He had gone only halfway up the rise when he once again saw the peak of the great tent, rigid in the midst of a rank of narrow fluttering flags. That, he assumed, was his destination. Another few steps past the blackberry bushes where he’d paused the last time (remembering how good they’d been, Jack popped two of the enormous berries in his mouth) and he could see the whole of the tent. It was actually a big rambling pavillion, long wings on each side, with gates and a courtyard. Like the Alhambra, this eccentric structure—a summer palace, Jack’s instincts told him—stood just above the ocean. Little bands of people moved through and around the great pavillion, driven by forces as powerful and invisible as the effect on iron filings of a magnet. The little groups met, divided, poured on again.
Some of the men wore bright, rich-looking clothes, though many seemed to be dressed much as Jack was. A few women in long shining white gowns or robes marched through the courtyard, as purposeful as generals. Outside the gates stood a collection of smaller tents and impromptu-looking wooden huts; here, too, people moved, eating or buying or talking, though more easily and randomly. Somewhere down in that busy crowd he would have to find the man with a scar.
But first he looked behind him, down the length of the rutted track, to see what had happened to Funworld.
When he saw two small dark horses pulling plows, perhaps fifty yards off, he thought that the amusement park had become a farm, but then he noticed the crowd watching the plowing from the top of the field and understood that this was a contest. Next his eye was taken by the spectacle of a huge red-haired man, stripped to the waist, whirling about like a top. His outstretched hands held some long heavy object. The man abruptly stopped whirling and released the object, which flew a long way before it thudded and bounced on the grass and revealed itself to be a hammer. Funworld was a fair, not a farm—Jack now saw tables heaped with food, children on their fathers’ shoulders.
In the midst of the fair, making sure that every strap and harness was sound, every oven stoked with wood, was there a Speedy Parker? Jack hoped so.
And was his mother still sitting by herself in the Tea and Jam Shoppe, wondering why she had let him go?
Jack turned back and watched the long cart rattle through the gates of the summer palace and swing off to the left, separating the people who moved there as a car making a turn off Fifth Avenue separates pedestrians on a cross-town street. A moment later he set off after it.
2
He had feared that all the people on the pavillion grounds would turn toward him staring, instantly sensing his difference from them. Jack carefully kept his eyes lowered whenever he could and imitated a boy on a complicated errand—he had been sent out to assemble a list of things; his face showed how he was concentrating to remember them. A shovel, two picks, a ball of twine, a bottle of goose grease . . . But gradually he became aware that none of the adults before the summer palace paid him any attention at all. They rushed or dawdled, inspected the merchandise—rugs, iron pots, bracelets—displayed in the little tents, drank from wooden mugs, plucked at another’s sleeve to make a comment or start a conversation, argued with the guards at the gate, each wholly taken up by his own business. Jack’s impersonation was so unnecessary as to be ridiculous. He straightened up and began to work his way, moving generally in an irregular half-circle, toward the gate.
He had seen almost immediately that he would not be able just to stroll through it—the two guards on either side stopped and questioned nearly everyone who tried to reach the interior of the summer palace. Men had to show their papers, or display badges or seals which gave them access. Jack had only Speedy Parker’s fingerpick, and he didn’t think that would get him past the guards’ inspection. One man just now stepping up to the gate flashed a round silver badge and was waved through; the man following him was stopped. He argued; then the tone of his manner changed, and Jack saw that he was pleading. The guard shook his head and ordered the man off.
“His men don’t have any trouble getting in,” someone to Jack’s right said, instantly solving the problem of Territories language, and Jack turned his head to see if the man had spoken to him.
But the middle-aged man walking beside him was speaking to another man, also dressed in the plain, simple clothes of most of the men and women outside the palace grounds. “They’d better not,” the second man answered. “He’s on his way—supposed to be here today sometime, I guess.”
Jack fell in behind these two and followed them toward the gate.
