Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman

by Duncan Eagleson

  The Summersend ceremony commenced at four P.M., but it was already feeling like sunset in the square, shadowed as it was by the tall buildings on all sides. Central Square was a wide open plaza in front of the main entrance to the CA Tower. For the city’s Summersend celebration the big fountain in the center of the plaza had been emptied of water and a huge Corn Guy had been set up in it. At least, I assumed it was a Corn Guy. The figure must have been twenty-five or thirty feet tall, but as we entered the plaza that afternoon it was still shrouded by what appeared to be a parachute. On the side of the square opposite the CA Tower a temporary stage had been set up, hung with speakers and sound equipment, but it was empty at the moment, and the crowd’s attention was focused on the steps of the CA Tower, where Roth, Weldt, Gage, and several other city officials were gathered, along with the three of us, and the priests and ministers of the city’s major churches and temples. Among the black robes and suits of the more conservative denominations I saw Thudisar Tyburn in his pale-blue over-robe, a woman in the orange robes of a Buddhist monk, and the representative of the Church of the King in his formal white spangled jumpsuit. Between the tower steps and the fountain with the shrouded Guy stood a huge cart filled with produce: bundles of corn, wheat, baskets of fruit and vegetables, and of fresh fish on beds of ice. I knew that beneath this pile would be dozens of financial statements and year-end reports, representing the less tangible fruits of the city’s harvest.

  Speeches were made, of course, though there was nothing particularly memorable about any of them, and certainly no mention made of the predations of the killer we were calling the Beast. I didn’t think the Beast would appear and wreak havoc at the public Blessing ceremony. That wasn’t his style. But even though it was unlikely he’d appear, he was clearly on everyone’s mind. Everywhere you looked there were tight mouths, haunted eyes.

  When the appropriate time came, city guards moved the closest of the crowd back, the priests and ministers ranged out in a circle around the Harvest Barrow, holding their hands out toward it, and the entire crowd seemed to hold its breath as I stepped forward to pronounce the Blessing of the Harvest. I had never performed the blessing for a crowd as large as this, nor had I ever used a microphone to do so, but I didn’t feel particularly nervous.

  I wasn’t quite prepared, however, for what followed. At the end of the Blessing the assembled community traditionally joins in a tone, and the crowd assembled in Central Square did so with great enthusiasm. I’d never heard a tone chanted by a crowd that large, and I could feel their joined voices vibrating through the pavement beneath my feet. For a moment I wondered if the vibration might actually cause some damage to the structures around, it was so loud, and then I realized that was silly. Bay City had been celebrating Summersend in just this way for many years; surely there was no danger of such a thing. There were probably outdoor concerts that had a higher decibel level. What I was really reacting to, I reflected, was the intensity of emotion the crowd put into their tone. A whole city that had been living in fear was putting their hopes and desires into this great sound, wishing for blessings on the results of their labor, as well as relief from the threat that hung over them.

  At the other side of the square a band had climbed onto the stage, and as the ceremony came to its end they began to play. I saw bottles being handed out, and people began dancing, despite the lack of space to move around in. The various dignitaries on the steps began to move around me, filing back into the tower, or down the steps through a cordon of guards. Now I had only to get through the formal reception upstairs, in the penthouse ballroom of the tower. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

  Politics and diplomacy can be a bitch. They come with the job, of course, and we’re all trained to that stuff, but I’ve only ever met a couple of Railwalkers who actually liked that end of the work. The rest of us deal with it just because we’ve been drilled in the necessity.

  Across the square I noticed a father and son. Dad was apparently explaining about the Corn Guy as Son stared up at the giant, shrouded shape, glancing between it and a corn dolly in his hand. I wondered what it was like to grow up with a knowledge of these ceremonies and traditions.

  My Pa had never stood before a town’s Corn Guy and explained it to me. We never had a Yule tree, hunted colored eggs on Osterday, never hung corn dollies. My father considered all that stuff superstitious nonsense. As a kid, they were strange foreign practices that I never quite understood.

