One Night in Sixes Read online

  ONE NIGHT IN SIXES

  ‘This author can really write. If you loved Stephen King’s Dark Tower series – or even if you’re a hardened Cormac McCarthy fan – you will find this book right inside your wheelhouse. Living, witty dialogue, and a familiar-yet-strange world inhabited by vivid characters. I loved it. And I don’t say that about a book very often.’

  Paul Kearney, author of The Ten Thousand

  First published 2014 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-765-4

  Copyright © 2014 Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson

  Cover art by Tomasz Jedruszek

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  For Nana

  As time passed, Vincent grew older.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One: A Bad Business

  Two: Strange Ladies

  Three: The Island in the River

  Four: Manners

  Five: One Night in Sixes

  Six: Something Irreversible

  Seven: Visitations

  Eight: Champagne and Petits-Fours

  Nine: Insufficiencies

  Ten: Concerning Fishmen

  Eleven: A Necktie Sociable

  Twelve: The Crow Prince

  Thirteen: The Worst of All Things

  Fourteen: Teeth

  Fifteen: The Indigent and the Dead

  Sixteen: Departing, Unrecognized

  Interim

  Glossary

  People and Places

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  ON THE THIRD day, God said: now you just stay there and think about what you did.

  So Elim stood there where they’d tied his hands to the two posts of the main street promenade, leaning into the dwindling shade as the sun climbed higher. The rest of the dust-choked street was long since deserted.

  Which left just Elim, standing spread-armed between the beams, struggling to keep his aching head shaded and his sluggish thoughts pious as his bare back and shoulders roasted in the sun.

  That was a tall order.

  It was powerfully difficult to let his gaze rest on the walkway without thinking of the people it had been built for. The raised wooden walk had kept their genteel boots out of the mud; the open sloping roof had guarded their reverend heads from the rude heat of the day.

  They would have been fine, decent folks. They wouldn’t have left even a bastard like Elim strung up like this. But they had long since passed on to their reward, and left him at the mercy of their brutal heirs.

  He was close, though – so close his sweat dripped onto the weathered gray planks. If he could just get past the pain in his arms and the tightness in his chest and lean in far enough to get his head into that heavenly shaded space – just for even a minute – he would surely breathe in some of their deathless grace, and understand how to account for himself.

  That kept him busy enough that the slow, rhythmic thud of hooves took him by surprise. Startled, Elim glanced back over one shoulder –

  – just as an enormous brown face hung itself over the other. There beside him was Molly Boone: unbridled, unsaddled, and apparently having liberated herself from the corral. Elim’s mouth cracked in a smile.

  “Miz Boone,” he declared in a parched whisper, “you are a brazen hussy. Is this you flauntin’ yourself around town without your bonnet on?” Elim closed his eyes as her lips anointed his face with a streak of sweet green slobbers. “And dolin’ out your affections to any man in the street, I see. Ain’t you ’shamed?”

  No, not hardly. Shame was for people – for creatures who could sort right things from wrong ones, and hold themselves accountable for the difference.

  By that reckoning, Elim was shamed enough for both of them. He breathed in the smell of her sun-warmed coat, and steadied his resolve. “Don’t listen to any of what they said about me, now. You know I ain’t like that.”

  He had to get himself sure on that point as well. Back home, he could have said it as a certifiable fact: he did not and never had hurt anyone.

  Here, though...

  Elim glanced down the empty street, past the adobe walls shimmering in the midday heat and the burnt-out ruins of the church, to the black-iron manor at the end of the road.

  He was just a boy.

  Maybe this place had changed him into a murderer. Elim couldn’t have said whether it had that power. But it certainly was fixing to change him into a dead man.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A BAD BUSINESS

  SOAP.

  Glue.

  Hide. Shaving-brushes, fishing line, fertilizer, bait, belts, boots – no, for sheer reliable marketability, you really couldn’t beat a dead horse.

  Unfortunately, the horses in the pen fairly radiated health and fine conditioning, which left Sil Halfwick to swelter, smile, and present himself as a livestock dealer with a special affinity for live stock.

  “Only the very best,” he said, and wiped his brow as he glanced over his shoulder at the merchandise in question. “What catches your fancy?”

  “Horses, eho,” the customer replied, impatience sharpening his tone. “I want to buy horses. Do you want to sell them, or are you just resting your culo on the gate?”

  Eho. Boy. Sil swallowed on a throat worn raw from the habit, and though the searing afternoon promised to broil the very stench from the air, he strove to keep his voice as cool and pleasant as fine cellar wine. “Sure I do,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I want to sell you eleven quarter-mile stock horses: two saddle-broke three-year-olds and nine long yearlings of the best breeding. Which ones would you like to see?”

  The customer’s gaze flicked from Sil’s face back to the horses, and he might as well have asked it aloud: what’s wrong with them?

  It was a fair question. The honeycomb of stockyard fencing and the sea of hoof-churned earth and dung stretched on for nearly a quarter-mile, but the salesmen who had so assiduously flanked their gates on Friday had almost all trickled away to the white-tented spectacles in the distance, their business happily concluded.

