The Talisman (14 page)

Before they quite reached the fair, they turned right on a road much wider than the one which led toward the great pavillion.
Outpost Road
, Jack thought, and then, with a little chill of fear and anticipation in his belly, he corrected himself:
No . . . Western Road. The way to the Talisman
.

Then he was hurrying after Captain Farren again.

6

Osmond had been right; they could have followed their noses, if necessary. They were still a mile outside the village with that odd name when the first sour tang of spilled ale came to them on the breeze.

Eastward-bearing traffic on the road was heavy. Most of it was wagons drawn by lathered teams of horses (none with two heads, however). The wagons were, Jack supposed, the Diamond Reos and Peterbilts of this world. Some were piled high with bags and bales and sacks, some with raw meat, some with clacking cages of chickens. On the outskirts of All-Hands’ Village, an open wagon filled with women swept by them at an alarming pace. The women were laughing and shrieking. One got to her feet, raised her skirt all the way to her hairy crotch, and did a tipsy bump and grind. She would have tumbled over the side of the wagon and into the ditch—probably breaking her neck—if one of her colleagues hadn’t grabbed her by the back of the skirt and pulled her rudely back down.

Jack blushed again: he saw the girl’s white breast, its nipple in the dirty baby’s working mouth.
Oooooo, this pretty young man’s SHY!

“God!” Farren muttered, walking faster than ever. “They were all drunk! Drunk on spilled Kingsland! Whores and driver both! He’s apt to wreck them on the road or drive them right off the sea-cliffs—no great loss. Diseased sluts!”

“At least,” Jack panted, “the road must be fairly clear, if all this traffic can get through. Mustn’t it?”

They were in All-Hands’ Village now. The wide Western Road had been oiled here to lay the dust. Wagons came and went, groups of people crossed the street, and everyone seemed to be talking too loudly. Jack saw two men arguing outside what might have been a restaurant. Abruptly, one of them threw a punch. A moment later, both men were rolling on the ground.
Those whores aren’t the only ones drunk on Kingsland
, Jack thought.
I think everyone in this town’s had a share
.

“All of the big wagons that passed us came from here,” Captain Farren said. “Some of the smaller ones may be getting through, but Morgan’s diligence isn’t small, boy.”

“Morgan—”

“Never mind Morgan now.”

The smell of the ale grew steadily sharper as they passed through the center of the village and out the other side. Jack’s legs ached as he struggled to keep up with the Captain. He guessed they had now come perhaps three miles.
How far is that in my world?
he thought, and that thought made him think of Speedy’s magic juice. He groped frantically in his jerkin, convinced it was no longer there—but it was, held securely within whatever Territories undergarment had replaced his Jockey shorts.

Once they were on the western side of the village, the wagon-traffic decreased, but the pedestrian traffic headed east increased dramatically. Most of the pedestrians were weaving, staggering, laughing. They all reeked of ale. In some cases, their clothes were dripping, as if they had lain full-length in it and drunk of it like dogs. Jack supposed they had. He saw a laughing man leading a laughing boy of perhaps eight by the hand. The man bore a nightmarish resemblance to the hateful desk clerk at the Alhambra, and Jack understood with perfect clarity that this man was that man’s Twinner. Both he and the boy he led by the hand were drunk, and as Jack turned to look after them, the little boy began to vomit. His father—or so Jack supposed him to be—jerked him hard by the arm as the boy attempted to flounder his way into the brushy ditch, where he could be sick in relative privacy. The kid reeled back to his father like a cur-dog on a short leash, spraying puke on an elderly man who had collapsed by the side of the road and was snoring there.

Captain Farren’s face grew blacker and blacker. “God pound them all,” he said.

Even those furthest into their cups gave the scarred Captain a wide and prudent berth. While in the guard-post outside the pavillion, he had belted a short, businesslike leather scabbard around his waist. Jack assumed (not unreasonably) that it contained a short, businesslike sword. When any of the sots came too close, the Captain touched the sword and the sot detoured quickly away.

Ten minutes later—as Jack was becoming sure he could no longer keep up—they arrived at the site of the accident. The driver had been coming out of the turn on the inside when the wagon had tilted and gone over. As a result, the kegs had sprayed all the way across the road. Many of them were smashed, and the road was a quagmire for twenty feet. One horse lay dead beneath the wagon, only its hindquarters visible. Another lay in the ditch, a shattered chunk of barrel-stave protruding from its ear. Jack didn’t think that could have happened by accident. He supposed the horse had been badly hurt and someone had put it out of its misery by the closest means at hand. The other horses were nowhere to be seen.