  In the square, Mom joined Dad and Son, and I watched them vanish into the crowd together. My mother left when I was barely three, and from what I learned later in life, I can’t say I blame her. Oh, I suppose there’s some residual resentment left in me that she didn’t at least try to take me with her. But if she was anything like the other women I saw my father with over the years, that would have been at least as big a disaster as leaving me with my Pop turned out. Women like that, they just had no real “mother” genes in them. They’ll ooh and aah over a baby, sure; they’ll pinch a kid’s cheek and call him cunning and cute as a button. But don’t ask them to change a diaper, or clean the kid’s spit-up. I don’t really know if my mom was one of those women or not, but I guessed she probably was. There’s not much I do know for sure about my mother; my Pa never talked about her.

  Pa wasn’t much better at being a father than his girlfriends were at mothering, come to that, but we got by somehow. He thought of himself as a professional gambler, and it was true he knew the games inside and out. There’s an old song about gambling, how you gotta know when to hold, and know when to fold. Pa knew all that shit. He knew the percentages on every game of chance there was, knew how to play ’em, too. But knowing is a different thing from doing. Gambling is an addiction, just like hooch or poppyshot, and however much intellectual knowledge an addict has about his chosen poison, he’s never really in control. All that knowledge just makes him think he is.

  When I was a kid we were always on the move. Sometimes Pa was just feeling the urge, needing to move on to greener pastures, convinced that his luck would be better in the next town or city. Sometimes we were doing what he called the Kansas City Shuffle. Doing the KC Shuffle always meant that Pa had been losing bad and didn’t have the money to pay off his losses. That happened almost as often as him just getting itchy feet for their own sake.

  I was woolgathering, I realized. Staring out unseeing over the desperately celebratory crowd, dancing and drinking before the shrouded figure of the giant Guy, I was thinking back to my days on the road with Pa. I felt a touch on my elbow, and turned to face Micah Roth.

  “Coming along with us?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said, and turned to join the procession to the elevators. Why was my father so much on my mind these days, I wondered. It wasn’t like I’d seen him in... how many years was it? Ten at least, probably more like twelve or thirteen, if I’d stopped to do the math. Perhaps it was just being in Bay City, or perhaps contact with Micah Roth was provoking old memories, though Roth had said nothing about our previous meetings.

  Waiting for the elevator in the vast lobby, the burble of conversation going on around me, I settled my Crane Bag more comfortably under my tunic, feeling the shape of the small rolled paper cylinder inside it. Yes, I’d been in Bay City with my father several times as a child, but the last time I’d actually seen him, it had been in further north, in Alturo. Which was ironic, I suppose, considering. The first time I remembered being in Alturo I was about eight or so, I guess.

  Our travels had brought us back north again, and we had landed at the house of one of my father’s older friends, a couple by the name of Bill and Patty Morris. The Morrises had a largish spread just outside the city, a ramshackle farmhouse and several outbuildings, all of which were filled to the brim with old junk and bric-a-brac. The farmhouse was chock full as well, both with old furniture and odds and ends, as well as with live bodies—the Morrises, their four kids, two dogs and six cats.

  The couple were a study in contrasts.
Patty was as broad as she was tall, a miniature mountain of a woman with a sharp, beaklike nose in the middle of her soft, round face. Bill was medium height and thin, bearded and balding, with a pug nose and blunt features. They scraped a living for their large family with a variety of small business ventures—besides dealing junk (the hand-painted sign declared “Anteeks,” but hardly anything in the place really deserved the name), Bill did a bit of small engine and appliance repair and hired out for haulage with his oldest son, using Bill’s beat-up panel truck. Patty took in washing and did a bit of seamstressing, read tarot cards and cast horoscopes, and acted as midwife and herbal doctor for the local women.

  Everything in the Morris place was strange to my youthful senses. Traveling with my Pa I’d met rich people and poor, stayed in palatial suites and fleabag hotels, but I had never spent much time in an actual home, never met people who were both so poor and so happy, had a life so rich. The smell of the place was a strange stew of spices and herbs, incense and old cooking smells, dogs and cats and dust and other things I couldn’t identify.

