“You make a fine pair,” she told Jamilla.
The other woman smiled down fondly into the eyes of the small person she held. “She’s a good baby, this one. With what she’s been through I expected her to be all tense and anxious, but she’s not. As soon as she got some food into her she calmed down, like she knew she had people caring for her and the world was all right. She’s a bright one, she is. Aren’t you?” she said to the serious face, and then looked up at Dian. “You go get your things together, I’ll bring her out front.”
A short time later Dian led her saddled horse to the front door of the inn. The clear weather was holding and gentle ripples of steam rose where the sun touched the frosted shingles. The dogs snuffled at the enthralling odors along the road, their noses catching up on the local news and gossip.
Jamilla came out the front door under the sign. Dian studied it for a moment by daylight, then shook her head.
“The painter didn’t do you justice,” she told Jamilla, who only laughed. Dian swung herself up into the familiar smooth shape of the saddle and reached down for baby Willa. She was sound asleep with her belly full of warm milk and didn’t stir when Dian settled her into the new, proper sling (bought by Jamilla and added, along with the price of five new diapers and a soaker cover, to the bill). Jamilla’s son Chinua and the toddler Aisha were on the top step watching the dogs, the other three girls having left for school some time before. Dian sat for a moment looking down at the warm, shrewd black face at her side.
“‘Thank you’ is not enough. I am in debt to you, and I don’t think I’ll be able to pay you back.”
Dian was amazed to see the face break into an expression of pure mischief.
“Oh, no, you’re not. No sirree. I gave that debt to ‘Nyame, and ‘Nyame charges interest. The only way you’ll work it off is to find somebody with an even bigger problem and help her with it. Or him. That’s the only way you’ll cancel that debt.” She looked smug at her cleverness, and into Dian’s mind came an image of Susanna’s face when she had tricked Dian in a chess game and beaten her for the first time.
Dian chuckled and took Jamilla’s hand, squeezing it tightly.
“As I said, you drive a hard bargain. I’ll try my best to work off the debt, but thank you anyway. I hope to see you in six or eight weeks. Give my love to your kids. Especially Wilama.”
Jamilla’s hand slapped the horse’s smooth flank as Dian turned away toward the Road, whistling her dogs to her. She rode off into the clear morning, gentle snores coming from the warm body cradled to her chest.
Dian had one piece of Valley business before the day was her own, and she found the broker just two miles up from where the side road entered the main thoroughfare. The woman had actually been born in the Valley, moving into town as a teenager when her mother fell ill and stayed on. She was trusted, so that the haggling Dian did was perfunctory—the prices the broker got for Lenore’s fabric were higher than anything Dian could have arranged, and the woman positively crooned over a pair of Kirsten’s pillow covers. Laine had sent a handful of sparkling jewelry, which she’d found on an overnight trip—best not to ask where, Dian had decided—that, once tested, fetched a startling sum. When business was over, Dian answered her questions about the Valley—Judith’s birth, Kirsten’s health—then signed the chit with her name in English and its Chinese equivalent, accepted a purse with some of the proceeds in cash, and rode away. Willa hadn’t even peeped.
Dian felt like a two-year-old in front of a Christmas tree as the Road opened up that morning, her jaw hanging down with the splendor of it. She saw more strangers in the first ten minutes than she had in the last ten years: women washing their shop steps; women driving animals and carrying loads of colorful wool and jangling pans; women pedaling rickshaw carts filled with produce and clothing, old machines and new shoes; women opening shops that sold jewelry and pots, hats and boots, vast gleaming heaps of tomatoes and oranges and eggplants and onions; shops with meat and shops draped with the carcasses of chickens, ducks, and geese, and some shops that Dian was not sure exactly what they were selling. One of these had a small window displaying half a dozen pictures of scantily clad men, and a stout door. Did it sell photographs of men? Did the shop act as a broker of some sort among groups who wished to trade men? Did it—appalling thought—sell actual men? Dian could not imagine that Meijing would tolerate such an activity in its area of influence, but what did the pictures signify? Dian looked back over her shoulder at the—shop?—and nearly rode into the wedge-shaped gap between a warehouse and a large wagon from which two heavily muscled women were pulling hundredweight sacks of rice and grain. She excused herself, extricated Simon from the trap, and nodded red-faced at the two workers. Laughter followed her up the road.
