by James Axler
FOR ONCE Mildred’s relatively short legs proved no handicap on a forced march. She towered over their captors, and their leg-to-height ratio made her look like a giraffe. The swampies set a steady pace, but even for her it was no more than that at which she might’ve walked to the library in med school.
Of course, that didn’t account for the humid heat or the marshy spots that tried to suck the boots clean off her feet, nor the obstructions that crossed their path, humped roots or fallen logs. The swampies warned of obstacles in their deep voices. Evidently the idea of tormenting their captives by watching them trip and fall or slam their shins held little appeal to them. Or they were merely so practical they didn’t want to waste marching time on frivolous diversions.
The prisoners’ hands weren’t bound, which let them scramble more easily over the larger blockages. They weren’t allowed to carry their packs. The swampies were sturdy and as strong as mules, and didn’t seem to mind the added burden. Mildred suspected they didn’t want to risk losing any of the precious booty if a prisoner bolted and was shot down into some gator-infested bayou where even the swampies didn’t dare try to retrieve it.
She became acutely aware of nonvisual sensory inputs. For the most part the sense of feel brought discomfort: humid heat, the sweat that tickled its way into every cranny and fold of her body, the chafing in her hinder parts. As for sound, the swampies discouraged their prisoners from talking, even during rare rest and water breaks. They themselves spoke seldom, in a sort of subterranean mutter. Given the extremely slangy French Creole they normally used, she wouldn’t have been able to follow the conversation if she heard it clearly.
She found herself concentrating on the birdcalls and chirps and trills, which came from all sides from the woods and brush and the egrets and herons wading in the sluggish dark-stained waters. Also she learned to recognize when the swampies guided Doc, who walked immediately in front of her—J.B. came next, a comforting warmth even if she couldn’t physically sense his nearness—over some obstacle lying in the path of what to them had to have been his freakishly long legs. They took great care over what they had to assume was an addled oldie.
It struck her, during a brief halt as the swampies helped their blindfolded captives negotiate a fallen cypress one at a time, that they were being unusually solicitous for the welfare of their enemies. This kid Jon Dough takes his responsibility to deliver us to his Daddy in prime shape pretty seriously, she realized.
That epiphany didn’t comfort her as much as it might’ve. She couldn’t help recalling that in her own time it was customary to nurse the convicted into the best possible health just to execute them.
By where the sunlight stung the skin of her face, she sensed they generally marched northwest as the sun mounted up the sky, rolled over the top and headed down the home stretch to its nightly resting place.
In what she judged midafternoon her blindfold began to slip. A gleam of light invaded the lower half of her right eye. Although even the vagrant and insignificant shine of sunlight, probably still filtered by a layer of cloth, dazzled her dark-accustomed retina, it lifted her spirits.
Briefly. Then she remembered what the swampies had told them about fooling with the blindfolds. Or even if they simply slipped.
She cursed the unknown mutie who had adjusted and retightened the knotted T-shirt at the last drink and pee break—in-and-out water stop, as she’d come to think of them. Swampies were capable of remarkable dexterity with the unwieldy-looking sausage fingers they had, to judge by their handicrafts. Just my luck to draw the one with five thumbs per hand, she thought bitterly.
For a time she marched in a rapidly rising fever of fearful anticipation. The sweat rolling down her face and her sides redoubled in volume and velocity. She grew sick to her stomach.
I’m chilled if I do and chilled if I don’t, she thought. What do I do?
Then it was as if another voice in her mind said, Wait, girlfriend. Remember what they actually told you.
It was that voice, the voice in her head that usually assured her that she couldn’t possibly make whatever she was doing anything but a fearful mess. Which made it a triple-pisser that she realized with something of a shock that it was right.
Jon Dough had said if the blinders slipped without the captives warning their captors they’d be killed out of hand. That implied if they did warn the swampies they’d be fine. Didn’t it? Didn’t it?
What if they misinterpret the situation? she thought. What if they blame me anyway? What if they lied?