  I’d also seldom had home-made food, unless you count the peanut butter sandwiches or beans out of a can that we dined on now and then when Pop’s luck was running bad. Dinner at the Morris’s house was lively and fairly noisy with five kids at the table, even though I didn’t contribute that much to the noise. I had spent very little time around kids my own age, and was more than a little wary of them.

  After dinner I followed Bill and my Pa outside, Bill carrying a large flashlight, my father smoking a cigarette. Bill led the way to a small, padlocked shed beside the swaybacked barn.

  “I’m really sorry, Doc,” Bill said. “But it’s been four, almost five years, and we really need the space.” My father’s name was Bryce, but no one ever called him anything but “Doc.” Since he knew nothing about medicine, to this day I have no idea why they called him that.

  “S’okay, Bill,” my father said. “I understand. Appreciate you keeping the stuff this long.” He stared off into the distance, smoking, while Bill fumbled through a ring with what looked to me like about a million keys on it, until he found the right key to fit the padlock.

  Inside the small shed were a few chairs, a table and dresser, a disassembled bedstead, and a pile of boxes. Unprepossessing, maybe, but I was fascinated. Here was all I would ever see of my father’s past, of my own life as it had been before my earliest memories decomposed into fragmentary, dreamlike images. Before my mother left us. I stared at the collection. The headboard against the back wall looked like a wide tombstone standing mute watch over the remnants of my father’s past.

  “Sorry there’s no light,” Bill said as he held out the flashlight, and Pa took it. “You sure you don’t want to wait ’til tomorrow, do this in the daylight?”

  “We gotta be in Freno tomorrow night,” said Pop. “May’s well git ’er done. Not much of it worth keeping anyway. Can you an’ Patty do anything with the furniture?”

  “Yeah, I s’pose,” said Bill. “That club chair would bring a buck or two, and you don’t see many of them old carved headboards anymore. Sure, we can unload that for you. We make anything on it—”

  “You keep it,” my father interrupted. “Call it rent on the storage space.”

  “We couldn’t—”

  “Sure you could. Betcha Patty would agree with me.”

  Bill smiled and shrugged. Pop went to the top box on the pile, lifting a flap with one finger and shining the flashlight inside.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Give a holler if you need anything,” Bill said, and headed back to the house. Pa began pulling the boxes out of the shed and going through them.

  Soon his previous life was spread out on the grass under the flashlight’s beam, all sorts of the things that go to make up a household: dishes, pots and pans, clothes, papers, books, discs, even some actual printed photographs. He sorted through it quickly, retaining only two small boxes, one not quite full of papers and things; I didn’t quite catch what they all were. Another box held some of the clothing. The rest he repacked, some to be burned, some for Bill and Patty to sell.

  I looked into one of the boxes of discards. It was mostly papers, a few old photo prints sitting on top. I leafed through the pictures. A couple showed my father as a younger man, horsing around with some guys I didn’t recognize. Another showed the same group gathered around an ornithopter. In a third my father sat on the hood of an older styled runabout. There were a couple of postcards from Freno and Two Suns. And one picture of a woman.

  The photo had been taken outdoors, near the zones. I could see buttes and scrub-brush and cactus in the background. She was wearing a white blouse, the collar turned up. Her light-brown hair was being lifted slightly by the wind. She looked at the camera with a rueful smile, as if she didn’t really want her picture taken, but was fond of the photographer and knew she couldn’t dissuade him from taking it. Although the picture was in color, she looked to me like a movie star from one of those old black and white pre-Crash movies. Something tingled in my gut.

  “Pa? Who is this?” I asked, holding the picture up.

  When his eyes alit on the photo, he looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach by a horse. He dropped the paper he’d been reading back into the box and sat up straight. Took a deep breath. “That’s your mother,” he said.

  Now it was my turn to feel like I’d been kicked in the stomach. There must have been some suspicion in my young mind as to who this was, but my world still turned on its side to have the suspicion confirmed. My mother was a strictly forbidden subject. I gripped the photo a little tighter, with both hands now, afraid he was going to rip it out of my hands and burn it before my eyes or something. I took a step backwards.

