by Amanda Witt
He was biting off his words and his blue eyes were flaming, and I didn’t like him towering above me. I scrambled to my feet and backed away, sand prickling everywhere my skin was bare, catching in the wind and threatening my eyes.
“Guarding the guarded for the watchers watching the watchers,” Sir Tom said. “Watchmakers, making watches without any sense of time or tide or wisdom, presumptuous idiots, full of sound and fury.”
I took another step backwards. If I ran would he chase me? How fast was he?
“Signifying nothing!” he shouted, and then he spun around and stalked away, talking loudly as he went, waving his arms, shaking his fist. At me? At the wind, the sea, some demon seen only by himself?
He went twenty yards away, thirty. Only then did I realize I’d been holding my breath.
And he kept going. Fifty yards. His boots left marks in the wet sand. The wind whipped my hair into my face and I fought it back, watching the old man go. Where was he going? The beach stretched out in front of him, long and unbroken, until it hit a steep wall of rocks in the distance.
Eighty yards or so. Ninety. He looked small now, small and unthreatening. The first rays of sun hit the sand and set it sparkling, as if it were strewn with tiny bits of glass.
I felt small, there alone there on the beach, small and helpless.
Was he going to go away and leave me here? If he did, then what would I do? The woods were so dark and thick they seemed impenetrable. There was underbrush, thorny and twined. And there were traps, he had said. If I could get through all that, I probably could find my way back to Optica—all I had to do was walk straight in and keep going until I hit the wasteland and the city wall—but there was no help for me in Optica, where Farrell Dean lay chained and Meritt was caught in some dangerous game with the Watchers, and where I’d be weeded out before winter. And somewhere in the woods were the wilderland creatures, those sniffing, prowling wolf-like men. I didn’t want to face those things again, and I didn’t want to be caught by Caliban, Jensen, whoever or whatever he was. Maybe the other man would help me find the Guardians. Angel. Could I find him, if I went back into the woods?
If I hadn’t been so frightened I might have cried.
Down the beach the old man was so far away that he looked as if he’d stopped moving entirely. I squinted. Was he moving? Was he still walking away?
He wasn’t. He’d turned. He was coming back toward me, across that long expanse of wet sand, making a second set of footprints beside his first.
The wind shifted, blew smoke from the dwindling fire into my eyes. I blinked hard, tried to bring the old man’s face into focus. Was he calm now? Sane?
As he got closer I was pretty sure he looked calm. At least, he wasn’t berating the wind anymore. All the same, I got ready to make a run for it. I brushed the loose sand off my hands and face and planted my feet firmly, plotting a path. I’d go straight toward the firmer sand, the wet sand, and I’d run up the beach beside the waves and then, when I’d put enough distance between us, I’d cut across the soft part to the tufty yellowed grass.
But when the old man drew near me, there was something like tenderness in his eyes, and regret.
“Forgive me,” he said gently. “You asked a reasonable question. You deserve a wholesome reply. Red Girl, meet the Guardians.”
And he bowed, touching one hand to his chest.
Chapter 21
Words failed me.
Sir Tom smiled, his expression wry. “Apparently reality doesn’t live up to fiction,” he said.
“You’re a Guardian?”
He nodded. “I was Chief Guardian for thirty-five years,” he said, and wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something bad. “Now I’m the only one.”
“The only one?” I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t help it. All those nightmares, the stories, the legends—that was all this one old man?
Sir Tom shrugged apologetically. “The others are dead or witless, including poor soul-sick Jensen. I’d not call him a Guardian, not anymore. Would you?”
I made a helpless gesture.
“As for Angel, he never should have been a Guardian. Any military man can tell you that conflicts of interest are the deadliest sort of conflict. Angel pulled some strings and set the puppets dancing, moved some pieces on the chessboard, and claimed he was playing the game he was ordered to play, and not his own. But who’s to say?” He shook his head sadly. “Not I.”
I couldn’t follow what he was saying about Angel; I was too busy thinking about what his revelation meant. The Guardians were humans. Nothing more. And Sir Tom, old and cryptic and half insane, was more or less the only one. It was far from all I’d imagined, all I’d been told.
What did it mean for Meritt, for Farrell Dean, for the others in danger?
It meant the Watchers had no one to back them up, and that was good. We might be able to do something, might be able to fight back, save the city, if we had only the Watchers and wardens to face, and not some unknown power. But it also meant there was no one to come to our aid. The Watchers and wardens had guns, stunners, handcuffs, cameras, patrol cars, prison cells. We had nothing, and more than a hundred of us were about to be euthanized. What a stupid word. We were about to be killed, that’s what was going to happen.
Could we come out here and survive on our own in the woods, by the sea? I didn’t know. Winter was coming, and most of those about to be killed were weak already.
I thought of gentle Mariella, so very old. She wouldn’t live long in a cold cave, and she couldn’t hunt or fish. She needed a bed in a heated building, needed food prepared and set down in front of her. Could those of us who were stronger feed those who were not? And what food was there, besides fish? Could we catch enough fish to survive?
