Dinner at Deviant's Palace (17 page)

McAn paused now when he came to the alley that he’d reconnoitered last night. He knew it looped around to the square where the wagons stood, and he swept a disapproving glance over the street before he stepped out of the patchy, unwarm sunlight and into the shadows of the alley.

But of course, he thought, no such opportunity came, and here we are in actual goddamn Irvine. I’ve stumbled onto a couple of small pieces of luck—having been healthy-looking enough to be assigned to the detail that loaded wagons with the people, including my quarry, who passed out during the two-day forced march; and being able to salvage this robe from a shepherd killed yesterday, in the confusion of the hooters’ second attack—but now it’s time to
make
some luck. My disguise is good; they never iron these robes, so you can’t tell that this one spent twelve hours crumpled in my pack, and with the hood up you can’t see the cropped patches on my head where I cut off hair to make this fake beard with.

Think about that second two hundred and fifty fifths! And the unparalleled stories you’ll be able to tell once you get yourself and the kid out of this loony, bottom-of-the-world town.

I think the thing about this place that most puts my teeth on edge, he thought as he silently picked his way along the trash-littered alley, is that there’s nobody in the whole damn ramshackle settlement who’s not birdy as a bedbug. The real shepherds have to hop just to keep slugging all the guys who click over to the speaking-in-tongues channel, and piling them onto the wagons heading into the Holy City. I suppose I ought to punch somebody, just to seem in character. I wonder if there’s a back gate to the city somewhere, where they bring the empty wagons out. There must be otherwise you’d be able to see the piles of old wagons over the top of the wall. Heh heh. Unless they—

He froze, for a ragged figure was crouched tensely at the courtyard end of the alley, apparently staring at the wagon McAn had to get to. Well, McAn thought, his heartbeat beginning to accelerate as he flexed his right hand and stole silently forward, here’s where I start behaving in character.

But with an alertness uncharacteristic of Jaybirds the figure spun to face him when he was still several yards away, and with no hesitation the man drew a knife from his sleeve and lunged at McAn. McAn managed to knock the knife arm aside, but the man collided hard with him and they both tumbled to the filthy pavement. McAn’s false beard was hanging from one ear and was badly unraveled, but he’d sat up and got his own knife out now, and had begun a feint to draw a wide, flank-exposing parry from his opponent—

“Frake!” his opponent gasped, and McAn hesitated.

He peered at the gaunt, red-eyed face. “Who are you?” McAn asked in a clipped whisper, not lowering his knife.

“Rivas.”

“Tell me who you are, or—” McAn looked more closely. “Really?”

Rivas nodded, leaning back against the alley wall and obviously trying to pant quietly.

“What on earth’s
happened
to you, Rivas? And I thought you’d retired.”

“I did.” He took several deep breaths. “This is… special circumstances.”

McAn got painfully to his feet. “You’re awful hasty with a knife.
You
I was only going to
hit
.”

Rivas had got his breath back, and stood up too. “That’s why you were always the second-best redeemer.”

McAn smiled coldly as he carefully re-hooked the beard across his lean young face. “Yeah. I sure do envy what being number one has done for you.”

To McAn’s surprise, Rivas actually reddened. What’s this, Greg, he thought—did you shed the cynical armor too when you shaved off that silly, affected, half beard?

“You’re on a job, I gather,” said Rivas quietly. “Someone in that wagon?”

“Right. The skinny kid just inboard of the right rear wheel. I put him there late yesterday. Which one’s yours?”

“Mine’s already in the city. How’s this—you make some kind of commotion out in the street to get the attention of anybody who may be hanging around here and I’ll drag your boy over to this alley for you, and then I’ll take his place in the wagon.”

McAn stared at him with genuine horrified awe. “You’re going
in there
to get yours?”

Rivas nodded hopelessly.

And I thought I was walking the farthest, most insanely dangerous edge just by having come
this
far, thought McAn. Impulsively he tossed his knife to his left hand and held out his right. “Rivas, I’ve always figured you for a posturing, slimy son-of-a-bitch, but by God, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that you’re the best damn redeemer there ever was.”

Rivas gave him a fragile smile and took the extended hand. “Thank you, Frake.” He sheathed his knife. “Let’s get moving before they bring the conscious members of this band over here.”

