The Talisman (11 page)

“This will have to be fast,” the Captain said. “I think I know how to do it, but we don’t have any time to waste.” He had shifted his mental direction with a military smoothness. “Now listen to me. We have a lot of bastards around here, so we’re going to pretend that you are my son on t’other side of the sheets. You have disobeyed me in connection with some little job, and I am angry with you. I
think
no one will stop us if we make this performance convincing. At least I can get you inside—but it might be a little trickier once we are in. You think you can do it? Convince people that you’re my son?”

“My mother’s an actress,” Jack said, and felt that old pride in her.

“Well, then, let’s see what you’ve learned,” the Captain said, and surprised Jack by winking at him. “I’ll try not to cause you any pain.” Then he startled Jack again, and clamped a very strong hand over the boy’s upper arm. “Let’s go,” he said, and marched out of the shelter of the flap, half-dragging Jack behind him.

“When I tell you to wash the flagstones behind the kitchen, wash flagstones is what you’ll do,” the Captain said loudly, not looking at him. “Understand that? You will
do your job
. And if you do not do your job, you must be punished.”

“But I washed some of the flagstones . . .” Jack wailed.

“I didn’t tell you to wash
some
of the flagstones!” the Captain yelled, hauling Jack along behind him. The people around them parted to let the Captain through. Some of them grinned sympathetically at Jack.

“I was going to do it all, honest, I was going to go back in a minute . . .”

The soldier pulled him toward the gate without even glancing at the guards, and yanked him through. “No, Dad!” Jack squalled. “You’re hurting me!”

“Not as much as I’m
going
to hurt you,” the Captain said, and pulled him across the wide courtyard Jack had seen from the cart-track.

At the other end of the court the soldier pulled him up wooden steps and into the great palace itself. “Now your acting had better be good,” the man whispered, and immediately set off down a long corridor, squeezing Jack’s arm hard enough to leave bruises.

“I promise I’ll be good!” Jack shouted.

The man hauled him into another, narrower corridor. The interior of the palace did not at all resemble the inside of a tent, Jack saw. It was a mazelike warren of passages and little rooms, and it smelled of smoke and grease.

“Promise!” the Captain bawled out.

“I promise! I do!”

Ahead of them as they emerged from yet another corridor, a group of elaborately clothed men either leaning against a wall or draped over couches turned their heads to look at this noisy duo. One of them, who had been amusing himself by giving orders to a pair of women carrying stacks of sheets folded flat across their arms, glanced suspiciously at Jack and the Captain.

“And I promise to beat the sin out of you,” the Captain said loudly.

A couple of the men laughed. They wore soft wide-brimmed hats trimmed with fur and their boots were of velvet. They had greedy, thoughtless faces. The man talking to the maids, the one who seemed to be in charge, was skeletally tall and thin. His tense, ambitious face tracked the boy and the soldier as they hurried by.

“Please don’t!” Jack wailed. “Please!”

“Each
please
is another strapping,” the soldier growled, and the men laughed again. The thin one permitted himself to display a smile as cold as a knife-blade before he turned back to the maids.

The Captain yanked the boy into an empty room filled with dusty wooden furniture. Then at last he released Jack’s aching arm. “Those were
his
men,” he whispered. “What life will be like when—” He shook his head, and for a moment seemed to forget his haste. “It says in
The Book of Good Farming
that the meek shall inherit the earth, but those fellows don’t have a teaspoonful of meekness among them. Taking’s all they’re good for. They want wealth, they want—” He glanced upward, unwilling or unable to say what else the men outside wanted. Then he looked back at the boy. “We’ll have to be quick about this, but there are still a few secrets his men haven’t learned about the palace.” He nodded sideways, indicating a faded wooden wall.

Jack followed him, and understood when the Captain pushed two of the flat brown nailheads left exposed at the end of a dusty board. A panel in the faded wall swung inward, exposing a narrow black passageway no taller than an upended coffin. “You’ll only get a glimpse of her, but I suppose that’s all you need. It’s all you can have, anyhow.”

