“All right then.” Will coughed nervously. “Can everybody hear me?”
They had pulled the wagon over to the side of the road against the trees of a small wood. Will stood on its boards, feeling as if he’d been backed up against a wall. Before him more than three hundred faces looked up from a scrubby wheat field, where they were busy trampling the crops. Lette, Balur, and Quirk stood to one side of the wagon, attention divided between him and the crowd. They still did not look particularly ready to leap to his rescue.
He searched the crowd for Firkin, picked him out near the back. The old man was clutching a ceramic jug and swigging deeply. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his beard swung back and forth as he tipped back the jug and swallowed. When he came back up for air, his eyes were on Will. He offered a friendly wave.
He spent almost all his time with the crowd now. Preaching the word of the prophet. Not that he ever spoke to Will to find out what the word actually was. Will was often as surprised to find out his own edicts as anyone. It seemed one of his main ones was to keep Firkin rolling in alcohol.
He wondered if Lette could hit Firkin with a knife from here. Probably. He just wasn’t sure she’d do it if he asked her right now.
He still liked her. That was the stupid thing. Lette was in so many ways a terrible human being. Quick to both anger and violence. Focused almost wholly on her own personal gain.
Yet there was something else—almost someone else—lurking behind all that. Someone who was even quicker with a jibe than she was with a knife.
They had been riding together in the wagon, two days after leaving Mattrax’s cave. Balur was pacing a quarter mile ahead, still in a fury over the crowd following them. Quirk and Firkin had been back with the flock, both ministering in their separate ways.
“What are you going to do with it?” Will had asked.
“With what?”
He had thumbed back at the gold, and she had pushed loose strands of hair behind her ears, ducking her head while she did it. There had been something strangely unguarded about the moment.
“I don’t know,” she had said after a second’s hesitation.
He hadn’t expected that. She seemed so certain of herself in everything else she did. “You haven’t ever dreamed of what you’d do?”
She had shrugged, deflected the question. “Have you?”
It had been Will’s turn to pause. “I don’t know,” he had started to say, but that hadn’t been entirely true, and it had seemed like they were being very honest then. “I mean I have. But when I did dream about wealth it was always about my parents’ farm. I’d put it back into that. Invest it in crops and animals. So it was profitable. Not just a way to get by. A real farm. What my parents always wanted it to be.”
“What about now?” Lette had been looking off down the meandering path ahead, at the bumps and ruts, and the eventual blind turn into the unknown.
“I don’t know. I haven’t really had time to think about it since I lost the farm. I was just focused on taking it away from Mattrax, not really on having it myself.”
“I’ll take your share if you don’t want it.” She still hadn’t been looking at him, but a smile had played at the corners of her lips.
“You don’t know what to do with it either.”
She had tossed her head, ponytail flapping. “I’ll melt your share down, make statues of myself, and put them up in every town square.”
“Classy.”
“Oh, they’ll be vile things. Big and gaudy and studded with the biggest jewels. But I’ll make sure the face is very accurate. So it’s recognizably me. And no one will know where they come from, but everyone will assume it’s someone very important. And then when I show up in towns they’ll all recognize me from the statue.”
“Will you be studded with gaudy jewels as well?” He had leaned back, listening to the unexpected pleasure of her rambling.
“Indubitably.”
He had almost laughed out loud at that, but he hadn’t wanted to break the flow.
“I will have to,” she had gone on, “to be sure they recognize me.”
“What then?”
“Well, they’ll all say to each other, it’s that woman from the statues, she must be very important. And they’ll do whatever I say, because they don’t want to find out what happens when they don’t. And they’ll bring me whatever I want. And I won’t have to spend a penny ever again.”
He had started laughing before she did, but only by a second.
Now she stood stony-faced, staring down the crowd. For their part, they all ignored her. They only had eyes for him.
“You can all hear me?” he checked again. None of the people who couldn’t hear him heard the question, so there was no response. He hadn’t really been expecting one. He was stalling again.