Rivas didn’t know how McAn did it, but no more than half a minute after the young man had loped back up the alley there came a splintering crash from the street, followed by a lot of screaming; he even heard one voice, evidently that of a far-gone startled right over into the last stage, begin babbling about how tasty it was when everybody helped to boil down the heavy water.

Thanks, Frake, thought Rivas. He sprinted to the wagon, rolled the luckily emaciated boy over the rail, crouched to get him draped across his shoulders, then straightened up and, gritting his teeth against the possibility of losing consciousness himself, plodded to the alley. At the last possible instant he changed his mind and instead of simply heaving the kid like a sack of gravel, squatted down and rolled him almost gently onto the pavement.

The unconscious young man was wearing clothes very similar to his own, so Rivas just hurried back to the wagon, climbed in and lay down in the same position the boy had been in, with his face well concealed under someone’s limp shoulder, and then let his breathing and heartbeat slow down. After a while he heard a muted scuffling from the direction of the alley, and thought he heard a whispered, “Thanks, Greg. Good luck.”

The morning began gradually to warm up, and Rivas heard the rumble of other wagons arriving in the enclosed yard. From time to time he heard desultory conversation, though he didn’t catch any words. He actually fell asleep for a while, but came instantly awake when closely approaching boots and hooves clocked on the pavement and the wagon shifted as someone—and then a second person—climbed onto the driver’s bench. “These all still out?” someone asked. Rivas heard the jingling of harnesses.

“Yeah, looks like. Buckled up there? Okay, let’s go, the rest of you walk alongside.

The wagon jerked, then the axles began creaking and it was moving. Rivas could hear the footsteps of the conscious members of the band walking beside the vehicle; to judge by the snifflings and hitches in breathing, at least one of them was quietly weeping.

He felt the grating shifts of a couple of slow turns, and then all too soon the rattle of the wheel rims became a soft hissing and he realized they’d left the pavement and were crossing the hundred yards of pale sand that ringed the Holy City like a gritty moat, presumably merging with the real beach sand on the seaward side. It occurred to him that it would be very easy to break out in a high, keening wail that could be maintained indefinitely by doing it while inhaling too… and as soon as he thought of it, it became difficult not to do it.

One of the plodders alongside must have felt something similar, for the hot noon air was abruptly shaken with glossolalic jabbering.

Rivas wasn’t particularly surprised when no one silenced this babbler—he’d already come to the conclusion that the shepherds did that to keep them from revealing something… but who cared what might be learned by people who were in the very process of entering the Holy City?

“Annoyances!”
croaked this far-gone now.
“What do I care? Deal with it yourselves, you idiots, I’m not to be interrupted in my cooking…. Sevatividam can’t be bothered with these provincial problems… far places, long ago times, I take a longer view…. What if it
was
your dreaded Gregorio Rivas? He can’t impede me….”

Rivas had stiffened with panic, assuming that they knew who he was and were only conducting this performance to let him know, albeit a bit elaborately, that he was caught; he assumed the wagon would now stop, the bodies slumped around him would leap up, and he’d find himself surrounded by triumphant shepherds with drawn-back slingshots. But the wagon kept rolling and the plodders kept plodding and the speaker in tongues babbled on:
“This stinking boat, you’re trying to kill me, careful, ow…”

Rivas began, one muscle at a time, to relax. Could it simply have been a coincidence? Who the hell was it that was talking, anyway? Obviously not the individual Jaybirds. Was it Norton Jaybush himself?
How?
And why in English now, when a few years ago it was all just gargling? Though the word—or name—
Sevatividam
showed up in both versions….

“…Leave me alone, I’m about to give the sacrament in Whittier,”
the helplessly babbling man went on.
“Oh, look at them all, turn around, you damned old carcass, I
w
ant to see them all…. Sevatividam’s blessings on you, my dears… give me your push, children, your at-a-distance strength… you never use it yourselves, you don’t need it… I wish I could
just
take that from you, not use you all up so fast… but it seems to be linked to your minds, so maybe you do need it… hard luck…. Oh, some first timers, how tasty….
At this point the stuff became more the way Rivas remembered it from his own days as a Jaybird, just grunts and burping and conversational-tone yodeling.

