boxing ring, some big black horses of apparently exceptional quality. . . . And when, two days out of Barrett, the caravan reached the top of yet another nameless hill, and the rolling plains were spread out below, in all their dusty rugged beauty, he came up beside her and said, “Gonna be sorry to see you go.”
She lowered her fan and looked at him in surprise. “We’re not there yet, Mr. Bond. Are we?”
He pointed west, down the valley of a meandering stream. “Just one day more to Conant. See?”
She didn’t see what he was pointing at. Everything in this country looked the same to her.
“Conant,” Bond said. An odd note of apology in his gruff voice. “Last stop. Then we turn back.”
“And Maggfrid and I go on to Gloriana.”
Bond spat. “Fucking Line.” He looked over to where Maggfrid—who couldn’t ride—sat on the back of a wagon, eyes closed, head resting drowsily on his chest. “Sorry to lose that one, too. He’s earned his passage.”
Bond’s men had at first not taken to Maggfrid—some of them teased him, some of them considered him bad luck. But then Maggfrid distinguished himself in defense of the caravan against Hillfolk attack, and after that they adored him; the more superstitious crewmen kept shaking his hand for good luck, which he thought was a great game. . . .
The attack had come when they were two days out of Monroe Town, as the caravan made its way down a high-sided valley that was strewn not only with rocks and brambles, which were bad enough, but also with bales of old rusted barbed wire, scattered like a mockery of vegetation.
“Linesmen leave it,” Bond said. “The wire. There was a battle here some thirty years ago. They put this stuff round their camps, for defense. Then it just rusts, forever.”
“Thirty years ago. That was when the Line was fighting the Red Valley Republic?”
The Child’s History of the West was full of lengthy accounts of the Republic’s battles against the Line—a progression of victories that Liv doubted were so glorious or so easy as the General made them sound. She couldn’t keep the details straight.
Bond shook his head. “That was south of here, and west. Republic never got out as far as us. This here was just some stupid local thing. Conant declared for Gun; Line came out here to show them what that meant. That was when they built Gloriana.”
“Who won?”
“Who do you think? Line always wins.”
The coils of wire had to be moved off the trail with long poles and ropes before the caravan could safely pass. They drifted slowly but ceaselessly back into place as if some fragment of the Engines’ relentless will still was in them. It was hot and frustrating work. The hands of Liv’s golden watch turned slowly.
The Folk attacked at sunset, while the men were still working.
There were half a dozen of them, tall angular shapes suddenly standing on the hillside, charging helter-skelter down, long legs springing and bending in odd ways. They didn’t speak or call out. They rustled and clattered. Their black beards and manes streamed out behind them as they ran. They threw stones and scared the horses, and one of Bond’s men fell backwards, screaming into a tangle of wire. Shouting “Form up, form up, wake the fuck up!” Bond drew his pistol and fired. . . .
Liv crouched under a wagon and watched. The Folk closed on the caravan at once. They didn’t seem at all afraid of Bond’s pistol. Most of Bond’s men were armed with shovels or poles or picks, and they swung wildly at the attackers, whose emaciated bone-white bodies were like springs; they bounced and spun and dodged. The shadows concealed them; the dust they kicked up blurred Liv’s vision. She saw long arms snap out and snatch picks from Bond’s men’s hands, she saw long white fingers close around Bond’s pistol and tear it away. Their bodies were painted or perhaps etched in glittering bloodred designs—abstract, mathematical—spinning and whirling. They kicked and lunged and knocked men in the dirt. On spiderlike legs, one of them crouched down by Liv’s hiding place, and then deep red eyes were staring into hers, steady, unblinking, as if fascinated by her.
She froze. Beneath the red eyes there was a long nose, oddly angled, as if not broken but formed according to a looser plan. Beneath the nose there was a wide mouth, which opened wider, as if it was about to say something to