A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C. A. Fletcher

Author:C. A. Fletcher [Fletcher, C. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316449458
Google: 859nDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0316449458
Goodreads: 40698027
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2019-04-22T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

John Dark

The boar was dead. The gun had blown an ugly chunk out of its face. It was just like the chunk blown out of its backside, only fresher. I didn’t know then but I found out soon enough that this wasn’t a coincidence. She had tried to kill the boar the day before, but only wounded it. If Ferg was right about the curses that piled up as long as you left an animal hurt before finishing it off cleanly, then she was drowning in them. And there was nothing clean about the way the boar had been finished off. It had tried to disembowel me, but now I looked at its poor hacked-about body I felt sad. It had been in pain. A human had caused that pain. I don’t blame it a bit for attacking the next human it saw.

But I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at it, or even thinking about it. There was too much else to take in. Her horse. The other two horses behind her, riderless, roped together, with great bundles hanging on either side. They were all pale grey, dappled with whiteish blotches and long white manes. They were much bigger than the little ponies we had on the islands. They stood very calmly, not even that interested in me.

Oo son lays owe-truh? she said, pointing around the landscape with a questioning gesture. She grimaced again and I realised that she was actually in pain.

I don’t understand, I said.

The rain was easing and she pushed the hood back off her head. My first thought was that her hair matched the horse’s—grey, strong and wild-looking as the wind blew it round her face. My second thought was that she had a face that was really two faces, the first old and weather-beaten but one that had also kept alive within it the second, younger face it had once been.

She grimaced again and pointed at the dead boar.

Sallo! she said, spitting at it. Pew tan de sangliay.

And she spat on it again and then turned her horse so that I could see the other side and the thing that made her grimace every time she moved.

The side of the horse was pink with blood. My first thought was that it was injured, but as I followed the irregular fan of blood back to its source I saw the wound was in the woman’s side, a gash in her buttock that she had tried to bind with a sash.

I had not expected to meet anyone on the mainland, or at least not until I got to Brand’s home. I had been brought up in the sure and certain knowledge that the mainland was empty. It made sense to me. I had, as I said, been made to do the maths to calculate how vanishingly few people remained in the world. And there was an unspecified sense that something had happened there that made it mysteriously hostile to man. I had in fact

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.