"What's this to do with blue ankle tattoos?"
"Oh," Strother said, recalled to the initial subject. "Anyone who ever did time in Beelie had one of those put on, y'see. Although I disremember if it was for punishment or just identification in case they ran off from one o' the work gangs. All that stopped ten year ago, when the stockade closed. That's why the harriers was able to have their way with the town, you know--because the militia left and the stockade closed. Now we have to deal with all the bad element and riffraff ourselves." He eyed me up and down in the most insolent way. "We don't get much help from Gilead these days. Nawp. Apt to get more from John Farson, and there's some that'd send a parlay-party west to ask him." Perhaps he saw something in my eyes, because he sat up a little straighter in his chair and said, "Not me, accourse. Never. I believe in the straight law and the Line of Eld."
"So do we all," Pickens said, nodding vigorously.
"Would you want to guess if some of the salt-miners did time in Beelie Stockade before it was decommissioned?" I asked.
Strother appeared to consider, then said: "Oh, probably a few. Nummore'n four in every ten, I should say."
In later years I learned to control my face, but those were early times, and he must have seen my dismay. It made him smile. I doubt if he knew how close that smile brought him to suffering. I'd had a difficult two days, and the boy weighed heavily on my mind.
"Who did'ee think would take a job digging salt blocks out of a miserable hole in the ground for penny wages?" Strother asked. "Model citizens?"
It seemed that Young Bill would have to look at a few of the salties, after all. We'd just have to hope the fellow we wanted didn't know the ring tattoo was the only part of him the kid had seen.
*
When I went back to the cell, Young Bill was lying on the pallets, and I thought he'd gone to sleep, but at the sound of my bootheels he sat up. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet. Not sleeping, then, but mourning. I let myself in, sat down beside him, and put an arm around his shoulders. This didn't come naturally to me--I know what comfort and sympathy are, but I've never been much good at giving such. I knew what it was to lose a parent, though. Young Bill and Young Roland had that much in common.
"Did you finish your candy?" I asked.
"Don't want the rest," he said, and sighed.
Outside the wind boomed hard enough to shake the building, then subsided.
"I hate that sound," he said--just what Jamie DeCurry had said. It made me smile a little. "And I hate being in here. It's like I did something wrong."
"You didn't," I said.
"Maybe not, but it already seems like I've been here forever. Cooped up. And if they don't get back before nightfall, I'll have to stay longer. Won't I?"
"I'll keep you company," I said. "If those deputies have a deck of cards, we can play Jacks Pop Up."
"For babies," said he, morosely.
"Then Watch Me or poker. Can thee play those?"
He shook his head, then brushed at his cheeks. The tears were flowing again.
"I'll teach thee. We'll play for matchsticks."
"I'd rather hear the story you talked about when we stopped in the sheppie's lay-by. I don't remember the name."
"'The Wind Through the Keyhole,'" I said. "But it's a long one, Bill."
"We have time, don't we?"
I couldn't argue that. "There are scary bits in it, too. Those things are all right for a boy such as I was--sitting up in his bed with his mother beside him--but after what you've been through . . ."
"Don't care," he said. "Stories take a person away. If they're good ones, that is. It is a good one?"
"Yes. I always thought so, anyway."
"Then tell it." He smiled a little. "I'll even let you have two of the last three chockers."
"Those are yours, but I might roll a smoke." I thought about how to begin. "Do you know stories that start, 'Once upon a bye, before your grandfather's grandfather was born'?"
"They all start that way. At least, the ones my da' told me. Before he said I was too old for stories."
"A person's never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them."
"Do you say so?"
"I do."
I took out my tobacco and papers. I rolled slowly, for in those days it was a skill yet new to me. When I had a smoke just to my liking--one with the draw end tapered to a pinhole--I struck a match on the wall. Bill sat cross-legged on the straw pallets. He took one of the chockers, rolled it between his fingers much as I'd rolled my smoke, then tucked it into his cheek.
I started slowly and awkwardly, because storytelling was another thing that didn't come naturally to me in those days . . . although it was a thing I learned to do well in time. I had to. All gunslingers have to. And as I went along, I began to speak more naturally and easily. Because I began hearing my mother's voice. It began to speak through my own mouth: every rise, dip, and pause.
I could see him fall into the tale, and that pleased me--it was like hypnotizing him again, but in a better way. A more honest way. The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but--as the oldtimers used to say--the world's tilted, and there's an end to it.
"Once upon a bye, before your grandfather's grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time, the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little. . . ."
THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
Once upon a bye, long before your grandfather's grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little.
"I have only four things to pass on to you," Big Ross told his son, "but four's enough. Can you say them to me, young boy?"
Tim had said them to him many and many-a, but never tired of it. "Thy ax, thy lucky coin, thy plot, and thy place, which is as good as the place of any king or gunslinger in Mid-World." He would then pause and add, "My mama, too. That makes five."
