Dinner at Deviant's Palace (12 page)

Lollypop had climbed up over the wagon’s stern and unbolted the cabin door, and Rivas hurried forward as it swung open. Three girls were standing inside, blinking in the orange firelight; they were smiling uncertainly, evidently still supposing that Rivas’s imitation of a far-gone receiving the sacrament had been genuine.

He peered closely. None of them was Uri.

“Step down, girls,” he said with weary gentleness. “You’re free.”

Their smiles disappeared, but they climbed down and wandered aimlessly toward the fire.

“Climb in there,” Rivas told Lollypop, “and, carefully, bring the fourth girl forward.”

The old man disappeared inside the cabin. After a moment he called out, fearfully, “She’s dead.”

“Bring her forward.”

“You’ll kill me.”

Maybe I will, thought Rivas helplessly. But, “Don’t be silly,” he said. “This is just a job to me.”

There was scuffling and thumping in the darkness, and then he saw a long, dark-haired body rolled to the cabin’s threshold.

“Let me see her face.”

Lollypop lifted the head and turned it toward Rivas. It wasn’t Uri.

Rivas wasn’t aware of how tense he’d been until his shoulders relaxed. “Not the one I’m after,” he told Lollypop. “Get inside and shut the door.”

There were tears on the old man’s face. “You can’t lock me in here! This cabin’s built tough, I’d starve to death, just shoot me right now—”

“I’m not going to lock it, relax. I’m just going to pile some stuff in front of the door so I’ll hear it if you come out. The dead girl you can leave in there with you or roll out onto the deck.”

Lollypop rolled her back inside. “I can’t be alone,” he muttered as he pulled the door closed.

Rivas let the slingshot go slack and tucked it into his shirt, then ran back into the dark garage, picked up the old bed frame and carried it back to the boat-wagon. He threw it onto the deck, climbed up himself, and leaned it up against the closed cabin door. “There,” he called. “If I’m still around when this falls, I’ll hear it and come back and kill you, okay?”

The old man was mumbling inside, possibly to the dead girl, but there was no specific reply.

Rivas let the slingshot go slack and tucked it into his belt, walked around to the driver’s bench and grabbed the bottle of Currency, then hopped down to the floor. During the day’s ride, he had noticed that the harness of the horses was an unusual style, with some sort of hinge and pin arrangement as well as buckles on the harness straps, and a light English saddle on each horse; now he put the bottle down, carefully, and walked up to the front right horse to get a closer look at the harness.

Each of the pins, he saw, had a ring on the top end; he yanked one out of its hinge and the harness strap fell away. He smiled almost sadly. Ready for anything, you boys were, he thought; Jaybird shepherds, punch-bees, the necessity of having to take to the water… even, I see, for having to abandon your vehicle altogether and proceed on horseback without unbuckling anything. I’ll bet old Lollypop is going to be a little more careful about picking up hitchhikers, though. Rivas yanked out another pin and tried to remember what length he liked stirrup leathers to be.

“Where’s the jaybush?” came a voice from right behind him, making him jump and gasp.

He turned to the girl. She was tall, with pale hair; she was silhouetted against the comparative brightness outside, and so he couldn’t see her expression, but, knowing Jaybirds, he didn’t figure there would be much to see anyway. “Sorry, miss,” he said. “There isn’t one anywhere near.” He looked past her. “Where’d the other two go?”

She shrugged.

“Good luck to them.” He went back for the bottle and tucked it into his shirt and then pulled the last pin, freeing the horse from the wagon. “And good luck to you,” he added, wondering if she’d know how to give him a leg up.

“Where are you going?”

He looked back at her in exasperation. Why couldn’t she have wandered away with her friends? “South.”

“South?” she said with sudden eagerness. “To the Regroup Tent?”

“No, dammit, I—” He paused. Why not? What better cover could he hope for than the role of a Jaybird who’d become separated from his band and was waiting to be caught up with or reassigned? Especially if he was accompanied by an obviously genuine stray Jaybird girl. “I mean yes,” he said.

“Can we start tonight?” she asked. “I feel terrible being away from everyone.”

“Yes,” said Rivas, leading his horse around so that he could reach the harness pins on the left front one. “I’d like to get away from this place as soon as possible.”

