a bloodied hand.

I drop my beak, staring down through the leaves of the sad oak, already burnt with the gold of their own dying. She curls white and black about the base of the trunk. Mammal surely, but human? I watch until her dark eye opens and meets my own. Then tuck my beak deep into my wing and select a secondary flight feather, one I can make do without. I tug it from its bony mooring and let it fall. Its path describes the mystery that has grown up between us, this undeniable, spiralling thread. Despite the black point of its quill, she watches it through her open eye.

MOTHER HAMMER
has a mania for sage. She adds it by the fistful to her every soup and stew, so that, more often than not, a perfumed cloud hangs over the table during the supper hour. Dorrie has learned to take small sips of air between her lips, holding her breath while she chews. She’s had little choice. The first wife put her foot down early on when it came to the subject of Dorrie eating with the family.

“Bread broken together is a covenant.” She addressed their husband as though the crowded table were a tunnel, the two of them crouched at either end.

Hammer smiled. “Judas broke bread, Mother.”

Her gaze took on a gilding of frost. “She’ll come for breakfast and she’ll come for supper, or she won’t eat a blessed thing.”

So Dorrie came. Took her place between eldest daughter and second wife, and endured Mother Hammer’s glare.

For three years now the first wife has been obliged to set aside a portion for Dorrie before seasoning the rest. Dorrie has no wish to vex her; she simply can’t stomach the dusty herb. Not that stomaching was ever an option—she’s never once managed to force down so much as a mouthful of anything that bears its taint.

She was fourteen years old, a bride-to-be come morning, when she encountered her first taste of Mother Hammer’s stew. She spit it out. Brown and slippery, it landed with a plop in her bowl. Mother Hammer was on her feet in an instant.

“I’m sorry—” Dorrie began, but her explanation met the first wife’s leathery palm. A person might be expected to tremble, even colour up, after delivering such a blow, but Mother Hammer stood steady, her creamy complexion unperturbed. No one—not Hammer, not his wives or his children—made a sound. After a long moment, the first wife folded her height gracefully, resuming her seat.

Dorrie raised a hand to her cheek, felt blood, or possibly a hot stream of drool, escape the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t crying. She very rarely cried. Her eyes had remained perfectly dry some five days previous while Mama sat weeping, watching her pack her trunk.

Mama hadn’t minded Dorrie’s aversion to sage. There was never even a question of setting portions aside—once she discovered the reason behind the frequent upsets at the supper table, she dumped a full jar of the vile stuff down the privy, never had it in her kitchen again.

It was clear Dorrie could expect no such kindness in her new home. Mother Hammer was watching her. Eyes lowered, she loaded her fork carefully—a glistening disc of carrot, a stringy clot of beef. Raising them to her lips, she felt her gullet constrict. It was no use. She laid down her fork.

“Mother Hammer,” she said quietly, “I mean no disrespect—”

“Don’t you dare.” The first wife’s tone was confusing, more suited to a request for the salt cellar than a threat.

Dorrie took a deep breath and held it, snapped the stinking forkful back up to her mouth. Shoving it between her lips, she bit
down hard, striking a sharp note across the tines. Her throat wasn’t fooled—it flinched shut, the sheer force of rejection propelling meat and vegetable in an exceptional arc. Both morsels hit the floor somewhere behind Joseph’s chair.

Who knows what Mother Hammer would have been capable of, had she not been suspended in disbelieving shock. This time it was Hammer’s turn to rise, and once he had, even the first wife had to keep her seat.

“Are you ill, Sister Eudora?”

“No,” Dorrie choked.

“Something amiss with your supper?”

The first wife gave a noise as though she too were in danger of gagging.

Dorrie rubbed her throat. “It’s the seasoning, the—” She hesitated, even the word nauseating now. “—the sage.”

Hammer nodded, working his gaze down the table in a slow stitching motion. “Mother,” he said, locking eyes with his oldest wife, “you know the Church counsels all good women to welcome their husbands’ wives.”

Mother Hammer’s eyes grew wide in what seemed a supernatural gesture, a calling down of the sky.

“From now on you will cook something simple for Sister Eudora. Something plain.” Hammer resumed his seat, grabbed his roll and tore it in two. “You must be tired, my girl.” It took Dorrie a moment to realize he was addressing her. He pushed the smaller of the two halves into his mouth and talked around it. “Sister Ruth, be so good as to fetch Sister Eudora some bread and milk, and show her to her room.”

The first wife has been holding forth on the life of the Prophet, letting her supper grow cold.

“That’s enough of that, Mother,” Hammer says abruptly. He shoots Bendy a look. “My wife holds but one subject dear to her heart.”

“You know of one more deserving, do you, husband? Hunting, perhaps? Or horses? Or—hunting?”

Hammer breaks the following silence by working his knife across the china with a squeal. “I suppose you’ve got a tale or two from your days on the ponies, Brother Drown.”

“Not many, sir. I had a pretty smooth time of it.”

