‘You steal horses.’

‘I do?’

Mary watched the man tentatively. He’d waylaid her a moment ago, here in the dusty inn yard. Would he blackmail her?

‘I have a bargain for you.’

She nodded. That was all right then.

‘What is it?’

The man’s purple frockcoat (what did he think he was? Royal?) looked terribly wrong against the heavy grey sky. His mouth seemed wrong too, come to think of it, when he opened it again to speak. The lips pulled at the skin diagonally, like they didn’t really belong in his face.

‘…difficult, very difficult,’ she heard him finish.

‘What do you mean? There’s a chance I’ll be caught?’

‘No. It is only that the man who owns the horse doesn’t often go far from it.’

‘So who is he?’

‘That does not matter. You will be wondering where to find him, though.’

Everything the man said came out as a statement - no, actually, an ultimatum. His words clunked into place like gears in a gigantic clock, or nails in a dead man’s coffin.

‘I have determined that he will be, on the night of the 14th, on the Split-hair Road, above Gur Bay. He will be coming from the direction of Tolbridge.

‘There will be a beggar there too. The man will come and leave his horse to go see to the beggar, who will be in one of the smuggling caves. Then will come your opportunity.’

Mary recited it to herself, fixing his words in her mind.

Smugglers, that was what this was all about. Not entirely surprising; her father was a smuggler, she knew the sorts of things they got up to – and commissioning a horse theft sounded just like one of them. Though… this man didn’t look like a smuggler. And when Mary later stated the price he’d have to pay for the horse, he didn’t even attempt to haggle with her. That was a very unusual thing for a smuggler to do.

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Split-hair Road was a narrow winding track, cut out between a looming cliff face on one side and a sharp drop to the rock-strewn sea on the other. It was against the cliff that Mary now huddled, trying to avoid the onslaught of the storm.

Tonight was terror, why, of all nights, did it have to be tonight? Mary leaned back, trying to move her head further under the shelter provided by an outcropping rock. Useless – she got a faceful of water for her trouble.

The sky had opened and rain was hurtling down, thick and cold. The sea hissed and lunged at the drenched rocks far below the road, and the dirt below Mary’s feet was mired and slippery.

The beggar had come.

His movements stiff, he’d hiked through the mud and downpour until, shivering, he’d crawled into the smuggler’s cave. Mary supposed it was the smuggler’s cave. In actual fact it was a smallish hole bored into the rockface. Still, it led somewhere; the beggar had disappeared there.

Now Mary was waiting, watching the path when it became visible in the flashes of lightning.

Darkness. Then – an ethereal bleaching of the night.

There, coming up the road, a rider was illuminated by the spike of light.

Darkness fell once more and Mary strained her eyes and ears towards the place, now cloaked with the double thickness of shadow and deafening thunder, where she’d seen the rider.

He was cloaked and hooded too, lean in black. He was definitely a smuggler then; he wore their typical garb.

When the lightning next came, he was further up the path, less than fifteen yards away. Surprised, Mary pressed herself against the rockface, hoping not to be seen.

Flash. The man getting off his horse, the image almost frozen it was so fleeting. Flash, coming towards the smuggler’s hole. Flash. Bending down, slithering into the cave.

Now. Mary took her chance. She pushed away from the rock. What parts of her that had remained dry were soaked instantly. Then she was sliding, churning through the mud, beating her way through the almost solid wall of rain.

She reached the horse. Trembling, not even checking in the direction of the cave entrance, she put one foot into the stirrup. A sizzle of lightning more and she was on the beast.

She guided it back down the path, hazarding a trot. She stroked at its sleek hair, murmured to it.

Waves smashed against black rocks on one side, the sheer cliff towered on the other. Patches of brilliance pierced the night sky.

Around the corner, and another clash of thunder rent the sky. The horse pounded on.