The girl glanced around blankly, apparently giving Nigel’s corpse no more attention than she gave the neglected pieces of pork. Obviously home was wherever the Jaybirds were, and every other place was simply a place where they weren’t, only to be passed through and not worth a second look. Rivas had read somewhere that toads could perceive only two categories: a fly, and everything that was
not
a fly. This girl seemed to have the same sort of two-position attention switch.

“Since it’s not where everyone is,” he amended wearily. She smiled and nodded, and he went on, “Sure, there’s still enough light for us to cut a couple of miles out from between us and the Regroup Tent.” He handed her the reins to the second horse. “Can you ride?”

Her smiled disappeared. “Yes,” she said, taking them.

He realized that it must have been a skill she’d acquired before becoming a Jaybird, during her renounced old life, and that while she was willing to use it to get back into the bosom of the church, she’d take no pride or joy in it.

“Well,” he said, “if I fall off, come back for me.”

Without replying the girl hiked her left knee up, got her sandalled foot into the left stirrup, and effortlessly swung up onto the horse; Rivas noticed that her legs, under the coarse cloth robe, were long and graceful. She’d have fetched a good price in Venice, he thought—and I’m glad I saved her from that. And what the hell am I looking at a girl’s legs for when I’m trying to find Uri?

At his second try Rivas got into the saddle. “Follow me,” he said, and led the way out onto the street.

When the quiet tick-tock of the hooves had receded away down the street, the garage was silent… but not quite still. The sunlight became redder and dimmer as it slowly advanced across the concrete floor, the remaining two horses blinked incuriously from time to time, and a shadow without a body drifted from the street into the garage, hard to see because it was the same color as the twilight glow. It turned like an unhurried underwater swimmer and tensed slightly when it saw the raw pork, but moved eagerly forward when it saw Nigel’s corpse. It lifted its legs in a crouch, and when gravity finally coaxed it down to the floor its insubstantial fingers fluttered over Nigel’s face and hands, trying to find an open wound.

Then finally the wagon’s cabin door was pushed open, and a bed frame toppled onto the deck with a tremendous crash. The transparent creature, immensely startled, darted away like a minnow, and by the time the snuffling Lollypop had shuffled across the deck and climbed down to the floor, the thing was clinging upside-down to one of the ceiling beams, as tight and still as a pink glass bat.

The old man sat down beside the body and began haltingly whispering to it while the light crept further into the garage and grew dimmer and the creature on the ceiling beam blinked and rolled its big eyes and one of the Jaybird girls, outside, made a steady clanging racket but no vocal complaint as she tried patiently to extricate herself from one of Nigel’s intruder alarms.

At last Lollypop picked up Nigel’s body, carried it to the wagon and laid it on the deck. He climbed back aboard, rolled the dead girl out of the cabin and dumped her over the gunwale, and then gently dragged Nigel inside and closed the door behind them.

Five minutes passed, then the ceiling-clinging thing let go and spread its arms and legs and spiraled down like an autumn leaf and touched down, silently, on the dead girl’s face.

There was no further motion in the garage; and after a while the Jaybird girl outside got free of the alarm and wandered aimlessly away into the night, and then the silence was unbroken.

W
HEN A SUDDEN CLATTER
of hoofbeats spilled Rivas out of the night’s web of dreams, he decided that he’d been premature yesterday in deciding that his fever was abating. His skin was hot and dry and tight and his breath was arid in his head and the bright morning sunlight seemed to be making faint rainbow auras around everything. His head was murky with the sort of unspecific depression left behind by a night of heavy drinking or the worst sort of nightmares.

He rolled over into a crouch on the pile of cardboard that had been his bed, and he squinted around at the weedy yard. A collapsed, rusty swing-set leaned against a fence near him, and the cardboard freshly shoved under it reminded him that when he’d gone to sleep last night the Jaybird girl had been sleeping there. So where was she now? He stood up, feeling dangerously tall and fragile, and stumbled out of the yard to the tree he’d tied the horses to.

One of the horses was still tied to it. Rivas peered around, blinking tears out of his eyes and wishing that his nose would either produce a sneeze or stop tingling, and finally saw her, fifty yards down the street, riding the other horse.

“Hey!”
he yelled. “Uh…” Why hadn’t he learned her name? “Hey,
girl
!”

