Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

‘Why don’t I like the sound of that?’ Steven replied, grinning.

‘Because, my good fellow, you are not a visionary.’

Howard Griffin had been there too; it was a rare occasion that the bank manager wasn’t with them at Owen’s. He noisily finished sucking the sauce from a chicken leg and said, ‘I understand the winds this time of year are favourable.’

‘Oh do you?’ Steven raised an eyebrow.

‘Yes, I do.’ Howard raised his own mug before adding, ‘Of course, I have no idea what we’re talking about.’

‘A circumnavigation,’ Mark cried.

‘Of what?’

‘Or whom?’ Howard raised an eyebrow too, mocking Steven.

‘Dirty old man,’ Mark chided, ‘of our great, sprawling city of Denver, Colorado, where else?’

‘We’re going for a drive?’ Steven smiled. ‘All right; I’m in.’

‘Not a drive, Steven, a bicycle ride,’ Mark declaimed, as if announcing they were about to take part in the Olympics. ‘Tomorrow, we set forth where no man has gone before.’ He lifted his glass and drank deeply. ‘Although I’m certain hundreds of adventuresome and resilient women have already made the trip, but that won’t mitigate our great pioneer achievement one iota.’

‘What is an iota, anyway?’ Howard sounded puzzled.

‘Don’t interrupt!’ Mark ordered, and went on, ‘Think about it. We’ll park down by Chatfield Reservoir – the car’ll be all right there overnight-’

‘Overnight?’ Howard interrupted, ‘optimistic, aren’t we?’

‘Don’t interrupt! We ride east through Highlands Ranch to Jordan Road. Granted, we’ll need to pick our way north on the prairie, but from there, we can take Tower all the way up to the 120. We’ll take 85 into Brighton and cut across Route 7 to Lafayette. There’s a hotel off the service road where we can pass out, and then we’ll be up and into Boulder for breakfast-’

‘Boulder?’ Steven said, ‘Mark, that’s not a circle, that’s a bloody great oval!’

‘Hear me out,’ Mark said, ill-advisedly reaching for another hot wing, ‘so breakfast in Boulder and then we come south along the Hogback on 93. We stop in Golden where I buy you a gigantic slice of blueberry pie at the drugstore-’

‘Best pie in the world,’ Howard pointed out.

‘It is,’ Mark agreed, ‘but don’t interrupt! Then it’s down past Red Rocks into Morrison and back to our car.’ Mark raised his hands as if to say see, nothing to it at all?

‘Why?’ Steven asked. ‘It’s got to be a hundred and fifty miles, and you want to do it on mountain bikes?’

‘Because it’s there.’ Mark waved to Gerry, the bartender, and held aloft the empty beer pitcher. ‘We will be there at the advent of a great and timeless tradition for cyclists in the Denver area: the Magellan Tour.’

Steven grimaced. ‘All right. Never let it be said that Steven Taylor ever turned his back on the great unknown.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Howard groaned, ‘there are convenience stores, shopping centres, motels and fast food restaurants along the entire route. You’ll both have cell phones with you, and the roads are paved, the whole way.’

Mark frowned. ‘We understand your lack of vision, Howard, but if you buy this next pitcher, we won’t hold it against you.’

‘Thanks for that, Sir Edmund,’ Howard said, ‘but you two should probably start drinking water now, lots and lots of water.’

‘And we will!’ shouted Mark, ‘for what is beer if not mostly water! Another pitcher, for we have a great adventure to prepare for!’

The first Magellan Tour had gone nearly as Mark – however drunk he might have been that night – had envisioned, and after that there were numerous other Magellan Tours, mostly on the heels of a long night at the pub or a particularly difficult week at work. Steven participated in all of them, gamely accompanying his roommate, sometimes with other friends, on the two-day ride.

But what Steven recalled most vividly from that first journey was the smell of onions. It was late autumn and most of the crops had been harvested, but one farmer near Brighton had left a field of onions to rot – maybe he failed to find a buyer, maybe he wanted the rotting vegetables to replenish something crucial in his soil for the following year, but whatever the reason, the aroma of rotting onions had been overpowering pedalling through Brighton, forcing Steven to the side of the road where he’d emptied his stomach, rinsed out his mouth with what was left of his water and limped the last few miles to their hotel, praying for a westerly wind before morning.

Awake now, slowly bringing his surroundings into focus, Steven smelled onions again, and his stomach clenched and he threw up what little he had left in his body. He rolled on his side, his head lolling until it struck the musty wooden floor. He shook off the last remnants of the dream and wondered how long he had been unconscious. The taste of vomit in his mouth made him gag again and he spat at the floor, trying to get rid of the saliva. He breathed deeply and stared up at the ceiling.

There’s a ceiling. That’s good.

‘Where are we?’ he asked anyone listening.

Footsteps thunked across the floor; Steven felt them. ‘It stinks in here,’ he whispered, breathing hard, ‘just like Brighton.’

‘Where?’ Garec crouched beside him, holding a wineskin and a section of folded cloth. ‘Let me wipe your face. You’re sweating.’

‘I puked.’ Steven turned his head again and spat another mouthful of discoloured fluid onto the floor.

‘If that means you emptied your stomach, then yes, you did. But no matter, we’ll clean it up.’

‘Where are we?’ He struggled to lift his head; Garec helped him sit up. ‘It smells like Brighton, like onions, rotten onions.’

‘Well, I don’t know where Brighton is, but what you’re smelling is pepperweed. There’s a whole bin of it there by the doors. It’s rotting, stinks like a grettan’s nightmare, but you’ll get used to it after a while. Pepperweed is strong, like onions but much more popular. A good cook would say it’s more useful in the kitchen, more flexible than onions. You had some in Traver’s Notch, at the Bowman, remember? The roots in that stew?’

‘Please, Garec, don’t remind me of that stew. I’ll be hurling again.’

Garec laughed. ‘Right. Sorry. It is good to see you awake, though. How are you feeling?’

‘Like the foul end of a buffalo herd.’ Steven dragged his hands through his hair. ‘How long have I been out of it?’

Brand and Kellin joined them, kneeling beside the confused foreigner. ‘Four days,’ said Brand.

‘Holy shit! Four days? Where are we? Is this a barn? Did we get to a farm?’

‘We did,’ Kellin said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘You had a seizure, a gods-rutting horrible seizure. It went on for so long, Steven, we thought you were going to die.’

‘I might have,’ he said. ‘Where’s Gilmour?’

Kellin winced.

Brand said, ‘We lost him. There was nothing we could do.’

‘He’ll be along,’ Garec assured. He tried to sound convincing, and hoped he was right.

‘You keep saying that, Garec, but I watched those snakes. They killed him.’ Kellin was visibly upset.

Garec took her hand. ‘I know what you saw, Kellin, but he’ll be back. We’ve lost Gilmour before. Trust me; the last time I burned his body on a pyre myself, and the old bastard still came back. It’ll take more than a nest of – well, whatever they were – to kill Gilmour.’ Garec hoped the others couldn’t read the doubt in his face. The snakes had been hideous, otherworldly monsters and he was afraid that perhaps Mark had summoned them because they were powerful enough to kill even a Larion Senator.