  Which left just Sil, conspicuously unsuccessful, and the customer, who fixed him with a suspicious coal-eyed stare. “How much for all?”

  Sil did not move, nor take his gaze from the customer’s sun-beaten face. But in his mind’s eye, he conjured Father’s old chess board and mentally swapped out the king and the rook, castling to put himself two healthy steps back from this present moment, and letting his imaginary older self come forward.

  He was – would be – a splendid fellow: ten years older, and an ambitious four inches taller, with a close-trimmed golden beard and a bespoke suit and silk shirt and confidence, that was what – such confidence and fearless, friendly ease that he could conjure a price and make people see its worth as clearly as if he’d branded it onto the merchandise with a smoking iron.

  “Twelve hundred,” Master Halfwick said. “Papers included.”

  The customer’s eyes went wide: he spat, the result missing Sil’s boots by a pennywidth. “¡Te-chinga!¿Kién keyengañas creyes?¡Wevoso timando eho de puta!”

  Sil couldn’t help but flinch, and it was only ironclad mindfulness that stifled his urge to cough. With most customers, that wouldn’t matter,
but this one was a Sundowner, and an older one at that: all grit and suspicion, years of sand and sun worn into his dark skin and dusty black hair. And as the old joke went, the surest way to scatter the natives was to send a white man out to sneeze at them.

  Needless to say, Master Halfwick would do nothing of the sort. He would do something marvelous, sophisticated, something no-one would ever expect.

  Sil swallowed the rising itch in his throat. “Sólo Dios’abe,” he said, a phrase he understood to mean That’s as it may be. “But I think you know that these are the best horses here. Therefore, the real question is...” He paused, fighting through a slow-roasted headache to twist the customer’s words into a question. “... am I the kind of brass-balled swindling son of a bitch you want to do business with?”

  Sil’s fluency in Marín was his only trump card, but it was a good one: every miserable hour he’d spent diagramming and conjugating and learning how to twist the accents just-so was repaid each time a Sundowner blinked in open amazement as he, the sickly milk-faced Eadan boy, returned their salty parlance as casually as if a rabbit had opened its mouth and barked.

  And it was working. Even now, the momentary surprise on the customer’s face was souring into suspicion, and when it fermented into doubt, he’d ask whether they were started for saddle, or demand to inspect their feet, and then Sil would have him. Master Halfwick would be born from this moment exactly, his reputation kindled by one single, fantastic, almost-impossible sale.

  Say yes, Sil willed his customer, loud enough to drown out the man’s own doubts, and the cajoling calls of the few other salesmen still on the lot. I respect you more than they do. I deserve this more than they do.

  The trudge of new footsteps on old straw halted his thoughts.

  God dammit, not NOW.

  The dull rattle of tin buckets and the slosh of water disturbed the heavy afternoon air in the pen behind him. Before Sil could even begin to choose his words, the customer hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his denim trousers and gave an agreeable nod.

  “Well,” he said. “I will buy your horses for twelve hundred... if you throw in the mule.”

  Sil let out a slow breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “He is not for sale. Not for any price.”

  Too late, Sil heard his own poor phrasing: this was a dead-end statement, a deal-killer. The customer’s expression withered.

  “But it allows – I allow” – the itch became unbearable; he aborted the cough with a violent clearing of his throat – “let me show you our prize filly; you’ll want to see how she handles on the lead.”

  No. Sil saw the answer before he heard it.

  The customer swatted a fly from his neck. “I have seen enough.” He half-raised a hand and turned to go on. “Try again when you have some hairs around that mouth, eho.”

  Sil kept his place at the gate, watching in dull-eyed stillness as his last chance of a sale walked away. His future self evaporated, banished to never-existence by the failure of the present.

  A great shadow fell over him from the right, announced by the telltale stink of horse and ripe sweat. “No dice, huh?” Punctuated by an empty pail being dropped onto the gatepost with a dumb thunk.

  Sil continued to stare at no particular point on the horizon, not trusting himself to answer.

  His name as it appeared on the Washburn County register was Appaloosa Elim. Yet Sil was seized by a sudden urge to shorten it to Ass Elim, Dolt Elim, Towering Idiot Elim, Barn-Born Ignorant Lumbering Ham-Fisted Ox Elim...

  Sil glanced up, his outrage thickening along with the contents of his lungs. It wasn’t Elim’s ridiculous features that irritated him: not his improbably ugly long face, not the stupid wet cow-licks in his hair, not even the vast brown blotch over his left eye that seemed to commemorate the day on which God, irate with the genesis of yet another half-bred bastard, had muddied the palm of His hand and smacked Elim across the face. He couldn’t help any of that. No, what Sil couldn’t stand was that attentively clueless look in his creased brown eyes: half white, half Sundowner, and all country-bred blundering clod.

