The Talisman

  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?

  And for a moment, everything trembled on his lips:

  Jack, I'm Jack Sawyer, yeah, I'm the kid from California, the Queen of this world was my mother, only I died, and I know your boss, I know Morgan--Uncle Morgan--and I'll tell you anything you want to know if only you'll stop looking at me with those freaked-out eyes of yours, sure, because I'm only a kid, and that's what kids do, they tell, they tell everything--

  Then he heard his mother's voice, tough, on the edge of a jeer:

  You gonna spill your guts to this guy, Jack-O? THIS guy? He smells like a distress sale at the men's cologne counter and he looks like a medieval version of Charles Manson . . . but you suit yourself. You can fool him if you want--no sweat--but you suit yourself.

  "Who are you?" Osmond asked again, drawing even closer, and on his face Jack now saw total confidence--he was used to getting the answers he wanted from people . . . and not just from twelve-year-old kids, either.

  Jack took a deep, trembling breath (When you want max volume--when you want to get it all the way up to the back row of the balcony--you gotta bring it from your diaphragm, Jacky. It just kind of gets passed through the old vox-box on the way up) and screamed:

  "I WAS GOING TO GO RIGHT BACK! HONEST TO GOD!"

  Osmond, who had been leaning even farther forward in anticipation of a broken and strengthless whisper, recoiled as if Jack had suddenly reached out and slapped him. He stepped on the trailing rawhide tails of his whip with one booted foot and came close to tripping over them.

  "You damned God-pounding little--"

  "I WAS GOING TO! PLEASE DON'T WHIP ME OSMOND I WAS GOING TO GO BACK! I NEVER WANTED TO COME HERE I NEVER I NEVER I NEVER--"

  Captain Farren lunged forward and struck him in the back. Jack sprawled full-length in the mud, still screaming.

  "He's simple-minded, as I told you," he heard the Captain saying. "I apologize, Osmond. You can be sure he'll be beaten within an inch of his life. He--"

  "What's he doing here in the first place?" Osmond shrieked. His voice was now as high and shrewish as any fishwife's. "What's your snot-nosed puling brat-bastard doing here at all? Don't offer to show me his pass! I know he has no pass! You sneaked him in to feed at the Queen's table . . . to steal the Queen's silver, for all I know . . . he's bad . . . one look's enough to tell anyone that he's very, intolerably, most indubitably bad!"

  The whip came down again, not the mild cough of a Daisy air rifle this time but the loud clean report of a .22, and Jack had time to think I know where that's going, and then a large fiery hand clawed into his back. The pain seemed to sink into his flesh, not diminishing but actually intensifying. It was hot and maddening. He screamed and writhed in the mud.

  "Bad! Most awfully bad! Indubitably bad!"

  Each "bad" was punctuated by another crack of Osmond's whip, another fie
ry handprint, another scream from Jack. His back was burning. He had no idea how long it might have gone on--Osmond seemed to be working himself into a hotter frenzy with each blow--but then a new voice shouted: "Osmond! Osmond! There you are! Thank God!"

  A commotion of running footsteps.

  Osmond's voice, furious and slightly out of breath: "Well? Well? What is it?"

  A hand grasped Jack's elbow and helped him to his feet. When he staggered, the arm attached to the hand slipped around his waist and supported him. It was difficult to believe that the Captain who had been so hard and sure during their bewildering tour of the pavillion could now be so gentle.

  Jack staggered again. The world kept wanting to swim out of focus. Trickles of warm blood ran down his back. He looked at Osmond with swift-awakening hatred, and it was good to feel that hatred. It was a welcome antidote to the fear and the confusion.

  You did that--you hurt me, you cut me. And listen to me, Jiggs, if I get a chance to pay you back--

  "Are you all right?" the Captain whispered.

  "Yes."

  "What?" Osmond screamed at the two men who had interrupted Jack's whipping.