Between the horse under the wagon and the one in the ditch lay the carter’s son, spreadeagled on the road. Half of his face stared up at the bright blue Territories sky with an expression of stupid amazement. Where the other half had been was now only red pulp and splinters of white bone like flecks of plaster.

Jack saw that his pockets had been turned out.

Wandering around the scene of the accident were perhaps a dozen people. They walked slowly, often bending over to scoop ale two-handed from a hoofprint or to dip a handkerchief or a torn-off piece of singlet into another puddle. Most of them were staggering. Voices were raised in laughter and in quarrelsome shouts. After a good deal of pestering, Jack’s mother had allowed him to go with Richard to see a midnight double feature of
Night of the Living Dead
and
Dawn of the Dead
at one of Westwood’s dozen or so movie theaters. The shuffling, drunken people here reminded him of the zombies in those two films.

Captain Farren drew his sword. It was as short and businesslike as Jack had imagined, the very antithesis of a sword in a romance. It was little more than a long butcher’s knife, pitted and nicked and scarred, the handle wrapped in old leather that had been sweated dark. The blade itself was dark . . . except for the cutting edge. That looked bright and keen and
very
sharp.

“Make away, then!” Farren bawled. “Make away from the Queen’s ale, God-pounders! Make away and keep your guts where they belong!”

Growls of displeasure met this, but they moved away from Captain Farren—all except one hulk of a man with tufts of hair growing at wildly random points from his otherwise bald skull. Jack guessed his weight at close to three hundred pounds, his height at just shy of seven feet.

“D’you like the idea of taking on all of us, sojer?” this hulk asked, and waved one grimy hand at the knot of villagers who had stepped away from the swamp of ale and the litter of barrels at Farren’s order.

“Sure,” Captain Farren said, and grinned at the big man. “I like it fine, just as long as you’re first, you great drunken clot of shit.” Farren’s grin widened, and the big man faltered away from its dangerous power. “Come for me, if you like. Carving you will be the first good thing that’s happened to me all day.”

Muttering, the drunken giant slouched away.

“Now, all of you!” Farren shouted. “Make away! There’s a dozen of my men just setting out from the Queen’s pavillion! They’ll not be happy with this duty and I don’t blame them and I can’t be responsible for them! I think you’ve just got time to get back to the village and hide in your cellars before they arrive there! It would be prudent to do so! Make away!”

They were already streaming back toward the village of All-Hands’, the big man who had challenged the Captain in their van. Farren grunted and then turned back to the scene of the accident. He removed his jacket and covered the face of the carter’s son with it.

“I wonder which of them robbed the lad’s pockets as he lay dead or dying in the roadstead,” Farren said meditatively. “If I knew, I’d have them hung on a cross by nightfall.”

Jack made no answer.

The Captain stood looking down at the dead boy for a long time, one hand rubbing at the smooth, ridged flesh of the scar on his face. When he looked up at Jack, it was as if he had just come to.

“You’ve got to leave now, boy. Right away. Before Osmond decides he’d like to investigate my idiot son further.”

“How bad is it going to be with you?” Jack asked.

The Captain smiled a little. “If you’re gone, I’ll have no trouble. I can say that I sent you back to your mother, or that I was overcome with rage and hit you with a chunk of wood and killed you. Osmond would believe either. He’s distracted. They all are. They’re waiting for her to die. It will be soon. Unless . . .”

He didn’t finish.

“Go,” Farren said. “Don’t tarry. And when you hear Morgan’s diligence coming, get off the road and get deep into the woods.
Deep
. Or he’ll smell you like a cat smells a rat. He knows instantly if something is out of order.
His
order. He’s a devil.”

“Will I hear it coming? His diligence?” Jack asked timidly. He looked at the road beyond the litter of barrels. It rose steadily upward, toward the edge of a piney forest. It would be dark in there, he thought . . . and Morgan would be coming the other way. Fear and loneliness combined in the sharpest, most disheartening wave of unhappiness he had ever known.
Speedy, I can’t do this! Don’t you know that? I’m just a kid!

