“New Canaan.”
She felt a flash of real excitement at that. New Canaan! Center of the Affiliation! That did not mean all it once had, of course, but still-
“Not Gilead?” she asked, detesting the hint of a girlish gush she heard in her voice. And more than just a hint, mayhap.
“No,” he said with a laugh. “Nothing so grand as Gilead. Only Hemphill, a village forty or so wheels west of there. Smaller than Hambry, I wot.”
Wheels, she thought, marvelling at the archaism. He said wheels.
“And what brings ye to Hambry, then? May ye tell?”
“Why not? I’ve come with two of my friends, Mr. Richard Stock-worth of Pennilton, New Canaan, and Mr. Arthur Heath, a hilarious young man who actually does come from Gilead. We’re here at the order of the Affiliation, and have come as counters.”
“Counters of what?”
“Counters of anything and everything which may aid the Affiliation in the coming years,” he said, and she heard no lightness in his voice now.” The business with the Good Man has grown serious.”
“Has it? We hear little real news this far to the south and east of the hub.”
He nodded. “The Barony’s distance from the hub is the chief reason we’re here. Mejis has been ever loyal to the Affiliation, and if supplies need to be drawn from this part of the Outers, they’ll be sent. The question that needs answering is how much the Affiliation can count on.”
“How much of what?”
“Yes,” he agreed, as if she’d made a statement instead of asking a question. “And how much of what.”
“Ye speak as though the Good Man were a real threat. He’s just a bandit, surely, frosting his thefts and murders with talk of 'democracy' and 'equality'?”
Dearborn shrugged, and she thought for a moment that would be his only comment on the matter, but then he said, reluctantly:” ’twas once so, perhaps. Times have changed. At some point the bandit became a general, and now the general would become a ruler in the name of the people.” He paused, then added gravely, “The Northern and West'rd Baronies are in flames, lady.”
“But those are thousands of miles away, surely!” This talk was upsetting, and yet strangely exciting, too. Mostly it seemed exotic, after the pokey all-days-the-same world of Hambry, where someone’s dry well was good for three days of animated conversation.
“Yes,” he said. Not aye but yes-the sound was both strange and pleasing to her ear. “But the wind is blowing in this direction.” He turned to her and smiled. Once more it softened his hard good looks, and made him seem no more than a child, up too late after his bedtime. “But I don’t think we’ll see John Farson tonight, do you?”
She smiled back. “If we did, Mr. Dearborn, would ye protect me from him?”
“No doubt,” he said, still smiling, “but I should do so with greater enthusiasm, I wot, if you were to let me call you by the name your father gave you.”
“Then, in the interests of my own safety, ye may do so. And I suppose I must call ye Will, in those same interests.”
“Tis both wise and prettily put,” he said, the smile becoming a grin, wide and engaging. “I-” Then, walking as he was with his face turned back and up to her, Susan’s new friend tripped over a rock Jutting out of the road and almost fell. Rusher whinnied through his nose and reared a little. Susan laughed merrily. The poncho shifted, revealing one bare leg, and she took a moment before putting matters right again. She liked him, aye, so she did. And what harm could there be in it? He was only a boy, after all. When he smiled, she could see he was only a year or two removed from jumping in haystacks. (The thought that she had recently graduated from haystack-jumping herself had somehow fled her mind.)
“I’m usually not clumsy,” he said. “I hope I didn’t startle you.”
Not at all. Will; boys have been stubbing their toes around me ever since I grew my breasts.
“Not at all,” she said, and returned to the previous topic. It interested her greatly. “So ye and yer friends come at the behest of the Affiliation to count our goods, do you?”
“Yes. The reason I took particular note of yon oil patch is because one of us will have to come back and count the working derricks-”
“I can spare ye that, Will. There are nineteen.”
He nodded. “I’m in your debt. But we’ll also need to make out-if we can-how much oil those nineteen pumps are bringing up.”
“Are there so many oil-fired machines still working in New Canaan that such news matters? And do ye have the alchemy to change the oil into the stuff yer machines can use?”
“It’s called refinery rather than alchemy in this case-at least I think so-and I believe there is one that still works. But no, we haven’t that many machines, although there are still a few working filament-lights in the Great Hall at Gilead.”
“Fancy it!” she said, delighted. She had seen pictures of filament-lights and electric flambeaux, but never the lights themselves. The last ones in Hambry (they had been called “spark-lights” in this part of the world, but she felt sure they were the same) had burned out two generations ago.
“You said your father managed the Mayor’s horses until his death,” Will Dearborn said. “Was his name Patrick Delgado? It was, wasn’t it?”
She looked down at him, badly startled and brought back to reality in an instant. “How do ye know that?”
“His name was in our lessons of calling. We’re to count cattle, sheep, pigs, oxen… and horses. Of all your livestock, horses are the most important. Patrick Delgado was the man we were to see in that regard. I’m sorry to hear he’s come to the clearing at the end of the path, Susan. Will you accept my condolence?”
“Aye, and with thanks.”
“Was it an accident?”
“Aye.” Hoping her voice said what she wanted it to say, which was leave this subject, ask no more.
“Let me be honest with you,” he said, and for the first time she thought she heard a false note there. Perhaps it was only her imagination. Certainly she had little experience of the world (Aunt Cord reminded her of this almost daily), but she had an idea that people who set on by saying Let me be honest with you were apt to go on by telling you straight-faced that rain fell up, money grew on trees, and babies were brought by the Grand Featherex.
“Aye, Will Dearborn,” she said, her tone just the tiniest bit dry. “They say honesty’s the best policy, so they do.”
He looked at her a bit doubtfully, and then his smile shone out again. That smile was dangerous, she thought-a quicksand smile if ever there was one. Easy to wander in; perhaps more difficult to wander back out.
“There’s not much Affiliation in the Affiliation these days. That’s part of the reason Parson’s gone on as long as he has; that’s what has allowed his ambitions to grow. He’s come a far way from the harrier who began as a stage-robber in Garlan and Desoy, and he’ll come farther yet if the Affiliation isn’t revitalized. Maybe all the way to Mejis.”
She couldn’t imagine what the Good Man could possibly want with her own sleepy little town in the Barony which lay closest to the Clean Sea, but she kept silent.
“In any case, it wasn’t really the Affiliation that sent us,” he said. “Not all this way to count cows and oil derricks and hectares of land under cultivation.”
He paused a moment, looking down at the road (as if for more rocks in the way of his boots) and stroking Rusher’s nose with absentminded gentleness. She thought he was embarrassed, perhaps even ’shamed. “We were sent by our fathers.”
“Yer-” Then she understood. Bad boys, they were, sent out on a make-work quest that wasn’t quite exile. She guessed their real job in Hambry might be to rehabilitate their reputations. Well, she thought, it certainly explains the quicksand smile, doesn’t it? 'Ware this one, Susan; he’s the sort to burn bridges and upset mail-carts, then go on his merry way without a single look back. Not in meanness but in plain old boy-carelessness.
That made her think of the old song again, the one she’d been singing, the one he’d been whistling.
“Our fathers, yes.”
Susan Delgado had cut a caper or two (or perhaps it was two dozen) other own in her time, and she felt sympathy for Will Dearborn as well as caution. And interest. Bad boys could be amusing… up to a point. The question was, how bad had Will and his cronies been?