Picking the Ballad's Bones (23 page)

When all of them seemed to have
exhausted their supply of versions they knew, Sir Walter said,
"Someone survived through that one, eh?"

Ellie shuddered. "I don't
see how. Everybody died."

"Nevertheless, if one of our people
hadn't survived it, I don't think we'd have gotten the song
back."

Just as they were getting cocky about
remembering that one ballad, the banjo began another
one.

"I don't even know that tune," Gussie
said.

"I do," Faron said. "It's Clerk Colin
or Clark—Colville." And he sang that one and three other different
versions.

"I've another version,"
Scott said and recited it laboriously to the banjo.

* * *

"You're supposed to shut these people
down, DD, not make deals with them," the Chairdevil said, visiting
the woman known as Torchy at the Gypsy camp, where Giorgio was busy
carrying a brick toward the restrained form of his uncle Theo, who
had driven the truck and given his forsaken violin to Faron before
setting the Randolphs free. Three other men held the old man down,
with his hands bound and flattened on another broad stone. Giorgio
was going to crush the old violinist's hands as an object lesson,
and Torchy was providing the cheering section.

"Come off it, Chair, I'm on very firm
ground in that department. Making deals with mortals is a totally
conventional, traditional kind of thing to do," she said, smiling
at the old man's grunts of pain and the tears rolling down his
cheeks. "Give him a little anesthetic out of the last haul,
Giorgi-porgy," she said. "Can't have traitors now can
we?"

"Tradition of that sort is exactly the
kind of thing we're trying to do away with here," the Chairdevil
said.

"Look, I've had all the ballad books
burned and served them up as tea. What do you want from
me?"

"I want that banjo in
pieces and those people neutralized, or better yet converted. I
do
not
want these
damned jingles suddenly blasting across the ether in forty-six
versions and more spin-offs than a Norman Lear sitcom."

"Hey, I made it as impossible as I
could. It's only one little song."

A spasm writhed across Chair's face
and Giorgio backed away from the old man, who cursed him. Giorgio's
wife crept up behind him with her dagger drawn.

"Oh, say," Torchy said, as the strains
of "Clerk or Clark Colville" disrupted the afternoon air. "That's a
nice grim one."

"You've got the wrong attitude, DD,"
the Chairdevil told her. "You're supposed to be keeping track of
those specimens of anachronistic noise purveyors, not playing with
your little friends."

Giorgio's wife stabbed him in the hip
and he dropped the brick on his foot.

"But, boss, these are my minions. They
need me here to supervise them. And I can only just keep so good a
track of those other people magically. I'm using a lot of juice
keeping my own little hell in motion for the four that are back in
la-la-la land, so I can hardly be peeking psychically over the
shoulder of the leftovers. I think I've pretty well pulled their
clawhammers. Get it? It's a banjo technique—?"

The Chairdevil yelled, "Enough! If you
can't do long-distance surveillance you'll have to do it in
person."

"Boss, they're onto me. Besides, these
people here need some encouragement. A little inspiration. You saw
what happened with that old reactionary." She tossed her head in
the direction of Giorgio's uncle, who now, with Giorgio's wife,
held the other men at bay negotiating for less maiming and more of
a strong warning.

The Chairdevil waved her protest
aside. "I'll send Expediency to whip them into line. I don't care
how you do it, but infiltrate the enemy and stop them. You left
them too big an out and they seem to be recovering seven songs for
every one you make them live through."

"That
is
my fault," she said. "I was the
one who encouraged the composers originally to keep stealing verses
and lines and melodies from each other. Now all the songs that have
any of those all come back at once."

"I like chain reactions better when
applied to nuclear technology," the Chairdevil said
primly.

"Oh, hell," she mumbled when he had
disappeared in the pillar of flame and sulfur that was, though he
wouldn't admit it, every bit as traditional as making deals with
mortals. "The way he's acting, you'd think I intended to honor that
silly deal and give them all up after seven years. Nobody ever
trusts me."

If anyone had asked her she would have
admitted that her problem with paying attention to her mission was
that Willie MacKai was out of commission on the present plane
anyway. She had taken a mighty shine to Willie and considered the
three remaining adversaries much less intriguing. Still, she
thought she might go peek in on them and then maybe she could take
a trip down memory lane to where Willie and Brose, Juli and Anna
Mae, were, just to see if she couldn't louse things up for them
even more. It was the least she could do.

* * *

"What next in this infernal game of
Name That Tune?" Gussie wondered.

While they sat trying to clear their
heads, a slender orange-striped cat with a spade-shaped face and a
roman nose strolled in and demanded to be fed, rubbing Faron's
shins and purring madly, blinking her large green eyes at
him.

"I'd like to call home and talk to
Daddy and Mama about what's going on," Ellie said. "I also want to
warn them about the charge from Norway on the American Express
card."

"There's a phone in the
bedroom."

"It seems to be sort of an extension
of the Carrs' phone. I tried calling out and Mr. Carr
answered."

"Well, let's call them and see what
the drill is," Faron said. "Unless you'd like to walk up
there?"

"I wouldn't mind. Cold as it was last
night, it was good to be out of the van. And see how pretty it is
this morning."

CHAPTER 21

She blew in on a gusty
wind, keeping pace with the rider
until
he reined in long enough to
direct his arrow at the dun deer flitting with elfin grace among
the fluttering green boughs. As his arrow flew from his bow, she
blew into him like a chill on the wind and joined with him. He was
a large, sun-bronzed, red-haired
man
from whose bark-brown eyes she
was suddenly looking at the forest around her, the wind she had
ridden on biting through the cloak that covered her in his
body.

