by James Axler
The warrior’s head lolled to the side. A geyser of blood erupted from his neck as he folded to the ground. Mildred shrieked and leaped back. But the brunt of the bloodflood sprayed Don Hector, who received it unblinking.
Then he turned to his visitors. His eyes seemed to stare out of a horror mask of gore. “Return to Don Tenorio and do me the favor of telling him I will meet with him two days hence at a place of his choosing. Tell him also the truth you have witnessed with your own eyes—that I and I alone possess the will and the means to save our valley from the Chichimecs.”
Chapter Sixteen
“He’s crazy,” Mildred said. “He’s flat-out, florid, schizophrenic.”
“Jumped back fast, back there,” Jak said with a wolf’s grin from the rear compartment of the Hummer. “Blood scared?”
“No. I mean, yes! Yeah, I’ve seen blood before—even been sprayed with it a few times. You people know that. But back in the twentieth century that was something we took seriously, what with AIDS and everything. And besides, it took me all by surprise, dammit. I never imagined he’d do something that barking damn crazy.”
“Which made it all the more effective a demonstration of the loyalty he commands from his household troops, dusky princess,” Doc said.
“Which only goes to show they’re as screwy as he is. And while you’re at it, you can seal that ‘dusky princess’ crap in lead and dump it in the Marianas trench, you goofy old coot!”
“Millie, our man Don Tenorio doesn’t seem to really want to be a baron,” J.B. said. “In this bad old world, what I’ve seen of it anyway, only those who want it really bad can hold on to it. He seems a nice enough old guy, for somebody who pays too much attention to whitecoats. But if I was a bettin’ man, and of course I am, my jack would have to be on this dude Don Hector. Even if he is crazy as a shaken-up jar full of hornets.”
“Barons always crazy,” Jak said. “Where big deal?”
“I don’t believe you people. He’s tried to have us killed, not once but twice.”
“Neither time on purpose,” J.B. pointed out.
“So he says. But even, just for the sake of laughs, stipulating that he didn’t mean it—correct me if I’m wrong, John, but are you not just as dead if you get chilled accidentally as on purpose? Either way, dirt hits you in the eyes.”
“People,” Ryan said softly, “this isn’t really our fight.” He was sitting in the back seat with Krysty beside him, gazing morosely out the window, letting the warm moist air, smelling of clean water and fertile soil and only ever so slightly of the omnipresent sulfur tousle his shaggy black curls.
He had been a little uneasy, approaching the checkpoint at the landward end of the causeway. Tenorio had allowed them to go to Hector without trying to send along any kind of chaperones—or spies. But it would be right within parameters for baronial paranoia for him to decide that, having broken bread and spoken with the enemy, they were never to be trusted back into the city. Or perhaps, not except under armed guard, as prisoners virtual or outright.
But no. The sentries had grinned and waved the way the scavvies always did to the visitors, hooked back the razor-tape tangles and moved the blocks and gestured them right on through. Did that lack of apparent suspicion in itself indicate pusillanimity on the part of Tenorio on his people? Mebbe.
Mildred sat back and crossed her arms. “It is if we have intention of staying here, Ryan. Making some kind of lives for ourselves other than running from danger to danger, living off the linings of our stomachs until we can scrounge a few self-heats or MREs. But if you-all like that kind of life, we can always shine it on. Maybe find our way back through all that lava to the redoubt, jump somewhere else and hope we finally lit in Paradise.”
“Now, Millie—”
“Don’t you ‘now Millie’ me, John Barrymore. Don’t even.”
“I fear our esteemed physician—is that cognomen acceptable to you, mademoiselle?—our esteemed physician has a point,” Doc said. “I do not believe any bonds unbreakable yet bind us to this place, nor to the parties involved. But if not here, where? And should we chose to light here, at least for the time being, we may find ourselves perforce choosing sides.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Krysty said. “We won’t be joining up with the Chichimecs.”