The boy followed the silent instruction to slip into the passageway. “Just go straight ahead until I tell you,” the Captain whispered. When he closed the panel behind them, Jack began to move slowly forward through perfect blackness.

The passage wound this way and that, occasionally illuminated by faint light spilling in through a crack in a concealed door or through a window set above the boy’s head. Jack soon lost all sense of direction, and blindly followed the whispered directions of his companion. At one point he caught the delicious odor of roasting meat, at another the unmistakable stink of sewage.

“Stop,” the Captain finally said. “Now I’ll have to lift you up. Raise your arms.”

“Will I be able to see?”

“You’ll know in a second,” the Captain said, and put a hand just beneath each of Jack’s armpits and lifted him cleanly off the floor. “There is a panel in front of you now,” he whispered. “Slide it to the left.”

Jack blindly reached out before him and touched smooth wood. It slid easily aside, and enough light fell into the passage for him to see a kitten-sized spider scrambling toward the ceiling. He was looking down into a room the size of a hotel lobby, filled with women in white and furniture so ornate that it brought back to the boy all the museums he and his parents had visited. In the center of the room a woman lay sleeping or unconscious on an immense bed, only her head and shoulders visible above the sheet.

And then Jack nearly shouted with shock and terror, because the woman on the bed was his mother. That was his mother, and she was dying.

“You saw her,” the Captain whispered, and braced his arms more firmly.

Open-mouthed, Jack stared in at his mother. She was dying, he could not doubt that any longer: even her skin seemed bleached and unhealthy, and her hair, too, had lost several shades of color. The nurses around her bustled about, straightening the sheets or rearranging books on a table, but they assumed this busy and purposeful manner because they had no real idea of how to help their patient. The nurses knew that for such a patient there was no real help. If they could stave off death for another month, or even a week, they were at the fullest extent of their powers.

He looked back at the face turned upward like a waxen mask and finally saw that the woman on the bed was not his mother. Her chin was rounder, the shape of her nose slightly more classical. The dying woman was his mother’s Twinner; it was Laura DeLoessian. If Speedy had wanted him to see more, he was not capable of it: that white moveless face told him nothing of the woman behind it.

“Okay,” he whispered, pushing the panel back into place, and the Captain lowered him to the floor.

In the darkness he asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nobody can find that out,” came from above him. “The Queen cannot see, she cannot speak, she cannot move. . . .” There was silence for a moment, and then the Captain touched his hand and said, “We must return.”

They quietly emerged from blackness into the dusty empty room. The Captain brushed ropy cobwebs from the front of his uniform. His head cocked to one side, he considered Jack for a long moment, worry very plain upon his face. “Now you must answer a question of mine,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Were you sent here to save her? To save the Queen?”

Jack nodded. “I think so—I think that’s part of it. Tell me just one thing.” He hesitated. “Why don’t those creeps out there just take over? She sure couldn’t stop them.”

The Captain smiled. There was no humor in that smile. “Me,” he said. “My men.
We’d
stop them. I know not what they may have gotten up to in the Outposts, where order is thin—but here we hold to the Queen.”

A muscle just below the eye on the unscarred cheekbone jumped like a fish. He was pressing his hands together, palm to palm. “And your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, to
go
west, is that correct?”

Jack could practically feel the man vibrating, controlling his growing agitation only from a lifetime’s habit of self-discipline. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m supposed to go west. Isn’t that right? Shouldn’t I go west? To the other Alhambra?”

“I can’t say, I can’t say,” the Captain blurted, taking a step backward. “We have to get you out of here right now. I can’t tell you what to do.” He could not even look at Jack now, the boy saw. “But you can’t stay here a minute longer—let’s, ah, let’s see if we can get you out and away before Morgan gets here.”

“Morgan?” Jack said, almost thinking that he had not heard the name correctly. “Morgan Sloat? Is he coming here?”

7

Farren

1

The Captain appeared not to have heard Jack’s question. He was looking away into the corner of this empty unused room as if there were something there to see. He was thinking long and hard and fast; Jack recognized that. And Uncle Tommy had taught him that interrupting an adult who was thinking hard was just as impolite as interrupting an adult who was speaking. But—

Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s . . . he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.

