Darwinia

They must have been god-ridden, Vale decided later. Nothing else made sense. One had a bottle, one had a length of threaded steel rod. They demanded nothing, took nothing. They worked strictly on his face. His immortal skin was slashed and gouged, his immortal skull fractured in several places. He swallowed several of his immortal teeth.

He did not, of course, die.

Swathed in bandages, sedated, he heard a doctor discuss his case with a nurse in a languid Louisiana drawl. A miracle he survived. No one will recognize him after this, God knows.

Not a miracle, Vale thought. Not even a coincidence. The gods who had closed his skin to the morphine needle in Washington could just as easily have staved off these cutting blows. He had been taken because he never would have volunteered.

No one will recognize him.

He healed quickly.

A new city, a new name, a new face. He learned to avoid mirrors. Physical ugliness was not a significant impediment to his work.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Guilford found the Bodensee where a glacial stream entered the lake, frigid water coursing over slick black pebbles. He followed the shoreline slowly, meticulously, riding the fur snake he had named Evangeline. “Evangeline” for no reason save that the name appealed to him; the animal’s gender was a mystery. Evangeline had foraged more successfully than Guilford had over the last week, and her six splined hooves covered ground more efficiently than his toothpick legs.

A gentle sun blessed the day. Guilford had rigged a rope harness to keep himself sprawled on Evangeline’s broad back even when he lost consciousness, and there were times when he drifted into a nodding half sleep, head slumped against his chest. But the sunlight meant he could shed a layer of furs, and that was a relief, to feel air that was not lethally cold against his skin.

As snakes went, Evangeline had proved intelligent. She avoided insect middens even when Guilford’s attention lapsed. She never strayed far from fresh water. And she was respectful of Guilford — perhaps not surprising, given that he had killed and cooked one of her compatriots and set the other free.

He was careful to keep an eye on the horizon. He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.

He credited Evangeline with finding the arch of stone where the expedition’s boats had been cached. She had nosed her way patiently along the pebbled shore, hour by hour, until at last she stopped and moaned for his attention.

Guilford recognized the stones, the shoreline, the hilly meadows just beginning to show green.

It was the right place. But the tarpaulin was gone, and so were the boats.

Dazed, Guilford let himself down from the fur snake’s back and searched the beach for — well, anything: relics, evidence. He found a charred board, a rusted nail. Nothing else.

The breeze slapped small waves against the shore.

The sun was low. He would need wood for a fire, if he could muster the energy to build one.

He sighed. “End of the road, Evangeline. At least for now.”

“It will be, if you don’t get a decent meal into yourself.”

He turned.

Erasmus.

“Tom figured you’d show up here,” the snake herder said.

Erasmus fed him real food, lent him a bedroll, and promised to take him and Evangeline back to his makeshift ranch beyond the Rheinfelden, just a few days overland; then Guilford could hitch a ride downriver when Erasmus floated his winter stock to market.

“You talked to Tom Compton? He’s alive?”

“He stopped by the kraal on his way to Jayville. Told me to look out for you. He ran into bandits after he left you and Finch. Too many to fight. So he came north and left decoy fires and generally took ’em on a goose chase all the way to the Bodensee. Saved your bacon, Mr. Law, though I guess not Preston Finch.”

“No, not Finch,” Guilford said.

They paralleled the Rhine Gorge, following the land route Erasmus had established. The snake herder called a halt at a pool of water fed by an unnamed tributary, shallow and slow. Sunlight had heated the water to a tolerable temperature, though it was not what Guilford would call warm. Still, he was able to wash himself for the first time in weeks. The water might have been lye, for all the skin and dirt he shed. He came out shivering, naked as a grub. The season’s first billyflies bumped his torso and fled across the sunlit water. His hair dangled over his eyes; his beard draped his chest like a wet Army blanket.

Erasmus put up the tent and scratched out a pit for the fire while Guilford dried and dressed.

They shared canned beans, molasses-sweet and smoky. Erasmus cooked coffee in a tin pan. The coffee was thick as syrup, bitter as clay.

The snake herder had something on his mind.