Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 135 of 150

Ben carried the sack away from the ruined hall. He could not follow the crew north, so he cut east toward a small village he had never entered. He needed water, food, and a road the crew did not watch. He kept the fox close and the coin hidden inside the painted cat. Dawn was close. He walked fast. At the village edge, he stopped behind a garden wall. A scout stood by the well, talking to two women. Ben knew the man by his crossbow and the horn at his belt. He belonged to the northbound crew. But the crew had gone north. This one had doubled back. The scout held up his hand, level with his own chin, and drew a shape in the air. Tall. Lean. A man with a chest that hummed. He was describing Ben. Ben pressed flat to the wall. The women pointed down the lane, unsure. The scout wrote in a small book. If Ben walked in for water, someone would name him within the hour. Every door in the village was now a trap. He could not go in, and he could not stay near the well. He needed the scout to carry a false story back, not a true one. He set the sack down behind the wall and thought. In a cart abandoned by the garden sat a peddler's wares under a torn cloth. Ben lifted the cloth. A tense painted mask stared up, brows raised, mouth open in a frozen scream. Beside it sat a soft blue chair and a striped vase, still wet with dew. Junk left to rot. Ben took the mask. He smeared his face with garden mud, dark and unlike his own skin. Then he tied the mask over his head, hunched his shoulders, and dragged one foot. He crossed into the lane in the open, a broken beggar in a fright-mask, the kind children chase and adults avoid. The scout turned. Ben croaked and shook the cart's wet vase at him, spilling water on the stones. "Coin," he rasped. "Coin for the road." He shuffled close, foul and loud, and pressed the mask near the scout's face. The scout stepped back, disgusted. "Get off." He looked at the bent, mud-caked figure and saw nothing tall, nothing lean, nothing worth a horn. He shoved Ben aside and turned to the women. "You're sure? No man like that came through?" They shook their heads. The scout closed his book. "Then he went another way." He walked off toward the north road, following the crew's false trail. Ben dropped the mask in the cart and slipped back behind the wall. He drank from the wet vase, filled it, and lifted the sack. The scout was gone, chasing a lie. But the mask lay in plain view now, and someone had seen a beggar spill water by the well. He had one clean hour, and a new face they might remember.