The Talisman

  "Are you for market-town, boy?"

  Jack gaped at him, half in a panic, realizing that the man was not speaking English--never mind "prithee" or "Dost thou go cross-gartered, varlet," it wasn't English at all.

  There was a woman in a voluminous dress sitting beside the whiskery farmer; she held a boy of perhaps three on her lap. She smiled pleasantly enough at Jack and rolled her eyes at her husband. "He's a simpleton, Henry."

  They're not speaking English . . . but whatever it is they're speaking, I understand it. I'm actually thinking in that language . . . and that's not all--I'm seeing in it, or with it, or whatever it is I mean.

  Jack realized he had been doing it the last time he had been in the Territories, too--only then he had been too confused to realize it; things had moved too fast, and everything had seemed strange.

  The farmer leaned forward. He smiled, showing teeth which were absolutely horrid. "Are you a simpleton, laddie?" he asked, not unkindly.

  "No," he said, smiling back as best he could, aware that he had not said no but some Territories word which meant no--when he had flipped, he had changed his speech and his way of thinking (his way of imaging, anyway--he did not have that word in his vocabulary, but understood what he meant just the same), just as he had changed his clothes. "I'm not simple. It's just that my mother told me to be careful of people I might meet along the road."

  Now the farmer's wife smiled. "Your mother was right," she said. "Are you for the market?"

  "Yes," Jack said. "That is, I'm headed up the road--west."

  "Climb up in the back, then," Henry the farmer said. "Daylight's wasting. I want to sell what I have if I can and be home again before sunset. Corn's poor but it's the last of the season. Lucky to have corn in ninemonth at all. Someone may buy it."

  "Thank you," Jack said, climbing into the back of the low wagon. Here, dozens of corn ears were bound with rough hanks of rope and stacked like cordwood. If the corn was poor, then Jack could not imagine what would constitute good corn over here--they were the biggest ears he had ever seen in his life. There were also small stacks of squashes and gourds and things that looked like pumpkins--but they were reddish instead of orange. Jack didn't know what they were, but he suspected they would taste wonderful. His stomach rumbled busily. Since going on the road, he had discovered what hunger was--not as a passing acquaintance, something you felt dimly after school and which could be assuaged with a few cookies and a glass of milk souped up with Nestle's Quik, but as an intimate friend, one that sometimes moved away to a distance but who rarely left entirely.

  He was sitting with his back to the front of the wagon, his sandal-clad feet dangling down, almost touching the hardpacked dirt of the Western Road. There was a lot of traffic this morning, most of it bound for the market, Jack assumed. Every now and then Henry bawled a greeting to someone he knew.

  Jack was still wondering how those apple-colored pumpkins might taste--and just where his next meal was going to come from, anyway--when small hands twined in his hair and gave a brisk tug--brisk enough to make his eyes water.

  He turned and saw the three-year-old standing there in his bare feet, a big grin on his face and a few strands of Jack's hair in each of his hands.

  "Jason!" his mother cried--but it was, in its way, an indulgent cry (Did you see the way he pulled that hair? My, isn't he strong!)--"Jason, that's not nice!"

  Jason grinned, unabashed. It was a big, dopey, sunshiney grin, as sweet in its way as the smell of the haystack in which Jack had spent the night. He couldn't help returning it . . . and while there had been no politics of calculation in his returning grin, he saw he had made a friend of Henry's wife.

  "Sit," Jason said, swaying back and forth with the unconscious movement of a veteran sailor. He was still grinning at Jack.

  "Huh?"

  "Yap."

  "I'm not getting you, Jason."

  "Sit-yap."

  "I'm not--"

  And then Jason, who was husky for a three-year-old, plopped into Jack's lap, still grinning.

  Sit-yap, oh yeah, I get it, Jack thought, feeling the dull ache from his testicles spreading up into the pit of his stomach.

  "Jason bad!" his mother called back in that same indulgent, but-isn't-he-cute voice . . . and Jason, who knew who ruled the roost, grinned his dopey, sweetly charming grin.

  Jack realized that Jason was wet. Very, extremely, indubitably wet.

  Welcome back to the Territories, Jack-O.

