The Fury and the Terror (67 page)

Just past eight o'clock by the angle of the sun. Sherard knew where Gillian would be, and all the others. He was close enough to camp to hear them talking and smell the coffee as breakfast was set out by his father's sturdy old safari cook, who had only two-thirds of a face due to the proclivity of hyenas to seize a sleeping victim by the head. Sherard walked that way, more aware of the blue flies buzzing up from a dung heap at his passing than he was of the thin flexible cord wavering behind him like a strand of spider's silk in a gentle breeze. He walked easily, without a limp, his legs feeling fresh and young.

Mojo, his father's Alsatian watchdog, last owner of the spiked brass collar generations of Sherard dogs had worn, saw Tom first and rose stiffly to greet him. His mother looked up with a smile. She had died at the age of twenty-eight beneath an overturned lorry; her only child was just two years old. Tom had inherited her angular body and long legs, but not her tightly curled copper hair.

"Good morning, my boy."

"Mother, it's wonderful to see you."

Tom kissed her cheek and turned to his father, who had risen from his camp chair with one of the corncob pipes he crafted himself gripped in his left hand. Donal Sherard looked as Tom remembered him just before his death in '61. His father's body finally had given in to the massive insults, it had suffered during the Mau Mau uprisings and a lifetime of hunting big game, his broken heart irreparable after Deborah's passing. At the time of their marriage he had been thirty-one years older than his wife. Donal's heavily pouched gray eyes, the eyes of a man who missed nothing and forgave no weakness in other men, were also Tom's eyes.

As always Donal had been out hunting before sunrise. His crepe-soled desert boots stood unlaced behind his chair and he was wearing felt carpet slippers, a concession in his later years to the aching often-broken bones in both feet.

"So they've dug another bullet out of you. Thought you'd be joining us permanently this time."

"I wish—" Tom said, but didn't complete the thought. He was looking at Gillian, who was seated in the third camp chair around the morning fire. Whole again, slender, with peaceful but penetrating eyes.

He felt his father release his hand. "You bloody well don't," Donal said. "Too much at stake yet. You'll be going back, and no nonsense about it. I do sympathize. As Pease wrote in his fine book on lion, 'You go out to Africa to see savages, and you find them only on your return.'"

"This is the world I want," Sherard said, staring at Gillian.

Gillian answered for all of them. "But this isn't a destination, Tom."

"What is it, then?"

"The country of memory. The 'mind-forest' of the old tribes. I thought you would be more comfortable meeting here than on the Astral plane; much too busy there. Too many distractions, some of them unpleasant if you haven't been much exposed to Astral travel."

"How long can I stay here?"

"Time isn't relevant," his father said, filling his pipe with Turkish tobacco, and his mother nodded.

"Time isn't linear either," Gillian said. "Then, Now, and There all exist simultaneously."

"You can see the future?" Tom asked, his eyes going from one face to another. "When will we all be together—I mean, can it be for as long as we want?"

"We have other lives now, Tom," his mother said gently. She made a motion with her spread hand and he saw the memory-earth vanish beneath her booted feet, saw a universe of nebulae glowing with life. "Out there," she said. Deborah looked at her husband. "As a matter of fact, I think we should be going. Tom and Gillian have a great deal to talk about."

Donal nodded and glanced down at the pipe he'd been about to light.

"Yes, of course, you're right. But I was looking forward to a few puffs on the old corncob. Well." He put the pipe back into a pocket of his bush jacket and held out his hand again to Tom. The old watchdog barked hoarsely, and turned into a nebula himself.

His father disappeared as Tom was clinging to his hand. He turned to his mother, seeing only her smiling elliptical eyes in a dazzle of starlight. He whispered something, longingly. Then he felt Gillian's arm slip inside his.

"Do you have another life?" he asked desperately. "Are you going to disappear on me too? Tell me who you are, and where in the world I can find you. I
will
find you."

She laughed. "No, Tom. I'm still Gillian. But not for much longer. My stay in the Astral is almost over. Then I'll choose—whatever life is most useful to the growth of my soul. Then, or There."

