Episode 3: What Walks On, Part 1

Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

The wind carried them to her.

At first there were the smells — burning mesquite lilted on the air, teasing tendrils caught in faint, then ever stronger plumes. Then musk of horse mixed with the odor of unwashed bodies of travelers, sour on the currents, tantalizing with the promise of something more than mirage.

Fallow caught the smells too, turning her ears forward, the tempo of her gait increasing by the smallest fraction of a beat. She whinnied as if to tell the stranger that there was a camp ahead of them, in case the signs were missed by her rider. Camp meant people. And where there were people, there might be horses. And other horses might mean feed.

Of the crow, there was no sign. It had gone its own way some time ago as it was wont to do — somewhere ahead of her in the scrub, she reckoned, in the mesquite along the mesa’s foot. The stranger hardly gave the matter more than the briefest of thoughts.

The light was wrong for it to be as late as it felt. The sun had been setting for longer than a sun ought to, the sky overhead still holding that bruised, indeterminate color that wasn’t evening and wasn’t night and had stopped promising to become either. As everywhere along the Old Canaan Road, the Dusk reigned. She had ridden long enough under it to stop expecting it to change. Mesa country did this, perhaps even more than those places gone to wastelands: it held to the gloaming like a drowning man held a breath that neither dared release. Shadows followed the old ley, snapping into places they had no reason to stand and taking to running along long, crooked and uncertain angles. She had been riding long enough now to begin to apprehend those untrustworthy angles, eyes adjusting to reading shape rather than color, movement more than detail.

In the standing cusp of a nightfall that sometimes took hours to affect, she next saw orange blossom at the base of the mesa’s western face. The campfire strained to outshine the ruddy glow of the dying day behind it and was only just succeeding. Then the voices, in that asymmetric overlapping that ebbed and flowed with the desert sands, suggesting at least three people had gathered around the fires. No more than a dozen. More than a single solitary drifter like herself.

She let Fallow decide on the pace as the camp continued to resolve ahead of her. The promise of a feedbag and rest urged the mare onward and her gait threatened to become a constrained trot.

Two clusters, one fire. She could read the gap between them while still a quarter of a mile away. One side angled, closer to the flames. The other group, two or three strides removed from the fire and opposite the first group. It was the body language of people sharing out of necessity and circumstance rather than preference. Only the fire between them was the one thing they agreed upon.

The hare was already on her, taken two hours back when she had spotted it sheltering in the shadow of a rock outcropping and the road had been otherwise empty. She had not been hunting toward anything. She had simply been moving and then she had not been moving, and then she had been moving again with the hare dressed and wrapped and the matter closed.

She made the decision without ceremony. She drew up her reins to bring the horse back to a slow walk and turned Fallow’s head toward the firelight, where it was only too happy to go.

Gait unhurried, she rode into the camp, careful not to let Fallow break the lines of the ward someone had drawn in salt around the camp to keep out the local fauna.

The stranger kept her hands away from the revolver holstered at her side and let the light of the flames wash over her. Nothing to hide. The hare hung from the saddle by a leather tether, where it could be seen. Conversations trailed off into the night and the faces came into focus as she drew up. On the near side, the people had the alertness to their gaze that expressed they had been more nervous before her arrival than after. On the far side, a smaller group sat, watching her the way people watch weather coming in — trying to decide if it was their kind of weather.

She stopped Fallow at the fire’s edge.

A woman across the fire spoke first.

“Long road,” she said, more statement than question.

“Long enough.”

The stranger unhooked the hare from the saddle and held it out, not toward anyone in particular. She held it out toward the fire, toward the camp, toward the compact the gesture implied. “I’ve eaten. This hasn’t been spoken for.”

Silence followed, that decision-making kind.

Then one of the men on the near side — hands that knew work — reached out and took it.

“Light and set a spell,” he said. “Coffee’s hot.”

She dismounted. Led Fallow to the fire’s margin where the ground was harder and looped her reins over a scrub branch that would hold the mare without holding her, the kind of tether that meant trust more than restraint. Fallow dropped her head and blew out a long breath and was still.

The stranger settled at the fire’s edge, on the side where the offer had been made, and accepted the battered tin cup that was pressed into her hands and nodded to the woman who poured her some hot coffee from an old turquoise-enameled kettle. The woman across the fire watched her with the focused attention of someone running a long column of numbers in their head and not yet satisfied with the sum.

She had a hawk’s eyes. They were the kind that had been doing this kind of work for years.

“Name’s Dee,” the woman said, by way of nothing in particular.

The stranger nodded after her over the flickering flames. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “Just passing through.”

The response was an answer to a question that hadn’t been asked, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so.

The fire settled as the stranger took a sip of the coffee. Good, rich stuff, not cut with chicory to make it stretch. The stranger sat in silence as conversation began its slow resumption around her.

The gloaming at the base of the mesa continued to hold.