“Why not?”
As far as questions asked in bars went, it was pretty typical.
“Because it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. I’ve got the paper right here, Mill.”
“You know I can’t read.”
“No, but I can and I’m telling you, black-and-white, page one, there it is.”
“And I’m telling YOU, Tyle – you right there – that flesh-and-blood beats black-and-white hollow. I don’t care how many crazy professors you care to tell me of-”
“Hadly, his name’s Geistoff Hadly, and he’s found-”
“–I don’t care what his name is, I wouldn’t go out into the chalklands for the king of the world and his eldest daughter too. Count me out.”
Tyle frowned, and as usually was the case with Tyle’s frown, it was immediately followed by Tyle’s fist. Matters continued in that way for a few minutes, whereupon Tyle returned to his table.
“No luck,” said Ram.
“Nope.”
“No luck at all,” repeated Ram, looking more than ever like a burnt-out tree stump. He shook his head at his drink, which was nearly as half-empty as he was. “But that’s not new, eh?”
“Mope less, help more. We still need that guide.”
“No luck.”
“I KNOW that,” said Tyle, but he left it there because beating up Ram was about as productive – and painful – as beating up a rock. At the end of it you had sore knuckles and no breath, all for a few nicks on its hide. “Miserable town this. A few hundred miles south, a fat old man can pull trinkets out of the ground worth more than gold with barely a spade. And here? You can’t so much as persuade ‘em to look outside.”
“They’re scared.”
“Of WHAT? There’s nothing out there but grass, rocks, and rocks on grass! It’s the most boring landscape I’ve ever laid eyes on!”
“Nothing left to see but yourself,” intoned Ram. “Nothing left to do but give up.”
“Oh, shut up. If you really believed that crap you’d have thrown yourself into a pond years ago.”
Ram shrugged, an expression as wholly unique to him as Tyle’s frown was. His shoulders didn’t actually move, but he somehow hunched even further inwards.
Tyle ignored Ram’s shrug and looked around the bar again. A bunch of miserable bastards here, nearly as bad as Ram in their way. They looked to hate each other as much as they did him; the whole damned building could burn down and nobody in town’d miss them.
Oh. Well that was a thought.
“Ram? Give me your drink.”
“No.”
Tyle took Ram’s drink from his unresisting hands and strolled down to the far end of the room, to the darkest, dustiest table of them all. Its occupant matched it. A walking stick seemed to be supporting his entire body, even while seated. It wasn’t enjoying it.
“Say, friend,” Tyle said with the happiest smile in the world, “care to help me finish this? I seem to have half left.”
The sky was blue.
“That was a mean trick.”
The grass was brown, but playing it up as golden.
“Worked, didn’t it? Now look, he’s awake.”
And the world was creaking slowly and surely.
Hed was chained up inside a wagon made of rotten wood and crammed next to a barrel. Again.
“Hello there,” said the smiling one. Tyle. “Now, care to show us the way?”
“Sure. Where to?”
“The chalklands.”
“Nobody goes out to the chalklands.”
“Well, you’re nobody right now. But be nice and maybe you’ll leave a richer nobody than you came along with.”
“Got a drink?”
Tyle raised an eyebrow. “After what the last one I passed did to you?”
“That was you hitting me.”
“Fair enough.” Tyle tapped the barrel, which didn’t slosh in the way very very full things didn’t slosh. “Tell you what. Point the way into the chalklands, and I’ll give you two drinks. Get clever and point us back into town, you get last night over again.”
“On one condition.”
“Oh?”
“You have one too. I don’t like to get drunk lonely.”
Tyle smiled. A big, happy smile.
Hed, after a lot of wheedling, had been given a replacement walking stick and a very very small knife to whittle it to his satisfaction. Tyle had been against it until Ram pointed out he couldn’t exactly chase them down with it, chained as he was.
“Not much use for walking either,” Tyle had said.
“It’s not for the walking,” Hed explained. “Just something that needs to be done.”
It was a beautiful day, even if the place was sort of ugly. Although that could be the whiskey thinking it.
“Ugly as sin out here,” said Tyle. “Sky’s wasted on it. All that sky and all it’s got to shine on is some lumpy rocks and scraggly grass.”
“Fair enough,” said Hed. “Let’s go back.”
“No.”
“Alright. See that ridge?”
“Yes.”
“Go over it. Then let me off and I’ll go back.”
“No. You’re with us ‘till the end, old friend. Can’t have the word getting out. Early, I mean. Before we strick it rich.”