She had forgotten the rhythm of the Bay Road, but it soon came back to her. Every eight miles a Meijing sentry box and approval station spawned a cluster of shops, inns, churches (or mosques or temples), and services. Each cluster would begin with a sprinkling of flimsy, sometimes portable stalls among the roadside farms, the first of them selling the produce grown behind them, the next selling cooked snacks and knickknacks. Then a few houses would offer rooms, and finally came one or more true inns, large or small. In the midst of the inns would stand the sentry box, not a box at all but a tall, sturdy building capable of housing, and defending if necessary, a dozen or more Meijing guards. North of the inns came the shops with their endless variety of wares, and in their midst would be the approval station, where buyer and seller could come for arbitration, testing, and currency exchange. Then a few more, rougher-looking inns, more flimsy stalls, and a patch of increasingly sparse housing where the fields could be seen, occasionally coming down to the road itself, before the next center—and more stalls and inns—began to creep up on the traveler.
The morning remained crisp and clear. A salt tang drifted up from the waters of the Bay, and the colors and smells of harvest shone from the stalls, intensified by the oblique angle of the autumnal sun. Traffic was well under way, the clop of shod hooves on the well-patched hardtop followed by the burr of rubber tires or the rumble of iron and wood wheels, the whir and warning bells of a thousand bicycles and rickshaws, and twice the thunder and stink of a combustion engine that cleared the road and made Dian’s horse shy and the dogs’ eyes show white. Once she thought she saw something in the sky over the Bay, a squat dragonfly shape that looked like what the old books called a helicopter, but there were too many sounds around her to hear any motor, and the thing’s mottled blue-gray coloration made it hard to see. When she looked up again after negotiating a narrow patch, it was gone—if it had been there in the first place, and was not a figment of her overstimulated imagination. Might as well think she’d seen a dragon.
Dian had been looking forward to this part of the journey for weeks, ever since it had been decided that she would go north, and Willa’s presence would make no difference. Today the riches of northern California were laid out at her feet, awaiting only the reckless use of the heavy pouch of coins at her belt, and she intended to take full advantage of it.
She bought a few utilitarian necessities: fifty rubber canning rings, a box of assorted nuts and bolts, eyeglass lenses in half a dozen magnifications, lengths of the rubber tubing useful for everything from drawing blood to making slingshots. And she bought gifts: two dozen graduated embroidery needles for Lenore, along with a rainbow of silk floss. For Ling she found a flute made of cherry wood with a mouthpiece of walrus ivory, for Judith a trio of silver bangles such as their mother used to wear. Peter she decided would like a piece of magnificent red silk fabric that Lenore could sew into a shirt, and Kirsten would treasure a set of four ivory double-pointed sock needles. An ivory-handled folding knife for Laine, a beautiful palm-sized leather-bound book of poetry to satisfy Jeri’s secret passion.
Susanna was more difficult, caught between childhood and maturity. She saw a pair of silver and abalone earrings and matching necklace, but the price seemed
low, and the shopkeeper was reluctant in allowing Dian to take them to the approval station. When she insisted, taking care to speak to the guards in Chinese like a civilized person, her suspicions were confirmed by the station’s Geiger counter.
“Ah, crap, that’s barely a reading,” the would-be seller protested—in English. “Look at that, you could wear them twenty-four hours a day for ten years and not get so much as a rash,” but Dian had already dropped the offending jewelry in the woman’s hands and left her to explain to Meijing’s representatives why she was selling goods from the contaminated zone.
Two miles later Dian was looking in the window of another, more reputable silversmith and spotted the ideal gift. It was a tall, slender silver mug, etched with a double line of domestic animals around the base. It proved clean, if expensive, and joined the other objects in her bags.