Speedy had said that, and Jack had been concentrating so hard on the Talisman that he had almost missed it. Now the words came back and came home with a nasty double-thud that was like being hit in the back of the neck.

“What does he look like?” he asked the Captain urgently.

“Morgan?” the Captain asked, as if startled out of some interior dream.

“Is he fat? Is he fat and sorta going bald? Does he go like this when he’s mad?” And employing the innate gift for mimicry he’d always had—a gift which had made his father roar with laughter even when he was tired and feeling down—Jack “did” Morgan Sloat. Age fell into his face as he laddered his brow the way Uncle Morgan’s brow laddered into lines when he was pissed off about something. At the same time, Jack sucked his cheeks in and pulled his head down to create a double chin. His lips flared out in a fishy pout and he began to waggle his eyebrows rapidly up and down. “Does he go like that?”

“No,” the Captain said, but something flickered in his eyes, the way something had flickered there when Jack told him that Speedy Parker was old. “Morgan’s tall. He wears his hair long”—the Captain held a hand by his right shoulder to show Jack how long—“and he has a limp. One foot’s deformed. He wears a built-up boot, but—” He shrugged.

“You looked like you knew him when I did him! You—”

“Shhh! Not so God-pounding loud, boy!”

Jack lowered his voice. “I think I know the guy,” he said—and for the first time he felt fear as an informed emotion . . . something he could grasp in a way he could not as yet grasp this world.
Uncle Morgan here? Jesus!

“Morgan is just Morgan. No one to fool around with, boy. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

His hand closed around Jack’s upper arm again. Jack winced but resisted.

Parker becomes Parkus. And Morgan . . . it’s just too big a coincidence.

“Not yet,” he said. Another question had occurred to him. “Did she have a son?”

“The Queen?”

“Yes.”

“She had a son,” the Captain replied reluctantly. “Yes. Boy, we can’t stay here. We—”

“Tell me about him!”

“There is nothing to tell,” the Captain answered. “The babe died an infant, not six weeks out of her womb. There was talk that one of Morgan’s men—Osmond, perhaps—smothered the lad. But talk of that sort is always cheap. I have no love for Morgan of Orris but everyone knows that one child in every dozen dies a-crib. No one knows why; they die mysteriously, of no cause. There’s a saying—
God pounds His nails
. Not even a royal child is excepted in the eyes of the Carpenter. He . . . Boy? are you all right?”

Jack felt the world go gray around him. He reeled, and when the Captain caught him, his hard hands felt as soft as feather pillows.

He
had almost died as an infant.

His mother had told him the story—how she had found him still and apparently lifeless in his crib, his lips blue, his cheeks the color of funeral candles after they have been capped and thus put out. She had told him how she had run screaming into the living room with him in her arms. His father and Sloat were sitting on the floor, stoned on wine and grass, watching a wrestling match on TV. His father had snatched him from his mother’s arms, pinching his nostrils savagely shut with his left hand (
You had bruises there for almost a month, Jacky
, his mother had told him with a jittery laugh) and then plunging his mouth over Jack’s tiny mouth, while Morgan cried:
I don’t think that’s going to help him, Phil. I don’t think that’s going to help him!

(Uncle Morgan was funny, wasn’t he, Mom?
Jack had said.
Yes, very funny, Jack-O
, his mother had replied, and she had smiled an oddly humorless smile, and lit another Herbert Tarrytoon from the butt of the one smouldering in the ashtray.)

“Boy!” the Captain whispered, and shook him so hard that Jack’s lolling head snapped on his neck. “Boy! Dammit! If you faint on me . . .”

“I’m okay,” Jack said—his voice seemed to come from far away; it sounded like the voice of the Dodgers announcer when you were cruising by Chavez Ravine at night with the top down, echoing and distant, the play-by-play of baseball in a sweet dream. “Okay, lay off me, what do you say? Give me a break.”

The Captain stopped shaking him but looked at him warily.

