“Not yet,” Strode said. “Brewmeister claims his have cultured and refined penicillin. Mebbe so. They got all kind of fancy gear down there, from the days they really were a brewery, back before the big cull. Claim they reworked some of it to make antibiotic. Me, I don’t trust ’em that far yet. This stuff’s scavenge. Old as it is, it still retains some potency. It’s better than nothing.”
Mildred nodded.
“So, what’s the deal with this Brother Joseph?” Ryan asked the ville healer.
Her face shut down. “He served the current Baron
Savij the last five, six years as a combination guru and right-hand man,” she said. “Now that the baron’s incapacitated and his daughter’s…missing, he’s stepped up to run things.”
She didn’t sound too happy about that. From her body language Ryan guessed that fact wasn’t anything she wanted noised around. Fine with him; she was taking good care of the Armorer, so he didn’t want anybody jogging her elbow.
“Is Brother Joseph a native of Soulardville?” Krysty asked.
Strode shook her head. “Turned up nine, ten years ago. Claimed to have wandered the wilderness for years seeking spiritual answers. Lotta people who listened to him seemed to think he found some.”
“And what do you believe, O dear and glorious physician?” Doc asked.
Whether she was exhausted or just had heard it all already—both occupational hazards for a busy healer—Strode didn’t even give him a “you have got to be shitting me” look.
“I’m agnostic, myself,” she said. “Some of what he says makes a lot of sense. Some of it doesn’t. He does seem to help some people. But what he brought with him…”
“What?” Jak almost yelped. “He sickie? Plaguer?”
“Not in any physical sense.”
They stared at her.
“I’ve already said too much,” she said firmly. “Obviously more of the people here agree with what he does than don’t. And mebbe he does keep us safe. That’s all I’m going to say.”
She sighed. “All right. Your friend’s a tough bird. He’s in stable condition, and I calculate he’s likely to recover soon. But he’s going to be out of it for some days yet. And
now I think it’s best we all leave now and give our patient time to rest without being disturbed by our noise.”
Curiosity itched Ryan like an armful of mosquito bites. He already knew there was no point peppering the woman with more questions. Fortunately the rest of his crew did, too. They allowed themselves to be herded none-too-subtly toward the door to the outer room.
Mildred, though, hung back, hesitating. Strode frowned. Of all the people in the small band of adventurers she clearly respected Mildred the most. Yet her expression also suggested she reckoned a fellow healer, of all people, should know better than to risk troubling the rest of somebody in the kind of shape J.B. was in.
“Thank you,” Mildred said at last. “You’ve done right by J.B.”
To Ryan’s astonishment the burly white healer enfolded the stocky black one into her strong arms. They hugged each other fiercely. Krysty looked on, smiling slightly and nodding.
Ryan’s eye caught Doc’s sardonic gaze. “It is women, my dear Ryan. Some say they’re a guild unto themselves. Men of science such as myself have often speculated they’re actually a separate species. Do not bother your head trying to understand them. Men have tried that and failed for millennia before my time. No further progress I could see had been made by the time of the great killing. I doubt much has been made since then.”
“Besides,” Krysty said as Strode and Mildred broke apart, “the heads men actually
use
to think with are too small for really important stuff.”
“So you see,” the tanned and wiry man with long gray-brown hair was saying to Krysty and Doc, who sat across the heavy-laden table from him, “from the very outset we employed square-foot gardening techniques to maximize our yield. The founder, the original Baron Savij, was quite an enthusiastic proponent of organic gardening. He proved to be highly knowledgeable, as did various members of his posse.”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “He was definitely known for his fondness for cultivating certain forms of herb. Smoking ’em, too.”
The speaker, whose name Ryan didn’t catch, turned red. Everyone else laughed.
The banquet hall was on the palace’s bottom floor. The kitchen was in the back. Heat washed into the room whenever the double doors swung open to admit servers carrying laden trays and full bowls. Although the twenty or so diners gathered around the big table—made by pulling several smaller tables together—raised the heat level plenty by themselves.
Amazingly, it didn’t stink. Not by Deathlands standards of stench. Cleanliness seemed the order of the day in the ville. It kept down disease, something every ville feared, especially since sickness spread like floodwater rising through concentrated populations.
Nor did Ryan and his friends contribute to the stink
level. They and their clothes had been freshly washed. They had bathed in metal tubs and water had been brought to them by order of Brother Joseph. Their clothes had been laundered by other ville helpers. Though the clothes were still damp, that actually helped cool Ryan a bit. It wasn’t as if they weren’t going to sweat their duds sopping by the time dinner was through anyway.
“I’m really interested in what you’re doing here, Mr. Bulstrop,” Krysty said to the long-haired garden guy.
The man smiled so big it seemed the top of his head would just open up backward like a hinged beer-stein lid. “Thank you so much, Ms. Wroth.”