The guards stepped forward as the men neared, and as they both approached the same guard, the other gestured to the man nearest him. Jack hung back. He still had not seen anyone with a scar, nor had he seen any officers. The only soldiers in sight were the guards, both young and countrified—with their broad red faces above the elaborately pleated and ruffled uniforms, they looked like farmers in fancy dress. The two men Jack had been following must have passed the guards’ tests, for after a few moments’ conversation the uniformed men stepped back and admitted them. One of the guards looked sharply at Jack, and Jack turned his head and stepped back.
Unless he found the Captain with the scar, he would never get inside the palace grounds.
A group of men approached the guard who had stared at Jack, and immediately began to wrangle. They had an appointment, it was crucial they be let in, much money depended on it, regrettably they had no papers. The guard shook his head, scraping his chin across his uniform’s white ruff. As Jack watched, still wondering how he could find the Captain, the leader of the little group waved his hands in the air, pounded his fist into a palm. He had become as red-faced as the guard. At length he began jabbing the guard with his forefinger. The guard’s companion joined him—both guards looked bored and hostile.
A tall straight man in a uniform subtly different from the guards’—it might have been the way the uniform was worn, but it looked as though it might serve in battle as well as in an operetta—noiselessly materialized beside them. He did not wear a ruff, Jack noticed a second later, and his hat was peaked instead of three-cornered. He spoke to the guards, and then turned to the leader of the little group. There was no more shouting, no more finger-jabbing. The man spoke quietly. Jack saw the danger ebb out of the group. They shifted on their feet, their shoulders sank. They began to drift away. The officer watched them go, then turned back to the guards for a final word.
For the moment while the officer faced in Jack’s direction, in effect shooing the group of men away with his presence, Jack saw a long pale lightning-bolt of a scar zigzagging from beneath his right eye to just above his jawline.
The officer nodded to the guards and stepped briskly away. Looking neither to the left nor to the right, he wove through the crowd, apparently headed for whatever lay to the side of the summer palace. Jack took off after him.
“Sir!” he yelled, but the officer marched on through the slow-moving crowd.
Jack ran around a group of men and women hauling a pig toward one of the little tents, shot through a gap between two other bands of people approaching the gate, and finally was close enough to the officer to reach out and touch his elbow. “Captain?”
The officer wheeled around, freezing Jack where he stood. Up close, the scar seemed thick and separate, a living creature riding on the man’s face. Even unscarred, Jack thought, this man’s face would express a forceful impatience. “What is it, boy?” the man asked.
“Captain, I’m supposed to talk to you—I have to see the Lady, but I don’t think I can get into the palace. Oh, you’re supposed to see this.” He dug into the roomy pocket of the unfamiliar pants and closed his fingers around a triangular object.
When he displayed it on his palm, he felt shock boom through him—what he held in his hand was not a fingerpick but a long tooth, a shark’s tooth perhaps, inlaid with a winding, intricate pattern of gold.
When Jack looked up at the Captain’s face, half-expecting a blow, he saw his shock echoed there. The impatience which had seemed so c
haracteristic had utterly vanished. Uncertainty and even fear momentarily distorted the man’s strong features. The Captain lifted his hand to Jack’s, and the boy thought he meant to take the ornate tooth: he would have given it to him, but the man simply folded the boy’s fingers over the object on his palm. “Follow me,” he said.
They went around to the side of the great pavillion, and the Captain led Jack behind the shelter of a great sail-shaped flap of stiff pale canvas. In the glowing darkness behind the flap, the soldier’s face looked as though someone had drawn on it with thick pink crayon. “That sign,” he said calmly enough. “Where did you get it?”
“From Speedy Parker. He said that I should find you and show it to you.”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know the name. I want you to give me the sign now. Now.” He firmly grasped Jack’s wrist. “Give it to me, and then tell me where you stole it.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Jack said. “I got it from Lester Speedy Parker. He works at Funworld. But it wasn’t a tooth when he gave it to me. It was a guitar-pick.”