  And sitting there with the child in his arms and warm wetness slowly soaking through his clothes, Jack began to laugh, his face turned up to the blue, blue sky.

  3

  A few minutes later Henry's wife worked her way to where Jack was sitting with the child on his lap and took Jason back.

  "Oooh, wet, bad baby," she said in her indulgent voice. Doesn't my Jason wet big! Jack thought, and laughed again. That made Jason laugh, and Mrs. Henry laughed with them.

  As she changed Jason, she asked Jack a number of questions--ones he had heard often enough in his own world. But here he would have to be careful. He was a stranger, and there might be hidden trapdoors. He heard his father telling Morgan, . . . a real Stranger, if you see what I mean.

  Jack sensed that the woman's husband was listening closely. He answered her questions with a careful variation of the Story--not the one he told when he was applying for a job but the one he told when someone who had picked him up thumbing got curious.

  He said he had come from the village of All-Hands'--Jason's mother had a vague recollection of hearing of the place, but that was all. Had he really come so far? she wanted to know. Jack told her that he had. And where was he going? He told her (and the silently listening Henry) that he was bound for the village of California. That one she had not heard of, even vaguely, in such stories as the occasional peddler told. Jack was not exactly very surprised . . . but he was grateful that neither of them exclaimed "California? Whoever heard of a village named California? Who are you trying to shuck and jive, boy?" In the Territories there had to be lots of places--whole areas as well as villages--of which people who lived in their own little areas had never heard. No power poles. No electricity. No movies. No cable TV to tell them how wonderful things were in Malibu or Sarasota. No Territories version of Ma Bell, advertising that a three-minute call to the Outposts after five p.m. cost only $5.83, plus tax, rates may be higher on God-Pounders' Eve and some other holidays. They live in a mystery, he thought. When you live in a mystery, you don't question a village simply because you never heard of it. California doesn't sound any wilder than a place named All-Hands'.

  Nor did they question. He told them that his father had died the year before, and that his mother was quite ill (he thought of adding that the Queen's repossession men had come in the middle of the night and taken away their donkey, grinned, and decided that maybe he ought to leave that part out). His mother had given him what money she could (except the word that came out in the strange language wasn't really money--it was something like sticks) and had sent him off to the village of California, to stay with his Aunt Helen.

  "These are hard times," Mrs. Henry said, holding Jason, now changed, more closely to her.

  "All-Hands' is near the summer palace, isn't it, boy?" It was the first time Henry had spoken since inviting Jack aboard.

  "Yes," Jack said. "That is, fairly near. I mean--"

  "You never said what your father died of."

  Now he had turned his head. His gaze was narrow and assessing, the former kindness gone; it had been blown out of his eyes like candle-flames in a wind. Yes, there were trapdoors here.

  "Was he ill?" Mrs. Henry asked. "So much illness these days--pox, plague--hard times . . ."

  For a wild moment Jack thought of saying, No, he wasn't ill, Mrs. Henry. He took a lot of volts, my dad. You see he went off one Saturday to do some work, and he left Mrs. Jerry and all the little Jerrys--including me--back at home. This was when we all lived in a hole in the baseboard and nobod
y lived anywhere else, you see. And do you know what? He stuck his screwdriver into a bunch of wires and Mrs. Feeny, she works over at Richard Sloat's house, she heard Uncle Morgan talking on the phone and he said the electricity came out, all of the electricity, and it cooked him, it cooked him so bad that his glasses melted all over his nose, only you don't know about glasses because you don't have them here. No glasses . . . no electricity . . . no Midnight Blue . . . no airplanes. Don't end up like Mrs. Jerry, Mrs. Henry. Don't--

  "Never mind was he ill," the whiskered farmer said. "Was he political?"

  Jack looked at him. His mouth was working but no sounds came out. He didn't know what to say. There were too many trapdoors.

  Henry nodded, as if he had answered. "Jump down, laddie. Market's just over the next rise. I reckon you can ankle it from here, can't you?"

  "Yes," Jack said. "I reckon I can."

  Mrs. Henry looked confused . . . but she was now holding Jason away from Jack, as if he might have some contagious disease.

