Testament of the 13th Marshal
Tuesday, August 8th
It was the hottest day in anyone's memory. The day-crickers were already buzzing loudly as I rode into town for work. My watch read quarter six as I unclipped my keys and opened my office. I heated the stove, and put some water on. I grabbed the handled pot, and measured out two tablespoons of cofay. I unwrapped my satchel, and passed chunks of beef and two fried eggs through the Bars of Jail to Jimmy Sames, but he said he was still too drunk to eat. He picked at the food as I unlocked the cell. By the time he'd finished sicking up in the bucket, I'd poured the boiling water into the handled pot with the cofay, stirred it, and measured it out into two three-inch shot glasses, and put the wool sweaters on the glasses. Jimmy poured his into a camp cup, and added cold water and sugar to it. It'd been years since we'd had fresh cofay, and it was about all gone. No telling when we'd next have more. Strangers came through a few months back, but they were from someplace cold, and had only furs and salted fish for trade, so yeah, we'd not be having cofay again anytime soon.
I wrote up the paperwork as Cow-Bird had taught me, keeping up the records, of weather, temperature, humidity, associated with the arrival of visitors, trying to narrow down the variables. I wrote up whatever I could, of who they were, and from where they'd come. Today the temperature in my office was 118, and the heat shimmered the street outside. It was hot enough again. The wind picked up around three that afternoon, stirring the dust, as I looked out the window to the east. I yelled to Jimmy, about four blocks up the street that he might want to start running. He turned round, and shuffled back towards my office, arriving in time to help shutter the windows, and bar the door. Who knew what this storm would blow in?
They almost always brought rain, which we welcomed, catching it in a system of gutters that cat-crossed the town, and diverted it to the reservoir to the south. If there was rain, doubtless there'd be two to three days of gutter repair, as everyone pitched in to fix the storm damage. More often than not, and with increasing frequency over the past few years, the storms brought other things. Sometimes dead things, like giant ticks, or creatures that appeared to be made of metal, now in pieces. Two years ago we found, among other things, a man's hand, freshly amputated, and still bloody. Each of these items had been cataloged, and I even fingerprinted the hand before filing it all away in the warehouse I'd built behind the office.
This storm raged for three days, and the street would be ankle-deep mud for the next week. Nobody reported anything strange after this storm, except for some leaves, like squash or potato, except they were two leaves to a stalk, like a mottled green butterfly. About a week later, the small shoots of plants had begun to spring up, unseen since before the summer. All over town, tender shoots broke the surface.
A week passed uneventfully. I checked every botanical book I could lay my hands on, including a book from Outside. I couldn't read any of the words, except for the plants I already knew, and hadn't bothered to try deciphering the rest of the text. These new leaves were not among the hundreds illustrated in that book, so they were unknown even to the scholar who penned that book.
Another week went by, and now, among the plants everyone knew, were these new ones also, growing twice as fast, opening little green wings, like thousands of little butterflies had landed. Oddly, nothing else grew near them in a circle of a few inches. There must be some chemical in the roots, preventing other plants from taking their nutrients from the dusty soil.
By mid-September, I'd forgotten the strange new plants. Visitors had come in with silks and spices to trade. I traded fourteen ounces of gold dust for a half-pound of cofay, two pounds of tea, and some smoking resin which intoxicated me greatly, and which I must remember to use sparingly. Jimmy bought one of their camels, and followed after them a day later. I know I'll never see him again. I hope he wasn't drunk when he left. People said he was looking for Scherezahd, and that he'd actually shaved off his beard before he'd left.
Thursday after Jimmy left, I passed Jay Simonds on the street. I almost didn't recognize him. Jay had never been one to keep things to himself, and was never known to be without a permanent scowl. Now, he seemed as lit from within, and a look of total peace was on his face. He actually looked happy. He walked brusquely past me without a word, and as if he had something which he urgently needed to attend to. He headed straight south, and disappeared between the mercantile and the saloon.
Towards the end of October, most of the cornfields were full of the butterfly plants, and they all but covered the old scarecrow in their vines and leaves. Daily, I saw more faces lit like Jay's, and always heading south.
I put my horse to saddle early Sunday morning, and rode to the west at an easy pace, arriving at the swirling dust of the borderlands. I then turned south, and rode until I could see the cliff face, below which only blew the clouds of dust which no one had ever come back out of. I turned north, up the slope, and when I could see the silhouette of the reservoir, it was covered in the thick vines and leaves as of some tropical oasis. As the sun came up, I hid my horse behind an outcropping of rock, and crawled up to get a better view of the two dozen or so townsfolk tending to the plants. At one end was a pile of decaying vegetation, with enormous squash of some kind, that reminded me of the mummified remains found occasionally in the cliff caves. These dried bodies were found, arms around knees, wrapped in colorful blankets, with the head painted in red by whoever had left them there. These strange fruits looked eerily similar to those old corpses. It was now five thirty. I rolled up my left shirtsleeve, and named each two-inch scar of my predecessors. I said a silent prayer for them, and asked for their guidance and aid in this most dangerous of undertakings.