The Talisman (12 page)

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. Strawberry 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.

“Now listen and I’ll give you some advice you won’t find in
The Book of Good Farming
,” the Captain said. He bent over the chef until their noses almost touched (his paralyzing grip on Jack’s arm—which was now going mercifully numb—never loosened the smallest bit). “Don’t you ever . . . don’t you
ever
 . . . come at a man with a knife . . . or a fork . . . or a spear . . . or with so much as a God-pounding
splinter
in your hand unless you intend to kill him with it. One expects temperament from chefs, but temperament does not extend to assaults upon the person of the Captain of the Outer Guards. Do you understand me?”

The chef moaned out a teary, defiant something-or-other. Jack couldn’t make it all out—the man’s accent seemed to be growing steadily thicker—but it had something to do with the Captain’s mother and the dump-dogs beyond the pavillion.

“That may well be,” the Captain said. “I never knew the lady. But it certainly doesn’t answer my question.” He prodded the chef with one dusty, scuffed boot. It was a gentle enough prod, but the chef screeched as if the Captain had drawn his foot back and kicked him as hard as he could. The women twittered again.

“Do we or do we not have an understanding on the subject of chefs and weapons and Captains? Because if we don’t, a little more instruction might be in order.”

“We do!” the chef gasped. “We do! We do! We—”

“Good. Because I’ve had to give far too much instruction already today.” He shook Jack by the scruff of the neck. “Haven’t I, boy?” He shook him again, and Jack uttered a wail that was completely unfeigned. “Well . . . I suppose that’s all he can say. The boy’s a simpleton. Like his mother.”

The Captain threw his dark, gleaming glance around the kitchen.

“Good day, ladies. Queen’s blessings upon you.”

“And you, good sir,” the eldest among them managed, and dropped an awkward, ungraceful curtsey. The others followed suit.

The Captain dragged Jack across the kitchen. Jack’s hip bumped the edge of the washing trough with excruciating force and he cried out again. Hot water flew. Smoking droplets hit the boards and ran, hissing, between them.
Those women had their hands in that
, Jack thought.
How do they stand it?
Then the Captain, who was almost carrying him by now, shoved Jack through another burlap curtain and into the hallway beyond.

“Phew!” the Captain said in a low voice. “I don’t like this, not any of it, it all smells bad.”

Left, right, then right again. Jack began to sense that they were approaching the outer walls of the pavillion, and he had time to wonder how the place could seem so much bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. Then the Captain was pushing him through a flap and they were in daylight again—mid-afternoon daylight so bright after the shifting dimness of the pavillion that Jack had to wince his eyes shut against a burst of pain.

The Captain never hesitated. Mud squelched and smooched underfoot. There was the smell of hay and horses and shit. Jack opened his eyes again and saw they were crossing what might have been a paddock or a corral or maybe just a barnyard. He saw an open canvas-sided hallway and heard chickens clucking somewhere beyond it. A scrawny man, naked except for a dirty kilt and thong sandals, was tossing hay into an open stall, using a pitchfork with wooden tines to do the job. Inside the stall, a horse not much bigger than a Shetland pony looked moodily out at them. They had already passed the stall when Jack’s mind was finally able to accept what his eyes had seen: the horse had two heads.

“Hey!” he said. “Can I look back in that stall? That—”

“No time.”

“But that horse had—”

“No time, I said.” He raised his voice and shouted: “And if I ever catch you laying about again when there’s work to be done, you’ll get
twice
this!”

“You won’t!” Jack screamed (in truth he felt as if this scene were getting a bit old). “I swear you won’t! I told you I’d be good!”

Just ahead of them, tall wooden gates loomed in a wall made of wooden posts with the bark still on them—it was like a stockade wall in an old Western (his mother had made a few of those, too). Heavy brackets were screwed into the gates, but the bar the brackets were meant to hold was not in place. It leaned against the woodpile to the left, thick as a railroad crosstie. The gates stood open almost six inches. Some muddled sense of direction in Jack’s head suggested that they had worked their way completely around the pavillion to its far side.

“Thank God,” the Captain said in a more normal voice. “Now—”

“Captain,” a voice called from behind them. The voice was low but carrying, deceptively casual. The Captain stopped in his tracks. It had called just as Jack’s scarred companion had been in the act of reaching for the left gate to push it open; it was as if the voice’s owner had watched and waited for just that second.

“Perhaps you would be good enough to introduce me to your . . . ah . . . son.”

The Captain turned, turning Jack with him. Standing, halfway across the paddock area, looking unsettling out of place there, was the skeletal courtier the Captain had been afraid of—Osmond. He looked at them from dark gray melancholy eyes. Jack saw something stirring in those eyes, something deep down. His fear was suddenly sharper, something with a point, jabbing into him.
He’s crazy
—this was the intuition which leaped spontaneously into his mind.
Nuttier than a damned fruitcake
.

Osmond took two neat steps toward them. In his left hand he held the rawhide-wrapped haft of a bullwhip. The handle narrowed only slightly into a dark, limber tendon coiled thrice around his shoulder—the whip’s central stalk was as thick as a timber rattlesnake. Near its tip, this central stalk gave birth to perhaps a dozen smaller offshoots, each of woven rawhide, each tipped with a crudely made but bright metal spur.

