“Yes.”
“Were you sent here to save her? To save the Queen?”
Jack nodded. “I think so—I think that’s part of it. Tell me just one thing.” He hesitated. “Why don’t those creeps out there just take over? She sure couldn’t stop them.”
The Captain smiled. There was no humor in that smile. “Me,” he said. “My men. We’d stop them. I know not what they may have gotten up to in the Outposts, where order is thin—but here we hold to the Queen.”
A muscle just below the eye on the unscarred cheekbone jumped like a fish. He was pressing his hands together, palm to palm. “And your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, to go west, is that correct?”
Jack could practically feel the man vibrating, controlling his growing agitation only from a lifetime’s habit of self-discipline. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m supposed to go west. Isn’t that right? Shouldn’t I go west? To the other Alhambra?”
“I can’t say, I can’t say,” the Captain blurted, taking a step backward. “We have to get you out of here right now. I can’t tell you what to do.” He could not even look at Jack now, the boy saw. “But you can’t stay here a minute longer—let’s, ah, let’s see if we can get you out and away before Morgan gets here.”
“Morgan?” Jack said, almost thinking that he had not heard the name correctly. “Morgan Sloat? Is he coming here?”
7
Farren
1
The Captain appeared not to have heard Jack’s question. He was looking away into the corner of this empty unused room as if there were something there to see. He was thinking long and hard and fast; Jack recognized that. And Uncle Tommy had taught him that interrupting an adult who was thinking hard was just as impolite as interrupting an adult who was speaking. But—
Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s . . . he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.
Speedy had said that, and Jack had been concentrating so hard on the Talisman that he had almost missed it. Now the words came back and came home with a nasty double-thud that was like being hit in the back of the neck.
“What does he look like?” he asked the Captain urgently.
“Morgan?” the Captain asked, as if startled out of some interior dream.
“Is he fat? Is he fat and sorta going bald? Does he go like this when he’s mad?” And employing the innate gift for mimicry he’d always had—a gift which had made his father roar with laughter even when he was tired and feeling down—Jack “did” Morgan Sloat. Age fell into his face as he laddered his brow the way Uncle Morgan’s brow laddered into lines when he was pissed off about something. At the same time, Jack sucked his cheeks in and pulled his head down to create a double chin. His lips flared out in a fishy pout and he began to waggle his eyebrows rapidly up and down. “Does he go like that?”
“No,” the Captain said, but something flickered in his eyes, the way something had flickered there when Jack told him that Speedy Parker was old. “Morgan’s tall. He wears his hair long”—the Captain held a hand by his right shoulder to show Jack how long—“and he has a limp. One foot’s deformed. He wears a built-up boot, but—” He shrugged.
“You looked like you knew him when I did him! You—”
“Shhh! Not so God-pounding loud, boy!”
Jack lowered his voice. “I think I know the guy,” he said—and for the first time he felt fear as an informed emotion . . . something he could grasp in a way he could not as yet grasp this world. Uncle Morgan here? Jesus!
“Morgan is just Morgan. No one to fool around with, boy. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
His hand closed around Jack’s upper arm again. Jack winced but resisted.
Parker becomes Parkus. And Morgan . . . it’s just too big a coincidence.
“Not yet,” he said. Another question had occurred to him. “Did she have a son?”
“The Queen?”
“Yes.”
“She had a son,” the Captain replied reluctantly. “Yes. Boy, we can’t stay here. We—”
“Tell me about him!”
“There is nothing to tell,” the Captain answered. “The babe died an infant, not six weeks out of her womb. There was talk that one of Morgan’s men—Osmond, perhaps—smothered the lad. But talk of that sort is always cheap. I have no love for Morgan of Orris but everyone knows that one child in every dozen dies a-crib. No one knows why; they die mysteriously, of no cause. There’s a saying—God pounds His nails. Not even a royal child is excepted in the eyes of the Carpenter. He . . . Boy? are you all right?”
Jack felt the world go gray around him. He reeled, and when the Captain caught him, his hard hands felt as soft as feather pillows.
He had almost died as an infant.