“You’re shocked and disappointed,” Sir Tom said. He didn’t look hurt, just sympathetic. “Of course you are. Oz behind the curtain is always a disappointment, and I can’t even claim to be a bad wizard, much less a good one. And I suppose you’re asking yourself the question I’ve been asking myself all these years.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “What do Guardians guard?”
“I thought you guarded the Watchers,” I said tentatively. “They told us you did. That you enforced their rules, protected them.”
“Ah. You thought we were glorified wardens, more or less. An understandable mistake. But wrong.” He waited, nodding encouragingly at me.
“Well . . . if you don’t guard the Watchers, then what do you guard?”
“Nothing.”
I stared at him.
“We guard nothing,” he repeated, giving me a knowing look. “Not since the watchmaker died. For he’s long dead—or at least long gone—and all that remains are the watchers and the watched, and guardians guarding nothing but an abandoned clock ticking out its last few ticks.”
Whatever that meant, it didn’t sound good.
Before I could figure out how to phrase another question, Sir Tom’s head jerked to one side. Then he cocked it, listening, squinting as if straining to hear.
“No,” he said, and he wasn’t looking at me. “It was not my idea, true. But I watched. I watched the ants behind the glass, and reported, and followed orders regarding their care and feeding. I let myself be made a demigod, and the gods I obeyed were graven idols.”
His eyes went to me, and he lowered his voice and shielded his mouth with a fist, as if pretending to cough, clearly trying to keep me from hearing. “And now, you see, she has come to me. The one to whom, above any other, I owe a debt. Gullible old fool that I am and was.”
He shut his eyes as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me. Then, keeping them shut, he lowered himself down onto the wet sand, slowly, carefully, and went completely silent. His knees were bent and his elbows rested on them. His hands were loosely clasped. He sat there for a long time without moving.
I couldn’t stand it. I had so many questions, but I was terrified of setting him off again.
Eventually I edged clos
er. He didn’t move, didn’t look at me.
“This watchmaker,” I said. “Who was he? What did he want? Why did he send you out into the woods?”
Sir Tom’s head jerked up and his eyes opened. He opened his mouth, too, and his lips moved, but no sounds came out.
Finally he flung out his arms. “The admiration of a grateful nation? Knowledge for its own sake?” For some reason that sent him into another cackling fit. He clutched his stomach and laughed like a maniac.
Which he apparently was. I was out here in the middle of nowhere with a raving lunatic.
In fact—at this thought I backed away from him, but slowly, so he might not notice—what if he wasn’t a Guardian at all? What if he was just another person driven mad by the Guardians, like poor Rosella?
That had to be the case. The Guardians weren’t just ordinary people; they were legendary, mysterious, powerful. Sir Tom and Jensen must be outcasts from the city, crazy people who’d never made it back in, who had somehow survived out here among the wild animals and those half-human things.
And Angel? I didn’t know what to make of him.
The old man had stopped cackling and was watching me. “This much is clear,” he said, and I really, really hoped something clear was coming. “You asked about the Guardians. Does that mean we are what brought you out into the wilderland alone?”
Cautiously, I nodded.
“It must be bad,” he said. “It must be very bad in the city, if you felt driven to come out here looking for the monsters.”
I looked at him more closely. Quiet authority had returned to his voice. He actually sounded sane.
“It is bad,” I said.
“Tell me.”
A minute earlier I couldn’t have imagined having a coherent conversation with the man. But what was I supposed to do? I had nowhere else to turn. And surely it wouldn’t hurt to tell him, even if he wasn’t a Guardian, even if he could do nothing to help us.
“We don’t have enough food to make it through the winter,” I began, edging a little closer to the fire, now nothing but glowing red embers. “So the Watchers are going to kill those of us who consume more than we produce. The sick, the underweight, the injured, —”
Suddenly embarrassed, I hesitated. He smiled a little grimly. “The old,” he concluded. “Though the Watchers, presumably, are exempt.”
He stayed calm, and though I’d much rather have been talking to someone a good bit more stable, it was a relief to tell anyone outside of Optica about the problems there, to describe the city meetings to someone who wasn’t traumatized by them or endangered by them, to talk to someone I didn’t have to comfort, who wouldn’t try to bolster me with false reassurances.
Sir Tom nodded while I talked. He didn’t seem surprised by anything I said—at least until I got to the part about Meritt spying on the Watchers.
“Young Meritt,” he said softly.
“Do you know him?”
Sir Tom’s gaze went distant. “Knowing another is more difficult than we like to believe,” he said. “In the end we will know fully, even as we are fully known. But here, faces are veiled. Not entirely, of course. But some veils are thicker than others.”
Of course he didn’t know Meritt. Meritt would have told me if he’d met a lunatic who thought he was a Guardian.
“But that name I do know,” Sir Tom said, his eyes focusing again. “Yes. I most certainly know the name. Young Meritt has nerve, if he’s willing to spy on the Watchers up close and personal.”
“Yes. He’s very brave.”
“Some young men have more nerve than brains, and some have more brains than nerve.”
“Meritt has plenty of both.”
Sir Tom looked at me sharply. “So that’s the way the wind blows,” he said. “Well, well.”