"Then? The past?"

"I can as easily be born five hundred years ago—earth time—as five hundred years in the future. Then or There, it's all the same, really: the same battles we fight over and over. Only the hellish technology changes, never the lusts and social ambitions. Our earthly tribulations seem to be ordained by genetics, no matter how hard the Enlightened Ones work to straighten out the human race." She shook her head in a moment of despair. "No, you won't find me. You'll be earthbound in Now for a while. But ... I make that sound much harder and gloomier than it deserves to be." Gillian smiled. "There's always love, Tom, and the children I couldn't give to you."

"I don't know what you—"

"Shall I show you some of your future, Tom? Do you seriously want to know?"

"Did you realize that you were going to die that day in New York?"

"Consciously, no. But I'd been preparing myself since the birth of Eden."

"You didn't know about her!"

She turned to face him. "It wasn't needful for me to know Eden during my earth-span. I would have been a danger to her when she didn't have the means to defend herself. Instead I tutored her on the Astral plane. She has great soul-strength, loyal friends, and a purpose, if only she will accept it. That's where you come in, Tom. You have
two
women in your life now. Beautiful, headstrong, gifted. Both need you. One of them you will marry."

"One—? But—I thought—who are you talking—"

Gillian kissed him. He was sure of that. But when he tried to pull her closer she wasn't there anymore. He heard only the whisper of her voice; or was that too just another memory, fading along with the landscape, a ghostly flight of egrets from the river's edge, the waning sun?

"T
om?" Two anxious faces in Sherard's hospital cubicle, dawn at the window.

"Where've I been?" he asked thickly, remembering so little.

"You were moving your toes," Bertie said, ecstatic tears on her face.

"You'll be out of here in no time," Eden Waring confirmed. She looked as if she hadn't slept for a couple of days. Exhausted, the left eye turning in, she was still a beauty. Made in the image of her mother. The face he had adored for twelve years, and would never tire of seeing.

Bertie held one of his hands, Eden the other.

His life, Sherard knew, could become very complicated if he wasn't careful. Stalwart was the word Katharine Bellaver had used.

Nothing like a serious dilemma of the heart to bring out the iron in a man's character.

He smiled gratefully at the women, and concentrated on moving his toes.

BIG COUNTRY RANCH • JUNE 14 • 7:20 A.M. MDT

R
ona was leading her roan filly Sun Dancer out of the barn when she heard the Secret Service agent named Bannister calling her. She put her foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle, looked down at Bannister as he hurried to catch up. The other agent on the morning detail, Gorman, followed Bannister. They wore new Wranglers and western-style shirts with mother-of-pearl snap buttons. It was obvious from their expressions that running in new pairs of boots hurt their feet.

"Where're we riding to this morning?" Bannister asked her with a friendly smile. Wasn't even as old as her son Joshua.

"
I'm
doing the riding, and I don't want company. I told you and I told your boss, I'll tolerate having you on the place as long as you don't get in my way. Otherwise I'm not obligated."

"Yes, ma'am. We thought—"

"And I don't believe either of you has ever been on a horse in his life. While you're hanging around Big Country, take a few lessons. Jess will fix you up with mounts you can handle."

"When can we expect you back, Mrs. Harvester?" Gorman asked.

"For the last time. This is
my
ranch. I come and go as I please, and I can take care of myself."

"Yes, ma'am."

Rona walked Sun Dancer to the pipe gate across the road. Gorman hastened to open it. They and the others hadn't been posted to Big Country to protect her, Rona knew that. They were there to spy on her. But she wasn't fooled.

Sun Dancer knew what Rona wanted on her morning rides, which trails to take. Three or four miles of cantering, then a level gallop for another two miles to Gunflint Spring, which fed one of the creeks flowing across the Big Country range. Easy work for Sun Dancer, who was an Arabian and Russian Orlov cross, bred for endurance racing and difficult terrain.

