Light Errant Read online

  Her death now, her death had not been easy, and there would be those—probably many, probably everyone else in town, all the citizenry, all the cattle with but a single voice—who would say that it was no more than she deserved. But that was over, and this was the aftermath; and she could RIP from here to eternity, quite untroubled. The rest of us, not so. Or not yet, though we’d catch up later.

  o0o

  Three Macallans waiting on a beach, and then there were many.

  o0o

  When they came, they came in a cavalcade, a slow procession of four-wheel-drives rolling over the dunes and down onto the beach.

  I’d have called it a cortège only that it became clear very quickly that the focus, the intent of all these vehicles was not to mourn Cousin Josie. They had come here to collect her, granted; but even that was not the sole purpose behind their arrival. The cars, all those Macallans were there to protect Uncle James; and Uncle James was there at least partly to collect me.

  They parked their cars all around us, and a dozen men stepped out watchfully and took up classic bodyguard positions—watching us, watching the lone and level sands, watching the sea—before ever Uncle James set foot to beach and walked across to join us.

  All those men were carrying guns, quite openly. Rifles, shotguns, handguns. Macallans, with guns?

  Macallans in daylight, I reminded myself. And no longer assured of the protection of their name, that not cutting the mustard any more; and centuries of seething resentment banked up, the dam that had held it back so long starting to crumble at last...

  No, I couldn’t blame them for the guns. Christ, though, it was frightening. Not that anyone was pointing guns at me. Jamie’s presence beside me was enough guarantee even for a rebel son, perhaps; or else they’d just been well briefed beforehand. Yes, it’s only Benedict; but remember, what we do in the dark he does in sunshine. Suited me, either way. Though if they were this twitchy already and they hadn’t even seen Josie’s body yet, then what followed could get very bad indeed.

  The guns might only be for show, of course, an ego-massage for the troops, a way to make them feel better. Look, we’re not vulnerable, we’re dangerous by daylight also...

  I didn’t believe that, though. Macallans weren’t used to doing things for show, unless it was making a serious example of someone pour encourager les autres. I thought they were carrying this much firepower because Uncle James had told them to, because he was afraid to go out in daylight without heavyweight protection; I thought he saw serious risk of a shoot-out, the cattle finally rising up against the ranchers, kill them quick and we needn’t fear the night...

  I also thought that guns made men cocky and confident, where doubt was far the better life-choice. I thought Macallan egos shaken by an unheard-of stand-off, shaken too by the need to carry guns, might be hazardously bolstered by the guns themselves. The weight of blued steel in their hands, the smell of oil, the sense of power independent of the light: I couldn’t imagine anything more volatile than this, armed Macallans out on the streets and angry in the daytime.

  Uncle James walked ponderously across the sand towards us. He’d put on weight these last years, but it hadn’t given him gravitas, though I’m sure he thought that it had. He just looked like a seriously, unhealthily fat man in a suit, with a grim scowl on his face. Fat and deadly, I reminded myself quickly. Never mind what he looked like, it was the inside that mattered, and he was dark and dank and rotting under the skin. The seed, the potential for that was in his blood and in his upbringing, nature and nurture both, as it was in Jamie’s and in mine, as it had been in Josie’s; we were none of us innocent, we all stood condemned. But we were not all of us psychopaths. Jamie not, myself I thought not; Josie yes, perhaps, though she’d reaped what she’d sown in appalling measure.

  Of Uncle James, there was simply no question. In him the blood turned bad, the seed had taken root and fruited richly; his soul was as black as all my family was painted.

  He gazed at me from behind heavy-framed spectacles, and his silence seemed to blame me for all of this, as my father’s violence had blamed me the night before. He looked at his son and there was blame there also, the blame of betrayal. Lastly he looked down at what lay between us, what lay between us all, Josie’s body reduced to a symbol.

  For a long minute he stood above her, saying nothing; then he looked beyond us, to summon a couple of his heavies with a gesture.