“Morgan’s diligence is drawn by six pairs of horses and a thirteenth to lead,” Farren said. “At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth. You’ll hear it, all right. Plenty of time to burrow down. Just make sure you do.”

Jack whispered something.

“What?” Farren asked sharply.

“I said I don’t want to go,” Jack said, only a little louder. Tears were close and he knew that once they began to fall he was going to lose it, just blow his cool entirely and ask Captain Farren to get him out of it, protect him,
something
—

“I think it’s too late for your wants to enter into the question,” Captain Farren said. “I don’t know your tale, boy, and I don’t want to. I don’t even want to know your name.”

Jack stood looking at him, shoulders slumped, eyes burning, his lips trembling.

“Get your shoulders up!” Farren shouted at him with sudden fury. “Who are you going to save? Where are you going? Not ten feet, looking like that! You’re too young to be a man, but you can at least
pretend
, can’t you? You look like a kicked dog!”

Stung, Jack straightened his shoulders and blinked his tears back. His eyes fell on the remains of the carter’s son and he thought:
At least I’m not like that, not yet. He’s right. Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can’t afford
. It was true. All the same, he could not help hating the scarred Captain a little for reaching inside him and pushing the right buttons so easily.

“Better,” Farren said dryly. “Not much, but a little.”

“Thanks,” Jack said sarcastically.

“You can’t cry off, boy. Osmond’s behind you. Morgan will soon be behind you as well. And perhaps . . . perhaps there are problems wherever you came from, too. But take this. If Parkus sent you to me, he’d want me to give you this. So take it, and then go.”

He was holding out a coin. Jack hesitated, then took it. It was the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, but much heavier—as heavy as gold, he guessed, although its color was dull silver. What he was looking at was the face of Laura DeLoessian in profile—he was struck again, briefly but forcibly, by her resemblance to his mother. No, not just resemblance—in spite of such physical dissimilarities as the thinner nose and rounder chin, she
was
his mother. Jack knew it. He turned the coin over and saw an animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. It seemed to be looking at Jack. It made him a little nervous, and he put the coin inside his jerkin, where it joined the bottle of Speedy’s magic juice.

“What’s it for?” he asked Farren.

“You’ll know when the time comes,” the Captain replied. “Or perhaps you won’t. Either way, I’ve done my duty by you. Tell Parkus so, when you see him.”

Jack felt wild unreality wash over him again.

“Go, son,” Farren said. His voice was lower, but not necessarily more gentle. “Do your job . . . or as much of it as you can.”

In the end, it was that feeling of unreality—the pervasive sense that he was no more than a figment of someone else’s hallucination—that got him moving. Left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot. He kicked aside a splinter of ale-soaked wood. Stepped over the shattered remnants of a wheel. Detoured around the end of the wagon, not impressed by the blood drying there or the buzzing flies. What was blood or buzzing flies in a dream?

He reached the end of the muddy, wood- and barrel-littered stretch of road, and looked back . . . but Captain Farren had turned the other way, perhaps to look for his men, perhaps so he would not have to look at Jack. Either way, Jack reckoned, it came to the same thing. A back was a back. Nothing to look at.

He reached inside his jerkin, tentatively touched the coin Farren had given him, and then gripped it firmly. It seemed to make him feel a little better. Holding it as a child might hold a quarter given him to buy a treat at the candy store, Jack went on.

7

It might have been as little as two hours later when Jack heard the sound Captain Farren had described as “thunder rolling along the earth”—or it might have been as long as four. Once the sun passed below the western rim of the forest (and it did that not long after Jack had entered it), it became difficult to judge the time.

On a number of occasions vehicles came out of the west, presumably bound for the Queen’s pavillion. Hearing each one come (and vehicles could be heard a long way away here; the clarity with which sound carried made Jack think of what Speedy had said about one man pulling a radish out of the ground and another smelling it half a mile away) made him think of Morgan, and each time he hurried first down into the ditch and then up the other side, and so into the woods. He didn’t
like
being in these dark woods—not even a little way in, where he could still peer around the trunk of a tree and see the road; it was no rest-cure for the nerves, but he liked the idea of Uncle Morgan (for so he still believed Osmond’s superior to be, in spite of what Captain Farren had said) catching him out on the road even less.