The panic was rising rapidly over her head like floodwaters. She recognized the fact. And one of the first lessons her new, unasked-for life in the Deathlands had taught her was that panic equaled death. Once you let yourself lose presence of mind, you lost your chance at life.
She forced herself to take a deep breath and hold it for half a dozen heartbeats before letting it out deliberately as she could. Another and another, ignoring the way her body demanded she breathe faster and pump more oxygen to her trudging, increasingly fatigue-poisoned muscles.
Take a chill pill, girlfriend, she told herself, using the phrase in the sense she’d grown up with—since its modern meaning would be “suicide capsule.” Nobody promised you’d live forever!
She caught herself just on the cusp of laughing out loud. Given when your birthday was, you made a good start at that already! Mildred summoned saliva into her mouth, swallowed so her voice wouldn’t crack into unintelligibility.
“All right,” she said aloud. “A little help here. The blindfold’s slipping and I’m sure as hell not gonna mess with it!”
She heard a swampie voice call halt from right nearby, an oboe honk. She stopped. In a moment, strong, disproportionately large hands were tugging at her, urging her to squat so her captors could adjust the blindfold. Or cut my throat, she thought.
But the hands, working with brusque efficiency, just rearranged the cloth knotted around her head, and retied it more tightly. Then she was prodded back to her feet and the march resumed.
Relief flooded her. Don’t get giddy, girl, her inner voice warned. We don’t know what’s waiting at the end of this day. Our last meal could still be a cold cut or a hot stake.
EVEN THROUGH the blindfold she could sense that day was ending when suddenly the nature of sounds changed around them. The wild noises of bush and woods and bayou didn’t stop, only seemed to retreat a ways. And inhumanly deep voices began to mutter excitedly around them.
We’ve reached a ville, Mildred guessed.
They were led by twists and turns deeper into what she estimated was a sizable settlement. She could somehow tell there were walls nearby, reflecting the sounds of their passage and tamping the slight, soggy breeze that came up as the sun started to go down. Then hands gripped her elbows, forcing her to stop.
Hands fumbled at the back of her head. Mildred’s heart raced. The blinders were coming off. This was it.
The cloth came away. Torches burned to left and right on bamboo holders taller than Doc. Sitting in front of her on a giant ornate and gaudy cane chair—topped, yes, by the grinning skull of a big alligator—sat an immense swampie with a head like an albino jack-o’-lantern. Mystic designs had been daubed on the expansive canvas of his belly in ochre, green, vermillion. Strings of golden beads, flowers and rattlesnake skulls hung from the area where his head sat upon ax-handle-wide shoulders in lieu of a neck. For a scepter he held a mirror-shiny ebony walking stick with a highly polished silver head not too different from Doc’s swordstick. Its elegant simplicity was almost incongruous next to the emphatic—not to say barbaric—display of throne and occupant.
Lips like papaya quarters split back from teeth the size and general shape of the tablet erasers Mildred had used in school. Laughter emerged from the mound of chalk-pale flesh in a rolling-thunder boom.
“Welcome to Papa Dough’s Damn Fine Domain!” the bizarre apparition exclaimed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ryan stepped forwar
d. “I’m Ryan Cawdor. I’ve brought these people here. If any offense has been committed, it’s on my head.”
The walking-stick scepter lolled to one side. Papa Dough put the other elbow on the arm of his chair and leaned his cheek against his palm.
“You don’t really want to deny me my moment of showmanship, here, do you?” he said.
Ryan took a sharp breath. “Reckon not,” he said, stepping back and nodding.
“Good, good. I like guests who mind their manners.”
He waved the walking stick. A mutie who was comically short and wide even for a swampie, so that he looked more toad than humanoid, waddled forth to proclaim the might and terrors of Papa Dough, Vodoun King of the Southern Swamps.
“’The earth trembles when he walks. When he frowns, catamounts piss and gators flee. When he laughs, the stars giggle along. When he farts, birds on the wing die as far away as Mobile.’”
