‘If hell has clouds,’ muttered Temple, ‘they look like that one.’ It was a grey-black mountain on the horizon, a dark tower boiling into the very heavens, making of the sun a feeble smudge and staining the sky about it strange, warlike colours. Every time Temple checked it was closer. All the endless, shelterless Far Country to cast into shadow and where else would it go but directly over his head? Truly, he exerted an uncanny magnetism on anything dangerous.
‘Let’s get these fires lit and back to the wagons!’ he called, as though some planks and canvas would be sure protection against the impending fury of the skies. The wind was not helping with the task. Nor did the drizzle, when it began to fall a moment later. Nor did the rain that came soon after that, whipping from everywhere at once, cutting through Temple’s threadbare coat as if he was wearing nothing. He bent cursing over his little heap of cow-leavings, dissolving rapidly in his wet hands into their original, more fragrant state while he fumbled with a smouldering stick of wood.
‘Ain’t much fun trying to set fire to wet shit, is it?’ shouted Leef.
‘I’ve had better jobs!’ Though the same sense of distasteful futility had applied to most of them, now Temple considered it.
He heard hooves and saw Shy swing from her saddle, hat clasped to her head. She had to come close and shout over the rising wind and Temple found himself momentarily distracted by her shirt, which had stuck tight to her with wet and come open a button, showing a small tanned triangle of skin below her throat and a paler one around it, sharp lines of her collarbones faintly glistening, perhaps just the suggestion of—
‘I said, where’s the herd?’ she bellowed in his face.
‘Er…’ Temple jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Might be a mile behind us!’
‘Storm was making ’em restless.’ Leef ’s eyes were narrowed against the wind, or possibly at Temple, it was hard to say which.
‘Buckhorm was worried they might scatter. He sent us to light some fires around the camp.’ Temple pointed out the crescent of nine or ten they had managed to set a flame to before the rain came. ‘Maybe steer the herd away if they panic!’ Though their smouldering efforts did not look capable of diverting a herd of lambs. The wind was blowing up hard, ripping the smoke from the fires and off across the plain, making the long grass thrash, dragging the dancing seed heads out in waves and spirals. ‘Where’s Sweet?’
‘No telling. We’ll have to work this one out ourselves.’ She dragged him up by his wet coat. ‘You’ll get no more fires lit in this! We need to get back to the wagons!’
The three of them struggled through what was now lashing rain, stung and buffeted by gusts, Shy tugging her nervous horse by the bridle. A strange gloom had settled over the plain and they scarcely saw the wagons until they stumbled upon them in a mass, folk tugging desperately at oxen, trying to hobble panicked horses and tether snapping livestock or wrestling with their own coats or oilskins, turned into thrashing adversaries by the wind.
Ashjid stood in the midst, eyes bulging with fervour, sinewy arms stretched up to the pouring heavens, the Fellowship’s idiot kneeling at his feet, the whole like a sculpture of some martyred Prophet. ‘There is no running from the sky!’ he was shrieking, finger outstretched. ‘There is no hiding from God! God is always watching!’
It seemed to Temple he was that most dangerous kind of priest—one who really believes. ‘Have you ever noticed that God is wonderful at watching,’ he called, ‘but quite poor when it comes to helping out?’
‘We got bigger worries than that fool and his idiot,’ snapped Shy. ‘Got to get the wagons closed up—if the herd charges through here there’s no telling what’ll happen!’
The rain was coming in sheets now, Temple was as wet as if he had been dunked in the bath. His first in several weeks, come to think of it. He saw Corlin, teeth gritted and her hair plastered to her skull, struggling with ropes as she tried to get some snapping canvas lashed. Lamb was near her, heavy shoulder set to a wagon and straining as if he might move it on his own. He even was, a little. Then a couple of bedraggled Suljuks jumped in beside him and between them got it rolling. Luline Buckhorm was lifting her children up into a wagon and Temple went to help them, scraping the hair from his eyes.
‘Repent!’ shrieked Ashjid. ‘This is no storm, this is the wrath of God!’
Savian dragged him close by his torn robe. ‘This is a storm. Keep talking and I’ll show you the wrath of God!’ And he flung the old man on the ground.
‘We need to get…’ Shy’s mouth went on but the wind stole her words. She tugged at Temple and he staggered after, no more than a few steps but they might as well have been miles. It was black as night, water coursing down his face, and he was shivering with cold and fear, hands helplessly dangling. He turned, bearings suddenly fled and panic gripping him.
Which way were the wagons? Where was Shy?
One of his fires still smouldered nearby, sparks showering out into the dark, and he tottered towards it. The wind came up like a door slamming on him and he pushed and struggled, grappling at it like one drunkard with another. Then, suddenly, a sharper trickster than he, it came at him the other way and bowled him over, left him thrashing in the grass, Ashjid’s mad shrieking echoing in his ears, calling on God to smite the unbeliever.
Seemed harsh. You can’t just choose to believe, can you?
He crawled on hands and knees, hardly daring to stand in case he was whisked into the sky and dashed down in some distant place, bones left to bleach on earth that had never known men’s footsteps. A flash split the darkness, raindrops frozen streaks and the wagons edged with white, figures caught straining as if in some mad tableau then all sunk again in rain-lashed darkness.
A moment later thunder ripped and rattled, turning Temple’s knees to jelly and seeming to shake the very earth. But thunder should end and this only drummed louder and louder, the ground trembling now for certain, and Temple realised it was not thunder but hooves. Hundreds of hooves battering the earth, the cattle driven mad by the storm, so many dozen tons of meat hurtling at him where he knelt helpless. Another flash and he saw them, rendered devilish by the darkness, one heaving animal with hundreds of goring horns, a furious mass boiling across the plain towards him.
‘Oh God,’ he whispered, sure that, slippery as he was, death’s icy grip was on him at last. ‘Oh God.’
‘Come on, you fucking idiot!’
Someone tugged at him and another flash showed Shy’s face, hatless with hair flattened and her lips curled back, all dogged determination, and he had never been so glad to be insulted in his life. He stumbled with her, the pair of them jerked and buffeted by the wind like corks in a flood, the rain become a scriptural downpour, like to the fabled flood with which God punished the arrogance of old Sippot, the thunder of hooves merged with the thunder of the angry sky to make one terrifying din.
A double blink of lightning lit the back of a wagon, canvas awning madly jerking, and below it Leef’s face, wide-eyed, shouting encouragements drowned in the wind, one arm stretched starkly out.
And suddenly that hand closed around Temple’s and he was dragged inside. Another flash showed him Luline Buckhorm and some of her children, huddled together amongst the sacks and barrels along with two of the whores and one of Gentili’s cousins, all wet as swimmers. Shy slithered into the wagon beside him, Leef dragging her under the arms, while outside he could hear a veritable river flowing around the wheels. Together they wrestled the flapping canvas down.
Temple fell back, in the pitch darkness, and someone sagged against him. He could hear their breath. It might have been Shy, or it might have been Leef, or it might have been Gentili’s cousin, and he hardly cared which.