Gunlaw

Gunlaw 34

Chapter 21 – Fifty Years Ago

Five days into his trek Hemar understood that he would die by the tracks, unmourned and alone. The wasteland where this epiphany struck could not be told apart from the wasteland where his journey began. Days and nights blurred one into the next. Each water-tower seemed further from the last as his strength waned, whittled away by each run between them, eroded by prolonged dehydration and the slow starvation of a domen worked too hard and fed too little.

At one tower he'd dug a thin root from a creosote bush and used it as a thong to tie George Ay's whiskey flask about his neck rather than hold the damn thing all the time. Somewhere along his trail he became aware the flask was no longer bumping against his chest bone. The loss troubled him more than he had imagined it could. Some madness almost saw him retracing his steps, searching. But he kept to his path and, though the flask had weighed no more than a plump rat, it started to feel as if he'd shed some far more heavy burden and passed a test, though choice had played no part.

The world was big. Bigger than Hemar had ever imagined. Whether a domen running, a beetle crawling, or a flea hopping, it seemed that no creature's journey could count for anything across the face of such vastness. Perhaps even the trains themselves became lost in the immensity and could thunder away for a lifetime without ever coming to a limit or boundary or even without ever seeing a variation in the barren lands through which they steamed.

Day five and it seemed that he had died, perhaps back on the train, his spirit doomed to follow an endless track, mercilessly straight, goaded on by thirst and hunger, dragged back by exhaustion. At each water-tower, stamped just below the rustless iron lid of the chamber, was a pattern of raised ridges, a legend of some kind. Hemar had never seen writing though an elder once laid out a mimicry of it in rib-bones across the dust for the pups to boggle at. Men set store by such things, the elder had said. Hemar guessed the kin did too. It seemed to him that the legends changed from one tower to the next and that they might be numbers. If so they were long numbers – big numbers, numbers that told him it would take a lifetime to run back to the first of them.

When the track split, Hemar stopped without seeing and stood panting over a dry tongue. It took minutes for him to shake off the running dream and see what lay before him. The track ran on straight and true, but curving away and soon heading off at right-angles was a second track, identical to the first. A choice! After so many miles following one straight line the idea of branching from it seemed a sin, but here at least was an invitation and an excuse.

Hemar sniffed the air. Any hint of a train had long since been scoured away by the wind. He listened to the silent rails then sat between them on the track, pondering perhaps the first true choice he'd had since deciding to bite James Purbright back in the cripple-shack.

A pack holds many minds. In Hemar's there had been domen who would pursue their quarry with single minded devotion, locked to their purpose. There had been domen who swapped from this to that as opportunity rose, riding the path of least resistance on occasion, but always aimed at 'better'. Had the pack come to this junction its unity would have been strained. Maybe the houndsmen would have fought, challenging Keshtar to lead. Maybe Bold Odar would have taken half the pack straight on, refusing to turn from the track's endless challenge, and Ghan with his scars and his one eye blue, one black, would have led others along the branching track, hunting a new solution to the problem.

Hemar whined, deep in his throat. He was neither houndsman nor wise nor bold, he couldn't split himself and both choices seemed like to kill him.

Look again. That's what Wise Odar had always said, whether it was at the moon, or the dance of a crow, or the puzzles of bones and stones he so delighted in. Look again. And so, alone and without hope, Hemar looked again.