Departures (39 page)

“Never knew ducks wore jeans,” Jorj said. Joke as he would, though, the meaningless and therefore necessarily magical words impressed him. “Whatever those en-things are, use ’em some more. They were something else.”

“I’m glad,” Madyu said, bemused still.

By then the women of the tribe were busily plucking the ducks, putting aside feathers for ornament and for fletching arrows, and the soft underdown for pillows, quilts, and jackets. As casually as he could, the shaman strolled over to Neena and asked her for one of the metallic green feathers from a male mallard’s head. Their fingers brushed for a moment when she gave it to him. He felt a spark, and from her friendly expression, she might have, too.

Before long, the savory odor of roast duck drove even lustful thoughts from his mind. Some of the women took out crocks of currant jelly to accompany the feast. Crisp skin crackled under Madyu’s teeth as he bit into a juicy thigh; rich hot fat filled his mouth. He ate until he could hold no more, then licked every finger clean.

The rest of the tribe stuffed themselves. Dogs yapped and snarled over gnawed bones thrown in the dirt. A little girl hit her baby brother over the head with a drumstick. He toddled off, crying. Their mother paddled her. She ran after him, crying even louder.

“Here, wizardly sir.” Jorj passed Madyu a skin of wine. “Always goes good.”

Madyu took a pull, then another one. He smiled, nodded his thanks, and belched enormously. Not to be outdone in politeness, Jorj belched back.

Then the chief hunter said, “Oh, what with all the ducks and everything, I almost forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Madyu asked absently. He was watching Neena again. Even if she had been his woman, he was too gorged to imagine anything but watching at the moment. Yet watching was a pleasure, too, albeit a small one.

Jorj’s answer brought back his full attention: “We came across an Old Time building nobody’s ever seen before, far as I know.”

“
Did
you?” The descendants of the handful of people who had survived the Big Oops (a term that had as many interpreta
tions as there were shamans), had been picking their ancestors’ bones for the past two hundred years. There were a lot of bones to pick, though. Every so often, somebody came across one with meat still on it. Madyu glanced at the dogs, which were still quarreling over remnants of roast duck. He wondered if the godlike men of Old Time would look at his scavenging tribesfolk the same way. No matter. “Where is it? How do I get to it?”

“It’s on a patch of fairly high ground that overlooks the pond where we took all those ducks, thanks to your magic.” Jorj thumped Madyu on the back and almost knocked him over even though he was sitting on the ground. “It’s surrounded by oaks and creepers. I suppose that’s why nobody noticed it before.”

“Oh.” Madyu’s spirts plummeted. So many Old Time buildings were nothing more than tumbledown ruins, hardly worth going through. By the way Jorj had spoken, he’d hoped for something better from this one.

The chief hunter was better at noting animals’ vagaries than those of his fellow men, but he saw how disappointed Madyu looked. “Cheer up, shaman. I didn’t mean there are oaks and creepers growing up through the building. They’re just around it. One must have blown down in the last storm, to let us see the walls through the new gap. The building is in halfway decent shape, maybe better. Part of the roof still looks to be on.”

At that, Madyu did feel better. If it was true—let the gods make it true! He bent his head, muttered a quick prayer. Then he said, “Will you take me to it tomorrow?”

“Me?” Jorj frowned but finally nodded. “I suppose I owe you that much after you brought us all those lovely ducks.”

“What I find in there might make me a better wizard yet,” Madyu declared. The ducks hadn’t been his doing, but if Jorj insisted on giving him credit for them, he wasn’t too proud to take it.

After a breakfast of duck soup and porridge, Madyu followed Jorj into the woods. The chief hunter moved as confidently as if he were walking down the Old Time road not far from camp. Toting a spear he wasn’t used to, Madyu blundered along behind him, peering this way and that at every noise. He didn’t know why he bothered; he never could see what made them. He thanked the gods he didn’t have to go out hunting all the time; he would have been the laughingstock of the tribe.

Because he didn’t hunt all the time, he was soft. He’d been
puffing and panting for quite a while when Jorj stopped and pointed. “There it is. Do you see?”