“I don’t think you understand what’s going to happen to you, boy.”
“You know him,” Jack pleaded. “He described you—he told me you were a Captain of the Outer Guards. Speedy told me to find you.”
The Captain shook his head and gripped Jack’s wrist more firmly. “Describe this man. I’m going to find out if you’re lying right now, boy, so I’d make this good if I were you.”
“Speedy’s old,” Jack said. “He used to be a musician.” He thought he saw recognition of some kind flash in the man’s eyes. “He’s black—a black man. With white hair. Deep lines in his face. And he’s pretty thin, but he’s a lot stronger than he looks.”
“A black man. You mean, a brown man?”
“Well, black people aren’t really black. Like white people aren’t really white.”
“A brown man named Parker.” The Captain gently released Jack’s wrist. “He is called Parkus here. So you are from . . .” He nodded toward some distant invisible point on the horizon.
“That’s right,” Jack said.
“And Parkus . . . Parker . . . sent you to see our Queen.”
“He said he wanted me to see the Lady. And that you could take me to her.”
“This will have to be fast,” the Captain said. “I think I know how to do it, but we don’t have any time to waste.” He had shifted his mental direction with a military smoothness. “Now listen to me. We have a lot of bastards around here, so we’re going to pretend that you are my son on t’other side of the sheets. You have disobeyed me in connection with some little job, and I am angry with you. I think no one will stop us if we make this performance convincing. At least I can get you inside—but it might be a little trickier once we are in. You think you can do it? Convince people that you’re my son?”
“My mother’s an actress,” Jack said, and felt that old pride in her.
“Well, then, let’s see what you’ve learned,” the Captain said, and surprised Jack by winking at him. “I’ll try not to cause you any pain.” Then he startled Jack again, and clamped a very strong hand over the boy’s upper arm. “Let’s go,” he said, and marched out of the shelter of the flap, half-dragging Jack behind him.
“When I tell you to wash the flagstones behind the kitchen, wash flagstones is what you’ll do,” the Captain said loudly, not looking at him. “Understand that? You will do your job. And if you do not do your job, you must be punished.”
“But I washed some of the flagstones . . .” Jack wailed.
“I didn’t tell you to wash some of the flagstones!” the Captain yelled, hauling Jack along behind him. The people around them parted to let the Captain through. Some of them grinned sympathetically at Jack.
“I was going to do it all, honest, I was going to go back in a minute . . .”
The soldier pulled him toward the gate without even glancing at the guards, and yanked him through. “No, Dad!” Jack squalled. “You’re hurting me!”
“Not as much as I’m going to hurt you,” the Captain said, and pulled him across the wide courtyard Jack had seen from the cart-track.
At the other end of the court the soldier pulled him up wooden steps and into the great palace itself. “Now your acting had better be good,” the man whispered, and immediately set off down a long corridor, squeezing Jack’s arm hard enough to leave bruises.
“I promise I’ll be good!” Jack shouted.
The man hauled him into another, narrower corridor. The interior of the palace did not at all resemble the inside of a tent, Jack saw. It was a mazelike warren of passages and little rooms, and it smelled of smoke and grease.
“Promise!” the Captain bawled out.
“I promise! I do!”
Ahead of them as they emerged from yet another corridor, a group of elaborately clothed men either leaning against a wall or draped over couches turned their heads to look at this noisy duo. One of them, who had been amusing himself by giving orders to a pair of women carrying stacks of sheets folded flat across their arms, glanced suspiciously at Jack and the Captain.
“And I promise to beat the sin out of you,” the Captain said loudly.
A couple of the men laughed. They wore soft wide-brimmed hats trimmed with fur and their boots were of velvet. They had greedy, thoughtless faces. The man talking to the maids, the one who seemed to be in charge, was skeletally tall and thin. His tense, ambitious face tracked the boy and the soldier as they hurried by.