“It’s the chalklands. There’s nothing here.”
“There was nothing on the mesas either, until Hedly dug there,” said Tyle. Then he laughed.
“Who’s that?”
“Mad old professor. Liked to play in the dirt and pretend he was working.” Tyle shook his head. “But he found things. Arrowheads that moved on their own. Bowls that filled with water at a touch. And that was in the badlands, with nothing but dirt and stone for miles. It’s uglier here, but it’s better living and nobody’s ever checked it before. Who knows what’s out here?”
“Nothing.”
A shadow of a frown passed over Tyle’s face, but the sun ironed it out before it finished.
“I need another drink,” said Ram. “For my other hand.”
“Shut up and steer.”
“I’d rather not.”
“We’re here,” said Hed.
Tyle peered up at the stones around them, past the dusk and the dim and a considerable amount of whiskey. “Really? Faster than I’d thought.”
“It’s as far as we’re going in this light. Unless you want the horses to step into gopher holes in the dark.”
Tyle smacked him in the shoulder. “Damn good advice! See, I KNEW any one of you little bastards could help us! This isn’t so bad, eh? The big, scary chalklands. All nothing but green and grey and empty. What’s the worry?”
Hed turned his walking stick over and over in his hands. The shaft was slim as a wrist by now, but the handle had been shaved down to a near-blade.
“You should leave, you know,” he said. “This is your last chance.”
Tyle sighed. “Scared of rocks?”
“Out west the stone’s full, but solid. Out east it’s near-empty. Here there’s too much empty space, and anything can come bubbling up through the cracks.”
Tyle laughed at that, a full-out-throated guffaw with a set of after-chuckles that took up at least a full minute. He laughed in Hed’s face, and he watched the whole time as the sunburnt wrinkles didn’t so much as crease.
“You should’ve stayed home,” he told Tyle, quietly.
Tyle frowned.
Hed woke up with his head dangling out the back of the wagon, eyes filled with a black sky – overcast with cloud and something worse – and he knew he didn’t have a lot of time.
Slowly, carefully, wincing with every rib with every step, he crawled himself upright, took out the odd bit of wire he kept coiled around his back tooth, and removed the clumsy chain from his arm. He leaned against the whiskey barrel, testing his strength, testing its weight.
Half-empty. It’d do.
Then he took up his stick in the crook of his arm and heaved the barrel out of the cart just in time to catch the first drops.
A fist picked him up.
“Rain,” muttered Ram. His breath was a fountain of alcohol and rot. “Shouldn’t go out in it.”
Hed shook his head.
“No,” said Ram. His words were fading into the background, being eaten up by the long slow roar of water. “You stay.”
“It’s not rain.”
“Oh?” Ram squinted up at the sky.
“It’s the sea.”
And it came down on them.
Lives fade after they’re spent. Everything but the most important bits.
For most of them, it’s how they ended.
The waves were strong, and the current deep. But the real weight of the long-dead water that pressed down on the three men was from the things inside it.
A billion billion schools of long-dead fish; uncountable clams and who-knew-whats. Swarms of spiralling things like squids stuffed into ram’s horns.
Tyle was screaming, and that made it fast. His mouth was still open as he floated beneath Ram, fading down and away. All slackness in his jaw, with none of the tight-skinned warnings his expressions had given it.
Ram, to his great astonishment, found that he wanted to live. His arms were thrashing, his legs were kicking. His body, in spite of all that had ever been, was trying to stay alive.
The water churned around him, then opened up into teeth.
Ram had never seen a swimming lizard before, let alone one quite that size. The startlement nearly dulled the bite.
Hed shut his eyes, felt which way the blood in his body was surging, then swam for it. The whiskey keg was an inert lump at his side, neither pulling him down nor buoying him up. But when it broke surface and he flung a leg over it, it did the job well enough. He took a moment to catch his breath, then dipped his walking stick in, blade-first.
Splish. Splash.
Now and again he saw a shadow or felt a current and dropped low, stopped moving. In this way his night was spent. And when the sun came up the water came down, so very quickly it couldn’t be seen. One moment he was sculling, the next standing.
He looked down under his feet and scuffed a toe. Grass and dirt peeled away and underneath was the chalk again, milky and unconvincingly dead to the eye.
“You’ll be back, you fucker,” he told it. And he spat and threw away his stick and started walking. Then running.
It was almost night again by the time Hed walked back into the bar. It was good timing. The keg had nearly run dry.