“No.” Madyu had to walk a fair way in the direction Jorj’s finger gave before he could make out a smear of lighter color against the greens and browns of the woods.

“I’ll come along, if you like,” Jorj said, but he didn’t sound as if he meant it. The magic that often lingered in Old Time buildings was dangerous even to shamans. The chief hunter wanted nothing to do with it.

“You don’t need to,” Madyu told him. If anything worth having did rest inside the building, he wanted it all to himself. But after a moment he added, “Could you stay within earshot in case there are snakes instead of demons in there?”

“Fair enough,” the chief hunter agreed. He reached into the pack he wore on his back. “Figured you’d say that, so I brought along a songbird net. The ducks won’t last forever, however much we wish they would. Pigeons and starlings aren’t bad eating, either.”

While Jorj looked for a likely spot to string up his net, Madyu scrambled over the moss-covered trunk of the fallen oak. When he made it to the other side, he let out a soft whistle. Jorj had been right: the newly revealed building wasn’t badly overgrown at all. After a moment, he saw why: it was surrounded by a stretch of the same hard black tarry stuff the men of Old Time had used to make their roads.

He’d seen other buildings protected that way. They never failed to puzzle him. For a road, the black, hard stuff was almost ideal; even if it was too hard for horses’ hooves, it kept the roadway from being overgrown. But why offend the earth powers by slapping it over what could have made a perfectly good vegetable plot? It made no sense that he could see.

For the moment, though, whys did not matter. The black stuff had cracked here and there, allowing some bushes to push up through it, but enough remained to hold the worst of the woods at bay. Windows bare of glass stared blankly out at Madyu like dead men’s eyes. Hefting his spear, he advanced on the building.

He tried the door once. When it didn’t open, he went over to one of those windows; Old Time locks were tougher by far than any made these days. Had he not known for a fact that the men of Old Time enjoyed both godlike power and godlike goodness, that might have made him wonder about their integrity.

Before he scrambled in through the window opening, he paused to sniff. His nose caught none of the rank order of cat
piss, so no cougar—otherwise known as puma, catamount, or, though Eestexas had no mountains, mountain lion—had denned in there any time recently. Just to stay on the safe side, the shaman thrust in his spear and poked around as far as he could reach. Nothing screeched or hissed or writhed under the point, so he scrambled in himself.

His boots scrunched on drifted leaves. He stood still for a couple of minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Then he looked around to see what sort of building this was.

A few feet ahead stood a closed door, the frosted glass panel inset into its upper half still miraculously intact. When Madyu saw that door, hope that he’d come upon a real find began to flower in him. If this place had been looted before, the door would have been ajar, the glass broken, or, more likely both.

Gilded letters marched across the glass. Some had peeled away, but the shaman could still read the words they made:
VETERINARIAN’S OFFICE
. All at once his breath came quick and short, as if he and Neena lay joined together on his pallet. In the Old Time, veterinarians had been shamans specially charged with healing animals. An unplundered veterinarian’s office might yield—

“Anything,” he said aloud, in soft, wondering tones. “Anything at all.”

He went up to the door and twisted the knob. He let out a whoop when it refused to turn—would a looter have locked a door behind him when he was through? It seemed anything but probable. He smashed the glass with the butt of his spear. After the rest of his searching was done, he would gather up the sharp shards to use in cutting blades and as arrow points. Nothing from the Old Time went to waste.

He reached into the opening he’d made and opened the door from the inside. The chamber thus revealed was better lit than he’d expected. A quick look showed why: part of the roof had fallen in, baring the office to the sky—and the rain.

“Oh, a pestilence,” Madyu groaned. Everything that had lain anywhere near floor level was long years ruined. Cobwebs lay thick upon every shelf. They covered countiess jars of pills. Madyu would have fought shy of those no matter what. Old Time medicines, whether meant for animals or men, were likelier to kill than cure when given by someone who did not thoroughly understand them, which, in the days since the Big Oops, meant everybody.

The shaman went over to a low cabinet with a great many
drawers. He pulled one open, tearing more cobwebs. He felt like shouting—in fact, he did shout—when he discovered it was full of little sharp knives of several sizes and shapes. They were as bright and unrusted as if they’d been forged the day before. He scooped them out of their neat pigeonholes, stuffed them into the stout leather sack he’d brought for booty, then tried another drawer.

