Day Boy Read Online Free PDF

it never goes.
    The man’s circling round. I can hear him. But he doesn’t come closer. His moves are
a Hunter’s, but they don’t do this. They don’t hunt boys. There’s a madness in this
one. And here I am alone to face it. I have a knife, but it’s not like the machete
that he’s carrying. Just a thing for cutting soft wire: gutting fish, not men.
    Dain says a man should always keep something with an edge to it. Women too, at that.
It’s the edge that makes us what we are, he said once, clever apes, clever cutting
creatures. I asked him what knife he carries and his lips curled up, tight against
his gums. He keeps his edge within him, he said, all superior. He’s no ape, not any
longer, but he’s all kinds of clever.
    Not that it will do me any good.
    I’m here, and he’s still in the black dark hiding from the Sun.
    I shouldn’t have been there. But I was, course I was. Never where I’m supposed to
be. What’s the fun in that?
    Chipped a tooth last year ’cause of what Dain likes to call my misadventures. Cracked
a leg bad a few years back, blood swelled it and darkened, he nursed me through the
bitter agonies and the sweats—and I know what that cost him, me being weak and all,
hardly any use to anyone, let alone the likes of him, but he did it. Can’t nurse
me through death though, and I know I’m in for a bloody hiding if I get through this
all right. A hiding at the least.
    For an hour I’m crouching in that water, clutching my knife. Twice a catfish brushes
my legs, and it’s an awful cruel thing that I can’t slide my fingers under it and
flip it free of the river—make a good meal, and Dain says I need fattening up. There’s
gunshots in the distance, like a storm that’s building. The hunt’s on round the Summer
Tree. Deer being culled in the heat.
    A different sort of hunt to what this fella engages in.
    ‘Not here to kill you.’ The voice comes clear through the reeds, and it’s all I can
do not to let out a cry, and an accusation: the cut says otherwise. I’m shivering
a bit, and catfish takes a tiny nibble at my calf just then and I nearly yelp again.
‘You’re near to being at your end of work. And I’ve need to a new boy. My last been
kilt, down in the Southern Darks eight years back. I’m done with the lonely life.
    ‘Could kill you easy enough.’ There’s a slur to his words—still drinking. You don’t
drink like that unless you mean to kill something, even if it’s just yourself. ‘You’ll
see the truth of it soon enough.’
    My teeth chatter.
    ‘I’m patient,’ the Hunter says, telling me that he isn’t. ‘You don’t live in the
places south and north of the line without being patient.’
    I can’t help but find a sliver of hope in that, forget awhile the chill seeping into
me. I stay where I am in the brown muck of the river: still as still can be.
    ‘He won’t find you,’ the Hunter says. ‘We’ll both wait out here until you or me dies.
I don’t intend dying today.’
    Neither do I. No one ever does.
    But every day holds its own terrors, its own surprises. That’s why the Masters have
us Day Boys. The ones that keep the wheels spinning even while that Sun’s burning.
We run their chores. See to their business and make it our own.
    And I’m doing none of it, stuck here in silt and menace.
    There’s another hour. Just me, and his voice calling and I’m not moving, barely breathing.
That’s a hard labour all itself.
    There’s another nibble at my toes.
    Sometimes staying still can almost drive you out of your skull when all you want
is to be running, all your head is saying is RUN RUN RUN. And I’m not a stay-still
kind of lad. Never been that.
    ‘What you’ve got to hide for, boy?’ More slur. Which leans the odds to my advantage.
The time’s coming, as I see it. ‘You know I’m not the bad man.’
    Not the worst man, no. But there’s all different types of bad. He’s got bad enough
in him.
    I hear him moving through the reeds, he