Thirty-six hours ago it had snowed, a late-spring storm. The snow was half-gone already. The sun was about to rise to join the last-quarter moon in a dawn-pink sky.

Yesterday the bandages had been removed from her rebuilt nose. Beneath the brim of the Stetson her glum eyes were still rimmed in yellow and streaky purple. Rona hadn't wanted to look at herself in any mirror. Her morale was at the vanishing point already although she still had fits of rage, like a badger she'd seen once. Three days with his hind feet locked in a poaching trap, wearing down but still snapping at the steel, snarling at the odor and sight of men and horses. The rage was bad, she knew that, not only an ordeal for the heart but it kept her from thinking of a way out of the trap Buck Hannafin had sprung on her.

Rona was wearing a scarf around her head under her Stetson with the beaded headband, a red and black lumber jacket. Sun Dancer wore a turquoise blanket and breast plate. Temperature was in the mid-thirties, breath of horse and rider steaming as Sun Dancer's hooves crunched through the frozen patches of snow remaining on the ground. But the lupine spikes and buttercups already in profusion had weathered the brief storm. The stock had not been bothered much either. She heard a saw-whet owl, bedding down for the day in a stand of gambel oak. The grama grass was tipped with frost beginning to dazzle as daylight came to the range.

She was only forty-seven. She could go where Clint had gone before her. Run for office in her home state. Free herself from the trap, one foot at a time. Then try for the presidency. They couldn't just throw her out of the White House like a common indigent, like trailer trash, and get away with it.
That was not her destiny
. The American people believed in Rona Harvester. They would come to her rescue. Even without Victor she knew . . . But first she had to kill Buck Hannafin. Kill him, kill him! AND STOMP HIS GLOATING FACE UNTIL HIS BLOOD WAS HALFWAY TO HER KNEES NOTHING LEFT NOT AN EYEBALL OR A PIECE OF BRIDGEWORK FROM HIS FAT INSULTING MOUTH—

Rona's heartbeat had accelerated madly. Now wait.
Don't go off like that
. Maybe it was the stuff they were giving her for pain. She didn't know if she needed Percocet anymore, but she craved it. For the pain of her crippled psyche.

Another horseman caught her attention, probably because he wasn't moving. His chestnut mount snorted smoke-breath along a ridge of black alder perhaps a quarter of a mile away. She didn't recognize the rider's lean silhouette, but there were no fat working cowboys in this country. It was the flat-crowned hat he wore. None of the Big Country's hands owned such a hat. The chestnut had a white face, she could tell that much at the distance. He wasn't from their remuda. So it was someone cutting across their range, which wasn't unusual. Was he watching her? Hard to say, but she felt a deeper chill next to the bone.

She spurred Sun Dancer away from the ridge and the unknown horseman and into their finishing run down to the cottonwoods by the spring, the small pond dotted with wood ducks. A flock of partridge blew out of the tall grass beside the trail as Sun Dancer passed. Wind whipped Rona's sore eyes, drew tears, momentarily blinded her as she leaned over his neck and gave herself to the thrill of the gallop.

When she dismounted the sun was full and flashing through the lacy pale green boughs of the tall cottonwoods. No wind yet. Ice still caked the spring spillway, the sedges that grew in the small pond below. Rona broke a thin layer of ice with the heel of her boot so that Sun Dancer could drink. There was a flare of light across the misted, ghostly surface of the partially iced pond. Some heifers with calves trailing them were on the move a hundred yards to the east. Rona glanced down, saw an exquisitely frosted dragonfly frozen to a blade of grass. Then she caught a glimpse of herself, a bright reflection off rim ice, and turned quickly away, looking back through the cottonwoods.

Her heart jumped. The chestnut with the white blaze she had noticed ten minutes ago was now fifty yards away, standing in the same attitude as if teleported, but riderless now. The chestnut was half-concealed by the trunks of the cottonwoods and buckbrush where the pond drained across a beaver dam and flowed south as Gunflint Creek. Robins flickered in and out of the hazy sunlight.