The animal was disturbing. Mary was used to horses but this bony, mud-spattered thing was freakish. It didn’t seem to care about the wet, the cold or the spitting thunderstorm. How had the creature been trained, what had it experienced, that it was now so calm? Horses weren’t like this.

Mary flicked her wet hair out of the way and urged the horse on further. She wanted to get away from this place, for under the storm all was deathly still. Meeting the horse’s owner on this deserted road was a dreadful thing to contemplate.

She rode down the twisting road, around a bend, then up again as it suddenly steepened. The path narrowed, edged between the cliffs like a sword-gash. Then she was up, away from the sea, away from the coast road, and onto the cliff top.

She turned in the saddle, sparing one last look back.

Lightning lit white waves, the severe rocks and the spindly Spilt Hair road. Blessedly, there was no sign of any angry horse-owner.

A disturbance in the sky – a strong gust of wind perhaps – shifted the storm clouds above. Suddenly no lightning was needed. The moon, abruptly uncovered, glared like a luminescent bee sting.

It was blood red.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

‘The animal’s outside. Do you have the money?’

The man glanced around the inn then passed her a woven purse.

‘You will find it in order,’ he drawled.

She did.

The man followed her out, not even searching about for the horse. Instead, he untied a saddled mule and mounted it.

‘What are you doing? Aren’t you taking it?’

‘No,’ he said, as if were obvious. ‘I’ve already done what I came to do. I’m going. The animal is of no consequence now.’

‘Really? Then can I keep it?’

The man said, his voice laced with boredom, ‘Of course.’

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So strange, it felt, to stand on a little grassy knoll and gaze in the direction of the village and the highway to town, and to be so peaceful. She could see smoke, belching trunks of it, which grew and mingled with the grey morning sky. That smoke was not from normal fires. It was too black and thick.

In the foreground a boy hurried up the hill path that led to her and her father’s house. Carrying some message for her, probably. She ignored him and focused her gaze again on the village, musing.

People had been complaining that something was in the air, when she’d last visited the small town. They’d talked of the bleakness of the weather of late, of how their vegetables were rotting in the ground, and how the sickness come upon them was not natural.

Mary couldn’t ignore it as she’d have liked to have done. For she felt it too, an unusual sense of foreboding. The new sickness with its strange impartiality towards its victims – it mattered not whether they were young, old, or healthy – this was a worry, but apart from it, there were other things. Something wasn’t right. She fumbled about in her mind for the reason – was it the village, was it her father going back to Dover –

But it wasn’t. The thing that gave her the most unease was the horse, the accursed smuggler’s horse. She wished she hadn’t done it. She felt wrong about the whole thing. There seemed to be something oppressive crouching on the horizon of the future.

The boy climbing up the hill turned a curve in the path. Mary followed his progress impassively, her mind on other things.

It was unfounded, but she had an unbearable suspicion that this would be the week she was discovered. Or, this would be the week her father was caught running goods across the Channel. Or it would be the week she was arrested and hanged, swinging from the gallows-tree.

Yet what could she do? She couldn’t very well return the horse, hoping for the best. She just had to keep it in the barn. Unfortunate that the gaunt, washed-out creature frightened Cedar, Mary’s stallion – but she couldn’t keep it anywhere else, and the horses had to share.

Mary’s attention wavered: the boy had mounted the hill and was hurrying towards her, an unnatural urgency writ across his face.

‘Miss, Miss Porter? I’m here to tell you that your father will be late, so you’re not to expect him this evening or the next few days.’

Mary scrutinised the boy in front of her. He was on the younger side of 14, with ridiculously long lashes and a crooked nose. A bandage bound the upper part of his left arm. She didn’t know who he was, perhaps just an orphan who’d got mixed up with nightrunners and their business.

‘And what’s keeping him busy, then? Why couldn’t he come himself?’

The boy frowned slightly, his face scrunching up before he replied, ‘He can’t, miss.’