This one held hollow needles attached to glass cylinders. No one these days knew why the men of Old Time had chosen to imitate rattlesnake fangs, but they had. The shaman took a few of the bigger ones; sometimes women in the tribe used them to stick sauces deep inside a joint of meat. Other than that, so far as he knew, they had no use.

Other drawers were full of things that had no use whatsoever that he knew about. A lot of them, however, were made of metal and glass, so they were valuable even if not useful in and of themselves.

But next to the cabinet stood a real prize, a metal bookcase full of books. Or, rather, almost full of books: those on the bottom two shelves had at some time in the unknown past been chewed up and turned into rats’ nests. The bookcase, though, was sheltered from the elements, and had kept its smooth coat of paint. Rodents hadn’t been able to get at the volumes on the upper shelves.

Madyu pulled one out, dusted it off, held it close to his nose to read the title on the spine:
Collected Numbers of the Journal of American Veterinary Medicine
. That looked as if it might be interesting. But when he opened the volume, the collected numbers flaked to pieces under even the gentlest touch.

“Pox-ridden paper!” Madyu growled. So many books from Old Time were like girls who teased but wouldn’t deliver; instead of giving up the precious information they contained, they crumbled away to nothingness.

Scowling at yet another such betrayal, the shaman pulled out another volume, this one also labeled
Collected Numbers
. He opened it even more cautiously than he had the first. All at once, he grinned in startled pleasure. The numbers collected here were not what the title claimed. Bound inside the spine were half a dozen copies of an Old Time magazine with which he was already familiar, one whose pictures displayed not only incomprehensible ancient artifacts like cameras, CD players, and Toyotas, but also a good many perfectly comprehensible ancient pretty girls in various interesting states of undress.

He closed this volume with the same care he’d used to open it, then stowed it in his leather sack. He had more than a little hope that he would be able to get it safely back to the encampment. Unlike the
real Journal of American Veterinary Medicine
, the magazines that had hidden behind the lying binding were made from a shiny, coated paper that was better at withstanding the ravages of time than was the more common kind.

The shaman plucked out more books, searching for others printed on the coated paper. He found a couple and put them into the sack. Several others, made from the ordinary variety, disintegrated as soon as he opened them. He murmured a prayer of regret at having destroyed so much irreplaceable wisdom, but did not know what else he could have done.

He picked up the heavy sack, closed the office door behind him, and left the ruin by the window through which he’d entered. He was surprised to note how far the sun had crawled across the sky; he hadn’t paid attention to the shadows as he ransacked the Old Time office.

He hallooed for Jorj, and felt a good deal of relief when the chief hunter hallooed back a moment later. Jorj had the knack for moving quietly through the undergrowth; in a couple of minutes, he simply seemed to appear in front of Madyu out of thin air. He pointed to the bulging leather sack. “Ha! No demons, eh?”

“None that I saw, anyhow,” Madyu answered. He’d only meant to be strictly accurate, but saw he’d also succeeded in frightening Jorj. Well, that wasn’t such a bad thing. Hiding a smile, he went on, “No snakes, either.”

“Good, good. What do you have in there, anyway?”

“Some little knives of good steel, some hollowed needles, glass and metal junk, and some books.”

“Books,” Jorj’s voice informed the word with scorn. “Why bother bringing out books, shaman? What good are they?” Like almost everyone else in the tribe, the chief hunter was illiterate.

“You’ll like some of them. Pictures from Old Time.” Madyu’s hands shaped curves in the air. As they did so, he thought again of Neena.

Jorj’s eyes lit up. “You’ll trade some?”

“Why not?” Madyu said. “I see you’ve also done pretty well for yourself.”

More than a dozen dead songbirds, their little yellow legs bound together with twine, hung head down from Jorj’s belt, along with a possum and a couple of chipmunks. “Could be
worse,” the chief hunter allowed. “I just wish there was more meat to each one. But as long as I do even this well, we won’t be down to eating grubs and grasshoppers the way we had to a couple of years ago.”