  The first was one of the dandies Jack and the Captain had passed going to the secret room. The other looked a bit like the carter Jack had seen almost immediately upon his return to the Territories. This fellow looked badly frightened, and hurt as well--blood was welling from a gash on the left side of his head and had covered most of the left side of his face. His left arm was scraped and his jerkin was torn. "What are you saying, you jackass?"

  "My wagon overturned coming around the bend on the far side of All-Hands' Village," the carter said. He spoke with the slow, dazed patience of one in deep shock. "My son's kilt, my Lord. Crushed to death under the barrels. He was just sixteen last May-Farm Day. His mother--"

  "What?" Osmond screamed again. "Barrels? Ale? Not the Kingsland? You don't mean to tell me you've overturned a full wagonload of Kingsland Ale, you stupid goat's penis? You don't mean to tell me that, do yoooooouuuuuuu?"

  Osmond's voice rose on the last word like the voice of a man making savage mockery of an operatic diva. It wavered and warbled. At the same time he began to dance again . . . but in rage this time. The combination was so weird that Jack had to raise both hands to stifle an involuntary giggle. The movement caused his shirt to scrape across his welted back, and that sobered him even before the Captain muttered a warning word.

  Patiently, as if Osmond had missed the only important fact (and so it must have seemed to him), the carter began again: "He was just sixteen last May-Farm Day. His mother didn't want him to come with me. I can't think what--"

  Osmond raised his whip and brought it whickering down with blinding and unexpected speed. At one moment the handle was grasped loosely in his left hand, the whip itself with its rawhide tails trailing in the mud; at the next there was a whipcrack not like the sound of a .22 but more like that of a toy rifle. The carter staggered back, shrieking, his hands clapped to his face. Fresh blood ran loosely through his dirty fingers. He fell over, screaming, "My Lord! My Lord! My Lord!" in a muffled, gargling voice.

  Jack moaned: "Let's get out of here. Quick!"

  "Wait," the Captain said. The grim set of his face seemed to have loosened the smallest bit. There might have been hope in his eyes.

  Osmond whirled to the dandy, who took a step back, his thick red mouth working.

  "Was it the Kingsland?" Osmond panted.

  "Osmond, you shouldn't tax yourself so--"

  Osmond flicked his left wrist upward; the whip's steel-tipped rawhide tails clattered against the dandy's boots. The dandy took another step backward.

  "Don't tell me what I should or shouldn't do," he said. "Only answer my questions. I'm vexed, Stephen, I'm most intolerably, indubitably vexed. Was it the Kingsland?"

  "Yes," Stephen said. "I regret to say it, but--"

  "On the Outpost Road?"

  "Osmond--"

  "On the Outpost Road, you dripping penis?"

  "Yes," Stephen gulped.

  "Of course," Osmond said, and his thin face was split by a hideous white grin. "Where is All-Hands' Village, if not on the Outpost Road? Can a village fly? Huh? Can a village somehow fly from one road to another, Stephen? Can it? Can it?"

  "No, Osmond, of course not."

  "No. And so there are barrels all over the Outpost Road, is that correct? Is it correct for me to assume that there are barrels and an overturned ale-wagon blocking the Outpost Road while the best ale in the Territories soaks into the ground for the earthworms to carouse on? Is that correct?"

  "Yes . . . yes. But--"

  "Morgan is coming by the Outpost Road!" Osmond screamed. "Morgan is coming and you know how he drives his horses! If his diligence comes around a bend and upon that mess, his driver may not have time to stop! He could be overturned! He could be killed!"

  "Dear-God," Stephen said, all as one word. His pallid face went two shades whiter.

  Osmond nodded slowly. "I think, if Morgan's diligence were to overturn, we would all do better to pray for his death than for his recovery."

  "But--but--"

  Osmond turned from him and almost ran back to where the Captain of the Outer Guards stood with his "son." Behind Osmond, the hapless carter still writhed in the mud, bubbling My Lords.

  Osmond's eyes touched Jack and then swept over him as if he weren't there. "Captain Farren," he said. "Have you followed the events of the last five minutes?"

  "Yes, Osmond."

  "Have you followed them closely? Have you gleaned them? Have you gleaned them most closely?"