“Okay,” Jack said again, and abruptly he slapped his own cheek as hard as he could—
Ow!
But the world came swimming back into focus.

He had almost died in his crib. In that apartment they’d had back then, the one he barely remembered, the one his mother always called the Technicolor Dream Palace because of the spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills from the living room. He had almost died in his crib, and his father and Morgan Sloat had been drinking wine, and when you drank a lot of wine you had to pee a lot, and he remembered the Technicolor Dream Palace well enough to know that you got from the living room to the nearest bathroom by going through the room that had been his when he was a baby.

He saw it: Morgan Sloat getting up, grinning easily, saying something like
Just a sec while I make some room, Phil;
his father hardly looking around because Haystack Calhoun was getting ready to put the Spinner or the Sleeper on some hapless opponent; Morgan passing from the TV-brightness of the living room into the ashy dimness of the nursery, where little Jacky Sawyer lay sleeping in his Pooh pajamas with the feet, little Jacky Sawyer warm and secure in a dry diaper. He saw Uncle Morgan glancing furtively back at the bright square of the door to the living room, his balding brow turning to ladder-rungs, his lips pursing like the chilly mouth of a lake bass; he saw Uncle Morgan take a throw-pillow from a nearby chair, saw him put it gently and yet firmly over the sleeping baby’s entire head, holding it there with one hand while he held the other hand flat on the baby’s back. And when all movement had stopped, he saw Uncle Morgan put the pillow back on the chair where Lily sat to nurse, and go into the bathroom to urinate.

If his mother hadn’t come in to check on him almost immediately . . .

Chilly sweat broke out all over his body.

Had it been that way? It could have been. His heart told him it
had
been. The coincidence was too utterly perfect, too seamlessly complete.

At the age of six weeks, the son of Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, had died in his crib.

At the age of six weeks, the son of Phil and Lily Sawyer had
almost
died in his crib . . . 
and Morgan Sloat had been there
.

His mother always finished the story with a joke: how Phil Sawyer had almost racked up their Chrysler, roaring to the hospital after Jacky had already started breathing again.

Pretty funny, all right. Yeah.

2

“Now come
on
,” the Captain said.

“All right,” Jack said. He still felt weak, dazed. “All right, let’s g—”

“
Shhhh!
” The Captain looked around sharply at the sound of approaching voices. The wall to their right was not wood but heavy canvas. It stopped four inches short of the floor, and Jack saw booted feet passing by in the gap. Five pair. Soldiers’ boots.

One voice cut through the babble: “. . . didn’t know he
had
a son.”

“Well,” a second answered, “bastards sire bastards—a fact you should well know, Simon.”

There was a roar of brutal, empty laughter at this—the sort of laughter Jack heard from some of the bigger boys at school, the ones who busted joints behind the woodshop and called the younger boys mysterious but somehow terrifying names:
queerboy
and
humpa-jumpa
and
morphadite
. Each of these somehow slimy terms was followed by a coarse ribband of laughter exactly like this.

“Cork it! Cork it up!”—a third voice. “If
he
hears you, you’ll be walking Outpost Line before thirty suns have set!”

Mutters.

A muffled burst of laughter.

Another jibe, this one unintelligible. More laughter as they passed on.

Jack looked at the Captain, who was staring at the short canvas wall with his lips drawn back from his teeth all the way to the gumlines. No question who they were talking about. And if they were talking, there might be someone listening . . . the wrong somebody. Somebody who might be wondering just who this suddenly revealed bastard might really be. Even a kid like him knew that.

“You heard enough?” the Captain said. “We’ve got to
move
.” He looked as if he would like to shake Jack . . . but did not quite dare.

Your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah
, go
west, is that correct?

He changed,
Jack thought.
He changed twice
.

Once when Jack showed him the shark’s tooth that had been a filigreed guitar-pick in the world where delivery trucks instead of horse-drawn carts ran the roads. And he had changed again when Jack confirmed that he was going west. He had gone from threat to a willingness to help to . . . what?

I can’t say . . . I can’t tell you what to do.

To something like religious awe . . . or religious terror.