Despite the delays, Willa was still deeply asleep when Dian reached the first of the three stops Jamilla had suggested. It was off the road but easily found (“Follow your nose,” the innkeeper had said), a fragrant and immaculate bakery. A bell tinkled over her head as she went in, and a round, glowing pink woman greeted her from where she was rolling out pie crusts on a vast marble slab.
“Good morning,” said Dian. “Are you Paula? My name is—”
“You’re Dian,” the woman said briskly. “I had a message from Jamilla a couple of hours ago. Is the baby hungry?” She dusted off her hands on a towel and came around the counter.
“I guess not.” Dian looked down at Willa’s completely slack face. “She’s fast asleep. Do you think I should go on? There’s another woman two hours north . . .”
“That’ll be Deirdre. No, she’ll be hungry long before that. I’ll wake her up and feed her in a bit, as soon as I get my pies in the oven. I hate to leave pastry rolled out. You probably want to wander around, though.” Before Dian could protest, she raised her voice and called out, “Candace! Come here a minute, will you?” A younger, rounder pink woman appeared from the back, holding an apple and a paring knife. “Candace, this is the baby Jamilla sent up. Could you hold her for five minutes while I finish the pies? The lady wants to do some shopping.” Candace’s eyes lit up and she went to the sink, washed her hands, removed the sticky-looking apron, and came to take baby Willa from Dian.
“My daughter Candace,” the woman said unnecessarily, picking up her rolling pin. “Come back in forty-five minutes.”
Before she quite knew what was happening, Dian was standing outside the shop. She was surprised at how much she resented being pushed away from the child and wondered, somewhat glumly, if this was the stir of some unsuspected maternal impulse. But still, it was a pleasant side street, quiet after the bustle of the Road, with a number of large trees dropping their yellow leaves on the ground on the lawns around three tall wooden houses from Before. Suddenly the noise of the Road seemed too much, and the fields at the far end of this street beckoned as a place free of sly merchants, hungry babies, and noise. She slipped the rifle from its scabbard, left both dogs to watch Simon, and strolled up the quiet street toward the hills.
In a few minutes the sounds of the Road had faded to a muted rumble. The street ended abruptly and a footpath entered somebody’s market garden, lush with the last remnants of the summer tomatoes and green beans, the ready fall crops of lettuce and peas, and the beginnings of the winter’s root vegetables. Dian let herself through a gate in the high deer-proof fence that surrounded the oasis of greenery, and found herself on the edge of grassland with oaks and an occasional outcropping of concrete chunks to mark the passing of a building. Cows grazed among the remains of foundations and chimneys. Overhead, three small birds dove at a hawk, driving it off armed with nothing more than agility and determination.
Dian walked out into this landscape, as foreign in its way as the Road was, and settled in the shade of a sprawling oak tree. Twenty feet away, a ground squirrel eyed her nervously, unwilling to venture far from its pile of concrete and twisted steel bars. A sentinel quail atop a chimney two hundred yards beyond too-hooed to its flockmates. The breeze brought the baked smell of dry grass. Around the base of the next tree several black and white cows lay ruminating, their jaws moving steadily, tails flicking. A memory tickled the back of her mind as she watched the cows, a memory of another hot day, other cows. And Kirsten, a Kirsten with still a faint touch of brown in her hair.
“When I was young,” she had said, as always. They were sitting on a fallen log in the upper pasture, watching the cows, and the sweet perfume of warm blackberries rose from the baskets at their feet. “When I was young—very young, I think—we went to visit a house down near the Bay. It was a big, crazy place, all twists and turns and doors that went nowhere, carved stairways that climbed up and ended at blank walls. It was beautiful, in a bizarre way, filled with lovely glass windows and fine workmanship. It made a deep impression on me—for a long while I wanted to be an architect when I grew up. I even remember the cock-and-bull story the guide told us about how the woman who built it was haunted by ghosts and believed that so long as she kept working on the house she wouldn’t die. Oh, she was haunted, no doubt, but not by anyone else’s spirit. She was the daughter of a family of gun makers, the Winchesters —they built the rifle that ‘won the West’ in the nineteenth century. She was a rich, lonely old woman who was obsessed by the thought of all those souls torn from their bodies by the weapons her family had made a fortune on, and she kept herself busy by exercising her creativity and money on this endless, empty, beautiful house.” Dian saw Kirsten’s hands reach for a gentle handful of the soft berries and pop them one by one between her already purple lips. “The image of that house comes back to me at odd times, that poor woman making a thing of crazy beauty built on blood. What Ling would call ‘working off her karma.’ It’s a good parable for what we used to call ‘Western civilization,’ which was of course neither particularly civilized nor peculiarly Western.”