  His heavies, my relations: but I felt no sing of blood between us, for all that I knew their names, their histories and their childhood secrets. In this at least I had grown, it seemed, that I could look past familiar features and see them as strangers where it mattered, in their hearts.

  “Take her up,” said Uncle James; and the sound of his voice was a cold bite on the back of my neck, no hope of outgrowing that. Him I still couldn’t deny. “For this,” he said, “there must be an accounting.”

  For this, I thought, there must be a reason; and again I remembered my father last night, and that also was a chill I couldn’t shrug away. I give little credence to instinct or prescience, it was unadulterated knowledge that drew a connection here, between my father in tears in a public place, my father blindly attacking me, and the death of a hostage held against my family’s behaviour. I didn’t know what that connection might be, I lacked the information, but I was willing to bet that it existed. That my father had gambled also—with Josie’s life, yet—and had lost...

  The men my cousins wrapped the dead woman my cousin in her plastic shroud again, and carried her away. Not even my eyes followed them with their burden; Uncle James had me in his sight, in his sights.

  “Why did you come back?” he asked, every word a difficulty, as though even so much recognition was somehow a betrayal of himself.

  For him I had no true answer. I hadn’t come back for him. I could lie, I supposed; but he wasn’t the only one who could taste the gall of incipient betrayal in the air. There had been a death here, or at least a body delivered. I could find some distance, perhaps, but not enough, and Jamie none at all; I thought my own father might be involved, might be directly responsible for it; and indirectly, sure, Uncle James was right. It all came back to me, to what I’d done to unbalance the family and the town. All of that lay on my shoulders, and to lie would be to betray Josie, Jamie, myself.

  I shrugged, said nothing.

  “Well.” He breathed heavily a time or two, working himself up to it; and said, “You are not welcome, but I suppose we can use you. Come back with me now. Both of you,” tossed over his shoulder to his errant son.

  He was already walking. Whether we glanced at each other and made a mutual decision, I’ve never been able to sort out in my head; maybe we made individual decisions and then came the glance, surprise or relief or whatever to find that we weren’t each of us alone, that blood-brotherhood was thicker than a watery will.

  Took Uncle James a second to realise he didn’t have two obedient dogs at his tail. He stopped, looked back, saw us standing; and when we still didn’t jump under the lash of his gaze, he turned and came back a couple of paces.

  “Well?” Speaking to me, assuming perhaps that Jamie was standing guard over a disobedient cousin, watching me for his father’s sake.

  “You said you could use me. Use me how?” I temporised, knowing full well but needing a moment longer to muster argument, determination, both.

  “Your—inversion,” he said, though perversion he meant and we both knew it, “will be convenient. Better than these,” and a flap of his hand covered all the guns that covered us, “to remind the cattle that we still govern here. Day and night.”

  “That’s what I thought you meant,” I said, “and the answer’s no.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Whatever I came back for, Uncle James, it wasn’t to be your hired executioner.”

  His nostrils flared. “You had few qualms about executing my brother Allan.”

  Fuck. “He killed your son,” I said, h
oping I didn’t sound desperate, or desperately short of any sustaining logic here, “and my sister, and the others...”

  “Yes. And these scum have killed your cousins.”

  Yes, and I’d run out of the tapas bar to find my family and enlist. But not this way, I wouldn’t be conscripted into Uncle James’ private and vindictive army.

  I would sign up with Jamie, though; and Jamie was standing firm at my side, and his body language said that he’d sign up with me.

  “I’ll fight them,” I said, “but not your way.”

  His face twisted with fury. Not under your command, he was hearing; and sure, I was saying that too. But I actually meant it the way that I’d said it, and that he wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t think there was another way. Demands enforced by terror, that was all he understood; and with me in his arsenal he could terrorise twenty-four hours a day, and even hostages could buy them no respite from that.

  So no, I wouldn’t march under his banner, even to save my own relatively guiltless kin, who were not ultimately responsible for what they’d been born or married into. And beside me Jamie said, “That goes for me too, Dad. We’ll do what we can, we both will; but we’re not going to hurt civilians. No eye-for-an-eye stuff, no chain reactions. We’ll get nowhere that way, we’ll only end up with more dead cousins.”