“You in on any of those mustang roundups Brother Egan ran?”

“Once or twice.”

Hammer nods.

Seeing more is expected of him, Bendy chews and swallows. “Well, there was this one time just after I signed on, we took a dozen or so down around Topaz Mountain.”

“Uh-huh.” Hammer pulls a stretchy, close-mouthed smile.

“They were watering at creek there. We let them drink their fill.”

“Slow them down a piece.”

“That’s right.” Bendy feels himself warm to the memory of that late spring day. The herd was still winter-scrawny, patchy with moult, but they were a sight to behold all the same. The saddle horses knew they were there long before any of their riders got wise. Bendy felt his mount quicken beneath him, wondered at first if they might be in the vicinity of a snake.

“We were lucky,” he tells Hammer. “We came up on them downwind, got a good look from a ridge maybe half a mile off. It was a pretty steep cut. We split up and got the jump on them from both ends.”

Hammer nods his approval. “You listening to this?” He knuckles his son’s well-developed shoulder, three sharp backhanded raps.

Lal bristles. “More than enough mustang blood on this ranch already.”

“This again.” Hammer wipes the gravy from his moustaches. “My boy here thinks I ought to donate my hard-earned dollars to a pack of Gentile swindlers out east. Used to be quarter horses were the be-all and end-all, but what is it now—Kentucky Saddlers? Blooded Morgans? Or should I get a pair of thoroughbreds shipped direct from the Queen’s stables?”

“What do you ride?” Lal mutters.

Hammer’s expression cools. “What’s that?”

“Stride’s three parts mustang.” Bendy surprises himself by wading in. “She’s not the prettiest horse, but she’s pretty near perfect.”

Lal gives a snort.

“Not some notion of perfect,” Bendy says. “Really perfect. For their world.”

Hammer’s son swivels to face him. “She’s weedy, hammer-headed, tied in at the knee. They all are.” He grins at the good sense he’s making. “Never mind that they’re devils to break.”

“Depends who’s breaking them,” Hammer puts in.

Lal ignores his father, bringing his nose an inch closer to Bendy’s. “I’ve seen them so stubborn they won’t even feed. Starve themselves rather than get broke.”

Bendy nods. “I’ve seen them like that too. You have to coax them.”

Lal flexes his upper lip. “More trouble than they’re worth.”

Bendy holds his tongue for a long moment. Then speaks, his voice firm in the service of something finer than himself. “They
might look cow-hocked, but their legs are sound. They’re more likely to drop from a burst heart than a broken bone. The same goes for their feet, and they know how to use them, too. Walk a mustang into muck and he knows to stop, back out slow. A blooded horse’ll panic, kick in deeper, get mired.” He shakes his head. “No, for my money you can’t beat a touch of the wild. There’s not a dog living with one-tenth the grace or cunning of a wolf.”

Hammer’s youngest wife flinches, the movement large enough to draw Bendy’s gaze her way. She meets it with her own—steady, deep-socketed, black. For a second he can’t be certain where he is.

“Well spoken, Brother Drown.” Hammer brings an open palm down hard on the table. “We’ll go out later in the season and see if we can’t haul in a few. Just the two of us, mind. Lal’s not much use in a roundup, are you, son? Gets confused.”

In the plate-scraping quiet that follows, it’s as though Lal—still now, deathly still—is nonetheless emitting a sound. Imperceptible to the ear, Bendy hears it through the skin of his right cheek, right forearm, right hand. Like fat hissing in a fry pan, popping and threatening to catch.

The silkhouse is light within, dark without. So long as Lal resists moving, there’s no reason he should attract Ruth’s eye.

Her dress is a discomfort to her—he can see that much through the window, her hands crabbing along its seams, moving now to her belly, now to the small of her back. It’s gift enough to watch her fret and fidget in this way. He doesn’t dream his luck will ripen to the point it does now.

The first button—the one at her throat—gives way easily. There are many others, though, a trail of tiny stepping stones leading down. His patience is beginning to fray by the time she slips the last of them—the one that hints at the navel beneath it—free of its hole. A double shrug out of the sleeves and the dress drops in a dark ring to the flower-strewn floor.

Faced with the pale bonework of Ruth’s stays, Lal finds it difficult to breathe. The ties oblige her fingers. Lace by lace, her beautiful body grows. The corset falls, a mess of angles atop the gentle dress.

Her shift is simpler than any woman’s garment he’s seen—not a gather, not a detail from neck to hem. Its colour is close to none at all, the yellow of fresh cream, but thin as the wateriest whey. When she moves to step out of her fallen clothing, he knows a sudden clutching in his chest, as though some creature has made a mouthful of his heart. The shift floats, then lies flat against her. He can see everything—the ghost of her drawers, the swell of life expected, the dual, moving beauty of her breasts.

It’s too much. Lal feels his knees turn to water. His head hitting ground rouses him. Minutes pass before he trusts himself to rise.