“Please don’t!” Jack wailed. “Please!”
“Each please is another strapping,” the soldier growled, and the men laughed again. The thin one permitted himself to display a smile as cold as a knife-blade before he turned back to the maids.
The Captain yanked the boy into an empty room filled with dusty wooden furniture. Then at last he released Jack’s aching arm. “Those were his men,” he whispered. “What life will be like when—” He shook his head, and for a moment seemed to forget his haste. “It says in The Book of Good Farming that the meek shall inherit the earth, but those fellows don’t have a teaspoonful of meekness among them. Taking’s all they’re good for. They want wealth, they want—” He glanced upward, unwilling or unable to say what else the men outside wanted. Then he looked back at the boy. “We’ll have to be quick about this, but there are still a few secrets his men haven’t learned about the palace.” He nodded sideways, indicating a faded wooden wall.
Jack followed him, and understood when the Captain pushed two of the flat brown nailheads left exposed at the end of a dusty board. A panel in the faded wall swung inward, exposing a narrow black passageway no taller than an upended coffin. “You’ll only get a glimpse of her, but I suppose that’s all you need. It’s all you can have, anyhow.”
The boy followed the silent instruction to slip into the passageway. “Just go straight ahead until I tell you,” the Captain whispered. When he closed the panel behind them, Jack began to move slowly forward through perfect blackness.
The passage wound this way and that, occasionally illuminated by faint light spilling in through a crack in a concealed door or through a window set above the boy’s head. Jack soon lost all sense of direction, and blindly followed the whispered directions of his companion. At one point he caught the delicious odor of roasting meat, at another the unmistakable stink of sewage.
“Stop,” the Captain finally said. “Now I’ll have to lift you up. Raise your arms.”
“Will I be able to see?”
“You’ll know in a second,” the Captain said, and put a hand just beneath each of Jack’s armpits and lifted him cleanly off the floor. “There is a panel in front of you now,” he whispered. “Slide it to the left.”
Jack blindly reached out before him and touched smooth wood. It slid easily aside, and enough light fell into the passage for him to see a kitten-sized spider scrambling toward the ceiling. He was looking down into a room the size of a hotel lobby, filled with women in white
and furniture so ornate that it brought back to the boy all the museums he and his parents had visited. In the center of the room a woman lay sleeping or unconscious on an immense bed, only her head and shoulders visible above the sheet.
And then Jack nearly shouted with shock and terror, because the woman on the bed was his mother. That was his mother, and she was dying.
“You saw her,” the Captain whispered, and braced his arms more firmly.
Open-mouthed, Jack stared in at his mother. She was dying, he could not doubt that any longer: even her skin seemed bleached and unhealthy, and her hair, too, had lost several shades of color. The nurses around her bustled about, straightening the sheets or rearranging books on a table, but they assumed this busy and purposeful manner because they had no real idea of how to help their patient. The nurses knew that for such a patient there was no real help. If they could stave off death for another month, or even a week, they were at the fullest extent of their powers.
He looked back at the face turned upward like a waxen mask and finally saw that the woman on the bed was not his mother. Her chin was rounder, the shape of her nose slightly more classical. The dying woman was his mother’s Twinner; it was Laura DeLoessian. If Speedy had wanted him to see more, he was not capable of it: that white moveless face told him nothing of the woman behind it.
“Okay,” he whispered, pushing the panel back into place, and the Captain lowered him to the floor.
In the darkness he asked, “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nobody can find that out,” came from above him. “The Queen cannot see, she cannot speak, she cannot move. . . .” There was silence for a moment, and then the Captain touched his hand and said, “We must return.”
They quietly emerged from blackness into the dusty empty room. The Captain brushed ropy cobwebs from the front of his uniform. His head cocked to one side, he considered Jack for a long moment, worry very plain upon his face. “Now you must answer a question of mine,” he said.
Talisman 01 - The Talisman Page 11