  The farmer, still looking back over his shoulder, smiled a bit ruefully. "I'm sorry. You seem a nice enough lad, but we're simple people here--whatever's going on back yonder by the sea is something for great lords to settle. Either the Queen will die or she won't . . . and of course, someday she must. God pounds all His nails sooner or later. And what happens to little people when they meddle into the affairs of the great is that they get hurt."

  "My father--"

  "I don't want to know about your father!" Henry said sharply. His wife scrambled away from Jack, still holding Jason to her bosom. "Good man or bad, I don't know and I don't want to know--all I know is that he's a dead man, I don't think you lied about that, and that his son has been sleeping rough and has all the smell of being on the dodge. The son doesn't talk as if he comes from any of these parts. So climb down. I've a son of my own, as you see."

  Jack got down, sorry for the fear in the young woman's face--fear he had put there. The farmer was right--little people had no business meddling in the affairs of the great. Not if they were smart.

  13

  The Men in the Sky

  1

  It was a shock to discover that the money he had worked so hard to get literally had turned into sticks--they looked like toy snakes made by an inept craftsman. The shock lasted only for a moment, however, and he laughed ruefully at himself. The sticks were money, of course. When he came over here, everything changed. Silver dollar to gryphon-coin, shirt to jerkin, English to Territories speech, and good old American money to--well, to jointed sticks. He had flipped over with about twenty-two dollars in all, and he guessed that he had exactly the same amount in Territories money, although he had counted fourteen joints on one of the money-sticks and better than twenty on the other.

  The problem wasn't so much money as cost--he had very little idea of what was cheap and what was dear, and as he walked through the market, Jack felt like a contestant on The New Price Is Right--only, if he flubbed it here, there wouldn't be any consolation prize and a clap on the back from Bob Barker; if he flubbed it here, they might . . . well, he didn't know for sure what they might do. Run him out for sure. Hurt him, rough him up? Maybe. Kill him? Probably not, but it was impossible to be absolutely certain. They were little people. They were not political. And he was a stranger.

  Jack walked slowly from one end of the loud and busy market-day throng to the other, wrestling with the problem. It now centered mostly in his stomach--he was dreadfully hungry. Once he saw Henry, dickering with a man who had goats to sell. Mrs. Henry stood near him, but a bit behind, giving the men room to trade. Her back was to Jack, but she had the baby hoisted in her arms--Jason, one of the little Henrys, Jack thought--but Jason saw him. The baby waved one chubby hand at Jack and Jack turned away quickly, putting as much crowd as he could between himself and the Henrys.

  Everywhere was the smell of roasting meat, it seemed. He saw vendors slowly turning joints of beef over charcoal fires both small and ambitious; he saw 'prentices laying thick slices of what looked like pork on slabs of homemade bread and taking them to the buyers. They looked like runners at an auction. Most of the buyers were farmers like Henry, and it appeared that they also called for food the way people entered a bid at an auction--they simply raised one of their hands imperiously, the fingers splayed out. Jack watched several of these transactions closely, and in every case the medium of exchange was the jointed sticks . . . but how many knuckles would be enough? he wondered. Not that it mattered. He had to eat, whether the transaction marked him as a stranger or not.

  He passed a mime-show, barely giving it a glance although the large audience that had gathered--women and children, most of them--roared with appreciative laughter and applauded. He moved toward a stall with canvas sides where a big man with tattoos on his slabbed biceps stood on one side of a trench of smouldering charcoal in the earth. An iron spit about seven feet long ran over the charcoal. A sweating, dirty boy stood at each end. Five large roasts were impaled along the length of the spit, and the boys were turning them in unison.

  "Fine meats!" the big man was droning. "Fine meats! Fiiine meats! Buy my fine meats! Fine meats here! Fine meats right here!" In an aside to the boy closest to him: "Put your back into it, God pound you." Then back to his droning, huckstering cry.