Big Ross would laugh and kiss the boy's brow as he lay in his bed, for this catechism usually came at the end of the day. Behind them, in the doorway, Nell waited to put her kiss on top of her husband's. "Aye," Big Ross would say, "we must never forget Mama, for wi'out her, all's for naught."
So Tim would go off to sleep, knowing he was loved, and knowing he had a place in the world, and listening to the night wind slip its strange breath over the cottage: sweet with the scent of the blossiewood at the edge of the Endless Forest, and faintly sour--but still pleasant--with the smell of the ironwood trees deeper in, where only brave men dared go.
Those were good years, but as we know--from stories and from life--the good years never last long.
One day, when Tim was eleven, Big Ross and his partner, Big Kells, drove their wagons down Main Road to where the Ironwood Trail entered the forest, as they did every morning save the seventh, when all in the village of Tree rested. On this day, however, only Big Kells came back. His skin was sooty and his jerkin charred. There was a hole in the left leg of his homespun pants. Red and blistered flesh peeped through it. He slumped on the seat of his wagon, as if too weary to sit up straight.
Nell Ross came to the door of her house and cried, "Where is Big Ross? Where is my husband?"
Big Kells shook his head slowly from side to side. Ash sifted out of his hair and onto his shoulders. He spoke only a single word, but one was enough to turn Tim's knees to water. His mother began to shriek.
The word was dragon.
No one living today has ever seen the like of the Endless Forest, for the world has moved on. It was dark and full of dangers. The woodsmen of Tree Village knew
it better than anyone in Mid-World, and even they knew nothing of what might live or grow ten wheels beyond the place where the blossie groves ended and the ironwood trees--those tall, brooding sentinels--began. The great depths were a mystery filled with strange plants, stranger animals, stinking weirdmarshes, and--so 'twas said--leavings of the Old People that were often deadly.
The folken of Tree feared the Endless Forest, and rightly so; Big Ross wasn't the first woodsman who went down Ironwood Trail and did not come back. Yet they loved it, too, for 'twas ironwood fed and clothed their families. They understood (though none would have said so aloud) that the forest was alive. And, like all living things, it needed to eat.
Imagine that you were a bird flying above that great tract of wildland. From up there it might look like a giant dress of a green so dark it was almost black. Along the bottom of the dress was a hem of lighter green. These were the blossiewood groves. Just below the blossies, at the farthest edge of North'rd Barony, was the village of Tree. It was the last town in what was then a civilized country. Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant.
"Taxes," Big Ross said, and laughed--but not in a funny way.
Most of the woodsmen went no farther than the blossie groves. Even there, sudden dangers could arise. Snakes were the worst, but there were also poisonous rodents called wervels that were the size of dogs. Many men had been lost in the blossies over the years, but on the whole, blossie was worth the risk. It was a lovely fine-grained wood, golden in color and almost light enough to float on air. It made fine lake and rivercraft, but was no good for sea travel; even a moderate gale would tear apart a boat made of blossie.
For sea travel ironwood was wanted, and ironwood brought a high price from Hodiak, the barony buyer who came twice a year to the Tree sawmill. It was ironwood that gave the Endless Forest its green-black hue, and only the bravest woodsmen dared go after it, for there were dangers along the Ironwood Trail--which barely pierced the skin of the Endless Forest, remember--that made the snakes, wervels, and mutie bees of the blossie groves seem mild by comparison.
Dragons, for instance.
So it was that in his eleventh year, Tim Ross lost his da'. Now there was no ax and no lucky coin hanging around Big Ross's burly neck on its fine silver chain. Soon there might be no plot in the village or place in the world, either. For in those days, when the time of Wide Earth came around, the Barony Covenanter came with it. He carried a scroll of parchment paper, and the name of every family in Tree was writ upon it, along with a number. That number was the amount of tax. If you could pay it--four or six or eight silver knucks, even a gold one for the largest of the freeholds--all was well. If you couldn't, the Barony took your plot and you were turned out on the land. There was no appeal.
Tim went half-days to the cottage of the Widow Smack, who kept school and was paid in food--usually vegetables, sometimes a bit of meat. Long ago, before the bloodsores had come on her and eaten off half her face (so the children whispered, although none had actually seen it), she had been a great lady in the barony estates far away (or so the children's elders claimed, although none actually knew). Now she wore a veil and taught likely lads, and even a few lassies, how to read and practice the slightly questionable art known as mathmatica.
She was a fearsomely smart woman who took no guff, and most days she was tireless. Her pupils usually came to love her in spite of her veil, and the horrors they imagined might lie beneath it. But on occasion she would begin to tremble all over, and cry that her poor head was splitting, and that she must lie down. On these days she would send the children home, sometimes commanding them to tell their parents that she regretted nothing, least of all her beautiful prince.
Sai Smack had one of her fugues about a month after the dragon burned Big Ross to ashes, and when Tim came back to his cottage, which was called Goodview, he looked in the kitchen window and saw his mother crying with her head on the table.
