The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

El Juez and his enforcers scattered to their own business, as if Enid’s arrival hadn’t caused any stir. The work of the camp, the work of any camp—food, shelter, cleaning, mending—went on. The storm from a couple of weeks before had left its mark here too, in different ways. Fallen branches had been dragged into piles, the rivulets of temporary creeks had cut through the dirt. An older boy and girl were up on a cabin roof, patching it. Clothing and hides hung on lines to dry.

Enid stood for a moment as the life of the camp went on around her. Folk stared, glanced away, looked again, but no one engaged with her. This was as pointed a request to just leave as was possible without physically tying her up and dragging her back down to the Estuary. That they didn’t go that far encouraged Enid to stay. They could ignore her for only so long, and she was here to learn. About Ella’s life, and about Neeve’s connection to these people.

Hawk watched Enid, his gaze hard and glaring. She made sure not to turn her back on him, keeping him in the corner of her vision at least. Keeping other people between them.

No one stopped her from wandering. No one challenged her, no one threatened her. They certainly didn’t seem worried that she would capture ever

yone and force them back to the Coast Road for implants and whatever other horribleness these people imagined awaited them there. That said something about them, and what they might have thought about Ella. Ella leaving here wasn’t seen as threatening or dangerous. When El Juez said it was her choice, he wasn’t blustering.

The camp—more than a camp, if less than a town—seemed to be arranged in a series of family units, lean-tos and sheds clustered around maybe a dozen cook fires. A couple of areas for messier work lay farther out. Drying meat was arranged on a rack. At the very edge of the settlement, a tannery. Latrine pits almost out of sight—and out of smell, downwind. The arrangement of it all was familiar. Roof and food and clothing. Only so many ways to keep a settlement alive.

Enid wandered over to have a look at the tannery, because she didn’t have a lot of experience with the process of making leather. A woman in her thirties, hair tied back, wearing a belted tunic and skirt, was working alone, pulling what looked like a whole deerskin out of a wide aluminum vat a couple of feet wide and deep. Pitted and beat-up, but clean and polished smooth, the vat must have been salvage from before the Fall. A thing like that, rare and useful, was always well taken care of. The hides had been soaking in muddy-looking liquid. Some kind of solution, Enid couldn’t guess what, but it smelled acrid. After letting the skin drip a moment, the woman lay the hide on the ground, staked it taut, and on her knees started scraping hair off with a dull-looking metal spatula. She’d scrape, shake hair off into a pile, scrape again, wipe off the spatula, over and over. It seemed tedious and awkward, the kind of work you had to get right, or else it could ruin all your previous effort. But the woman was clearly well practiced at it. The bare leather emerged in moments, clean and smooth.

“Hola,” Enid said, and the woman flinched, dropping the scraper. She glared. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Can I help?”

The woman frowned. “Think you can stake the next one like this?” She gestured to the vat, and to a clear spot on the ground.

Enid wasn’t sure, but she would certainly try. Gingerly, she reached into the vat, grabbed hold of what looked like the edge of a skin, held it up. Took a couple of tries. Soaking wet, the thing was heavy. She expected it to stink, but it had the nose-tickling scent of a dying fire. As the woman had done, Enid let the hide drip, then laid it out as best she could, taking small wooden stakes from a nearby pile, punching them through the edges and into the ground. This took Enid much longer to accomplish than it did when the woman had done it. But she managed it on her own, and by the time she finished, the woman was done scraping the first hide and ready to move to the next. She didn’t offer to let Enid try scraping, which was just as well. That looked like it required some real finesse.

“I’m Enid.”

The woman took a long time to answer. She had hair the color of rich brown earth, a tan face marked with soot and fatigue. Lines pulled at her mouth. “Creek,” she said finally. She never stopped scraping. The messy pile of byproduct was growing.

“These are deer hides, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t see a lot of deer down south. I understand you hunt cattle as well? Folk say the leather’s better here.”

“The best. We trade with you folk sometimes.”

“You ever go that way? South to the Estuary?”

“No need to.”

“Did you ever meet Neeve?” Creek seemed the right age to have known Neeve.

A pause, as the woman glanced up. She said, “When she used to foot it up here.”

“I heard she spent quite a bit of time up here.”

“Long time ago.”

A third skin was soaking in the tub, so Enid went to stake that one onto the ground too. She wasn’t helping much, not really, but Creek was polite about it. She moved straight to the third skin as soon as she’d finished with the second.

Enid asked, “You want to talk at all? About Ella? What you think might have happened?”

“She died. It’s what happens when folk leave, she knew that.”

“I’m not sure that follows,” Enid said.

Creek sighed. “No one trusts a person wandering on their own. You don’t trust us, we don’t trust you. Doesn’t end well.”

“And Neeve? Did you trust her?”

“Was never like us. She couldn’t stay, no matter how much she wanted to. And Ella . . . well, Ella was Ella. They were a lot alike.”

Enid waited, but Creek didn’t offer more.