My face began to feel hot and I changed the subject. “Apparently the Watchers watch me in particular,” I said.
“Naturally.” To my surprise tears filled his eyes.
“Because of my hair—” I began, but he gave a short bark of incredulous laughter.
“Hair has nothing to do with it,” he said. “What? Do you think they’re beauticians?”
My face grew hotter still—but at least the old man wasn’t crying any more. He studied me with his brow knitted. “I’m too blunt,” he said apologetically. “I had a way with the ladies once, but that was many years ago.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You can be blunt. I want to know the truth. If it’s not because of my hair, what is it? Why do they watch me?”
“They watch you because they can,” he said, and then he screwed his eyes shut. “I will go no further,” he said, and he wasn’t talking to me. “I will not. Going further means dashing hopes or raising hopes, and neither will I do.”
“But—”
He opened his eyes. “Some doors, once opened, can never be shut. And some doors, once shut, can never be opened.”
I couldn’t believe it—he wouldn’t tell me?
Maybe he wouldn’t tell me anything because he didn’t have anything to tell. He was like one of my old people spinning a yarn, except without the good grace to finish the story or even say it was all make-believe.
“I will do no more harm,” he said. “I can live with no more. But I will tell you this: Red Girl wouldn’t be in the fix she’s in if it weren’t for me. And I’d fix that fix if I could, but I can’t, because not a soul alive can turn back the clock.” A deeper shadow passed over his face. “Break, break, break, on the cold gray stones, o sea. But the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.”
More rhyming. Wonderful.
I had an idea. “Even if you can’t turn back the clock, can you do something to help me now? In the present?”
He brightened. “Now that is an interesting thought,” he said. “I’ve been pondering it since you showed up on my doorstep last night, like the ghost of Christmas Past draped in long red hair instead of chains. But it’s been a long time since I’ve reconnoitered, a very long time indeed. Longer than you’ve been alive.”
He was on the wrong track. I had been trying to think of a tactful way to get him to lead me to the real Guardians, but he sounded as if he intended to help me fight the Watchers himself.
He tilted his head, gazed at me. “Are the wardens well armed?”
“They all have stunners, and there are some real guns, but I don’t know how many—I’ve only seen a few.”
“Is anyone else armed?”
“Not that I know of.”
“No one? Not even after all these years? That is a pity.”
He bent and sketched a big circle in the sand. “Does Red Girl know where the active cameras are?” he asked. “Not the secret ones, and not the blanks, but the ones the Watchers watch? Last I checked they were here.”
Taking a stick, he drew a rough city map, and then marked the active cameras.
He was right—he knew exactly which cameras were dummies, and which were active.
“Meritt has disabled a few of the active ones,” I said, and pointed out which. But my mind was on his earlier words. “The secret cameras?” I said. “What do you mean?”
He looked up at me. “The ones in the wasteland,” he said. “They’re hidden, as are the ones in the Watcher compound. We didn’t guard the Watchers, but naturally we had to watch them. And it was essential that we maintain the perimeter.”
He was talking about the circles on Rafe’s map, about the camera Meritt and I had found.
“What do you mean, the last time you checked?”
He wasn’t particularly interested in answering—he was studying the map on the sand—but he replied, absently, “The stockade has a monitoring system. I disabled it long ago, when I finally realized what we’d done. Until then we saw whatever the Watchers saw, and more. The streets, the dormitories. Each cell in the prison. That lazy old warden sitting in the tower playing Solitaire. The wasteland, where people tried to hide from watching eyes.”
“You really are a Guardian,” I said. I couldn’t quite believe it.
He glanced at me wryly as he got to his feet. The tactless morning sun caught every wrinkle in his creased face, sparkled in the stubby silver hair on his head, but though it made him look older it did not make him look weak.
Turning toward the water, he scanned the horizon. There was nothing out there—nothing but water, sky, the curve of the earth.
“Hubris, old man,” he said, but his voice was calm. “Emancipating an entire city is not an easy thing for one old man and one young girl to do. Impossible, if the city does not want to be emancipated.”
His head turned just slightly to the left. “And if it does?”
Now he turned slightly to the right. “Some ills are beyond your power to fix.”
“But not all.”
“Guilt impairs your clarity of thought.”
“Restitution is a legitimate desire.”
“Restitution, or restlessness? Old Ulysses heading out to sea one last time?”
“Better than to rust for want of use.”
It really sounded as if he were talking to someone else, impossible as that was. Which was worse, I wondered—an old man who argued with himself, or an old man who talked to invisible beings?
Whichever he was doing, I knew which side of the argument I was on.
“Please help us,” I said. “My friends are going to die.”
For a long moment Sir Tom stood there with his back to me, facing the sea. Perhaps the argument continued in his head, but if so, he gave no sign of it. He simply stood there, perfectly still, gazing away from me, across the wide gray sea.
Finally he turned. “I am weary of watching,” he said. “This will take time and consideration. We will not accomplish any large success today or tomorrow or tomorrow’s morrow.”
“But you’ll help?”
His blue eyes were troubled. “I will try.”
Chapter 22
We had almost reached the cave when Sir Tom fell.