His mother had told him the story—how she had found him still and apparently lifeless in his crib, his lips blue, his cheeks the color of funeral candles after they have been capped and thus put out. She had told him how she had run screaming into the living room with him in her arms. His father and Sloat were sitting on the floor, stoned on wine and grass, watching a wrestling match on TV. His father had snatched him from his mother’s arms, pinching his nostrils savagely shut with his left hand (You had bruises there for almost a month, Jacky, his mother had told him with a jittery laugh) and then plunging his mouth over Jack’s tiny mouth, while Morgan cried: I don’t think that’s going to help him, Phil. I don’t think that’s going to help him!
(Uncle Morgan was funny, wasn’t he, Mom? Jack had said. Yes, very funny, Jack-O, his mother had replied, and she had smiled an oddly humorless smile, and lit another Herbert Tarrytoon from the butt of the one smouldering in the ashtray.)
“Boy!” the Captain whispered, and shook him so hard that Jack’s lolling head snapped on his neck. “Boy! Dammit! If you faint on me . . .”
“I’m okay,” Jack said—his voice seemed to come from far away; it sounded like the voice of the Dodgers announcer when you were cruising by Chavez Ravine at night with the top down, echoing and distant, the play-by-play of baseball in a sweet dream. “Okay, lay off me, what do you say? Give me a break.”
The Captain stopped shaking him but looked at him warily.
“Okay,” Jack said again, and abruptly he slapped his own cheek as hard as he could—Ow! But the world came swimming back into focus.
He had almost died in his crib. In that apartment they’d had back then, the one he barely remembered, the one his mother always called the Technicolor Dream Palace because of the spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills from the living room. He had almost died in his crib, and his father and Morgan Sloat had been drinking wine, and when you drank a lot of wine you had to pee a lot, and he remembered the Technicolor Dream Palace well enough to know that you got from the living room to the nearest bathroom by going through the room that had been his when he was a baby.
He saw it: Morgan Sloat getting up, grinning easily, saying something like Just a sec while I make some room, Phil; his father hardly looking around because Haystack Calhoun was getting ready to put the Spinner or the Sleeper on some hapless opponent; Morgan passing from the TV-brightness of the living room into the ashy dimness of the nursery, where little Jacky Sawyer lay sleeping in his Pooh pajamas with the feet, little Jacky Sawyer warm and secure in a dry diaper. He saw Uncle Morgan glancing furtively back at the bright square of the door to the living room, his balding brow turning to ladder-rungs, his lips pursing like the chilly mouth of a lake bass; he saw Uncle Morgan take a throw-pillow from a nearby chair, saw him put it gently and yet firmly over the sleeping baby’s entire head, holding it there with one hand while he held the other hand flat on the baby’s back. And when all movement had stopped, he saw Uncle Morgan put the pillow back on the chair where Lily sat to nurse, and go into the bathroom to urinate.
If his mother hadn’t come in to check on him almost immediately . . .
Chilly sweat broke out all over his body.
&nb
sp; Had it been that way? It could have been. His heart told him it had been. The coincidence was too utterly perfect, too seamlessly complete.
At the age of six weeks, the son of Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, had died in his crib.
At the age of six weeks, the son of Phil and Lily Sawyer had almost died in his crib . . . and Morgan Sloat had been there.
His mother always finished the story with a joke: how Phil Sawyer had almost racked up their Chrysler, roaring to the hospital after Jacky had already started breathing again.
Pretty funny, all right. Yeah.
2
“Now come on,” the Captain said.
“All right,” Jack said. He still felt weak, dazed. “All right, let’s g—”
“Shhhh!” The Captain looked around sharply at the sound of approaching voices. The wall to their right was not wood but heavy canvas. It stopped four inches short of the floor, and Jack saw booted feet passing by in the gap. Five pair. Soldiers’ boots.
One voice cut through the babble: “. . . didn’t know he had a son.”
“Well,” a second answered, “bastards sire bastards—a fact you should well know, Simon.”