  "Yes. I think so."

  "Do you think so? What an excellent Captain you are, Captain! We will talk more, I think, about how such an excellent Captain could produce such a frog's testicle of a son."

  His eyes touched Jack's face briefly, coldly.

  "But there's no time for that now, is there? No. I suggest that you summon a dozen of your brawniest men and that you double-time them--no, triple-time them--out to the Outpost Road. You'll be able to follow your nose, to the site of the accident, won't you?"

  "Yes, Osmond."

  Osmond glanced quickly at the sky. "Morgan is expected at six of the clock--perhaps a little sooner. It is now--two. I would say two. Would you say two, Captain?"

  "Yes, Osmond."

  "And what would you say, you little turd? Thirteen? Twenty-three? Eighty-one of the clock?"

  Jack gaped. Osmond grimaced contemptuously, and Jack felt the clear tide of his hate rise again.

  You hurt me, and if I get the chance--!

  Osmond looked back at the Captain. "Until five of the clock, I suggest that you be at pains to save whatever barrels may still be whole. After five, I suggest you simply clear the road as rapidly as you can. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, Osmond."

  "Then get out of here."

  Captain Farren brought a fist to his forehead and bowed. Gaping stupidly, still hating Osmond so fiercely that his brains seemed to pulse, Jack did the same. Osmond had whirled away from them before the salute was even fairly begun. He was striding back toward the carter, popping his whip, making it cough out those Daisy air rifle sounds.

  The carter heard Osmond's approach and began to scream.

  "Come on," the Captain said, pulling Jack's arm for the last time. "You don't want to see this."

  "No," Jack managed. "God, no."

  But as Captain Farren pushed the right-hand gate open and they finally left the pavillion, Jack heard it--and he heard it in his dreams that night: one whistling carbine-crack after another, each followed by a scream from the doomed carter. And Osmond was making a sound. The man was panting, out of breath, and so it was hard to tell exactly what that sound was, without turning around to look at his face--something Jack did not want to do.

  He was pretty sure he knew, though.

  He thought Osmond was laughing.

  5

  They were in the public area of the pavillio
n grounds now. The strollers glanced at Captain Farren from the corners of their eyes . . . and gave him a wide berth. The Captain strode swiftly, his face tight and dark with thought. Jack had to trot in order to catch up.

  "We were lucky," the Captain said suddenly. "Damned lucky. I think he meant to kill you."

  Jack gaped at him, his mouth dry and hot.

  "He's mad, you know. Mad as the man who chased the cake."

  Jack had no idea what that might mean, but he agreed that Osmond was mad.

  "What--"

  "Wait," the Captain said. They had come back around to the small tent where the Captain had taken Jack after seeing the shark's tooth. "Stand right here and wait for me. Speak to no one."

  The Captain entered the tent. Jack stood watching and waiting. A juggler passed him, glancing at Jack but never losing his rhythm as he tossed half a dozen balls in a complex and airy pattern. A straggle of dirty children followed him as the children followed the Piper out of Hamelin. A young woman with a dirty baby at one huge breast told him she could teach him something to do with his little man besides let piss out of it, if he had a coin or two. Jack looked uncomfortably away, his face hot.

  The girl cawed laughter. "Oooooo, this pretty young man's SHY! Come over here, pretty! Come--"

  "Get out, slut, or you'll finish the day in the underkitchens."

  It was the Captain. He had come out of the tent with another man. This second fellow was old and fat, but he shared one characteristic with Farren--he looked like a real soldier rather than one from Gilbert and Sullivan. He was trying to fasten the front of his uniform over his bulging gut while holding a curly, French horn-like instrument at the same time.

  The girl with the dirty baby scurried away with never another look at Jack. The Captain took the fat man's horn so he could finish buttoning, and passed another word with him. The fat man nodded, finished with his shirt, took his horn back, and then strode off, blowing it. It was not like the sound Jack had heard on his first flip into the Territories; that had been many horns, and their sound had been somehow showy: the sound of heralds. This was like a factory whistle, announcing work to be done.