He went on for a time in this vein, in a voice like a cannonball rolling in a rain barrel. Papa Dough slumped deeper and deeper into his amazing throne, which made him look as if his skeleton was dissolving inside the unbelievable mass of his fat. At last he stretched a tubby arm and tapped the cane on the herald’s shoulder.
“All right, all right, Crapaud. That’s enough. I’m awesome. Blah, blah. We know.”
The toadlike mutie looked as if he were about to cry. “But I was just warming up, M’sieur!”
“Scuttle.”
He scuttled.
“Okay. Despotic display, done. What’s on your alleged mind, skinny bones?”
“My woman, Krysty Wroth, lies helpless—”
Papa Dough waved a vast hand. “Yeah, yeah. I know why you’re here. I’m just fucking with you.”
“How do you know?”
“Julie. We send messages back and forth all the time.” His face darkened. “That’s how I know how this war started—with a cynical lie. But she didn’t dare speak truth in Haven. It would’ve got her chilled. And we swampies, when we are attacked, we fight.”
Jon Dough bustled up. “Have I done well, Father?” he asked.
“Yeah. You did. You got the stilties well-tenderized. And this one matches up with what Sweet Julie said—he’ll listen to reason, if for no other reason than he’s a survivor. He knows well that if he’s not reasonable, all of his friends are chills.”
The younger Dough bowed—no easy feat, given his basically globular shape—and withdrew. His father clapped hands the size of a big man’s butt cheeks.
“Bring chairs for my guests,” Papa Dough ordered, “and let the feasting begin!”
He looked at Ryan with his huge bulbous eyes. “Hope you-all brought your appetites, boy. I make a mean crawfish and sausage filé gumbo!”
“THIS REALLY IS GOOD, Your Majesty,” Doc said, scooping up more gumbo and rice with a wooden spoon. “Truly excellent.”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “You weren’t kidding. You made this yourself?”
“Well,” Papa Dough said, visibly pleased, “given the demands of my office, my role consists primarily of supervision. It is my recipe, though.”
“He sits on his ass in the shade while everybody else does the work,” his son said, chewing a hearty bite of tough-crusted, tasty bread.
Papa Dough smirked. “Rank hath its privileges, boy. And always remember, it’ll be your fat ass sitting in the shade one day.”
Ryan accepted a refill of his heavy fired-clay bowl, forcing himself to smile at the swampie girl who twinkled at him as she served him. He would’ve thought he looked as unappealing to her as her coconut-with-a-lemon-on-top shape looked to him. But apparently things didn’t work that way.
“Please don’t take this wrong, Papa Dough,” he said, “but how did you happen to wind up talking like that?”
“Mannie tutors, of course,” he said. “My daddy, bless his soul, didn’t think it was fit for the true people to be ruled by an ignorant hick.”
Doc’s bushy brows rose. “But you war with the people of Haven! How could your father enlist tutors from among, um, standard humans?”
“Haven’s our neighbor to the south,” the king said. “There are other directions, remember? And while we tend to try to keep contacts with the stilties minimal to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings, we maintain friendly relations with various trading partners.”
He scowled. “We’re friendly to those who treat us as friends. If you come as an enemy, we’ll be waiting for you!” He slapped a thigh to jiggling.
“We got a sample of that when our ship wrecked down near the coast,” Ryan said.
“The people who attacked your party have been punished severely,” Papa Dough said. “The ones that mad thing Tobias left alive.”
“But why?” Mildred asked.
“Isn’t it obvious? We’re not predators. We’re not wreckers. You were obviously not from our enemies in Haven. And anyway, only a triple-stupe nukehead fucks with Tech-nomads!”
LATER THEY SIPPED RUM and listened to the music-and-language tutor to Papa Dough’s daughter Jane play a Spanish guitar and sing. The tutor was a pretty young Caribbean Spanish woman who wore an orange flower in her long black hair. She sang softly, to allow the king to converse with his prisoners, who somewhere in the course of the evening, seemed to have changed into guests.
Of course Ryan well remembered the old joke: Good night, I’ll probably kill you in the morning.
