Toll the Hounds

She heard the back door swing open on its leather hinges and knew Gaz was standing on the threshold, eyes hooded, watching her. His fingerless hands twitch-ing at the ends of his arms, the ridge of knuckles marred and bright red, teeth-cut and bone-gouged.



He killed people every night, she knew, to keep from killing her. She was, she knew, the cause of their deaths. Every one of them a substitute for what Gaz re-ally wanted to do.



She heard him step outside.



Straightening, wiping the ash from her hands on her apron, she turned.



‘Breakfast leavings,’ he muttered.



‘What?’



‘The house is full of flies,’ he said, standing there as if struck rooted by the sunlight. Red-shot eyes wandered about the yard as if wanting to crawl out from his head and find shelter. Beneath that rock, or the bleached plank of grey wood, or under the pile of kitchen scraps.



‘You need a shave,’ she said. ‘Want me to heat the water?’



The haunted eyes flicked towards her-but there was nowhere to hide in that direction, so he looked away once more. ‘No, don’t touch me.’



She thought of holding the razor in her hand, settling its edge against his throat. Seeing the runnels winding down through the lathered soap, the throb of his pulse. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the beard hides how thin you’ve become. In the face, anyway.’



His smile was a threat. ‘And you prefer that, wife?’



‘It’s just different, Gaz.’



‘You can’t prefer anything when you don’t care, right?’



‘I didn’t say that.’



‘You didn’t have to. Why’d you make that stone thing-right there on the best dirt?’



‘I just felt like it,’ she replied. ‘A place to sit and rest. Where I can keep an eye on all the vegetables.’



‘In case they run away?’



‘No. I just like looking at them, that’s all.’ They don’t ask questions. They don’t ask for much of anything at all. A few dribbles of water, maybe. A clear path to the sun, free of any weeds.



They don’t get suspicious. They don’t think about murdering me.



‘I have supper ready for dusk,’ Gaz said, lurching into motion.



She watched him leave. Gritty ash made black crescents of her fingernails, as if she had been rooting through the remnants of a pyre. Which was appropriate, because she had, but Gaz didn’t need to know things like that. He didn’t need to know anything at all.



Be a plant, Gaz. Worry about nothing. Until the harvest.



The ox was too stupid to worry. If not for a lifetime of back-breaking labour and casual abuse, the beast would be content, existence a smooth cycle to match the ease of day into night and night into day and on and on for ever. Feed and cud aplenty, water to drink and salt to lick, a plague to eradicate the world’s biting flies and ticks and fleas. If the ox could dream of paradise, it would be a simple dream and a simple paradise. To live simply was to evade the worries that came with complexity. This end was achieved at the expense, alas, of intelligence.



The drunks that staggered out of the taverns as the sun rose were in search of paradise and they had the sodden, besotted brains to prove it. Lying senseless in the durhang and d’bayang dens could be found others oozing down a similar path. The simplicity they would find was of course death, the threshold crossed almost without effort.



Unmindful (naturally) of any irony, the ox pulled a cart into an alley behind the dens where three emaciated servants brought out this night’s crop of wasted corpses. The carter, standing with a switch to one side, spat out a mouthful of rustleaf juice and silently gestured to another body lying in the gutter behind a back door. In for a sliver, in for a council. Grumbling, the three servants went over to this corpse and reached for limbs to lift it from the cobblestones. One then gasped and recoiled, and a moment later so too did the others.



The ox was not flicked into motion for some time thereafter, as humans rushed about, as more arrived. It could smell the death, but it was used to that. There was much confusion, yet the yoked beast remained an island of calm, en-joying the shade of the alley.



The city guardsman with the morning ache in his chest brushed a hand along the ox’s broad flank as he edged past. He crouched down to inspect the corpse.



Another one, this man beaten so badly he was barely recognizable as human. Not a single bone in his face was left unbroken. The eyes were pulped. Few teeth remained. The blows had continued, down to his crushed throat-which was the likely cause of death-and then his chest. Whatever weapon had been used left short, elongated patterns of mottled bruising. Just like all the others.