Blood For Wages

14: The Stink of Death

The two boys followed the girl, and the blood, across the hard, uneven hill country. Making their way through a thicket of ironbark trees, the boys marched quickly along behind the girl saying nothing, trying to make sure that their feet did not stumble on the rough ground. The rust-green scrub––bracken, hopbush and narrow-leaf wattle––rustled and bent as they passed. The scent of bruised rosemary and lavender rose under their feet. Lethargic clouds of pollen, golden in the early morning sunlight, mingled with the steaming breath of the sister, brother and half-brother in the frigid air.

The blood was shockingly red against the dark earth and the moss-coloured leaves of the wild sage. As bright and vital a colour as the trio had ever seen. A secret colour. Fascinating somehow. The girl paused by some jagged rocks, stained with spreading lichen. Dipped her fingers into a thick warm splash of crimson. Saw where it had begun to clot in places to a darker red.

They followed the blood trail and emerged from the brush onto a ridge. Broken scree underfoot, with pendulous redleg grass growing in spiky profusion down and across the shallow but treacherous slope. The three of them picked their way across the face of the long hill, the lay of it turning them westward. They discovered a narrow game trail. Followed it around a promontory so that they found themselves standing halfway up a far larger slope. Thigh-high heather covered it; a roiling swathe of purple and white that blanketed the hillside from the valley floor to the tops of the tors.

The girl stopped and crouched. Pointed out a smear of blood against the rotting trunk of a fallen cedar. She looked to the sky. There were no birds circling. Not a hawk, buzzard or crow to be seen. She gazed up the hill, then back at the blood, and then down the slope into the gently waving sea of grass.

"Fia," one lad said, "how can you tell which way he went?"

The girl, strands of loose ash-brown hair flying about her face from where they'd escaped the leather cord, regarded her brother. Eyes, a messy mix of dark blue and light jade, glittered. She was two years younger and a foot shorter than the older boy, but both lads followed her unquestioningly.

"A wounded thing is like water, Arlen. Takes the path of least resistance. You ever see water run uphill?"

"No," Arlen said.

"Redmond?" Fia asked the other slighter, younger boy.

"No," the half-brother, Redmond, said sullenly, as if he was offended at being asked the obvious.

"No," Fia said, and started pushing her way down through the heather.

They had found the billy goat by his smell at first light, at the spring, as they approached it slowly with the wind in their faces. The musky stink of piss. They'd been looking for a doe, even a boar, but the billy had been the only animal by the water and so Arlen had tried an arrow at him. The shaft had punched in just behind the shoulder and the creature had run. Arlen had cursed softly and brushed the peaty fen soil from the knee of his trousers.

"He'll be in this brush," Fia said, her words etched with excitement. "No way he could've gotten far bleeding like that. Let's split up to sniff him out quicker. Arlen, you follow this track. I'll cut across the slope up here and flush him out if he's laid up somewhere. Redmond you head to the bottom and stop him if he's still got any running left in him."

The youngest of the three nodded.

"We'll find that beggar, Fia," Arlen said, his enthusiasm mirroring that of his younger sister's. "He stank bad enough to knock a buzzard off a gut pile. If he's bleeding bad... Well, you've your knack."

Fia winked at the vaguely nauseous look on Redmond's pale face and hurried away, leaving the other two to their tasks.

She moved with a hunter's grace that would have dismayed her mother and all the tutors she had employed in her attempt to refine Fia. Quiet. Sure. Rolling her feet from the outside in as she stepped carefully through the underbrush. Her nostrils dilated, questing for the metallic, cloying tang of fresh blood; a scent which Arlen had remarked on more than one occasion she'd a strange aptitude for picking up.