It was one of the settler families that found them, their oxen lumbering side by side over the tundra, breaths spewing white from their snouts like dragonsmoke. When the husband saw Mym and the soldier in the track before them he hauled up on the beasts and began to turn them around but by then Mym was up and had hold of the yoke and had stopped the wagon in its tracks. The soldier came shambling up to the jockey box. The wife dove into the cabin whence a child peered and she reappeared with an ancient smoothbore and passed it up to the husband. The soldier was already halfway alongside the man and he flopped himself into the cabin and lay unmoving on the wagonbed. The wife was yammering at the husband and she'd drawn her hand around the child. The husband pointed the smallbore at Mym and shouted haltingly at her and she hopped onto the tongue and balanced along it until she stood before him. He shrank back and pulled the trigger and nothing happened.
Mym hopped up onto the jockey box and put a finger in the muzzle. "Ye fergot te powder yer pan," she said. She dropped down into the wagonbed and wrapped herself in a thick wool blanket there. The wife and child had drawn back into the far corner of the wagon and watched redeyed and pale and pinched like cornered rats. She nodded at them and she felt the wagon start to move again, clattering and creaking its way north to who knows where.
There was a cask of water stowed on its head beside her and she knocked at its stave and heard the fullness of it. She levered out the bunghole and drank from the stream that poured without and the soldier dragged himself alongside and drank next. She plugged it up and laid back and as the wagonbed jerked up and down and back and forth she closed her eyes and slept as hard as she ever had.
***
The wagon had stopped. It was dark inside and out. The bed was empty of the family and the jockey box abandoned. Through the rear portal she could see a great prominence silhouetted against the stars and forward were the tall and bonehipped hindquarters and hanging tails of the team. She hunkered down and slept again until the bark of a dog woke her. The feeling of a fly walking up her cheek. She sat up. Rising into the sky to the rear of the wagon and framed by the cinched canvas cover was a great spire in the shape of a thumb. She stretched her legs and her back and put her head out the front to see what was. The oxen were gone and she saw the low stone wall of a paddock and a house made of frozen clay with a drift of smoke curling out of a protruding stovepipe.
She sat back on her heels and looked down at the soldier. He was lying faceup in the bottom of the bed with his arm tucked across his chest and flies crawling in and out of the sleeve. His lips were blistered and his skin was gray. She reached to wake him. The flies scattered and buzzed about. He was hard as stone and cold as the day. The flies settled back.
She was squatting by the cartwheel when humans came upon her. They seized her as she pulled up her trousers and they seized her alpenstock and longarm and her pack. They bound her hands behind her back. They looked in at the soldier and made rancid faces and they prodded her into the settlement with the butts of their spears.
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She was marched through the narrow streets of the settlement where she saw the houses built atop the ruins of others, mud adobe emerging from stonewrought foundations that suggested what had once been before that country was given over to the dead. She was herded by men who spake not at all. They passed a circular fountain built over a hot spring that steamed in the crosswise sunlight and the bundled folk with rolled sleeves laundering on its stones. They passed an old mansion that had once been the provincial governor's and they passed a smoke stained cathedral where white ravens roosted along the sooty buttresses and among the niches of the dwarfcarved frieze between martyrs unknown to her, the birds crouching on the upheld hands of some god and their splattered shit dried all down his face as if he wept white tears.
They passed refugees sitting on the steps under the church door with their seamed faces downcast and some of them missing hands and eyes and their children asleep in their arms or in their laps. Hunks of hard bread clacked in a tarnished silver offertory, fine scrollwork etched around. A pilgrim crouched on the steps with his travelstained robe gathered around and his book clutched in his hand and his talisman hanging from a chain. They passed into a side street where wolflike dogs nosed at something in the gutter and meat pie merchants and thin urchins with sunburnt faces as bleak as the land crouched in a doorway over a panfire where greasy strips of pork belly sizzled and set Mym's mouth to watering. Old women teetered opposite their passing as if in their final hours and frontiersmen and fortune seekers lounged in pairs and trios in open doorways. They moved her past the metropolitan meat market and the copper smell where racks of anonymous steaks hung in dark red drapes and whole pigs lay side by side on tables and plucked geese and doves and chickens hung neck downward from lines strung from awning to awning and a tanner heaped damp pelts into a deep wicker basket beside an open pitcher full of brain matter.
She was driven past these throngs and down a stair and under an archway with a conspicuous granite keystone that whispered to her of faraway places. Along a subterranean hall warmed by the earth about. At the hall's end she was pushed through a rod iron gate and into a circular dungeon that smelled of urine and of forgotten things into which daylight dimly shone through a solitary sewerhole in the domed ceiling. The gate clanked closed behind her.
She could make out folk huddled along the circumference of the prison and rags that might've been men lying on beds of hide and hay from which there came light breathing. Shadows passed the hole. The calling of vendors from without and the screech of metalworking from somewhere deeper in the underground complex. Mym looked for a place to make her own. An empty bed of hay and mold and a scattering of fleas within. An extinguished candle melted in its own wax. She turned from it.
In the center of the room stood a tall dark figure shirtless and in sidebuttoned trousers and a floppy hat. Along the wall the others shrunk back from him. He came Mym's way. He wore his long hair in a dreadlock tied upon itself between his shoulderblades.
She squinted up at him. "I'd know yer stink in a public shithouse."
He looked down at her. "About time you showed up."
"Should've known better than te trust some pigheaded orc te count much past the fingers on his claws."
"Should've known better than to trust some firebellied beardling from grabbing her trigger."
They stood there regarding each other. Then they started laughing.