“Ms. Wroth,” Ryan repeated aloud. “They got some bastard manners in this ville. Ow! Why did you kick me?”
“Because I’m not close enough to,” Mildred said grimly.
“But I was impressed!”
“Ryan—”
The tone in Krysty’s voice shut him right down. Since he’d finally gotten grown-up and hard-bit enough to stand up to Trader, who’d ridden him unmercifully during his early apprenticeship, Ryan would step down for no man.
Then again, only a blindie would mistake Krysty Wroth for a man.
“My friends!” Bro Joe’s voice pealed like a bell from the head of the table. Booker sat at his side, stuffing a piece of bread into his face with crumbs cascading to the scarred wood table below him. Ryan noticed he’d managed to turn the bread gray just from briefly handling it. Ryan was glad that whatever breeze the open windows and doors gave didn’t blow down from that end of the table. It would’ve taken the edge off even his appetite.
“As you know,” the preacher continued when the burble of conversation stopped, “we are privileged to have guests with us tonight—intrepid wanderers of the wasteland!”
That brought out some discreet applause. Ryan wasn’t sure how the guest list had been assembled. Most of the attendees were getting on in years, forties at least, looked well enough fed and well-scrubbed. He didn’t reckon they’d been picked for opposition to Bro Joe; he noted Strode was absent. Tully sat at the far end of the table from the preacher and looked fairly uncomfortable. Didn’t harm his appetite any Ryan could see.
Garrison was there, sitting up on the preacher’s right across from Booker. Ryan admired the strength of his stomach. Unless, like some folks, he’d been born without any sense of smell.
Ryan caught Krysty’s eye as she smiled around at everybody, playing the ideal dinner guest in a way that wouldn’t have been out of place at a baronial party in Front Royal. Her expression hardened briefly as she caught Ryan’s attention.
Guests, he knew she was thinking, as he was. Six sec men with hands behind their backs and sidearms and truncheons hanging from their belts stood at ease around the dining room. Brother Joseph might call the companions guests, but there were still blasters ready to come out if they started actually acting like them. They were prisoners, no matter how well they were being treated.
Fattened? Ryan didn’t like the taste of that line of thought.
“In their honor, and in honor of our wonderful ville and the service rendered it by a succession of heroic Barons Savij, I propose that we bring out Saga to give us the story of Soulardville!”
That brought out another round of applause. It was louder and more enthusiastic than before, although Ryan thought he caught some eye-rolling, too. Apparently there wasn’t unanimity on the locals’ appreciation of this Saga.
The palace was a big place. Ryan had the impression it had expanded beyond the building’s original footprint, possibly by breaking down walls between it and neighboring buildings. Though they might’ve built additions to the structure, too. They’d had plenty of time. He had seen the walls they’d built around their ville, to seal it off from the outside world.
So Ryan wasn’t sure where the old man in the walker shuffled in from. He was tiny and wizened and the color of aged mahogany, with a thrusting blade-nosed face and a shiny egg of skull with just a fringe of white fluff like cotton puffs glued on. Bright green tennis balls, right out of the scavenged can, capped the front legs of his walker. He wore sandals and a brown-and-black-striped dashiki that hung to his knees, and a cap halfway between a skullcap and a fez knitted out of gold, red, yellow and green yarn on his crown. Like Booker, he wore dark glasses.
“What with wrinklie?” Jak asked, gesturing with a roasted chicken leg.
“I think he’s some kind of bard or chronicler,” Krysty said.
“Looks like he could have come here with the first Savij,” Ryan said, sopping up some beans bubbled with molasses and bacon from his heavy blue earthenware plate with a crust of bread.
The far end of the table from Brother Joseph had lacked a chair or place setting. Now Saga thumped his walker to the spot. At a gesture from Brother Joseph a chair was placed for him. He sank onto its cushion with a grateful sigh and with help from an attendant set his walker aside. Then he leaned forward and placed hands that looked like claws carved from aged hardwood on the table.
“Hear me now, children of Soulardville and visitors from the wasteland!”
Ryan almost jumped out of his chair. The old man’s voice was triple-loud and trumpet-brassy, especially coming out of such a dried-up old cicada-husk of a body.
“Hear me as I tell the tale of Savij, the gangsta who made the ville! Out of the very flames of the big nuke he strode into Soulard. Him and his posse. And the people of Soulard cowered in fear before him.
“But he didn’t bring destruction. He brought life. Life! Because he was a prophet and had seen the end coming. He had studied and he had calculated. He knew. He knew!”
The ancient paused to lubricate his aging vocal cords with a healthy slug of wine from a glass jar.
In the hiatus in the old man’s oddly hypnotic rhythmic shouting, Mildred leaned toward Ryan across the table. “Savij was a big conspiracy theory buff,” she said quietly. “He got into survivalism and all kinds of crazy stuff.”
She shook her head, making the beads in her plaits rattle.
“Guess he wasn’t so crazy after all, was he?”