The sweat from his moment of panic cooled him and he had nearly relaxed back to the degree of tension he’d been in before it, but suddenly he tensed up with fear again, for the light had dimmed and the air was a degree or two colder and he knew that they were even now under the high stone arch of the gate… and when the brightness returned and the chill passed he felt only worse, for he knew he was now on the inner side of the high white walls. As if to emphasize it for him, the gates slammed loudly behind the wagon.

The vehicle was riding perfectly smoothly now, the wheels making a featureless noise like water being slowly poured into a metal pan. Rivas had begun shivering among the tumbled bodies in the wagon bed, for he could tell by the very scent of the air—a sort of garbagey sweetness with burned overtones mixed with the fish smell of the sea—that he was in entirely unknown territory. He was pretty good at faking and bluffing the Jaybirds in the camps and stadiums and meeting places out there in the hills, though not even too successful at that lately, but now he was in the house of Norton Jaybush himself, the man—if he was a man—through whose generosity the Jaybirds had whatever they had of power and fearsomeness. In here he might find anything.

There are only two things, he thought, that I can be reasonably sure are in here to be found: Uri, and my own death.

The wagon slowed, and a man’s voice said, “All of you—this way,” and the sounds of the wagon’s pedestrian escort—the babbling of the far-gone, the snuffling and sobbing, and the thudding of all the footsteps—receded way to the right while the wagon resumed its course straight ahead, in a silence that only strung Rivas’s nerves tighter.

Quite a while later reins flapped and the wagon came to a stop—after a weird sensation of sliding that made Rivas wonder if they were on a vast sheet of glass—and the shepherd in the driver’s seat spoke: “One dozen as promised, Mister Trash Heap, sir.” Rivas heard the other man on the driver’s bench laugh nervously.

And suddenly there came a sound that made Rivas’s eyes open wide for a moment in pure astonishment; it was as if a man had channeled a whole valleyful of wind through one mouth-sized hole, and then for years experimented with holding all sorts of inorganic but flexible instruments up to that focus point of wind, exploring all the ranges of sound that could thus be produced, cooings and whistlings and bass rumblings, until finally he was able to approximate human speech.

“Yess,” sighed this implausible voice. “Run along you now, shepherds. Roentgens and rads like to bald you here in minutes only.”

“Right,” agreed the driver cheerfully. “Rags and rajahs gonna make me bald. Probably why rajahs wear rags on their heads, do you think? To cover it. Help him get the sleeping guys out of the wagon, will you, Bernie?”

“Okay,” Rivas heard Bernie say in a strangled voice.

The wagon rocked as Bernie hopped down, his boot nails audibly clicking on the ground. Bernie began hoisting up a body on the far side of the wagon from Rivas, but a moment later there was a sound like someone trying hard to sweep a tile floor with tree branches, and then Rivas felt something thrusting between himself and the floor of the wagon bed. It rolled him over, and he had to open his eyes just a slit.

After a few seconds of stunned staring he decided that the thing prodding at him wasn’t a tall fat man with a bucket over his head and bits of cardboard and rusty metal attached all over himself, for Rivas could see blue sky through many gaps in the thing’s neck and chest. He saw now that it had bits of glass for eyes, and some arrangement of rusty tanks and dented copper tubing inside
the
stripped baby carriage that was its chest, and its head was mainly an oversized cocktail shaker in which, in this silence, Rivas could hear something sloshing.

Somehow it didn’t occur to Rivas that this was the source of the windy voice, that this thing was in some sense
alive
, until it spoke again. “Wakeful, this one is,” it whistled, “or near.”

Then without any clear transition, though obviously much later, Rivas was thrashing with nightmares on a cold hard bed in darkness.

His head throbbed painfully and he was terribly thirsty, but every time he got up and went into the kitchen and filled a cup from the water tank and started to drink it, he realized he had only dreamed of getting up and was still in the comfortless bed. Finally he actually sat up—and knew he hadn’t done it before because of the unprecedented way it increased the pain in his head—and blinked around at a dim, long room with beds standing every few feet along both walls. The air was stale, and smelled faintly of fish and garbage.