The arrow sought the
fleeing deer and found its mark with a soft thud and a squeal, and
within her host,
triumph and
the anticipation of hot venison mingled with
regret for the beautiful beast. The hounds at his horse's hooves
bayed victoriously, streaking into the brush like jet streams, and
the steed, the color of the last leaves before winter, bolted after
them, so that the rider had to hang on to the reins with one hand,
clamp his knees tight to his mount's sides, and fend off smacking
tree branches with the hand that still held his bow.

The deer died cleanly, though, and had
not run far. It leaped only a single leap before falling, a heap of
slender limbs and bloodied hair, the tongue sticking out of the
muzzle a little. Overhead the goshawk cried and landed on the man's
shoulder, its talons biting into the leather pads but never into
flesh.

The dogs wagged themselves
into a frenzy as the man, with a stroke that would have made
Julianne close her
eyes had they been her
own eyes and not this stranger's, bled the deer and gutted it,
dressing it out on the spot.

The clop of other hoofbeats came from
the glade beyond and the hounds increased their racket.

"Tha's a beaut, Highness," said a
voice behind him, but the red-haired man didn't seem to hear him at
first, for the hunter was silently addressing his kill, "I thank
thee for thy life that we may eat and live."

Then Juli's host answered his
companion, "Aye. Wi' the other one, it's a feast worthy of the
hunt."

She didn't intrude on his thoughts at
this point but watched with his eyes and listened with his ears,
lifted with his muscles and let his feelings flow through
her.

"The toun is but seven miles,
Highness, are ye sure ye want to bide at yon haunted lodge?" asked
a small wiry man as they loaded the deer onto the back of the
horses. The dogs coursed 'round them, barking excitedly.

"Quiet, you dogs!" Juli's host
ordered, reaching down with bloody hands to scratch ears and to
have his fingers licked clean of the deer's blood.

"You're too good to them,
Henrie," said the small man.
(Jamie
Lochlan, sister's husband,
Henrie's mind
supplied the name and position.)

"Ah, but they're good
dogs."

"But aboot yon lodge. Tis haunted, ye
know. Your faither nivair used it because of that."

"Then I vow we'll exorcise it with the
incense of roasted meat and that holy water you brought with you
from the brewer's," Henrie said.

"A party?"
Juli asked, and knew at once the nature of her
relationship with her host when he answered her as though she and
he were the same, as they were then.

"By God, a party. And long
overdue it is,"
the host said.
"Glad I am to have had the thought."

They rode through
overgrown and overhung trails a mile or so farther. The stones of
the lodge were almost obscured by the moss clinging to it and the
vines dangling from its eaves. The trees and underbrush crowded
close about it, rattling in a rising wind that whipped the
riders into the musty, dank building. The lodge
stank of old fires and body odor.

"So much for the life of
royalty, "
Juli mused.
"Henrie,
baby, you need a gardener
and a housekeeper in the worst
way."

"Yes,
indeed,
" her host replied.
"If we're to keep coming here, we will need to
make it more hospitable. On the other hand, I wanted a wild place
where my friends and I
could feel
ourselves wild men, at ease with our hounds and
horses and hawks and content to eat our catch and speak
loudly and indiscriminately and stay up until all hours
gorging ourselves and passing gas and giving no
offense to
the ladies of the house or
setting bad examples for the youngsters."

"You're concerned about
the opinions of women and
children in your
house when you're the King?"

"It's a bit of a bother,
to be sure, but I am King of all of my subjects and therefore their
servant. Women and children must be considered as well as men for
where do men come from but women? All children are future men and
the mothers of men and are therefore worthy of my utmost
concern and care. Aye, I could almost wish there
were a
woman here now to minister to the
cooking of the meat. My men are rough cooks indeed."

But no sooner had he given form to
that thought than the wind blew up so loud and moaning that it
gushed through the drafts in the hall, tossing the rushes about,
whisking away the dense cobwebs, and rattling the shields hanging
up from the walls. So lowly it moaned, so shrilly it whined, so
loudly it roared that Julianne, who wanted to ask her host if they
had weather like that real often in those parts, literally couldn't
hear herself think.

Then suddenly, as if the wind had
blown the pilings out from under the house, the whole earth
shifted, knocking the King and all his men back a notch. Henrie's
dogs yelped and came yowling to huddle by his feet.

That was when the wind burst the
fastened door and smashed it open to reveal a visitor.

Julianne screamed a little
scream inside the King's head and he almost gave it voice, but
instead caught himself, saying,
"I maun
stop that. Scares the dogs when I do that, but I vow by the blood,
that is the ugliest creature I've ever seen."

Julianne was staring through the
King's eyes at the visitor towering above him. It seemed to be
female from her lopsided, low-hung dugs and her filthy,
lice-infested skirts. She stood as tall as the roof tree in the
middle of the room and she was so big around she had to come in the
door sideways. Her teeth were as long and twice as brown as the
stakes Henrie and the other men had tethered their horses to and
her nose looked like a mace, bulbous and bristling with warts and
hairs.

"A fiend from hell!" cried Jamie
Lochlan, and that worthy led the exodus of the other huntsmen out
the back window of the hall, leaving the King and his terrified
animals alone to face the apparition.

"A fiend from hell indeed," Henrie
thought despairingly.

Julianne's deafness,
fresher in her mind than its cure, had taught her something of what
it was like to be an outcast and she was not so ready as she might
have been at one time to be repulsed.
"She
certainly could use a makeover, "
she
said, half whimpering, to her kingly self,
"but maybe she's just a poor sad street
person
—
uh, trail
person
—
looking
for shelter from that awful wind. You're not just the King of the
pretty people, you know, Henrie. And look how fast they deserted
you. Invite the poor thing in. Offer her a place to sit and
something to eat."