The next day they met the flies. Met, fought, and were resolutely defeated by, despite the salve, which smelled of pine needles and cat urine and kept the enormous flies from biting but not from swarming around one’s eyes and mouth and crawling inside one’s collar. While they rested the swaybacked old horse at midday, he watched Cary fashion a fringe for his hat, tying bits of bark to long blades of grass then threading the grass through holes he had punched in the brim with his knife. It gave him the look of a beaded lamp-shade, but he seemed to be spitting out fewer flies.
“You doing alright?” Cary asked when they were moving again, speaking low under the creak of the wagon and incessant cursing of the boys.
“I’m fine.”
“I worried you might have had a rough night, is all.”
“I don’t need you coddling me.” That it was true only cut harder, for when Jaime had at last fallen asleep it had been to dream of the tunnel, the flood. He had awoken panting and drenched to the skin. Every step northward took them closer to danger. A danger he could not see, as though he still groped through that subterranean canal, waiting for an unimaginable death to swallow him whole.
“It’s not coddling to want to help you,” Cary grumbled.
“You’re not meant to help me. You’re meant to keep me from running away.”
“Where would you go?”
“Compared to this death march? I’d take my chances.”
“Go on then,” Cary said, his hard face unchanged, so that Jaime had no sense if he was at all serious. “If you’re so sure of yourself.”
“Come with me.”
He grunted, lowering his grim brow. “I can’t.”
“Then help me destroy him.”
“Don’t try.”
“Would you stop me?”
“If I had to.”
“You’ll protect me from his violence, make sure I’m fed, show me every kindness but this.”
“It’s not kindness you’re asking of me.”
The convoy jolted to a halt as the wheel struck another deep furrow, for the mud from yesterday’s rain still lay thick on the road. While the others heaved and ho’d, trying to roll the wagon out of the rut, Jaime quietly tested his newest skill. Early this morning, he’d pulled the water from a fresh green leaf, watching it shrink then curl then crumble to powder in his hand. He brought the same focus of mind to the muck beneath the wagon’s wheels, willing the moisture to boil itself into vapour and dissipate.
“By God, boys, that’s got it!” Patrice cried as the wagon jerked forward out of the drying crevice. “Can’t wait to get off these dirty old roads and onto the water.”
“The what?” Sandover had been standing on the roadside, swatting away the flies with his closed fan, and now grabbed Patrice’s sleeve. “What do you mean, water?”
“It’s all downstream from here, Mr. Sandpiper, once we get to Lake Simcoe.”
“You told me we were going overland!”
“What do you think we’re doing right now, Mr. Silky Pants?”
Trembling with rage, Sandover let go of the man’s arm and raised his clawed hand, ready to strike. Paused, then clenched his hand into a fist, his eyes pinching closed as he muttered under his breath.
“What’s that now?”
“None of your damned business.”
“What hold does he have over you?” Jaime asked Cary as a fuming Sandover stomped away.
“It’s not him,” he replied, shoulders moving like two boulders trying to climb over each other. “It’s the man he serves. All of this is on his orders.”
“Whose orders?”
“The duke’s.”
“Which duke?”
“Dunno. Didn’t much feel like asking at the time. Was doing my best not to cack my drawers in fright.”
“He frightened you?
His voice dropped to a subterranean drone, his words chilling. “There’s something unholy about that man. And I’ve met some wicked men. Sandover’s as much his slave as we are.”
“What does he want?”
“Power, like all men who already have too much. I don’t know how this venture serves his cause, but you can bet that’s what he’s after. More power.”
“We can’t let them control us.”
“I have no choice. But I’ll do all I can to protect you.”
“If Sandover wants me dead you won’t be able to stop him.”
“He doesn’t want you dead. You’re too useful.”
“Please, Cary. Tell me what he wants from me.”
“If you knew, would it make a difference?”
Yes, and no. Yes, because he wished to be forewarned. No, because he was bound to this adventure, whether he wished to be or not, and knowing what awaited wouldn’t diminish its danger.
“By God, boys, did you see that?” Gordo cried, grabbing the nearest horse’s halter to stop the wagon. He pointed along the path a householder had cleared through the pine woods.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est? Show me, buddy,” Patrice said, squinting along Gordo’s quivering arm.
“There in them bushes.”
Stroking his beard, Patrice gasped. “Could it be a saskahach?”
“Is that some kind of animal?” Jaime asked.
“He means sasquatch,” Gordo said as Patrice went to whisper in Cesar’s ear. “Big hairy man thing, lives in woods just like this. We seen one last year. A right hairy bastard he was too. I’ll be damned if I didn’t just see one off there in them bushes.”
“If such a thing happened to exist,” Sandover droned, “you couldn’t possibly see it at this distance with those lantern-glass eyes.”