Mary frowned back at the boy. She caught herself from immediately asking what he meant, instead examining his appearance more closely. The boy had huge purple circles under his eyes, his shoulders were slumped slightly. His whole posture reeked of fatigue and stress. Mary suddenly felt a vague sense of panic; had her fears come true?

‘They’ve been found out? Arrested?’ She took a deep breath. Even so, the word came out as a whisper, ‘Hanged?’

‘No, no, miss, ’course not,’ the boy said. But then his face fell, and Mary knew that the real news was worse.

‘George – I mean, your father – he’s ill. Quite a few others are too. An’ miss, that weren’t all. There was – there was cold-blooded murder too. Evil things happened. Horrible. I-I couldn’t…’

Mary was suddenly aware of a harrowed cast to the child’s eyes which she had previously missed. The glint there, in the depths of his crystal blue eyes, was like that of a soldier just returned from his first battle, that of someone who had looked death in the eye.

‘Tell me,’ she commanded, and the boy, stoically rubbing his eyes, did so.

He explained their first sortie in Baird’s sailing ship, how her father and some other men had gone down into the rowing boats (he had too). He told how they’d returned, once they’d done their job.

The oar had hit something, he said. A corpse, face-down in the water, arms outstretched ‘like he was hugging it’. They’d turned him over and it was Morrison, one of the ship’s mates. Everyone had thought it was pirates, but Mary’s father had disagreed.

Treachery, the man had said, and he had been right. Morrison had been stabbed in the back.

The boy skimmed over the return to the sailing boat, the fight which had then ensued. The mutineers had been led by Jorris, apparently. Mary knew the name; she had a vague impression of a smooth face and shaggy brown hair.

Sickened, she nodded as the boy rounded off the tale, saying, ‘and that was when everyone got ill. So they sent me.’

‘You’d better stay here until my father gets back.’ If he gets back, some infuriating nether-region of her brain added. If he had the disease prevalent in the village then the possibility was unlikely.

‘I think I should go back and tell -.’

‘Stay here.’

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Two days had passed. There was no sign from her father, and Mary was extremely worried. Yesterday she’d gone out, hoping to hear news of him and the other smugglers, but the things she’d seen on the road had quickly forced her to turn back.

The boy was still here, as she had insisted. He was currently sleeping in the back room. He didn’t seem sick so much as extremely tired.

Mary felt the same, but there was no chance of sleep for her. Oppression saturated her soul. She felt like she was wrapped in a corpse cloth that was slowly tightening, constricting, so that she could barely breathe. She didn’t think she was alone in this feeling either.

The people she’d met in the village, on the highway – their shoulders were sort of hunched inwards and they wouldn’t talk or say hello, or offer any sign of recognition at all.

The only time they did start speaking was when omens were mentioned. Turner’s fowl had been born with one eye. Everyone sighed about it, and said it was a worry, and then went dejectedly on their ways, still keeping their heads firmly bent towards the earth.

And there were other things, nasty things. There’d been a man caught murdering his wife in the next town over, Widdeshaw. He’d butchered her and sliced her into little bits and was burying her in his dung heap when he was discovered.

There were sick people, sick with the rot and black-mouth, stupid festering beggars who she’d had to throw stones at to keep away. Normally she would have given them bread or cheese, but these ones looked – well, she didn’t like the savage gleam of their eyes nor the mad fidgeting of their fingers.

The wind, common on her hill, sighed and whipped up her clothes and hair. Mary felt cold, not for any chill the draught brought. No, for the slight, discordant rustle it brought with it.

The rustle, the wind, was not right. She knew, even before she turned that she wasn’t alone on the hill.

A tall figure stood before her, wearing heavy black robes that hung still despite the wind. A sharp pain stung Mary’s chest. It was the smuggler; he had found her. His posture conveyed finality and though his face was hidden under his cloak, Mary knew he was enraged.