He dropped the slate with his mathmatica problems on it (long division, which he had feared but turned out to be only backwards multiplication) and rushed to her side. She looked up at him and tried to smile. The contrast between her upturned lips and her streaming eyes made Tim feel like crying himself. It was the look of a woman at the end of her tether.
"What is it, Mama? What's wrong?"
"Just thinking of your father. Sometimes I miss him so. Why are you home early?"
He began to tell her, but stopped when he saw the leather purse with the drawstring top. She had put one of her arms over it, as if to hide it from him, and when she saw him looking, she swept it off the table and into her lap.
Now Tim was far from a stupid boy, so he made tea before saying anything else. When she had drunk some--with sugar, which he insisted she take, although there was little enough left in the pot--and had calmed, he asked her what else was wrong.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Why were you counting our money?"
"What little there is to count," said she. "Covenant Man will be here once Reaptide's gone--aye, while the embers of the bonfire are still hot, if I know his ways--and what then? He'll want six silver knuckles this year, p'raps as many as eight, for taxes have gone up, so they do say, probably another of their stupid wars somewhere far from here, soldiers with their banners flying, aye, very fine."
"How much do we have?"
"Four and a scrap of a fifth. We have no livestock to sell, nor a single round of ironwood since your father died. What shall we do?" She began to cry again. "What shall we do?"
Tim was as frightened as she was, but since there was no man to comfort her, he held his own tears back and put his arms around her and soothed her as best he could.
"If we had his ax and his coin, I'd sell them to Destry," she said at last.
Tim was horrified even though the ax and lucky coin were gone, burned in the same fiery blast that had taken their cheerful, goodhearted owner. "You never would!"
"Aye. To keep his plot and his place, I would. Those were the things he truly cared about, and thee, and me. Could he speak he'd say 'Do it, Nell, and welcome,' for Destry has hard coin." She sighed. "But then would come old Barony Covenant Man next year . . . and the year after that . . ." She put her hands over her face. "Oh, Tim, we shall be turned out on the land, and there's not one thing I can think to change it. Can you?"
Tim would have given everything he owned (which was very little) to be able to give her an answer, but he could not. He could only ask how long it would be before the Covenant Man would appear in Tree on his tall black horse, sitting astride a saddle worth more than Big Ross had made in twenty-five years of risking his life on that narrow track known as the Ironwood Trail.
She held up four fingers. "This many weeks if the weather is fair." She held up four more. "This many if it's foul, and he's held up in the farming villages of the Middles. Eight is the most we can hope for, I think. And then . . ."
"Something will happen before he comes," Tim said. "Da' always said that the forest gives to them that love it."
"All I've ever seen it do is take," said Nell, and covered her face again. When he tried to put an arm around her, she shook her head.
Tim trudged out to get his slate. He had never felt so sad and frightened. Something will happen to change it, he thought. Please let something happen to change it.
The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true.
That was a rich Full Earth in Tree; even Nell knew it, although the ripe land was bitter in her eye. The following year she and Tim might be following the crops with burlap rucksacks on their backs, farther and farther from the Endless Forest, and that made summer's beauty hard to look at. The forest was a terrible place, and it had taken her man, but it was the only place she had ever known. At night, when the wind blew from the north, it stole to her bed through her open window like a lover, bringing its own special smell, one both bitter and sweet, like blood and strawberries. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed of its deep tilts an
d secret corridors, and of sunshine so diffuse that it glowed like old green brass.
The smell of the forest when the wind's out of the north brings visions, the old folken said. Nell didn't know if this was true or just chimneycorner blather, but she knew the smell of the Endless Forest was the smell of life as well as death. And she knew that Tim loved it as his father had. As she herself had (although often against her will).
She had secretly feared the day when the boy would grow tall enough and strong enough to go down that dangerous trail with his da', but now she found herself sorry that day would never come. Sai Smack and her mathmatica were all very well, but Nell knew what her son truly wanted, and she hated the dragon that had stolen it from him. Probably it had been a she-dragon, and only protecting her egg, but Nell hated it just the same. She hoped the plated yellow-eyed bitch would swallow her own fire, as the old stories said they sometimes did, and explode.
One day not so many after Tim had arrived home early and found her in tears, Big Kells came calling on Nell. Tim had gotten two weeks' work helping farmer Destry with the hay-cutting, so she was by her onesome in her garden, weeding on her knees. When she saw her late husband's friend and partner, she got to her feet and wiped her dirty hands on the burlap apron she called her weddiken.
A single look at his clean hands and carefully trimmed beard was enough to tell her why he'd come. Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together, and great pals. Littermates from different litters, people of the village sometimes said when they saw the three together; in those days they were inseparable.
When they grew to young manhood, both boys fancied her. And while she loved them both, it was Big Ross she burned for, Big Ross she'd wed and taken to bed (although whether that was the order of it no one knew, nor really cared). Big Kells had taken it as well as any man can. He stood beside Ross at the wedding, and slipped the silk around them for their walk back down the aisle when the preacher was done. When Kells took it off them at the door (although it never really comes off, so they do say), he kissed them both and wished them a lifetime of long days and pleasant nights.