  Uncle James looked like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. I was having trouble enough myself. Jamie said it all as if it was a pact signed and sealed between us, as if we’d discussed nothing else while we’d been waiting. Blood-brother, can you read my mind? I wanted to ask him; only I knew the answer already, it was sometimes, but not this time. This was all Jamie, unless it was Jamie mediated by two years of Laura. Except that that was the same thing, of course, Jamie was mediated by Laura now, there wasn’t any other version of him...

  “It’d be more useful,” I suggested as quietly as I could manage, not to seem confrontational, “if you could find out why they did this. They must have had a reason, no one kills hostages for fun.” Ask my father. I didn’t add that, but I didn’t need to. Dad would have a voice in my uncle’s counsels, if not one that would be listened to. His birth entitled him to so much, and Uncle James was big on birthright. So long as they paused at all to consider why this had happened, before they risked any more lives—before someone said or whispered or implied they’re only women, they don’t have talent, they barely count against what we have to lose here—I thought my father would give himself away. Uncle James wasn’t exactly stupid, only tunnel-minded and the tunnel lit only by his own self-interest. Right now his antennae would be as sensitive as ever they got, with that interest so very threatened.

  He stared at me, at us both, trying to dominate us with his weight and age as he used to when we were kids. Almost it worked, too, I thought Jamie was very close to caving. Whatever practise he’d had in standing up to his father, I didn’t think it would prove to be enough in such a crisis. Head to head, eyeball to eyeball, will pitted against will: no, Uncle James was immovable, and Jamie not. So I thought, at least. For all our sakes—his, Laura’s, our kidnapped cousins’ and my own—I thought he needed rescuing.

  “Look,” I said, “what we will do, we’ll sniff around in the town, okay? We’ve got friends, we can ask people, find out who’s behind it, maybe we’ll find out where they’re being held...”

  Actually, as a serious proposal that was only pissing into the wind. We were known Macallans, Jamie and me, and easily identifiable to anyone who didn’t know. We might have been accepted on sufferance, but nobody was going to talk to us now. All I wanted to do was take the heat off Jamie, even if that only brought it onto me. I thought I was scorch-proof.

  Apparently I was beneath withering; he waved a loose hand to silence me, didn’t so much as glance in my direction. The full force of his glare was held on Jamie, and my best coz, my bro, for many years my idol was going to wilt under it, any second now...

  My uncle was speaking, saying something soft and menacing that certainly I could have heard if I’d tuned in. But I was casting around desperately for a way to lead Jamie out of this, or failing that for a distraction, for anything...

  All I saw was men with guns, and empty sand, and sea.

  Guns, sand, sea. No gun ever hurt the sand, no bullet could harm the sea...

  I focused, frowning just a tad. Cousin Duquesne, the Duke was one of Uncle James’ entourage; he was the nearest, the easiest target, and I had to be both quick and subtle. He held a shotgun under his arm, closed up and ready for action, typically Macallan where there was clearly no action to be had.

  Nightfire, that all my male relations had in their gift: nightfire burns cold, but it can make bangable things go pop none the less. My own opposing talent gave me what inevitably I had to call dayfire, as well as a great deal more besides; and that I knew could make rubber melt or a petrol-tank explode. I’d even set a flame on water, and made it hot.

  No trouble then to heat the barrel of a gun, from this distance; and I could control it, I thought, I wouldn’t twist the metal. But I couldn’t cool it after, and even the Duke would notice, and say, and Uncle James would understand. A distraction exposed for what it was, what use was that? Some, maybe; not enough, perhaps.

  So no, nothing so clumsy. I liked the idea, though, and I worked it. I reached out to take a feather-light grip on that shotgun, so gently that the Duke never noticed the tug. I gripped and I squeezed just where it was balanced across his elbow, not even he being stupid enough to keep his finger on the trigger. I squeezed that trigger in my mind, and the gun cracked and leaped in my grip and his, kicking so hard that the barrel shot up and caught him on the cheek before I let it go and he dropped it.

