losing something dear,” he responded. He needed to enlist her aid and saw this as a way of securing her empathy. She brought her head up and nibbled the side of his chest. He felt vaguely sleepy. “I’ve lost something,” he continued, “something close to me, like your tree.”
“How awful,” she said somberly.
“It was stolen, too. Taken from me in the night.” He forced himself not to think directly of Dicey; it was far too painful and he needed to keep cool. Meli was responding, though, to Joshua’s true feelings, and to her own as tears filled her eyes.
“What was it?” she asked timidly, afraid to hear his answer, trying to erase the image of her tree being cut.
“My bride,” he whispered.
“How awful,” she repeated. She smoothed his brow with her fingertips. “Who stole her? Do you know the man?”
Mercifully, he forced his thoughts again on to his revenge, off his pain. “The thing that did it is here,” he replied. “Hiding. Meli, you have to help me find him.”
She was frightened, uncertain. A dozen fears assaulted her, all meeting at her lost tree. Lost life. “What if she’s dead?”
Josh refused to entertain this thought. They hadn’t kidnapped Dicey just to kill her. “No,” he said. “Besides… we’re Scribes.”
Meli looked confused. “I met a Scribe once,” she nodded. Then asked, “What’s a Scribe?”
“We read and write,” he began. “We believe in the power of the written word. We learn things in books. We believe the Word is God. Words tell us everything important, we set it down in writing, then it lives forever, and other Scribes can read it in thousands of years and know it the same as we do.” He paused. “That’s why Dicey won’t die. Because her name is written. Even if her body is destroyed, I can lay down her life in scripture, and she’ll live as long as the words, and every time her words are read by another Scribe, she’ll feel joyful.”
“That’s beautiful,” said Meli. The wind outside rose a bit and rattled the window. The lights in the room went on dimly for a moment as the windmill outside began to generate some electricity. Soon enough the wind subsided and the lights flickered out. The candles on the table continued to glow warmly.
The sleepiness Josh had felt earlier returned. He forced himself not to yawn. Meli sat up and put her slight hand on his breast. “Will you do something for me?” Her voice quivered. “Will you write the name of my tree?”
Josh was moved. He got up, walked over to the table and sat down. He picked a piece of bramble out of his boot, held it to the candle flame until it started to burn, and then dropped it into a little cup he found on the windowsill. When the bramble had burned itself out in the cup, Joshua stuck his thumb down onto it and crushed it into soot. His flesh was pricked in the process, and two or three drops of blood fell into the cup. Finally, he spit into the mixture of blood and charcoal dust. Meli watched the whole thing with mixed wonder and doubt.
Josh tore a piece of dirty white sheet off the bed and laid it flat on the table. He took his quill out of his boot, dipped it into the makeshift inkwell, and wrote in careful block letters on the small cloth: MELIAE. Then he handed it to her.
She stared at it lovingly, turning it this way and that, holding it up to the light, smelling it, touching it. It made her so happy, Josh tore off another piece of sheet and wrote ‘Meli’ on it in flowing script. He handed this second scrap to her and said: “This is your name.”
She held it gingerly, lest it break. The wind whipped up the lights once more, then let them down slowly. Muffled laughter floated up from downstairs. Meli pressed the two cloths gently together, then looked back at Josh. “I’ll help you find your tree,” she said. “What do the thieves look like?”
Back to the hunt. Josh felt his muscles tauten once more. “One is an Accident,” he said, “and he’s wounded. I know he’s here somewhere. He was with a Griffin and a Vampire, but they split up. He might be meeting them here or somewhere else.”
She scrunched her face. “I haven’t seen any Accidents.”
Josh found himself so profoundly sleepy he had trouble keeping his eyes open. He sat down on the bed.
Meli went on. “But there was a Vampire and a Griffin here before, just waiting around too; they didn’t want to dance…”
The press of sleep became overpowering and Josh closed his eyes. Meli’s voice was getting farther and farther away.
“They said they couldn’t wait, but they went to room…”
Everything faded into blackness, without sound, without direction, without substance. At the end of the blackness, an intensely bright, infinitely distant spot of light arose. Distant but evocative, like the memory of perfume. The light exerted a pressure, only it was a negative pressure, a kind of suction, teasing Joshua through the endlessly unfolding black ether…
Beauty reached into his quiver, pulled two silver coins out of the pouch and handed them to the Equiman whore. She took the money and tied it into a loop in her tail.
“Now tell me where the Accident is,” said Beauty.
She put her finger to her lips and motioned him in closer. He leaned his head down to hers and put his ear to her mouth. With an unexpectedly swift stroke, she brought a plank down on the side of his head. He heard rather than felt the blow, but reflexively stumbled out the door of the stall.
She followed him, yelling. “Dirty bounty killer, filthy scummy parasite,” she screamed, whacking at his loins.
He stumbled and then got up. Animals were coming out of their stalls to watch. Beauty felt a rivulet of warm, thick blood flow down the side of his face. He saw the old man approaching and reared up to defend himself. The old man walked right past him though, grabbed the raging Equiman by the wrist and knocked her unconscious with one reluctant punch.
Beauty quieted down. The old man came up to him. “Sorry about that, mister. She goes kinda crazy sometimes. Her old man was killed by bounty hunters. You better go.” He handed the Centaur his money back.
Beauty trotted out of the barn and sat in the grass fifty yards away. His head hurt, but the fresh air cleared his mind.
It was a good lesson. He was a hunter, not a detective. Houses, walls, or cities were not for him. Besides which, he’d been too trusting in the stable, too unwary.
He lay back, let the cool rising breeze dry the blood on his head. Time to sit and wait and watch. He could do more with his senses in an open field than in any barn or brothel.
He let his eyes and ears accommodate to the night, and set a vigil.
Josh opened his eyes. No more sleep hunger, no burning hypnotic light. He lay on his back in the half-dark room, trying to remember where he was. He turned and almost rolled over on Meli, lying quietly beside him. At his movement she jumped, sat up straight, and hugged him happily.
“Oh, you’re alive,” she breathed, “I was so scared.”
“What happened?”
“You went down, you looked dead, I got so scared, I didn’t know what, you didn’t