Osmond tugged the whip’s handle and the coils slithered from his shoulder with a dry hiss. He wiggled the handle, and the metal-tipped strands of rawhide writhed slowly in the straw-littered mud.

“Your son?” Osmond repeated, and took another step toward them. And Jack suddenly understood why this man had looked familiar before. The day he had almost been kidnapped—hadn’t this man been White Suit?

Jack thought that perhaps he had been.

3

The Captain made a fist, brought it to his forehead, and bent forward. After only a moment’s hesitation, Jack did the same.

“My son, Lewis,” the Captain said stiffly. He was still bent over, Jack saw, cutting his eyes to the left. So he remained bent over himself, his heart racing.

“Thank you, Captain. Thank you, Lewis. Queen’s blessings upon you.” When he touched him with the haft of the bullwhip, Jack almost cried out. He stood straight again, biting the cry in.

Osmond was only two paces away now, regarding Jack with that mad, melancholy gaze. He wore a leather jacket and what might have been diamond studs. His shirt was extravagantly ruffled. A bracelet of links clanked ostentatiously upon his right wrist (from the way he handled the bullwhip, Jack guessed that his left was his working hand). His hair was drawn back and tied with a wide ribbon that might have been white satin. There were two odors about him. The top was what his mother called “all those men’s perfumes,” meaning after-shave, cologne, whatever. The smell about Osmond was thick and powdery. It made Jack think of those old black-and-white British films where some poor guy was on trial in the Old Bailey. The judges and lawyers in those films always wore wigs, and Jack thought the boxes those wigs came out of would smell like Osmond—dry and crumbly-sweet, like the world’s oldest powdered doughnut. Beneath it, however, was a more vital, even less pleasant smell: it seemed to pulse out at him. It was the smell of sweat in layers and dirt in layers, the smell of a man who bathed seldom, if ever.

Yes. This was one of the creatures that had tried to steal him that day.

His stomach knotted and roiled.

“I did not know you had a son, Captain Farren,” Osmond said. Although he spoke to the Captain, his eyes remained on Jack.
Lewis
, he thought,
I’m Lewis, don’t forget
—

“Would that I did not,” the Captain replied, looking at Jack with anger and contempt. “I honor him by bringing him to the great pavillion and then he slinks away like a dog. I caught him playing at d—”

“Yes, yes,” Osmond said, smiling remotely.
He doesn’t believe a word
, Jack thought wildly, and felt his mind take another clumsy step toward panic.
Not a single word!
“Boys are bad. All boys are bad. It’s axiomatic.”

He tapped Jack lightly on the wrist with the haft of the bullwhip. Jack, his nerves screwed up to an unbearable pitch, screamed . . . and immediately flushed with hot shame.

Osmond giggled. “Bad, oh yes, it’s axiomatic, all boys are bad.
I
was bad; and I’ll wager
you
were bad, Captain Farren. Eh? Eh? Were you bad?”

“Yes, Osmond,” the Captain said.

“Very bad?” Osmond asked. Incredibly, he had begun to prance in the mud. Yet there was nothing swishy about this: Osmond was willowy and almost delicate, but Jack got no feeling of true homosexuality from the man; if there was that innuendo in his words, then Jack sensed intuitively that it was hollow. No, what came through most clearly here was a sense of malignity . . . and madness. “
Very
bad? Most
awfully
bad?”

“Yes, Osmond,” Captain Farren said woodenly. His scar glowed in the afternoon light, more red than pink now.

Osmond ceased his impromptu little dance as abruptly as he had begun it. He looked coldly at the Captain.

“
No one
knew you had a son, Captain.”

“He’s a bastard,” the Captain said. “And simple. Lazy as well, it now turns out.” He pivoted suddenly and struck Jack on the side of the face. There was not much force behind the blow, but Captain Farren’s hand was as hard as a brick. Jack howled and fell into the mud, clutching his ear.

“
Very
bad, most
awfully
bad,” Osmond said, but now his face was a dreadful blank, thin and secretive. “Get up, you bad boy. Bad boys who disobey their fathers must be punished. And bad boys must be questioned.” He flicked the whip to one side. It made a dry pop. Jack’s tottery mind made another strange connection—reaching, he supposed later, for home in every way it knew how. The sound of Osmond’s whip was like the pop of the Daisy air rifle he’d had when he was eight. He and Richard Sloat had both had rifles like that.

Osmond reached out and grasped Jack’s muddy arm with one white, spiderlike hand. He drew Jack toward him, into those smells—old sweet powder and old rancid filth. His weird gray eyes peered solemnly into Jack’s blue ones. Jack felt his bladder grow heavy, and he struggled to keep from wetting his pants.

“Who are you?” Osmond asked.

4

The words hung in the air over the three of them.

Jack was aware of the Captain looking at him with a stern expression that could not quite hide his despair. He could hear hens clucking; a dog barking; somewhere the rumble of a large approaching cart.

Tell me the truth; I will know a lie,
those eyes said.
You look like a certain bad boy I first met in California—are you that boy?