“It was Dornan, of course,” Papa Dough said, enfolding a mighty brass goblet of rum in one hand. “And that vicious bastard Dupree. They decided what they needed to really consolidate power in the ville was an outlander enemy. So they sent a couple secret raiding parties into my father’s domain, committed the usual atrocities. My people retaliated. And the war was on.”
“Dornan was a pig,” Rameau said woozily. He had taken on a double load of rum, which probably helped a little with his stung arm. He had adjusted to receiving hospitality from recent mortal foes a lot more readily than Bluebottle, who sat aside looking vaguely scandalized at the whole thing. It hadn’t stopped him tucking into the king’s gumbo with a will.
“When the Beast returned,” Papa Dough said, “they needed an excuse to intensify the war, distract the people even more. So they cooked up the idea of telling their subjects we were cannies.”
Outrage made his huge face scary, especially in the light of the dwindling fire. “That’s just gross. I don’t mean to be racist here, but even if we were going to eat people, why on Earth would we eat you? I mean, you don’t even have any meat on your bones. And it’s stringy.”
In the sudden silence that followed the monarch’s outburst, especially among the normal humans, J.B. said, “Tobias keeps up the lie? He strikes me as a good man, I have to say.”
Papa Dough turned the full force of his scowl on the Armorer. J.B. looked back mildly.
The swampie King sighed and his brutal features softened. “Don’t expect me to see it,” he growled. “But he and his sister were raised to believe that lie. They might’ve questioned it a little harder, especially after Tobias killed his father to keep the old baron from chilling Elizabeth.”
He set his cup down. “So, down to business. You’ve proved you had courage getting here and facing down my boy. You showed you were a leader by cooling everybody down when that poor fool kid went jolt-walker on my people. You’ve passed the tests with flying colors. So far.”
“Tests,” Ryan repeated dryly.
Papa Dough shrugged. The rippling fat aftershocks continued for several seconds after. “You’re on a quest to save your beautiful princess, allowing for your standards of beauty. You got to pass tests. It’s standard. Anyway, you’re here. And you’re not a bad type, for a stilter!”
He leaned forward conspiratorially. His gut squeezed out to either side. “So here’s the deal—to get what you want, you must promise to bring me what I ask for.”
“What?” Ryan said.
Papa Dough held up a big finger. “Tut-tut. You don’t get t
o ask that. You have to say yes. You have to mean yes. You have to swear to bring me what I demand. No fingers crossed, no takebacks, no welshing!”
Ryan looked around at his friends. All he got back was different shades of unaccustomed helplessness. My decision, he thought, and mine alone. So what’s new about that?
“I agree,” he said.
“No horseshit?”
“No horseshit.”
“Cross your heart three times and hope to die if you lie!”
Ryan raised his right hand to his breastbone and made an X with his thumb, three times. “If I lie or cheat you, may I wind up staring at the sky.”
Papa Dough nodded, grinning hugely.
“Can he ask now?” Mildred said tentatively.
“Huh? Oh, sure.”
He rose ponderously to his feet. “Ryan Cawdor,” he declaimed in his best ceremonial bass-drum boom, “what I want you to bring me is…peace.”
“Say what?” Ryan asked.
“Peace. Peace with the Havenites. An end to the age-old war!”
“How in the name of glowing night shit am I supposed to do that?”
“You’re the one on a quest, son. Not my problem.”
“If anyone can do it, Ryan.” J.B. said, “you can.”
“But do I have to do it before I help Krysty? Fireblast, we’re days out of Haven! If I have to go back, find a way to stop the war, then drag ass all the way back—”
“Deep breaths, boy. You’re hyperventilating. Remember—you swore, cross your heart, hope to die. You’re good for it. Only…”
Ryan lowered his head and gave him a blue-laser glare. “Only?”
“The kicker is, I don’t have the secret. Not personally. You’re going to have to get it from our own witch-woman, Maman Fucton.”
“Maman what?”
“My consort. Mad as Fire Day. And you must please her.”
He laid his hand on Ryan’s shoulder, which was only possible because Ryan was still sitting.