The others laughed, but briefly. “There’s a point to what you say, like always,” J.B. said. “That being, if we stay, we fight. Or we’re food. Since I’m not up for getting eaten, that makes our problem figuring out the best way to help fight.”
“Tenorio’s a friend,” Ryan said, “if a baron can be anybody’s friend.”
“Tenorio’s a good man. I believe that, I do. I also believe he’s a weak leader. Hector’s crazy and he’s probably a sadist. Like J.B. says—”
“As,” Krysty corrected automatically.
“As J.B. says, what else is new? That seems to be another part of being a baron—you got to be ready to force people and to hurt people to get them to do things your way, so why is it surprising most of them seem to like it so much? It’s the job. One thing taken with another, he seems to have the force, both in personality and manpower, to swing the weight. Can we honestly say that about Tenorio?”
“Tenorio and his people would be hard to beat in the city, Ryan,” Krysty said. “Mebbe we should think about that. The scavvies have achieved self-sufficiency or near to it in food and water. And we know enough about guerrilla fighting, not to mention city fighting, to realize how hard it would be to dislodge them. For either the Chichimecs or Hector.”
Ryan nodded slowly, not quite seeing where she was heading.
“They can’t keep people out, though, Krysty,” the Armorer pointed out. “We know that pretty damn well, too.”
“No, they can’t. But getting raiders inside the city and getting the scavengers out are two different matters. Tenorio’s people know the place. It’s their home. We have to figure they’ll fight for it, and fight hard and well. I have to think that means they could hold out pretty near indefinitely, if they had to.”
“So what you’re saying is, we could throw in with Tenorio and his mob, and just let the landward part of the valley go hang?” J.B. rubbed his chin. “Mebbe. But I’m not so sure how well that idea sits with me, to tell truth.”
“Nor I, J.B.,” the redhead admitted. “It’s just something I think we need to take into consideration.”
“Now, it don’t gripe at me because my heart’s started to bleed cherry syrup for all those poor sufferin’ people out in the valley I don’t even know. But, dark night, forting up in the city waiting for the Chichimecs to wear us down, living every day just waiting to die…well, losin’ slow is still losin’.”
“But have you not just described life itself, John Barrymore?” Doc asked.
J.B. grimaced. “Mebbe. But I guess I like the illusion that I got a chance.”
“What do you think, Jak?” Ryan asked.
The albino shrugged disinterestedly. “Cities no good. Moving on better.”
“Doc?”
They were approaching the city and the flat island parking lot where they would of necessity have to leave their big wag. Doc began to slow the Hummer.
“It seems we find ourselves faced with a choice between Scylla and Charybdis—or, as may be, between the Devil and the deep blue sea. I believe I am just as glad to abide by your wisdom in this matter, Ryan, for I can see no easy resolution to our dilemma.”
“People,” Mildred said, “I don’t like to be the voice of doom, here. But I think there’s something else we need to look at.”
“Speak up,” Ryan said. “Your thoughts won’t do us no—any good if you don’t let them out.”
“Can we live under Hector, any more than the Chichimecs? What if he decides to tell us to cut our throats—or just asks his fat boy Mendoza or this fire-haired daughter of his you folks got crosswise of, back in the city—to do it for him? Maybe you have to be a bastard to be a real baron. Maybe you have to be
a little crazy. But not this big a bastard, and not this crazy.”
Ryan scratched under the lower edge of his eyepatch, where sweat was making it chafe his cheek. “You got your sights lined up right on that,” he said after a moment. He sat back in his seat and gazed at the ruined towers of the city, thrusting up right in front of them now.
“Trader always used to say, ‘a leader who shows doubt really isn’t a leader after all.’ Mebbe that’s so. Most times it is, I reckon. But we’re bound up together by trust, or we aren’t bound by anything at all, so I can’t lie to you. The plain fact is, right now I don’t know whether to pull the trigger or to snap on the safety.”
Krysty touched his cheek. “Don’t worry, you’re not perfect, lover. You’re human, and you aren’t made of vanadium steel. We noticed that. When the time comes, you’ll make the right call.”
