"El Camino," Chapter Six

[ This is Chapter Six in an ongoing, improvised prose story about three adventurers trying to find their way after the head of their party has died, as well as trying to get paid from a town full of miserable racists. Chapter One; Chapter Two; Chapter Three; Chapter Four; Chapter Five. ]

[ 83% of voters decided that The Party should leave Cherry Springs and let the town defend itself against whatever toothy goblin-fate was coming for it. ]

- - - - - - - - - - -

CHAPTER SIX

As Eyman left the Steward’s office, he noticed the weight of the front door. It was insubstantial, as far as those things go. It wouldn’t hold up against more than one and a half goblins, though goblins were more likely to come up through the crawlspace or scurry through a smashed window.

Eyman and his brothers each carried a satchel: one full with cash, one of their own rightful belongings, and a third full of things that did not belong to them, but certainly didn’t belong to the Steward, either. They left the loose currency, minus what the Steward had promised them for their work. Outside, now, a ring of the town’s men inched toward the office like worms.

The Traveller’s headlight was still marred by goblin blood, Eyman noticed on his way down the steps. He ought to do something about that. It was getting late in the day; that headlight would be useful soon.

As the adventurers had just subdued and restrained four men, then reclaimed the personal valuables that those men had stolen from fellow adventurers, Faris tried not to sound too buoyant when he called, “shotgun.” Susa—who was due a turn in the front—only looked at him with the sort of knit brow that said, “you know better,” and indeed Faris did. Faris conceded, but before he could leap into the back, Eyman tossed him the keys and told him to drive.

“Stop for gas, though,” Eyman said, finding a perch in the back.

As The Traveller roared to life, the ring of townsmen parted. After all, they didn’t want to have their own blood pasted across a headlight, as the goblin’s had been.

Half way down the street, to one side, there was a service station. Faris steered into it, and Eyman asked him to stop near the water pump. Susa got out to buy gas from the attendant. Faris stayed behind the wheel with the engine running, just in case. The ring of worms had re-centred around them, closing in on the growling crocodile of The Traveller.

Eyman tested the water pump. Nearby stood the town’s only tree, though Eyman barely recognized it as such. Its bark peeled too much, and the way the trunk turned at sharp angles, the way half the branches had been removed, whoever had been tasked with its care had done lazy, unthinking things. It was as little like a tree as a tree could be and seemed so un-alive that Eyman assumed the pump would be dry.

But the pump lived. After a few squeaky clanks, Eyman had soaked a grotty towel, the grottiest they had, reserved for the grottiest jobs.

As he blotted and scrubbed at the gummy stuff caking the headlight, the town’s men settled nearby. They stopped two car-lengths from The Traveller, surrounding it like waves on the shore of a desert island. Eyman eyed them up. He saw suspicion in their faces, of course, and distaste, and wariness. The stern watchfulness of a dog guarding its property. Here and there, fear. Some let it show more clearly than others. Curiosity, too, in those men over there. One bent down to see what he could see of The Traveller’s undercarriage. Fair enough—they mostly saw motor mules and pickups around here.

There was a child, too. Sitting on a nearby porch railing, stretching to see. Then, two more, at the outside of the ring. They were with their mother, also come to observe.

Who would those children become, Eyman wondered. Would they grow crooked, like the tree? A strange feeling crept into his heart: he wanted to rescue them. That was, of course, what Ranulf had done for him, his brother, and Susa. Eyman liked who he had become, he liked his life, and he liked his brothers—Ranulf’s choice had turned out so well for them, had saved them—so for a moment, he could not imagine how he could be faulted, if he were to spirit these children away. What would their families be able to do for them in the face of a goblin swarm?

There was another child in the window of a building across the street. And a small gang of them, joining the ring, aping the belligerent postures they saw on the grown men. Eyman’s heart sagged. He felt helpless. He could not heroically steal them all away to safety—they would not all fit in The Traveller—and he did not know what else he could offer. His toolkit was not suited to this problem, he knew. He was good with a sword and could guide The Traveller fast through the worst terrain. He could hike for three days straight without sleeping and stay steady on his feet. He could identify at a glance four hundred and thirty-one distinct trees and shrubs. He could tell you the week of the year based solely on the smell of the air. But what good would this expertise do for the dozen scraggly children who would—assuming they survived the goblins—grow up in the angry, greedy lap of this town?

Ranulf’s voice rose in his head, chastising him for being too sentimental, saying, “all men were children once. Some still are.”

Eyman clenched his jaw, ground his teeth together. They should not have taken this job. He or Ranulf or Susa or Faris—one of them, at least—should have foreseen the consequences, the way they would only draw the swarm back here. Instead, they had taken too much pride in achieving a task that seemed more and more difficult, the more they learned. They had crouched in a thicket, surveying the goblin camp, seeing the cruel eyes and the sharp teeth, so much more numerous than they had been told to anticipate. But they were all of a mind that they had promised to do a thing, so they would do the thing, and they would do it properly. In the process, Ranulf had died, and now there was the town worry about.

Susa had returned, laden with wicker-wrapped fuel canisters.

Eyman blinked free from all the unfixables. He asked Susa, “how was it?” Meaning, how much did you have to over-pay?

“Not good,” said Susa. But they had expected that. Susa emptied their existing spare fuel into the tank, replacing the stored canisters with the fresh fuel.

The headlight was clean. Eyman threw the grotty towel into a trash bin (or, at least, he assumed it was a trash bin—it was hard to tell what was trash and what was not in Cherry Springs), and he climbed into the back.

Standing, Eyman announced to the ring of townspeople, “you should expect a goblin assault.”

No one responded.

“You’ll need to defend yourself,” he said.

“Where’s the Steward?” someone shouted.

