Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 89 of 150

The cart rolled through half a mile of dark before Ben saw the problem clearly. The shepherd's hut sat where Chilly Willy had said it would, low and slumped in the meadow grass. But the footpath ran ten paces from its fallen door. A traveler heading to the ford would pass close enough to see a boot print, a scuff of fresh drag, or the outline of a barrel-shaped chest under a feed trough. He stopped the driver at the bend and walked the last stretch alone. The path was hard-packed. Wagons used it. Shepherds still cut through in daylight. Cage's meeting was still a day and a night away. Any passing eye between now and then could find the chest. He crouched behind the split alder and thought it through. He could not move the hut. He could not close the path. He needed the hut to look like nothing, so eyes slid off it. A voice came from the grass. "You're standing on my supper." Ben looked down. A small green figure sat with his back against a stone, a walking stick across his knees. A turtle-shelled man, no taller than Ben's hip. He chewed something slow. "Who are you." "Tax Evasion." The man did not move. "I sleep here sometimes. The door's already down." Ben studied him. Not a scout. Too still, too settled. A man who lived by not being noticed. "I need the hut for a day and a night," Ben said. "I need travelers to walk past and see nothing worth stopping for." Tax Evasion took a long time to answer. "Then don't hide it like a hidden thing. Hidden things look hidden." "What does that mean." "Put washing on the line. Leave a pot by the door. Sit outside and mend something. A hut with a man in it isn't worth a second look." Ben watched him. "You'd sit here a day and a night for what." "Three coins. And you don't tell the gate keeper you saw me." Ben counted three coins from his mother's chest. His hand was steady. He had two left. He went back for Millie and the winged creature. It lifted the chest low over the alders, wings slow in the dropped wind. Two minutes of hum, faint under the leaf noise. Ben met it at the hut and slid the chest under the trough himself, packing straw around the wood. He kicked dust across the floor to break his prints. When he stepped out, Tax Evasion was already at the door with a cracked pot beside him, whittling a stick that did not need whittling. He did not look up. Ben walked back to the road on the path side, in plain view, empty-handed. A shepherd nodded at him from the meadow and kept going. The chest was hidden. The hut looked lived-in. Now he needed Marty's chalk mark on the north post.