  A farmer passing with his adolescent daughter raised his hand, and then pointed at the joint of meat second from the left. The boys stopped turning the spit long enough for their boss to hack a slab from the roast and put in on a chunk of bread. One of them ran with it to the farmer, who produced one of the jointed sticks. Watching closely, Jack saw him break off two knuckles of wood and hand them to the boy. As the boy ran back to the stall the customer pocketed his money-stick with the absent but careful gesture of any man repocketing his change, took a gigantic bite of his open-faced sandwich, and handed the rest to his daughter, whose first chomp was almost as enthusiastic as her father's.

  Jack's stomach boinged and goinged. He had seen what he had to see . . . he hoped.

  "Fine meats! Fine meats! Fine--" The big man broke off and looked down at Jack, his beetling brows drawing together over eyes that were small but not entirely stupid. "I hear the song your stomach is singing, friend. If you have money, I'll take your trade and bless you to God in my prayers tonight. If you haven't, then get your stupid sheep's face out of here and go to the devil."

  Both boys laughed, although they were obviously tired--they laughed as if they had no control over the sounds they were making.

  But the maddening smell of the slowly cooking meat would not let him leave. He held out the shorter of his jointed sticks and pointed to the roast which was second from the left. He didn't speak. It seemed safer not to. The vendor grunted, produced his crude knife from his wide belt again, and cut a slice--it was a smaller slice than the one he had cut the farmer, Jack observed, but his stomach had no business with such matters; it was rumbling crazily in anticipation.

  The vendor slapped the meat on bread and brought it over himself instead of handing it to either of the boys. He took Jack's money-stick. Instead of two knuckles, he broke off three.

  His mother's voice, sourly amused, spoke up in his mind: Congratulations, Jack-O . . . you've just been screwed.

  The vendor was looking at him, grinning around a mouthful of wretched blackish teeth, daring him to say anything, to protest in any way. You just ought to be grateful I only took three knuckles instead of all fourteen of them. I could have, you know. You might as well have a sign hung around your neck, boy: I AM A STRANGER HERE, AND ON MY OWN. So tell me, Sheep' s-Face: do you want to make an issue of it?

  What he wanted didn't matter--he obviously couldn't make an issue of it. But he felt that thin, impotent anger again.

  "Go on," the vendor said, tiring of him. He flapped a big hand in Jack's face. His fingers were scarred, and there was blood under his nails. "You got your food. Now get out of here."

  Jack thought, I could show you a flashlight and yo
u'd run like all the devils of hell were after you. Show you an airplane and you'd probably go crazy. You're maybe not as tough as you think, chum.

  He smiled, perhaps there was something in his smile that the meat-vendor didn't like, because he drew away from Jack, his face momentarily uneasy. Then his brows beetled together again.

  "Get out, I said!" he roared. "Get out, God pound you!" And this time Jack went.

  2

  The meat was delicious. Jack gobbled it and the bread it sat on, and then unselfconsciously licked the juice from his palms as he strolled along. The meat did taste like pork . . . and yet it didn't. It was somehow richer, tangier than pork. Whatever it was, it filled the hole in the middle of him with authority. Jack thought he could take it to school in bag lunches for a thousand years.

  Now that he had managed to shut his belly up--for a little while, anyway--he was able to look about himself with more interest . . . and although he didn't know it, he had finally begun to blend into the crowd. Now he was only one more rube from the country come to the market-town, walking slowly between the stalls, trying to gawk in every direction at once. Hucksters recognized him, but only as one more potential mark among many. They yelled and beckoned at him, and as he passed by they yelled and beckoned at whoever happened to be behind him--man, woman, or child. Jack gaped frankly at the wares scattered all around him, wares both wonderful and strange, and amidst all the others staring at them he ceased to be a stranger himself--perhaps because he had given up his effort to seem blase in a place where no one acted blase. They laughed, they argued, they haggled . . . but no one seemed bored.

  The market-town reminded him of the Queen's pavillion without the air of strained tension and too-hectic gaiety--there was the same absurdly rich mingle of smells (dominated by roasting meat and animal ordure), the same brightly dressed crowds (although even the most brightly dressed people Jack saw couldn't hold a candle to some of the dandies he had seen inside the pavillion), the same unsettling but somehow exhilarating juxtaposition of the perfectly normal, cheek by jowl with the extravagantly strange.