“Erm…” he started. He should have written something down. But he’d put that off too. Until it was too late. Until it was now.
“So, it’s come to my attention,” he went on. It was how his father had started all his stern lectures.
So, it has come to my attention that you punted a chicken halfway across the yard.
So, it has come to my attention you’re unable to tell your arse from your elbow.
So, it has come to my attention your mother caught you investigating your burgeoning manhood.
Yes, that was exactly what he needed to be thinking about…
“So, it has come to my attention”—he tried to strengthen his voice, his resolve—“that some of you are under the impression that I am a prophet. That I killed Mattrax. That—”
His words were lost in a hail of cheering and whooping. People leapt up and down in front of him. They were screaming. He could literally see a man crying. Hands reached out toward him, and the crowd pressed in at the base of the wagon. He took anxious steps back from the edge, stumbling on the sacks of gold. A piece of white cloth sailed out of the crowd and landed on his face. He tugged it off. It was a pair of women’s underwear.
“What are you doing?” he asked them. They ignored him completely.
“Stop!” he yelled as loud as he was able. “You have to listen to me.”
They did not. They went on for another full five minutes before they calmed enough to hear his cries. He looked at Lette—she had taken a step back behind Balur’s protective bulk. She was right. He had left this for far, far too long.
“I said,” Will said, his voice hoarse from yelling, “that you thought that I killed Mattrax.”
Another wave of whooping broke out through the crowd. Will held up his hands, desperate for silence.
“We don’t just think,” broke out a voice from the crowd. “We know.”
“Why we’re here,” shouted another.
“Prophet! Prophet! Prophet!” The chant broke out in isolated pockets throughout the crowd. Will hung his head.
“I am not a prophet,” Will said as loud as he could, voice full of frustration and disgust. He stared at his own feet. Dust and mud flicked up from the road had spattered his shoes. The wooden boards beneath them were worn and chipped.
Silence fell upon them. He looked up.
Oh, now they chose to bloody hear him.
The gaze of the crowd had changed. It was no longer the stare of a girl gazing into her young lover’s eyes; rather it was the gaze of that girl discovering her young lover with his pants down and her sister knelt before him.
Will swallowed hard. In the crowd, a murmur of discontent arose, drifting off into the autumnal sky. It brewed and bubbled, gaining in volume.
Will cleared his throat, and failed to think of something else to say. He checked for escape routes. Surrounded on all sides, they did not appear to be plentiful.
“No,” arose a voice from the middle of the crowd. “He ain’t no prophet.”
The crowd echoed this dissension. The murmur becoming physical, a shudder running through the bodies surrounding him.
“What you say?” A voice from elsewhere. It threatened violence.
“He ain’t a prophet,” insisted the dissenter.
“Well…” Will started.
“He’s a god!” shouted the dissenter.
Will’s jaw dropped. He tried to get out the word “no!” but was unable to do it before the crowd erupted.
“No! No!” he screamed too late, but the crowd had gone back to not listening again. He looked down at Lette. She was shaking her head. Balur was massaging his forehead. Quirk just stared, utterly perplexed.
This time, he thought they would break the cart. It creaked under the pressure of the hysteria. Much like his sanity. He looked out at them, hopeless. “I’m not a god,” he said quietly. “I’m just an idiot who got himself arse deep in all of this shit.”
A small boy had worked his way to the front of the crowd. He stood at the edge of the cart staring up at Will. And despite the chaos all around him, he alone had caught Will’s words. As Will stared down, the boy stared up and their eyes met. Will watched those eyes as all the hope and joy drained away. He saw those eyes fill with horror and despair.
He glanced away, looked to Lette. She was shaking her head, staring at the crowd in disgust.
Will look back at the boy. The child’s bottom lip was quivering now. Will forced a smile from somewhere deep in the back of his throat up onto his face.
“No,” he breathed and shook his head. “It’s okay. I’m a prophet if you need one.”
The boy hesitated, then grinned. Will looked away.