  “Can I keep it?” I asked, sure he was going to refuse.

  He sighed, then looked at me silently for a long time. Sighed again. “Yeah,” he said. “Just don’t ever let me see it again, okay sport?”

  I nodded gravely.

  I still carry that picture of my mother, rolled up in my crane bag, what the Indios call a medicine pouch. Regular folks don’t often see a Railwalker’s crane bag, but we all carry them, generally on a thong around the neck. The formal tunic even has an inside pocket that the crane bag slips into, so it rides right where it usually hangs, in the hollow of your breastbone, and doesn’t move around or cause a bulge. Mostly your crane bag is filled with pebbles, little feathers, tokens and fetishes—small objects that hold a piece of your memory, a piece of your magic. The rolled-up picture in mine was a little larger than most such fetishes, and I could feel it riding there under my tunic as I stepped through the doors of the big function room on the fifth floor of the CA Tower, into the noise and motion of the Bay City Summersend reception.

  The reception was typical, if larger in scale and more glittery than most I’d attended. You didn’t see many tuxedos or ball gowns at Summersend in the zones. Fortunately we’d been in the city long enough for me to get the dress tunic cleaned and pressed, so I looked almost as respectable as Rok. I enviously watched Rok and Morgan slide out onto the dance floor.

  The Allworlder Tyburn was rambling on about the city’s zoning ordinances. One of the other officials there, I think it was a fellow from the Crafter’s Guild, started hectoring Tyburn about dual-purpose zoning (he thought crafters ought to be allowed living space as well as sales and manufacturing in the same building). As their dispute heated up, a new voice said, “We would welcome the arriving stranger.”

  It was the first line of the really formal version of the traditional greeting. I hadn’t heard it in years. I turned to face an elder woman, white of hair and pale of skin. Thin as a starving zone wolf, she stood as straight as any of the guardsmen there. She wore a floor-length gown of scarlet and black, and on her breast was a cloisonne pin with the sigil of the Harlot’s Guild.

  “Come you from the east?” she continued.

  “I come as the crow flies, and would not remain a stranger. Wolf am
I, Walker of the Rails Between the Worlds, charged by Ianeh, seventh of her line from Brick, the Red Crow. Twenty-three blessings of Soul-Are upon you and yours, sister. Say your need.”

  She smiled, stepped forward and took my arm. Despite her age she was a handsome woman, and had no doubt been in great demand when actively working for her guild. I was sure better men than I had been overwhelmed by that intimate, quietly glowing smile.

  “Hannah Caine am I, Guildmadam of the city’s Harlot’s Guild.” I had guessed as much. There were younger members of the guild in attendance, most on the arms of various city functionaries, but she was the only older guildswoman I’d seen, likely to have been officially invited as one of the guild’s officers. “Welcome to our city, Railwalker,” she completed the formula. “Come freely, go safely, and bless our homes with your corvine wisdom.” She sighed and smiled again. “As to my need, no more than some pleasant and diverting conversation in the midst of a boring social function full of self-important people. And perhaps a few minutes on the arm of a handsome young man, to remind me of the glories of days past.”

  “Not so young, I fear,” I said. “Nor do I believe for one moment, looking at you, that your glories are all in days past.”

  She laughed. Her laugh wasn’t silvery; it was more like the rattle of ice cubes in a glass of fine bourbon.

  “Ah, the Railwalkers were ever well spoken. We’ve not seen a Railwalker in Bay City these many years. It was a true delight to see the Blessing of the Harvest performed in the traditional manner. Tell me, how is it you return just now?”

  “We don’t get here often, but technically, Bay City is on our usual round,” I said, “and it’s not often we arrive just in time for one of the great festivals.”

  “Or that you arrive to find the city so desperately requires your corvine councils?” She raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. “Tell me for a truth, Railwalker Wolf: Roth summoned you to help with the problem of the Beast, didn’t he?”