“The S-Man!” Saga exclaimed. “In his wisdom he taught the people of the ville how to survive the fire and the poison that fell from the sky. But the travails of the bad old world outside weren’t over. Oh, no! The New Mad rid! The New Mad rid the earth of tens of thousands who had lived through the blasts and the fire and the invisible death! The earth shook, the buildings fell down, the mighty river jumped its bed!
“And then the sky went dark. Earth grew cold. And so it was for many years.
“But the first Baron Savij bade the children go forth into the ruins, amid the cold and the darkness, and seek out the means to live. And so we did, over those terrible, terrible years of shadows and ice.
“And when the skies at last cleared, he led the children out into the healing rays of the sun and said, ‘Yeah, motherfuckers, can you feel it?’ And verily they said, ‘Fuck yeah!’”
“Fuck, yeah,” the other diners echoed reverently.
Mildred’s left eyebrow rose. She looked around at the others. Doc stared amiably into infinity at a point just above the others’ heads. Jak was fidgeting in his chair like a little boy who needed to go pee. Krysty maintained a suspiciously frozen expression.
J.B. wasn’t there to grin and shake his head and perhaps mutter a wise-ass crack under his breath. For the first time Ryan really missed the runty little bastard, keenly felt the hole his absence left.
He hadn’t had luxury to do it earlier. To miss his friend and hard right hand, even during their hours locked up, when other needs like eating and drinking and sleeping took priority.
“Fuck yeah,” Ryan said loudly, hoisting his mug in salute. Then he took a swallow of beer to cover his grin. Mildred shot him an outraged glare. It went right up her back for him to go along with this mumbo-jumbo. That was part of why he said it.
And partly, he thought, as he swigged the beer, it was because these Soulard fusies had given them good grub and better beer, and also they outnumbered them and took their blasters. It didn’t cost him anything to say crazy shit if that made his hosts happy.
He hoped Mildred would chill out before she got them chilled, period.
“So the days passed. We waxed and grew strong. Strong! The first great Baron Savij, the founder, set us to work on the building of the walls and fences and the plant
ing of the hedges that protect us to this day. Praise him! Praise his memory!
“Came the day for him to lie down and give his bones to the earth. But from his studly loins he had brought forth a fine, strong son. The new Baron Savij was good and wise and strong. He carried on his father’s mighty work.
“Thus we built our strength and built our wealth. We came to trade with the others who had somehow managed to survive, despite lacking the wise firm hand of Savij to guide them. The scavvies in the ruins, the haughty opportunists from Breweryville, we traded with them. Lo, people came from as far away as Fort Zellich and even Camp Knappenberger, far in the wooded mountains to the west. They crossed the perilous river from Eastleville. Because we had the good shit. The best food, meds, wine, the best pottery, the best salvage. We were for real! And we still are, praise Baron Savij!”
He hoisted his wine jar, which a young boy kept topped off from a large ceramic jug. A seismic wave of the red fluid slopped over the side and splashed onto the tabletop. The diners, who had finished eating, by and large, moved their chairs back with scrapes on the brick floor to avoid getting splashed or dripped on. Beyond that no one paid any attention.
“But something was lacking.” He drank deeply, belched in satisfaction, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, belched heroically and set the glass jar down with a clunk on the tabletop.
“Something was lacking, my children. We had soul, but that soul cried out for nourishment. Then one day, one glorious day, a wanderer came to us. A man who quenched our thirst for the spirit. A man who brought us the compact, just in time to protect us from the new menace from the sky—Brother Joseph!”
The diners burst into wild applause. It seemed to Krysty there was an overstretched quality to some of the smiles, a glassy look to certain eyes. But no one seemed willing to let his or her neighbors out-do them in zeal.
“Wait,” Jak whispered, as Joseph rose, smiling. “What menace from sky?”
Krysty pressed a finger urgently to her lips.
The ville’s spiritual leader spread his hands before him, palms down, for silence. As though he were stilling the waters, the frenzied approval ceased.
“Thank you, Saga,” he said. “An inspired performance.”
Saga’s jaw dropped. “But I’m not done.”
“You must be exhausted. My acolytes will help you to your rest.”
The wrinklie went ashen. “I’m goin’, Bro Joe! You know me! I’m your biggest fan!”
“Of course,” Joseph said, nodding magnanimously. “And I yours.”
A couple of husky young men in T-shirts tie-dyed similarly to the preacher’s appeared. They lifted Saga to his feet, planted him gently but firmly in his walker. Then with him clutching frantically to its metal bars they lifted him by his matchstick arms and hustled him out.
When Saga and his unwelcome attendants were out of sight and earshot, Brother Joseph swept the table with his pale amber gaze.
“And now, if our guests would be so kind, I think we’re all dying to hear the chronicle of their undoubtedly strange and terrible journey that has led them here to our garden of peace and prosperity.”