  There was a faint spray of dry sand before his feet, where a cartridgeload of pellets had just buried themselves in the beach.

  Everyone spun round, of course, at the sudden noise and the movement, his yelp of pain and the thud of the shotgun’s falling. I thought of firing off the other barrel then, but once was enough; I didn’t want to sting anyone’s ankles.

  Uncle James had turned with the rest, and his face was livid. I wished him a heart attack, choleric angina. He looked ripe for it, fat and purple.

  No such luck, alas; but I’d got what I really wanted, his determination deflected, if only for a moment or two. I nudged Jamie’s elbow, murmured, “Wanna go back to Laura, talk this through with her?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “But nothing,” I said, against the thought I could see on his face. “Trust me, okay? Follow me...”

  Not often, I’d said that to Jamie; not often he’d said yes, when I did. But he said yes that day, and I think perhaps that all things sprang from there.

  o0o

  My uncle his father was scathing the poor Duke, who stammered and blushed like a child though he was well past thirty now, must have thought himself well hard, well past a public scolding.

  “Cousin James, I never... I swear...”

  “Oh, it went off by itself, did it?” And without pausing to consider the merits of that, “You fool, you could have killed any one of us, you’re not safe with such a weapon.”

  Which really was a joke, said to a Macallan; but Uncle James wasn’t laughing, and nor was anyone else. Not even I, especially when I saw him stoop to pick up the shotgun himself. If I’d gone for the heat treatment and the Duke had somehow missed noticing pale flames licking around the barrel, Uncle James for sure would not have missed noticing the residual heat. His accountant’s mind would have gone click click, and I’d be in serious trouble.

  Thanking my lucky stars for my own good sense—and that was a rarity also, usually I did the other thing, cursed my own stupidity—I stood still and signed for Jamie to do the same, to wait. This was a diversion, yes, but I had no plans to run away. In a room with a door, perhaps, anywhere there was a fast exit to be made; but on a wide beach, where they had four-by-fours and we had nothing but feet? Thanks, but no thanks.

 
We stood still, stood like patient captives in defeat. When Uncle James finally came back towards us, with the shotgun under his arm now and properly broken open, with his men our cousins already scattering to their various vehicles and a this is it, you boys, no more prevarication look on his face, I met him with the best I could manage in the way of sullen surrender.

  “We left our bikes in the car park, up at the end of the beach. They can’t sit there all night, they’ll be pinched...”

  He’d heard that tone from me all my life, the stubbornness that always tried to find some minor victory in capitulation. That must have seduced him, or else he simply didn’t believe either one of us could sustain our defiance for long.

  At any rate, he nodded brusquely. “All right.” Don’t want to leave good Macallan property for the cattle to steal. “We’ll take you that far, then you can drive back with us. Get into the Range Rover.”

  The Ranger was his own, of course. Everything a status-symbol, because status was everything. Even his sandals would have been Timberland, if he’d only worn sandals to the beach.

  He sat in the front, we in the back, and his driver another cousin took us down the beach, with all the cavalcade in attendance behind. When we came to the car park, our two bikes were standing side by side in utter emptiness; the whole place had been deserted, else. We were lucky, I suppose. If they’d linked the bikes to us and us to the swarming Macallans, some brave punter might have ploughed his pick-up over our darlings before he headed off.

  Uncle James had his driver stop reasonably if not considerately close to the bikes—a careful or a casual distance: I thought a distance precisely measured in his mind—and waited while we powered up, no doubt waited for us to fall into formation behind.

  That we didn’t do. I drove boldly to the head of the parade, in front of the Ranger yet; I drove and Jamie followed as he’d promised, and that was lèse majesté if ever anything had been. Except that my uncle could always pretend we were outriders, of course, such as any sovereign might command. Could and would, no doubt, but oh, he would be scowling in his car there, he’d be adding this to the burden of grievance charged against us both. Jamie gave me an anxious glance; I winked, and mouthed, Trust me...