She knew also, that he had come with support. A few men sat astride horses a stone’s throw away. One’s face was lacerated with scabs and pockmarks, but the other two were ordinary enough. They were presumably the smuggler’s followers. One had a wickedly curved sword hanging by his side.

There was no chance of escape. She had her belt knife on her, but against men on horseback, with swords, she was doomed.

The smuggler stepped forward.

‘You have my horse.’ His voice was a lifeless monotone.

‘Do I?’ Mary choked out, backing up.

‘I must have it back.’

‘Yes of course, I understand.’

Her tongue seemed independent of her brain. Mary let it move as the rest of her seized in paralytic shock.

‘You don’t understand. I have a Duty. Get the horse.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that now.’

Mary hurried towards the barn, her limbs stiff automatons. When she got there, Cedar shied away from her, his eyes showing white and fearful. The other horse, calm as usual, accepted the rope, then peaceably followed her back to the smuggler.

The smuggler wordlessly took the horse. In barely a moment he was on the its back, seemingly without performing the necessary intervening motions to get there.

He swung round to face the other riders.

‘I can finally end my Duty.’

He laid one hand on the horse’s shoulder, one caressing hand. No retribution against Mary for stealing it; he was glad he had the horse back.

Then she realised.

The hand was fleshless. Smooth bone fingers tangled themselves in the horse’s hair.

A skeleton, the tales, in black, his horse…

A lump she couldn’t swallow lodged in her throat.

‘The Duty? You mean -.’

The smuggler’s head turned, but she couldn’t see his face. From his hood a black void gaped at her.

‘D-death,’ she stuttered.

The hood dipped in a nod.

His duty ended? Why? Why?

Mary shook. No, it couldn’t happen. Not now, not when…

‘No you can’t,’ she said.

Death slowly raised his eyeless gaze to meet hers. He didn’t say a word, but it was enough. Mary’s words hung in the air, and that gaze was enough to expose them as feeble. Her hope was futile, unfounded, stupid.

She was up against the Inevitable, for heaven’s sake. She was being pathetic.

‘Fate has decreed it,’ he said. ‘She has dispatched her servants.’

Doom.

She had stolen his horse. She – had she started everything by agreeing to steal the horse? She remembered the man from the inn, with his flat voice, and strange clothes. What was he?

Had she been used as the trigger for a calumny of events that meant the end of the world?

She didn’t know, she could never know, whether it was so. But if she hadn’t stolen that horse – would he have realised? Would he have thought to end it? Would there –

The Apocalypse.

She hated it all. She was being used as nothing more than a pawn. A tiny piece of tinder used to kindle the fire that would annihilate the entirety of human existence.

She loathed the whole sinister thing. She would die. She was useless.

Not caring what would happen to her, she acted.

With vicious speed she drew her belt knife and fell upon the horse.

The creature barely flinched as she thrust the knife in. And in again. Again and again and again until her arm was leaden. A violence born of desperation.

Panting, despondent, Mary stepped back. She skimmed the knife over the beast’s haunches then dropped the blade.

‘You must know my horse won’t die,’ Death said.

Mary didn’t say anything.

One of Death’s companions sneered at her. The others watched impassively, uncaringly.

Then their attention shifted, as one might cease watching a beetle to contemplate the heavens instead.

Death spurred his steed on. The dark veil of destruction, of death, war, famine and pestilence was descending.

The horse stumbled.

Again it limped.

Then its front knees buckled and it stopped completely.

Its leg tendons had been slit. The creature was lame.

‘You lamed my horse. I can’t end the Duty now.’ Not a trace of anger, only realisation.

Death faced her.

‘You’ve cheated Fate.’

Then wind moved, pulled, tugged. Ice-cold and overpowering it swept up the grass and the leaves. Mary saw a billowing of black robes, heard the shrieking of the gust, then she was alone.

Death had vanished. Only a smell of stale earth and mould hung in the air. The sky was clearing, the clouds were scudding away, whipped along by the wind.

All the grass on the hill was brown.