“You don’t know what them eyes have seen,” Patrice said.
“Not a damned thing, I expect.”
“That’s where you might be wrong there, Mr. Fancy Coat and Shoes,” Gordo said, plucking at the shoulder of Sandover’s satin coat. “There’s things in these woods you don’t want to be looking at with your regular people eyes.”
He smacked Gordo’s hand away. ‘I know where I’d start,” he gritted.
“What’s that you say?”
“I said can we keep on?”
The going was slow on the rough road and they reached Holland Landing late in the evening. From here they would travel up the river to Lake Simcoe. Though the boys had planned to continue by boat to Georgian Bay, Sandover had asked, then insisted forcibly, that they journey overland from a town on the northwest shore, taking what appeared on the map to be a much shorter route than the riverways, a ‘portage’ of less than twenty miles across lightly settled country.
They pitched tents with several other groups of travelers on a grassy pitch not far from the small dockyard. Sandover had done his disappearing act while the others were still setting up camp. If Jaime ever saw Voight again, that non-man in human form who worked for Adrian, he would ask if Sandover was anything like him, able to step out of the world and into another.
Thoughts of his friend—not of Voight, who was a faceless void in a top hat, who was not, but of Adrian, sensible, sensitive, generous Adrian—churned in Jaime’s hollow heart. Did he know about Jaime’s abduction? Was he even now leading a magical army in pursuit, or was this duke powerful enough to interfere in the laws of their world? Jaime’s world, like it or not, for he was bound up in this wretched business as long as he remained in Sandover’s control.
Being an active trading port the little town was lively, with several public houses spread between the two main intersections of the northbound road. Seated with the crew at a pair of tables in the side room of a busy tavern, he accepted a bowl of fish and corn soup from the shared tureen. Gordo sat across from him, his jaw working rapidly. His eyes swiveling, he drew an inch long fishbone from between his lips.
“Don’t want to be swallowing that,” he said, flicking the bone onto the muddy floor where a passing foot immediately trod it into the muck.
“Did you really see a creature in the woods today?” Jaime asked as Gordo went back to scraping his bowl clean.
“I seen something. And believe you me, there’s plenty out there to see.”
“Monsters?”
“The sasquatch, he’s no monster. Least I don’t think of him as such. Sometimes if you’re out in the woods by yourself too much, you forget how to be around people, but I know there’s a man under all that hair of his.”
“What if it was a bear you saw?”
“What if it was? There’s stinking big bears all around, and wolves and coyotes and you name it. So don’t be wandering off, Mr. Town and City. You don’t need to sneak off into them woods to hide what you and your big friend do.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Gordo blew out a breath through his lips. “As long as you know, your secret’s safe with us.”
“What secret?”
“You and the big fella.”
“I don’t understand.”
Gordo exhaled again, his eyes wheeling. “You and him are sharing a tent tonight, aren’t yas? So? Why’s that?”
“Because that’s all there was and there’s no room for a third person and…oh. You think we’re lovers.”
Gordo’s big eyes swelled even more. “Sacrebleu…” he muttered through his teeth. “If you’re just gonna come out and say it—”
“We’re not, though.”
“You don’t need to lie.”
“I’m not lying. He’s nothing to me.”
“If you say so.”
“You know what he is to me? My jailor.” Needing to get away from this reeking tavern, these baseless beliefs, he pushed aside his uneaten soup and stood up. The man sitting behind him stirred then got to his feet as well. Cary, whose face showed no sign of having heard, though he couldn’t have missed a word. He followed Jaime outside.
“Must you be at me night and day?” Jaime jammed his clammy hands in his pockets to keep from gathering any more dew as they walked.
“It’s my job” he replied. “And are we not on the same side anymore?”
“There are no sides. We’re all victims of that cursed duke of yours.”
“Then why are we at odds?”
“You tell me.”
“You think I’ve been telling people we’re sodomites?”
“Someone has been.”
“People see what they want to see.”
“Maybe if you weren’t stuck to me like a bad smell they’d have nothing to see.”
The boys had provided themselves a pair of army tents, broad, sturdy structures with a high ridge pole so one might stand up inside. The third tent was that in miniature, so low Cary had to crawl to get in.
“They haven’t made this easy,” he grunted, turning over onto his rump to reach for his boot laces.
“You’ll be sleeping half on top of me,” Jaime said, surveying the narrow strip of bedroll not covered by Cary’s bulk.
“Better get used to it, there’ll be a lot of nights like this.”
“Don’t say that so loudly or they really will think we’re lovers.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Cary muttered. “I’d not have you for love or money.”
“Like I’d let you lay a finger on me, you benighted lump of clay. And shove over.”
“There’s nowhere to go.”
Except anywhere else in the world. Into the wilderness, to live or die as he might, away from this grinding alienation, the knowledge that he would always be alone.