“Look on the bright side, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “We do not have to make up our minds right upon this instant. Don Hector’s agreed to talk to our esteemed host, after all. Who knows what might happen?”
“Something generally does,” J.B. said, getting out and stretching. “And that there’s the whole rad-blasted problem, in a cartridge case.”
THE SMOKIES WERE triple angry this night. The terrace vibrated constantly beneath the soles of Ryan’s boots, not, so far as he could tell, from earthquakes, but from the shattering unceasing violence of the eruptions. Their rumble was like the sound of big engines revving nearby, and the occasional blast sounded like a gren going off right down the block. A sort of fiery haze enveloped both peaks, sometimes shot through with flashes of light, terribly intense. A fine ash, sulfur-reeking, floated on the breeze, brushing Ryan’s face like clouds of gnats, sticking to hair and skin.
“Don Tenorio,” Ryan said, “you’ve been a good host. But by that token I reckon I owe it to you to give it to you straight and not walk all around the muzzle before going for the trigger. Don Hector’s right.”
Don Tenorio turned from the railing. His rather sharp features now looked to have been chiseled from stone by a rude, hasty hand. As if he were an idol of an unfriendly god.
“It’ll take all you’ve got to beat back these Chichimecs. It’ll take unity of action, of command. If that means giving in to what Hector wants, well, that’s the price that’s asked for holding on to what you have. Mebbe even your lives.”
The alcade’s dark eyes flashed. Here’s where we see how thin a baron’s gratitude really stretches, Ryan thought. He knew he was risking all their lives, but his companions had all agreed he owed Tenorio the truth. He didn’t like the idea of trying to lie to the man, that much was sure.
“So this is what it comes to?” Don Tenorio rapped. “The wise white men from the north, come to tell the simple brown men how things will be.”
All Ryan could think to do was to paraphrase what Mildred had said to Hector at the training grounds that afternoon. “Well, Don Tenorio, we’re not all men, and we’re not all white.”
Don Tenorio glared a moment longer, then laughed. A silent, openmouthed laugh, the way a wolf laughs. Ryan was reminded for a moment of Jak, of all people, and it came to him to wonder what depths this little undistinguished-looking man might have that he, Ryan, hadn’t come close to plumbing yet.
“Forgive me, my friend. I always beg my people to speak only the truth to me, without…How do you say? Sugar-coating. Of course they promise to do so. Of course that is not the way it happens. I am unaccustomed to such directness. You are a brave man, Don Ryan.”
“That or triple stupe.”
“And that is one thing you are not. Still, no more am I. And I still believe that you are wrong.”
Ryan spread his hands.
“First, we would prove very difficult to dislodge from the city, by the Chichimecs or, should it come to that, by Don Hector’s forces.”
“I realize that. But like J.B. says, making them dig you out building by building, room by room, is just a form of dying slow.”
“Perhaps. But the Chichimecs are raiders, customarily so, classically so. Theirs is not the persisting strategy. It is their way to strike, seize what they can carry and leave. On that basis we alone could simply wait them out, if we must.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Baron. But these Chichimecs don’t act like they’re here for just a smash-and-grab job. They act like they’re fixing to stay. Looks to me a lot more like a migration than a raid.”
The small man turned back and gripped the railing hard. Ryan could see the muscles of his shoulders hunch through the thin linen of his shirt.
“I fear you are correct. They are driven by hunger, by greed, and by religious fanaticism, and those are harsh, relentless masters. And they are many, far more than I would have thought possible. The lands to the north must be depopulated save for the women and children and those too old to travel.”
He stood staring into the night. After a moment Ryan walked soft-footed to the table where various refreshments had been laid out by María. They were alone on the terrace. Don Tenorio didn’t prepare or serve his own food, nor sweep his own floors, but he didn’t like to be waited on hand and foot; he couldn’t bear to have servants hovering around, although when he worked he tended to keep a stream of eager young aides hopping to various tasks and taking down notes. The ash made the white tablecloth look as if it had been sprinkled with pepper. Ryan refilled his ceramic mug with a punch blended from several juices, not all of them familiar. No alcohol for him this night; he needed as clear a head as possible.