The harsh scree of an overhead hawk scattered the ghost of Kirsten’s rich laughter from Dian’s ears, and when she looked again at the hills around her, she realized that it must have been very near this place that Kirsten’s father had died. Perhaps those massive foundations and blocks on the next rise over were where his ashes lay, mingled with the ashes of a million cremated books. The University library, according to Kirsten, had taken a month to burn.
Not that the precise site mattered. This entire area—say, a fifty-mile radius around this spot—lay drenched in blood, condemned to infamy in whatever history was left to the world. It was here that the movement that was called Destroyer was born, the final synthesis of sophisticated technology and religious fanaticism, a synthesis of knowledge turned against itself that literally blew the foundations out from under humankind and caused the world to collapse in on itself. It was a few miles to the east, across the deceptive, clear, blue, sparkling waters of the still-toxic Bay, that Joseph Walker had invented his kitchen-cupboard explosive, so beloved of the low-budget radical groups, that had set the world to flames and rubble in a few short years. It was just north of here, where live oaks now took root and deer came to graze, that one of those fanatical groups had set their homemade bomb in the University, aiming at the library, ending up in the laboratories, and thereby loosing, inadvertently or by intent, the swamp of manmade viruses that had swept away half the world’s population within three months, and half of the remainder before the year was out. One of those viruses had proven to have a lasting affinity for the male genetic structure. No, Dian thought, getting up and brushing the leaves from the back of her trousers, this was not a happy place to pass through.
She made her way back to the bakery, telling herself that she was not exactly eager to see the infant, just concerned, but when she got there she found Willa in a state she’d not seen her in before: calm and alert. The child lay on Candace’s lap, examining the young woman’s face. Paula was taking some pies from the big oven, filling the air with spice and apple, and Dian went to stand behin
d the baker’s daughter to witness more closely this amazing spectacle of Sixtoes awake and not screaming.
“What did you do to her?” she asked. “She’s quiet!”
Paula looked at her oddly. “Fed her, burped her. Changed her diapers. Why?”
“I’ve just not seen her so . . . content before.” Dian leaned down to look into little Willa’s face, and the wise gray-blue eyes shifted to gaze into her own. The two studied each other for a long minute, then the small face turned red and a muffled explosion came from below. The laughter of the three women startled her, but before she could screw up her face to cry, Dian scooped her up out of Candace’s arms, thanked her benefactors, and went to find another diaper in her saddlebag.
ON THIS ISLAND CALLED CALIFORNIA,
THERE WERE MANY GRIFFINS,
BECAUSE THESE BEASTS WERE SUITED
TO THE RUGGEDNESS OF THE TERRAIN.
FIFTEEN
THE ROAD’S TRAFFIC WAS THICK NOW, BOTH FOOT AND wheeled, and the dust and noise rode heavy on the air. The fields receded, giving way to neat rows of squash and corn and later to small flower gardens, before disappearing entirely behind fences and walls. Grand houses began to appear—or rather, their high and solid perimeter walls began to loom over the public way, laced along their tops with wicked shards of glass and broken by iron gates with guards wearing uniforms of various colors and decorations. The shopkeepers’ wares became more gleaming, despite the dust, their smiles broader, their hands more clever. Culum and Tomas grew increasingly edgy, and twice Culum showed his teeth at riders who pressed too close. The second time disturbed even Simon, when they were all crushed between an unexpectedly swerving coach-and-four and a high wall topped by jagged bits of glass. Dian cursed the driver loudly, to no response, and turned off abruptly into the next lane, which led east to the Bay.
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