“The Steward is fine,” Eyman said, gesturing up the street, to the office.

“Where is he,” demanded another, idiotically.

“I said he’s fine,” Eyman repeated. “Look—”

“They killed him,” another voice interrupted.

“We didn’t—” Eyman sputtered. A fog of irrational nonsense was rising; mundane, invisible sorcery. He blinked free. “Look, you should prepare for goblins. The Steward has a large chest of coin in his office. It doesn’t belong to him and it doesn’t belong to you.” It didn’t belong to Eyman or his brothers, either, which is why—despite the temptation—they had left it. “If I were you, I’d set it aside to give to the goblins if they show up. Maybe—maybe—you can buy their forgiveness.”

The ring snorted at Eyman, swore at him. One lean man in overalls broke from the ring and sprinted toward the Steward’s office. Eyman wouldn’t have thought anyone in the town could move that fast. Three others tripped over themselves to chase after. Did they intend to check the other man, or would each one fight the others to claim the chest for himself?

“Come on,” Faris said to Eyman, through the window. He was sympathetic to what Eyman was doing, but it was time to go.

Eyman sat. Faris shifted into reverse and The Traveller rumbled back out into the street, but slowly, so the crowd had time to part once more. The people’s voices rose around them. The crowd believed the warning; or it didn’t; or Eyman was a liar, or filth; or, “go swallow a bed post;” or someone was still saying the Steward had been killed. Some of the children looked at the adventurers with hate in their eyes. Secretly, Eyman wanted—he silently begged—to hear someone say, “stay and help us,” but no one did.

The Traveller growled its way up the street and past the Steward’s office. The flimsy front door swung on its hinges. There was no sign as to what was happening inside, though Eyman suspected the men were in the process of aggressively ignoring the good advice he had given them.

The Party camped among the shadows half way up a nearby hill, within sight of the town but hidden by a lip. Eyman wanted to see what would happen. All three of them agreed to stay four days—no longer—and to help the town if they must.

First, the town set up a barricade along the road, as if goblins and their tiny, miserable, scurrying feet would care about a barricade. Then they started to build a perimeter fence. Eyman saw them pull siding from buildings to do it. Perhaps the Steward had convinced them of the threat in a way he never could have. Eyman hung his head and chuckled sadly to himself when he saw someone circle the fence, hanging flags of the local lord at regular intervals, as if that could possibly mean anything at all to a goblin eye.

As he sat and watched, the past days’ feelings of need and immediacy sloughed off Eyman, replaced by thoughts of Ranulf. He missed Ranulf. Specifically, he missed the reassurance that the older man would offer at times like these. Eyman wanted to know he had made the right choices, that he had acted appropriately. He felt he had—as best he could—and intellectually he knew that Ranulf was no more an arbiter of what was right and wrong than he would be himself, or than his brothers would be, but still: he wanted it. He wanted to laugh the way he always had when the old man said “phew” and goggled his eyes wide when he knew they were in the clear. He saw the creases around the old man’s eyes. His wiry beard. His one blackened thumbnail and roughened hands, his hands, his hands.

On the third day, the town chopped down its only tree, for fence stuff.

By the end of the fourth day, no goblins had appeared. The Party pulled up camp and climbed into The Traveller. Eyman took the wheel once more.

Originally, they had intended to head west after Cherry Springs, but now Eyman drove east, back the way they had come. They had fuel to spare and were not short on coin. Eyman skirted the town, turning his visor to shield his eyes from the curious guard lamps, then rejoining the Rust Shelf road. He carried on past the spot where the coyote had snatched up the hare, past the T-junction, up into the hills. He was looking for a spot he remembered, where the rain was washing out the road. When he found it, he turned the car around. It was the perfect place to start laying down new tracks. Following their old wheel ruts as best he could, Eyman doubled back once more toward Cherry Springs. When he reached the T-junction, where the road split off north toward the Gristle Hills, he turned, taking the new road. This way, Eyman imagined, if the goblins had any interest in tracking The Traveller, there was at least some chance the swarm would follow them toward the Gristle Hills and leave Cherry Springs alone. He didn’t care to guess what that chance might be, but it seemed like the least The Party could do, all things considered. The Swarm Master’s head was still in a box in the back, and he figured the wretched smell it trailed behind them would help lure the swarm. Faris trickled slop on the road behind them, just to make sure.

Briefly, Eyman had considered revisiting the place where they had buried Ranulf, but it seemed hard to justify. Every kilometre east would have increased the likelihood that they run into goblins themselves, and what would be the point, really? Ranulf would always travel with them. The Traveller was his—it was almost him. Susa hung the folded paper dragon from the rear-view mirror. They joked that the reason they had not seen any goblins was because Ranulf had brought the spruce sapling to life; his beard had grown into the roots, they became the size of dragon tails and burst from the ground, sending snow into the air, snatching every last goblin that passed his way, choking them, taking his vengeance. With this thought to warm him, riding in the back, Faris drew a blanket around himself.

They drove toward the Gristle Hills without a clear destination in their collective mind. They had Rulles’ tinderbox, though… perhaps his next of kin might like to receive it. More importantly, someone might be curious to learn what had happened to Rulles, what the Steward of Cherry Springs had lured him into. They had met Rulles to the north-east, so even if they weren’t heading in the right direction, they weren’t heading wrong. They might find out who had owned all these other things, too—the spyglass, the tobacco tin, the jewelled canisters—and deliver them home, as well.

Night settled across Pristine Valley and the tail lights of The Traveller shone like two red, watchful eyes, rising against the black shape of the hills. They took a bend, and were gone.

- - - - - - - - - - -

This is the final chapter of this "El Camino" story. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it (quite a bit, actually), and thank you to everyone who voted to steer the course.