He wants to get out of here because he’s afraid we’ll be caught
, Jack thought.
But there’s more, isn’t there? He’s afraid of me. Afraid of—

“Come on,” the Captain said. “Come
on
, for Jason’s sake.”

“
Whose
sake?” Jack asked stupidly, but the Captain was already propelling him out. He pulled Jack hard left and half-led, half-dragged him down a corridor that was wood on one side and stiff, mouldy-smelling canvas on the other.

“This isn’t the way we came,” Jack whispered.

“Don’t want to go past those fellows we saw coming in,” the Captain whispered back. “Morgan’s men. Did you see the tall one? Almost skinny enough to look through?”

“Yes.” Jack remembered the thin smile, and the eyes which did not smile. The others had looked soft. The thin man had looked hard. He had looked crazy. And one thing more: he had looked dimly familiar.

“Osmond,” the Captain said, now pulling Jack to the right.

The smell of roasting meat had been growing gradually stronger, and now the air was redolent of it. Jack had never smelled meat he wanted so badly to taste in his whole life. He was scared, he was mentally and emotionally on the ropes, perhaps rocking on the edge of madness . . . but his mouth was watering crazily.

“Osmond is Morgan’s right-hand man,” the Captain grunted. “He sees too much, and I’d just as soon he didn’t see
you
twice, boy.”

“What do you mean?”

“
Hsssst!
” He clamped Jack’s aching arm even tighter. They were approaching a wide cloth drape that hung in a doorway. To Jack it looked like a shower-curtain—except the cloth was burlap of a weave so coarse and wide that it was almost netlike, and the rings it hung from were bone rather than chrome. “Now
cry
,” the Captain breathed warmly in Jack’s ear.

He swept the curtain back and pulled Jack into a huge kitchen which fumed with rich aromas (the meat still predominating) and billows of steamy heat. Jack caught a confused glimpse of braziers, of a great stonework chimney, of women’s faces under billowy white kerchiefs that reminded him of nuns’ wimples. Some of them were lined up at a long iron trough which stood on trestles, their faces red and beaded with sweat as they washed pots and cooking utensils. Others stood at a counter which ran the width of the room, slicing and dicing and coring and paring. Another was carrying a wire rack filled with uncooked pies. They all stared at Jack and the Captain as they pushed through into the kitchen.

“Never again!” the Captain bellowed at Jack, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat . . . and all the while he continued to move them both swiftly across the room, toward the double-hung doors at the far side. “Never again, do you hear me? The next time you shirk your duty, I’ll split your skin down the back and peel you like a baked potato!”

And under his breath, the Captain hissed, “They’ll all remember and they’ll all talk, so
cry
, dammit!”

And now, as the Captain with the scarred face dragged him across the steaming kitchen by the scruff of his neck and one throbbing arm, Jack deliberately called up the dreadful image of his mother lying in a funeral parlor. He saw her in billowing folds of white organdy—she was lying in her coffin and wearing the wedding dress she had worn in
Drag Strip Rumble
(RKO, 1953). Her face came clearer and clearer in Jack’s mind, a perfect wax effigy, and he saw she was wearing her tiny gold-cross earrings, the ones Jack had given her for Christmas two years ago. Then the face changed. The chin became rounder, the nose straighter and more patrician. The hair went a shade lighter and became somehow coarser. Now it was Laura DeLoessian he saw in that coffin—and the coffin itself was no longer a smoothly anonymous funeral parlor special, but something that looked as if it had been hacked with rude fury from an old log—a Viking’s coffin, if there had ever been such a thing; it was easier to imagine this coffin being torched alight on a bier of oiled logs than it was to imagine it being lowered into the unprotesting earth. It was Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, but in this imagining which had become as clear as a vision, the Queen was wearing his mother’s wedding dress from
Drag Strip Rumble
and the gold-cross earrings Uncle Tommy had helped him pick out in Sharp’s of Beverly Hills. Suddenly his tears came in a hot and burning flood—not sham tears but real ones, not just for his mother but for both of these lost women, dying universes apart, bound by some unseen cord which might rot but would never break—at least, not until they were both dead.