There was a roar of brutal, empty laughter at this—the sort of laughter Jack heard from some of the bigger boys at school, the ones who busted joints behind the woodshop and called the younger boys mysterious but somehow terrifying names: queerboy and humpa-jumpa and morphadite. Each of these somehow slimy terms was followed by a coarse ribband of laughter exactly like this.
“Cork it! Cork it up!”—a third voice. “If he hears you, you’ll be walking Outpost Line before thirty suns have set!”
Mutters.
A muffled burst of laughter.
Another jibe, this one unintelligible. More laughter as they passed on.
Jack looked at the Captain, who was staring at the short canvas wall with his lips drawn back from his teeth all the way to the gumlines. No question who they were talking about. And if they were talking, there might be someone listening . . . the wrong somebody. Somebody who might be wondering just who this suddenly revealed bastard might really be. Even a kid like him knew that.
“You heard enough?” the Captain said. “We’ve got to move.” He looked as if he would like to shake Jack . . . but did not quite dare.
Your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, go west, is that correct?
He changed, Jack thought. He changed twice.
Once when Jack showed him the shark’s tooth that had been a filigreed guitar-pick in the world where delivery trucks instead of horse-drawn carts ran the roads. And he had changed again when Jack confirmed that he was going west. He had gone from threat to a willingness to help to . . . what?
I can’t say . . . I can’t tell you what to do.
To something like religious awe . . . or religious terror.
He wants to get out of here because he’s afraid we’ll be caught, Jack thought. But there’s more, isn’t there? He’s afraid of me. Afraid of—
“Come on,” the Captain said. “Come on, for Jason’s sake.”
“Whose sake?” Jack asked stupidly, but the Captain was already propelling him out. He pulled Jack hard left and half-led, half-dragged him down a corridor that was wood on one side and stiff, mouldy-smelling canvas on the other.
“This isn’t the way we came,” Jack whispered.
“Don’t want to go past those fellows we saw coming in,” the Captain whispered back. “Morgan’s men. Did you see the tall one? Almost skinny enough to look through?”
“Yes.” Jack remembered the thin smile, and the eyes which did not smile. The others had looked soft. The thin man had looked hard. He had looked crazy. And one thing more: he had looked dimly familiar.
“Osmond,” the Captain said, now pulling Jack to the right.
The smell of roasting meat had been growing gradually stronger, and now the air was redolent of it. Jack had never smelled meat he wanted so badly to taste in his whole life. He was scared, he was mentally and emotionally on the ropes, perhaps rocking on the edge of madness . . . but his mouth was watering crazily.
“Osmond is Morgan’s right-hand man,” the Captain grunted. “He sees too much, and I’d just as soon he didn’t see you twice, boy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hsssst!” He clamped Jack’s aching arm even tighter. They were approaching a wide cloth drape that hung in a doorway. To Jack it looked like a shower-curtain—except the cloth was burlap of a weave so coarse and wide that it was almost netlike, and the rings it hung from were bone rather than chrome. “Now cry,” the Captain breathed warmly in Jack’s ear.
He swept the curtain back and pulled Jack into a huge kitchen which fumed with rich aromas (the meat still predominating) and billows of steamy heat. Jack caught a confused glimpse of braziers, of a great stonework chimney, of women’s faces under billowy white kerchiefs that reminded him of nuns’ wimples. Some of them were lined up at a long iron trough which stood on trestles, their faces red and beaded with sweat as they washed pots and cooking utensils. Others stood at a counter which ran the width of the room, slicing and dicing and coring and paring. Another was carrying a wire rack filled with uncooked pies. They all stared at Jack and the Captain as they pushed through into the kitchen.
“Never again!” the Captain bellowed at Jack, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat . . . and all the while he continued to move them both swiftly across the room, toward the double-hung doors at the far side. “Never again, do you hear me? The next time you shirk your duty, I’ll split your skin down the back and peel you like a baked potato!”
And under his breath, the Captain hissed, “They’ll all remember and they’ll all talk, so cry, dammit!”