She looked over her shoulder, then reined in and rode back to the tree, which he was now leaning against. “What?” she said.

“Where are you going?” He had to squint to look up at her against the bright blue sky.

“The Regroup Tent,” she said impatiently. “Where did you think?”

“Well, Christ… you weren’t going to wait for me?”

“I thought you were sick.”

“Oh!”
he said, nodding in exaggerated comprehension. “
I
see. You thought I might slow you
down
.”

“Right.”

He throttled his anger by reminding himself that she was a vital stage prop in his role as a stray Jaybird… and just for a moment, though he suppressed the thought almost instantly, he knew he’d have ditched
her
in an instant if she’d been sick and of no use to him.

“Well, I’m
not
sick,” he said. “This is just an allergy. I’m allergic to these… bushes, here. Okay? So wait for me. And don’t run off without me again, hear?”

She blinked at him in some surprise. “It’s the duty of every strayed follower of the Lord to return to the fold as quickly as possible.”

“Well, sure,” he said, intrigued by the hint of an Ellay accent in her voice, “but not so hastily that you’re likely not ever to get there at all. One girl alone, why… you wouldn’t get two miles before you’d run into a snake or a punch-bee or a rapist or another couple of pimps.”

She seemed genuinely puzzled. “But my soul would be in the Lord’s hands. Why should it upset
you
?”

He spread his hands and opened his eyes wide to show her how sincere he was. “Because I care what
happens
to you, that’s why.” She waited while he saddled his horse and got onto the animal by half climbing the tree.

The girl didn’t speak as they rode slowly down the sunlit street, but she looked vaguely troubled.

“Didn’t I save you from those two guys who killed your friend?” he reminded her after a couple of minutes.

“Yes,” she said. Phone poles stood every few hundred feet along the left side of the road, and sun-rotted rope rings dangled from some of the cross pieces, way up there where only birds could get to, and a couple still held yellow sticks of forearm bones. At about every twenty-fifth hoof clop the horses passed through the shadow of another pole. “But…” the girl said after a while, “we aren’t supposed to care about each other that way…. That’s for the shepherds, rescuing is… and even they don’t do it because they care about us but just because the Lord wants us.”

Rivas glanced at her with some respect. Very good, sister, he thought. You’ve got clear eyes for a birdy chick. She caught his look and smiled uneasily before looking away.

Rivas let his gaze drift to the buildings in the middle distance ahead, standing out there among the heat shimmers like broken, discolored teeth in green gums, and he let his eyes unfocus so that it all became just blurs of color. As the morning wore on, he wished he’d taken Nigel’s hat as well as his slingshot. The hot sun made it feel as if his fever had spread out from him and infected the whole world, like a spilled beer gradually soaking through a whole book, so that the pages tore or stuck together in clumps, and all continuity was gone. He
could
remember, if he tried very carefully, who he was, how old he was, and what his purpose was in being here; but during this monotonous southward ride he didn’t need to keep all those things in mind, and so he just rocked with the motion of the horse and, unless something roused his attention, thought about nothing at all.

Don’t put on the act for me, old boy. I know you hate ’em all, every one of ’em.

He frowned and focused his eyes. Where had he heard that recently? Who was it that had said that to him? He couldn’t have been sober at the time, or he’d remember. Unless he’d been overpoweringly sleepy…?

It’s me you love. Me only.

It was last night. A dream? Yes, of course it had been a dream, a fever-warped one. He tried to remember something more about it, but couldn’t.

At midmorning he killed two doves with Nigel’s slingshot, and as he was awkwardly butchering them another sentence from his dream came to him.
You’re too ashamed to admit it,
the voice had said.

Rivas paused, the bloody knife hovering over one of the half-dismembered birds, and he tried to remember what the dream had been about and who in it had been saying these things to him. Then he remembered seeing something in the dream… a person… himself? Was he looking in a mirror? And why, of all things, did he see himself sucking his thumb?

He finished butchering the birds, and started a fire by dampening some shredded cloth from his shirt with Currency and then banging together various rocks and bits of scrap metal until some sparks fell on the shreds and ignited the alcohol vapor. Then he spitted the doves and cooked them over a fire of powdery old lumber pieces. His companion didn’t seem surprised when he let her have one of the birds, served with a mock flourish on a Ford hubcap, but she didn’t look pleased either.