Eleven
The dust felt like an old friend, now. After another week on the road, there were three things were happening, and I wasn’t expecting any of them.
First, I was finally starting to feel at home on the back of a horse, which wasn’t something that I generally thought of.
Second, I was starting to get used to having dust in every crack and crevice of my body. It wasn’t supposed to feel like something that I could ultimately deal with given time. Sand was one of the worst things I’d experienced in my life, and it ought to have been that way for the rest of my life.
Somehow, those two things had been unexpected, but it made sense. Once someone deals with something long enough, they start to get used to it. It’s just reality. Christ was in the desert for forty days; I was only in it for ten before we found a new place to settle down.
At least, that was what I thought was going to happen. Which led to the third thing that surprised me. I’d thought that I would go crazy if things didn’t change with Baron Euler. If I didn’t either scratch the itch or get over it then I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope with it. And a week later, I wasn’t sure how I had coped with it.
But I had. The twisting feeling in my gut that told me that I wanted to do something very, very wrong, didn’t go away. It wasn’t going to, and I knew it. We both knew it, deep down in our bellies.
It didn’t make a difference, though, because just like the sand and the saddle between my thighs, I had just… gotten used to it. It was there, all the time. I would look over and I’d see him watching me with that predatory expression. And then I would feel something in my belly, a feeling that I knew to be desire in spite of how much I wanted not to be feeling it.
And then I would move on with it. Keep the horse moving, look away, and remind myself that I wasn’t going to be making the first move. Or the second move, for that matter. Or any move. I told myself that was what I wanted, for the whole thing to never go anywhere. Eventually, I would be more than used to it; it would be part of the background of my life and I could simply move on completely.
The ride was everything. I didn’t know where we were going, and Euler didn’t seem interested in telling me. He didn’t seem interested in telling me to leave, but it seemed to me that if I did leave, he wouldn’t be particularly upset.
More than anything I disliked that. If he needed me desperately, and then I had to give into him, I knew that I would be able to get over it. The sand had taught me that the simple reality is, you can get used to most things. I already understood that, deep down.
But if there was anything to him other than a spanking and smoldering looks, then he didn’t let me see it. And then we got to Perdition. The sign was mostly destroyed by time. Nothing like the last places that we’d stopped. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, honestly.
I thought that it was a ghost town before he announced, still riding without a single change in tempo or pace, “We’re here.”
“Where is here?”
He turned and raised an eyebrow. I realized that the town wasn’t quite abandoned. There was a small population, and they looked tired and wrung-out. I’d seen plenty of people with that look. People with a hard life and no particular solution for making it any better.
“Home,” he said. “Back to base.”
I looked around a little more. There were unrealized depths to Perdition. I would learn about them later, though, through little stories that Baron would tell me. The long and short was that my read was closer to accurate than I’d realized at first.
It was a ghost town. Baron and his gang had found the place after it was abandoned. There was supposed to be a salt mine, but the hole had dried up almost immediately, and the town that had started to form itself around the mine spread out and went their separate ways.
The folks I did see were mostly men. Perhaps two men to every woman. The other thing that weighed on me as we pulled up the horses to a hitching post, was that there was some kind of mood in the air. People didn’t want to look at me. Or maybe it was Baron that they didn’t want to look at.
“Seems tense,” I said. “Is it always like this?”
He looked over at me with those sharp eyes of his. The gaze seemed to pierce my gut. I hated it because I couldn’t fight it.
“No,” he said finally. “It’s a quiet little place. But this feels a little different.”
I shivered. There was a look in his eyes that I didn’t like. It was a look that fit on his face all too well.
“Stay close to me,” He muttered. “And let me do the talking, will you?”
“I always do,” I answered. Which was true, if you ignored times that he shouldn’t have known about in the first place.
“Make sure you do.”
Then he pushed open the door to the bar that we stood outside of. I stepped in behind him. The doors swung shut on their own.
The eyes around the room were tense, too. Like they weren’t sure how they were supposed to react to the new development.
“I’m back,” Baron said. Like it was a challenge.
“Welcome home, boss,” said one. Another looked at him. There was a careful lack of anything in that expression. But it meant something. I could guess what it was: something was going on, and it was something that they didn’t want to let Euler in on. I guessed that it was something that they couldn’t afford to let him in on.
Which I guessed meant one thing:
Mutiny.