  “Oh no, it was a smashing success, textbook really, just brilliant,” Sil hissed up at him, “until YOU stuck your bloody big nose into it! God damn you Elim, what hellborn foolish idiot notion possessed you –”

  The mutiny in his lungs finally overwhelmed him, but that hardly mattered now: bereft of any chance of a sale, he was free to cough to his heart’s content, choking on snot, dust, and failure.

  “Well,” Elim said, “they don’t advertise so good as horses if you parch ’em ’til they’re jerky.” And then, as Sil got on towards the last of his vile swallows and straightened, a big hand patted his shoulder. “And that goes double for you, Slim. C’mon have you a drink and some lie-down, and nevermind that trifling old flea-rustler anyhow. Been a beater of a day.”

  Appaloosa Elim, who’d had no more thought than fetching water for dry horses.

  By now they were alone, and Sil was at liberty to pull off his hat and run his fingers through his sweat-streaked blond hair. He squinted out at the stockyards in the deepening red afternoon light. Yes, he could probably stagger back to the bunkhouse, and he could certainly carry on raging at Elim, but the overpowering wrung-out weariness in his limbs was fast reducing it to an either-or proposition. He sniffed, swallowed, and sighed.

  “Right,” he said with an asthmatic wheeze as he replaced his hat and waited for Elim to close the gate. “Lay on, then.”

  No, he decided as they retreated from the heat of the day, he didn’t mind the horses so much – but the mixed-race ‘mule’ called Elim was going to be the death of him.

  IT WAS A hell of a thing, really.

  Elim sat hunkered over on the lower bunk of the old bedframe, half-packed supplies spread out over the worn quilt before him.

  It was really just a hell of a thing.

  The fall fair was a fixed part of his calendar, as regular and natural as spring foals and summer hay. Granted, anything could happen any time of the year: this was the far side of the Bravery, after all, and the only surer guarantee than storms and drought and wild-minded murdering Sundowners was that you’d be dead long before the government bothered itself to notice.

  But you always figured you’d be all right, once you got to the fair, because it was such a small and human event: you just fixed up your herd and kept an eye out for thieves and stray nails while you waited for the sale, and that was that.

  Except that this year, somehow, it wasn’t. Something had gone wrong, not all at once but slowly, like milk that wouldn’t churn to butter. And as hard as Elim tried to keep from thinking it, the problem most likely started when Boss Calvert had left Will Halfwick back home, and promoted Sil in his place.

  Elim could not have said what essential quality had been lost in the swap. Sure, Sil was younger and frailer and powerfully more irritable than his siblings, but he had a solid knack for salesmanship, and Elim could look after him discreetly enough. Plus, Easy-Hey had taught him to speak that heathen Marín, which meant that he should have been even better than Will in spite of his greenness, that he should have been able to pitch to the new brown buyers and the regular white ones alike – that he should have had their business done in record time.

  It was really just a hell of a thing.

  Elim’s piebald hands put their rations to readiness as the early evening light faded behind the dirty sackcloth curtains. They took five meals a day between them – Sil breakfasting exclusively from a coffee-pot – and it was two days on the road back to Hell’s Acre, and Elim meant to see that they at least made it home without any further expense. So the hardtack went with the cheese, because they needed no fixing, the dried peas with the flour, because the water from soaking the one would make hoecakes with the other, and the beans with the bacon, because that was how you made beans and bacon.

  It was important to be orderly with anything that could be ordered – that was what Boss always said – because the list of
things that couldn’t was just too long to keep track of.

  And it included Sundowners, too. Sil could boil over about that all he wanted, and Elim was content to let him.

  It hadn’t cost Elim anything to make-pretend with a couple of water buckets, or to take a hollering for it after the fact. But Sil didn’t understand what might have happened if he’d let that pistol-packing old sandsucker go on thinking there wasn’t anyone else around to remark on him. Probably he hadn’t even noticed the gun. And treaty or no treaty, you just couldn’t trust those damned –

  “Well,” the voice said from above, “I expect you’ll still be wanting your supper, regardless.”

  Elim looked up to see Sil peering down at him from the upper bunk. He was seventeen now, almost a man grown, but those deep, hollowed dark rings under his eyes always gave him a boyish look to Elim’s mind, like a child sucked dry by dysentery. Their fading meant that the lie-down had done him good.

  And it was high time to eat. “I expect I will, sure,” Elim replied. “Does your lordship expect he’ll suffer his-self to join me?”

  Sil inspected him at leisure, taking in the sight of Elim’s brushed hair and fresh clothes and clean-washed spotted face. “He might. Remind me why I should bother.”

  That was how you knew for sure-positive that he was a Northman: it wasn’t the white of his face or the blue of his eyes or even the corn-silk gold of his hair that gave him away, but that almighty attitude that seeped out of him like so much cold sugared sweat. Elim sometimes felt sorry for Sil’s having to hat his hair and smother his accent out here among strangers, but he never had wondered about it.

  Instead, he reminded himself about how hard it was to be cheerful when you didn’t feel well, and how lonesome it must be to live a thousand miles removed from your own natural home, and how tempting it could be to lighten the load of your inward miscontents by doling them out on everyone around you.