And now, as the Captain with the scarred face dragged him across the steaming kitchen by the scruff of his neck and one throbbing arm, Jack deliberately called up the dreadful image of his mother lying in a funeral parlor. He saw her in billowing folds of white organdy—she was lying in her coffin and wearing the wedding dress she had worn in Drag Strip Rumble (RKO, 1953). Her face came clearer and clearer in Jack’s mind, a perfect wax effigy, and he saw she was wearing her tiny gold-cross earrings, the ones Jack had given her for Christmas two years ago. Then the face changed. The chin became rounder, the nose straighter and more patrician. The hair went a shade lighter and became somehow coarser. Now it was Laura DeLoessian he saw in that coffin—and the coffin itself was no longer a smoothly anonymous funeral parlor special, but something that looked as if it had been hacked with rude fury from an old log—a Viking’s coffin, if there had ever been such a thing; it was easier to imagine this coffin being torched alight on a bier of oiled logs than it was to imagine it being lowered into the unprotesting earth. It was Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, but in this imagining which had become as clear as a vision, the Queen was wearing his mother’s wedding dress from Drag Strip Rumble and the gold-cross earrings Uncle Tommy had helped him pick out in Sharp’s of Beverly Hills. Suddenly his tears came in a hot and burning flood—not sham tears but real ones, not just for his mother but for both of these lost women, dying universes apart, bound by some unseen cord which might rot but would never break—at least, not until they were both dead.
Through the tears he saw a giant of a man in billowing whites rush across the room toward them. He wore a red bandanna instead of a puffy chef’s hat on his head, but Jack thought its purpose was the same—to identify the wearer as the boss of the kitchen. He was also brandishing a wicked-looking three-tined wooden fork.
“Ged-OUT!” the chef screeched at them, and the voice emerging from that huge barrel chest was absurdly flutelike—it was the voice of a willowy gay giving a shoe-clerk a piece of his mind. But there was nothing absurd about the fork; it looked deadly.
The women scattered before his charge like birds. The bottom-most pie dropped out of the pie-woman’s rack and she uttered a high, despairing cry as it broke apart on the boards. Str
awberry juice splattered and ran, the red as fresh and bright as arterial blood.
“GED-DOUT MY KIDCHEN, YOU SLUGS! DIS IS NO SHORDCUD! DIS IS NO RAZE-TRAG! DIS IS MY KIDCHEN AND IF YOU CAD’T REMEMBER DAT, I’LL BY GOD THE CARBENDER CARVE YOUR AZZES FOR YOU!”
He jabbed the fork at them, simultaneously half-turning his head and squinching his eyes mostly shut, as if in spite of his tough talk the thought of hot flowing blood was just too gauche to be borne. The Captain removed the hand that had been on the scruff of Jack’s neck and reached out—almost casually, it seemed to Jack. A moment later the chef was on the floor, all six and a half feet of him. The meat-fork was lying in a puddle of strawberry sauce and chunks of white unbaked pastry. The chef rolled back and forth, clutching his broken right wrist and screaming in that high, flutelike voice. The news he screamed out to the room in general was certainly woeful enough: he was dead, the Captain had surely murdered him (pronounced mur-dirt in the chef’s odd, almost Teutonic accent); he was at the very least crippled, the cruel and heartless Captain of the Outer Guards having destroyed his good right hand and thus his livelihood, and so ensuring a miserable beggar’s life for him in the years to come; the Captain had inflicted terrible pain on him, a pain beyond belief, such as was not to be borne—
“Shut up!” the Captain roared, and the chef did. Immediately. He lay on the floor like a great baby, his right hand curled on his chest, his red bandanna drunkenly askew so that one ear (a small black pearl was set in the center of the lobe) showed, his fat cheeks quivering. The kitchen women gasped and twittered as the Captain bent over the dreaded chief ogre of the steaming cave where they spent their days and nights. Jack, still weeping, caught a glimpse of a black boy (brown boy, his mind amended) standing at one end of the largest brazier. The boy’s mouth was open, his face as comically surprised as a face in a minstrel show, but he kept turning the crank in his hands, and the haunch suspended over the glowing coals kept revolving.
Talisman 01 - The Talisman Page 12