“When we came out here,” Tenorio said, speaking out across the lake, “I made quite sure that everyone understood that, while our mission was one of peace and hope and life, we must be prepared to fight, to kill or die, for what we made here. Otherwise, we would have nothing at all. And we have had to defend what is ours. There have been raids, attacks, treacheries—not, I must say, from Don Hector. Not until recently. For a time, indeed, he was a stabilizing influence on the valley, and most welcome. Banditry declined as he rose—I must say that much for his methods.
“So we, and I still believe it is true of most of us, we understand the paradox, that to keep anything, we must be prepared to risk all without hesitation. We will fight if we must. For all that we prosper, we have not yet grown soft, because every day is a fight for survival, against the dangers of the city.
“But…let me explain it to you in this way. I have no children of my own body. I cannot, and I suspect you cannot know how devastating such a fact, such an admission is for a man of this land. It means that in a true and real sense I am something less than a man. But that is how it is.”
He turned to face Ryan. “I will not say that the people of the city are my children. That would be obscenely patronizing. I will say that what I would leave behind as my legacy is a better life for our children, the children of the city. Unending war is no such legacy, even if we someday win.
“What I would gladly do is welcome everyone, the people of the valley, the Chichimecs, even the poor socalled witches. You’ve seen the size of the city, the magnitude of the task involved in reclaiming it, rebuilding it. Not all the people of the valley, humans and mutants alike, could finish the task in my lifetime. But I know that will not happen. We must fight the Chichimecs. We must rout them.”
“Which brings us full circle,” Ryan said, “back to Hector.”
“Back to Hector. He is a far better war leader than I. I respect and honor him for it. I am willing to do what I can to help, and most of my people are, as well.”
“Then why not give him what he wants?”
“Because he will not be content with our assistance, with mere alliance. He insists on having power over us. I cannot for the life of me comprehend why. But I do know this—my people will not accept the burdens he would lay upon us. You saw today, I believe, what I am speaking of.”
Ryan had nothing to say.
Don Tenorio sighed. “And so you can now perhaps see why I was sharp with you before, unfo
rgivable a breach of hospitality though it be. I can neither deny Don Hector nor give him what he wants. I—”
A screaming came across the sky. Ryan tensed, unsure of how to respond. His instincts cried out for him to seek cover, but reason told him whatever was making the racket, it was too late to hide from it already. Nor did Don Tenorio show any sign of bolting. The small, gray man didn’t even flinch, and Ryan was rad-blasted if he would show less stone than a bookworm of a merchant.
There was a crack like the loudest thunder Ryan had ever heard. He looked wildly up at the sky. What seemed to be huge but not very bright shooting stars were passing overhead, trailing smoke. One of them struck the building right behind Don Tenorio’s headquarters with a flash and breaking of glass, passed through like a bullet.
“Fireblast! What’s going on?”
“Tonantzin’s tears, we call them, the tears of our ancient earth goddess. More prosaically, they are bombs thrown out by the volcanoes.”
Ryan stared at him with his lone eye. “They throw them this far?”
“Rarely. But yes. As you can see.”
Light spilled onto the terrace as the door was flung open. Ryan’s companions spilled out, blasters in hand, staring around with wild eyes.
“What in the name of everything nuke-blasted is going on?” J.B. demanded, brandishing his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun. “Are we being shelled?”
Ryan had to moisten his lips before he could speak. “Lava bombs,” he said. “From the smokies.”
“Dear God,” Mildred said. She stared off toward the south. “It looks like somebody pried the lid off Hell.”
She turned to Ryan. “If they’d been going off like that when we were leaving, when we came across the mountains, we’d never have made it!”
J.B. put his arm around her shoulders. She pressed her face into the hollow of his.
Krysty was at Ryan’s side. She alone held no weapon. Her eyes were calm, but her hair stirred around her shoulders as if agitated.
“You knew it wasn’t an attack,” he said softly.